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Giordano Bruno After 400 Years
We live in a publicity-craving era of frenetic fame-seekers. So it can be ironic to realize how some of the most celebrated people of the past somehow slipped into obscurity, even after a lifetime spent earning acclaim. Take Aldous Huxley, for example. The author of Brave new World and many other bold novels -- who also helped usher in the psychedelic era -- managed to time his death so the obituary vanished in a back corner of any newspaper that bothered to mention it at all. He did this by passing away on Nov. 22, 1963, the same day that President John F. Kennedy was shot.
Care to top that? Try this. Even as we slowly work off our hangovers and headaches from those Y2K non-events and anticlimactic "millennium celebrations" -- and while we watch the Internet undergo partial self-destruction at the hands of some of its brightest sons -- I notice on my calendar that we nearly let pass without notice the 400th anniversary of the death (on an execution pyre) of Giordano Bruno.
Giordano who?
Giordano Bruno... only one of the greatest geniuses of the later Renaissance and one spectacularly interesting fellow.
All right, few people know of him today. Tourists blink in puzzlement at his statue, now standing in the Roman square -- the Campo de Fiori -- where the Inquisition incinerated him. But his name wasn't always obscure. With a colorful personality and a flood of unconventional opinions, Bruno was a sensational figure as the 17th century drew to a close -- a prominent Renaissance thinker who, true to that complex era, mixed philosophy, religion, logic and mysticism while preaching a daring worldview that helped set the stage for what we now know as science.
Born near Naples in 1548, Bruno joined the Dominican order of monks at age 18. But soon his restless spirit and critical mind led him to question church teachings, including the notion that the heavens revolved around the Earth, forcing him to flee to Geneva, then France, England and Germany. Bruno's habit of questioning established doctrines brought him into conflict with powerful leaders of both the Catholic and Reformed churches, few of whom were known to tolerate free-thinkers.
Still, with luck and uncanny survival instincts -- and by appealing to the intellectual excitement of the time -- Bruno kept teaching unconventional views in Oxford, Marburg, Wittenberg, Prague, and Frankfurt. Eventually lured back to Italy on a pretext, Bruno was imprisoned in 1592 by the Inquisition, tried as a heretic and burned alive on Feb. 17, 1600.
It can be easy to get carried away over some of Bruno's most prescient views - for instance championing the heliocentric astronomy of Copernicus before Galileo did, then going much further to suggest that the twinkling stars in our night sky are actually suns shining on distant planets, possibly harboring other forms of life. He also held that humans might someday acquire almost godlike powers by understanding lightning and other heavenly mysteries. In that event, we might still need religion for moral guidance -- he opined -- but no longer to shape our models of the physical or biological world.
In an era transfixed by the primacy of the human image -- when great minds of the establishment insisted that the Creator must have a navel and a beard -- Bruno completely rejected the anthropocentric universe, believing instead that the Earth and individual humans are ultimately accidental products of a single living world-substance. In this, he presaged many notions of Darwinian biology.
To a modern mind, his call for tolerance and open enquiry seems especially poignant and prophetic.
Still, one does Bruno a disservice by emphasizing only the things he got right. Many of his other writings now seem silly, deliberately provocative, or just perplexingly obscure, such as his doctrine of panpsychism (belief that reality is constituted by the mind), which anticipated the teachings of Gottfried Leibniz and Baruch Spinoza... and may be echoed in today's extropian movement. He used to get into terrific rows with contemporaries over minutiae that would put most of today's philosophy professors into snoring catalepsy. (People cared deeply about such things, once upon a time.) His fascination with magic and the occult would hardly impress scientists in the year 2000, though it might lend him a New Age cult appeal.
So? The essential point -- and the reason I find this long-dead fellow's life worth noting -- is how Bruno looked around a superstitious age with eyes that were essentially modern. Even his flaming egotism and penchant for pushing other peoples' buttons would fit in well, today.
The clergy of his time weren't dummies; they had their own "grand unified theory" of how things worked and how people should behave. If we have made progress since that era, we owe it less to our improved orthodoxies than to the way we've learned to _tap_ the creative energies of those who defy the intellectual status quo, instead of killing them. Slowly, often grudgingly, society discovered that there is something to value in the rancorous, difficult, blasphemous few who gleefully challenge authority. Those who rip away the set pieces of any conservative worldview to reveal disturbing truths that lie beneath and beyond. Such people, though irksome, are also responsible for much progress in the world.
Imagine if Bruno somehow got teleported into our time -- perhaps with other standout intellects like Benjamin Franklin. One could picture him adjusting with relish to an era so enamored of flamboyant eccentrics. In a month, he would be on all the talk shows. In a year, he might have his own.
In fact, why not spin a story about that? Imagine that some future, time-traveling age will share our own fascination with exceptional men and women of the past. Suppose they reach back to grab Bruno out of his pyre at the last moment, if only to repair and then enjoy a colorfully vivid person who surged so far ahead of his time, caroming about the realm of ideas like a joyous crank, shouting at his stupefied contemporaries to _wake up!_
Not all geniuses are saintly or perfect. Some can be simultaneously offensive, delightful, in your face and profound in both their prescient visions and their spectacular errors. They are also terrifically alive.
So very alive that I feel they somehow testify for the rest of us. They help justify us, showing that humanity _must_ have a reason -- beyond mere creation or natural selection -- for being.
david brin,copyright 2/00 1000 words
==
David Brin is a scientist and bestselling novelist. His 1989 thriller Earth foresaw both global warming and the World Wide Web. A movie with Kevin Costner was loosely based on The Postman and Startide Rising is in pre-production at Paramount Pictures. Brin's non-fiction book -- The Transparent Society: Will Technology Make Us Choose Between Freedom and Privacy? -- deals with threats to openness and liberty in the new wired-age. His latest novel, Foundation's Triumph, brings to a grand finale Isaac Asimov's famed Foundation Universe.
Forgotten famous individuals are very common. Sometimes they really aren't that famous or that important on a global sense. There aren't very many REALLY special or known people, but there are an incredible amount of people who are sort of famous. Is anyone going to remember scientists such as Murray Gell Mann (coined the term "quark"), Stan Pruisner (nobel for discovering the prion) or David Ho (Time's Man of the Year a few years ago -- Aids research)? Although sad, I really don't think so.
I think that like media, the digital age is going to enhance our understanding of present day figures in the future. Just like we will watch a TV show from today that has been digitalized 20 years from now identically, we will have better access to documents and academic insights on important people of our era.
-- Moondog
While I agree that those who fundamentally tear at rules or even whole mindsets do produce the biggest advances, I disagree that we have gotten any better at tolerating non-conformity. In philosophy of science studies, the role of non-conformists has been analysed by TS Kuhn. His major publication is "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". Unfortunately, non-conformists are just as frequently burnt at the stake today as they ever were by the Inquisition. The role of the liberal arts professor nowdays, at least at the University of Chicago, is perceived as stamping out any original thought in their students, indoctrinating them with the correct viewpoints, quotables and pet phrases and even pre-arming them with dirt on the major players of opposition academic camps. It is mostly the toadies and parrots who survive and prosper amid such an education. Heretics are still burnt at the stake, but with modern methods.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
The clergy of his time weren't dummies; they had their own "grand unified theory" of how things worked and how people should behave. If we have made progress since that era, we owe it less to our improved orthodoxies than to the way we've learned to _tap_ the creative energies of those who defy the intellectual status quo, instead of killing them. Slowly, often grudgingly, society discovered that there is something to value in the rancorous, difficult, blasphemous few who gleefully challenge authority. Those who rip away the set pieces of any conservative worldview to reveal disturbing truths that lie beneath and beyond. Such people, though irksome, are also responsible for much progress in the world.
We really need to be careful about patting ourselves on the back here. We might not be killing dissidents today, but they can be marginalized enough to prevent their voices from being heard by more than a handful of people.
Power structures will do anything to maintain their power, they never simply close up shop becuase they realize they aren't working anymore. Many years ago religious structures set the rules including their "absolute truths" and taboos (still true in some countries today). The institutions running things today might not be specifically religious, but they aren't necessarily acting any different.
We need to be especially careful today because of what technology allows us to do, from manipulating public opinion with mass media to the ability to track what people do without them knowing it.
Even the scientific community is guilty. They have their own absolute truths, and anyone who tries to cross them gets cut down until the evidence is too overwhelming to ignore.
Don't get me wrong, the human race has made a lot of progress, I just don't think we've made as much as everyone else seems to think we have.
Bruno was actually written up in Scientific American several years ago now; that's where I first heard of him. (No, I don't know which month off-hand, but it was almost certainly pre-1986.) He was a trouble-maker in many ways as well.
When you get right down to it, Galileo was put under house arrest because Bruno had been using Galileo's discoveries as part of his arguments against the Church. Galileo himself wasn't all that active politically, and the political side of the Church probably would have ignored him completely if Bruno hadn't used Galileo's observations of the moons of Jupiter as proof that not everything revolved around the Earth, and then went on to challenge the other teachings of the Church. (The Church didn't really care if people believed in the Copernican model; hell, the Church financed Copernicus. But they really took exception when anyone challenged the idea of the Earth being the spiritual centre of the universe. Which Bruno did.) Bruno's agitation helped fuel the anti-science leanings of the Church at the time, and made life a whole lot harsher for many other scientists at the time.
Bruno himself was an interesting thinker; unfortunately, when he got the Church's attention, he ended up taking a number of others down with him.
-- Bryan Feir
A small point, to be sure, but the part about the "pretext" isn't really true. In the 1580's Bruno had developed an elaborate theory of memory training (published in, most famously, his Clavis Magna or Great Key). In 1591 he was invited to Venice by a gentleman named Mocenigo, who was keenly interested in his methods of memory training. Angry after failing to obtain from Bruno the secret of his "natural magic", Mocenigo denounced him to the Inquisition. The Ventian authorites reluctantly extradited him.
When I'm singing a ballad and a pair of underwear lands on my head, I hate that. It really kills the mood.
-Tom Jones
Nowadays, everyone is a specialist. An artist could never be a respectable mathetician. These gentlemen were metheticians, astromoners, chemists, artists, architechs, physicists, writers and other professions too. Not just one profession each, but usually 2 or 3 or more all at the same time.
How would anyone claim that burning someone at the stake invalidates belief in Jesus?
For starters, a non-believer can hardly pontificate about what believers should and should not do.
>The actions of misguided people abusing Jesus' name 400 years ago have nothing to do with my faith now
But the actions of people 2000 years ago have everything to do with your faith.
How do you justify crediting certain events and discrediting others?
And why did you mention 400 years as seemingly the remote past, if you centre your beliefs on events five times as old?
This looks like a case of selectively interpreting events, according to what fits your preconceived belief.
On a side note, C.S. Lewis, another great thinker and writer, also died the same day as J.F. Kennedy, relegating his passing into obscurity as well.
--
"There's a word for people who live close to nature -
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Repression never stops. The Spanish Inquisition comes back every few years. Right now it's the atheists and OSS zealots. In a few years it'll be the Blacks again.
Actually, right now it's drug users. As of a few days ago, the U.S. passed the two-million prisoner mark. According to the Department of Justice's own figures, one quarter of those, or one half million U.S. citizens are imprisoned for non-violent drug offences alone.
Mandatory minimum prison sentences were applied in 64 percent of drug cases in 1998. The average length of imprisonment for drug offenses was 76 months; for firearms violations it was 63 months; and for manslaughter, it was 45 months. -- The Washington Post
Even if you find yourself with incurable cancer, like Steve Kubby, and all that is keeping you alive is regular use of medical marijuana, you are subject to imprisonment and likely death in prison from deprivation of your medicine if you are caught using an illegal medicine, i.e. one that is not patented by a campaign-contributing pharmaceutical company. Many medical marijuana patients, once discovered, find themselves under a court order not to use the only medicine that will keep them alive, and are subject to drug tests, and risk imprisonment and death in prison if they dare to continue using their medicine.
Drug users in general are subject to abuse and murder by the police. Their property is subject to seizure without trial, thus bankrupting them and preventing them from defending themselves. They are sent to special "drug courts" where they find that their constitutional rights don't apply. They are subject to "mandatory minimum" sentencing rules that forbid the judge from using any discretion in sentencing, hence the 76 month average drug sentence.
Back to the original point, if you go back far enough, the origins of most religions are based on the teachings of individuals who have had mystical -- i.e. hallucinatory, drug-like experiences. During the inquisition, someone who accidently ate the wrong mushroom, had a "mystical" experience, and claimed to have seen God would be put to death. In the year 2000, someone attempting to replicate the experience would face years in prison if caught.
Atheists and blacks, by contrast, are protected by a host of federal and state laws.
"Flamboyant eccentrics" does not necessarily equate to above-average-in-intelligence, socially-inept, or even non-mainstream. Some examples, perhaps, of what Brin may have been referring to are Elton John, Prince, Richard Branson, Judge Judy, Howard Stern, Ross Perot, the entire cast of the World Wrestling Federation, and anyone who's ever been on the Jerry Springer show.
While you might be eccentric, you probably aren't all that spectacularly flamboyant. Compare yourself to Emperor Norton Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico. How many major bridges have you ordered to be built, and actually had it accomplished?
I did not know of this. Are you referring to Bush and Gore?
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
>> gets cut down until the evidence is too overwhelming to ignore.
> It may look that way to an outsider, but if you ever as a scientist you
> will see that that simply isn't true. To be sure, there are some
> scientists that are dogmatic about their beliefs, but on the
> whole the scientific community as a whole is fairly tolerant of
> unorthodox views, provided that there is at least a smidgeon of
> evidence to back them up.
In fact, I must totally disagree. As a whole, the scientific community is fairly tolerant of unorthodox views, within the context of their own conceptual framework.
This is especially evident in epistemology. The scientific community of the twentieth century, confronted with the questions, "what is knowledge?" and "how are things knowable?" had two basic strategies. First, the great majority ignored them. Second, those few who took it upon themselves to become "philosophers of science" made great efforts to ramrod the truth into the mold of science. Perversely inverting the scientific method, they first they decided what was true, (that science was productive of knowledge), and then came up with reasons to justify it.
Take Logical Positivism, for instance, the darling of 20th century science. They chose to define knowledge to make science (and only science) fit it: "to be knowable is to be open, at least in theory, to empirical verification". This despite the obvious fact that this statement itself is not empirically, or even logically, verifiable!
Scientists are indeed open to a great deal, so long as you presume a materialist universe which is empirically knowable, and don't trod on any of their other pet assumptions. I have seldom heard any group, however, so willing to state their presumptions as fact: "the universe is without purpose", "evolution is the result of random mutation", even "B consistently follows A, so A causes B". Their faith is very strong, and many just as testy about it as the most dogmatic Christians.
I can think of something better: the Socratic method. Question everything. The unreflected life is not worth living.
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton