Hitchens seems to prefer another Paine quip to the same effect—that the idea of hereditary legislators is as absurd as the idea of hereditary mathematicians—but Paine most likely didn’t coin this one himself, since Franklin used it to describe the House of Lords in his Journal of Negotiations in London, written while aboard ship to America in March 1775. On equality and the hereditary principle, Franklin, Paine, and Hitchens are three peas in a pod.
Damn. I almost picked up this Hitchens biography of Paine during a layover at San Fran international. Instead, and without regret, I purchased Tolstoy's, "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" and drank some Sierra Nevada Pale Ale with a soldier just returned from serving a year in S. Korea. Nice kid. I bought him a round to celebrate the homecoming. I'll have to get Hitchens bit on Paine, though. Check out the diest polemic against Christians, Jews and Muslims in "The Age of Reason" by Paine if you haven't already.
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4 comments:
The idea of a "hereditary mathematician" is not so crazy: there's dozens, if not hundreds of significant examples. The Bernoullis and the Cartans of course come to mind. Then again, you have him.
Hereditary in the sense of Nobility -- or what Paine called No-Ability.
If I understand it right, Bernoullis and the Cartans were a family of mathematicians. With that said, they were good mathematicians not because they were of the "same blood." Rather, they were good because they applied themselves and figured things out using the rationale that seems to be out of style these days (or maybe I'm being too cynical).
So the idea of hereditary mathematician is only crazy if it implies that mathematical formula can somehow be passed along through blood-lines (which, so far as I know, it can't). Instead, it's passed along familial lines because the father or mother teaches the son or daughter the ways of math.
Paine was merely aiming this barb at the imbred Nobility of Europe, and the claim of Divine Right to Rule. Fuck the Nobles (in the literal sense, that would stabilize their gene pool) and Divine Right. Yankee know-how will trump that shit any day of the week.
...and we ought to seriously consider term limits not just for the CIC, but also for Federal Senators and Representatives.
fun pic, AI, but the guy is supposed to be good... of course no offspring from that velocipedeian union...
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