A distinguished lawyer was talking on an internationally well known news network recently. This individual said that, at the end of the day, the most important thing is the truth. I was surprised to hear that. Perhaps this only reflects my naiveté, given that the person is also simultaneously a politician. Nevertheless, it is now a long time ago that I would have shared that belief, unfortunately. At least I fail to see its usefulness as a practical tool to understand how people think, and operate. It appears to me to be a term that is constantly under siege, and a concept that is rarely, if ever, well understood.
This is not to say that I do not value truth. It has just turned out not to appear to me to be as important as I thought when I was younger. I still think of it as a rare and precious thing, worth fighting for. It is also clearly a much more elusive thing, as anyone who has seriously tried to study it has surely come to realize, than what its day-to-day use suggests.
When I started working in the private sector, I was convinced that the so called invisible hand would ultimately force truth, merit, humility, sacrifice, selflessness, value creation, voluntary exchange and other noble values to prevail, at least in private enterprises, which I thought were ultimately regulated by the willingness of others to trade their goods and services for other things of value, and that, I believed, would opt for such qualities whenever the opportunity arose. This, in hindsight, was a flawed induction. Time after time, I was left confounded by how very obviously experienced and intelligent people around me were overruled or even punished with references to unfounded, shallow, arbitrary and often even clearly false reasons.
Initially, I mostly, and almost instinctively, attributed these events to inexperience and intellectual inferiority of the proponents of such reasons and ideas, but this turned out to be an unhelpful way of looking at things, it did not accurately predict the evolution of events among people. It also, fundamentally, did not make sense. If an individual is smarter than another, would it not be smarter to either convince everyone to pursue the truth, or even smarter still, to put oneself in a position of sufficient power to overrule stupidity and irrationality? There lies the rub, does it not? A seemingly much more predictable picture emerged when I shuffled off this coil of prejudice, and started to study incentives. This came with a price, though. At least it felt as if I was forced to choose, either to continue to believe in the prevalence of stupidity, or to accept the prevalence of deceit, a much darker and more depressing outlook, but also, as it turned out, a far more helpful tool for predicting the behavior of others. It even seems as if deceit thrives in the guise of stupidity, as this judgement conveniently liberates the deceitful from exposing his underlying motives.
With that I mean that there has to be an explanation for how stupid and erroneous ideas can ever trump intelligent and correct ones. An embryonic such explanation I found when watching a program about chimpanzees on the television. In a chimpanzee troop, if the strongest individual becomes too oppressive, the two next strongest chimpanzees band together, and beat the living daylight out of the strongest one, until it is either killed or subdued under their joint rule. This principle appears simple enough to explain how intellect, excellence, and other hard earned and valuable qualities can be outmaneuvered by less refined means. I am sure this line of thinking has some standard name that I am unaware of, but I call this hypothesis the ape alliance hypothesis, and in order to test the viability of elaborating this ape alliance hypothesis, I decided to study the most obvious and widely known counterexample of the prevalence of truth that I could think of, the trial of Galileo. Through these investigations, I developed a keen interest in a recurring friend of this collection of essays, Pope Urban VIII.
I am not sure if it is accurate, but I imagine a young man from Rome, at a point where he is still called Maffeo Barberini, who meets in person the rock-star scientist whom, for the first time, has shown the regular people of Florence the strange protrusions that would later be identified as the rings of Saturn, and the moons of Jupiter now named after him. A man that has provided irrefutable evidence to the populace that he knows more about the stars than the men who are the closest to heaven. I would be surprised if Maffeo would not have been both impressed and amused by the persuasiveness, charisma, and audacity with which Galileo intellectually smites the rivals of his patron, Cosimo II di Medici - of which Maffeo certainly also knows himself to, at least one day, be one. It would also not surprise me if the members of the rivaling families governing the regional states in what is now Italy still feast, travel and work together, perhaps even meanwhile they conspire and wage war against each other. It is clear that some of them find common ground within the College of Cardinals of the Catholic Church, the latter of which I suspect, in certain ways, was not entirely dissimilar from a UN or an EU, of its time. After all, it was from the Catholic Church that the regional states received blessings to go to war. The Holy See was also a kind of fiscal super localization, in the sense that tax had to be paid by nations within its borders, to the Papal States, not unlike the members of the EU, or indeed in some sense also the UN. I also find it interesting, that it was a nation where the ruler, the pope, was elected by the cardinals, making it a central concern for any ambitious European family to work its way in among the cardinal alliances that would ultimately choose the next ruler of this powerful realm and holy institution.
The point being that, according to the ape alliance hypothesis, the audacity of Galileo is only a sustainable behavior as long as he lives under the protection of the leader of the indirect hegemony constituted by the states represented by the momentarily strongest alliance of cardinals, a person whose children it is Galileo's occupation to privately tutor, although this perspective only holds true as long as the regional political balance of power remains stable. This is simply because the collection of states those cardinals represent will, by default, ally with the Papal States. That alliance tips the regional balance of power in their favor. From a judicial point of view, this coalition may, while remaining in this state of power, arbitrate truth at sword's point.
That a similar, and probably more refined, perspective on this reality, is consciously understood by Urban VIII, appears to be quite clear from the fact that he does nothing about the public intervention by the famous French cardinal Richelieu in the Thirty Years' War, which I was taught in school was a war between Catholics and Protestants. The Red Eminence, through the Treaty of Bärwalde actively and openly sided with Protestant Sweden against the Catholic forces in Bohemia and its surroundings. From a strictly Catholic point of view, this makes no sense, but from a real political - and therefore ape alliance - point of view, a kind of socially grounded realism, it is quite easy to understand that any Pope in Rome, is not necessarily vehemently opposed to the weakening of a political force like the House of Hapsburg, which at that point, had both Italy and France surrounded by its realms in the Holy Roman Empire, Spain and the Netherlands. It would have been neither the first, nor the last, time for a political powerhouse to claim religious authority above all other, nor to invade a militarily weaker, surrounded neighbor.
The death of Cosimo II, and subsequent messing around by his incompetent son and successor Ferdinando II, puts Galileo in a situation that is fundamentally different from his previously secure position that granted him extensive freedom of expression as the intellectual mascot of the dominant regional political force, a situation which most obviously his book Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo, but also his letter to the Grand Duchess Christina di Lorena, suggests that he fails to identify before it is too late. His point of view no longer echoes hegemonic power, but rather resistance to the new de facto ruling alliance; a veiled signal of defiance, by the new losers.
And so, the strongest alliance arbitrates justice, and determines which celestial orb circles which. Regardless of the truth, and regardless of whether it matters to anything.
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