Impact Of Gutenberg's Creation Of The Printing Press

Gutenberg’s creation of the printing press was a revolutionary innovation which permanently changed the culture at the time. This invention was created around 1440. Nothing like it was ever seen before it. It allowed for many copies of books or articles to be printed relatively quickly. Books at the time were extraordinarily expensive. The only people that had access to them were the extremely rich. A peasant couldn’t imagine owning a book, let alone reading it. Because they were so unobtainable, the masses didn’t learn how to read but even if they could, they would have no use for it because they had nothing to read. Gutenberg’s invention changed all of that. It made books and literature infinitely more attainable. This gave the common person
Religion was becoming unfashionable at the time. All of the elites especially were looking for answers without religion. Many intellectuals were working on this. Paradise Lost, a book written by a man named John Milton stated that good and evil is in the world so that God can see who is good and bad. This allowed for the assumption that God isn't with us. Humans were on our own which started many developments of this theory, which lead to the idea that there is no God period. Darwin worked with those ideas too but instead of using God, he used a more naturalistic approach. God was out of the equation. Natural laws are to blame for good and evil. Then comes in his theories on evolution. He gave answers to creation without a God present. This became very popular because the people liked that they didn’t need a God, they could do everything on their own. To sum up, Darwin gave answers to how the world worked without any divine intervention. The world began and sustained itself naturally. This theory took hold in the scientific world and dramatically changed both science and society. There were now answers to big questions without
This one however, changed the world for the worse. Karl Marx developed his theory of a new economic structure which created a Utopian society. This society would make everyone entirely equal. No one had any more than another man. everyone was at the same level. His ideas were said to be to support the average oppressed worker. In hindsight, he was very bad with money and wanted the government to fix all of his problems. His theories can be very popular in universities because they do sound nice on paper but in reality they are very unsuccessful. His ideas were attempted in the real world by Vladimir Lenin with the Bolshevik’s at his side in Russia in the early 1900s. From the very start it was a bloody mess. Literally. As the Bolsheviks began attempted to take over Russia, they were pulled into a civil war against the people who were loyal to the Czar. After the Bolshevik Communists won, they slaughter all who were against them in the Red Terror. Other countries still saw Communist Russia as a Utopia with everyone being equal. After the Second World War, the fear that Communism would take over the world was a valid concern. Many countries had parties who were communist and many had those parties actually take over, like in Cuba and China. The world was terrified of a Communist take over. This Communist fear and lead to the threat of a nuclear war between the Russian’s and the US in the Cold War.