Orbits

I was in Philadelphia recently and saw a couple of remarkable things. A philosophical juxtaposition between them occurred to me.

The first was an exhibit at the Franklin Institute, a science museum, on Galileo. It was a traveling exhibit that included artifacts from museums in Italy, artifacts contemporary with Galileo. These included books about mathematics and astronomy, paintings, and scientific instruments. The instruments were made in a time when practical items were made to be beautiful as well as functional, so there was a lot of engraving and gilding to be seen. The premiere artifact, however, was Galileo’s telescope.  It is one of two attributed to him, a copper tube about four feet long, covered in paper and capped on either end with painstakingly hand ground lenses. It is with this instrument that he observed the heavens and exploded the earth-centered theory of the universe.

Before Galileo the dominant theory of the heavens places the earth at the center, motionless, with the sun, planets, and the fixed, crystalline sphere of stars rotating around it. It was called the Ptolemaic system, after the astronomer Ptolemy. There was a problem with this system in its primitive state, however, aside from being patently wrong. It didn’t explain what people observed. Because of the different orbital diameters and speeds of the various planets around the sun, other planets appeared to stop in their tracks, go backwards for a time, then reverse again and go forward. This is known as retrograde motion. Ptolemy worked up a complex system of cycles and epicycles to account for this, and managed to cob together a theory that described the actual motions. Imagine walking in a large circle (the cycle) while whirling a ball on a string (the planet) in a small circle (the epicycle) over your head.

Galileo supported the Copernican, or heliocentric (sun-centered) system. When I write that Galileo exploded the earth-centered system, I mean that there was a loud noise and a stink. We have all read in school about how the church came down on him and forced his public recantation. His crime was one of heresy, contradicting church dogma of an immobile earth. It was a symbolic heresy as well. The power structures of the time were all central and hierarchical, with one man at the pivot. All people orbited the central figure, whether pope or monarch, and theology justified this unequal relationship.

This brings me to the second extraordinary thing I saw in Philadelphia. I visited the old section of the city and toured Congress Hall, where our legislators met from 1790 to 1800. On March 4, 1797, it hosted an epochal event – the inauguration of John Adams, the second president of the United States. It was an unprecedented transfer of power. Prior to that date, all major transfers of political power had involved blood. This blood was either literal, in cases of military force and assassination, or figurative, in the case of inheritance.

The inauguration was, as with Galileo, the explosion of a theory. In this case it was a literal expression of Galileo’s figurative heresy. Political power no longer revolved around one man, fixed at the center of lesser beings. The government of a country had become relativistic rather than absolute. However imperfect the new political structure, it didn’t need a complex and arbitrary theory to justify it.

One thing that concerns me about the evolution of our country is the continued focus on that man at the center. I have noticed a tendency in all political institutions to mimic the family. With small groups, committees and the like, I often notice someone trying to make the group into a version of his or her particular dysfunctional family. In the case of our nation, I notice people looking for a father figure, focusing on an individual personality rather than the relationship between the office and the people. People wish that we could get someone out of office or someone else in. That is Ptolemaic thinking. We should be thinking about the process by which an office holder such as the president gets into the position and our relationship with the office once he (so far) gets there. It is that process and relationship that determines the personality and capability of the person in office. The peaceful transfer of power between Washington and Adams was not dependent upon the personality of either man, but the political structure that surrounded them.

Political structure is less interesting to most people than personality and personal narrative, but it is infinitely more important. We have been granted a respite from the worst excesses of the Bush era with the inauguration of Barack Obama, but the president is still beholden to the financial powers that bankrolled his campaign and the campaigns of members of Congress. His presence in office is partially due to the structure of election laws across the country, which favor the partisan over the independent, the established over the new, and those with wealthy friends over those with many friends. We need to be Galilean in our thinking, and focus our efforts on those structures.