The Modern Anglo-Dutch Empire

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Chapter 5 – Empiricism against the Renaissance
“What has philosophy to do with measuring. It’s the mathematicians you’ve got to trust;
they are the surveyors of empty air the way I can survey the field and tell you how long it
is.”
Le Opere di Galileo Galilei (The Works of Galileo Galilei)
This chapter brings us back to the fundamental issue raised at the beginning of this work: the
nature of man and his role in the universe. Venice's break with the Holy Alliance was not simply
political; it was a realization by Sarpi and his associates that feudalism and backwardness could no
longer be imposed by brute force and superstition. The Renaissance idea of the commonwealth,
Cusa's revolution in science, and the economic progress they both engendered, could no longer be
contained either by Venice's purely geopolitical maneuvering, nor by the belief structures of the middle
ages. These beliefs were, in fact, inevitably doomed. The work of Cusa, leading a century later into
the discoveries of Johannes Kepler, annihilated the entire medieval Aristotelean philosophy.
Sarpi knew that there was no saving the old mechanisms of social control. In order to preserve
oligarchical rule he formulated a threefold strategy: 1) Develop a new science of radical materialism,
known as empiricism, and demand that all scientific investigation utilize this empirical method; 2) Use
the “discoveries” of this new empirical science, to falsely claim for himself and his associates the
laurels for overturning the dictatorship of Aristoteleanism (this is where the “Galileo Project” fits in); 3)
Utilizing sympathetic networks and individuals, to spread this new empirical science from one corner
of Europe to another, until it was hegemonic everywhere.
Lyndon LaRouche has defined the empirical method of Sarpi as follows:
●
“First, the empiricist assumes that no experimentally verifiable knowledge exists outside
the bounds of simple sense­certainty.
●
“Secondly, therefore, every cause­effect relationship which can not be located explicitly in a
sense­observed agency, is related to a domain of such forms of attributed bias in statistical
behavior of observable events, or to some anonymous agency to which neither sensecertainty
nor cognitive reason provides access.
●
“Thirdly, the second element leaves available a niche for creating the illusion of the
existence of purely magical spiritual powers, operating entirely outside the reach of access
by sense­certainty, but able to make arbitrary interventions, even capriciously, into the
domain of sense­certainty.” 25
Essentially what Sarpi did was to say, “Since scientific progress can no longer be stopped, I will
determine the method of all scientific investigation. I will determine, not merely what people think
about the physical universe, but how they think, and I will ensure that individual human creativity,
and the method of lawful hypothesis, is banned from all scientific investigation.”
In Sarpi's world, there is no hypothesis, there is no creativity, and there is no discovery. Only
“observation” and calculation of linear data exists. The 21 st century name for this is information
theory, and in a world governed by this theory, no human identity is possible. Machines and
computers may exist, but the ability to make actual discoveries of principle has been outlawed. If this
25 Laputa's President Bush, by Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr., Executive Intelligence Review, Vol. 29, No. 18, May 10, 2002