"Inventing the Renaissance", III

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Machiavelli redux:

• The Three Branches of Ethics:
  • Virtue Ethics—is any ethical system which judges action based on the interior motives, character, feelings, or intentions of the actor.
  • Deontology—is any ethical system which judges action based on a set of laws or rules external to the doer. They can be any rules, with any source.
  • Consequentialism/Utilitarianism--Machiavelli is the founder of consequentialism/utilitarianism as we know it (with some precursors, notably Mohism in fifth-century BCE China),..  any form of ethics which judges an action based on the consequences of the action, rather than the action itself or the motive of the doer.


• Back to deontology vs. virtue ethics: Dante is a fabulous window on how most ethical systems are hybrids of the two. In Dante, judgment is dictated by Divine Law, but Divine Law cares both about the soul’s character and the soul’s deeds... Hell is organized by which act was done and which rule broken (deontology), while Purgatory is organized around interiority (virtue ethics). It’s also (an oversimplification) generally true from the Reformation on that Catholicism is more concerned with repenting for deeds, and many Protestantisms (especially Calvinism and Puritanism) with the purity of one’s thoughts.


• Voluntarism is an ethical system which says an act is only good if (drumroll please…) it is good by both virtue ethics and deontology!


• One is that consequentialism’s rise in the eighteenth century led to the first arguments for deterrence-based justice, advanced by figures like Voltaire (1694–1778), and Cesare Beccaria (1738–94), a Milanese Enlightenment figure much admired and publicized by Voltaire, and hailed today as the father of our modern systems of deterrence-based justice.192 In contrast with retributive justice, rehabilitative justice, or restorative justice, deterrence-based justice aims to minimize human suffering by inflicting the lightest possible sentence that still effectively deters the crime, so the sum total of the pain experienced by victims and criminals together is the lowest possible.


• the Pandora’s Box which releases Voltaire and Beccaria to campaign against torture has other contents too, including that deadliest inhabitant of thought-experiment land, the trolley problem.


• if deontology and virtue ethics are as old as philosophy, why did it take 1,800 years for the third (to us equally obvious) branch of ethics to enter the formal conversation? <> Because, my friends, before we can have consequentialism, we must have Borgias.


• * Once upon a time (c.1475) the whimsical Will that scripts the Great Scroll of the Cosmos woke up in the morning and decided: Someday centuries from now, when humankind has outgrown the dastardly moustaches of melodrama and moved on to a phase of complex antiheroes, sympathetic villains, and moral ambiguity, I want history teachers to be able to stand at the front of the classroom and say, “Yes, he really did go around dressed all in black wearing a mask and killing people for fun.” Thus Cesare Borgia was conceived.


• * The Prince (completed by 1513) was far from the first mirror for princes. It came from a long tradition of such advice manuals and collections of heroic maxims; the first use of the title Speculum regum (mirror of the princes) was 1183,


• The Nine Worthies: We see this in the long tradition of wildly ahistorical Troy narratives, featuring anachronisms such as Hector and the Greeks fighting chivalric duels around the walls of Troy196 in works like Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (c.1390). This gorgeous nonsense remained so popular that even the return of the Iliad had no power to stop the surreal experience of Shakespeare’s Chaucer-based Troilus and Cressida (1602), or the mind-bending Troy/Arthuriana crossovers in Orlando Furioso, which feature the haunted tomb of Saint Merlin (really!),


• Della Rovere: “Borgia bad! You said you’d oust Borgia!”
  France: “I can see how Borgia out-bribed you at the election. He’s way better at this evil pope stuff than you. Also, did you hear I’m the Sword of the Lord?” SMASH!!!!
  Naples: “Someone please rescue us from the horrors of war!”
  The Plague: “HELLO! You called?”
  France: “Plague? Yikes! Bye!”
  Horsemen of the Apocalypse: *high-five*


• Good morning, Mr Machiavelli. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to keep Duke Cesare “Valentino” Borgia from conquering Florence. You will serve as our ambassador to him.


• The Borgia conquest sweeping away illegitimate rulers meant a lot of past popes’ cronies finally got some comeuppance.. Duke Valentino’s newly planted governors didn’t have any ties to local people, so they were short-term more equitable in their enforcement of justice than those who had been in town long enough to have local favorites. It is sometimes said of modern democracies that every politician enters office at their most popular and least competent, and leaves it at their most competent and least popular—this was somewhat similar.


• * The vassal betraying the benefactor is the worst thing in Dante’s Inferno, right at the center of Hell where Satan and Judas are; Dante didn’t even have a section for benefactors who betray their vassals, it wasn’t in his mind that anyone would do that. But it did occur to Valentino, who, by this time, had been disfigured by syphilis and started wearing a mask most of the time.


• Like our Norse scholars realizing those loom weights might be fishing weights, old questions are sometimes answered by investigating unrelated questions—this is intellectual diversity.


• _Because he had a great spirit and lofty aims, could not have governed his affairs differently, and only Alexander’s short life and his illness thwarted his designs.207 <> Valentino did not fall because of his cruel and fearsome deeds, says Machiavelli, they were the best possible plan. The Borgia fall is not a moral lesson that good princes rise and evil princes fall, it is the opposite:


• The ethicists of Machiavelli’s past condemn Pope Julius as a traitor, but is it really a bad act—our Nick asks—betraying one man and his followers to end so terrible a war? Is that a meaningful use of good and evil? <> Thus utilitarian ethics is born... we should also study Valentino and Julius, who—with their treatment of Remirro de Orco and of each other—showed that fear and cunning are even more potent in crisis than virtue and love.


• the old oversimplification, the end justifies the means, is in this sense a smaller shift than what Machiavelli is suggesting: he wants us to judge the means by its end... Machiavelli never explicitly discusses the religious implications of consequentialism, but he very conspicuously does not talk about the theological side; there is no section of The Prince to parallel the final part of Hobbes’s Leviathan, “On the Kingdome of Darknesse” about how theology trumps politics.


• When scholars argue about “Who was the first modern philosopher?” those who argue for Machiavelli point out that he was the first person to combine all three forms of ethics, and the first to use history, not as a set of moral maxims, but as case studies to be analyzed, making history an empirical, not a philosophical or literary exercise: a social science, looking for the hidden causes of things,


• Plato advanced the radical idea that it would be better if kids took jobs they were well suited for instead of automatically doing what their parents did, but we mainly remember the weird stuff, the Cave, the “noble lie.” Aristotle said maybe nature has patterns we can understand (science!), but we remember all those tedious syllogisms. Just so, with Machiavelli, we take away the ends justify the means and better to be feared than loved, not realizing that his more important, now-ubiquitous innovations were ever new: that ethics should consider consequences, and that studying history can help us understand the causes of past tragedies and triumphs


• It was the magical year my papal election class was in the same time slot as my wonderful colleague John McCormick’s course on Machiavelli’s political thought, so we had a crossover. We brought both classes together, so each could hear how the other’s approach (history vs. political science) felt different. <> As an example, I asked both classes, “What would Machiavelli say if you asked him what would happen if Milan suddenly changed from a monarchal duchy to a republic?” The poli sci students went first: He’d say that it would be very unstable, because the people don’t have a republican tradition... Then my students replied: He’d say it would all depend on whether Cardinal Ascanio Visconti Sforza is or isn’t in the inner circle of the current pope, how badly the Orsini-Colonna feud is raging, whether politics in Florence is stable enough for the Medici to aid Milan’s defenses.. the instant they heard the phrase, “if Milan became a republic,” all my students had turned as a body to stare at our King Charles with trepidation


• We need that antidote to the illusion that the world is shaped only by geniuses, by special people, history’s protagonists, who never fretted about rent or laundry as we powerlessly ordinary people do.


• in 1861, when the unification of Italy kicked out the Habsburg rulers, and Florence suddenly had to decide whether to be part of the new Italian Republic, they gathered the descendants of the families that had been the last set of Dudes in the Tower, gathered them anew in the Palazzo Vecchio, and had them vote on it

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• Whether we call it a work ethic, or values, or a worldview, or a national genius, or a spirit of the age, we moderns have inherited a long tradition of believing eras are defined by the characteristics of their people, like the strengths and flaws of epic heroes.


• In the nineteenth century (the true recurring villain of our story) England, Scotland, France, the Dutch empire, and uniting Germany did a lot of work to paint themselves as the true shapers and inheritors of Western thought, claiming straight lines of descent from the golden age of ancient philosophy to their own intellectual golden ages: the French Enlightenment, English scientific revolution, Scottish Enlightenment, modern German science and geisteswissenschaft (moral sciences, humanities, literally spirit-of-a-people-studies), etc. Such efforts to claim the ancient golden age worked better if one could exclude Italy’s Renaissance one, resulting in claims that, while the Renaissance was an artistic and cultural golden age, the more serious intellectual golden age waited for [insert nation here]. This was part of a larger project of casting Mediterranean nations—especially Spain and Italy—in a negative light, magnifying the evils of Catholicism... claiming the Inquisition’s censorship strangled freethought and made true intellectual innovation impossible (even though Protestant powers had their own censorship), and even claiming that only Iberian empires did the bad colonialism with atrocities, while the English and French empires did beneficent good colonialism (look up the Black Legend if you aren’t familiar).


• This project reflects how funding structures shape research. The way Germany funds scholarship these days encourages big, collaborative, grant-funded research groups, required to write very detailed explanations of their methodologies when asking for funding, which has caused Germany to produce lush detailed studies of the methodologies and collaboration of Renaissance scholars too. The way Italy funds scholarship these days gives lots of support to philology and art history, encouraging translations, critical editions, and lushly-researched group-authored exhibit catalogs. A similar set of funding structures encourage Dutch scholarship to do meticulous teamwork and philological analysis, resulting in deep readings of Renaissance texts from scholars like Karl Enenkel, Susanna de Beer, and Lodi Nauta.15 In America, meanwhile, neither collaboration, nor exhibit catalogs, nor translations, critical editions, or deep philological analysis will get a historian tenure, so we mostly produce single-authored topical monographs like my Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance,


• Petrarch used to complain that people were so eager for his letters that they were copied numerous times en route, and read by many before they reached the addressee.20 Such letters could also have complexly plural authors, as one classics lover served as amanuensis to another, hence Raffaello Maffei plausibly mistaking a Lorenzo letter for Poliziano, since Lorenzo’s correspondence was usually dictated to one of his umanisti


• “A humanist is someone who receives a letter from Erasmus.” It also works... Centering our definition of umanisti on letters communicates the interconnected, diasporic, multi-city, multi-national nature of Renaissance scholarship, built of friendships, friend circles, schools, and also rivalries, whose battles in letters made combatants famous... And it communicates how exclusive the humanist world could be, how failing to be acknowledged, failing to get a letter back, could lock you out, no matter your efforts.


• We have so much material from Florence because it was an outlier, in everything: art, wealth, politics, law, literacy rate, sodomy rate, soul projection rate, you name an attribute a Renaissance city could have and Florence is at an extreme end. Yes, all these things happened elsewhere too, but we must be careful basing any impression of the defining spirit of the age on such an outlier.


• The single introductory text read and reproduced most in medieval Europe was Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, a philosophical dialog written in the last days before the great scholar-statesman’s execution in 524 CE... The Consolation of Philosophy is different from Boethius’s other works, a deeply personal dialog in which Lady Philosophy descends into the prison to help the philosopher prepare to face his coming death.


• Boethius’s description of Lady Philosophy herself. She is queenly, commanding, supernatural, and wears a long gown with its skirt tattered and missing many pieces. Over the years, she explains, many have tried to grasp her, and many philosophers or sects have torn a piece from her gown and carried it off, clutching it dearly and believing that they possess the whole of her, not realizing it’s just a tiny scrap...They are a little right. The Stoics, Skeptics, Platonists, Aristotelians, Zoroastrians, Chaldean cults, they all had scraps of truth. Doesn’t it sound like it would be a good idea to stitch that tattered fabric back together?


• Much of the compatibility of Boethius’s ideas with both pagan and Christian thought comes from the fact that Saint Augustine was a very, very, very, very, very, very, very troublesome child, and his mother Monica was a very, very, very, very, very, very, very patient mom. (Monica is, in fact, the patron saint of patience,.. Young Augustine decided that Christianity was a stupid religion for stupid people like his stupid mom


• Good old Manichaeism, the belief that the cosmos is ruled, not by one Maker, but by two great forces in constant conflict, a Good/Light force and an Evil/Bad force (so, Star Wars), and you too can be part of this epic battle if you give the leaders of this movement lots of money! Manichaeism was a mystery cult, like Mithraism or the Orphic Mysteries, with exclusive membership, tantalizing recruitment, dazzling rituals, months or years of initiation before you learned their real beliefs, and constant demands for cash...  Adherents could help the light force defeat the dark by finding seeds of light trapped in base matter and liberating them, and many seeds were trapped in expensive foods like delicious fruits and desserts, and could be liberated by buying those foods for the cult leaders whose spiritually trained digestive systems were capable of liberating seeds of yummy yummy light. And throughout his Manichaean period, Augustine was also having lots of fun, wine, and sex, and constantly dissing and ditching his still supportive mother,


• Augustine then reread the Bible and went, Holy shit! This religion isn’t stupid, it makes perfect sense, it just needs coherent metaphysics! He then sat down and wrote so many books explicating Christianity that they outnumber the entire surviving corpus of classical Latin. Using Neoplatonic-Stoic Aristotelian-hybrid metaphysics (and a dash of Kabbalistic practice), he created the first Christian answers to many questions the Bible doesn’t answer, and everyone embraced him as the prince of theologians,


• Remember that time Peter Abelard ticked off his abbot by proving their abbey’s founding saint didn’t exist? That was Saint Denys, i.e. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagyte, a book more than a person, since the author was imagined backward from the book. The book is a work of late antique mystical theology written in Greek around the fifth or sixth century CE (later than Augustine, contemporary with Boethius) and full of the period’s typical Neoplatonic/Christian hybrid stuff about the soul and abstract Maker. But the work was mistakenly attributed to Dionysius the Athenian lawyer described in the Acts of the Apostles, who was converted to Christianity by Saint Paul and became the first Bishop of Athens, so the book seemed 500 years older than it really was... We think Christianity got a big dose of Platonism in 400 CE with Augustine, and another with Boethius a century later, but Renaissance people thought that earlier Christianity, exemplified by Pseudo-Dionysius, was more Platonic than Augustine, concluding that Christian and ancient Greek theology had become less similar over time, splitting from one archaic whole instead of merging two things into one.


• The philosopher kings who take turns ruling Plato’s hypothetical republic are expected to agree 100 percent, because their souls are trying to craft laws that are sketches of the same perfect justice, and slight disagreements will be corrected as easily as two people discussing a movie correct each other’s imperfect memories of it.


• In the 1600s, Thomas Hobbes sparked one such firestorm when his Leviathan suggested that pre-civilized humanity, living in a war of all against all, might through Reason and self-interest come together and develop society. Until Hobbes, Europe had no explanation for how government came to be other than that God instituted it, and no explanation for what glue should hold men together other than fear of divine punishment... Hobbes’s was a political theory an atheist might use, giving atheism an answer, and thereby so terrifying England that the government strengthened its censorship specifically to target “Leviathan the Great,”


• * If one wanted to be an atheist in the Middle Ages one had to throw away 90 percent of all science and social theory, and when asked “Why do rocks sink?” or “How do planets move?” or “Where did the world come from?” or “How does the mind connect to the body?” one had to answer, “I have no idea.” <> Turning one’s back on answers is very difficult, and is part of why the study of atheism is so closely tied to the study of philosophical skepticism, i.e. philosophies which say we cannot understand the fundamentals of existence. Only very recently have atheists had the leisure of both denying God and still having a clear, technical model of the universe... it required saying you believed one thing so much that you were willing to turn your back on the understandings of the world shared by almost everyone, even though you didn’t have a coherent alternative. There is a fragile courage to pre-modern atheism


• Lucretius also relates that Epicurus thought many atoms have little hooks on them which is what made them clump together into worlds, that there are many worlds like ours, and that the animals we see are all suited to their environments because only animals suited to their environments survived, but he also says that no new species come into existence anymore because Earth has undergone menopause and no longer grows giant placentas out of the ground, which is where new species used to come from (so close and yet so far…).


• there is one early copy of Lucretius (1490s) whose annotations stand out from the rest, whose reader didn’t mark the grammar or Vergilian lines, but concentrated on the sections in Book III with the technical fundamentals of atomism, and, in the margin by the explanation of the famous random swerve of matter, which others marked “absurd to consider,” this scholar wrote instead, much as a modern would, “that motion is variable, and from this we have free will.” And that copy is Machiavelli’s.


• We also have to understand that the Renaissance Inquisition was not an all-powerful, all-seeing Orwellian thought police; it aspired to be that, claimed to be that, but its inner workings show it constantly felt understaffed and underfunded, stretching its resources thin to hold back what it saw as an avalanche of threats...  it chose its battles, prioritizing the threats it considered most important. It did not choose atheism. <> Why wasn’t the Inquisition worried about atheism? Largely because it was so radical they thought no sensible person would take it seriously... The lack of answers of early atheism meant it wasn’t seen as a real competitor. The only people who would be tempted by it, in the period’s view, would be a fool, or someone fundamentally wicked who hopes there is no God because they’re afraid of being punished—both those categories are people the Church didn’t care about.


• But many Lucretius readers were other kinds of freethinking radicals, dissatisfied with the standard answers of the Church and interested in new approaches. While a few turned to atheism, Ficino, Pico, Franchi, and even Giordano Bruno turned in other directions: to Luther, to Aristotle, to Zoroaster, to astrology, to new mystic visionaries and old rediscovered texts, to all sorts of things. Atheism was an option, but it was not the default direction for a freethinking Renaissance radical.


• The meta-lesson here is that one of the victims of censorship is our ability to interpret the historical record. When we know people are self-censoring, we inevitably try to deduce their secret thoughts, but such efforts are very vulnerable to the subjective bias of we who do it.


• * A secular turn simply in the sense of caring more about secular things than earlier thinkers started as a trickle around 1400, entered libraries and courts, then universities started offering more courses on rhetoric (how to convince Earthly people of Earthly matters) and hired their first chairs in ethics (how to behave on Earth). One world-changing effect of our umanisti—one which clearly does merit association with secular humanism—was simply increasing how much people thought this world was a meaty topic. Major contributions to the history of thought don’t have to be systemic theories or advancing a specific answer, they can instead be broadening the range of questions. Many of the most important eras in the history of thought can be better characterized by their questions than their answers. Antiquity: How do we know things with certainty? Medieval: How do we know things about the eternal and permanent? Scientific revolution: How do we know things about Nature? Analytic philosophy: How do we know what we mean when we express things? Renaissance: What can we know about the human world, social dynamics, and how to make them better?


• Machiavelli’s Discourses devote several chapters to demonstrating that ancient Roman religion made ancient Rome stronger than Christian nations are. the Roman cult of honor and ancestor worship meant Romans believed their posthumous wellbeing depended on being remembered on Earth, a state best achieved through doing deeds of valor, glory, and renown, so that to fight and die for one’s country was encouraged by religion, unlike Christianity which glorifies a humble and contemplative life and otherworldliness, which are useless to the welfare of the state.


• I don’t think you’d arrive at modern atheism because you wouldn’t have Hobbes, Newton, Locke, Marx, Darwin, genetics, or telescopes to guide your answers, instead you’d have Aristotle, Abelard, Averroes, Lucretius, Plato, Petrarch, and the astrolabe. The modern scientific answers core to modern atheism aren’t transparent when you don’t have telescopes or DNA. It’s natural for different data to yield different answers. You would be a radical freethinker, you’d ask the same brilliant, all-touching questions, but, like Lucretius’s many Renaissance readers, you might be drawn to any of a wide variety of new, exciting radicalisms which prospered in 1450’s wide Renaissance world.


• This way of understanding the Renaissance has a name now: virtue politics, the Renaissance project to use the study of the classics to cultivate virtue in Europe’s ruling elites, using a particular method and aiming to advance a particular stability-seeking political agenda.71 That the method and political agenda are particular is key, because medieval elites were also raised on the classics, and medieval education also centered virtue, but Renaissance umanisti and their patrons and students did so in different ways (for example, exaggerating their classicism), and for different reasons (for example, the hope for European peace). The project was to heal Italian and European politics through cultivating personal virtue, a union of soulcraft and statecraft.


• * Legitimate power equaled power virtuously exercised. This was appealing in an Italy full of new powers, where traditional legitimacy was virtually absent... Italy suddenly redefined nobility, putting Roman antiquity at the center. Europe’s other powers largely consented, racing to fill their courts with antiques and Italian arts, excited to have this new, non-military axis on which to compete; like the Space Race, the classical culture race could let powers compete while keeping wars cold.


• The propaganda coup of Virtue Politics failed to defend Italy from plagues, feuds, and invasions, but it did establish the importance of Italy’s culture in a way which prevented the cultural assimilation Petrarch had feared... hanks to the same defense mechanism we saw Cosimo deploy against our imaginary envoy so many years before: you don’t want to burn this, you want to have it. Italy defined itself as the win condition of the culture game, and soon, not only did we have Hungarian warlords using laurel wreaths to impress the heirs of Vlad the Impaler, but Lucretius also reached Voltaire’s bookshelf, and Epicurean materialism entered Hobbes’s thought


• there was the idea that education makes nobility, and that a child of gold like Poliziano may be born to parents even of the lowest rank—that now-familiar hairline crack which gradually widened toward the radical idea that all humans might be created equal.


• Machiavelli was a passionate lover of the studia humanitatis, a product of virtue politics, but he saw the project to save Europe by instilling virtue in its rulers as a failure. If the studia humanitatis did produce some philosopher princes like Ippolita Maria Visconti Sforza and Alfonso the Magnanimous, it just as often produced their next generation kinsman, entitled Ippolito d’Este... Machiavelli looked around still-wounded Italy and said: It isn’t working; saving Europe requires something new.


• another innovative perceiver of that problem lay on the horizon, shaped by the fourth generation of the studia humanitatis and observing the continued tumults of this desperate a century: Martin Luther. Luther—like Machiavelli and Savonarola—grew up with Vergil and Ovid, the old educational starter set which had been used in medieval classrooms for centuries, but which were now transformed, layered with new ideas. .. The meticulous philology of the umanisti, and their multi-generational teamwork assembling Greek and Latin lexicons, helped Luther to expose centuries-old confusions caused by the distorting word-for-word translation methods the ancients had applied to Christian and pagan texts alike.

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• Printers: went bankrupt too; there were 300 people in Europe who wanted Cicero at that moment, but they were scattered over 80 towns. In a world of artisanal production, with few mass-produced commodities beyond coins and still newfangled woodblock-printed playing cards, this costly mass-produced commodity did not have a way to reach the rich but far-flung buyers who were building libraries.... printers living on book sales required distribution methods.


• each printing press had to be built by someone who’d learned to make one from another printer, so the innovation spread exponentially, reaching large cities first, then medium, taking generations to reach smaller towns and saturation point. <> In parallel to the books-on-boats and books-for-cheese economies of Venice and Germany, the period also saw the growth of a news economy.


• This is how Luther’s words were in print in London seventeen days after they went public in Germany.


• In 1123, Peter Abelard attracted Woodstock-sized crowds using The Philosopher (Aristotle) to make two seemingly contradictory authorities agree. In the 1260s The Theologian Thomas Aquinas demonstrated this wedding of authorities even more potently, and all supporting Christianity.


• And there was a correspondence between nobility of people and the noble qualities of plants, not just that Europe’s (better-fed) nobility tended to be taller and (from spending days indoors) paler, but they ate nobler foods. Nobles ate noble fruits that grew on noble trees, and noble cuts of meat from the front (head end, Heavenly end) of the animal, while their servants ate base Hellbound onions, garlic, carrots, and hams from the butt end of the animal.


• * Enter cantaloupe. <> Spherical, golden, sun-like, lying basely on the ground. Are noble fruits not fed by tall strong trees reaching high toward Heaven? Are plants not differentiable into a hierarchy? What rank is supposed to eat cantaloupe? If we were wrong about Nature having a hierarchy of plants, are we wrong about other hierarchies? ... maybe human souls aren’t fundamentally different, with souls of iron destined to be ruled by souls of gold?


• In sum, medieval and especially Renaissance Europe valued authority... While the average castle guard would not use the words epistemology and psychology to describe this, he understood perfectly well the ubiquitous belief that most people are liable to be wrong a lot of the time, and that the best guide away from error is authority, whether accepting what the castle doctor says wise Galen said, or going to fetch Horatio to talk to the ghost because he’s a scholar,


• The Renaissance hierarchy of evidence put authority foremost, logic second, and observation at the bottom, the weakest form of evidence for a claim.


• it took 150 years to clean up the text, and develop tools like printed margin notes and glossaries. By 1590 there were 30,000 copies, many of them cheap, just in time for med students—shocked by the discovery of the circulation of the blood!—to look to them for new ideas of how the body’s health might work. We celebrate Lucretius as a contributor to science, but it took 150 years of umanisti to make texts like his legible, and to convince ambitious families of Europe that a library of classics was the best route to (A) peace (B) legitimacy, and (C) a decent salary. It was that process which—by 1590—finally got Lucretius’s science into the hands of what we can at last call scientists.


• The presumptive authority of the past wasn’t just broken by Ptolemy and Galen turning out to be wrong, but by the sheer number of authorities accumulating via Ever-So-Much-More-So for a thousand years, coming to a head in 1600 for everyone to see. It took all of them together, all those years, to get us to one of the most powerful sentences in the history of humankind: “If Aristotle were alive today, he would change his mind.” —Galileo


• 1600s Italy was so saturated with experiment that even members of the Roman Inquisition set up experimental science laboratories in Rome to test the findings of books they were tasked to censor, considering it their job to fact-check publications, not only against doctrine, but by all means: philology, checking footnotes, and testing in the lab.


• To prove these things, Descartes used many familiar scholastic arguments, like Saint Anselm’s famous ontological proof of God’s existence, but Descartes framed it all in simpler, more approachable vocabulary, his signature clear and distinct ideas, since he wanted logic to be a tool for everyone—with Europe’s intellectual world already swarmed by contradictory Christian truth-claims, there was no point in continuing scholasticism’s practice of using super technical language to keep non-experts from approaching theology’s deadly nuclear enriched uranium, the whole world had already been exposed.


• All this resulted in such fantastic contrasts as Cartesians ferociously denouncing Newtonian cosmology (Vacuum in space? Never!) while crashing witch trials to insist that curses can’t be real because there’s no force at a distance (this genuinely got the French witch trial craze to fade out sooner than in many other regions).


• Medieval Christian Europe realized (and if you grant their starting premises they’re right) that, given that the entire world is a temporary construct designed by God for the purpose of teaching humans about salvation and damnation, it’s madness to look to Earth for cause-and-effect chains: there is one omnipotent Cause of all effects. As Dante tells us, God wanted Christ to be lawfully executed by all humanity together, so the guilt and salvation would be universal, so He created the Roman Empire in order to have a government large enough to represent the whole world and then order the Crucifixion.


• surpassing the ancients lay in execution, not fundamentals, and better ships were supposed to bring back gold and glory, not cantaloupe to overthrow Theophrastus. Umanisti envisioned positive change, and (major major moment!) they proposed that people could collaborate to intentionally (!!) cause large-scale social change, but they did not envision ongoing, constant anthropogenic change. Their focus was a one-time restoration of a better age, within a world presumed to be governed by a Divine Plan with its cycles, rises and falls, good kings and bad, all scripted from beyond.


• Then, around 1600, Francis Bacon invented progress. <> You know what the trigger was: the multiplication of rival truth-claims—some from antiquity, some from fracturing Christianity, some from exploration or discoveries—until we couldn’t just keep Abelarding anymore. Bacon invented progress in the same sense one might say Petrarch invented the Renaissance: he was the rhetorical firebrand whose flashy, persuasive rhetoric, those words that sting and bite, gave fame and momentum to a collective project already in progress, and made wealthy patrons take it seriously.


• * There are, Bacon said, three kinds of scholar: the ant, the spider, and the honeybee (a simile he took from Petrarch, who took it from Seneca, who took it from Plutarch, but each used it to describe different things). For Bacon, the three represent different ways of seeking knowledge. The ant is the encyclopedist, who roams the Earth gathering crumbs of knowledge into a huge pile, raising the ant mound higher and higher, competing to have the greatest pile to sit and gloat upon, but making nothing. The spider is the theorist or system-weaver, who spins elaborate, entrancing webs out of the stuff of his own mind, in which it is so easy to be entangled, but there’s nothing there but the produce of that one mind. And then there is the honeybee, who gathers from the fruits of nature and, processing them through the organ of his own being, produces something good and useful for the world—this was the newborn third knowledge-seeking mode, the scientist.


• Bacon proposed something different: the glory of this new science would not be having the marvel but gifting the means to make marvels to all humanity.20 Rather than secretive Leonardos and Brunelleschis, who jealously guard their methods so their works will still be wonders in a thousand years, the scientist’s glory will lie in publishing, sharing techniques, the measure of achievement not one looming monument, but the useful invention which enters every home and improves every life.


• * It’s not an easy task to prove that science works when you have no examples of science working yet. Bacon does not have steam engines, or pasteurization, or vaccines to point at...  We know science will work, Bacon replied, because of God... So, from God’s Goodness, we know Reason must be able to achieve all things that God designed us hope for. God gave us science, and it is an act of Christian charity, an infinite charity toward all posterity, to use it.


• Two hundred years is a long time for a vast, society-wide project to keep getting support—funding laboratories and observing spiders—fed by nothing but pure hope that these discoveries streaming out of Royal Society papers would someday do something. It may remind us of another project to create a golden age, which got support from royal courts and merchant princes for 200 years before Valentino Borgia looked Machiavelli in the eye and made him think they needed something different.


• The concept as the 1600s crystallized it was positive, and to use it in a negative sense would have been nonsensical to Bacon and King Kristina, like using healing in a negative sense. But now along with Great progress this year! We say swallowed up by progress, or the ironic shrugging Welp, that’s progress!


• Teleological histories (histories that presume society is developing toward some specific end) are also particularly prone to presentism, i.e. magnifying things that look like us,

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• once pointed out to me that France during the Catholic-Protestant religious wars was about 10 percent Protestant, somewhat comparable to the African American population of the US today, which is around 13 percent. It’s a striking comparison, and with telling differences. For example, France’s Protestant population was disproportionately rich and powerful, comprising 10 percent of the population but 30 percent of the ruling class,


• Human Agency history can also be harmful. The old, bad version was Great Man history, epitomized by Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841) which presents humanity as a kind of inert but rich medium, like potting soil ready for a seed... That makes us feel just as powerless as Great Forces history


• Ruxandra of Wallachia the Vampire Raven Princess (granddaughter of Vlad the Impaler and niece of Matthias Corvinus the Raven King, about whom, through some unfathomable injustice, there is not yet a single YA fantasy romance!)


• The Great Forces were real. The dam was about to break; no one could stop it. The Italian Wars were going to happen, the likely popes were too warlike, the incentives for the great thrones of Europe too strong. But the human agents—even the junior clerk, grateful that someone gave him one florin to fix his parents’ roof, who passes on a whisper—they shaped what happened, each having consequences, intertwined but real. The dam was about to break, but every person there got to dig a channel to try to direct the waters. Those channels determined the flood’s shape, its path, its damage, whether it burned Burgundy, or Genoa, or fragile Florence.


• But my Renaissance class, the class who’d just burned down imaginary Europe, was all energy: It’s the system! The incentives! Structures of power! We need to analyze the structures that make people support a candidate they know won’t actually be good for the position, but which gets them what they want, or think they need. Let’s study the system! Systemic analysis will teach us how to make better results in future! Instead of bitterness, they had questions.


• Florence’s public health response to the Black Death was to double the fine for selling meat from male and female animals in the same butcher’s booth, thinking that the mix of generative juices birthed disease.


• the second time he worked his courage up and went back home, to guard the great dome whose foundations were laid out by builders who did not know how to finish what they started, but began their project trusting future generations would keep working on it, and find a way. Their efforts didn’t make a golden age in the 1400s. Or the 1500s. Or the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, or 1900s. But Renaissance people didn’t shy away from starting things that take 500 years.