Da Vinci and Depravity

[milefile]

There's going to be an exhibition of Da Vinci's drawings, sketches and studies in NY soon. I'd love to go to that. But hearing about it got me thinking about him, his place in his time, and our place in ours'.

He was an illegitamate child. He was gay. He stayed "single" throughout life. He was on drugs. He was unconventional to say the least. And his Roman Catholic contemporaries would even say immoral.

He was a trailblazer in the field of anatomy, dissecting corpses and drawing the insides. He was the first to understand the circulatory system and that the heart and pulse were synchronized. He was the first to document a fetus in the womb, and draw it. And these things are what I was thinking about.

In order for him to understand the heart, he watched pigs being slaughtered. They did this by sticking a large tube into the pig's chest cavity, right into the heart, which pumped out all the blood. Da Vinci's insatiable thirst for knowledge had him right there, looking into the tube as the pig bled out, pressing his ear to the pigs body to hear the heart, and taking it's pulse during the slaughter. Nobody would disagree this is peculiar behavior, especially when most people were perfectly content to not know what he discovered.

During his life, the Vatican, which was the owner of power in Europe at the time, declared dissection of humans to be blasphemous. To be caught with a body was punished severly. But he was able to pay people to dig up corpses for him to dissect in secret. This was how modern anatomy began, through crime.

And then I thought of analogous situations in today's world, situations where science and so-called morality are at odds. Stem-cell research jumped to the fore. Bush's rules regarding this essentially make it impossible for any meaningful research to occurr. But as "Leader of the Free World" I'd hope that he could grasp the fact that his little edict will be short lived, and that stem cell research will probably be the next major medical phenomenon, no matter how "immoral" it seems now, in our miniscule slice of history.

The idea is that for there to be progress there must be deviation, there must be moral depravity for new ground to be broken, for humanity to move further into the formerly dark unknown.

Today every medical student cuts up a human body. In Da Vinci's time it was a serious crime. So have we progressed or regressed?

 

[rjensen11]

I'm thinking regressed and progressed. We've progressed because we know how to cure a lot more and understand much more, but we've regressed, because we're basically making the birthrate so high that we're going to overpopulate, take up too much space, and eat up all the available foods before we die. My prediction: Even with the AIDS epedimic going on in Africa, the people there's civilization will last longer that the "First World Countries"

 

[vat_man]

If you go through history you'll see people who made enormous scientific breakthroughs dealt with severely by the powers of the time - Galileo comes immediately to mind.

 

[risingson77]

Well...yeah. Most people's intellectual curiosity is far outweighed by their fear and complacency. It also seems that the Church has a long history of suppressing knowlwdge on the grounds of being "immoral". Mostly because knowledge displaces fear, and when you lose the ability to scare people you lose the ability to control them. And they stop giving you money. This is why the Catholic Church did not allow "commoners" to read the Bible (or read at all): they would realize how badly they're being abused.

Some people just don't want to know more about their world. They prefer to hold to simple-minded mysticism. Learning constantly challenges you, and changes your perception of the world. I am constantly amazed at how intellectualy stunted some people are - it seems like they have no desire to know more. It really rather depressing....

 

[rjensen11]

I feel you're talking about my type of people there, risingson.

It's not the fact that we don't have any desire, but by the time we learn something, we will have to unlearn it and learn something to cover for the reason why we had to unlearn what we learned, then we will have to unlearn what we learned to cover what we learned before to fill the gap of what we unlearned. You see, it gets very complicated, so we just try not to express it too much. It's because it's complicated to learn and then unlearn, yeah, that's it, and because we're just too lazy. You see, it's not like we don't have any desire, but simply we don't have enough. It's like people saying "Yeah, I'll do it tomorrow", they're not saying they'll never do it, but that they just don't want to do it there and then.

Oh, and where did you find that the Catholic Church refused to teach people to learn to read and write? It never said, "Hey, we don't want you to go to the ceminary because we don't want you to learn to read and write!", but if you can find a non-biased place that says that it purposely refused to teach people to read and write I won't be upset.

 

[risingson77]

What I'm talking about occurred in the Middle Ages. Only monks and priests were allowed to read the Bible, despite the fact that it was intended for all people.