Tag: history

The Promethean capture of science, and the transformation of scientistry into a propaganda machine for a very old religion, may not have begun with this 1923 essay by the revered J.B.S. Haldane, entitled, DAEDELUS or Science and the Future, but it is clearly detectable in hindsight.

Ever since the time of Berkeley it has been customary for the majority of metaphysicians to proclaim the ideality of Time, of Space, or of both. But they soon made it clear that in spite of this, time would continue to wait for no man, and space to separate lovers. The only practical consequences that they generally drew was that their own ethical and political views were somehow inherent in the structure of the universe. The experimental proof or disproof of such deductions is difficult, and — if the late war may be regarded as an experimental disproof of certain of Hegel’s political tenets — costly and unsatisfactory.

Einstein, so far from deducing an new decalogue, has contented himself with deducing the consequences to space and time themselves of their ideality. These are mostly too small to be measurable, but some, such as the deflection of light but the sun’s gravitational field, are susceptible of verification, and have been verified. The majority of scientific men are now being constrained by the evidence of these experiments to adopt a very extreme form of Kantian idealism. The Kantian Ding-an-sich is an eternal four-dimensional manifold, which we perceive as space and time, but what we regard as space and what as time is more or less fortuitous.

It is perhaps interesting to speculate on the practical consequences of Einstein’s discovery. I do not doubt that he will be believed. A prophet who can give signs in the heavens is always believed. No one ever seriously questioned Newton’s theory after the return of Halley’s comet. Einstein has told us that space, time and matter are shadows of the fifth dimension, and the heavens have declared his glory. In consequence Kantian idealism will become the basal working hypothesis of the physicist and finally of all educated men, just as materialism did after Newton’s day. We may not call ourselves materialists, but we do interpret the activities of the moon, the Thames, influenza, and aeroplanes in terms of matter. Our ancestors did not, nor, in all probability, will our descendants. The materialism (whether conscious or sub-conscious does not matter very much) of the last few generations has led to various results of practical importance, such as sanitation, Marxian socialism, and the right of an accused person to give evidence on his or her own behalf. The reign of Kantian idealism as the basal working hypothesis, first of physics, and then of every-day life, will in all probability last for some centuries. At the end of that time a similar step in advance will be taken. Einstein showed that experience cannot be interpreted in terms of space and time. This was a well-known fact, but so long as space and time down not break down in their own special sphere, that of explaining the facts of motion, physicists continued to believe in them, or at any rate, what was much more important, to think in terms of them for practical purposes.

A time will however come (as I believe) when physiology will invade and destroy mathematical physics, as the latter have destroyed geometry. The basic metaphysical working hypothesis of science and practical life will then, I think, be something like Bergsonian activism. I do not for one moment suggest that this or any other metaphysical system has any claims whatever to finality.

Meanwhile we are in for a few centuries during which many practical activities will probably be conducted on a basis, not of materialism, but of Kantian idealism. How will this affect our manners, morals and politics? Frankly I do not know, though I think the effect will be as great as that of Newton’s work, which created most of the intellectual forces of the 18th century. The Condorcets, Benthams, and Marxs of the future will I think be as ruthlessly critical of the metaphysics and ethics of their times as were their predecessors, but not quite so sure of their own; they will lack a certain heaviness of touch which we may note in Utilitarianism and Socialism. They will recognise that perhaps in ethics as in physics, there are so to speak fourth and fifth dimensions that show themselves by effects which, like the perturbations of the planet Mercury, are hard to detect even in one generation, but yet perhaps in the course of ages are quite as important as the three- dimensional phenomena.

If the quantum hypothesis is generally adopted even more radical alterations in our thinking will be necessary. But I feel it premature even to suggest their direction in the present unsatisfactory state of quantum mechanics. It may be that as Poincare (the other Poincare) suggested we shall be forced to conceive of all changes as occurring in a series of clicks, and all space as consisting of discrete points. However this may be it is safe to say that a better knowledge of radiation will permit us to produce it in a more satisfactory manner than is at present possible. Almost all our present sources of light are hot bodies, 95{cc08d85cfa54367952ab9c6bd910a003a6c2c0c101231e44cdffb103f39b73a6} of whose radiation is invisible. To light a lamp as a source of light is about as wasteful of energy as to burn down one’s house to roast one’s pork. It is a fairly safe prophecy that in 50 years light will cost about a fiftieth of its present price, and there will be no more night in our cities. The alternation of day and night is a check on the freedom of human activity which must go the way of other spatial and temporal checks. In the long run I think that all that applied physics can do for us is abolish these checks. It enables us to possess more, travel more, and communicate more. I shall not attempt to predict in detail the future developments of transport and communication. They are only limited by the velocity of light. We are working towards a condition when any two persons on earth will be able to be completely present to one another in not more than 1/24 of a second. We shall never reach it, but that is the limit which we shall approach indefinitely.

Developments in this direction are tending to bring mankind more and more together, to render life more and more complex, artificial, and rich in possibilities — to increase indefinitely man’s powers for good and evil.

Haldan’s speech is now considered a foundation of transhumanist philosophy. 

Fundamental ideas of transhumanism were first advanced in 1923 by the British geneticist J. B. S. Haldane in his essay Daedalus: Science and the Future, which predicted that great benefits would come from the application of advanced sciences to human biology—and that every such advance would first appear to someone as blasphemy or perversion, “indecent and unnatural”. In particular, he was interested in the development of the science of eugenics, ectogenesis (creating and sustaining life in an artificial environment), and the application of genetics to improve human characteristics, such as health and intelligence. 

Science should not be confused with the religion itself, as all three aspects of science are merely the tool and the fetish of the Promethean transhumanism it serves. Needless to say, the Vaxx is the mass practical application, possibly though not necessarily the first, of transhumanist religion to humanity. Whether it will prove to be an advance for the species, an evolutionary dead end, an extinction event, or a spiritual blasphemy has yet to be determined.

But regardless, I tend to doubt that those whose evaluation of the present crisis are limited to the material, the scientodific, and the political are going to be able to comprehend much of what is happening, or what it is genuinely at stake here.

Julian Huxley wrote: Many people assert that this abandonment of the god hypothesis means the abandonment of all religion and all moral sanctions. This is simply not true. But it does mean, once our relief at jettisoning an outdated piece of ideological furniture is over, that we must construct something to take its place.

And now we are beginning to see that which has been constructed to take the place of God: Techno-Babylon. But instead of building a temple to the race of Man, they are building a temple of the race of Man. Note, in particular, the gleefully demonic way in which Haldane ends his essay with a mocking parody of G.K. Chesterton’s The Ballad of the White Horse.

The scientific worker of the future will more and more resemble the lonely figure of Daedalus as he becomes conscious of his ghastly mission, and proud of it.

Black is his robe from top to toe,

His flesh is white and warm below,

All through his silent veins flow free

Hunger and thirst and venery,

But in his eyes a still small flame

Like the first cell from which he came

Burns round and luminous, as he rides

Singing my song of deicides.

The Dark Herald explains why the cultural war places so much focus on what otherwise appears to be a fairly insignificant aspect of the entertainment industry at Arkhaven:

Comics are the foundation of civilization. No, seriously, they are.  Comics were how the whole business of moving out of caves, growing crops, and building cities got started. 

Without comics we would never have had a means of passing on our personal experiences to our descendants, or keep records, or count to a number that was higher than twenty. They are that important.

The Altamira cave paintings are nearly the oldest in the world at 35,000 years of age.  These images tell tales of mighty hunts, dangerous beasts, and swift-footed prey. When the paintings were first discovered in 1879, the quality of the art was so good that its discoverer was immediately accused of fraud.  Understandably so.

The Altamira drawings are clearly the end result of a long tradition of artwork.  Using only charcoal, iron ore, and ochre these artists of proto-Spain created images that used shading, contrast, and various intensities of color to create a rough three-dimensional effect.  

The cave paintings at Lascaux in France are even more impressive, having been painted over the course of several generations. And given the level of sophistication of the works, it couldn’t have been a first attempt.  This was an established school of art.

These frescoes gave us, their remote posterity the only images we will ever have extinct Steppe Bison in magnificent herds or the towering Megaloceros deer or the European Rhinoceros in all its power.

The artists even signed their work.

This was art acting as (among other things) a means of communication, and it still works.  We were meant to understand the tales these earliest of comics were meant to convey. And we do.

A few thousand years later, art became not just a means of not only of storytelling but also record keeping…. The first system of Egyptian writing was found at Abydos.  Now I am using the term “writing” very loosely here. The proto-hieroglyphs found on tags there, were more like heraldry than a real attempt at formal communication.  It was just a series of pictures declaring that (for example) these twenty urns of grains were sent in tribute by the people who live in “the place with still water, rushes and Ibis birds,” or these forty urns of Beer are from the people who live on “the mountain with falcon birds.”

Read the whole thing there. You’ll understand the particular significance of his choice of topics soon enough.

It is common for modern atheists to claim that neither science nor history has detected any sign of the Biblical account of Jesus Christ. But only those who are ignorant of both can make the assertion with a straight face.

It is certainly interesting to observe how even ancient man was trying to explain away supernatural events with natural ones—a hobby often taken up in our modern day. Returning to ancient Greece, we can read from Pseudo-Dionysus in a letter to Polycarp:

Then ask him: “What have you to say about the Solar Eclipse, which occurred when the Savior was put on the cross? At the time the two of us were in Heliopolis and we both witnessed the extraordinary phenomenon of the moon hiding the sun at the time that was out of season for their coming together… We saw the moon begin to hide the sun from the east, travel across to the other side of the sun, and return on its path so that the hiding and the restoration of the light did not take place in the same direction but rather in diametrically opposite directions…”

In 1457, Lorenzo Valla would ridicule this notion that Christ’s crucifixion was caused by an eclipse. In our modern day, NASA and astronomers worldwide would solidify Valla’s position, pointing to the fact that no projection of the ancient past shows an eclipse at that time. And yet it happened. Ancient man was witnessing a global supernatural occurrence.

If we jump to 52 AD, we can read a Greek secular historian named Thallus who recorded the following:

“On the whole world there pressed a most fearful darkness; and the rocks were rent by an earthquake, and many places in Judea and other districts were thrown down. This darkness Thallus, in the third book of his History, calls, as appears to me without reason, an eclipse of the sun.”

Julius Africanus, Chronography, 18:1

This quote of one of Thallus’ lost writings was by Julius Africanus, who was writing about the event around 221 AD. Africanus also discusses another ancient who bore testimony to the darkness of Christ’s crucifixion:

“Phlegon records that, in the time of Tiberius Caesar, at full moon, there was a full eclipse of the sun from the sixth to the ninth hour; it is clear that this is the one. But what have eclipses to do with an earthquake, rocks breaking apart, resurrection of the dead, and a universal disturbance of this nature?”

Ibid

This very same Phlegon is also quoted in Eusebius’ The Chronological Canons:

“However in the fourth year of the 202nd olympiad, an eclipse of the sun happened, greater and more excellent than any that had happened before it; at the sixth hour, day turned into dark night, so that the stars were seen in the sky, and an earthquake in Bithynia toppled many buildings of the city of Nicaea.” 

Clown World is built upon a series of intellectual pillars that range from Darwin, Diderot, and Freud to Einstein, Keynes, and Foucault. The first thing that rapidly becomes apparent when one regards them as a set is first, that they are all frauds. The second thing one realizes is what a collection of seriously evil sexual deviants they tend to be:

A French-American professor has accused fellow intellectual Michel Foucault of being a “paedophile rapist”, a report by The Sunday Times said.

In an interview, Guy Sorman said he found out about Foucault’s behaviour after visiting the late philosopher in Tunisia where he was living in 1969.

“Young children were running after Foucault saying ‘what about me? take me, take me’,” he said to The Sunday Times. “They were eight, nine, ten years old. He was throwing money at them and would say ‘let’s meet at 10pm at the usual place’. He would make love there on the gravestones with young boys. The question of consent wasn’t even raised.”

Sorman argued that Foucault was able to get away with this because of the racial element of his affairs.

“Foucault would not have dared to do it in France… There is a colonial dimension to this. A white imperialism,” Sorman said.

In the interview Sorman said he “regrets” not reporting this “extremely morally ugly” behaviour to the police. He added that the press had been aware of Foucault’s conduct but were reluctant to publish stories due to his status as France’s “philosopher king” alike to that of a “god”.

The philosopher who died in 1984 signed a petition in 1977, which sought to legalise sexual relations with children aged 13 or above.

Don’t be misled. Whatever aspect of Clown World rhetoric happens appeals to you, be it free trade, freedom of expression, libertarianism, judeo-christianity, equality, tolerance, or respect, it’s really all about pedos and human sacrifice. It’s literally all designed to lead there in the end.

Not-President Greenscreen has been reading some tough lines about the Russian leader. But the historical reality is just a little bit different:

I documented what happened at Joe Biden’s one and only meeting with Vladimir Putin in my book Joe Biden Unauthorized. I can attest that the title of my chapter on the incident – Bitch Slapped in Moscow – is the actual truth.

Biden got bitch slapped, and he’s pretending he didn’t.

Putin knows what happened. He was there. He knows he compromised Joe Biden, who appeared unprepared to deal with the ruthless, former-KGB agent. Regardless, Joe continues to perpetuate his “I was the tough guy” lie.

As Joe Biden’s White House stenographer, I stood directly behind Putin at a distance of five feet. Biden, seated across from Putin at an elegant conference table, was about 12 feet from me.

About 10 minutes into the meeting, Vice President Biden attempted to start lecturing about his decades-old part in U.S.-Russian negotiations with the dreaded phrase, “I’ve been around a long time. The first time I was here…”

And… cut.

Joe Biden got about one sentence further into that spiel when off went his microphone, off went the lights for the TV cameras, and stern Russian voices were commanding the press to leave. And leave they did.

They went out quickly and efficiently, with videocameras popping off of tripods. Equipment snapping shut. Portable lights clattering down retractable poles. No one spoke, and no one dared linger.

This was Putin in all his KGB ruthlessness. Whether by some prearranged signal or simply an undisclosed time limit, he had pulled the plug and done the unthinkable: he’d stolen Joe Biden’s audience and rendered him speechless. Shut him down in mid-sentence with the flick of an invisible switch.

Across the table, I could see Vice President of the United States Joe Biden, in the now dimly lit room, looking as duped as an exhausted fish in the bottom of a boat. No protest, no complaint. No, hey, I wasn’t finished. Nothing. He was humiliated.

To me, the revelation was the premeditated precision of the snub. Putin or his team had likely plotted this all out. They knew exactly what bait to use, exactly how Joe Biden would take it, and then when he did, they reeled him helplessly in.

The Russian President and his delegation sat calmly and coldly as their American counterparts realized their blustery leader’s big moment had been stolen right out from under him. The most powerful man in Russia had neither fear nor respect for Joe Biden. He had just played with him for sport.

Putin knows. He knows a lot more about what’s actually going on than we do. 

In 2008, the self-proclaimed Bad Astronomer attempted to mock my grasp of science and scientists:

“I happened to notice I was getting some traffic sent my way from Voxday, an ultraconservative blogger who has a history of saying ridiculous things — sometimes so ridiculous it’s indistinguishable from satire. Unfortunately, of course, willful ignorance has quite an audience these days, and just in case it’s not satire, I decided to reply….

“Your conclusions are way off the mark, for two reasons: you misinterpreted/misunderstood what scientists did, and then you misapplied it. First, 5{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} of the Universe is normal matter and energy. About 23{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} or so is dark matter. While we don’t know precisely what it’s made of, its existence has been conclusively proven, and it was using scientific methods that proved it (its existence was speculated due to odd motions of galaxies, its impact on observations predicted and then confirmed).”

This scientistic posturing did not cause me to change my opinion. And five years later, I noted that scientistry appeared to be moving in my direction. Seven more years have gone by and the case for “dark matter” is looking more grim than ever.

Observations of galactic rotation curves give one of the strongest lines of evidence pointing towards the existence of dark matter, a non-baryonic form of matter that makes up an estimated 85{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} of the matter in the observable Universe. Current assessments of galactic rotation curves are based upon a framework of Newtonian accounts of gravity, a new paper published in EPJ C, by Gerson Otto Ludwig, National Institute for Space Research, Brazil, suggests that if this is substituted with a general relativity-based model, the need to recourse to dark matter is relieved, replaced by the effects of gravitomagnetism.

The main role of dark matter, Ludwig points out in the paper, has historically been to resolve the disparity between astrophysical observations and current theories of gravity. Put simply, if baryonic matter — the form of matter we see around us every day which is made up of protons, neutrons and electrons — is the only form of matter, then there shouldn’t be enough gravitational force to prevent galaxies from flying apart.

By disregarding general relativistic corrections to Newtonian gravity arising from mass currents, and by neglecting these mass currents, Ludwig asserts these models also miss significant modifications to rotational curves — the orbital speeds of visible stars and gas plotted against their radial distance from their galaxy’s centre. This is because of an effect in general relativity not present in Newton’s theory of gravity — frame-dragging or the Lense Thirring effect. This effect arises when a massive rotating object like a star or black hole ‘drags’ the very fabric of spacetime along with it, in turn giving rise to a gravitomagnetic field.

In this paper, Ludwig presents a new model for the rotational curves of galaxies which is in agreement with previous efforts involving general relativity. The researcher demonstrates that even though the effects of gravitomagnetic fields are weak, factoring them into models alleviates the difference between theories of gravity and observed rotational curves — eliminating the need for dark matter. The theory still needs some development before it is widely accepted, with the author particularly pointing out that the time evolution of galaxies modelled with this framework is a complex problem that will require much deeper analysis.

Ludwig concludes by suggesting that all calculations performed with thin galactic disk models performed up until this point may have to be recalculated, and the very concept of dark matter itself, questioned.

You simply have to laugh at the complete lack of credibility and self-awareness on the part of these scientists. They blithely shift between estimating that dark matter accounts for 23 percent and 85 percent of all matter in the universe without ever stopping to think that this variance means that their base model is almost guaranteed to be fundamentally wrong. 

And this is why it is vital to distinguish between actual scientody and the parade of groundless assumptions and backdated mathematical models that are the basis for scientistry.

The lesson, as always, is this: when scientists start manufacturing epicycles to explain anomalies, their core assumptions are incorrect.

The Dark Herald on the decades-long devolution of Disney World into Devil Mouse Trap

It was pretty close to magic.  It wasn’t just the rides, although those were great.  Epcot didn’t exist yet, so WDW was strictly the Magic Kingdom but there was a lot to it.  Animatronics were quite a lot more cool in the seventies.  The 20,000 Leagues Under Sea ride was still running.  And the Carousel of Progress was featuring the “Now is the Time,” song, (which led to me being gaslighted by my own family for years. They had me half convinced that song was a product of my deranged imagination).  The Haunted Mansion was everything a haunted mansion was supposed to be for a little kid.

But like I said, it wasn’t just the rides.

There was something about just walking down Mainstreet USA that made me happy.  The characters on the street like the mayor and the fire chief gave this fake American town quite a bit of depth. Occasionally, some of the townsfolk would suddenly break into a “Hello Dolly” style song and dance number. Even the town suffragette added something fun.  There was a depth to Mainstreet because it was telling a story.

Stories matter. 

He’s right. There was something… relaxing… about walking down Mainstreet USA even in Disneyland Paris some 10 years ago. I think it is because it was somehow part of the world that I knew as a child, a bright, cartoon version of that world, to be sure, but one that was familiar somehow, and comforting.

It is the material echo of the world we have lost. And that, of course, is why the Devil Mouse is determined to replace it, in the same way that his master seeks to replace us. 

In case you’re not up on Greek history and you didn’t read the entirety of The Thirty Tyrants article on Tablet, you should still be aware of what could be in store in the event it turns out to be a predictive model:

What does history teach us about this moment? The bad news is that the Thirty Tyrants exiled notable Athenian democrats and confiscated their property while murdering an estimated 5{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} of the Athenian population. The good news is that their rule lasted less than a year.

After eight months of misrule, they were overthrown by armed rebels.

There is historical precedent for the sellout of Americans by the not-Americans of the globalist corpocracy who have been ruling them for the last 20+ years, as Lee Smith points out how an Athenian elite sold out the people of Athens after its defeat by Sparta:

In Chapter 5 of The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli describes three options for how a conquering power might best treat those it has defeated in war. The first is to ruin them; the second is to rule directly; the third is to create “therein a state of the few which might keep it friendly to you.”

The example Machiavelli gives of the last is the friendly government Sparta established in Athens upon defeating it after 27 years of war in 404 BCE. For the upper caste of an Athenian elite already contemptuous of democracy, the city’s defeat in the Peloponnesian War confirmed that Sparta’s system was preferable. It was a high-spirited military aristocracy ruling over a permanent servant class, the helots, who were periodically slaughtered to condition them to accept their subhuman status. Athenian democracy by contrast gave too much power to the low-born. The pro-Sparta oligarchy used their patrons’ victory to undo the rights of citizens, and settle scores with their domestic rivals, exiling and executing them and confiscating their wealth.

The Athenian government disloyal to Athens’ laws and contemptuous of its traditions was known as the Thirty Tyrants, and understanding its role and function helps explain what is happening in America today.

For my last column I spoke with The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman about an article he wrote more than a decade ago, during the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency. His important piece documents the exact moment when the American elite decided that democracy wasn’t working for them. Blaming the Republican Party for preventing them from running roughshod over the American public, they migrated to the Democratic Party in the hopes of strengthening the relationships that were making them rich.

A trade consultant told Friedman: “The need to compete in a globalized world has forced the meritocracy, the multinational corporate manager, the Eastern financier and the technology entrepreneur to reconsider what the Republican Party has to offer. In principle, they have left the party, leaving behind not a pragmatic coalition but a group of ideological naysayers.”

In the more than 10 years since Friedman’s column was published, the disenchanted elite that the Times columnist identified has further impoverished American workers while enriching themselves. The one-word motto they came to live by was globalism—that is, the freedom to structure commercial relationships and social enterprises without reference to the well-being of the particular society in which they happened to make their livings and raise their children.

Undergirding the globalist enterprise was China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. For decades, American policymakers and the corporate class said they saw China as a rival, but the elite that Friedman described saw enlightened Chinese autocracy as a friend and even as a model—which was not surprising, given that the Chinese Communist Party became their source of power, wealth, and prestige. Why did they trade with an authoritarian regime and send millions of American manufacturing jobs off to China thereby impoverish working Americans? Because it made them rich. They salved their consciences by telling themselves they had no choice but to deal with China: It was big, productive, and efficient and its rise was inevitable. And besides, the American workers hurt by the deal deserved to be punished—who could defend a class of reactionary and racist ideological naysayers standing in the way of what was best for progress?

This is a really important article if you want to better understand the grand strategic situation. Read the whole thing, and understand the way in which it is connected to the original plan of the Learned Elders of Wye to make the Great Leap Eastward that was publicly rejected by the Chinese in 2015. 

I read Italian military historian Alessandro Barbero’s book on the lead-up to the battle of Adrianople, The Day of the Barbarian, and it was a fair, but eye-opening explication on the insanity of civic nationalism and the insidious danger of pro-immigrant elites. He has a new book out on Dante that I’ve been reading; unfortunately, it’s newly released in Italian so you’ll have to wait for it. 

I don’t have the time to translate this interview with the author in La Republicca, but the Google translator actually did a pretty good job translating it, at least well enough to understand most of it.

FLORENCE. It is only a little less mysterious than Cleopatra’s: but in short, Professor, did Dante have a hooked nose or not? “And who knows? All the portraits we have of him were made by people who had never seen him” smiles the historian Alessandro Barbero in the cloister of Santa Croce. We talk a stone’s throw from Alighieri’s cenotaph: that empty tomb that for centuries has been claiming the mortal remains of the Supreme unheeded, tenaciously guarded in Ravenna. In the statue that surmounts the Florentine sarcophagus, Dante has the usual frowning air. What made him so grim were the torments of exile or a temper enhanced by the proverbial Tuscan irascibility? “When I think of Dante, sympathy is not the first thing that comes to mind” admits Barbero. “But if they invited me to have a coffee with him, I would rush. A historian always falls in love with the subject he studies. Passion is to discover. Like a cop trying to catch a criminal. “

And in fact the Dante by Barbero, published by Laterza, is a 360-page stalking following a genius who remains elusive seven centuries after his death. Otherwise what genius would that be? Starting the book is enthralling. Also because the two great passions of Alessandro Barbero get married there: the Middle Ages and military history.

Saturday 11 June 1289: the Florentine troops move towards the clash with the Aretini in what will be remembered as the Battle of Campaldino. Dante is 24 years old. It is in the front row. He throws himself into the fray, but during the slaughter – he himself tells it – he is assailed by fear and runs away. A behavior that at the time was not necessarily considered dishonorable.

Was the principle that “soldier running away is good for another time” already valid?

“In a certain sense, yes. Let’s be clear: even in the Middle Ages the brave were appreciated and cowards were despised. But it was not thought that if you are brave you will not run away. Above all, the competence, the professionalism of those who understand what during the battle counted. is happening around. We are talking about people who knew wars well, who really waged them. We invented the knights without blemish and without fear much later. “

Dante belonged to the Florentine elite. His ancestors had made money by lending money. But even on the sinfulness of usury, the medieval people had elastic opinions. If you lent to a poor man you were a loan shark. While if you lent to a rich man you moved capitalism, you made GDP grow, you were a respectable businessman.

“Dante’s ancestors lent to everyone. But at the time a usurer was the one who lived only on loans. If he also did other activities, the matter changed. Both on the theological and on the social level, Dante’s world wonders about the problem of wear always looking for a balance, pragmatic solutions “.

Florence is the Wall Street of the time.

“More than Wall Street, a city-bank. In Italy in general and in Florence in particular, more cash circulated than in any other place in Europe. By itself, Florence had revenues comparable to those of a kingdom. Not even the comparison with New York gives an idea of ​​what its economic and financial power was then “.

Until he abandons it, Dante lives as a rentier in Florence .

“Yes, the income field. And its condition already refers to what will be the dramatic crisis of Italian capitalism in the Middle Ages”.

Crisis triggered by what?

“From the idea that once you become rich you no longer continue to invest, but you buy land and become lords. Dante belongs to the generation of those who stop working to sit down on income”.

He too is borrowing money.

“In those days, those who ask for it are not necessarily in economic difficulties. Usually, those who make large debts are because they can afford them. Even today, a poor person does not get loans of five hundred thousand euros”.