The ill-fated attempt of Thirteen and Fifty-two to reverse our glorious revolution was once too controversial to pronounce upon. No longer.24
The years spent perfecting Wave technology,25 preparing for the next test, were years in which Bernoulli neglected his family, but it is churlish to ask if things might have turned out differently if he had been less remote a father; a lesser man could not have been father to his city. Responsibility for his son’s fate is his son’s alone.
Jacopo Bernoulli was a weak man, lacking talent but overburdened with ambition. His father was surrounded by the first generation of great Engineers, but Jacopo, raised in the shadow of power, had more in common with the first generation of disenfranchised nobles. It is true that a clique of opportunists exploited his credulity, but we may justly condemn him for taking up the dagger. And Justice was watching, for another family member betrayed Jacopo in turn.
Thus is treachery repaid with treachery.
Might things have turned out differently? Bernoulli thought so. His philosophy, harshly cynical in the bloom of youth, took on even darker cast after the scandal, trial, execution, and attendant purge:
You seek Truth? Look not to Love nor to Art nor to Philosophy. Look to the tragedy in which we are bit players. Look to Nature. Look to beasts tearing the flesh of their young. Our bodies vying with themselves. War is the perpetual truth of Nature. Nature is War. War is natural. Its fruits are beauty, grace, and harmony.
Here we detect the important philosophical shift where a war of expansion is recast as a crusade.26