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The NPR blog 13.7 is populated by a lot of academics from a wide range of disciplines. The most recent entry was by Marcelo Gleiser, professor of Philosophy and Physics at Dartmouth, on similarities in Stevie Wonder's lyrics and Lucretius.
What do Stevie Wonder and Lucretius, the Roman poet who wrote "The Nature of the Universe," have in common? As it turns out, more than you'd think. While jogging yesterday, I listened to Stevie Wonder's "Superstition." Even though I heard this song countless times, yesterday the chorus really stood out:
When you believe in things
That you don't understand,
Then you suffer,
Superstition ain't the way.
Here is what Lucretius had to say about the same topic, over 2,000 years ago:
Which mortals gaze upon (O anxious oft In quaking thoughts!), and which abase their minds With dread of deities and press them crushed Down to the earth, because their ignorance Of cosmic causes forces them to yield All things unto the empery of gods And to concede the kingly rule to them.
Lucretius's agenda was to propose a new way of thinking about the world, based on the atomistic philosophy of the pre-socratics Leucippus and Democritus. "Think," Lucretius might have said, "try to find explanations about Nature within Nature, don't attach them blindly to some supernatural cause." Stevie Wonder's song is trying to say the same thing, admittedly in a much groovier way.
Well, science did come along, and Nature's workings became more transparent.
Read more.
This stuff abounds in our world (am I the only one to draw serious comparisons between Catullus and Kanye West's song Bittersweet? What do you think:
Bittersweet, you're going to be the death of me. I don't want you but I need you. I love you and hate you at the very same time.
The rest of the lyrics, available here and which include some expletives, are just as reflective of many of Catullus' poems), and it's just more of a reminder of the universality of much of the content from classical antiquity. Of course, you're never going to be able to whip out some Catullus and Kanye (or even Lucretius and Stevie) and use it to impress a school board or Dean about the necessity of Classics. However, it is an example of the depth of what would be lost if we had to rediscover much of this on our own.
Human technology may advance at a rapid rate and change how we live our lives, but it does little to change the very fabric of humanity. And despite some may think, there's so much about ourselves that we don't know that we gain by being humanists.
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