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… is from page 117 of the 1993 Third Edition of the late Carlo Cipolla’s 1976 book, Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy, 1000-1700 [2]:
It was a poor and primitive Europe, a Europe made up of countless rural microcosms – the largely self-sufficient manors, whose autarchy was part cause and part consequence of the decline in trade. Society was dominated by a spirit of resignation, suspicion, and fear of the outside world. People withdrew into the economic isolation of the manors just as they sought spiritual isolation in the monasteries.
DBx: While today’s world isn’t likely to resort to the extreme localism and isolation that marked Europe in the latter half of the first millennium A.D., there is nevertheless a lesson for us in the calamitous actions of our ancestors from that era. Suspicion and fear of the outside world – in our case, suspicion and fear of citizens of foreign countries – that prompts us to retreat from the outside world and to arrest economic and social change will make us poorer materially, intellectually, and spiritually.