1. The Context
Bob Avakian’s In Light of the Urgency Spoken to in “Something Terrible, Or Something Truly Emancipating” A RENEWED CHALLENGE: SEARCHING FOR AN HONEST LIBERAL OR PROGRESSIVE takes us back 2,500 years to the time of the Greeks, and of the philosopher Diogenes. As Bob Avakian (BA) puts it:
There is the story about how, in ancient Greece, a philosopher named Diogenes wandered over a wide territory, with a lantern to light his way, searching for one honest man. Today, I am searching for an honest liberal or progressive.
A painting depicting ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes, who is said to have wandered over a wide territory in search for one honest man.
The renewed challenge: an invitation by BA to READ and seriously confront the reality of the world, including as captured in the works of BA… then “try to...make the case that this is a great country and great system, and see if you can explain why this system should be preserved, in any form. Or, failing that, acknowledge that it is true that we need an actual revolution to overthrow this whole system, and bring a radically different and much better system and world into being.”1
Journeying back from 2,500 years ago to today’s urgent situation for humanity, inspired by Bob Avakian's challenge at this historic moment, I stopped off at 500 years ago, during the time of Galileo Galilei, a scientist who lived in the 1500s, and was “a brilliant theorist, a master experimentalist, a meticulous observer and a skilled inventor."2 Many have heard of Galileo, he and the times he lived in ushered in the era of modern science.
I was struck by the realities of that time in history—including similarities among the “liberals and progressives” of that time (especially scholars, academics and scientists), specifically with regard to earth-changing scientific breakthroughs.
Until this historical moment, for fifteen hundred years, the increasingly complex Earth-centered model of the universe forged by Ptolemy, a Greek mathematician and astronomer, held sway. This model became increasingly convoluted to be consistent with actual astronomical observations of the planets’ motions. Geocentrism—the earth as the center of the universe (“geo,” referring to the Earth)—was part of the Catholic scripture, and Biblical dogma. Aristotle, who came 500 years before Ptolemy, was a pioneering scientist and philosopher. Aristotle’s theories, including his geo-centric theory of the universe, shaped—better yet, dominated—“natural philosophy” (the physical science of nature before modern science) from the 3rd century BC until…the period around Galileo and his telescope.3
Ptolemy’s model became increasingly convoluted to remain consistent with astronomical observations of the planets’ motions.
Galileo developed a telescope that was able to achieve significant magnification (60 times). The photo shows one of the actual telescopes that Galileo constructed and used.
Galileo with telescope
Galileo’s telescope was able to achieve significant magnification (60 times the size)—a never-before, one-of-a-kind technological breakthrough. Galileo peered into space with his new telescope and the first significant thing he saw was that the moon was “full of vast protuberances, deep chasms and sinuosities.” This contradicted the Ptolemaic framework, which was the moon, and all the planets, were flawless spheres (“as perfectly smooth and as polished as a gemstone”). Then Galileo observed blotches and blemishes on the sun—sunspots (as we know of them now, cooler patches on the Sun’s surface). These imperfections in the “heavenly bodies” challenged the Bible’s dogma and ancient theory.
Observations made by Galileo with his telescope of the moon and planets contradicted the established (and incorrect) framework that had dominated for centuries. This watercolor drawing by Galileo shows the moon with its different phases.
Galileo was not alone in this. In the 1500s, Nicholas Copernicus, who was born in what is today Poland, spent 30 years carrying out astronomical research, studying the motion of the planets, and forged a sun-centered (or heliocentric, helio referring to the sun) model of the cosmos, an extraordinarily revolutionary model for its time, even as it was not experimentally confirmed through observations.
Galileo was on the verge of even greater discoveries with his telescope: next, Galileo saw four stars loitering around Jupiter—yet a closer look through the telescope revealed these weren’t stars at all, but moons—Jovian moons. Nobody in history had ever seen a moon other than our own moon. This was incontrovertible evidence that not everything orbited around the Earth as the center of the universe! Then Galileo confirmed one of Copernicus’s heliocentric-related predictions, that (Mercury and) Venus should exhibit a series of phases (e.g., full, half, and crescent Venus). In 1610, Galileo became the first person to witness and chart the phases of Venus.
Observation made by Galileo through the telescope revealed four moons near Jupiter. Their movement around Jupiter was incontrovertible evidence that not everything orbited around the Earth as the center of the universe! Since Galileo’s time, scientists have discovered many more moons around Jupiter—the current number is 79. Photo: NASA
2. A Stubborn Refusal to Confront Reality — “The Liberals and the Progressives”
These scientific discoveries should have led the intellectuals and astronomers of Galileo’s time to switch models, and take up helio-centrism. The model of a universe revolving around a static Earth was wrong—give it up!4 But it was not to be, at least during that time.
Galileo’s discoveries contradicted the Bible, and the Catholic Church was unwilling to change from the doctrine that the Earth was fixed at the center of the universe. And, not only that. The Holy Inquisition5 put Galileo on trial!
Galileo’s discoveries contradicted the Bible's statement, and the belief of most scientists of that time, that the Earth was at the center of the universe. The Catholic Church was unwilling to change its position. The Holy Inquisition—a Catholic Church institution that persecuted "heretics," including torturing and executing them—put Galileo on trial. Credit: Cristiano Banti
As the Bible says, “God fixed earth upon its foundation, not to be moved forever.” Here is quite a wild gem from that time from the Catholic Church: “To assert that the Earth revolves around the Sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin” (Cardinal Bellarmine). In 1616, the Inquisition found Galileo guilty, forcing him to recant, and sent him into isolation. Then in 1633, the Inquisition again tried him and found him "gravely suspect of heresy," sentencing him to indefinite imprisonment. Galileo was kept under house arrest until his death in 1642. Heliocentric books were banned and Galileo was ordered to refrain from holding, teaching, or defending heliocentric ideas.
If the problem was simply the dogma of the Bible, the Catholic Church threatening Galileo with “the instruments of torture,” and Galileo recanting in the face of that torture, that would be one thing. In fact, most of the scientists and intellectuals of Galileo’s time refused to confront reality.6 Instead they clung to the geocentric model, which was more comfortable, including because some had careers rooted intellectually in Aristotle’s teachings (e.g., at the universities). Galileo’s discovery would have made their jobs and positions untenable given their entire intellectual framework was now proved to be based on a fallacy.
Their arguments to counter Galileo? Simply put, if Galileo was so correct, and if it’s supposedly true as Galileo says, that he’s proven Copernicus’s idea that the earth does not rest motionless at the center of the universe with everything else revolving around it… if that were true… we’d feel it! Sound familiar! Galileo refuted this with “a brilliantly clear ‘thought experiment.’”7
This takes us near to the heart of this observation: many liberals, progressives, intellectuals, and scientists of Galileo’s time REFUSED to look through Galileo’s telescope! Pope Urban VIII declined to look through the telescope and forced Galileo to recant his claims, but it was not only the Pope who refused!
Well, one did take a peek through the telescope—a friend, colleague, and rival of Galileo’s, a professor of Aristotelian philosophy at the University, who is known to have explained after the experience of looking through one of the most powerful of scientific tools of that time: “I do not wish to approve of claims about which I do not have any knowledge, and about things which I have not seen… and then to observe through those glasses gives me a headache. Enough! I do not want to hear anything more about this." Obviously, this is an excuse to avoid seeing the evidence that would challenge his world-view.8
Most of the scientists and intellectuals of Galileo’s time refused to confront the scientific realities that Galileo discovered, refusing to even look through his telescope.
Yet others simply refused to look through the telescope, and some came up with the most outrageous arguments. Upon hearing of Galileo’s telescope revealing Jupiter’s moons, astronomer Francesco Sizi countered Galileo with this: “The moons are invisible to the naked eye and therefore can have no influence on the Earth and therefore would be useless and therefore do not exist.” The philosopher Giulio Libri, a contemporary of Galileo’s, simply put his foot down and refused to look through the telescope as a point of principle. When Libri died, Galileo suggested that Libri might at last see the sunspots, the moons of Jupiter, and the phases of Venus on his way to heaven.
Galileo wrote this to Johannes Kepler, the German astronomer and mathematician, who was eventually instrumental in establishing the orbital paths of the planets around the Sun, through tremendous hard work and meticulous scientific observations: “My dear Kepler, I wish that we might laugh at the remarkable stupidity of the common herd. What do you have to say about the principal philosophers of this academy who are filled with the stubbornness of an asp and do not want to look at either the planets, the moon, or the telescope, even though I have freely and deliberately offered them the opportunity a thousand times? Truly, just as the asp stops its ears, so do these philosophers shut their eyes to the light of truth.”9
3. The Moment Now — and the Challenge
Which brings us to this “rare time and circumstance” when revolution becomes possible, even in a powerful country like the U.S…. and to Bob Avakian’s “renewed challenge.” Bob Avakian (BA), in his new talk “Something Terrible, Or Something Truly Emancipating,” is offering to “the liberals and progressives”—actually offering EVERYBODY—the telescope he’s built.
And this is even more true of Bob Avakian’s “body of work” overall, which is freely and widely available—of why a revolution is necessary and possible, and the concrete vision of a radically different society as concentrated in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic of North America, authored by BA. This is a tremendously positive and game-changing factor for the emancipation of all of humanity, no less radical and revolutionary than putting the Sun at the center of what we now know as the solar system in the 16th century, replacing thousands of years of a geo-centric “universe.”
At this moment, Bob Avakian has brought forth a scientific analysis of the historic conjuncture the earth and its people finds itself in and reveals the possibility of a better future for humanity and for the planet—through revolution, an ACTUAL revolution that overthrows this system of capitalism-imperialism. His scientific analysis not only of why a revolution is necessary, but “The reality is that such a revolution can succeed, but this is possible, particularly up against powerful ruling forces, like in this country, only in rare times and circumstances. And here is a very important truth: This is one of those rare times and circumstances.”
BA digs into the fundamental question: What are the necessary conditions for a revolution? He then pulls out his microscope and speaks more fully to what needs to be done… BA speaks truth bluntly, which is “bound to offend some people,” because the stakes in all this are so high—with an understanding that the masses can “make a profound break” with “ways of thinking and acting which serve to perpetuate their own oppression and degradation, and that of others as well.” In this context, and as part of this:
Do you dare look through Avakian’s telescope?
Or will you be like the scholars of Galileo’s time and refuse to even look through the telescope, because they ”knew” what Galileo said he had seen could not be true?
The road to a better world is not, and will not be, an easy one—this cannot be accomplished without determined struggle and, yes, great sacrifice. But continuing on the current course, under the domination of this system of capitalism-imperialism, means a continuation of the horrors already being perpetrated in the world today, the far worse horrors that are immediately threatening, and the very real existential danger that is increasingly looming. — Bob Avakian, “A New Year, The Urgent Need For A Radically New World—For The Emancipation Of All Humanity,” January 2021.
Four Centuries Later—Catholic Fascists Defend Burning Cosmologist Giordano Bruno at the Stake
Giordano Bruno Wiki Commons
“… [T]he Catholic Church didn’t kill him. Bruno chose suicide-by-the-state rather than being humble enough to keep his vows as a Dominican priest”—so ends the National Catholic Register’s publishing of an article in 2020 by Catholic journalist Angelo Stagnaro, defending Giodarno Bruno’s seven-year trial by the Holy Roman Inquisition, which found Bruno guilty and then burned him at the stake in Rome's Campo de' Fiori in 1600.10
Stagnaro, one of those modern-day Catholic fascist lunatics, dressed up as “reasonable” people and even people accepting of astronomical science and its breakthroughs, writes in this article 420 years after the fact (in 2020) that Bruno wasn’t burned at the stake for his support for Copernican heliocentric cosmology but for his “theological errors, among which were his belief that Christ wasn’t God”—which, to be clear, with regard to murdering him for this reason, is perfectly fine and legitimate, according to this author and the National Catholic Register (a prominent national Catholic newspaper).
This article came out right about the time of the new Cosmos TV series, hosted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. There is an extended tribute to the 16th-century Italian philosopher and theologian Giordano Bruno in the first episode of this science series. Bruno is put forward as “a martyr in the cause of modern astronomy,” even though there is significant debate in scientific circles about Bruno, most if not all acknowledging his brilliance, but some criticizing his cosmological approach, offering it wasn’t mainly physical but theological (religious, or “about God.”)
Well, it’s one thing to debate Bruno, but it’s another to uphold, defend and celebrate (yes celebrate!) burning him at the stake, whether for his cosmological views or his running afoul of the Catholic doctrine, or both. In addition to the oh-so-rational writer Stagnaro, while the Vatican has published few official statements about Bruno's trial and execution, in 1942, Cardinal Giovanni Mercati, who discovered a number of lost documents relating to Bruno's trial, stated that the Church was PERFECTLY JUSTIFIED in condemning him. On the 400th anniversary of Bruno's death, in 2000, Cardinal Angelo Sodano declared Bruno's death to be “a ‘sad episode’ but, despite his regret, he defended Bruno's prosecutors, maintaining that the Inquisitors ‘had the desire to serve freedom and promote the common good and did everything possible to save his life.'”11 Also in 2000, Pope John Paul II made a general apology for "the use of violence that some have committed in the service of truth."