Human nature has been remarkably consistent. The rules governing it, somewhat less so.
Leonardo da Vinci was born in 1452 to parents who were not married to one another. Neither was married to anyone else at the time. Both subsequently married other people.
His father, Ser Piero, a Florentine notary, went on to marry four times, outliving three wives and fathering a remarkably large family. Leonardo was his firstborn, but far from his last child. Genealogical research has raised the possibility that he was not Ser Piero’s only child born outside marriage, while estimates of the notary’s total offspring have ranged into the high teens. The family tree has proved surprisingly difficult to pin down. Perhaps not quite what 23andMe had in mind when it launched its service.
It’s quite the family tree.
What particularly caught my attention was how easily we might imagine that the rules governing marriage and legitimacy produced correspondingly tidy domestic arrangements. Evidently not. The rules were clear enough; human relationships were another matter.
We have a rather nostalgic attachment to the idea of the traditional nuclear family: two devoted parents, their wholesome children, perhaps a grandparent or two in the background, nodding benignly. Yet households have taken an astonishing variety of forms. Widows and widowers remarried, children moved between relatives, servants and apprentices became part of domestic life, and economic circumstances frequently determined who lived with whom.
The familiar mid-twentieth-century picture of a breadwinning father, a mother at home and 2.3 children growing up together in a household of their own is one version of family life. It is neither the only one nor an arrangement that has prevailed consistently throughout history.
I find this fascinating because it raises a question that extends well beyond families: how much of what we regard as natural is simply familiar?
Consider Florence in the fifteenth century. The city was fiercely proud of its republican government. Its institutions were designed to prevent any one individual from exercising too much power. Public offices rotated, elaborate procedures governed appointments, and the Florentines remained deeply suspicious of anything resembling a hereditary ruler.
Then along came Cosimo de’ Medici, who well understood that holding office was not necessarily the most effective way to exercise influence. He built relationships, extended credit, cultivated allies and supported public projects. Florence retained its republican institutions while Cosimo became the man whose wishes were exceedingly difficult to disregard.
There is something wonderfully recognizable about this arrangement.
Organizations still have formal structures and informal networks. Authority may be assigned by title, but influence travels along different routes. Anyone who has worked within a large institution knows that the organizational chart rarely tells the whole story. Cosimo would recognize a modern boardroom at a glance.
The rules are different. The underlying human behaviour is remarkably familiar.
Adam Smith offers another perspective. Writing three centuries after Leonardo da Vinci, he was fascinated by the ways people seek approval, justify their conduct and respond to the judgments of others.
His impartial spectator was an ingenious device for examining our own behaviour from a little distance. We might imagine an observer who was neither particularly impressed by our intentions nor especially receptive to our excuses. I have always liked the idea, although I suspect my own impartial spectator occasionally wishes to be reassigned to a less trying subject.
Smith recognized something that seems unlikely to become obsolete: we are remarkably attuned to detecting self-interest in others while finding entirely satisfactory explanations for it in ourselves.
Social conventions may alter what earns approval or invites disapproval, but the desire for approval itself is remarkably persistent. And perhaps that is why the study of history is so absorbing. It provides an almost endless collection of experiments in organizing human life.
Marriage, inheritance, education, work, political authority and social standing have all been governed by varying socially approved arrangements at different times. Some changes emerged gradually, others through upheaval. Some rules solved genuine problems; others created new ones. And people adapted, resisted, negotiated and occasionally found ingenious ways around them. Yet one thing remains consistent: the results were seldom quite what anyone intended.
Even the things we now regard as settled can have surprisingly recent histories. The structure of the working week, the expectation of retirement, the length of childhood education and the organization of family life would all have seemed novel to many of our ancestors.
And yet those arrangements quickly become the background against which we judge what is “normal”. I wonder what future generations will make of ours.
What I enjoy about history is the opportunity to see familiar human impulses operating within unfamiliar circumstances—and to discover that the past was often rather less conventional than we imagine. Leonardo’s family, Cosimo’s Florence and Smith’s moral psychology belong to different worlds, yet the people inhabiting them are surprisingly recognizable.
They formed attachments, sought influence, fretted about appearances and pursued opportunities. They were ingenious, contradictory and occasionally spectacularly inconsistent.
Much like us.
