The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World (37 page)

The first attribute that Pericles cited was Athens’ democracy. And he explained why. Not because ‘the people should rule’, but because it promotes ‘wise action’. It involves continual discussion, which is a necessary condition for discovering the right answer, which is in turn a necessary condition for progress:

Instead of looking upon discussion as a stumbling-block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all.

Pericles, ‘Funeral Oration’,
c
. 431
BCE

He also mentioned
freedom
as a cause of success. A pessimistic civilization considers it immoral to behave in ways that have not been tried many times before, because it is blind to the possibility that the benefits of doing so might offset the risks. So it is intolerant and conformist. But Athens took the opposite view. Pericles also contrasted his city’s openness to foreign visitors with the closed, defensive attitude of rival cities: again, he expected that Athens would benefit from contact with new, unforeseeable ideas, even though, as he acknowledged, this policy gave enemy spies access to the city too. He even seems to have regarded the lenient treatment of children as a source of military strength:

In education, where our rivals from their very cradles by a painful discipline seek after manliness, in Athens we live exactly as we please, and yet are just as ready to encounter every legitimate danger.

A pessimistic civilization prides itself on its children’s conformity to the proper patterns of behaviour, and bemoans every real or imagined novelty.

Sparta was, in all the above respects, the opposite of Athens. The epitome of a pessimistic civilization, it was notorious for its citizens’ austere ‘spartan’ lifestyle, for the harshness of its educational system, and for the total militarization of its society. Every male citizen was a full-time soldier, owing absolute obedience to his superiors, who were themselves obliged to follow religious tradition. All other work was done by slaves: Sparta had reduced an entire neighbouring society, the Messenians, to the status of helots (a kind of serf or slave). It had no philosophers, historians, artists, architects, writers – or other knowledge-creating people of any kind apart from the occasional talented general. Thus almost the entire effort of the society was devoted to preserving itself in its existing state – in other words, to preventing improvement. In 404
BCE
, twenty-seven years after Pericles’ funeral oration, Sparta decisively defeated Athens in war and imposed an authoritarian form of government on it. Although, through the vagaries of international politics, Athens became independent and democratic again soon afterwards, and continued for several generations to produce art, literature and philosophy, it was never again host to rapid, open-ended progress. It became unexceptional. Why? I guess that its optimism was gone.

Another short-lived enlightenment happened in the Italian city-state of Florence in the fourteenth century. This was the time of the early Renaissance, a cultural movement that revived the literature, art and science of ancient Greece and Rome after more than a millennium of intellectual stagnation in Europe. It became an
enlightenment
when the Florentines began to believe that they could improve upon that ancient knowledge. This era of dazzling innovation, known as the Golden Age of Florence, was deliberately fostered by the Medici family, who were in effect the city’s rulers – especially Lorenzo de’ Medici, known as ‘the Magnificent’, who was in charge from 1469 to 1492. Unlike Pericles, the Medici were not devotees of democracy: Florence’s enlightenment began not in politics but in art, and then philosophy, science and technology, and in those fields it involved the same openness to criticism and desire for innovation both in ideas and in action.
Artists, instead of being restricted to traditional themes and styles, became free to depict what they considered beautiful, and to invent new styles. Encouraged by the Medici, the wealthy of Florence competed with each other in the innovativeness of the artists and scholars whom they sponsored – such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Botticelli. Another denizen of Florence at this time was Niccolò Machiavelli, the first secular political philosopher since antiquity.

The Medici were soon promoting the new philosophy of ‘humanism’, which valued knowledge above dogma, and virtues such as intellectual independence, curiosity, good taste and friendship over piety and humility. They sent agents all over the known world to obtain copies of ancient books, many of which had not been seen in the West since the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The Medici library made copies which it supplied to scholars in Florence and elsewhere. Florence became a powerhouse of newly revived ideas, new interpretations of ideas, and brand-new ideas.

But that rapid progress lasted for only a generation or so. A charismatic monk, Girolamo Savonarola, began to preach apocalyptic sermons against humanism and every other aspect of the Florentine enlightenment. Urging a return to medieval conformism and self-denial, he proclaimed prophecies of doom if Florence continued on its path. Many citizens were persuaded, and in 1494 Savonarola managed to seize power. He reimposed all the traditional restrictions on art, literature, thought and behaviour. Secular music was banned. Clothing had to be plain. Frequent fasting became effectively compulsory. Homosexuality and prostitution were violently suppressed. The Jews of Florence were expelled. Gangs of ruffians inspired by Savonarola roamed the city searching for taboo artefacts such as mirrors, cosmetics, musical instruments, secular books, and almost anything beautiful. A huge pile of such treasures was ceremonially burned in the so-called ‘Bonfire of the Vanities’ in the centre of the city. Botticelli is said to have thrown some of his own paintings into the fire. It was the bonfire of optimism.

Eventually Savonarola was himself discarded and burned at the stake. But, although the Medici regained control of Florence, optimism did not. As in Athens, the tradition of art and science continued for a while, and, even a century later, Galileo was sponsored (and then abandoned)
by the Medici. But by that time Florence had became just another Renaissance city-state lurching from one crisis to another under the rule of despots. Fortunately, somehow that mini-enlightenment was never quite extinguished. It continued to smoulder in Florence and several other Italian city-states, and finally ignited the Enlightenment itself in northern Europe.

There may have been many enlightenments in history, shorter-lived and shining less brilliantly than those, perhaps in obscure subcultures, families or individuals. For example, the philosopher Roger Bacon (1214–94) is noted for rejecting dogma, advocating observation as a way of discovering the truth (albeit by ‘induction’), and making several scientific discoveries. He foresaw the invention of microscopes, telescopes, self-powered vehicles and flying machines – and that mathematics would be a key to future scientific discoveries. He was thus an optimist. But he was not part of any tradition of criticism, and so his optimism died with him.

Bacon studied the works of ancient Greek scientists and of scholars of the ‘Islamic Golden Age’ – such as Alhazen (965–1039), who made several original discoveries in physics and mathematics. During the Islamic Golden Age (between approximately the eighth and thirteenth centuries), there was a strong tradition of scholarship that valued and drew upon the science and philosophy of European antiquity. Whether there was also a tradition of
criticism
in science and philosophy is currently controversial among historians. But, if there was, it was snuffed out like the others.

It may be that the Enlightenment has ‘tried’ to happen countless times, perhaps even all the way back to prehistory. If so, those mini-enlightenments put our recent ‘lucky escapes’ into stark perspective. It may be that there was progress every time – a brief end to stagnation, a brief glimpse of infinity, always ending in tragedy, always snuffed out, usually without trace. Except this once.

The inhabitants of Florence in 1494 or Athens in 404
BCE
could be forgiven for concluding that optimism just isn’t factually true. For they knew nothing of such things as the reach of explanations or the power of science or even laws of nature as we understand them, let alone the moral and technological progress that was to follow when
the
Enlightenment got under way. At the moment of defeat, it must have
seemed at least plausible to the formerly optimistic Athenians that the Spartans might be right, and to the formerly optimistic Florentines that Savonarola might be. Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilization or in a single individual, these must have been unspeakable catastrophes for those who had dared to expect progress. But we should feel more than sympathy for those people. We should take it personally. For if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now, and you and I would be immortal.

Blind optimism (recklessness, overconfidence)
   Proceeding as if one knew that bad outcomes will not happen.

Blind pessimism (precautionary principle)
   Avoiding everything not known to be safe.

The principle of optimism
   All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge.

Wealth
   The repertoire of physical transformations that one is capable of causing.

– Optimism. (And the end of pessimism.)

– Learning how not to fool ourselves.

– Mini-enlightenments like those of Athens and Florence were potential beginnings of infinity.

Optimism (in the sense that I have advocated) is the theory that all failures – all evils – are due to insufficient knowledge. This is the key to the rational philosophy of the unknowable. It would be contentless if there were fundamental limitations to the creation of knowledge, but there are not. It would be false if there were fields – especially philosophical fields such as morality – in which there were no such
thing as objective progress. But truth does exist in all those fields, and progress towards it is made by seeking good explanations. Problems are inevitable, because our knowledge will always be infinitely far from complete. Some problems are hard, but it is a mistake to confuse hard problems with problems unlikely to be solved. Problems are soluble, and each particular evil is a problem that can be solved. An optimistic civilization is open and not afraid to innovate, and is based on traditions of criticism. Its institutions keep improving, and the most important knowledge that they embody is knowledge of how to detect and eliminate errors. There may have been many short-lived enlightenments in history. Ours has been uniquely long-lived.

SOCRATES
is staying at an inn near the Temple of the Oracle at Delphi. Together with his friend
CHAEREPHON
,
he has today asked the Oracle who the wisest man in the world is,
*
so that they might go and learn from him. But, to their annoyance, the priestess (who provides the Oracle’s voice on behalf of the god Apollo) merely announced, ‘No one is wiser than Socrates.’ Sleeping now on an uncomfortable bed in a tiny and exorbitantly expensive room,
SOCRATES
hears a deep, melodious voice intoning his name.

HERMES
: Greetings, Socrates.

SOCRATES
: [
Draws the blanket over his head.
] Go away. I’ve already made too many offerings today and you’re not going to wring any more out of me. I am too ‘wise’ for that, hadn’t you heard?

HERMES:
I seek no offering.

SOCRATES
: Then what do you want? [
He turns and sees
HERMES
,
who is naked.
] Well, I’m sure that some of my associates camped outside will be glad to –

HERMES
: It is not them I seek, but you, O Socrates.

SOCRATES
: Then you shall be disappointed, stranger. Now kindly leave me to my hard-earned rest.

HERMES
: Very well. [
He makes towards the door.
]

SOCRATES
: Wait.

HERMES
: [
Turns and raises a quizzical eyebrow.
]

SOCRATES
: [
slowly and deliberately
] I am asleep. Dreaming. And you are the god Apollo.

HERMES
: What makes you think so?

SOCRATES
: These precincts are sacred to you. It is night-time and there is no lamp, yet I see you clearly. This is not possible in real life. So you must be coming to me in a dream.

HERMES
: You reason coolly. Are you not afraid?

SOCRATES
: Bah! I ask you in return: are you a benevolent or a malevolent god? If benevolent, then what do I have to fear? If malevolent, then I disdain to fear you. We Athenians are a proud people – and protected by our goddess, as you surely know. Twice we defeated the Persian Empire against overwhelming odds,
*
and now we are defying Sparta. It is our custom to defy anyone who seeks our submission.

HERMES
: Even a god?

SOCRATES
: A benevolent god would not seek it. On the other hand, it is also our custom to give a hearing to anyone who offers us honest criticism, seeking to persuade us freely to change our minds. For we want to do what is right.

HERMES
: Those two customs are two sides of the same valuable coin, Socrates. I give you Athenians great credit for honouring them.

SOCRATES
: My city is surely deserving of your favour. But why would an immortal want to converse with such a confused and ignorant person as me? I think I can guess your reason: you have repented of your little joke via the Oracle, haven’t you? Indeed, it was rather cruel of you to send us only a mocking answer, considering the distance we have come and the offerings we have made. So please tell me the truth this time, O fount of wisdom: who is really the wisest man in the world?