Ada Palmer: preference

Transcript context

…one of this has existed for a thousand years.” That’s the moment that Cosimo de’ Medici turns to you and says, “Would you like to make an alliance with Florence?” And you can say no. You can say, “No. My king is going to come over the Alps with his enormous army, and we’re going to descend upon this city, and we’re going to sack it, and everyone’s going to let us because it has no friends because it doesn’t have any nobility, so it can’t marry anybody, so it has no meaningful allies. And also, it’s in the middle of this Guelph-Ghibelline feud, so all of its neighbors hate it and they’re just going to let it burn. We’re going to take the enormous piles of gold that are in your basements and go home rich, and all of this will be gone like a dream.” Or you could say, “Yes, let’s make an alliance. Give me a bronzesmith and an architect and a Greek teacher and a Platonist, and we’re going to take all of these things, and we’re going to do the French court like this. Then when the ambassador from Portugal comes, he’s going to feel like an uncultured fool, just like I feel right now.” The power dynamic just flipped upside down. Suddenly, the condescending nobleman is in awe of the merchant scum. That’s what the art and the culture does as a propagandistic tool. The next stage of it then is, “Okay, we’ve raised these princes like this, and they have the Latin, and they have the Greek, and they can impress everybody.” Then they fight a bigger, nastier, worse war than any of the earlier big, nasty wars, with more deaths and more betrayals and bigger cannons knocking down cities and burning whole areas. The wealth is centralized, so the mercenaries are more numerous because people can produce more. The first generations raised by this are supposed to be philosopher princes, and instead we get Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, both of whom had Latin and Greek and Cicero and Plato when they were kids. Then they grow up, and Cesare sets fire to half the world. That is the war Machiavelli watched. Machiavelli was raised on all of the Cicero and Livy. He was raised on the Petrarchan project. He has this famous, beautiful letter that he wrote in exile, where he’s describing his day to his friend. Most of the day is wasted, and he mucks around hunting for larks. Then he goes to a pub and gets drunk in the company of uncultured countrymen. Then he goes home, and he gets dressed in the court robes, the court finery that he would wear back when he was an ambassador to popes and kings. Attired thus, he enters his library to hold commerce with the ancients. He loves this the way Petrarch wanted him to love it. But he observes these wars, and he observes virtuous princes like Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, who does every single thing you’re supposed to do virtuously. He has all the Plato, and he has all the libraries, and he has all the art. And he gets betrayed and his city taken away from him and loses everything. And he watches terrible people like Cesare Borgia and Julius II make terrible choices and succeed. He says, “Okay, clearly Petrarch was wrong that just reading Cicero would make successful rulers like the Caesars. s terrible people like Cesare Borgia and Julius II make terrible choices and succeed. He says, “Okay, clearly Petrarch was wrong that just reading Cicero would make successful rulers like the Caesars. But I still feel in my heart a deep power in the classics.” So he says, “What if the libraries are what we need, but we need to use them differently?” He proposes what we would think of as political science. We observe historical examples. We say, “Okay, here are five examples of battles that happened next to rivers. We’ll put those examples side by side and see what decisions the commanders made to try to figure out which one worked better.” We use history as a casebook of examples of what worked and what didn’t. We imitate what worked, and we avoid doing what didn’t. Instead of feeling that reading about good men will make us good, we read about wise choices, and we imitate those choices. This is one of the reasons Machiavelli is described by his contemporaries as a historian. He says we need to use history and use the classics differently. He proposes that. He isn’t very popular in his own day. It takes a long time for that to catch on. Many people for decades after him are still trying to use absorption by osmosis. But he’s writing that in the early 1500s, so it’s been a little over a century since this started. We have to remember how long this process is. From Petrarch’s first call to Machiavelli writing that is as long as from Yuri Gagarin’s space flight back to Napoleon. The childhood of Napoleon to the space race, that’s Petrarch to Machiavelli. We think of it as one time period, but a lot changed. They had a plan. They tried the plan. They brought the plan to its maximum. They raised all the princes in this new way. The wars happened. It clearly failed. Machiavelli then thinks about why it failed. We’re still only halfway through the Renaissance. Shakespeare’s grandparents have barely been born. We have a lot more time to go. So what do we need? We need new ways of thinking about it. We’re reading the ancients, and we have bigger libraries. We have the printing press now. We’re having libraries in smaller towns. More and more people can read. It’s easier and easier to get an education. More people are starting to learn about science. It also is important that they’re inventing micro technologies of book production like footnotes and glossaries in the margin that explain the hard vocabulary. When Petrarch’s successors like Ficino were young, you had to be a masterful Latinist to read these ancients. You had to have an enormous vocabulary. There are no dictionaries. There are no glosses. There’s nothing to help you. Only a tiny slice of expert classicists could actually read this stuff. A hundred years later, there are translations into the vernacular. There are footnotes that tell you the hard vocabulary. Any med student can read Lucretius’ discussions of materialist information. When Poggio found it, there were two dozen people in the world who could read it. A hundred years later, 30,000 people can read it in the 30 print editions that are printed before 1600. t information. When Poggio found it, there were two dozen people in the world who could read it. A hundred years later, 30,000 people can read it in the 30 print editions that are printed before 1600. When all different kinds of people read it—med students, law students, people in different countries, people in different places—they ask new questions. They wonder whether they can test the hypotheses. They do test the hypotheses. They’re the generation that discovers that the heart is a pump. They’re the generation that takes seriously the question, “Maybe there are atoms, and maybe that’s how diseases work, and maybe we can develop the germ theory of disease.” That’s the 1560s, 1580s, 160 years after Lucretius comes back, because it takes generations of work to build the libraries, to have the libraries, to use the libraries. So when we get to 1600, which is almost exactly 200 years after this begins, a little bit more, we’ve had time to say, “Let’s build the libraries, have the libraries, use the libraries, or realize we failed in how we use the libraries, and use the libraries differently.” That’s the generation of Francis Bacon and Galileo who say, “Hey, let’s use the information differently. Let’s use nature as a casebook of examples the way Machiavelli said we should use history. Let’s examine, let’s doubt, let’s rethink, let’s do stuff in new ways.”…

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