Cancel Culture is hardly new. Ronald Reagan said "Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.”
But except for in the few recent and going extinct democracies, rulers have relied on genocidal thugs to deal with dissenters. Cancel Culture is practiced by all genocidal thugs and only by genocidal thugs.
They Were Just Like College Students Today.
On May 10, 1933, university students in 34 universities throughout Germany burned over 25,000 books. Jewish authors like Albert Einstein, Heinrich Heine, and Sigmund Freud were especially targeted. Sigmund Freud reacted by saying "What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now, they are content with burning my books.” Freud was wrong, of course. It took extraordinary efforts to get him out of National Socialist Europe alive, and four of his sisters were exterminated in death camps. The long dead Heine appraised the situation more accurately. In an 1821 play about the Spanish Inquisition, Heine wrote ”Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too.” This phrase is today engraved in German at the site of Nazi book burnings.
Cancel Culture in Peak Form
Giordano Bruno, Dominican friar & mathematician, was burned to death in Rome, in 1600, for maintaining that the stars were suns and perhaps surrounded by planets.
We are all familiar with how Galileo was lucky to escape with his life and forced to recant for believing in heliocentrism. This ban of heliocenrism was in response to the ongoing challenge of Protestantism and included a ban on teaching “infinitesimals.” Infinitesimals are defined by wikipedia as “quantities that are closer to zero than any standard real number, but are not zero” are a mathematical concept that was a precursor to calculus.
Antoine Lavoisier was considered the father of modern scientific chemistry. Just one of his accomplishments was proving the conservation of mass. Listing all of his accomplishments would require a book. This despite his career being cut short., pardon the bad pun. He was a humanitarian, dedicated to improving the lot of the common people and dedicated to the goals of the French revolution. But he was a “toxic” aristocrat, so in 1794, he was beheaded.
Mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange would say, “It took them only an instant to cut off that head, and a hundred years may not produce another like it.”
So it always goes with political correctness..
Archimedes Palimpsest
This palimpsest is a work by Archimedes, on parchment of course, that survived because it was folded, rebound and reused for a liturgical text. In the Dark Ages, Archimedes surviving writings were burnt. However parchment was rare and valuable, and was routinely scraped and reused. After years of work using modern technology, such as digital imaging with ultraviolet and infrared light, most of Archimedes work underneath could be read. Astoundingly in 225 BC, Archimedes invented integration using infinitesimals, and was on the doorstep of calculus.
Archimedes was famously murdered by an invading Roman soldier. It only took 1,900 years for humanity to again stand where Archimedes stood.
By the 1630s into the 1650s Bonaventura Cavalieri, Jesuate monk (the order was abolished in 1668 over rivalry with Jesuits) and John Wallis, Presbyterian minister, who invented the symbol for infinity, again came up with the idea of infinitesimals, the cornerstone of calculus. But Cancel Culture had problems with infinitesimals. They were the Confederate flags of their time.
What is Heretical about “Next to Nothing”?
Science has produced all that has elevated human life from being in the famous words of Thomas Hobbes, “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Science depends on calculus.
Basic to the idea behind calculus is that a line consists of infinite points and a plane consists of infinite lines. This sounds like a logical contradiction. If a line consist of infinite points, then if the length of each point is zero, the line should have a length of 0. And if these points had a length, no matter how infinitesimally small, the length of the line should be infinite.
Calculus neatly solves this apparent contradiction and in fact depends on it.
Today we can regard these points as hypothetical conveniences, but in the 17th century, the Church made dogma Plato's belief that ideas, forms and essences were ultimate reality. God was infinite, points on a line were not.
In 1632 as Galileo was being condemned and fighting for his life, a committee of Jesuits met and gave a ruling. Infinitesimals were heretical and teaching them forbidden. The work of Cavalieri was suppressed.
Ironically in Britain, Thomas Hobbes, quoted above, condemned infinitesimals too, and the work of John Wallis. Hobbes was an empiricists and materialist. He saw infinitesimals as a threat to absolute authority, not of religion which he cared naught about, but of the king. In Britain though, the pendulum was swinging toward greater freedom.
National Socialists Never had it so Good, Who Needs Book Burning.
All throughout the dark ages there were huge scale burnings of the Talmud. In 1242 alone, in Paris, 10,000 volumes of the Talmud were burned. The printing press did no exist. These were all written on parchment by hand by scribes, who were bound by torturous religious rules such as only the skin of a kosher animal was allowed. Nevertheless it proved impossible to burn every copy of the Talmud. Once the printing press was invented, censors had no chance to burn every copy of a book. But now it is different, today an article is purely on line. Today. And tomorrow at the whim of a totalitarian technocrat it is gone.
The Price of Cancel Culture.
In the words of Amir Alexander, whose book “Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World” helped bring this little known act of censorship into the limelight, “Italy was into the 17th century the mathematical capital of Europe. It had the greatest mathematicians…by the time the Jesuits were done, that was gone… By the 1670s, Italy was a complete backwater in mathematics and the sciences."
For the two hundred years the teaching of calculus was banned in Italy. Italy never never recovered. Knowledge follows freedom. Science and discovery went to places where there was freedom. It is no accident that at its birth at start of the 20th century, statistics was a totally British affair and then totally British and American.
But where is science and the quest for knowledge to go today? The Democratic Socialist heirs of the National Socialists have taken over the United States. The burners of Giordano Bruno have already taken care of statues of “patriarchal oppressors” and Dr. Seuss. In academia every word a professor writes is going to go to have to be approved by an “Anti-Racism” committee. Progress depends on tolerating dissenting, controversial, even offensive, points of view. Voltaire realized this, today’s “progressives” do not.
Read about the dark ages, it is the future.
(The photograph is of a World War II Nazi officer’s dagger. My late parents were holocaust survivors. Their families did not survive. I see no better symbol of Cancel Culture.)
