Last week, a friend shared articles from both Daily Kos and The Atlantic citing a recent survey by the National Science Foundation suggesting that about one quarter of the American population doesn’t know the Earth revolves around the Sun. Granted, this grabby headline may not literally mean that some fifty to seventy million fellow citizens are unaware of the heliocentric model; and the article in The Atlantic does offer a few qualifiers and also reveals that Americans are not alone in their ignorance compared to other developed nations. Regardless, I probably would have ignored these posts had I not been in Rome last week to film events related to the anniversary of the execution by fire of 16th century philosopher, poet, and troublemaker Giordano Bruno.
On 17 February 1600, Bruno was burned at the stake in a market square called Campo de’ Fiori (field of flowers) after a seven-year trial by the Roman Church and ultimately being declared a heretic by Pope Clement VIII. As some records are missing, there is a degree of controversy as to exactly what heresies were key to Bruno’s conviction — he rejected the trinity, the virgin birth, transubstantiation, etc. — but his lecturing and writing on cosmology certainly appears to have been a factor. Not only was Bruno a defender of Copernicus’s heliocentric model, but he went a step further, insisting that there are other suns and other worlds revolving around them. Bruno’s contribution to science is also a matter of debate among modern cosmologists, but those who see him as a martyr to the cause of free thought certainly have reason to honor him in this way.
Today, a statue of Giordano Bruno stands as the centerpiece of Campo de’ Fiori, which is still a vibrant marketplace ringed by popular cafes. Poised on a tall pedestal, dressed in a monk’s robe, Bruno’s covered head is slightly bowed in a way that suggests to me both resignation and forgiveness — forgiveness of the people; he faces away from the Vatican. To my knowledge the 17th of February is observed and honored every year as it was last week when a crowd of maybe a couple hundred assembled in the late afternoon as merchants cleared away their stalls, and street cleaning machines competed with pigeons for scraps of produce and other spilled garbage.
Some visitors lay flowers on the pedestal while members of political and social organizations brought large wreaths. Official ceremonies began with a police band playing a Sousa march and then the Italian national anthem. This was followed by speeches and readings from political leaders, poets, philosophers, and scientists, and these continued into the early evening as the audience slowly dwindled down to the die-hards. I understood very few words, but the themes were familiar — a celebration of the diffusion of knowledge and the courage required to occasionally evangelize heterodoxy.
History teaches us time and again that even the most creative forms of sadism can never fully terrorize the free expression of ideas into hiding for long. In both mythology and reality, we find a recurring theme of knowledge cracking the forces of repression like weeds growing through concrete. From Prometheus and Eden to the inquisitions and contemporary brutalities in places like Iran, North Korea, and Russia, the battle rages over who controls the flow of information. After all, whatever Giordano Bruno was — scientist, artist, philosopher, or mystic — he is certainly in the pantheon of important pains in the ass of those who attempt to wield power by presuming to control the story.
In 1536, Henry VIII, who had broken with Rome two years earlier, burned William Tyndale at the stake for presuming to translate the Bible into English. And two years after that, Henry promoted the publication of the first great English Bible based largely on Tyndale’s work — making the king not only a murderous tyrant but also a plagiarist. And when Henry’s daughter, Mary Tudor, unexpectedly assumed the throne from 1553-1558, she sought to restore Catholicism to England and burned 277 protestants including Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer at the stake. And when the Puritans had enough of both Rome and the Church of England, they colonized New England, where the governors still controlled the story — or tried to.
It is certainly interesting that four centuries after Giordano Bruno’s execution plus at least fifteen years of Internet availability, some tens of millions of Americans still don’t know the Earth revolves around the Sun. The fact that this number is roughly the same today as it was before the available Internet can, I assume, be explained by the principle of leading horses to water; ignorance is a choice that some people are going to make no matter what new technology can provide. Of course one of the pitfalls of at least this period in the digital revolution is that one can find so many alternatives to water.
The manipulators of information in our time and place generally don’t employ physical terror like inquisitors or even like the thuggish Cossacks who recently beat up members of the band Pussy Riot. Instead, digital-age bullies, from corporate barons to common trolls, can evangelize hate or ignorance or just plain bad intel without expending much energy at all. The democratization of information has been a boon to the amateur and the huckster, who can present the most vile nonsense in a slick package with all the trappings of authenticity. This is how, for instance, the RNCC easily sets up sixteen websites designed to trick voters into thinking they are the official sites of democratic candidates.
The battle over who will control information certainly continues in the digital age, albeit mostly without bloodshed. Any sense that this control is now solidly in the hands of the people thanks to technology is, I believe, illusory. In fact, it isn’t that big a stretch to compare a technocracy to theocracy since both produce a minority of powerful individuals whose amok egos allow them to presume the role of intercessor between the people and some form of salvation. We should, therefore, be wary of new-age cardinals who hail from the great Valley and preach hip, progressive-sounding mantras. Given the tendency for the digital revolution to further consolidate wealth and devalue individual labor, I suspect that behind the pretty, new words lurk some very old ideas.
