[extropy-chat] Two anniversaries: Galileo and Bruno

[Amara Graps]

* Thursday February 15, 2005 is the 442 birthday of Galileo Galilei

* Thursday, February 17,  2005 is the 404th anniversary 
of Giordano Bruno burning at the stake.

(p.s.: extropes, fast forward below to what Bruno got wrong)

Giordano Bruno After 400 Years 
by David Brin, Thu Feb 17, '00

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