The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

"Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us." Alain de Botton

Lucretius has been on my mind a lot in the past few days since I finished reading "The Swerve." Mind you, I haven't read a word of "The Nature of Things" outside of the quotations in the book, but clearly, he has had a fairly significant impact on my thought. I guess that's because death has been on my mind a lot for the past few weeks. I've just kind of developed the, what, feeling?, attitude?, premonition?, that I'm not going to live much longer. And here comes Lucretius, saying, in effect, "What, me worry? We're all going to get the chop some day and it will be sooner rather than later for some of us, and that's just the nature of things." Or as Goldblatt puts it, "Death is nothing to us. To spend your existence in the grip of anxiety about death is mere folly. It is a sure way to let your life slip from you incomplete and unenjoyed."

So really, he nails it completely. Is that spot on your face cancerous? Is that rattling in your lungs another clot forming? Is the fact that your piss barely dribbles out a sign of prostate cancer or bladder failure? Is some drunk roughneck not gonna see you in time on the side of the highway and take you out? Is it today, tomorrow, next week, next year, next decade? Whatever. Don't get hung up on it. Enjoy the wonder and the weirdness of it, from that fact that anything exists. to our own consciousness of existence and of ourselves. I mean, it is all too weird and incomprehensible that I'm here, sitting in this chair, writing down thoughts about Lucretius and anxiety over death.

And especially weird that a book comes along taking on the issues that I've been pondering for some time, but in a format of historical nonfiction about a "book finder"--Poggio Bracciolini-- who rediscovered Lucretius' poem "The Nature of Things" in a southern German monastery about 1500 years after it had been written. The way that Goldblatt tells the story, it's really improbable that the poem came to light at all, and yet it has made all the difference to the history of western thought since it began to recirculate in humanist circles. To tell that story, Goldblatt covers the development of literate culture in late republican Rome, the demise of literacy in Europe in the aftermath of the Gothic wars and the "decline of the Roman empire," the "revaluation of all values" as both learning and pleasure were both radically devalued by Christianity, the monastic culture that kept reading alive for its spiritual benefit but that paradoxically kept some of the texts of the ancient literate culture that diametrically opposed the values of the monastery.

To make the story even more intriguing is Poggio's role in the debacle of the Papal schism. It makes a grand narrative built around Poggio's discovery of the manuscript shortly after he lost his job and his livelihood as the secretary to Pope John XXII, who was forced to abdicate, along with two other claimants to the Papacy, by the council called by the Holy Roman Emperor. This was the same council that captured and burned Jan Hus at the stake after luring him with promises of safe conduct. (And it was the memory of this betrayal that forced Charles V to allow Martin Luther to leave the Diet of Worms unharmed a little over a hundred years later, a move which Charles later greatly regretted.)

In the midst of this ecclesiastical maneuvering, Poggio discovers the text of a 1500 year old poem that is totally secular. How did it make it through the years of neglect, being recopied again and again--for that is what it took to have lasted that long--when its message was totally antithetical to what the church, the monasteries, and the monks believed? The copyists must have not read the texts that they so painstakingly reproduced.

"There is no master plan, no divine architect, no intelligent design," is how Goldblatt summarizes Lucretius' message. Lucretius traces his views back to Epicurus, who in turn looks back to Democritus' atoms as the stuff of all the universe. "You needed only to comprehend that there is a hidden natural explanation for everything....That explanation will inevitably lead you back to atoms. If you can hold on to and repeat it to yourself the simplest fact of existence--atoms and void and nothing else...your life will change." Everything that is is just a temporary recombination of atoms, and that's all there is. There is no immaterial soul that survives the body, there is no afterlife with rewards and punishments. And so, the only thing left to us, then, is to enjoy it while we've got it, 'cause it ain't gonna last very long. For Epicurus and Lucretius, it was in physical pleasure, but also, or even mainly, in friendships and contemplation that life finds its highest meaning. 

The life of simple pleasures was all that matter: "Man's natural needs are simple. A failure to recognize the boundaries of these needs leads human beings to a vain and fruitless struggle for more and more." So think: Epicurus--and then think Henry David Thoreau? More weirdness? It turns out that the church naturally did a hatchet job on Epicurus as well as Lucretius, the idea that epicurean means nothing more than overwrought sensual pleasure and debauchery. As Tertullian--he who would enjoy watching the souls of the unsaved burning in hell, even though he also said, "Credo quia absurdum," I believe because it is absurd--said, "If you grant Epicurus his claim that the soul is mortal....the whole fabric of Christian morality unravels." So morality depends on rewards and punishments in the afterlife.

But then I guess Thomas More and Machiavelli thought so as well. Goldblatt writes that More composed Utopia in response to Lucretius to show what a society could look life if it adopted a free-thinking philosophy devoted to the pursuit of happiness for all. But he insisted that belief in a soul and in an afterlife were absolutely necessary to make it work--which of course totally contradicts the intention of what Epicurus and Lucretius had to say. Machiavelli pronounced that laws and customs were worthless without fear of what might happen in the afterlife. More's friend Giordano Bruno had a much better handle on Lucretius, "Bruno might have been the first person in more than a millennium to grasp the full force, at once philosophical and erotic, of Lucretius' hymn to Venus. The universe, in its ceaseless process of generation and destruction, is inherently sexual."

(I do have trouble reconciling this view of Bruno with the Bruno of the Kabbalah/Trismegistus theme given him by Dame Francis Yates. Somehow, calling down mystical influences through the stars or helping the Sefiroth piece itself back together doesn't quite gibe with which I hear Lucretius saying. Somehow, Bruno is the heir of Lucretius/Copernicus on the one had and Ficino/Pico on the other. Dame Yates saw this strain leading eventually to Newton and the Royal Society. Goldblatt also traces a lineage from Lucretius to Newton.)

And once the cat was out of the bag, it seems, Lucretius became one of the founders of the modern age, not only in Bruno and More and Newton, but in Shakespeare and Montaigne as well. "Montaigne articulates what it feels like from the inside to think, write, live in an Epicurean universe." Of course, the parallels between Lucretius and Spinoza are obvious, but Goldblatt doesn't go there. He does point out that "Lucretius' materialism helped to generate and support the skepticism of the likes of Dryden and Voltaire and the programmatic disbelief expressed in Diderot, Hume, and many other enlightenment figures," including, most notably, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the pursuit of happiness into the Declaration of Independence, and who finally described himself as "an Epicurean." Of course, what we know about Jefferson's habits make him an epicurean of the old school as well.

Ultimately, Goldblatt is probably a better story teller than an accurate historian. His story has all the earmarks of being a pivotal moment in the history of western thinking. It seems like there is a straight line from Poggio's discovery of the manuscript to Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins. Would the thinking of western science have turned out all that much differently if Poggio had not made his his discovery in 1417? I'm not sure that I'm convinced that it would have. But, really, when you come down to it, that's not all that relevant to me right now. What is important is that "The Swerve" has given me another handle on the thoughts and issues that seem to dominate my life these days. It turned out to be the right book at the right time.

Author: Greenblatt, Steven

Date Published: 2011

Length: 284 pp

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Egypt, Greece and Rome

One of my fantasies is to come back as a born again history teacher. I would love to teach a two year advanced placement sequence on Mediterranean and European history stretching from the dawn of agriculture in Syria and Turkey to the latest conflicts over the European Union and Greek debt. Well, maybe not that contemporary, but at least through World War II. This book by Charles Freeman could serve as a good text underlying the first half of the course on the Mediterranean worlds.

The book cover such a wide time--from about 4000 BC until the Islamic invasions of Syria and Spain in the seventh century--and a wide area--all of the Mediterranean civilizations--that there can be little unity of theme to it. It falls in five major areas: the ancient Near East, Egypt, Greece, the Hellenistic city-states, and Rome, which really ought to be subdivided into the rise of the Roman republic and the establishment and eventual decline of the Roman empire. But really, while the book covers the Sumerians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Hittites, the Minoans, the Mycenaeans, the Israelite, the Gauls, the Germans, etc., etc., the emphasis of the book is in the title--Egypt, Greece, and Rome, with well over half of the book devoted to Rome.

The book is really about the rise of city culture in the different Mediterranean civilizations. Cities in the Tigris-Euphrates valley center on the control of water and the creation of surplus grain. With the incipient cities of the ancient near east--Uruk, Ur, Eridu--by about 3000 BC, also come the first kings that we know of, although it is interesting to note that these kings often shared power with the merchant classes as trading became widespread. Egypt was a bit different in its development as abundance was created by the natural cycle of flooding of the Nile river, and the Pharaoh became a symbol of the cosmic harmony that enabled this cycle. The infamous Sargon subjugated a large portion of the Tigris-Euphrates valley in establishing the first known empire in about 2300 BC, and the even more famous Hamurabi promulgated his law code some 500 years later. But something brought these civilizations to a screeching halt about 1100 BC or so--volcanic eruptions?, new methods of warfare?, the sea people? Freeman doesn't go into any depth for the reasons for the decline. Out of the ruins of this "Dark Age" appear the neo-Assyrians, the Israelites, and a bit later, the Greeks. Egypt appears to get back on track, and the Babylonians appear again as power players. Soon enough, new bad boys--at least to the Greeks, Egyptians and Babylonians--take over the Near East, the Persians.

For me, things take off with the late archaic culture of the Greek peoples who begin populating first the eastern Mediterranean with colonies that eventually spread across north Africa and as far west as Spain as well as across the Black Sea. Then begins the "power to the people" movement that eventually led to the rise and spread of democracy. Freeman characterizes Greek cities as a place where people could hammer out the rules of living together--the rise of politics. This was "the dawning of a new age, that of the city state, where justice can perhaps be made a reality," and the city becomes a place of communal bonding contrasted to earlier cities which served more to glorify the ruler. In Athens, especially, this came about with the reforms of Salon as order threatened to break down under the increasing debts owed by the lower classes to the aristocrats. This was also a time when wealth and opportunity were spread to a lot more people with the massive migrations of Greeks throughout the Mediterranean world. Aristocrats were becoming more and more dependent on the citizens to serve as soldiers, first with the small land owners becoming hoplites and later with even poorer citizens needed to row the triremes of the Athenian navies.

This need to hammer out disputes in the public forums also led to the "incentive to find first principles from which debate could begin." The ability to speak and argue in public forums put an increasing premium on the facility of reasoning, especially in the cities of the Ionian coast, probably the richest cities in the Greek world at the time, and led to searching for the underlying forces of the universe. "This attempt to give a single, rational account of the natural order can be seen as a key movement in the evolution of western culture, and eventually the first formulations of philosophy. "The archaic age deserves to be seen as one where a particular attitude of mind took root, perhaps, as been suggested, because of the intensity of life in the polis. It involved the search for an understanding of the physical world free of restraints imposed by those cultures which still lived in the shadow of threatening gods." At the same time, a revival of aristocratic values in the face of threats from the Persian empire--arete, glory, manliness, and valor--become important in the defense of liberty. Now man and his freedom become the measure of all things.

This could not last. Hubris, or overweening pride, brought about the fall of the Athenian empire, and the rise of Macedonia put a demise to the independence of the Greek polis. At the same time, however, Alexander and his armies spread Greek culture and city life, along with the development and glorification of the individual, throughout the region.  Alexander's tutor, Aristotle, suggests "that there is an underlying purpose to nature, that of the fulfillment of every living being through the correct use of the attributes it possesses....the highest state that all human beings should aim for, is eudaemonia, happiness."

Macedonia also established a new political system for the polis, however, the monarchy. The army and the nobility owed loyalty to the king, not to the city or the state, and the divine right of kings became the norm in the Hellenistic empires. Alexander's legacy was "a form of monarchy, based on absolute power, an aura of divinity, and conspicuous consumption," a legacy later picked up by the Roman emperors and eventually most of the rulers of Europe until the French revolution.

Then come the Romans. To tell the truth, I'm beginning to lose steam on them. They are the baddest bullies of the ancient world--in a world full of bullies--and probably most responsible for who we have become. There are just times when I find myself pulling for Hannibal or the Gauls or Philip, knowing the outcome in advance. There's the dreadful certainty of a militaristic group first conquering Latium, then the Etruscans, the Samnites, the Carthaginians, Asia Minor, Greece, and Egypt: from Britain to Mesopotamia and essentially all points in between. And somewhere along the way the Romans decide to take on each other. When the Gracchi brothers try to reform the practices of the aristocracy seeking to hoard the new found wealth of the republic, violence takes over the politics of the city leading first to Sulla, then Pompey, Julius Caesar, and Augustus, who establishes a military dictatorship. Short intervals of peace and order give way to more civil wars and military dictatorships, interspersed with emperors who border on the criminally insane--Caligula, Nero, Commodus, Caracalla, etc--with the famed Roman legions running amok on occasion. Eventually the price of keeping the empire was just too great--over 70% of the state's resources went to the military. By the time that Constantine pulled out of Rome in 325, a general "systems collapse" appears to have begun, at least in the west.

When you get down to it, the development of western civilization in the Mediterranean basin really seems to be about the rich wanting to continually line their own pockets. Greed drives the world, whether its Sargon demanding tribute from the conquered cities of Sumer or Roman emperors plundering the continents for lavish shows of consumption and wealth. The same greed also drives the development of the best and the brightest--the sudden influx of wealth built the glories of Athens and Rome. But maybe its also when the wealth and glory and power begin to recede that the impulse to look inward and individual growth takes over. Or, maybe, the politics of scarcity lead just to meanness and strife. In any case, it seems to be where our civilization is headed these days.

Author: Freeman, Charles

Date Published: 2004

Length: 736 pp

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Hannibal: One Man Against Rome

It was not a great book, but it was both enjoyable and informative for me. I had a vague knowledge that Hannibal used the wealth of the Spanish (rather, Iberian) silver mines to build up the Carthaginians militarily, cross the Alps, defeat the Romans decisively at Cannae in the single deadliest day of combat in history and then hang around southern Italy for a while before being chased around the Mediterranean by the Romans. Now his story is much clearer to me.

With Rome's growth through the defeat of most of the different cities and tribes of central Italy, and with its vested interests in maintaining client relations with those states it conquered, it was probably inevitable that Rome and Carthage would clash. And it was probably inevitable that Hannibal would eventually lose. But he came as close as he could to making it work. As it was, he hung on for close to 15 years in southern Italy, terrorizing the Romans and hampering their grain supply. But since he could not control the seas--and it had only been fairly recently that Rome became a naval power--he could not land supplies and reinforcements. Had he been able to join forces with his brothers as planned, then perhaps he could have broken the Roman domination of the cities and ports that he needed, especially Tarentum.

But Hannibal was at the mercy, really, of the mercenary army that he built from the various tribes and peoples of Africa and Europe, and he convinced most of them that he offered them freedom from domination from Rome. Roman treatment of these various peoples that they conquered--for example, the Ligurians, the Brutians, the Capuans, the Macedonians, the tribes of Portugal and Span, shows how determined and ruthless the Romans were: 80,000 Macedonians sold into slavery from one city; all the males of Portugal massacred.

And who knows what history would have been like if Hannibal had been able to force Rome into some kind of peace? Lamb certainly takes a sympathetic tone towards Hannibal, maintaining that he was really a freedom fighter against the Roman juggernaut, banding together diverse peoples who would all stand to regain their independence should Rome capitulate in some way. But it seems far fetched that Hannibal wasn't as merciless or as imperialist as the Romans he fought. Lamb maintains that Hannibal's destiny came from the pledge that he took at his father's insistence that he never become a "friend"--an amicus--of Rome. This came at the conclusion of the "first" Punic War when Rome and Carthage clashed over trading rights in Sardinia and Sicily. The Roman response to this clash had been to build a navy from scratch--with scenes of building a fleet based on a captured Carthaginian vessel and then teaching men to row from dry land mockups--and establish dominance in the Mediterranean. It was like, "game over, man" from that point on for Carthage as a sea power.

Author: Lamb, Harold

Date Published: 1958

Length: 11 hr 12 min

Narrator: Griffin, Charlton

36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction

I have had an interesting experience in thinking about my read of this book. I liked reading the book, but not as much as I wanted to like reading it, especially since I enjoyed Betraying Spinoza. I'm not sure whether the problem was with the writing or with my preferences for non-fiction these days. Some of the narrative and the dialog just seemed a bit wooden to me. I enjoyed the story and I identified with Cass, but the book didn't blow me away.

Until I began to look back over the passages that I highlighted. Then the book really took over a whole new meaning for me. First I copied my highlighted passages from my Kindle account to a web page, and then I winnowed those down further to what I thought were the most significant passages. Rereading these passages then really made me appreciate just what a fine book this is.

The major character of the book is Cass Seltzer, a professor of the psychology of religion at a small Jewish university who has just written a best seller, The Varieties of Religious Illusion, which has caused major publications to dub him "the atheist with soul." As part of his book, he has included an appendix with 36 arguments for the existence of God, with a refutation for each argument that points out its flaws. Goldstein has included the appendix as the second half of the novel. It's pretty heady stuff but it seems to me fairly comprehensive, moving from Aristotle's Unmoved Mover through Spinoza's Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe.

I found myself laughing out loud at the foibles of Cass and the people around him. At times, Cass seems a bit like Dobie Gillis as we see him fail at three different love affairs and move with perpetual adolescent wonder and angst through his life. But so much of the comedy also comes at the expense of the pompous academic, Klapper. a thinly veiled parody of Harold Bloom, who makes his graduate students jump through some pretty unrealistic hoops. Some reviewers have felt this character is just too unreal, but it worked for me as broad satire. And Klapper presents a pretty good foil against the Rebbe's son, Azarya, who struggles with the passion to follow his individual genius versus the need of his Hasidic community for him to fulfill a specific and circumscribed role that is central and sacred to them.

But still, it's those passages trying to capture what is really ineffable, moments when Cass is struck with the weirdness of existence, seeking for meaning and feeling special in the the face of being a cosmic fluke lost in an unfeeling and unmeaning universe. "All that one knows is that onen is a part of it, a considered and conscious part of it, generated and sustained in existence in ways one can hardly comprehend, all the time conscious of it, though, of existence, the fullness of it, the reaching expanse and pulsing intricacy of it." So there's part of me that says this is what Camus calls the absurd, man's searching for meaning in a meaningless universe. And yet, I get a sense almost of joy rather than despair. "The brave new world of Modernism, where we aren't shaded from the hard truths of the natural world, and we have to create what meaning we can get from our relations with one another. That's all we have, in the end. The sublime has abandoned us, and what sublimity we have remaining we have to make for ourselves, subliminally, from the material of our our own self."

Is that the same as the look that Sisyphus has as he begins his walk down into valley to begin rolling his rock up the mountain yet once more time? And is that joy, that sublimity, coming from Goldstein's infatuation with Spinoza and his Intelligibility, that the universe, or at least our place in it, is ultimately knowable, even though our own understanding is, and will probably always be, incomplete, but it gives us meaning to strive for intelligibility, and that this striving gives us purpose, gives us dignity, gives us grace? In that regard, it seems in line with Kazantzakis in Saviours of God, maybe, or even--and this is a stretch--Teilhard's evolution toward the omega point. Are Teilhard and Spinoza on the same page, when you get down to it?

"Perhaps that is the proof that no solution exists, that the most gifted among us is feeble in mind against the brutality of incomprehensibility [what a phrase!] that assaults us on all sides. And so we try, as best we can, to do justice to the tremendousness of our improbable existence. And so we live, as best we can, for ourselves, or who will live for us? And we live, as best we can, for others, otherwise, what are we?"

Author: Goldstein, Rebecca

Date Published: 2010

Length: 530 pp

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The Rise and Fall of Alexandria: Birthplace of the Modern Mind

Scholarly, the book is not. It's another book written to accompany a British television series, but it tells the story so well, if a bit over the top at times ("There was never anything like the great library and museum before, nor has there been since: the single place on earth where all the knowledge of the entire world was gathered together…the key to understanding…simply everything."), it is both enjoyable and informative, filling in the blanks of a lot of my knowledge. I mean, I know the outlines of Alexander's march through Anatolia, the near east, Egypt and thence back through southwestern asia well enough. And I have an inkling, though admittedly not nearly as good, of the Hellenistic kingdoms that shook out from his conquests. But Ptolemy was just a name to me, and it was enlightening to see his efforts at forging an empire in Egypt what would accept a Greek ruler by combining Egyptian religious thought with Greek concepts of rationality, economics, and politics.

The wealth of the Nile, "the most production agricultural land in the known world," held it all together, of course, producing something like 20 million bushels of grain a year in seemingly endless fertility. Not for nothing was it called the bread basket of the Roman Empire in later years. But if Pollard and Reid are correct, it was Ptolemy I's vision of Alexandria as the intellectual center of the world that really made the difference. And since Ptolemy, a boyhood friend of Alexander, also received his education from Aristotle alongside Alexander, the museum and library of Alexandria were driven by Aristotle's vision of collecting and understanding all knowledge.

The observations and the knowledge that came out of the museum underlie much of modern science: the geometry of Euclid, the algebra of Diophantes, the geography of Ptolemy. But even then, many of the observations that anticipated the findings of modern science were lost during the "Dark Ages": Eratosthes' measurement of the earth's circumference and tilt, Aristarchus' heliocentric model of the universe, knowledge of the body obtained through dissection (widely practiced in Egypt but strictly forbidden elsewhere), and who knows what else.

The stability of Alexandria depended on wise rule, but this only lasted about three generations. The downfall of the dynasty began with Ptolemy IV, leading to a period of aoubt 150 yers of economic and social decline, until Cleopatra ascended the throne. She sought to restore Alexandria through alliances with Caesar and Anthony, but ultimately brought about the collapse of the dynasty. Did Julius Caesar inadvertently destroy the great library, some 400,000 volumes of all the known works of antiquity? That's what Livy would have us believe, but Pollard and Reid are not so sure. In any case, by the time that "Octavian walked into Alexandria [in 30 BC], the Ptolemaic kingdom came to an end." Alexandria entered into the Roman Empire where it remained until destroyed by the Arab conquest of the Middle East. It also became a city riven by ethnic tensions (the city was originally laid out one third Egyptian, one third Greek, and one third Jewish) and by the vagaries of the different Roman emperors. Caracella, the worst of the lot, executed all males below the age of 25, among others, an estimated 20,000 persons--this after murdering his brother to gain sole possession of the throne.

Much of the thinking in the museum now became more attuned to philosophical and metaphysical speculation, and the big names in Alexandria's intellectual history take a religious turn, beginning with Philo's concept of God as "creativity itself," and the world having been created by "Logos, the word of God." After than, Alexandria became a major source for the development of Christian theology. The speculations of the pagan philosophers Ammonious Sacchus and Plotinus found Christian counterparts in Clement and Origen, who applied Alexandrian rationality to Christian beliefs in coming up with a coherent theology and philosophy of the world. This speculative theology also led to one of the first great battles over heresy in the early church with Arius. Arius' fight with Alexander, the patriarch of Alexandria, and his toadie, Athanasius, triggered the formation of the council of Nicea in 325 under Constantine, leading to the expulsion of the Arians who could not support the formulation of the Trinity put forth in the creed.

Much ugliness ensued in later years. Theophilus sought to destroy pagan philosophy in Alexandria following Theodosius proscription of paganism in 391. Theophilus physically assaulted managed to destroy the contents of both the "daughter library" and the Serapeum, the temple built by Ptolemy I combining the remains of Alexander with the worship of the Searapis bull. Theophilus' successor, Cyril, then incited his bully boys, the Nitratian monks and the Parabolans, using physical force to grab secular power in the city and to also murder the philosopher Hypatia, "the last of the Alexandrian Hellenes." 300 years later, the Sultan Omar I ordered what was left of Alexandria to be destroyed. "Religious bigotry had after a thousand years of enlightenment finally dragged Alexandria into oblivion."

So the story of the Rise and Fall of Alexandria is a good story of light vs. dark, with the dark side winning out in the end, perhaps with a warning for the rest of us. Knowledge is a precious commodity, but also very vulnerable. It can and has been destroyed. It makes for a tidy narrative, but you really have to wonder whether the story is really that neat, that accurate. But as Pollard and Reid make clear, the importance of Alexandria in the history of ideas cannot be underestimated, "If the Renaissance was the 'rebirth' of learning that led to our modern world, then Alexandria was its modern birthplace…in our minds, we are all children of Alexandria."

Author: Pollard, Justin and Reid, Howard

Date Published: 2006

Length: 352 pp & 11 hr 31 min

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Narrator: Vance, Simon