Ada Palmer: evaluation

Transcript context

…Virgin Mary in front of their face, so that to the very last moment, the person who’s about to be executed is thinking about heaven. The ideal outcome of the execution is that the soul goes to heaven. So the whole structure of the justice system expects the intervention of a patron, who represents the intervention of a patron saint, persuading the judge, who is God, to give you mercy. So when we see 100 trials end with 99 where the person paid a small fine, and one where the person was executed, what that actually means is that in 99, their patron stepped in. Somebody persuaded somebody who put in a good word, and they got the light sentence. In one, that person had fallen out of the patronage network. That person had angered their boss, their protector. That’s why it went all the way to being a capital offense. Probably a lot of people listening are familiar with Giordano Bruno, very famous as a martyr for science because he was burnt at the stake by the Inquisition. Fewer people know that that was not his first Inquisition trial. He was investigated a number of times by the Inquisition for doing various radical forms of thought. The earlier trials had the usual outcome for that kind of trial. He had a patron, there were rich people that he worked with or for, the university was hosting him. They put in a good word. He’s fine. The Inquisition tells him, “Be good,” and things continue as they are. That time, he had angered the person he worked for. He pissed off his patron. It’s his patron who turns him into the Inquisition and says, “This guy is a charlatan. He promised he could teach me these things, and he can’t. I don’t trust him. He’s no good. Throw the book at him.” The reason that trial goes all the way to a capital sentence is that he doesn’t have a patron. He’s the 99th case that time. If he had had a patron protecting him, despite how radical his stuff was, he would’ve been okay. We see that in the trial of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who was candidly substantially more radical than Giordano Bruno. But when Pico is on trial, Lorenzo de’ Medici and other powerful people really care about Pico, and they pull out all the stops. Lorenzo talks to his brother-in-law, who’s an Orsini. The Orsini have enormous influence in Rome. They get permission for Pico to be let go and sent home to Lorenzo to sort of live under house arrest, under Lorenzo’s promise that he’ll be good from then on. Or you have Marsilio Ficino who is this radical Platonist who publishes a book on how to project your soul outside of time and summon angels, arguing for the existence of reincarnation, and is very clearly being extremely theologically weird. This is the man who wrote the best letter of recommendation ever written in the history of time when he was recommending a young scholar for a job with the King of Hungary. He writes in the recommendation letter, “This young man is the reincarnation of St. Thomas Aquinas, so you should give him a job.” Now, that is a letter of recommendation. But you think, “The reincarnation of St. Thomas Aquinas, huh?” And the Inquisition comes knocking on Ficino’s door and is like, “Hmm, reincarnation?” Ficino’s like, “Oh, no. Help. r of recommendation. But you think, “The reincarnation of St. Thomas Aquinas, huh?” And the Inquisition comes knocking on Ficino’s door and is like, “Hmm, reincarnation?” Ficino’s like, “Oh, no. Help. Talk to Lorenzo.” Lorenzo talks to his brother-in-law, Cardinal Orsini. Cardinal Orsini shuts it down, and Ficino is told, “Maybe lay off talking quite so overtly about the reincarnation. ” Ficino says, “Yes, of course, and I will only teach very pious people how to summon angels and project their souls out of their bodies. I promise I won’t teach it to anybody who will use these powers irresponsibly.” The Inquisition is like, “Okay,” and goes home. Because patronage kicked in. Patronage is the glue that makes everything work. You can’t even stay in a hotel or buy an apple—I’m not kidding—without a patron. You arrive at a city. Nobody knows you. You’re a stranger. What you have is a letter of recommendation from your patron who’s friends with some important person there. You present that at the hotel. That’s why they let you stay. To tie together a couple of threads you were talking about, The Prince is painting a picture of regimes being incredibly unstable. You have to worry about foreign powers. You have to worry about rival factions within your own country. You have to worry about mercenaries. You have to worry about lots of different things. So any given regime is very unstable. So what had to happen for things to get more stable? We’re talking about a couple of the ways in which people owed their loyalties not to the regime, but to others within the regime, which created instability. In Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli talks about how one of the reasons the Roman Empire’s fall was instigated is that these generals were months away on the frontier fighting these wars because the empire was so big, they had to amass for periods of years—or in some cases, for Caesar of course, decades—the command of so many men who have for decades just been listening to this guy tell them what to do, who to fight next. This is the person they’re loyal to. As opposed to, say, if the consuls could be giving dictates every single day, then the loyalty could be to the regime in Rome. Same with patronage, if there’s not a system of deterministic justice like we have in the modern world today. A lot of The Prince and Discourses on Livy is dedicated to: how do you make sure that a family is not pissed off that their son got killed and it wasn’t avenged? If you just have a reliable criminal justice system, that problem goes away. It’s the same with the welfare state and getting rid of the patronage system. If you don’t have to rely on this family, then this disintermediates them, and the state can have your loyalty. So it’s interesting to connect all these threads together—communication time, impartial justice system, impartial welfare state—as being what is required for the regime to have enough legitimacy and then, as a result, enough stability to have modern nation states.…

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