Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
That really makes you want to start examining your life,
doesn’t it? While you examine your own life, it is probably helpful to examine
the lives of the people who came before you as well. You can learn from their
mistakes and successes and then move forward with your own life.
One of the most important themes of the renaissance is the
idea of looking back to the past and applying it to the present. The best part
of that is that it all connects together is ways we couldn’t imagine at first.
The people of the renaissance looked back to the ancients—the Greeks and the
Romans—to learn from them and to make advances based off what they knew.
We, in the twenty-first century, are not so different from
our ancestors in the past, and we can learn from the things they’ve done, just
as they did in the period of the renaissance. We can look back to the 60s in
America and see the forerunners of social reform, like Martin Luther King Jr.
We can see echoes of their ideas in our own debates over feminism and gay
rights. In comparing the two periods of time, we find that the differences in
situation are just as important as the similarities.
Because it has been one hundred years since World War I,
there are many discussions going around the world about those times and what we
can learn from them. This is an
excellent example of examining the history and lives that preceded us and lead
us to where we are now.
We can also look to the renaissance itself for inspiration
in what to learn and how to live. They examined the past, but they did more
than just examine—they used that knowledge to do amazing things and create new
ideas. They reached new levels—new
worlds—in all the aspects of their lives. They advanced in art (Michelangelo
and Shakespeare), science (Da Vinci and Galileo), travel (Columbus and Magellan),
technology (Gutenberg), and religious freedoms (Martin Luther). I listed just a
few of the people that contributed to these advances, but there were many, many
more.
As Latter Day Saints, we have a very personal connection to
this idea of learning from the past. We
have been given The Book of Mormon, and it is specifically a record of the past
meant to teach the generations of the future—that would be us. We learn from their faith and sometimes lack
of faith. We learn from their war and their peace. We learn from their trials
and their joys. It is through the lens of their lives that we are able to
examine our own lives, and if Socrates was right, that makes our lives worth
living.
Really great connections to from how the figures in the renaissance used the past and how we now use it. Many of which I hadn't considered. I think that perhaps the past had more relevance however in the renaissance when talking specifically about the themes. The past is important today, but it's importance is decreasing at a decreasing rate. Take technology for example. By the time you have the new iphone 7, they will have already set the release date for the new iPhone 8, which when released will make the old one obsolete. This is an arbitrary example, that I understand, but I feel it is a quick example of what I am getting at without going to much into detail here.
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