Ada Palmer: belief

Transcript context

…ure exactly the way he and his peers marveled at the works of the ancients. They look at something like the Colosseum or the Pantheon in Rome with its enormous dome, and they say, “How did they do it? If only we could work that out, we could make one and then make sure no one else could.” Brunelleschi, who built Florence’s famous beautiful dome, deliberately burned all of his notes and schematics so that nobody else would be able to replicate his work. That is an inventor, and an engineer, but in the sense of a community of scientists, this is not a servant of human progress. This is actually a saboteur of human progress, if anything, who deliberately makes progress and then tries to cut it off at that point so that no one else can be his peer. That is what you did as a learned inventor in the 1400s and in the 1500s. But as you get to 1600, the suggestion is different, and here I’m going to use Francis Bacon’s gorgeous simile of the three insects. There are three types of knowledge wielders, says Bacon. First, there is the ant, who is the encyclopedist, who gathers information from all around the world. He learns everything he can, and he piles it up into a great big pile. He makes an anthill, and he sits on top. If he has the biggest anthill, the biggest pile of knowledge, then he’s proud of having made it. But all he does is assemble it and possess it. It’s a beautiful library, but nothing comes from it. The second type is the system weaver, the spider who spins elaborate webs of beautiful, intricate, logical theory. You admire them, and you can get entranced and ensnared in them easily because they’re so beautiful. They’re almost hypnotic. But there’s nothing real in them. They’re all just spun out of the body of the spider himself, the theorist theorizing from his own mind. The third kind, says Bacon, is the honeybee, who, gathering from among the fruits of nature, processes what he gathers through the organ of his own being to produce something which is sweet and useful for humankind. That is the scientist who gathers from nature to produce something sweet and useful for humankind. With this rhetorical call, and with Francis Bacon’s portrait on the title page, the English Academy of Sciences is founded and starts publishing. The standard switches over from “You are not a great achiever because you built the dome” to “You are a great achiever because you worked out how it can be done, and you shared that sweet and useful thing with all of humankind.” Bacon says if we do this, if we make academies of sciences, we can make sure that every human generation lives in a better condition than the past. We’ll have better agriculture, fewer famines. We will have refrigeration. We’ll have chicken in winter. We will have all of these things that we aspire to. If we collaborate, each generation’s experience will be better than the last. He says that to be a scientist is the ultimate act of charity because there is no greater act of charity than to give a gift to every human who will ever live after you. That is the rhetoric of what you would feel was happening if you’re alive in the 1620s and 1630s. se there is no greater act of charity than to give a gift to every human who will ever live after you. That is the rhetoric of what you would feel was happening if you’re alive in the 1620s and 1630s. Galileo is publishing his observations, and Descartes is publishing his systems. They’ve just discovered that the heart is a pump and that they were totally wrong about the four humors theory. The blood circulates, and they’re trying to figure out what it does. They have magnification, and they can see worlds of complex patterns on the wing of a flea. It sounds like the whole world is suddenly coming into view, and we’re at the beginning of progress. If we zoom out, we would say there’d been progress the whole time. People had always been inventing things. Agriculture in France was better in 1300 than it was in 1000. Plows got better, seed got better, cabbages were bred to be bigger. People worked out better pots. There were always artisanal inventors. In fact, that’s a lot of what Bacon is observing. He worked in the patent office as a young man, and he would see a carpenter come in to patent: “I have invented a better chisel. I’ve invented a thing that goes like this. I’m going to patent it.” He would realize that it was workers and workmen and handicraftsmen who were inventing the really useful tools. He wanted to make this systematic. We would say there was always anthropogenic progress. In 1630, they realize there is anthropogenic progress. They think there hasn’t been. They think they’re beginning, and that history up until this point has been stagnant, but now it’s going to suddenly be full of invention as, for the first time, there will be deliberate anthropogenic progress. Really, we would say there always was and that it’s accelerating, and at this point, we realize it and articulate and describe it. You’ve probably seen lots of graphs of history with the hockey stick graph structure, where it’s flat for a long time and then zhoops up. They’ll put that zhoop after the invention of the scientific method. It depends on what we’re graphing, whether that zhoop is appropriate. It also depends on how much you zoom in or zoom out. It’s true, we do get to inventions that result in enormous increases in population 150 years after Bacon. Would we have anyway, even if it hadn’t been systematized? Probably a bit later, and we would have a slightly flatter hockey stick. But we would still have hockey sticked. In the same way that when you put mice on an island without mice, they breed and they breed and they breed and they breed and they hockey stick. Humans would also have hockey sticked. But would we have hockey sticked later? Would we have hockey sticked with more pain? When mice hockey stick, they also starve to death and eat each other. We haven’t done that yet. Go us. Was that science? Probably. There are a lot of factors to it. So is it true that everything accelerated after 1620? In one sense, yes. In another sense, it’s a continuation of a curve that was already curving. I think you might have answered a question I was about to ask. The book you recommend on your website, The Renaissance in Italy, I keep forgetting the name of the author. Italian names are tough.…

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