Inferno Decoded

by Michael Haag

  Meanwhile the pope had placed Florence under an interdict, denying its people the usual rites of the Church. The Signoria, the top government officials elected from the guilds, asked Savonarola not to preach any more. He agreed but said he needed to give one more sermon. When he spoke, he claimed the power of prophecy, the divine right to resist all unlawful authority and the right to attack the Church, which he called a Satanic institution for the promotion of vice and whoredom. This was too much for the Franciscans, one of whom said both he and Savonarola should submit to ordeal by fire. To avoid losing face, Savonarola had to accept, and on 17 April 1498 a great pile of oil-soaked wood was heaped up in the Piazza della Signoria with a pathway running through the middle. There they would pass and by God’s grace not be burned alive.

  As the rooftops and windows around the square filled with expectant Florentines, the disputants argued over details. Could one take a crucifix into the flames, could the other carry a consecrated host? And then the rain began to fall, a long and heavy rain, and the priors intervened, saying it was too late and too wet for the trail to go ahead.

  The crowd reacted furiously, directing their anger and disappointment at the cancellation of the spectacle towards the Dominicans and Savonarola. A huge mob assaulted the monastery of San Marco, and Savonarola was captured and taken to the Palazzo Vecchio. He was then transferred in chains to the Bargello, where he was tortured and made to confess to heresy. Along with two other friars, Savonarola was condemned to death.

  The execution of Savanarola, as shown in an anonymous painting that’s now in the Museo San Marco in Florence.

  THE EXECUTION OF SAVONAROLA

  To ensure that the populace should not be disappointed for a second time, and that every one should have a view as the condemned were led to their execution, a high platform was built from the gate of the Palazzo Vecchio to a gallows that was raised at the centre of the Piazza della Signoria. There, three ropes and three chains hung from a tall post with a transverse beam at the top. The ropes were for the three friars’ necks, the chains to hold their dead bodies in the flames when the immense pile of wood surrounding the gallows was set alight.

  As the friars were led out from the Palazzo Vecchio early on the morning of 23 May, each was stripped of his robes, leaving him barefoot and dressed only in his undertunic. After his two companions were hanged though still dangling alive, crying ‘Jesus, Jesus’, Savonarola was led to the vacant place between them and soundlessly dropped. Down below, a man who had been waiting all morning with a lighted torch to set the pile of wood alight called out ‘At last I am able to burn him who would have burned me’. Savonarola was hardly dead before the flames closed around his body. In a freakish moment, they burned through one of the cords that pinioned his arms; his right hand rose as if giving a blessing to those who were burning him.

  THE MAP OF HELL

  Botticelli would have been among that crowd in the Piazza della Signoria. His intention had been to illustrate each canto of Dante’s Divine Comedy, but by the time of Savonarola’s execution he had still not completed his task. He never did. Though Vasari describes Botticelli as producing drawings to illustrate the printing of an edition with commentary by Landino in the 1480s, the Mappa dell’Inferno belongs to a later set, a set that was made during the intense and fiery days of Savonarola’s rule. Robert Langdon is wrong when he describes the Map of Hell as an oil painting; it is silverpoint and ink, and coloured in tempera on parchment. Neither is it a cross-section; it is a three-dimensional image, a kind of painted sculpture, a new way of representing Dante’s Hell that had never been attempted before.

  Whatever Botticelli intended when he drew his Map of Hell, he had all but completed a journey. With his Primavera – playful and bright, and touched with the mystery of Ficino’s thoughts, conveyed from the sinless Graeco-Roman world via Gemistus Plethon of Mistra and Constantinople – we feel the early light of the Renaissance. With the rule of the fanatical Savonarola, and Botticelli’s descent into Hell, there is a real sense that the Italian Renaissance is coming to an end.

  PART TWO

  A WORLD IN DANGER?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Mathematics of Malthus

  Fueled by the unyielding mathematics of Malthus, we teeter above the first ring of hell.

  Bertrand Zobrist, Inferno, chapter 33

  Dan Brown prefers not to present himself as any sort of activist. He has often said that it’s simply part of his technique to put a ‘moral, ethical and scientific grey area’ into each of his novels, and then ‘argue both sides’. It would be hard to read Inferno, however, without concluding that he genuinely believes the world to be facing a potentially devastating crisis of overpopulation, and also suspecting that he has at least a certain sympathy with the extreme measures taken by his lanky protagonist, Bertrand Zobrist.

  After all, at the end of the book, when the conventions of the genre have been utterly subverted by the success of its villain’s scheme to inflict forcible mass sterilisation on the entire human race, every character buys into his agenda. They may be somewhat queasy as to whether the end truly justifies the means, but that it’s a worthy end is not in dispute. As Elizabeth Sinskey – who, let’s not forget, is supposedly the director of the World Health Organization – puts it, ‘If we manage to neutralise Bertrand’s virus without a viable alternate plan … we are simply back at square one’.

  In interviews to promote the book, Dan Brown told Time magazine that ‘population explosion on this planet is a very, very serious problem, and could well require some serious solutions’. Speaking to NPR, he went further:

  Here is somebody [Zobrist] who says we have an enormous population problem on this planet and everybody’s turning a blind eye, and there are no simple solutions, but there is a solution. And while it’s terrifying, maybe there’s a silver lining to it. Maybe he’s actually the good guy in all this.

  Brown has also acknowledged that he shares the antipathy towards the Catholic church that’s expressed by both Elizabeth Sinskey and Robert Langdon when they first meet, in chapter 61 of Inferno. In his own words, again to Time magazine: ‘I am horrified [at] the Catholic church’s stance on contraception, and I think it’s dangerous’. Catholic commentator Massimo Introvigne responded by charging Brown with promoting what successive popes have called ‘The Culture of Death’.

  Zobrist’s justification for unleashing his genetically engineered virus rests on two highly dubious assertions: that ‘by any biological gauge, our species has exceeded our sustainable numbers’, and that ‘any environmental biologist or statistician will tell you that humankind’s best chance of long-term survival occurs with a global population of around four billion.’ It’s those two statements to which Sienna Brooks is referring when she says ‘The mathematics is indisputable’, and Elizabeth Sinskey clearly agrees: ‘his assessment of the state of the world is accurate’.

  Thomas Robert Malthus – known to his students as ‘Pop’ (as in population)..

  Apart from the composite graph in chapter 31 of Inferno, which comes from New Scientist magazine’s 2008 report on ‘How Our Economy Is Killing The Earth’, Brown does not give his sources. It seems reasonable to give him the credit of assuming that he did indeed find scientists who espoused Zobrist’s two defining statements. Such views are very far from representing any general consensus, however, let alone from entitling us to see Zobrist as the ‘good guy’.

  The precise nature of Dan Brown’s political opinions is his own business. What else could he mean by the epigraph of his book, however – ‘The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis’ – than that he considers overpopulation to pose just such a crisis? He insists that the history and science in Inferno and his other novels is ‘real’. Given that the ‘science’ that’s presented as being ‘mathematically guaranteed’ in Inferno is used to justify a global-scale eugenics programme, he surely has a moral responsibility to ensure its accur
acy.

  In this chapter and the next, therefore, we set out to define the ‘Malthusian catastrophe’ that forms the central theme of Inferno. How, why and when did the idea originate, and does the way it’s described in Inferno reflect the actual state of the world today? Are we really in danger of doomsday?

  WHAT DID MALTHUS ACTUALLY SAY?

  The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.

  Thomas Robert Malthus, Essay on the Principles of Population

  Thomas Robert Malthus was born in Surrey, England, in 1766, took a degree in mathematics at Cambridge, and became a curate shortly before he published the first edition of his Essay on the Principles of Population in 1798. Dan Brown quotes its most famous passage in chapter 33 of Inferno:

  The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.

  Malthus’s arguments rest on what he considers to be an incontrovertible mathematical truth, that ‘Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio.’ To explain that assertion, he argues that while the human population can potentially double every 25 years, it’s inconceivable to imagine that food production could increase by any more than some steady, incremental amount year upon year.

  Those words ‘when unchecked’ are important. Although Malthus is often said to have predicted a vast population explosion and subsequent crash, he was in fact describing the ‘checks’ that kept human numbers from reaching such an apocalyptic level. He believed that the population did indeed fluctuate, but that such fluctuations were swiftly corrected. What’s more, while it’s the dire warnings of plague and famine that catch the modern eye, Malthus saw the primary checks as being the ‘vices of mankind’. As a clergyman he was a little squeamish about spelling out exactly what he meant, but he was basically referring to abortion, infanticide, prostitution and contraception. In other words, what he regarded as the moral failings of humanity served as the first line of defence against overpopulation.

  Far from seeking to alleviate the effects of the ongoing cycle of population rise and fall, Malthus regarded it as the natural order of things. He believed that political and philosophical programmes aimed at increasing equality were not only doomed to failure, but morally wrong. As far as he was concerned, ‘fatal effects … would result to a society, if every man had a valid claim to an equal share of the produce of the earth’, and thus those ‘unhappy persons who, in the great lottery of life, have drawn a blank’ must inevitably ‘suffer from want’.

  A visceral disgust for such ‘unhappy persons’ permeates Malthus’s work. When Dan Brown’s Bertrand Zobrist describes the mass of humanity as ‘cramped and starving, weltering in Sin’, he’s making an explicit reference to Dante’s Inferno, but he’s also conjuring up a very Malthusian vision of overpopulation as the inevitable source of ‘vice’. Much like Malthus, Zobrist equates overpopulation with ‘sin and hopelessness’, and holds it responsible for creating the ‘throngs of sickly people’ visible in the Doré engraving that he shows to Elizabeth Sinskey. All of which serves to dehumanise the poor to the status of animals, and makes it possible for Zobrist to speak of the Black Death as having ‘thinned the human herd’.

  The Peterloo Massacre of 1819, in which fifteen demonstrators in Manchester were killed during protests triggered in part by food shortages caused by the Malthusian policies of the British government.

  Malthus became ‘prominent’, as Brown puts it, after the publication of his Essay. He expanded upon his theories through several subsequent editions, and was appointed to a professorship in History and Political Economy – his students are said to have called him ‘Pop’ Malthus, short for ‘population’. Shortly before he died, in 1834, he was instrumental in the amendment of the Poor Law, which took away the entitlement of unemployed men to financial relief, substituting instead the prospect of the workhouse.

  The lasting influence of Malthus’s ideas was demonstrated a decade later, when the Great Famine hit Ireland, and the British government continued to export food from Ireland even as its people starved. In quintessentially Malthusian terms, the British official responsible for distributing relief to those affected stated that ‘the judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated… The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people’.

  Thanks to the perceived ruthlessness with which Malthus and his followers were prepared to allow such population ‘checks’ to operate, and his overarching disdain for the ‘lower classes’ as deserving their miserable fate, Karl Marx described his Essay as a ‘libel against the human race’.

  * * *

  Malthus and Transhumanism

  * * *

  Although Inferno depicts the anti-hero Bertrand Zobrist as being equally convinced by both Malthusianism and Transhumanism, there’s no intrinsic connection between the two. It’s interesting to note, though, how close Malthus came to discussing – and dismissing – some of the central preoccupations of today’s Transhumanists.

  Malthus devoted much of his original Essay towards explicitly countering the upsurge in Utopian sentiments that had followed the French Revolution less than ten years earlier. While professing himself to be ‘warmed and delighted’ by the recent ‘speculations on the perfectibility of man and of society’ advanced by French philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet, he considered it his duty to point out the ‘unconquerable difficulties’ that made them impossible to achieve. As paraphrased by Malthus himself, Condorcet’s views now read as a remarkably accurate presaging of the kind of hugely optimistic Transhumanist programmes outlined in Chapter Nine of this book:

  From the improvement of medicine, from the use of more wholesome food and habitations, from a manner of living which will improve the strength of the body by exercise without impairing it by excess, from the destruction of the two great causes of the degradation of man, misery, and too great riches, from the gradual removal of transmissible and contagious disorders by the improvement of physical knowledge, rendered more efficacious by the progress of reason and of social order, he infers that though man will not absolutely become immortal, yet that the duration between his birth and natural death will increase without ceasing, will have no assignable term, and may properly be expressed by the word ‘indefinite’.

  For Malthus, such ideas were patently absurd: ‘it may be fairly doubted whether there is really the smallest perceptible advance in the natural duration of human life since first we have had any authentic history of man’. Although human life expectancy has in fact doubled since Malthus’s day, to be fair that doesn’t prove him wrong. He might not have approved of the kind of medical and social programmes that have made that increase possible – especially by hugely reducing infant mortality – but he could argue that they have done nothing to change the ‘natural’, as in inheritable, human life span.

  The eighteenth-century French philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet.

  Malthus did however play a significant role in the development of evolutionary theory. Charles Darwin wrote that he was first inspired to think about the Survival of the Fittest by reading Malthus, and in particular considering how populations would respond to, and recuperate from, Malthusian ‘checks’. In Darwin’s words, ‘I had at last got a theory by which to wor
k’.

  * * *

  WAS MALTHUS WRONG?

  It is an acknowledged truth in philosophy that a just theory will always be confirmed by experiment.

  Thomas Robert Malthus, Essay on the Principles of Population

  What’s most conspicuously lacking in the original version of Malthus’s Essay is empirical evidence to support his fundamental premise, of the ‘natural inequality of the two powers of population and of production’. Apart from drawing to a certain anecdotal extent on the reported rate of population increase in the frontier regions of the then-new United States, he simply asserts rather than demonstrates.

  That makes it very easy to show that Malthus’s much-vaunted ‘mathematics’ were wrong. Malthus explicitly stated that the population could not carry on rising ‘even for a single century’, and that he had a ‘very different view’ to that of his contemporary William Godwin, who argued that ‘Myriads of centuries of still increasing population may pass away, and the earth be still found sufficient for the subsistence of its inhabitants.’ It’s now more than two centuries since Malthus wrote the Essay, and both population and food production have in fact increased in tandem. It took more than 120 years for the total number of people on Earth to double from the one billion who were alive in 1800. Population growth did indeed accelerate during the rest of the twentieth century, but it has continued to be matched by available food, and the rate of increase is currently slowing down rather than rising exponentially.