Rick Riordan's Reviews > The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689

The country is trapped in a culture war, with some arguing for a return to the Good Old Days and others arguing for greater personal freedom and less enforcement of religious and moral laws. The 'sides' are fluid, but each group uses new technology to rapidly share its ideas with likeminded individuals, creating echo chambers that highlight only the news they want to hear while distorting news that would contradict their worldview. The groups jeer at each other -- calling their political opponents 'cuckholds,' 'idiots,' 'traitors,' and worse. Chaos increases, leading to violent confrontations between angry mobs on the street. Everything becomes 'political,' from church to entertainment to schools. Eventually, the country slides into a civil war that nobody really thought would happen, and that would tear the country apart.

I'm taking about England in the 1600s. But if it sounds like this could be a scenario playing out today, well . . . that's why I think history is so valuable. As it says in Ecclesiastes, there is nothing new under the sun. People are people, and what happened over four centuries ago is still echoing through the world in 2024.

The Blazing World is probably not a read for everyone. It is thorough, comprehensive in scope, and juggles a cast of hundreds of characters. Nevertheless, if you're a history nerd like me, Revolutionary England is a fascinating time period to read about, and one that I only knew about superficially before this. What struck me as most relevant and scary: The people of the time had no idea what direction things would go, and events moved at such a whiplash pace that they were quickly plunged into situations that would've been unthinkable only a few years before. For the first time in memory, a king was beheaded by his own people. The English were faced with a clean slate and a chance to completely remake their society. Utopian ideas flourished (briefly). England could be a communist collective with no property ownership. Or a Republic. Or a Theocracy. Or a kingdom without a king. In the end, the country swung between extremes, back and forth, looking to a dictator (Oliver Cromwell) to stabilize the nation and save them from anarchy, only to eventually decide that maybe the old king and country idea wasn't so bad after all (with a few new checks and balances). My other major takeaway was the effect of the printing press and the increase in literacy rates, especially in London, which meant that for the first time, the common folk, the 'blue collar workers,' were reading and discussing political ideas, becoming a force unto themselves -- a powerful counterweight to the crown and to landed aristocracy. There are differences compared to the rise of social media, yes, but the disruptive potential of new communication media is a factor today, just as it was then.

All in all, a fascinating book about a different time that echoes our own, though I want to be mindful of Healey's warning -- the people in the past were not us, and they could not have existed or acted as they did in any other time period. Still, yikes! The 1600s in England are what it looks like when social and political polarization run amok, and the results are not pretty.