What Galileo has to do with the economy, or how Wall Street is moulding your taste in art.

The universe is made of stories, not atoms,” poet Muriel Rukeyser famously proclaimed.

During the Middle Ages, the dominant monoculture was one of religion and superstition. When Galileo challenged the Catholic Church’s geocentricity with his heliocentric model of the universe, he was accused of heresy and punished accordingly, but he did spark the drawn of the next monoculture, which reached a tipping point in the seventeenth century as humanity came to believe the world was fully knowable and discoverable through science, machines and mathematics — the scientific monoculture was born.