A Walk Down Pretend Memory Lane

I often wonder what my life would have been like had I been born in Europe during the Renaissance instead of into my current modern-world existence. I always ignore the physical impossibility of this; my particular batch of genes could only have existed after the extensive colonization of North America. I'm also not sure why this is such a common daydream for me, although it's possibly due to the fact that I think I would have really kicked ass back in the Renaissance.

Today's particular rumination session was begun by an article on Salon about Giordano Bruno, an Italian academic who was burned at the stake during the wonderful days of the Inquisition. On a slight tangent here, I'm really glad I wasn't raised Catholic. I think I would have had a very difficult time reconciling the fact that I was supposed to venerate certain saints with the fact that they were involved in killing people whose ideas turned out to be right, all in the name of protecting the faith. Turns out that Bruno's Inquisitor ended up being canonized by the church back in the '30s.

I see a lot of myself in the version of Bruno presented in that article. I see myself as a thinker, as someone who's willing to buck conventional wisdom when it's wrong, and someone with a very strong sense of indignation when I perceive injustice. Of course I don't think of myself as an elitist asshole and Bruno seemed to have been a little bit of a jerk. The only thing keeping me from buying into the image of myself as a modern-day Bruno with better manners is that anyone in the US with enough intelligence and academic interest to be proud of it probably feels the same way. Our culture, especially certain segments of the culture catering to types like me, values freedom of speech, the courage to stand up for what you believe in and, and righteous rebels. Things weren't like that back in Bruno's day. Saying the wrong thing could get you killed, even if you could prove it. Speaking out against commonly held beliefs was not as easy as it is today. Atheists now can run around calling believers dipshits in public and nothing happens to them worse than lots of people considering them assholes. Conservative Christians can rail against homosexuals and secular lifestyles and again, nothing happens to them other than lots of people calling them assholes.

Still, I know that I probably wouldn't have been on the cutting edge of academic history had I been born in the Renaissance. I know that my beliefs really aren't that exotic in my lifetime, so they wouldn't have been that exotic back then, either. I've never been one to come out with any sort of extreme evident in my appearance or lifestyle. Now, with the right birth status I may have been one of those famous Renaissance men despite my lack of extremes. I'm not much of a specialist. I'm too generally curious and too unwilling to focus myself or limit my curiosity. I didn't really have any major weaknesses in school. I wasn't fond of math, but I was good at it (as long as you didn't ask me to add, multiply, subtract, or divide, but I could do Calculus without too much trouble). Every other subject I loved. I would have sucked as an artist, but I was a passable musician. The standards were lower back then, kind of like the level of competition in the early Olympics compared to the level of competition now. Just because there are guys who far exceed my abilities in every academic discipline now doesn't mean that I wouldn't be near the top of the pack back then. The giant scientific leaps of the Renaissance didn't require the huge capabilities for deep mathematical reasoning or the huge learning backlog of past discoveries that enable modern discoveries.

Of course just because I would have had the ability, doesn't mean that would have been the life I would have lived. If I'd made the mistake of being born into a poor family of common birth, I never would have had a chance at being an academic. Instead, I would have been a farmer, carpenter, or the like. I would have only had a chance at this had I been born to a noble family and even then probably only if I weren't the first born. And that's entirely ignoring the disease factor. There have been several times in my life when I was sick enough that I would have died in the past. But then again, I rarely catch most diseases. I've never had the flu. The only things I'm unusually susceptible to are strep throat and bronchitis. Who knows how I would have fared against dysentery and the plague.

But if I had been born lucky, managed to reach adulthood without dying of easily preventable diseases, and my curiosity and intelligence turned out to be a product of nature and not the nurture of my upbringing I really could have been something back then.

I would have so used my brains to get laid, too.