The One Piece of Art that Most Defines the Renaissance

Much of Renaissance art is priceless. If you could own a work by Michelangelo or Botticelli or Raphael you would not only have sublime art to gaze on but could - any time you wanted - sell it for more money than you could hope to spend in a lifetime. And rightfully so. It's not just amazing art. As cliche as it sounds, Renaissance art changed how we looked at the world.

And on that note, I think Peter Bruegel's Landscape With The Fall of Icarus from 1555 best depicts the change from focusing on the supernatural to the natural. It shows how the Renaissance changed how we in the west looked at - and saw - the world.

The most obvious thing here is the farmer plowing the land. He's at work. Just behind him is a ship likely laden with goods from or to another land. A shepherd over the shoulder of the farmer is contemplating the sky, perhaps daydreaming or perhaps looking for signs that would help him to forecast the weather. Oh, and in the water before the ship is Icarus who flew too close to the sun.

Icarus's story is amazing. He flew to freedom with wings his father had constructed of feathers and wax. His father warned him not to fly too close to the sun lest the wax melt and the wings be unable to keep him aloft. Of course Icarus was unable to resist the exhilaration of flying high and, indeed, his wings failed him, causing him to fall out of the sky into the sea to his death. Not only are a host of themes bound up in this story of Icarus (among other things he's a lesson in hubris) but the idea of freedom through flight is sort of amazing. Especially to ancient Greeks and even 16th century Dutch.

But what Bruegel does with this incredible story is relegate it to a corner of the painting. Myth has given way to business. The farmer could not be less impressed with Icarus's foolishness.

We can hardly imagine how completely the promise of heaven or threat of hell defined medieval life. For most Europeans from the fall of Rome until the discovery of the new worlds (about a 1,000 years, from roughly 476 to 1492) business concerns like plowing a field were a distant second to religious concerns. By the time of this painting, in more developed places like the Netherlands and Northern Italy, this had begun to shift. And Bruegel's painting rather brilliantly captures this. A great deal of how we look at the world is defined by where we look. By Bruegel's time in the mid-16th century (Columbus had "discovered" the "new" world and Magellan's crew were the first to circle the whole world), people realized that the natural world was full of the unknown, full of promise, full of riches. It deserved our full attention. At least during harvest or planting.

A Terrible Mind is a Thing to Lose - Bachmann Disapproves of the Renaissance

Here's a curious conspiracy theory for you.

What if the people behind Michele Bachmann's campaign were merely trying to bring in a candidate who would make Sarah Palin look informed by comparison? And what if even they never dreamed that Bachmann might be a front-runner?

As it turns out, Bachmann does not just believe that constitutional amendments should not be forced onto the states. She thinks that the Renaissance represents a wrong turn in the history of the West. Read this if you're prepared for some mind boggling. An excerpt:

Tea party queen and Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann is convinced that America is sinking into tyranny. Why? In a remarkable profile of the candidate appearing in the Aug. 15 issue of the New Yorker magazine, the artistic flowering of the Italian Renaissance takes a beating for having done away with the god-fearing Dark Ages.

It would be hard to condense more ignorance into one thought than to doubt that the Renaissance was a great thing. During medieval times lives and people were short and brutish, even priests often could not afford Bibles to read, witches and heretics (essentially anyone who suspected of thinking independently) were burnt at the stake, and even a serf's right to take his bride's virginity might be challenged by the lord who ruled the land to which he was bound. The Dark Ages were unrelentingly wretched and it was the Renaissance and its package of trade, exploration, reliance on the empirical, spread of books, and emergence of law and order in the form of the nation-state that changed this.

I wonder if anyone has asked Bachmann what her position is on reviving witch trials.

And the Cow Flew Over the Moon - Newton Counters Centrifugal Force

The leading Renaissance thinkers were willing to adapt their minds to the facts but weren’t sure how to fully explain them. Although it took decades for most scientists to accept Copernicus’s revolutionary claims, those scientists were not stupid. In addition to scripture and their own senses – it was obvious even to the casual observer that the sun rose and the earth was stationary – they had a fairly reasonable, scientific objection. Copernicus could accept facts as he observed them, but didn’t really have a cogent explanation of why the solar system worked as it did.

Imagine this conversation.

Copernicus’s debate opponent says, “So, Nicoli, let me grant you your silly premise for a moment. Let’s assume that we do, indeed, circle the sun. You claim that we’re spinning through space and traveling at thousands of miles per hour. Okay. What about centrifugal force? Spin a rock at the end of a string and see how many seconds it takes the ant on that rock to fly into space. Why doesn’t this happen to us? Why don’t cows slip out of the grip of milk maids and fly over the moon?”

“I don’t know,” says our hero Copernicus. “I just know what the data suggests. We are orbiting around the sun. I can’t explain it. I just know it is so.”

“So,” continues his opponent, “you have no explanation? You make no attempt to account for the simple fact of centrifugal force? You just want us to believe something that even you don’t understand?”

“Yes.”

Not much of a debate. On the one hand we have ants without opposable thumbs obviously unable to keep their grip on a rock in orbit, a phenomenon that would suggest that we should be observing panicked cows floating off into space if Copernicus was right. And on the other hand we have someone arguing that the data on the movement of planets fits better if we assume that it is the sun and the not the earth that is stationary, if we assume that we’re hurtling through space at about a thousand miles an hour. Preposterous.

It took an Enlightenment thinker – the Enlightenment thinker – to explain why. Isaac Newton solved two problems with one universal law. It is tempting to think – reasonable to suspect – that the explanation for our circling the sun would be different from the explanation of why it is not impossible to find our car in the morning, uncertain as to where it has spun off through centrifugal force. Newton sees a falling apple and realizes that it is pulled by the same force as the earth. Gravity is the universal force that explains why cows don’t fly and the earth does. Newton added laws – a theory – to observations and facts.

Newton gave the lovers of facts a set of laws that made sense of their facts.

Renaissance Popes (Helping the Protestant Cause)

Bad popes and CEOs, while possibly not a sign of the apocalypse, are a sign that an institution has gone rogue. When the church is about the glorification of the pope, or the corporation is about enriching the CEO, it is an institution in bad need of reform or reinvention. It is hard to imagine three popes who could do more to dissuade Europeans of respect for medieval authority than the 3 Renaissance popes.

Think of the fun Fox and MSNBC would have reporting on these popes. A pope with sword on hip, swearing at his soldiers to urge them on in military campaigns? Another pope who, when a cardinal, was rebuked for hosting orgies?

Alexander rather fittingly took his name from the conqueror Alexander the Great rather than some milquetoast saint. Pope Alexander purchased the papacy in 1492. As Columbus was discovering a new world, Alexander was bribing fellow cardinals for their vote, an investment that he and his children would recoup.

Where a modern CEO might think it fun to throw multi-million dollar parties for a child, Alexander’s gifts were more creative. He bought his children lavish wedding parties, private bull fights, political positions and even armies with which to conquer new territory. Alexander had at least 7 known illegitimate children, a natural enough product from a man who seemed so at ease with sex. As pope, he once hosted a party that included a contest matching his guests with prostitutes and then dispensing gifts to the guests who demonstrated the most impressive feats of virility.

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Social Invention & the Fourth Economy

1. Social Invention & Progress

In the earliest grades, children learn that technological inventions fuel progress. Things like the wheel, the iron plow, the automobile, and computer obviously made ours a different world.

Less obviously, social inventions are essential to progress. Tribes, city-states, nation-states, and international organizations have made it possible for larger groups of increasingly specialized people to cooperate to create a new world. Like microwave ovens, churches, governments, banks, and corporations have also made ours a different world from the one in which our ancestors lived.

We're about to enter a new economy, one in which the act of social invention (a broader application of the notion of entrepreneurship) will become as normal as the introduction of new products. At first, this will seem disorientating, but our grandkids will think it is normal. It will be a period of unprecedented prosperity and individual freedom.

2. Waves of Social Invention

Social invention often looks like revolution. When innovators change how people worship, or challenge the king’s authority, innovation will probably be violent. Indeed, the acceptance of change without violent resistance is a fairly novel experience in humanity’s history, and a big reason that the pace of progress is accelerating.

Social invention can occur in a wide variety of domains, from Macarena dance moves to currency arbitrage. Some of this innovation is random and in some of it one can discern a pattern.

Between about 1300 to 1700, a wave of social and technological inventions produced the first economy. As land, or natural resources, was the basis of wealth in this economy, one can simply refer to this as an agricultural economy. Technological inventions like the seed drill and steel plow enabled farmers to produce more and new technology like the compass made it possible for anyone to sell their products more widely, capturing a higher price as trade emerged across even oceans. Meanwhile, social inventions like Martin Luther’s challenge to the papacy and Henry VIII’s making himself the head of the Church of England were key to the eclipse of the nation-state over the church. This maelstrom of innovation produced an agricultural economy, the first market economy in lieu of a traditional economy.

Once natural resources were being traded widely (think of Italy without the tomato, Ireland without the potato, and England without tea and you begin to get a sense of how transformed Europe was by the flow of new products across oceans), the next step in creating value was processing. Wood and wool has less value than lumber and textiles. Processing natural resources into finished products was the work of the industrial revolution. This, too, required a panoply of technological and social inventions. Democracy did for the nation-state what the Reformation did for the church – dispersing power in the dominant institution outwards to a wider group.

In the last century, the most advanced countries have hosted the latest wave of technological and social inventions, culminating in the information economy. Technology like the computer and telephone, coupled with innovations like the modern corporation and university have produced the most advanced economy yet.

3. Social Evolution is Not Done Yet

But this most recent economy will not be the last. The pattern of invention and revolution since about 1300 suggests that we are on the cusp of one more wave of innovation. One more economy, one more society, has yet to emerge. As with every new economy before it, this one will transform our philosophy, our dominant institution, the social order, and the individual. And unlike the emergence of the first economy that took place over a period of hundreds of years, this one will emerge in about half a century.

Read the rest of the posting here at The Next Transformation.

Nardelli at Home Depot (HD): One Third of a Billion in Pay for Losing $1 Billion a Year

Home Depot's (HD) CEO Nardelli left the company today. One of the big reasons? Stockholders thought his pay (about $124 million in six years) was too high given the performance of HD stock, which dropped about 5.6% under his tenure. Given Home Depot's market capitalization, he lost about $1 billion a year. His severance pay, triggered by his high pay, is $210 million. So, he gets total pay of about one third of a billion dollars for destroying about $5 billion in stock value. Amazing. I have no doub that Nardelli has above average ability in terms of negotiation and his mastery of the alpha male dynamics. What I (and most everyone probably) doubts is his ability to actually create wealth.

The CEO is the last of the monarchs. Whatever your beef with George W. Bush (and readers of this blog know I have plenty), he puts up with plenty of criticism from his own citizenry and press. By contrast, CEOs get almost no criticism from within their own companies. To speak out against a CEO in the same way that, say, Paul Krugman speaks out against George Bush would ensure a loss of citizenship, I mean employment.

The corporation has risen to great power. I would argue that it is today's dominant institution. But the power structure within the corporation is dated, echoing the power structure of medieval popes or Renaissance kings.

One of the biggest problems with the modern corporation is that it is now owned by the likes of me and you. Peter Drucker seemed to have been the lone voice pointing out that a silent revolution had taken place in recent decades: suddenly the biggest owners of stocks were common employees who held equity through mutual and retirement funds. Yet even though we own these stocks, we don't have a mechanism for influencing policy. CEOs still have disproportionate power over corporate policy.

If a CEO actually influences stock price enough to justify pay of a third of a billion in five years, he is simply exercising too much power, playing the autocrat far too much. A Renaissance king was easily the richest man in the kingdom. Today's presidents are rarely in the list of the top one hundred wealthiest. We'll know that the corporation has adopted a more sensible power structure when the top paid employees within a corporation are only rarely, rather than inevitably, the CEO. It's time for corporate revolution.