Silicon Valley: The Next Decade (Part 2)

How Do You Foster Renaissance Thinking?

Each period of renaissance from history saw great congregations of talented people from multiple disciplines in certain cities or regions. Two prominent examples are Florence under the Medicis and Elizabethan England. Artists, writers, scientists, and philosophers were in the same place, working close to each other and exchanging ideas on a regular basis.

In contrast, Silicon Valley is ill-equipped for Renaissance thinking. While we have great technologists residing here, we certainly do not have great artists or musicians collaborating with them.

Over the years, I have spoken with art gallery owners who have complained that Silicon Valley’s elite lack taste and do not buy art. If you look around, you’ll see that they don’t care very much about fashion or elegance, either. The nightlife or entertainment venues are limited in scope and quality. Theaters, museums, concerts – everything operates timidly, meekly, with uninspiring social consequence in that they don’t move people, or move society forward as art can so often do. Even restaurants lack in sophistication, if you compare them with those in San Francisco or Napa. And the architecture of the Valley is positively pathetic. The old ranch-style houses and fake French chateaux or Tuscan villas are impressive in size, but not in any other way. No boundaries are pushed; there is no real achievement in the domain of architecture.

One of the first things that needs to happen is a concerted effort to expand the social framework of Silicon Valley from a nerdville to a more well-rounded, sophisticated, and interesting place.

Many of our nerds are absolutely brilliant. But to achieve brilliance in the next phase of Silicon Valley’s history, they perhaps need to interact more with some liberal arts types.

Renaissance Patrons and the Renaissance Salon

How could that happen in a natural way? To answer this question, we need to look at the models of the Renaissance patrons and the Renaissance salons.

Lorenzo de’ Medici, perhaps the most important Renaissance patron, supported and promoted artists such as Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Botticelli. Michelangelo, in fact, lived in his palace. Lorenzo commissioned art, helped artists to secure commissions from other patrons among the Florentine elite, and fostered an immensely productive art scene in Florence. He made it fashionable among his peers to support artists, thus making Florence a magnet for talent.

Madame Marie-Thérèse Rodet Geoffrin, on the other hand, was the quintessential Parisian salonnière who became a leading figure in the French Enlightenment: “Madame Geoffrin’s popularity in the mid-eighteenth century came at a decisive time as the center of social life was beginning to move away from the French court and toward the salons of Paris. Instead of the earlier, seventeenth-century salons of the high nobility, Madame Geoffrin’s salon catered generally to a more philosophical crowd of the Enlightenment period.” [Wikipedia]

Madame Geoffrin held dinners twice a week. Mondays were for artists, while Wednesdays were generally reserved for literary discussions. This organized schedule had important consequences:

“Geoffrin, who acted as a mentor and model for other salonnières, was responsible for two innovations that set Enlightenment salons apart from their predecessors and from other social and literacy gatherings of the day. She invented the Enlightenment salon. First, she made the one-o’clock dinner rather than the traditional late-night supper the sociable meal of the day, and thus she opened up the whole afternoon for talk. Second, she regulated these dinners, fixing a specific day of the week for them. After Geoffrin launched her weekly dinners, the Parisian salon took on the form that made it the social base of the Enlightenment Republic of Letters: a regular and regulated formal gathering hosted by a woman in her own home which served as a forum and locus of intellectual activity.” [Wikipedia]

The patrons fostered and supported the artists, while the salons provided the forums for intellectual exchange.

In today’s world, one of the concepts that has drawn from these practices is the TED Conference series. However, in my opinion, the format of the salons – small, exclusive, personal, and elegant – were more conducive to deeper engagement and relationship building than the large conference format, which I do not like.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Silicon Valley: The Next Decade
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