Ada Palmer: prediction

Transcript context

…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.” Just to make sure I understood, the chain of causation here. We’ve got to resuscitate the virtues of the Romans, therefore read what they read. To do that, you need to build the libraries. You build the libraries, you resuscitate all those arts. Then you just need to have people be literate, have people think about information in a new way to analyze it. And that analysis lends itself not just to the history of leaders, but also to the nature of the world. Whenever I hear a story about how this is why the scientific revolution happened, why the Industrial Revolution happened, I’m like, but there are so many stories and it’s just hard to figure out why this one over the other ones. There’s a dozen other stories you could tell. I had a previous guest, Joseph Henrich, who has this theory that the Catholic Church was breaking down these old kinship-based networks that the rest of the world had. It was encouraging guilds, encouraging these kinds of centers where people could get together and discuss ideas. There are probably twenty other stories you could tell. Why this story?…

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