Lucretius, and the man who saved his work from oblivion, sparked our modern world

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern – Stephen Greenblatt (2011)

            The intellectual progress of humanity is never smooth, and quite often fraught with violence, pride in ignorance, and just plain old bad luck.  Sometimes an artifact from long ago is rediscovered, or translated, and then becomes a touchstone for a whole world of new thoughts and ideas.  This book is about one such re-discovery.  There are few writings from antiquity that have shaped and informed the modern world we all live in quite like the work On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura in its OG Latin form) by the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius.  Stephen Greenblatt does an amazing job of uncovering not only the history of Lucretius himself and his seminal work, but also the history and life of the sometime Papal Secretary, and lifelong lover of literature and antiquities, Poggio Bracciolini who through his diligent exploration unearthed a 400 year old handmade copy of Lucretius’ masterpiece and shared it with the world.

            Lucretius did not create the ideas espoused in his poem.  He was a Roman citizen at a time when the Empire was in decline, and many thinkers were looking back to the golden age of Greek thought and ideas to try and gain some sort of insight that would bring back the glory of Rome.  Lucretius was interested in the work of a specific Greek philosopher, Epicurus, who lived and created a school of philosophy nearly 300 years earlier.  This philosophy, known as Epicurianism, is central to the ideas of Lucretius, and forms a base for him to explore the nature of reality, life, and the universe at large.  Democritus’ idea, atomism, is that all matter in the universe is reducible to tiny non-reducible parts called atoms, and that because of this all matter is similar across the Universe.  Epicurus started his explorations at the age of 12 when his teachers could not explain to him the meaning of chaos.  He took the atomist idea and ran with it, positing that everything, planets, stars, the Sun, us, etc., were all a part of the natural order of things, and that the same principles that govern life and change on Earth do so in the heavens.  Because of this, he stated that pleasure, derived without hurting anyone or anything else, is the highest goal of life.  Epicurus denied the immortality of the soul, seeing it as just another part of the living organism, which dissipates at the time of death.  There is no afterlife, and yet one should not fear death.  “Death is nothing to us, for that which is dissolved I without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us.”

            Consider this, using pure thought and reason, and before any scientific method of empirical experimentation was even conceived of, Lucretius had taken the starting point of Epicurus’ philosophy, and intuited some deep truths that, to modern, post-Enlightenment minds, come off like predictions of the advancements of science in the past 2,000 years.  As listed in this book by Mr. Greenblatt, here are some of the elements of the Lucretian challenge put forth in On the Order of Things, as stated by the author, Peter Greenblatt:

·         Everything is made of invisible particles (There are no non-natural forces or deities creating existence)

·         The elementary particles of matter – “the seeds of things” – are eternal (Neither destruction nor creation have the upper hand.  Everything is in a constant state of change and mutation of form.  The philosopher George Santayana called this idea, “the greatest thought that mankind has ever hit upon.”)

·         The elementary particles are infinite in number but limited in shape and size (Lucretius intuited that there is a hidden code of matter, and a specific set of rules by which they combine into the substances of our existence.  He could not have known about molecular chemistry, or genetics, or any other such thing, but his reasoning told him it had to be true.  Amazing!)

·         All particles are in motion in an infinite void (Every high school science student learns this as part of physics.  Einstein understood this as well and it was the basis for his Special Relativity.)

·         The universe has no creator or designer (There is no purpose or end-goal for the existence of the universe, only ceaseless creation and destruction.  This is a very similar concept to that of the endless cycles of time in many Eastern religions)

·         Everything comes into being as a result of a “Swerve” (If particles all moved in one straight line there would be no interactions between them.  Lucretius stated that “at absolutely unpredictable times and places they deflect slightly from their straight course.”  He was thinking of a minimally slight adjustment, enough to cause an infinite variety of combinations.)

·         The “Swerve”: is the source of human free will (if all motion were one pre-determined chain of events, there would be no room for free will, with cause following cause for eternity.)

·         Nature ceaselessly experiments (There is no single moment of creation nor an end to creation)

·         The universe was not created for or about humans (There were forms of life before humans, which no longer exist, and there will be forms of life after humans cease to exist.)

·         Humans are not unique (We are made of the same stuff as all other life and non-life.  We can find many life-forms that share traits we consider human, such as compassion, altruism, regret, and love.  As Lucretius states, a calf recognizes its mother cow just like a baby human recognizes her mother.)

·         Human society began not in a Gold Age of tranquility and plenty, but in a primitive battle for survival (Lucretius understood that life is harsh, and was especially so to early humans who had no tools, no medicines, no social organization, and no language.)

·         The soul dies (The human soul, or any other living thing’s soul, is as much a part of the body as the eyes, and also dissipates upon death.)

·         There is no afterlife (the afterlife has been a consolation and a torment to many humans.  However, once it is grasped that the soul dies alongside the body, one can grasp that there are no posthumous punishments to worry about, nor any rewards to be expected.  Life on this Earth is all we humans have.)

·         Death is nothing to us (Once the body and soul die, there will be neither pleasure nor pain, longing nor fear.  “You will not care, because you will not exist.”)

·         All organized religions are superstitious delusions (Humans become enslaved to their own dreams.  They experience sequences of misfortune and feel that they are being punished by some deity.  They feel awe and wonder while gazing at the sky above and assign that beauty to some magical being that must have created it, regardless of the natural explanations for such phenomena.

·         Religions are invariably cruel (They promise hope and love but their deep underlying structure is cruelty.  “The quintessential element of religion – and the clearest manifestation of the perversity that lies at its core – is the sacrifice of a child by a parent.”  Lucretius was writing this nearly 60 years before the currently prominent sacrifice myth began.  He was aware of Hebraic myths such as Abraham almost gutting Issac cuz some voice in his head told him to, and would have understood the prominent display of images and statues of a bloody, murdered son.)

·         There are no Angels, Demons, or ghosts (All are entirely unreal and best forgotten.)

·         The highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain (Lucretius believed that there is no higher purpose than the facilitation of the pursuit of happiness for oneself and one’s fellow creatures, and this includes all living things.  “All other claims, such as service to the state, glorification of gods or a ruler, and the arduous pursuit of virtue through self-sacrifice, are secondary, misguided, or fraudulent.” as paraphrased by Mr. Greenblatt.)

·         The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion (Lucretius believed the principal enemies of human happiness are inordinate desire and gnawing fear.  Our ability to imagine the infinite, whether infinite pain, infinite sorrow, or infinite joy, keeps us from accepting or enjoying the finite pleasures, rising up from finite sorrows, and controlling the desire for infinite joy.)

·         Understanding the nature of things generates deep wonder (For Lucretius, humans engage in many poisonous beliefs that prevent us from enjoying the wonder of the world around us, including the idea of an eternal soul that will be punished or rewarded indefinitely.  This keeps humans from living in the now, and lets them accept the wrongs and horrors of life as just a way-station into the next world.  This is deep poison, and keeps us from doing our best to increase happiness worldwide, and reduce pain worldwide.  It is the source of much of the evil in the world)

          For hundreds of years, Lucretius works were forgotten, until the world changed and people started exploring the old Greek masters again.  Due to the inherent bias in christian researchers, they praised any philosopher whose ideas seemed to correlate to the tenets of christianity while excoriating or outright destroying the works of any philosopher who held what they believed to be “pagan” or non–christian ideas.  Because of this, Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius were consigned to the “pagan” pile, and their ideas and works ridiculed outright as part of Catholic dogma.  Ironically, it took a bibliophile like Poggio Bracciolini to travel to remote monasteries to rediscover these old works.  The masses in the intervening centuries had become dumb as rocks and highly illiterate.  The monk copyists in these secluded monasteries would copy old works, many times purely by eye, as they could not actually read old Greek or Latin.  Poggio’s discovery of On the Nature of Things, and his subsequent dissemination of the work, occurred before the invention of the printing press.  Once that was invented, copies of Lucretius spread far and wide, influencing many of the thinkers, artists, and writers that led what is now called the Renaissance.  These same writers went on to influence the Enlightenment, and through that, the modern world we all share. 

          This book is a great treasure, and should be read by anyone who wishes to understand the underpinnings of our world, and the many ways in which the enemies of free thought and free ideas fight and kill to keep their lies alive in the minds and hearts of the masses.  We currently live in a world where too many factions are seeking to distract humanity back into religious factions of “US” versus “THEM.”  If it is not one religion against another, it is upper classes against the poor ones, citizens against immigrants, or civilized people against uncivilized “animals.”  Every one of these con-artists, and they are ALL con-artists, seeks to force us to see the world in the manner they prescribe, for their own ends.  It is such a joy to find heroes in the past that help me fight the near-endless waves of stupidity and evil that seek to keep humanity under control.  Those who fight ideas do so because they KNOW these ideas shatter their bullshit lies.  Long live the life of the mind.  Lucretius was one bad mo-fo.

(To read On The Nature of Things - Lucretius (translated by William Ellery Leonard) click here: http://classics.mit.edu/Carus/nature_things.html) 

(To purchase The Swerve - Peter Greenblatt, click here: THE SWERVE )

David Letterman was the First and Last of his kind.

Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night – Jason Zinoman (2017)

            My favorite television show was always Late Night with David Letterman.  As a kid in the 1980’s, I loved staying up late on Fridays, or on weekdays during a school break, and watching this weird, confusing, and downright absurd television show.  The host was an odd-looking white dude who did not seem to actually care, and his comedy was at times mean, at times rude, and definitely at times juvenile.  For a while cable TV would re-run old episodes of Late Night, which allowed me to catch up on the insanity I had missed.  This was awesome.  I even started a Church of Letterman with my friend Antonio Villalobos, but we had no converts.  When I went off to college I would never miss the show.  I would regularly go to sleep around 12:30 PM, (or midnight if the guests were boring).  During that time I was “written up” by the RA over a dozen times because I was laughing way too hard during “quiet hours” which at our dorm ran from 11:00 PM to 6:00 AM.  I did not care.  I wanted to watch Dave and Paul.  In all that time, I felt like I never really got to know Mr. David Letterman, the man whose singular voice excited a generation of cynical and jaded slackers.  That is the beauty of books such as this.  They allow me to fill in huge gaps of knowledge while providing context for some of my most favorite and treasured television memories.

            As a super-fan of Dave, I knew the basics of his life story.  His early work at Ball State University’s radio station, his early gigs as a news weatherman on TV, and his “acting” in shows such as The Mary show and Mork & Mindy were all known to me.  Dave is a private man however, and surrounds himself with other private people, or at least people who will not yap about Dave to the media.  Because of this, the inside info found in this book is all the more exciting!  The author has done extensive research and interviews with people from Dave’s early life, and fleshes out a lot of what made Dave who he is from these sources.  It is very cool and funny to hear how Dave would screw with his bosses from the start, never letting them get comfortable with him.

The author, Jason Zinoman, breaks down the late night talk show career of David Letterman into three separate parts, each focused on a different type of show, a different type of comedy.  After the failed morning show, the classic Late Night with David Letterman began.  For the first few years, the thematic center of the show was an unbridled and caustic attack on the conventions of television, celebrity, and show business itself.  This was Dave breaking down the very form of what he was trying to create, a talk show where stars and celebrities come to peddle their latest work, and where the host usually comes off as an ass-kissing sycophant, helping create the false images of celebrity and fame which Hollywood uses to sell their product.  The author describes the various people involved and gives a lot of credit to these early writers and directors.  They helped guide Dave into his proper role.

A few years in, and the show changed again.  This time, for the better part of 4-5 years, Late Night with David Letterman became a crazed circus, an insane madhouse which destroyed even the visual conventions of a televised talk show.  It was more high-concept, and less snarky.  This version lasted quite a while, and created some of the most memorable moments in talk show history.  It was this version of the show that made Letterman a superstar.  He was now unable to distance himself from celebrity by ridiculing it.  He WAS celebrity.  Late Night became the one show that up-and-coming comedians wanted to be booked on.  It was the only show that booked cutting edge bands, many of which made their national television broadcast debuts on Late Night (REM for instance).  Dave had become a bigger star than his guests.

The show changed once again after the Tonight Show was given to Jay Leno instead of Dave, who was Carson’s personal fave.  The show moved to CBS, and Dave became more of a fatherly curmudgeon, with the show becoming bigger and grander in every way, from the sets to the ever growing band, to the nicer clothing being worn by Dave.  This was all in response to CBS moving the Late Show with David Letterman to an earlier time slot to compete against Leno’s Tonight Show directly.  It seems that age and hard-earned wisdom tempered the manic crank that Letterman used to be.  While I missed the insanity of the earlier iterations of this show, I stayed a true fan and appreciated it for what it was.  Dave’s absurdist streak still remained, and Paul Shaffer and Dave became even more of a comedy duo.  The show also had more gravity at an earlier time slot, and it seemed Dave took it a lot more seriously.

During the time that Dave was on the air, both at NBC and CBS, countless other pretenders tried their hand at the format, each of them eventually being dumped by their networks.  By the time Dave went off the air, there were countless other shows, hosted by watered-down versions of himself.  None were nor are as good, and it is likely no one will ever capture the entire nation’s imagination with a late night show like Letterman did.  He was never personally satisfied.  He berated his writers and himself for not being funny enough, and he seemed to actually HATE being a famous person, but I think it was because of this that his comedy worked.  He stood outside the Hollywood shit-storm and assaulted it endlessly with words and comedic ideas.  A talk show depends upon a steady stream of actors and celebrities shilling their latest bullshit, but Dave upended that idea.  He did not care about their projects or what they were supposed to promote.  He wanted to create entertaining conversations and interactions, not promote shit with canned answers from his guests.  Those who understood became his favorite guests.  Those who did not were mercilessly mocked.  They deserved it.

(This book can be ordered here: THE LAST GIANT OF LATE NIGHT  )

Tycho Brahe & Johannes Kepler. Two shining lights in a sea of ignorance.

Tycho & Kepler: The Unlikely Partnership That Forever Changed Our Understanding of the Heavens – Kitty Ferguson (2002)

The knowledge that humanity has built up over our existence is always dependent on the sharing of information and the ability to spread the information as far as possible.  One never knows just who will be the person to grasp that bit of data and head off on a new intellectual adventure.  This is especially true in the sciences, where solitary scientists spent years of their life making very careful observations of the natural world and the heavens around us.  This hard data is the basis of all science.  Only when such rigorous data is obtained are the theories that seek to explain the data able to be verified, or rejected as not conforming to the verified data.  For decades, Tycho Brahe labored as the pre-eminent astronomer of his time, using his knowledge and position to build ever more elaborate and precise astronomical observation instruments.  His data, gathered after countless thousands of man-hours spent between him and his many assistants making nocturnal observations, spoke no truths in and of itself.  It was up to a younger astronomer and mathematician, Johannes Kepler, to utilize this storehouse of astronomical data in his quest for the truth about why and how the planets move through the sky, and bring about a revolution in the human understanding of the Universe.

The two men could not have been more dissimilar.  Tycho Brahe was, while not a royal, a member of a family that had been deeply ingrained in Denmark’s aristocracy, with members serving royal courts, acting as bishops in the church, and running fiefdoms in accordance with the King’s will.  Tycho Brahe grew up and was educated with the intent to have him become one of these servants to the crown, which included not only formal education, but the skills and tact necessary to commiserate with the royal courts of Europe and the egos found within.  He ingratiated himself with the king and was given many opportunities to pursue his intellectual and scientific curiosity, mostly abandoning the family demands that his class demanded.  Johannes Kepler was a more modest man.  He was not raised in the aristocracy, but his family members were well respected members of academia, business, and local religion.  Kepler did not have the connections available to Brahe.  He had to seek out his place in life.  He wanted to study the cosmos, but his family would not support it, hoping he would become one of the new class of professional men, and urging him to become a physician, a job more respectable than University professor at the time.

It is the life stories of these two men, and how they eventually became intertwined for posterity, that is the main thrust of this book.  It details both men’s childhoods, their educations, their attempts at scientific discovery, and their nearly endless troubles with the crown, the churches, and the profound level of ignorance that they found themselves surrounded with.  Tycho Brahe worked for decades, cataloguing a star chart the likes of which had never even been attempted by a human being.  In the later years of his life, and through countless setbacks, he accepted Johannes Kepler as his assistant.  In fact, he had chosen a man whose intellectual abilities rivaled the master’s, and who would guarantee the immortality of Tycho Brahe and his work.  Johannes Kepler used these precise measurements to understand what we now know as the Solar System.  He was the first human to do so, working out his three Laws of Motion, which are the basis for nearly all of modern astronomy. 

Johannes Kepler’s insights allowed him to describe our heavens in a way that had never been understood before.  Tycho Brahe had refuted the Ptolemaic system, which stated that the sun, planets, and stars all rotated around the Earth, which was the center of existence.  Tycho did not, however, postulate a solar system where the planets all rotate around the Sun.  Instead, he created a very complex system to explain the motions of the heavenly bodies.  It was not perfect.  Johannes Kepler, much to Brahe’s consternation. Supported the Copernican model of the solar system, in which the Sun stood in the center and the planets and stars all rotated around the Sun.  Kepler also suspected that the stars were much further away than the planets.  These and other observations were extremely revolutionary, not just for science, but for humanity at large.  Humans had been living under the Ptolemaic system for centuries because it aligned with the teachings of the catholic church.  The Earth was the center of all things, as it should be, since god created earth for humans and humans are his most perfect creation. Everything else is secondary. These types of circular arguments are all that any organized religion has to justify their own bullshit existence.  The church silenced any scientists that sought to understand the true reality of existence, even setting a few of them on fire. 

            Both Brahe and Kepler had to contend with a Europe in the midst of a Counter-Reformation.  The Calvinists and Lutherans that had started the Reformation, were now being attacked on all sides by the Holy Roman Empire and the ridiculous catholic church.  In catholic towns, protestants were banished or killed if they chose not to convert, with their heads hung on pikes for the world to see their “sin.”   In Protestant towns, Catholics were equally persecuted, all for supporting the Pope.  These two men of science, men of reason and enlightenment, and devout Christians both, were plagued on all sides by the stupid, petty, and evil wars that religions create among us to keep us in their debt and our money in their coffers. (It is still the same damn thing).  Not only did Kepler have to contend with religions and their stupidities, but he had such a tragic life.  He lost his first wife and around 9 children to disease over the span of twenty years.  His mother was accused and tried at age 72 for being a witch, by the ignorant Christians in her town.  Thank rationality and human ingenuity that Kepler was able to overcome all this and work on astronomy.

The bravest among us are the ones willing to stand up for their individuality and the ability to think for oneself.  Humanity is filled with countless people and organizations who seek to dampen human intelligence, to keep us stupid and slobbering at their crooked teats.  People like Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe who are strong enough and fortunate enough to hold their own against the tide of shit around them do so for the betterment of all humankind.  Without these two men our world would be a lot different.  The story of their lives and research is invaluable and anyone interested in the history of astronomy, or human thought, should read this book.

(This book can be purchased here:  AMAZON  )