Ada Palmer: evaluation

Transcript context

…Obviously all the stories are somewhat true, but to the extent that this is a part of the story, you’re building up libraries of classics and … setting up a network of information exchange that leads to the Scientific Revolution… The reason this feels salient right now is that a lot of people have this idea that they’re going to make AI go well by doing X thing. Maybe some of those things work, but it’s at the same time frustrating but also funny and interesting that historically nobody has a good track record of being able to say, “I will do this thing so that this huge unanticipated change in history will go my way, or according to my values.” Right. I think “go my way” as opposed to “go well” is a really important distinction. Petrarch wanted a world with these values. He thought, for example, that this would be a triumph for Christianity and what we would call Catholicism, though there’s only one Christianity from his point of view at the time, except for the East, which is different. He was sure that when we found the ancients, fundamentally all of their philosophy would agree with Christianity. The ancients were wise, therefore they will be correct, and Plato will ninety percent agree with Christianity. It just needs a little shaker of the Trinity on top to be Christianity. When he says, “Go find these ancients,” he is in a world that doesn’t have the ancients yet. He’s just guessing what’s going to be in these books. But he says, “If we find them, they will uphold good values,” and everyone believes him. Then they go find them, and they squabble with each other. There are Hedonists and Epicureans and Stoics and all sorts of chaotic things, much more plural than he anticipated. It makes a world that in turn has giant wars, which he would not like, and a crisis, and Machiavelli’s critique of the ancients, and then the new science and the new philosophy, and eventually Galileo, none of which resembles what Petrarch imagined if he had specifically described the future he was trying to make. But then we get to the propagators of Bacon’s scientific method, meaning Voltaire and Montesquieu, who are also big campaigners for inoculation against smallpox. The first major disease eradications start to begin under that immediate influence. Science gets us to the germ theory of disease gets us to modern hygiene, which gets us to vaccines, which gets us to penicillin and the treatment for the Black Death. Petrarch thought he would make a world which shared his values. Instead, he made a world that doesn’t share his values but is capable of curing a disease he never imagined would be curable. If you showed him this future, it would be scary. It would be weird to him because it does not embrace his values. Our values are different. He would be horrified by democracy. He believed that only a tiny elite has the capacity to rule. If we had a time-traveling Petrarch, he would really wrestle for a long time to wrap his head around democracy as a functional system. He really thought in oligarchic terms. But he would see the wonders we’ve created, especially the fact that we can treat the Black Death, and he would weep for joy seeing that. He did not create a world that went as he wanted, but he created a world that went well. We have many examples of that. Trains and bicycles come in, and we get feminism because it’s easier for people, especially women, to move freely and independently. They can organize. They can mobilize. We get suffragettes. Did the inventor of the train intend for there to be women’s liberation? No. Did it go the way he imagined? No. Did it go well? Yes. ndently. They can organize. They can mobilize. We get suffragettes. Did the inventor of the train intend for there to be women’s liberation? No. Did it go the way he imagined? No. Did it go well? Yes. It’s important here to zoom in a little bit on Florence’s own government system and how and why it’s weird, in order to understand what rank Machiavelli actually holds in it. All of these republics, except Florence, are modeled on ancient Rome. The ancient Roman model was an oligarchic republic in which within the city there are certain noble families, usually founding families who made the city in the first place, who are the senatorial families. Hereditarily, when they come of age, the men of the family are automatically in the senate. From among them are elected the consuls, high senators, or the head of state if there is one. You have a small slice of the population that are fully enfranchised members of the republic who rule over the commoner majority. That is how Venice works. That is how Genoa works. That is how Bologna and Siena for the most part work. That’s how the Swiss Republic works. That’s how all of these republics work. Florence was like that for quite a while, but when republics fell, they usually fell to noble families who are the foremost, the strongest, the military class. If you’re a military leader in this period, you have to have noble blood. No soldier is going to follow a commander who doesn’t have noble blood. That would be weird. Those threats to the independence of the republic almost always came from the nobility. After one particular near miss in which the city was nearly taken over, they decided to get rid of the nobility of Florence. They massacred most of them, cut their heads off, put them on pikes, burned their houses down, raked salt into the earth, and had a party on their graves, the way you do in the period when you’re getting rid of a class of people. There were a few noble families that they really liked who had not been part of negative stuff. They allowed them to officially renounce their nobility. They renounced their nobility, changed their names, and declared themselves commoners. They set up a commoner republic. What that meant was the senate consisted of members of merchant guilds. A member of a merchant guild here means the owners of workshops. It’s not the guy who sits at the loom weaving, but the guy who owns the warehouse full of looms where the workers are working. The head of the sculpture works, the head of the architectural firm, not the bricklayers who are actually laying the bricks. Bourgeoisie is an anachronistic word, but we’re talking about the owners of the means of production who are themselves commoners. They are very wealthy, but from the point of view of the diplomatic corps of any other society, all of the ruling people and all of their ambassadors are noble-blooded. If you’re an ambassador, you’re automatically noble-blooded. Nobody’s going to take an ambassador seriously who isn’t. From the perspective of every other polity in the world, the rulers of Florence are the rank of their valet. There is no nobility left in the city.…

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