Reading The Swerve with spring still in the distance brings tears to my eyes. The book is about the discovery of Lucretius’ poem, On the Nature of Things, and how it resulted in part in a swerve in the trajectory of history and the spring like birth of the Renaissance which one can experience with a trip to Florence where the dull minds of the Dark Ages fell to the power of human creativity and achievement.
The story of the ancient Roman poem has parallels today when the works of the ancient Greeks and Romans are no longer taught in the schools and knowledge of their knowledge is relegated to digital snapshots of the Coliseum by hordes of tourists. Yet we are as Americans at a swerve point ourselves which some would like to snuff out.
The American mindset until recently could be ascertained by reading Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad a book that does two things. First it establishes the provincial superiority over the Old World that will dominate American thinking and at the same time creates a thirst for the knowledge of the Old World drawing both worlds closer together in a beneficial way.
Conservatives want the superiority complex to continue even while liberals understand that it must give way to a new global society where borders are a thing of the past and we are all one among equals.
So we are at the point of the swerve and the future has yet to be decided. Will historians two thousand years from now look back and say conservatism triumphed and the status quo remained and the planetary society failed to evolve or will they look back and say there was a triumph of liberalism and a swerve occurred and mankind took a giant step forward into a brighter future for one and all. Tell us Venus what the future holds.