The 16th Century: Modernity Begins!
The 16th Century: Modernity Begins!
I intend to explore today according to what I have named “Stages Of Modernist Grief” based on Occulturation's "Stages Of Cultural Grief" videos except it's centuries instead of decades. Every century also has a theme which also lines up with the regular stages of grief.
As such, the 16th century is shock, the 17th century is denial, the 18th century is anger, the 19th century is bargaining, the 20th century is testing, the 21st century is depression, and presumably the 22nd century will be acceptance though we have to see what would happen.
People didn’t just wake up one day in the modern world. We limped into it, dazed, grieving, and unprepared.
The premodern world, the world of kingdoms and cathedrals, of myth and mystery, of divine order and cosmic hierarchy, died. Not suddenly, but painfully. Not with a single collapse, but through centuries of erosion. It was a world where people didn’t ask what the world was, but why they were in it and the answers came from religion, tradition, and a sense of purpose.
Then it all began to slip away. The modern period arrived. One blow after another. One certainty shattered, then the next. It wasn’t just a shift in politics or economics. It was an existential rupture. And like anyone who’s lost something profound, people reacted the only way it knew how:
With grief.
What followed was a centuries long mourning process, not just for a way of life, but for a worldview. And like all grief, it came in stages. Shock. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. And, someday, maybe even acceptance.
This isn’t a simple historical timeline. It’s an emotional autopsy of the Western World reeling from the death of its certainties. It’s the story of how the West has felt its way through the transition from medieval to modernL how it kicked, screamed, resisted, surrendered, and now drifts somewhere between longing and numbness.
Each century since the 1500s marks a step in this emotional journey, a reflection of the psyche of civilization grappling with its own transformation. I need to get this out of the way, that for the most part, this will be mostly from the perspective of the Western World since I live in a Western country. It is very likely that in the Eastern World like in China or Japan could have had completely different stages of grief. Maybe while the West is experiencing shock in the 16th Century, China may be experiencing denial or some other stage. The Western World isn't the same as the rest of the world. So, anyway, let's get started.
The 16th century was the shock era. It was the moment Europe, especially Western Europe, realized something had broken, but didn’t yet understand what. It marks the first tremor in the shift from the premodern to the modern. And with that tremor came shock — a disorientation so profound that the change of the century felt more personal than anything that had come before.
This is the century where the premodern brain short circuited. Everything they thought they knew…was gone. Suddenly you have printing presses making Bibles in local languages. Copernicus was saying the Earth isn’t the center of the universe. This was the century that saw the beginning of the colonization of the Americas because of Christopher Columbus, and as such Spain is getting rich off gold that isn’t even on their continent. Martin Luther started the Protestant Reformation and was critical of the Catholic Church in Wittenberg. The sheer shock of it all.
To your average European peasant, it must have felt like someone just glitched the simulation. The medieval worldview of God’s plan, a static society, the Earth under heaven starts to tremble. This was not just shock in an average peasant's worldview but also in their lifestyle as the 16th century would see the closing of commoner land which would force large amounts of peasants into beggars or working various dirty odd jobs in the city such as a gong farmer, or a fuller, or a knacker. Very disgusting, gross jobs, that would come as surprising or weird to do. Jobs that come across…as shocking.
It wasn't just shocking because of people being shocked by changes. It was also shocking in the sense of shock value with humans reacting violently, hysterically, and with witch hunts. Masses burned at the stake, entire civilizations colonized out of existence, and theology basically turned into a cage match. The 16th century didn’t even try to understand modernity. It just screamed for it.
So let's back to that earlier question: Why is it that despite slavery existing for thousands of years, the Transatlantic Slave Trade is the one people think of and is the one that gets all the attention? Slavery has existed for as long as humanity did, slave trades have always existed and existed long before the 16th century as well as long after, and slavery isn't even anything new in say Africa. Yet slavery from Africa to the Americas is the one thing everyone discusses with entire political debates and discussions over it to this day. People could say it's because “it's because of wokeness/need to victimhood” or because of “it leads to decades to systemic racism” but it doesn't explain why the transatlantic slave trade is talked about only but not slavery from earlier times or later timed anywhere else. Or there aren't any equivalents elsewhere in the world. Why don't people ever study the effects of the descendants of slaves of say the Arab Slave Trade or their aren't entire shows and movies and books centered around the conditions of those slaves and debates about reparations or systemic issues as an effect of the Arab Slave Trade in the Arab World? Or even discuss human trafficking in a later century such as Libyan slavery in the 21st century despite it still happening? It's because the Transatlantic Slave Trade was infamous in the 16th century... because it happened in the shock era.
Violence was nothing new. History, up to this point, was an endless reel of warlords, invasions, and empires crushing each other. But the violence of the 16th century felt different. It felt more jarring, more intimate, and more morally haunting. Why?
Because the West had begun to expect better of itself.
Take the colonization of the New World by Spain. Was it more brutal than earlier Medieval conquests? In many ways, not particularly. But what was new was the context: Europe now possessed written philosophies of Christian mercy, humanism, and moral conscience. The printing press ensured that firsthand accounts of conquest and genocide traveled fast. Bartolomé de las Casas didn't just witness colonial atrocities; he published them. For the first time, the West watched its own violence in real time... and recoiled. There are entire books and written accounts printed in large numbers about detailing things like colonization and slavery. The Laws of Burgos, The New Laws, General and Natural History of the Indies, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, Casa de Contratación (House of Trade) and so on and so on. Not to mention the various letters by missionaries and colonial governors mentioning enslaved labor. But I very much doubt there are detailed books and journals discussing slavery or colonization happening in the 20th century or the 21st century, or if they were they seem to be ignored by most people compared to before because they were different eras with different standards with what's allowed to be discussed. Compared to the 16th century, things like trafficking or warfare aren't shocking, people know that it's bad and, if anything, want to avoid reading about it.
Or consider the religious wars of the Reformation. Christianity had fought countless bloody battles before such as the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Albigensian Crusade but this time, the war wasn’t on the borders. It was within. Catholics and Protestants were killing each other, village by village, family by family. This wasn’t righteous expansion but a soul-shattering schism. The unity of Christendom, the spiritual scaffolding of the medieval world, collapsed under the weight of Luther's 95 Theses and centuries of papal corruption. And with it, certainty itself.
I need to also mention that there isn't a hard cut off for these centuries. A lot of the shock era began in the late 15th century as well as the early 17th century. It isn't a case where the shock era starts on January 1st 1501 and then on January 1st 1601, the denial era begins.
It was also in the 16th century, the very truth of the universe was up for debate.
The Copernican Revolution quietly whispered that the Earth, and by extension, humanity, was not the center of the cosmos. Printing presses multiplied heresy and scripture alike. Renaissance humanism told people they could rely on themselves, not the Church. In just a few decades, people went from fearing hell to fearing being unknown in a vast, cold universe.
The 16th century was the century of realization. That old orders would not hold, that authority could be questioned, and that God’s will wasn’t as obvious as it once seemed. It was the century where neighbors could turn on each other for believing in grace versus works.
It was the moment of historical vertigo.
And just like a person who experiences sudden trauma, civilization went into shock. Institutions flailed. Popes and kings lost grip. Violence exploded not out of bloodlust, but out of a collective attempt to cling to something, anything, that still felt solid.
The premodern world had died... and no one quite understood what had taken its place.
Our stages of grief continue…
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