Today, thoughts about Machiavelli and immature
science. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
Machiavelli lived from 1469
to 1527. He was only a few years younger than
Leonardo da Vinci and they both spent time working
for the cruel Cesare Borgia. He and Leonardo had
something else, even more important, in common.
Both helped invent the new practice of empirical
science. Leonardo observed the workings of nature.
Machiavelli tried to make observational science of
politics.
A popular view of scientists paints them as people
who like to pull the wings off flies to see how
they react. That's what we do when we let
cold-blooded detachment run mad, but it has little
relation to effective science. Still, Leonardo and
Machiavelli give us an idea where the stereotype
comes from.
Both were formed by the revival of classical Greek
values we call Renaissance humanism. Like early
Greeks they tried to reduce the world to human
scale by observing it with detachment. Leonardo set
us on the way. A century later, Galileo fine-honed
the new experimental method. All the while, scores
of bright people tried to see things in this new
perspective.
So Machiavelli made his detached dissection of
politics. He removed the religious language used in
contemporary discussions of statecraft. He stripped
the art down to secular cause and effect. He wrote
much, but the book he's famous for is The
Prince. Machiavelli modeled his hypothetical
prince on Cesare Borgia and used him to show how
the state should be run. He'd come to hate Borgia
the man, but Borgia the prince served his purposes.
Joseph Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish read The
Prince and find a flawed scientist looking
at the problem of running a state. Machiavelli's
Prince (or prime minister or president) is obliged
to be unscrupulous in the interests of the state --
lying, killing, torturing -- using religion to
further the ends of the state.
Machiavelli advises his prince not to let his
standards of personal morality fall apart. But
personal morality is a luxury to be set aside in
the interests of the state. He tells the Prince not
to casually violate his people's personal property
and to be surgically accurate in using cruelty for
the common good. Again and again he warns the
Prince not be self-indulgent when he's unscrupulous
in support of the state.
And so Machiavelli forged a science of ends over
means. Yet, even as he wrote, Borgia's rule was
coming apart just because it was unscrupulous. Any
prince serves at the pleasure of the people,
whether he realizes it or not. The failure of
Machiavelli's scientific model lay in its naive
acceptance of apparent truth. Science is much more
than pulling wings off flies. It is looking below
the surface and seeing with the mind as well as the
eye. But Machiavelli hadn't come that far. And
today would-be leaders still read his simplistic
embryonic science and are still taken in by it.
I'm John Lienhard at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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