a bonobo humanity?

Lucretius, apparently

I was, for a time, a member of the South Australian humanists, basically a meet-up group, but also a branch of the national organisation, the title of which I can’t remember, mea culpa. I might also claim to be a prominent member, as I gave three talks to the group, the first on free will (on which I’ve since changed my position), the second on the decline of religion in Australia, and the third on the birth and growth of international organisations. I write this purely to big-note myself, as nobody else will. 

I believe that humanist group is no longer with us, but of course humanism lives on in many hearts and minds. I’ve been very much reminded of this as I read a collection of essays by the philosophical physicist Carlo Rovelli, with the grand and charming title, There are places in the world where rules are less important than kindness. And I must say, to my shame, that I only got the book via a ‘Dirty Santa’ game last Christmas. I filched the book from someone, as part of the rules of the game, largely to show off about how bookish I am (I also filched another book, to become the sole owner of the only book gifts available). 

Strangely I knew the name, probably through my various researches for my writing, but I chanced to search my little library and found a slender Rovelli volume, Seven brief lessons on physics, which I can’t for the life of me remember buying, and have surely never opened – mea maxima culpa. So now I have two Rovelli essay collections to read, and they truly are gems, resurrecting my humanist interests as well as, if it’s not the same thing, making me want to be a better person, at last!

The most recent essay I’ve read, ‘De rerum natura’, rather excited me in anticipation, and I must tell a story about it, which I suspect I’ve written before, but never mind. 

In my early twenties I was at a party at a friend’s house, a fairly raucous affair, with painfully loud music and painfully attractive women, and I found myself overwhelmed and wilting. My friend noticed and made some effort to revive me, but I told him I was in a dull mood and should go home. He suggested instead that I spend some time in his spare room, away from the noise, where there was a sofa bed and ‘lots of books’. He knew me well. So, shutting the door to the beats of Ian Dury, Elvis Costello et al, I perused a plethora of texts before more or less randomly selecting Lucretius. De Rerum Natura is generally translated as On the nature of things, or On the nature of the universe, though there may be other variants. It was written in the first century BCE, and, believe me, it’s an extraordinary work, which cuts through the centuries between then and now like a knife through air. After the first few pages I found myself laughing with incredulity. Though from the beginning he addresses the great goddess Venus, it didn’t strike me as a religious text, it was too full of the life of the nature around him, animate and inanimate, and the atoms this natural world was all made from. Yes, this was an early atomic theory, first posited by Democritus and Epicurus, though long before subatomic particles, quantum states, electromagnetism and field theory,  

I was certainly bedazzled by this 2,000 year old claim about atoms, but other speculations seemed fascinatingly ‘modern’:

… if things were made out of nothing, any species could spring from any source and nothing would require seed. Men could arise from the sea and scaly fish from the earth, and birds could be hatched out of the sky… The same fruits would not grow constantly on the same trees, but they would keep changing: any tree might bear any fruit. If each species were not composed of its own generative bodies, why should each be born always of the same kind of mother? Actually, since each is formed out of specific seeds, it is born and emerges into the sunlit world only from a place where there exists the right material, the right kind of atoms. This is why everything cannot be born of everything, but a specific power of generation inheres in specific objects. 

This is the very sniffter of an intuition about the origin of individual species, which went through me, as a young man, like a very mild and titillating electric shock. The passage, and others like it, appear in the first few pages of De Rerum Natura, and it may well be that I didn’t get much further on that night, given the circumstances, but they made a deep impression. Our thoughts, or those of the best of us, have been plumbing the depths of what’s what in terms of what we are, and everything living – and non-living – around us, for 2 thousand, or 20 thousand, or even 200 thousand years. Our sharing of these thoughts no doubt began with the development of language, and then writing, which boosted us to become the dominant species we now are. 

So I note that I’ve got a copy of On the nature of the Universe on my bookshelves, but I likely haven’t read past Book One of six books. Time to make amends. Life begins at 69! Which reminds me – vive les bonobos!

References

Carlo Rovelli, There are places in the world where rules are less important than kindness, 2022

Carlo Rovelli, Seven brief lessons on physics, 2014

Lucretius, On the nature of the universe, trans by R E Latham, 1994