Coda. I suspect every stick ends up burned

The Bastone miracoloso does not end with an argument. It ends with a fire. After beating mechanics, electricians, surveyors, inquisitors, friars armed with relics of crusade faith, and even a Latin teacher to death, Ismaele’s stick does not fall defeated by any superior refutation. It falls because the theologians, fed up with always losing, bribe the guards of the temple where the kingdom had consecrated it as an official oracle, and one night burn it in secret. Pignotti devotes barely two lines to the event, almost in passing, like someone shutting a drawer. And yet there, in that final scene that none of the three previous essays stopped to look at head-on, lies the missing key to reading them together.

Because in all three cases—the stick as a logical executioner that would have beaten both the sophist and Galileo; the stick as a judge of scientific theories that made no distinction between Buffon being wrong about the number and right about the question; the stick as a protocol of spiritual discernment that condemned yesterday’s heretic with the very same method it later used, without irony, against a piece of wood—the underlying problem was never the lack of rigor of the person wielding it. Berkeley, Buffon, Maupertuis, the inquisitors of Canto III, all had method. The problem is structural, and it is more uncomfortable than the simple denunciation of pedantry that Pignotti believed he was writing: no instrument capable of punishing error indiscriminately can, by design, separate sterile error from fertile error, because both present themselves in the exact same superficial form—a statement that sounds wrong, uttered with the confidence of someone who does not yet know they are mistaken. The stick does not measure truth. It measures apparent nonsense, and apparent nonsense is, for a time, indistinguishable from a discovery that has not yet been confirmed.
But there is a corollary that the three previous essays left unsaid out loud, and it is the one that explains the final fire: precisely because the stick does not distinguish, sooner or later it ceases to be comfortable even for those who installed it. It beats the Inquisitor with the same lack of consideration with which it beat the heretic the Inquisitor had previously condemned. That is the exact moment when an instrument of purity runs out of allies. It is not defeated by a better argument—no one in the poem ever manages to overcome it with logic—it is defeated by a coalition of interests that, until yesterday, benefited from its existence and today discovers that the blade cuts both ways. Ismaele asked for it to punish others. It never occurred to him—because it never occurs to anyone—to request it with a clause that would make it forgiving toward himself.

If we were to summon the three ghosts that appeared separately in each essay—Feyerabend defending the right to fertile heresy, the collective shadow of Buffon and Maupertuis defending the method over the result, Savonarola pointing out that the discernment that condemned him was formally identical to the one that later condemned the stick itself—they would probably agree, each from their own century and without having read one another, on a single phrase: every device of purity needs, in order to survive more than a single generation, to secretly leave an exception for the person funding it. The day that exception is broken, the instrument is not reformed. It is burned, and another one is invented, under a different name, for the next kingdom.

Because we keep inventing sticks, and the pattern repeats itself with a regularity that should already bring us a bit of collective shame. Peer review was born as a reasonable stick against academic charlatanism, and every now and then someone remembers, with the same eternal surprise, that it also rejected papers that later won the Nobel Prize. Fact-checkers were born as a stick against misinformation, and end up accused—rightly at times, wrongly at others—of hitting harder toward one side of the fence than the other. Algorithmic moderation systems, citation rankings, media "reliability" indices: they all start with the same Enlightenment promise of Ismaele, a neutral arbiter of nonsense that will finally make cheap opinions pay a heavy price. And all of them, sooner or later, reach the same crossroads: either they let through some genuinely fertile nonsense because at the time it sounded like any other, or they begin to strike inward, against those who sustain them, and that is where they stop lasting. I do not know a single institutional stick that has survived intact the day it became fair.

Perhaps the most honest character in the poem, in the end, is not any erudite ghost but Ismaele himself—old now, looking at the ashes of what he himself asked for when he was young and certain that pedantry could be cured if one only found the right instrument. I can picture him wondering, this time without any household spirit to solve the question with a magical object, whether the mistake was building the stick poorly—too blind, too fair, too easy to bribe—or the original illusion that there exists an instrument, any instrument, capable of replacing the slow, unheroic work of sitting down to distinguish, case by case, without automation and without magic wands, who is mistaken out of laziness and who is mistaken because they are seeing, however imperfectly, a little farther than the rest. That distinction cannot be outsourced to a stick. It must be done by hand, every single time, accepting that sometimes we will get it wrong.

Coda. Sospecho que todo bastón termina quemado

El Bastone miracoloso no termina con un argumento. Termina con un incendio. Después de apalear a mecánicos, electricistas, geómetras, inquisidores, frailes armados con reliquias de fe cruzada y hasta a un maestro de latín hasta matarlo, el bastón de Ismaele no cae derrotado por ninguna refutación superior. Cae porque los teólogos, hartos de perder siempre, sobornan a los guardias del templo donde el reino lo había consagrado como oráculo oficial, y una noche lo queman en secreto. Pignotti le dedica al hecho apenas dos versos, casi de pasada, como quien cierra un cajón. Y sin embargo ahí, en esa última escena que ninguno de los tres textos anteriores se detuvo a mirar de frente, está la clave que faltaba para leerlos juntos.

Porque en los tres casos —el bastón como verdugo lógico que hubiera apaleado tanto al sofista como a Galileo; el bastón como juez de teorías científicas que no distinguía entre Buffon equivocándose en el número y acertando en la pregunta; el bastón como protocolo de discernimiento espiritual que condenó al hereje de ayer con el mismo método que después usó, sin ironía, contra un palo de madera— el problema de fondo nunca fue la falta de rigor de quien lo empuñaba. Berkeley, Buffon, Maupertuis, los inquisidores del Canto III, todos tenían método. El problema es estructural, y es más incómodo que la simple denuncia de la pedantería que Pignotti creyó estar escribiendo: ningún instrumento capaz de castigar el error de manera indistinta puede, por diseño, separar el error estéril del error fecundo, porque ambos se le presentan con la misma forma superficial —una afirmación que suena mal, dicha con la confianza de quien todavía no sabe que se equivoca. El bastón no mide la verdad. Mide el disparate aparente, y el disparate aparente es, durante un tiempo, indistinguible del descubrimiento que todavía no fue confirmado.

Pero hay un corolario que los tres ensayos anteriores dejaron sin decir en voz alta, y es el que explica el incendio final: precisamente porque el bastón no distingue, tarde o temprano deja de ser cómodo también para quienes lo instalaron. Apalea al Inquisidor con la misma falta de miramiento con que apaleó al hereje que el Inquisidor había condenado antes. Ese es el momento exacto en que un instrumento de pureza deja de tener aliados. No lo derrota un argumento mejor —nadie en el poema logra nunca vencerlo con lógica—; lo derrota una coalición de intereses que, hasta ayer, se beneficiaba de su existencia y hoy descubre que el filo también corta para el otro lado. Ismaele lo pidió para castigar a los demás. Nunca se le ocurrió, porque a nadie se le ocurre nunca, pedirlo con una cláusula que lo hiciera indulgente consigo mismo.

Si convocáramos a los tres fantasmas que fueron apareciendo en cada ensayo por separado —Feyerabend defendiendo el derecho a la herejía fecunda, la sombra colectiva de Buffon y Maupertuis defendiendo el método por encima del resultado, Savonarola señalando que el discernimiento que lo condenó a él era formalmente idéntico al que después condenó al bastón mismo—, probablemente coincidirían, cada uno desde su siglo y sin haberse leído entre sí, en una sola frase: todo dispositivo de pureza necesita, para sobrevivir más de una generación, dejar en secreto una excepción para quien lo financia. El día que esa excepción se rompe, no se reforma el instrumento. Se lo quema, y se inventa otro, con otro nombre, para el reino siguiente.

Porque seguimos inventando bastones, y el patrón se repite con una regularidad que ya debería darnos un poco de vergüenza colectiva. El peer review nació como un bastón razonable contra la charlatanería académica, y cada tanto alguien recuerda, con la misma sorpresa de siempre, que también rechazó papers que después ganaron el Nobel. Los verificadores de datos nacieron como bastón contra la desinformación, y terminan acusados —con razón unas veces, sin ella otras— de golpear con más entusiasmo hacia un lado del cerco que hacia el otro. Los sistemas de moderación algorítmica, los rankings de citación, los índices de “confiabilidad” de medios: todos empiezan con la misma promesa ilustrada de Ismaele, un árbitro neutral del disparate que por fin le va a cobrar caro a la opinión gratuita. Y todos, tarde o temprano, llegan al mismo cruce de caminos: o dejan pasar algún disparate genuinamente fecundo porque en el momento sonaba igual que cualquier otro, o empiezan a golpear hacia adentro, contra quien los sostiene, y ahí dejan de durar. No conozco un solo bastón institucional que haya sobrevivido intacto el día que se volvió parejo.

Quizás el más honesto de los personajes del poema, al final, no sea ningún fantasma erudito sino el propio Ismaele, viejo ya, mirando las cenizas de lo que él mismo pidió cuando era joven y estaba seguro de que la pedantería tenía cura si uno encontraba el instrumento correcto. Puedo imaginármelo preguntándose, sin genio doméstico esta vez que le resuelva la duda con un objeto mágico, si el error no fue construir mal el bastón —demasiado ciego, demasiado parejo, demasiado fácil de sobornar— sino la ilusión original de que existe un instrumento, cualquier instrumento, capaz de reemplazar el trabajo lento y sin ningún heroísmo de sentarse a distinguir, caso por caso, sin automatismos y sin varitas, quién se equivoca por pereza y quién se equivoca por estar viendo, todavía mal, un poco más lejos que el resto. Esa distinción no se puede tercerizar en un palo. Hay que hacerla a mano, todas las veces, y no queda otra que aceptar que a veces nos va a salir mal.

I Suspect the Devil Tests Himself with Protocol (or Savonarola Against the Inquisition of the Cane)

Canto III of Il bastone miracoloso contains the most elaborate scene of the entire poem, as well as the most awkward one: a friar, Father Bonanchiena, decides that the cane harbors a diabolical spirit and performs a full-fledged exorcism on it, complete with stole, holy water, and a Latin formula—"parti, o espíritu inhumano, el Cielo y yo te lo ordenamos" ["depart, oh inhumane spirit, Heaven and I command you to do so"]. The cane, which has no patience for liturgy, knocks him down with a single blow along with the aspergillum. Father Inquisitor then steps in, offended that a minor friar would arrogate to himself jurisdiction over the Devil—a matter that belongs to him by office—and convenes his own tribunal.

That is where the poem gets truly interesting: before proceeding, the friars earnestly debate what exactly the object before them is. Fra Garofano suggests it might be Moses's staff. Brachino counter-proposes that perhaps it is Saint Joseph's cane, the very one that blossomed in the legend of his selection as Mary's husband. The Inquisitor dismisses both hypotheses with an argument that is logically flawless within his own framework: Moses's staff would never strike sacred backs, so it cannot be that. It can only be the Devil.

For the final confrontation, each friar arms himself with his trusted relic: Fra Broscia carries wrapped in a black cloth a lock of Muhammad's beard; Fra Garofano puts on, as a protective undershirt, a shred of Savonarola's burned skin. The cane, naturally, does not discriminate: it beatings the Inquisitor first, out of hierarchical precedence, and then everyone else without exception of relic.

It is easy to read this as simple anticlerical mockery—and to a large extent, it is—but there is something more precise hidden in the scene, and it has to do with procedure, not belief. What Pignotti is parodying is not superstition in the abstract: it is an actual protocol, backed by centuries of scholastic refinement, meant to distinguish genuine diabolical possession from fraudulent cases or mere illness. The tradition is called discretio spirituum—discernment of spirits—and its foundational treatise, De probatione spirituum by Jean Gerson, Chancellor of the University of Paris, dates to 1415. Gerson was not writing a manual of superstition: he was trying to solve, with the intellectual tools of his era, a genuine epistemological problem—how to distinguish a true vision or possession from a feigned one, or from natural delirium—and he proposed evaluation criteria, not blind faith. Two centuries later, the Rituale Romanum of 1614 systematized those criteria into an almost clinical protocol: to confirm a genuine possession, the exorcist had to verify that the possessed spoke or understood languages they had never learned, manifested physical strength disproportionate to their age or build, revealed knowledge of hidden or distant things, and displayed a violent aversion to the sacred. Four verifiable criteria, in theory replicable by any trained examiner. A protocol, word for word.

Pignotti’s scene dramatizes, almost without exaggeration, that exact procedure: identification of the nature of the phenomenon by eliminating alternative hypotheses (Moses's staff? Saint Joseph's cane? ruled out by internal argument), application of the standardized ritual (aspersion, formula of incantation), and empirical verification of the outcome (does it yield to the command or not?). The joke isn't that the inquisitors are methodless idiots. The joke, far crueler and more interesting, is that they do have a method—a serious method, inherited from centuries of serious scholastic debate—and they apply it with total procedural honesty to a phenomenon that, within their own conceptual framework, has zero chance of being correctly diagnosed, because the entire framework is misdirected from the start. It is not the absence of rigor that condemns them: it is having rigor pointing in the wrong direction—something that, let us be honest, can happen to any discipline, including those we call science today without quotation marks.

And here it is worth pausing for a second on the scene's most uncomfortable detail, the one Pignotti likely included purely for comedic effect without fully measuring its edge: Savonarola’s burned skin, used as a protective amulet against the Devil. Because Girolamo Savonarola did not die of natural causes, nor was he a canonized saint with official relics. He was hanged and burned in Florence's Piazza della Signoria in 1498 by order of the Church itself, excommunicated as a heretic and schismatic, accused of false prophecy. The very institution that decided his body should burn like a heretic's is the one that—generations later, at least in the popular imagination Pignotti mockingly captures—ends up treasuring a fragment of that burned skin as if it were a shield against evil. Yesterday's heretic is today's talisman, and the distance between both statuses depends on nothing Savonarola did or refrained from doing: it depends entirely on which side of the institutional verdict he fell, and how much time has passed since.

If Savonarola's ghost could look in and read his own cameo in Pignotti's poem, I doubt he would laugh. But he would probably say something like this: that he too was once a "phenomenon" subjected to the same type of scholastic discernment that now passes judgment on the cane—his visions, his prophecies about the punishment of Rome, were evaluated using the exact tools of discretio spirituum, and the tribunal decided, with total procedural conviction, that they came from the wrong side. That the criterion that condemned him is formally identical to the one his institutional executioners would later use, without irony, against a wooden stick in Congo. And that the burned skin someone now wears as an amulet is physical proof that the verdict of a tribunal—however rigorous it may seem at the time, however well-founded on the best available theory—is not a fact about reality: it is a bet with an expiration date. The cane struck the Inquisitor just like everyone else. Savonarola, who knew firsthand what it was like to be on the receiving end of the cane back when it was still called the stake, could have warned him that sooner or later, it always ends up striking the one holding the protocol, too.

Generated with AI · Revised by me.

Sospecho que el diablo se prueba con protocolo (o Savonarola contra la Inquisición del Bastón)

El Canto III del Bastone miracoloso tiene la escena más elaborada de todo el poema, y también la más incómoda: un fraile, el Padre Bonanchiena, decide que el bastón aloja un espíritu diabólico y le hace un exorcismo en toda regla, con estola, agua bendita y fórmula latina —"parti, o espíritu inhumano, el Cielo y yo te lo ordenamos"—. El bastón, que no tiene paciencia para la liturgia, lo derriba de un golpe junto con el hisopo. Interviene entonces el Padre Inquisidor, ofendido de que un fraile menor se atribuya jurisdicción sobre el Diablo que a él le corresponde por oficio, y convoca a su propio tribunal. Ahí es donde el poema se pone verdaderamente interesante: antes de proceder, los frailes discuten en serio qué es exactamente el objeto que tienen delante. Fra Garofano propone que podría ser la vara de Moisés. Brachino contrapropone que quizás sea el bastón de San José, el mismo sobre el que floreció la vara en la leyenda de su elección como esposo de María. El Inquisidor descarta ambas hipótesis con un argumento lógico impecable dentro de su propio marco: la vara de Moisés jamás golpearía espaldas sagradas, luego no puede ser ella. Solo puede ser el Diablo.

Y para el enfrentamiento final, cada fraile se arma con su reliquia de confianza: Fra Broscia lleva envuelto en un paño negro un mechón de la barba de Mahoma; Fra Garofano se pone, a modo de camiseta protectora, un jirón de la piel quemada de Savonarola. El bastón, por supuesto, no distingue: apalea al Inquisidor primero, por precedencia jerárquica, y después a todos los demás sin excepción de reliquia.

Es fácil leer esto como una simple burla anticlerical —y en gran medida lo es—, pero hay algo más preciso escondido en la escena, y tiene que ver con el procedimiento, no con la creencia. Lo que Pignotti está parodiando no es la superstición en abstracto: es un protocolo real, con siglos de refinamiento escolástico detrás, para distinguir la posesión diabólica genuina de la fraudulenta o de la simple enfermedad. La tradición se llama discretio spirituum —discernimiento de espíritus— y su tratado fundacional, el De probatione spirituum de Jean Gerson, canciller de la Universidad de París, es de 1415. Gerson no estaba escribiendo un manual de superstición: estaba tratando de resolver, con las herramientas intelectuales de su época, un problema epistemológico genuino —cómo distinguir una visión o una posesión verdaderas de una fingida, o de un delirio natural— y proponía criterios de evaluación, no la fe ciega. Dos siglos después, el Rituale Romanum de 1614 sistematizó esos criterios en un protocolo casi clínico: para confirmar una posesión genuina, el exorcista debía comprobar que el poseído hablara u comprendiera lenguas que nunca había aprendido, que manifestara una fuerza física desproporcionada a su edad o complexión, que revelara conocimiento de cosas ocultas o distantes, y que mostrara una aversión violenta hacia lo sagrado. Cuatro criterios verificables, en teoría replicables por cualquier examinador entrenado. Un protocolo, palabra por palabra.

La escena de Pignotti dramatiza, casi sin exagerar, exactamente ese procedimiento: identificación de la naturaleza del fenómeno por eliminación de hipótesis alternativas (¿vara de Moisés? ¿bastón de San José? descartadas por argumento interno), aplicación del ritual estandarizado (aspersión, fórmula de conjuro), y verificación empírica del resultado (¿cede o no cede a la orden?). El chiste no es que los inquisidores sean idiotas sin método. El chiste, más cruel y más interesante, es que tienen método —un método serio, heredado de siglos de disputa escolástica seria— y lo aplican con total honestidad procedimental a un fenómeno que, dentro de su propio marco conceptual, no tiene ninguna posibilidad de ser correctamente diagnosticado, porque el marco entero está mal orientado desde el principio. No es la ausencia de rigor lo que los condena: es tener rigor apuntando en la dirección equivocada, algo que —seamos honestos— le puede pasar a cualquier disciplina, incluidas las que hoy llamamos ciencia sin comillas.

Y ahí conviene detenerse un segundo en el detalle más incómodo de la escena, el que Pignotti probablemente puso ahí por puro efecto cómico sin medir del todo su filo: la piel quemada de Savonarola, usada como amuleto protector contra el Diablo. Porque Girolamo Savonarola no murió de causas naturales ni fue un santo canonizado con reliquias oficiales. Fue ahorcado y quemado en la Piazza della Signoria de Florencia en 1498, por orden de la propia Iglesia, excomulgado como hereje y cismático, acusado de falsa profecía. La misma institución que decidió que su cuerpo debía arder como el de un hereje es, generaciones después, la que —al menos en el imaginario popular que Pignotti recoge con sorna— termina atesorando un pedazo de esa piel quemada como si fuera un escudo contra el mal. El hereje de ayer es el talismán de hoy, y la distancia entre ambos estatus no depende de nada que Savonarola haya hecho o dejado de hacer: depende enteramente de en qué lado del veredicto institucional cayó, y de cuánto tiempo pasó desde entonces.

Si el fantasma de Savonarola pudiera asomarse a leer su propio cameo en el poema de Pignotti, dudo que se riera. Pero probablemente diría algo parecido a esto: que él también fue, en su momento, un "fenómeno" sometido al mismo tipo de discernimiento escolástico que ahora juzga al bastón —sus visiones, sus profecías sobre el castigo de Roma, fueron evaluadas con las mismas herramientas de la discretio spirituum, y el tribunal decidió, con total convicción procedimental, que venían del lado equivocado. Que el criterio que lo condenó a él es formalmente idéntico al que después sus propios verdugos institucionales usarían, sin ironía, contra un palo de madera en Congo. Y que la piel quemada que ahora alguien lleva como amuleto es la prueba física de que el veredicto de un tribunal —por riguroso que parezca en el momento, por bien fundado que esté en la mejor teoría disponible— no es un dato sobre la realidad: es una apuesta con fecha de vencimiento. El bastón golpeó al Inquisidor exactamente igual que a todos los demás. Savonarola, que conocía de primera mano lo que es estar del otro lado del bastón cuando todavía se llamaba hoguera, podría haberle avisado que tarde o temprano siempre termina golpeando también a quien sostiene el protocolo.

Generado con IA · Revisado por mí.

I Suspect Logic is a Thing of the Devil (or Feyerabend against the Bastón Miracoloso)

In 1831, a nearly forgotten mock-heroic poem (poemetto burlesco) was published in Dublin—though written much earlier by the Tuscan physician and poet Lorenzo Pignotti. It possesses the exact moral-fantasy structure one would expect from an illustrated fairy tale: in Abyssinia, a young man named Ismaele—weary of having devoured metaphysics, physics, algebra, theology, medicine, and astrology without actually understanding a single thing—invokes a household genie and asks for a way to unmask the wise men surrounding him. The genie does not give him an argument. He gives him a cudgel.

The object is simple and perfect: it strikes on its own, without a hand to wield it, anyone who utters nonsense, and it does not stop until the victim shouts "I am an ox" three times. It does not negotiate, it does not nuance, it does not distinguish intent. Ismaele unleashes it first upon an academy of philosophers competing to explain the cudgel's phenomenon—one using mechanics, another electricity, another a dowsing rod—and then upon a college of theologians, upon a pair of friars fist-fighting while arguing in Latin, and even upon an Inquisition tribunal attempting to exorcise it, convinced it harbors the Devil. The cudgel makes no exception for sides: it thrashes the pretentious physicist and the inquisitor who wants to burn it for witchcraft with equal enthusiasm. At the end of the poem, sick of always losing, the theologians bribe the guards and burn it to ashes.

What interests me about this artifact is not its humor—which is considerable—but its function: it is a device that introduces real friction into an idea market that otherwise has none. The scholars of Congo can utter any fantasy about the origin of the world or the nature of matter without paying any cost for being wrong; the cudgel is the literally physical eruption of a consequence. It is skin in the game carved out of wood. One could read the entire poem as an early allegory of something Nassim Taleb would later frame in more sober terms: the asymmetry between those who voice opinions and those who risk something by doing so. The cudgel, in that sense, is not an instrument of cruelty but of epistemic hygiene: it specifically punishes the person who theorizes without risking anything.

Yet before Pignotti imagined this punitive toy, Dante had already harbored the exact same suspicion, albeit with far less of a sense of humor. In Canto XXVII of the Inferno, a devil explains to Guido da Montefeltro—the fraudulent counselor who believed he could sin and repent in time through a well-crafted calculation—why he is dragging him down to hell, with these words: that he didn't expect him to be a logician. Logic, there, is not a neutral tool of reason: it is the devil's own terrain, the space where a well-constructed argument detaches itself from truth and virtue to serve any cause, including one's own damnation. Guido was a perfect syllogist his entire life—and that is precisely why he ended up where he did. Four hundred years before Ismaele’s cudgel, Dante already suspected that reasoning detached from moral grounding leads not to wisdom, but to perdition—and that someone, or something, comes to collect the bill sooner or later.

Pignotti’s cudgel can thus be read as Dante’s logical devil turned into a blunt instrument: what is paid with the soul in Hell is paid with the back in Congo. And it is worth noting that neither of them passes judgment on intent. The devil does not ask Guido if he sincerely believed in his argument. The cudgel does not ask the theologian if his faith is genuine. Both devices operate on outcomes, not on the subjective merit of the reasoner: if the argument was hollow, it does not matter how convinced you were.

Now then. Let us imagine, for a moment, the cudgel unleashed not in Congo, but in any contemporary family WhatsApp group. The brother-in-law explaining with complete confidence why the dollar will hit a certain rate next month, having never put a single dime where his mouth is. The Instagram coach asserting that you failed due to a lack of a "winning mindset." The armchair political scientist who in 1789, 1917, and 2001 would have been equally sure of everything. One imagines them all, head low and teeth loose, shouting "I am an ox" in unison at a Sunday barbecue, and one must admit the fantasy holds an almost vengeful charm. It is the punitive version of what life—more slowly and with far less elegance—tends to do anyway: eventually collecting the check on cheap opinions.

And yet—this is where the poem stops making me laugh and starts troubling me a bit—we would do well to ask the ghost of Paul Feyerabend what he thinks of all this before applauding too loudly.

Feyerabend devoted much of his work to arguing that science did not advance by following a rigorous, disciplined method, but through sheer heresy: Galileo defending Copernicanism with arguments that, judged by the logical standards of his era, bordered on nonsense; theories that sounded like madness and only later, with the benefit of hindsight, proved fruitful. His motto, "anything goes," was not a praise of stupidity, but a warning: if a device capable of automatically beating anyone who said something sounding like a sophism to prevailing common sense had existed in 1610, Galileo would have ended up shouting "I am an ox" before finishing his telescope assembly. The cudgel does not distinguish between the charlatan talking nonsense because he has nothing better to offer and the heretic talking nonsense because he is seeing, however dimly, something no one else can see yet. It thrashes both with equal enthusiasm.

That is, I think, the design flaw that neither Ismaele’s genie nor Pignotti paused to consider: an instrument that punishes mistaken certainty also punishes, indistinguishably, premature certainty. The cudgel would have done humanity a massive favor by thrashing the poem’s entire Sorbonne, yes—but we have zero guarantee that it wouldn't have also thrashed, with the exact same mechanical enthusiasm, the first person to suggest that the Earth rotates, that microorganisms exist, or that time is not absolute. The epistemic hygiene demanding skin in the game is, at its core, conservative: it rewards the non-committal, not the one who takes a calculated risk. And science, according to Feyerabend, has always required a few people willing to utter absurdities without someone waiting for them at the exit with a stick.

Perhaps the most honest reading of Pignotti’s poem is not the one I hinted at initially—that the world needs more cudgel—but its inverse, the one neither Ismaele nor his genie wished to see: that any orthodoxy, as soon as it obtains an instrument capable of silencing the mistaken, inevitably ends up turning it against the person who is not yet right, but will be. The cudgel was ultimately burned by the theologians who hated it most. I suspect that had it survived another century, the Sorbonne itself would have ended up wielding it—and we would have lost, right along with the charlatans, a Galileo or two.

This post was created with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools.

The smallest enemy can cause us a lot of trouble.

 

 "The smallest enemy can cause us a lot of trouble." This idea, which summarizes a military, biological, and everyday strategy—that the strength or impact of an adversary does not depend on their physical size, but on their capacity for resistance, adaptability, or the resources required to overcome them—has ancient roots.

The most famous and widespread version comes from Aesop (the fable of the mosquito/gnat and the lion). Jean de La Fontaine adapted and popularized it in 1668 as Le Lion et le Moucheron ("The Lion and the Gnat/Mosquito"). In it, the tiny insect challenges and torments the lion until he surrenders in exhaustion; the moral underscores that the smallest enemies are often the most formidable and difficult to defeat, and that whoever escapes great dangers may succumb to insignificant things. This is the main source that spread into popular tradition, proverb collections, and school adaptations (including Spanish and Italian versions titled "The Lion and the Mosquito/Fly").

Lorenzo Pignotti (1739–1812), an Italian poet, historian, and fabulist, author of Favole e Novelle, wrote a related variant titled Il Leone e il Tafano ("The Lion and the Horsefly"). In it, a small insect challenges and pesters the lion to the point of driving him away in despair, and the moral concludes: Nessun dispregerai: Che il più piccol nemico; Può darti briga assai. ("Despise no one: for the smallest enemy can cause you a lot of trouble.")

Pignotti, therefore, clearly and poetically formulated that idea within the 18th-century Italian fable tradition, drawing inspiration from classical heritage (Aesop) and French models. He is not the author of La Fontaine's famous version, but he did contribute one of the most direct formulations closest to the phrase circulating today.

In summary: the idea had been circulating since Antiquity and was consolidated by La Fontaine; Pignotti revisited it and gave it precise expression in his fable Il Leone e il Tafano.

Lorenzo Pignotti's fable Il Leone e il Tafano is quite short, like most classical fables in verse. It has a little over 40 lines and takes less than two minutes to read. 

Here is the full text in Italian:
 

Il Leone e il Tafano
(Lorenzo Pignotti) 

Non mi guardar sì fiero, Che non mi fai paura; Credi che il mondo intero Tremi di tua bravura? Sol que’ vili animali, Che passeggiano a piè, Tremano innanzi a te: Ma quelli ch’hanno l’ali, Sì poca han soggezione Del superbo Leone, Ch’anche un Tafan par mio Puote, o signor mio bello, Disfidarti a duello.
Ah! insetto vil, se degno Crederti potess’io, Risponde, del mio sdegno; Con una leggierissima Sferzata solamente D’uno de’ crini miei Tacer perpetuamente, Credimi, ti farei.
Le ciarle sono inutili, Delle minacce io rido, Rispose quegli; e voglio Domar cotesto orgoglio: In faccia a tutti i tuoi, Alla pugna ti sfido; Difenditi se puoi.
Rapido qual saetta Sugli occhi a lui si getta, E stranamente il punge. Vibra il Leon la zampa, Ma già l’insetto è lunge. Torna, e di nuovo il fiede; Il Leon d’ira avvampa, Né mai però lo giunge. Quello ora fugge, or riede, E sempre il fere in faccia: Nel naso a lui si caccia; Freme il Leone e sbuffa, L’irta criniera arruffa, Si sferza a’ lati, e rugge; E per boschi e pendici Da disperato fugge.
Allor dalle narici, In aria trionfale, Esce, e con stridul’ale Grida in rauco ronzìo: Il vincitor son io.
Nessun dispregerai: Che il più piccol nemico Può darti briga assai.

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