Luther's age is presented in caricature. Six hundred freakin years after the modern age began in the Renaissance, these unimaginative boobs are still beating the "our-age-is-better-than-your-age" dead horse. OOOOH! How barbaric things were then! OOOH! How corrupt they were! We're living through the corrupt later phases of modernity, but now, as then, we live it as "normal," because now, as then, human lifetimes are too short to get a sense of historical change without careful and IMAGINATIVE attention to it. What makes Luther a great man is precisely that his response to his circumstances was NOT as obvious and inevitable as this alleged "documentary" presents it.
Has anyone noticed that we have our own characteristic historical ills-- serial killers, genocide, racism, which aren't present in prior ages? They had their prejudices and their violence, but their prejudice was at least based on doctrine or culture, which at least almost fall into the moral sphere, while modernity's contribution to the history of prejudice-- racism-- is based on materialism and biology, which is an even more absurd justification for devaluing other persons. They had their violence and war, but our body count is FAR higher, and we're the ones who are supposed to value keeping people alive and healthy. They had their insanities, but we have psychology and other social sciences that are supposed to make us better, yet it seems that about 3/4 of the population in developed nations need the moral anaesthetic of Prozac to cope, and large numbers of people are psychotic at some point. Civility is in the toilet, though even in our recession, we have many times the material comforts and security than prior ages ever did, and fewer reasons to be so cranky.
- - This is a documentary with strong moral themes, but its presentation is more concerned with modern conventional wisdom patting itself on the back for its moral "superiority" to Luther's age. This is ironic, considering that the problem with Luther's age was that they took their moral superiority to the pagan ages so much for granted that they could wallow in moral complacency even as they became cynical and crass. The old saw about being doomed to repeat history applies most importantly not to the superficial aspects of history, but to the complacency every age falls into as its accomplishments accumulate, while failing to realize that the accumulation occurs just as its genius has already been exploited past the point of diminishing returns.