Ada Palmer: commitment

Transcript context

…I think that is an underrated aspect of what it must have been like to be a foreign power evaluating Florence at the time. Yeah. We have to remind ourselves that these are high-tech achievements as well as historic achievements. Also that this is a period in which backwards is forwards. That is to say, this is not a period that, like us, thinks of the future as where potential is, and that humanity might get better and better over time. The potential of humanity is recapturing Rome. Backwards is forwards. If we can get more and more like that, that’ll be better. That’s what we aspire to. They do debate: can we surpass the Romans? Can we make things even better than the Romans? But it’s an “if,” it’s a debate. It’s not a “definitely, of course”. For us, it’s “definitely, of course.” We’re moving forward. We’re trying to build bigger and more impressive things. Even people who are cynical about progress will say, “Yeah, we will be more powerful in the future. We’ll be able to do more. We may use it to stab ourselves in the foot, but we will be more powerful in the future.” For them, it’s very much: will we ever be as powerful as the Romans were? We don’t know. We can debate it. We hope so. We aspire to it. Will there be another Pax Romana? Will there be another universal peace someday? Will we ever achieve that again? So when we look at something like Florence’s cathedral or Florence’s neoclassical buildings, we look at it and we know they’re imitating the past. So we don’t think of it as cutting-edge technology. But for them, cutting-edge technology is imitating the past. We talked about last time how both Machiavelli and the other umanisti, in the different ways they understood virtue, were trying to emulate the virtues that made Rome originally great. How much are they going off of just these random myths that Livy or whoever would write down about something that supposedly happened, where Brutus killed his own sons, or who was that guy who put his hand in a fire to show that the Roman people will be loyal and you shouldn’t fight us? You look at actual Roman history, and it’s incredibly fucked up. We were just talking before we started recording about the life of Claudius and the period of the emperors and so forth, and surely this must have been known to them that actually……

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