And the betrayal broke vows and tradition and everything that says you should do, and it worked, and it saved tens of thousands of lives. And Machiavelli says, 'I will not call that action wrong.' So we're all Marxists and we're all Freudian and we're all Machiavellian, right? But we don't realize it because we just all do this.
That of course was Ada Palmer. Hi Ada.
Yeah, I'm so excited to see you in Florence, like in a beautiful setting. Um, and although it looks like Rome, I know. But yes, behind you the wallpaper looks like Rome, but the ceilings are all Florence.
Yeah. The decorative motif for the apartment is all the best Renaissance art that isn't in Florence, because if it is in Florence, we can go out and look.
Yeah. All right. You kind of miss the other stuff when you're here.
Although, I don't know if Machiavelli would approve of all this non-Florentine art polluting Florence. Um, I'm Adam Davidson. Ada and I host this show, Beforecast, where we take a deep look at the past to understand the present and also the future. And Ada, of course, is a historian of the Renaissance at the University of Chicago. You should subscribe here wherever you're listening — YouTube, podcast — and you should go to Ada's Patreon. Maybe just spend a minute, Ada, on all the other stuff you do, because I feel like we keep making reference.
Yes. Updates about science fiction, about the latest fantasy novel, which is a deep dive into Norse mythology and metaphysics. Other non-fiction projects on Renaissance, on philosophy. Also music updates. The band is getting back together. We're going to be doing my Norse mythology stage play, a cappella musical this year. Yep, hasn't been performed in over a decade.
I'm going to want to know about all of those things. So, at some point, we need to dig deeply. You are — is it like, can I call you a Renaissance woman? Is that an anachronism?
Yes. It's a fun one. Polymath is also a good word.
Yeah, polymath is a good word. Yeah. And it's — I mean, you are — when I was at the University of Chicago and thinking about getting a PhD in the history of religion, the reason I chose not to and to go into journalism was I didn't want to just do one thing for the rest of my life. But you are — I remember standing in a hallway at the University of Chicago and hearing two people talk about their dissertations. Both were on 15th-century Turkish textiles, and they had never met, and neither of them were familiar with anything the other person was working on. And I was like, see, that is a kind of siloization I don't want to be part of.
But it's also an example of just how deep everything goes, right? And that no matter, you know, no matter how niche the topic, you discover that there's lots, lots more in there to zoom in on.
Yeah, which is a great sign. I'm gonna have my gelato today. So, please —
Yes, I'm glad you're having gelato. I feel like gelato is the third host of this show.
Um, and I've, by the way, I've been to New York a bunch. I have not been to Italy, but now I think my gelato consumption has gone dramatically higher because of you and talking about gelato all the time. So I cannot now pass what looks like a decent gelato place without eating it, at least to drip in to sample.
Um, all right. So we've been going on a lot of journeys, bringing hopefully to the listener and viewers' eyes and minds what it felt like to be in Florence at the time of Machiavelli. But you and I were talking about some of the big ideas, you know, and specifically ethics. So let's — you know, I'm not a scholar of philosophy by any stretch, but my vague memory from taking Eugene Gendlin's Aristotle class at the University of Chicago — he's probably before your time, he was quite a character — was, you know, there's metaphysics, there's epistemology, how do we know what we know? And there's ethics, which I think of as like, how do we live a good life, the right life, a moral life.
There's also ontology. How do we know what exists?
How do we know what exists? Yeah. So was Machiavelli a polymath on philosophy, or was he really focused on ethics?
So it's useful to remember that in Machiavelli's own day, the practice of history and the writing of history and the practice of ethics and the philosophy of ethics are deeply intertwined, to the degree that a history position at a university is often going to be considered to be a subbranch of ethics and a seat within the ethics part of a philosophy program. And Machiavelli's own practice of the evaluation of ethics is very different, but it's a period when it's very, very normal for ethics and history to be deeply, deeply entangled in their practice. Now, Machiavelli is a polymath in that he's also a political figure and he's a historian and he's a playwright. He's a very funny comic playwright. And he's a Latin scholar and he transcribes manuscripts at some points for his own use. So he has all of the Renaissance man characteristics that we would want. He's not an artist, but he is a poet.
But I think of his — and maybe I'm wrong, there's a good chance I'm wrong — but I think of his writing and thinking as, I don't know what word to use, as fairly pragmatic. It's like news you can use, and —
But that itself is innovative in his own day.
That it's not just abstract how many angels on the head of a pin kind of stuff.
No, no, no. It's not a question of that. Pragmatism or utilitarian or consequentialist ethics is what's new. So here we need some vocabulary, and this is not going to be the highly technical vocabulary of a modern philosophy department. This is going to be the mediumly technical vocabulary of a historian of ideas. But when we look broadly at the history of ideas, we can divide ethics into three big categories. And there are many, many other — there are many categories of ethics and there are many traditions and practices, but it's a really useful division to divide them into these three categories. They have terrible names, and I apologize on behalf of history for the fact that they have terrible and confusing names, but they have terrible and confusing names. The first one is deontology, which confusingly has nothing to do with ontology, because ontology is the study of what exists, from ontos, being or existence. Deontology, coming from deontos, which is a completely different word, is the branch of ethics — any kind of ethics — that judges the rightness or wrongness of an action based on a set of external rules. Is it wrong to kill? If so, then killing is a deontologically wrong action. And so like Hammurabi's code or the Ten Commandments, that kind of thing.
Exactly. Because sometimes you can judge something to be right or wrong based on a religious code of conduct. Sometimes it can be the law of the land, whether it's legal or illegal where you are. Sometimes it can be custom, right? Is it wrong to tread upon the grave of the dead, or is it not wrong to tread upon the grave of the dead? Many different things can create rules for us. They can be a personal code. They can be a vow that you've taken. It can be, you know, you're a monk, things are not allowed for you because you're a monk that would be allowed for others. Whatever it is, if it's the bylaws of your nonprofit organization or your —
Exactly. Exactly. If there's a set of, you know, the customs on Blue Sky and how you do and don't behave, right? Any set of external rule, if you judge something to be right when it follows the rule and wrong when it doesn't follow the rule, that is deontology. Even if it's an Enlightenment philosopher like John Locke saying we can deduce the laws of nature and it's a law of nature that it's right to rebel against a tyrant and wrong to rebel when there's not a good cause, right? And even if the laws are ascribed abstractly to nature and not having been generated by man or God, it's still external laws and that's still deontology.
Okay. All right. So deontology, external laws. If I want to know what's right or wrong, there's somewhere I got to check and it'll tell me.
Exactly. The second category is virtue ethics. Also a bad name. Virtue ethics is any category of ethics which judges the rightness or wrongness of a deed based on the internal intention and choice and character of the doer. Did you will a good action when you took that action? Did you choose good or did you choose evil? Right? And so if you put a powder in somebody's drink and they drink it and they die and you didn't know it was poison, you thought it was medicine, virtue ethics would say you did not commit a bad act because you did not will that person's death. You caused that person's death, but you did not will that person's death. You didn't take wrong action. Conversely, if you put what you think is poison in somebody's drink and it turns out that it wasn't and it was perfectly benign and you didn't kill them and nothing happens, but you willed murder in your heart, virtue ethics says you committed an evil act.
Deontology says nobody died, so you technically didn't do anything, so there technically wasn't a breaking of a law. But internally, virtue ethics says you willed evil. Yeah, this is — since I studied a lot about the ancient Near East before and after the time of Jesus in college, this was a big shift where, at least the way I was taught, that a few hundred years before Jesus there was this shift that before that the outcome was what mattered. It didn't really matter. Nobody was asking what did you want to happen or think should happen. It was just the outcome. And then, not because of Jesus solely, but around the time of Jesus there is this shift to intention mattering more than outcome. And that, like right now, I happen to be reading a bunch of Buddhist philosophy where the karma idea is — it's all, they call it volition in the literature, but it's all intention like that, right? That is ontology, that is metaphysics, that's everything.
Yeah, everything. And when we go back to the very, very earliest recorded philosophical discussions, both in the East among the early Confucians and in the West among the Pre-Socratics and then especially in Plato, the first debates almost always involve both deontology and virtue ethics and the ways they overlap, and debates over the question of when people don't commit crimes, is it because inside they're a good person and they don't want to commit crimes, or is it because of the rules? If the rule wasn't there, would they commit the crime? Right? There's the thought experiment in ancient Greek thought of the Ring of Gyges. If you had an invisibility ring which guaranteed there were no consequences for doing whatever you wanted, would people do whatever they want, or would people choose to be good? These are debates about having both deontology and virtue ethics at play at the same time.
Yeah, it's great. And this, by the way, just another side note, a friend of mine, Joe Henrich, who's an anthropologist and psychologist at Harvard who wrote about WEIRD — the Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and — I'm forgetting — Developed. So his basic thing is a lot of what we think we know about human psychology comes from studies on college campuses in the US and Europe, and those people are WEIRD in that Western, Educated sense. And this is one of the issues he points out, that if you do surveys around the world, even today, huge swaths of the world do not use virtue ethics the way we do, that outcome is more relevant than intent.
Yeah. Yeah. And most legal systems involve an entanglement of these things with each other. The most familiar example for a lot of cases is the idea of manslaughter, where you didn't intend to kill somebody but by your actions you did kill somebody and you should have realized that you were putting someone's life in danger. And also the distinctions between first and second degree murder, when we say killing a person and having planned it in advance and having premeditated it and stuck with the plan for days and days is somehow worse ethically and legally than having just gotten really angry and suddenly killed somebody one time then. Right? Both of these are murder. Both of these break 'thou shalt not kill.' But the legal system says there's something ethically worse about having consistently willed murder in your heart over a period of time, calmly, rationally looking at it and still deciding yes, and having very much the heart of a murderer, right? Versus having been carried away in a fit of passion one time and done a thing perhaps rashly. And that distinction is just virtue ethics, right? It's just this idea that somehow the one is ethically worse than the other, even if the deed is identical in the end, and that both of them are worse than manslaughter where you didn't intend it even if you caused it.
Right. And then, yeah, my wife, Jen Banbury, works as a private investigator on, among other things, death row mitigation cases where someone's been convicted of murder, but then the defense will hire a private investigator to research their childhood or their background to convey — I mean, basically almost everyone who is convicted of murder has a gothically awful, or a huge percentage have a really truly awful childhood. And it's to me both instinctively right but also just intellectually interesting that if two people commit murder, the one with the worst childhood might get a lesser sentence simply because —
Because we consider there to have been damage to the internal being.
Exactly. And that internal being is scarred in a way that made the deed more likely and made ethical judgment more difficult.
Yeah. We treat it as an ethical disability in a sense.
Yeah. It's — yeah. Yeah. It also makes me think of this guy I grew up with. He was a very good friend of mine who became a drug addict and a petty criminal. And he got arrested because he tried to break into someone's house, but he was so high he passed out in the doorway. And he was very angry because he said, 'Why is intended breaking and entry the same charge as breaking and entering?' And I felt like that was not a winner argument.
Because internally the willing is the same even if the actual deed was not.
Was not. Yeah. Yeah. And it was not not because he decided it was a bad idea. It was just —
Well, and sometimes you see in older case law people arguing the reason intended murder or attempted murder should have a lesser sentence than a successful murder is that the person might have hesitated at the last moment. That many people, our culture tells us, hesitate at the last moment, think they can commit murder but then get there and can't. This person may have planned a murder, but possibly if they'd gotten there, they wouldn't have been able to make the dagger fall. And therefore, attempted murder is less certain that this person has the heart of a murderer than a murder that is a fatal completion.
Right. Right. Okay. Great. So, we have deontology, lists that tell us what's wrong. Virtue ethics, something about your internal nature that tells us if you're wrong —
That judges what did you do? And then the third is utilitarianism or consequentialism, which judges the rightness or wrongness of an action by its results, by the consequences of the deed. Right? You killed a person who was about to push the nuclear destruction button and blow up a city, and you did it, you know, to save thousands of lives or took one life. The trolley problem is a version of this.
Yeah. I was about to say, you instantly — I think of the TV show The Good Life and — or not The Good — The Good Place.
The Good Place. And I think of the trolley problem instantly. Yeah.
Exactly. And judging things by the result of them. But it's interesting how often when we think about consequentialist thought experiments, we get entangled with things like virtue ethics. When you pushed the button — sorry, when you killed the person to stop them from pushing the button to blow up the city, did you do it to stop them from blowing up the city, or did you do it because you're a homicidal maniac and you enjoy killing people and by coincidence that happened to be somebody who was about to blow up a city? Right. Right. But ethically, you just like killing people and here was a person who killed them. Suddenly we feel differently about that even if you actually saved the city from being blown up, because virtue ethics is telling us you have the heart of a murderer, not the heart of somebody who wished in their heart that the trolley problem wasn't there but it was, so they made the hard decision and took a life to save a city. Right.
Gotcha. Right. And obviously any one act could implicate all three of these or in some messy way. And no individual is sitting there going, 'Well, I'm going to do it because of the list of rules, but I'm not going to do it because of my personal virtues, but then I am going to do it because I can think of, you know, it's —'
This is a way of breaking down unbelievably complex events and trying to think through the implications. And often when we find ourselves arguing with something about, you know, a character did something in fiction and we feel strongly about it, often if you dissect their action based on these three criteria, you'll usually find what it is that is making two fans like or dislike this moment. Or if a character does something and you're like, 'That's out of character for that person, but I can't articulate why.' Often if you use this triad to break down — well, usually this person is very deontologically faithful to rules even if they're not concerned about consequences, but suddenly they allowed consequences to over[whelm] and it felt out of character for that reason. Often this triad can help you pick apart exactly what's going on in narrative, because we often construct the tricky situations in narrative around these. Like, you know, Batman doesn't kill, and you'll be in a ridiculous situation where the Joker has made it that if Batman allows one person to die it'll protect three buses full of nuns and orphans, and Batman absolutely won't allow one person to die to save the buses full of nuns and orphans. He will put people in ridiculous amounts of danger to do something extra super to try to save everyone, including the first person, right? Um, and it's actually very striking how consistently in big Hollywood action things, the bad guy will be acting upon consequentialism or utilitarianism and the good guys will be acting strongly on virtue ethics.
And nobody will be following the rules.
Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Nobody — right, the rules.
Right. The good guys will irresponsibly break the rules all the time to do the thing that is ethically good in your heart. The bad guy will break the rules to do the thing that is consequentially going to achieve whatever it is that he thinks is better than the status quo. And neither of them will actually be following rules in a deontological sense. And it's eerie if you could put movie after movie and analyze it on that metric.
Yeah, that's interesting. I'm also thinking of some of my favorite shows, or lots of people's favorites, like Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Sopranos, where there are characters who are doing sort of objectively evil things all the time, yet they have a very precise moral code and you're sort of — you're rolling with it. You're like, within your moral code you are doing the thing you're supposed to be doing.
Yes. Yeah. And I think Better Call Saul is probably almost — it's like a multi-season essay on what are the edges of his moral code and —
Yeah. Yeah, that's really interesting. So, and just to flag what we already said, so we're not saying like if we had a bunch of philosophers here, they'd have slightly different subdivisions than —
They'd all be debating about. If we had a bunch of philosophers here, they would have technically more narrow, specific definitions of what is consequentialism versus utilitarianism versus blah blah blah.
But we're going to pretend we don't care.
But we're going to use these three more generous macro categories.
And we're not going to worry about like reading all this Buddhist stuff. It's all about basically, do I exist? Does the world outside of me exist? What is my mind? Like all that kind of epistemology. We're not going to worry about that for this conversation. All right. So, okay, so let's get to Machiavelli.
Yeah. The reason this is relevant to Machiavelli is that in the European philosophical tradition, deontology and virtue ethics go all the way back, and Plato debates them a lot and Aristotle debates them a lot and everybody has been debating them a lot. And the challenges that co mingle with them are primarily a skepticism, the question of, well, can you know what's right? Can you actually know that there are rules? Maybe it's impossible to know what's right and wrong. That position is also around early. And the next sort of big innovation in ethics after antiquity in Europe — and after this one we'll come, there's one in between —
Is what in the European tradition we call voluntarism, which is credited primarily to William of Ockham —
Yeah, Ockham's razor, the high scholastic, late medieval, high medieval period —
— but is actually articulated slightly before William by Heloise of Abelard —
— and Heloise, and she articulates it in her letters to Abelard. Because what voluntarism is, is the idea that a thing is only good, an action is only moral and good, if it's right by both virtue ethics and deontology. It has to both be good by the rules and you have to intend it for a good reason. And Ockham uses the very clear example of a man goes to church. You would think this is a morally good act if you're living in 11th-century Europe. But says Ockham, what if the man is going to church to show off his expensive clothing to impress people and make others think that he's rich and improve his financial contacts, right? And meet up with people and for motives that are not a heavenly motive. If he's not really thinking pious thoughts, then says Ockham, it's not a good action. So an action must be both good and done for a good reason for it to count as good. And The Good Place has this too, right? The Good Place has the, you know, 'I worked really hard to raise all this money for charity, but I only did it to try to compete with my sister. I didn't really do it to be good,' right? Therefore, it wasn't a morally good act because I was doing it for selfish and competitive reasons, not for generous reasons. So it's not judged to be truly good. And that is —
That's really interesting. Yeah. I was an Edgar Bronfman Youth Fellow in Israel where Edgar Bronfman paid for a bunch of Jewish kids. I think he still does. Well, he's passed, but I think the program still exists. And I remember the rabbi on the trip was talking about how Edgar Bronfman and his brother Charles Bronfman, the heirs of the Seagram fortune, competed to have grander and more praiseworthy charity. But this rabbi's view was great, you know, and in a sense that's Adam Smith and capitalism, right?
And that's the consequentialist view, right? The consequentialist view is a whole lot of good came from this competition. Therefore, we should call it good. We should hope they're even less virtuous, you know, and more —
Let them keep at it. What a great way to compete.
Yeah. And Heloise, in her slightly earlier than Ockham articulation of this, is using it in a specific personal case where she — this is after she and Abelard had an affair. He got outed as having had an affair with her. Her father cuts off his penis very dramatically. Blood is everywhere. This becomes a great scandal all across Paris. He becomes a monk. She becomes a nun. They're separated from each other. He's a monk, she's a nun. They're writing letters and she's writing to him and saying, you know, look, I'm being a nun and I'm doing all the nun stuff and I'm getting up in the morning and I'm praying, you know, before the crack of dawn the way you're supposed to. And I'm wearing all the nun clothes and I'm doing all the nun things and all the other nuns say I'm a great nun because I do all the things. But I'm doing all of it and on my knees, you know, reciting these prayers, thinking about how much I want to have sex with you. And I'm just thinking all day about how much I wish I was having sex with you. And I feel like I'm not a good nun because I'm doing all the things. I'm going through the motions, but my heart is not in it. And Abelard writes back to her and says, 'Just keep it up. Keep practicing. If you practice long enough, you'll sort of outgrow your feelings and the habit of doing the good motions on the outside will eventually make you a good person on the inside.' And this he's getting from Aristotle, because Aristotle talks about what he calls habits of virtue. You know, are you a miser and a greedy person? Then make a habit to carry around $5 bills. And whenever you see a beggar, give them a $5 bill. And if you keep up this habit, eventually you'll become a generous person because you'll practice being generous. And you'll learn the virtue just by rote repetition. This is something Aristotle says works. This is something the monastic tradition takes to heart. And are you not virtuous? Well, practice the thing over and over and it will come to be. And Abelard — I mean, Heloise of the Paraclete says, try this. Heloise says, 'It's not working. I'm still just thinking about how much I want to be having sex with you. I think we need to rethink the whole monastic system and the way ethics works.' And William of Ockham then does so. So voluntarism is an important challenge and question. Does a thing have to pass both bars, right, to be considered good, or is passing one bar and not the other enough? Right.
Right. Right. There's also like a question of can you control your desires with that kind of precision. But let's leave that aside for now.
Yeah. Yeah. But it raises neat questions, right? When we want to judge something by your internal internality —
That gets very, very narrow. And I know we keep postponing Machiavelli, but I've got to give you this great example of how seriously and also how alienly the Middle Ages take this. So when you read Dante and look at other examples of sort of Renaissance and late medieval discussions of who goes to heaven and who goes to hell, right? One thing that modern people often really struggle to figure out is what purgatory is and what limbo is and how they're not the same thing.
I don't think I knew they weren't the same thing.
They're not the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. Because — and I love how the best way to describe this medieval concept is to use physics. The soul, according to medieval people who are getting this from antiquity, has a vector. It has a direction that it's pointed. It's like an eye and it's looking at something. Your soul is focused on a topic. It's focused on what you're thinking about. And your soul at any given time is either focused upward, looking at eternal, beautiful, heavenly things. You're thinking about beauty. You're thinking about love. You're thinking about generosity and kindness. You're thinking about the saints. You're looking at a gorgeous work of art and your soul is elevated. You're thinking about math and your soul is elevated by thinking about, wow, the proportions of a triangle really are eternally unchanging. All I'm ever thinking about — Yeah. You're thinking about kindness. You're thinking about St. Catherine of Alexandria. Whatever it is, you're thinking heavenly thoughts. Your soul is pointed upward. If you're thinking about the fact that you need to do laundry and that you have to pay that credit card thing, but the credit card was shut down because of a fraud thing, so you have to phone the bank again, and you have a thing due for work, and you know there's a leaky drip somewhere in the house and you do have to deal with that eventually but not yet because you have an appointment, or you're worried about, you know, there's a fire that might come to destroy my house, my city is at war and under siege — all these different earthly concerns, whether they are petty or vast earthly concerns — your soul is then pointed downward toward earthly things. And if at the instant you die your soul is pointed upward, that's what means you go to heaven. And if at the instant you die your soul is pointed downwards, that means you go to hell.
Really? Yeah. That is not how — it's not an accumulation of everything you've done. Like you could have murdered 13 people and then —
You could have murdered 13,000 people. But if at the last moment on your deathbed the priest is there talking about God and you're thinking about God — wow. Or your girlfriend is there and her beauty is reminding you via Platonic beauty of celestial heaven. Or you're dying in your deathbed but you're rich enough to have beautiful art on the wall and you're looking at that. You can then go to heaven. And if you lived the best possible life but the moment you're dying you're worried about whether you have to make a phone call to the bank again — down.
And that's not just neutral, that's hell. That's —
Yeah. Yeah. So limbo is where you go if at the moment of death your soul is pointed down, but you were a good person and didn't commit any major sins. And it's the outer section of hell. And it's just like the ancient Greek and Roman afterlife. It's modeled — by Dante and others pick this up after him — on, you know, it's a sort of shady night kind of place and there are gardens and you wander around and it's generally okay. There's no hellfire or demons stabbing you with stuff. You're there, you're just mundanely there and you don't get eternal bliss and you're aware that you didn't get eternal bliss and so you're sad. Wow. In Dante's depiction of this, all of the ancient pagans, you know, Homer is there and Plato is there and cool philosophers are there and Alexander the Great is there and Saladin and virtuous Muslims are there in his version, because another thing that he, via St. Augustine, believes is that if you haven't been baptized it's impossible for your soul to point upward. It can only point downward and the baptism kind of fixes your soul's hinge and lets it be able to point up.
I see. But you can point less downward kind of if you're a better person.
Yeah, exactly. You thought about — you were Plato. You spent your time contemplating stuff, right? If you die and your soul is pointed upward but you did terrible things, then your soul is heavy and it's physically heavy with physical sin and it needs before it can float to be purged of that. So a really useful simile is to think of it as a balloon. When you die, if your balloon is pointed upward, if your balloon is full of helium it can rise. If your balloon isn't full of helium, it's just full of regular air, it's going to sink no matter what. And that's — your soul is pointed downward. You're not a helium balloon. Sorry. You're an air balloon. You just can't rise. You're stuck at the outer sequences of the Earth in limbo forever and ever. If when you died you had helium, nonetheless your soul might be tied to a whole lot of lead weights which keep the balloon from rising until those lead weights are purged off of it. Purgatory is where your soul goes on the way to heaven to be purged of weight. And your soul goes there temporarily and then after all of its sins are purged off it, then goes to heaven. So purgatory is only for souls that are on their way to heaven and will —
That's interesting. I would have thought limbo was better than purgatory, but it sounds like purgatory is better than limbo.
Yeah. Purgatory is the threshold. And the way Dante again describes it, which is useful for thinking this through, is that the souls there are, you know, in fire, but they're in purging fire and they're happy and it feels painful but it feels good. I think a good comparison is, you know, if you've done some really intense exercise and afterward you feel sore, but you know it's good soreness, right? You're on fire, but it's good fire, is how we're supposed to imagine purgatory. So you move through the flames of purgatory and you gradually get to heaven. And this, as far as we can tell, was sort of intuitive to folks. Like how many people today — I would say it's intuitive that we die and worms eat our body and we never —
Think, for example, of the very iconic scene in the middle of Hamlet where Hamlet, young Hamlet, comes upon Claudius and has the chance to kill him. And this play could have a happy ending. He could just kill him right now and everything would be fine. But Claudius is at prayer and Hamlet says, 'You know, he killed my father when my father's soul was unprepared. Shall I then in this moment send his killer to heaven? No. What revenge would that be?'
He doesn't want to kill, right? He doesn't want to kill his uncle while his uncle is at prayer because then his uncle's just going to go to heaven. He wants to wait and do it while he is in his cups, meaning drinking, or while he is gambling, or while he is in his incestuous bed —
Because then he'll be thinking earthly thoughts, and then he'll be much more likely to go to hell. That's why Hamlet doesn't kill Claudius in that —
Oh, that's it. It wasn't out of respect for prayer. It was like —
— that I want you to really —
And it's the same reason that a virtuous person in this period is supposed to, if you're going to murder somebody, say, 'Say your prayers, I'm going to murder you,' to give them the opportunity, right? And all the way through Shakespeare the murderer comes in and is like, 'Your Grace, Duke of Clarence, we're going to kill you now, make your peace with God,' because that's supposed to give people that chance. And one fun detail in Shakespeare is that practically every time a character dies on stage, he makes sure we know whether they're thinking about heaven or hell when they die. And sometimes their last words will be, 'Oh, God, have mercy upon this worthless sinner,' right? And then they die. And you know that that guy's soul went to heaven because the audience is invested in this question.
They really — the audience. It's interesting because I was just watching a comedy, this British Mitchell and Webb had a comedy thing about an actor wanting his last words to be grand and — but it was kind of the absurd, who cares about last words like that? And —
Shakespeare's audience really — sounds like almost everybody in Europe in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance cared. Yeah. And so if a virtuous king's last words are thinking about heaven and a bad king's last words are 'A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse' —
We know where he's not going, right? We know that he's thinking about his earthly kingdom and his earthly problems. So there's a fun meta-game in Shakespeare of tracking who goes up and who goes down. And for really beloved characters like Falstaff, he makes it really suspenseful. And the description of Falstaff's death at the beginning of Henry V is very carefully scripted to leave you at maximum suspense as to whether this character you really love got to go to heaven or not.
Wow. Do we ever find out or no?
Well, his last words are, 'God, God, God' three times. But then the foolish woman who's with him when he's dying says, 'Oh, Sir John, you don't need to think about God yet. You're going to live a long time.' And so if he listened to her, he's lost. If he didn't listen to her, then he's saved, and we the audience have to judge which one it was. It's brilliant.
Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. So, yeah, and I love learning about that very thing of, you know, the beliefs that are just not mundane but just everyday beliefs like we just —
Saturate. Yeah. They saturate. They assume this is the case. Exactly.
And it is funny because you think of — or I think of Shakespeare, I think of Machiavelli through my — like I think of them as like having my views of the world, not —
We have to remember these people live in an alien universe in that they think the universe works differently. Machiavelli's is a little less alien to ours.
But also Shakespeare is writing for his audience and his audience certainly thinks this no matter what he —
No matter what he perceives.
I'll give you the best example and then we'll be right in Machiavelli's own day. If you're being executed, there's a special charity group that people are members of, they volunteer, like being in the volunteer fire brigade or volunteering to help take care of the orphanage, where you volunteer to help stay up all night with people who are about to be executed and walk with them holding their hand all the way to the gallows. And one person holds their hand and gives them encouragement. And the friend walks with them holding a picture of the Virgin Mary in front of their face as they walk up to be hanged. So they're thinking about her and not thinking about the gallows so they have the best chance of getting into heaven.
Wow. Wow. Yeah. There was that awesome Sean Penn movie about a nun who sort of helped — Sean Penn, I forget the name of this movie — who was a condemned man like kind of face his crimes. And I remember it feeling so satisfying. That, yeah, that's really interesting. I'm trying to think how much of this — I mean obviously the —
The vector thing is very alien to us, but are there echoes of these ideas that we, you know —
There definitely are echoes, right? We do worry about what a person was thinking about when they died. Did they die at peace or did they die —
Stressed out? Did they die having gotten the message or did they die not finding out —
That's true. One of my best friends died too young of cancer and his last month was like beautiful. He was really at peace. He was really serene. And but I wasn't there for the last 12 hours and my friend who was said he got really anxious and restless. And I have wondered like, does — I mean I hate to even put it this way, but how do I make sense — like did that kind of ruin it, did that not ruin it? I've even thought, yeah.
Right, somehow that those hours being troubled matters more than any other hours being troubled.
Right. That if he was troubled for the same number of hours three years earlier, that doesn't linger the same way, right? We worry about —
The calmness or the state or the sense of closure or completion.
Yeah. That that comes in those last moments.
And whether one thinks there is or isn't an afterlife, nonetheless, one is very concerned with the last hour and the last day.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't believe — I'm pretty sure he didn't believe in an afterlife. I don't. But yet this was quite intense. Yeah.
