More Renaissance: humility & arrogance

So continuing with the Renaissance riff from the former post, what struck me when studying people like Vesalius was their interesting mix of arrogance and humilty.

They had a certain arrogance towards Church authority. They were not going to take dogma about the natural world (much of it cobbled together from Scripture & Aristotle) as the last world on the matter. The Church exacted a heavy wage for the sin of heresy so they might position their research as going back to the spirit of the Ancients but they still needed guts to do what they did.

Meanwhile, they had a humility before the empirical world. They observed & experimented obsessively. They built machines & measured. They drew on learning from Greece, Rome, the Arab world. Their world was increasingly globalised and connected - with new technologies introduced, new forms of trade & exchange emerging.

In many situations, we privilege organisational dogma over our observation (both qualitative & quantitative) of the world around us. We must turn this upside-down. Like those in the Renaissance, we will have to draw on the diverse aspects of a globalised world and we may also have to disguise our heresies to allow acceptance.