Quotulatiousness

March 31, 2018

If anybody could be described as Machiavellian, it’d surely be Machiavelli, right?

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Italy — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At the Foundation for Economic Education, Paul Meany tries to rescue the reputation of Niccolò Machiavelli:

Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli by Santi di Tito (1536-1603)
Via Wikimedia Commons.

If you have ever studied Shakespeare, you might have heard your teacher use the word “Machiavellian” to describe amoral characters such as Iago from Othello or Edmund from King Lear. “Machiavellian” denotes a person or action that disregards morality and is wholly self-serving. The origin of the word derives from the famous Florentine politician and writer Niccoló Machiavelli.

[…]

Published posthumously, The Prince left Machiavelli with an infamous reputation as an amoral, atheistic, and cynical writer. In 1559, the Catholic Church put Machiavelli’s works on the Index of Prohibited Books. In the play The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe, written in 1589, Machiavelli appears in the prologue, boldly exclaiming, “I count religion but a childish toy, and hold there is no sin but ignorance.”

Machiavelli came to be associated with an Elizabethan term, “Old Nick,” used to denote the devil. There is a subject of modern psychology, known as the “dark triad,” which focuses on three malevolent personality traits: narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism.

However, this deeply negative image of Machiavelli did not always exist. In the 17th and 18th centuries, a more positive view of Machiavelli emerged, with authors such as the Republican James Harrington referring to Machiavelli as “the prince of politicians.” During the Italian Renaissance, humanist Giovanni Battista Busini fondly described Machiavelli as “a most extraordinary lover of liberty.”

This praise might seem confusing; after all, the word “Machiavellian” denotes someone who is cunning and unscrupulous. How could a man so devious and pragmatic be called a lover of liberty? The answer lies with Machiavelli’s other book, known as Discourses on Livy, which presents a very different image of his political beliefs.

[…]

The stark differences between Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy and The Prince come from the nature of the aims of each book. The Prince aims to refine the conduct of a single prince, while Discourses on Livy offers guidance for the entire citizen body. The Prince was written to address a unique political opportunity that quickly evaporated, whereas Discourses on Livy was written to articulate the principles required by republics that sought longevity, liberty, and prosperity.

To this day, there still remains a huge debate over the intricacies and contradictions that characterize Machiavelli’s writings. Machiavelli was an extremely nuanced and original thinker whose reputation should not exclusively be that of an evil schemer. He argued for a republic whose liberty is safeguarded by the common person, in which free, unhindered debate provides the best course of action, and where compromises between opposing groups create harmony. Discourses on Livy reveals another side of Machiavelli, a man committed to the ideals of freedom through the means of representative government.

March 29, 2018

QotD: The decline of Epicureanism

Filed under: Greece, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The philosophy seems to have continued strong into about the 3rd century AD. Thereafter, it went into decline. By the middle of the 6th century, when the Emperor Justinian closed all the philosophical schools in Athens and dispersed the teachers, Epicureanism appears to have been already dead.

The main traditions of thought during the last few centuries of the ancient world were turned away from the everyday world. There were the neoplationists, with their settled belief in a higher reality that could be approached through a combination of mathematics and magic. There were, of course, the Christians, for whom the world is simply a preparation for the better life that is to come.

As said, relating what people think to what is happening around them is not easy. But the last few centuries of the ancient world were ages of great uncertainty. There were epidemic diseases that swept away multitudes without warning and without apparent cause. There were barbarian raids and civil wars. There was catastrophically overextended government to grind the survivors into helplessness and poverty. In this sort of world, teachings of Epicurus about seeking happiness in this life may have lost their attraction.

In one of his more sensible comments on Epicurus, Plutarch writes:

    As to the vulgar sort… when they lose their children, wives, or friends, they would rather have them be somewhere and still remain, though in misery, than that they should be quite destroyed, dissolved, and reduced to nothing. And they are pleased when they hear it said of a dying person, that he goes away or departs, and such other words as intimate death to be the soul’s remove and not destruction. …. …. And they are discomposed when they hear it said of any one, he is perished, or he is gone or he is no more…. And therefore it is very plain that with the belief of immortality they [the Epicureans] take away the sweetest and greatest hopes the vulgar sort have.

In a world where life is uncertain and often unpleasant, there will tend to be an emphasis on some happier supernatural future.

There may be nothing sinister in the loss of virtually the whole body of Epicurean writings. Perhaps they were destroyed by a triumphant Church that had room for Plato and Aristotle but none for a naturalist enemy of all that Christianity proclaimed. But there is no reason to suppose any deliberate act of destruction. Papyrus rolls were by their nature delicate things. They were also far more expensive and therefore scarce in number than modern books. In any European climate, a papyrus roll would last for about a century, and then the glue that held it together would perish. Without careful recopying, a work might easily be lost.

The last centuries of the ancient world were mostly ages of depression. There was a shortage of all the means that had so far kept libraries together. Such means as remained were naturally given to recopying works for which there was an active demand. That means Christian theology, those parts of the pagan philosophies that could be reconciled to Christianity, and the greatest products of the pagan high culture. Since, with the exception of Lucretius — whose work largely survived — the works of Epicurus and his followers were in a style remarkable only for its plainness, it is unreasonable to suppose that librarians, forced to choose what to copy and what to leave to die, would take up the 37 volumes of On Nature and not the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius.

So far as I can tell, whatever works of Epicurus survived were not studied in the Byzantine Empire. In the West, all but his name and whatever is said about him in Cicero vanished for a thousand years.

Sean Gabb, “Epicurus: Father of the Enlightenment”, speaking to the 6/20 Club in London, 2007-09-06.

March 14, 2018

“[Jordan Peterson has] been described as ‘rightwing’ or ‘far right’ by journalists who have apparently forgotten how to think”

Filed under: Australia, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Guardian, Gareth Hutchens discusses the rise of Jordan Peterson:

Professor Jordan B Peterson is not yet a household name in Australia.

But he’s in the middle of a speaking tour that has found an enthusiastic audience. All four speaking events have sold out, including his Sydney and Brisbane shows this week. Organisers know they could have booked more venues.

Why are Australians paying to hear him talk?

Peterson loathes identity politics, rails against postmodernism and “neo-Marxism”, and despises gender studies and political correctness. He asserts the biological differences between men and women, and delivers pep talks on how to live a meaningful life and how to find the right partner.

He gives lectures on the truths embedded in myths and legends that are thousands of years old.

To appreciate where he’s coming from, it helps to be familiar with Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and their premonition that the death of mass belief in God would lead to nihilism and/or the rise of totalitarian value systems as alternatives.

I’ve watched Peterson’s online lectures for a while now, after he became an internet celebrity in late 2016.

It’s been fascinating witnessing media outlets trying to come to terms with him. He’s been described as “rightwing” or “far right” by journalists who have apparently forgotten how to think.

Does he belong to the far right because he loathes political correctness, identity politics and postmodernism? Noam Chomsky has made similar criticisms for decades. As did Christopher Hitchens.

Is it rightwing to lament the damage done to the left by the increasing tendency of leftist students on North American campuses to harass people who challenge their ideological orthodoxy? Nicholas Christakis, a sociologist and physician from Yale University, who is a self-confessed progressive, says he can’t understand their behaviour. Bret Weinstein, a former biology professor of Evergreen State College, says he can’t understand it either. He considers himself “deeply progressive” but he says the left is “eating itself.”

Peterson deserves to be taken seriously.

February 28, 2018

QotD: Words as “physical violence”

Filed under: Education, Liberty, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Berkeley. Evergreen. Middlebury. Missou. Yale. Brown. McMasters. Wilfred Laurier. The list goes on. One must wonder where this trend will ultimately take us. There have been several justifications given for this increasing rash of no-platforming, shaming, and at times, physical violence on North American campuses. In essence, these justifications can be distilled into a triad of well-meaning but ultimately flawed theses, namely, 1.) that all discourse is about power and that any speech that renders a listener physiologically uncomfortable therefore rises to the level of a physical attack upon that individual, thereby justifying actual physical violence in response, 2.) that for the sake of historically marginalized voices, persons who are members of historically privileged groups should forfeit their right to free speech or ought to remain silent, 3.) that certain assertions, even if possibly true, are nonetheless morally impermissible to make since to do so will likely create conditions whereby bad-intentioned persons will inevitably and successfully advance their morally heinous projects.

This first thesis — that all discourse is fundamentally about power — finds its philosophical origins in the likes of post-modernists such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. To quote Foucault, “Discourses are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations.” Thus, on Foucalt’s view, if all discourse is, at heart, really just veiled force relations between competing groups; if language isn’t fundamentally capable of being about objective truth or about the world in any meaningful sense, then the ink symbols written on the page and the shaped air admitted from one’s mouth in the forms of ‘rationality’, ‘facts’, ‘knowledge’, and ‘truth’ are just another set of weapons in a person’s overall arsenal to seize and maintain power, no different in kind from weapons of a physical sort. To speak then, on Foucault’s view, is to wield a weapon, albeit a subtler and refined one. The uncomfortable physiological feeling of hearing offensive speech, it would then seem, vindicates this view that one is being attacked. One might thus conclude, “Why not attack back with heavier, more effective, and more expedient weapons?”

Michael Robillard, “In Defense of Offense”, Quillette, 2018-02-05.

February 25, 2018

Assassin’s Creed: Games with a Libertarian View of the World

Filed under: Gaming, Liberty — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

ReasonTV
Published on 23 Feb 2018

A look into the philosophy of Ubisoft’s long-running franchise.

—————-

Video games have become one of our most influential, popular, and creative forms of media. Last year, the industry generated almost $150 billion in revenue worldwide, rivaling books and films and dwarfing music.

Gamers spend over three billion hours a week in the virtual worlds of their choosing. And more so than other contemporary forms of media, video games explore the themes of freedom and personal agency, allowing players to go where they want and do what they please — as long as they’re prepared to bear the consequences. Two of the three best selling video games of all time are Grand Theft Auto 5 and Minecraft. They’re polar opposites in terms of violence and target audience, but both were designed to offer players the opportunity to make their own destinies.

But it’s the Assassin’s Creed series, published by Ubisoft, that puts the conflict between liberty and authority at the center of its plots, its characters, and the alternate history in which the games are set. Reason takes a look at the series’ narrative merits, and at the titular creed.

Written and edited by Ian Keyser. Read by Andrew Heaton. Gameplay footage by Sean Keyser.

“Plague” by Kai Engel is used under CC BY 4.0.

February 18, 2018

Nitay Arbel on Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life

Filed under: Books, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

A guest post at According to Hoyt:

Those looking for an ‘alt-right’ manifesto will be sorely disappointed. Peterson actually says explicitly that on some economic issues (e.g., income disparity) he leans somewhat left, and elsewhere in the book laments that the cultural demonization of anything masculine is (as he describes it) causing a backlash, in terms of a resurgence in popularity of European parties he calls ‘far right’ or even ‘fascist’. (For Trump, to be clear, he uses the term ‘populist’, which undeniably fits.)

Nor will you find a camouflaged Christian revivalist tract here, as some claim. To be sure, Peterson heavily draws on the Bible and particularly on the Christian New Testament for quotes, but there are plenty of references to Eastern religious philosophies as well, particularly Taoism (‘yang vs. yin’, which here becomes ‘order vs. chaos’) and classical Buddhism (the concept that life is suffering). Among Christian theologians, Kierkegaard’s “act of faith” comes up repeatedly. During an interview, he was asked point-blank “Are you a Christian, and do you believe in G-d?” His intriguing answer: “I think the proper response to that is No, but I’m afraid He might exist.”

Nor is it some sort of “EST”-type (quasi-)cult manual, with Peterson setting himself up as a guru.

Moreover, it does not purport to be a reasoned scholarly tome of conservative philosophy. This is where Peter Hitchens (brother of the late Christopher) gets a little dyspeptic in his review in The Spectator, as he found it wanting there. http://archive.is/4eQIE (h/t: masgramondou)

David Solway, in his much more sympathetic article on PJMedia, hits the nail on the head, I believe. https://pjmedia.com/trending/jordan-peterson-phenomenon/ Like Solway, I find it hard to identify a single new idea in the book — pretty much everything Peterson says would be familiar to those of us who have been reared on Scripture and the Great Books.

But we have reached the level of intellectual corruption where, as George Orwell put it, the first duty of any thinking person is the restatement of the obvious. And that, Peterson does very well indeed. The book is a coherent whole, an engaging read, yea even a compelling ‘recap’ to the well-read. Peterson makes his discourse more engaging through extensive illustrations from psychological research, his own clinical practice, neuroscience, and his own life experience. Most importantly, it will bring wisdom of the ages (and of rational-empirical thinking) to a millennial generation drowning in derp and denial of objective reality. To those who, if you will pardon me the phrase, “know not the gods of the copybook headings”.

I just finished reading the book myself, and I largely agree with this summary.

January 30, 2018

The Three Teachings – Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism l HISTORY OF CHINA

Filed under: China, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

IT’S HISTORY
Published on 1 Aug 2015

The Three Teachings Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism have been a backbone of Chinese society and culture since the bronze age. The Three teachings are still intertwined strongly with today’s China. There are different interpretations to China’s chore faiths. Over time, different dynasties favoured different faiths, if only to define themselves against their predecessor. Ultimately though, its all about the philosophy of combining spirituality with every day life. All about the Three Teachings now on IT’S HISTORY.

January 29, 2018

“… those I know in the alt-right crowd dislike [Jordan Peterson] more than the honest progressives I know”

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Zachary Slayback tries to discover why so many intellectuals dislike Canadian psychologist Jordan B. Peterson:

I’ve spent the last few years thinking about how to upend higher education and have worked with some leading entrepreneurs and thinkers in this space. Continually, we come back to the question of liberal arts education and its value (remember, I studied philosophy!). Some people are too quick to dismiss liberal arts education as useless and not worth the time. Instead, they insist on purely vocational education. Yet many of the most successful and happiest individuals I know are widely read (rarely because of their college courses), can discuss ideas from Aristotle to Jung to Jacobs with you, and love the idea of entertaining big ideas.

I visited Peterson’s lectures and found them to be nuanced, intricate, and to jump well between clinical experience, psychological research (most of which was well-validated, hard to do in psychology), and Jungian myth interpretation. When he released his Bible lecture series, I found myself, for the first time since I was a child, intimately listening about the ideas that go into religion and how these ideas surface elsewhere in the culture. More than a decade of skepticism towards religious texts due to their shallow readings and uses for the Joel Osteens of the world melted away.

His lectures rarely touch on politics in any capacity. When it gets brought up, he’s quick to note that he does not oppose calling trans individuals by their pronouns but that he opposes having his language dictated by a central political committee. This seems commonsensical to me. Part of what made the American and Canadian traditions so egalitarian is their rejection of forced speech and titles.

And for those who listen to Peterson, he bridges any kind of ideological gap (in fact, those I know in the alt-right crowd dislike him more than the honest progressives I know). Peterson’s worldview is a classical liberal rejection of collectivism (an ideology that killed more than 50 million people in the 20th century alone) while simultaneously not falling into an atomized view of the individual relative to his culture.

Just last week, I met with an acquaintance in San Francisco, the Mecca of American political correctness, who described herself as a “liberal democrat type,” who had listened to and met Peterson at a company event. She admitted that she couldn’t read into his politics and found his talk compelling about the nature of the world, men in it today, and why people like Peterson must appeal to so many people outside the San Francisco and Washington DC bubbles. She was explicit in saying that she was neither a libertarian nor a conservative and still Peterson motivated her to introspect, read into Jungian archetypes, and better understand the culture that shapes the world.

She’s not alone. I regularly speak to friends and acquaintances from across the political spectrum who find value in Peterson’s talks. These are people years out of college (or who never went) who now pick up classics like Dostoyevsky, Jung, Neumann, and even the Bible with a critical intellectual lens. Peterson regularly talks about and shares letters from fans who admit that his moralistic talks inspired them to pull themselves together and “sort themselves out” by figuring out what they want from life and pursuing that. r/JordanPeterson (yes, he has his own subreddit) is filled to the brim with stories of people saying how Peterson helped them get control of their lives and navigate the world.

I’ve bought but not yet read Peterson’s recent book, 12 Rules for Life. It’s not the sort of thing I usually read, so I’m not quite sure what to expect (Indigo says it’ll be delivered tomorrow).

December 7, 2017

Frankenstein: Radical Alienation – Extra Sci Fi – #6

Filed under: Books, History, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 5 Dec 2017

What draws us to Frankenstein, and to sci fi as a whole? As the novel wraps up and our time with its characters draws to an end, Mary Shelley lays out the final theme which shaped the identity of science fiction as a genre: radical alienation and the search for a place to belong.

November 29, 2017

Frankenstein: Paradise Lost – Extra Sci Fi – #5

Filed under: Books, History, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 28 Nov 2017

Paradise Lost told the story of Satan, a creation who rejected his creator just like Frankenstein’s monster did. But even Satan had a loving creator, beauty, and friends. The monster had nothing, and his life in Mary Shelley’s eyes was not a horror story, but a tragedy.

November 17, 2017

QotD: Karl Marx and relativism

Filed under: Economics, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The most notable philosopher in this tradition was, of course, Karl Marx. He argued that the values of any civilisation — prior, at least, to the socialist culmination — are determined by its mode of production. He says:

    In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist. The same men who establish their social relations in conformity with the material productivity, produce also principles, ideas, and categories, in conformity with their social relations. Thus the ideas, these categories, are as little eternal as the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products.

This is a radically subversive claim. It allows any institution, any custom, any set of beliefs — no matter how obviously right or true they might appear — to be dismissed as “ideology” or “false consciousness”. Let this claim be accepted, and our own claims about the naturalness of market behaviour falls to the ground.

With the remaining exception of North Korea and perhaps too of Cuba, the Marxist political experiments of the twentieth century have all long since collapsed, and, bearing in mind their known record of mass-murder and impoverishment, there are few who will admit to regretting their collapse. But Marxism as a critique of the existing order and as a theory of social change, remains alive and well in the universities. In its reformulation by Gramsci, as further developed by Althusser and Foucault among others, it may be called the dominant ideology of our age. Its hold on the English-speaking world has been noted by both conservative and libertarian writers, and is subject to an increasingly lively debate.

Sean Gabb, “Market Behaviour in the Ancient World: An Overview of the Debate”, 2008-05.

November 14, 2017

Paradise, the Fall, and the Second Coming … Marxist style

Filed under: Politics, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Sarah Hoyt draws a few parallels between traditional Christian beliefs and modern-day progressive ones:

First, I’m going to say that this is to an extent the result of self-selection that has nothing to do with politics.

The left has a narrative that is a just so story. It is, as was pointed out here, in the comments, a Christian heresy, but one that caters to fake “rationalism.” What I mean is that the narrative of the leftist/communist/socialist story includes all the comforting high points of Christianity but avoids the opprobrium of “superstition” cast by enlightenment onto traditional Christianity.

Leftism, whatever they call it, has its roots in Marxism, and Marxism offers a comforting view of paradise (primitive times, when property was communal and blah blah blah. If the flavor is feminist, it was communal property and ruling matriarchs) fall (we discovered something that changed us. These days it’s fashionable in academic circles to blame agriculture, which apparently was no good, very bad, terrible for us, even though, you know, it allowed us to colonize the Earth and have a vast and varied population. In the seventies it was war. There are as many candidates for the liberal sin that caused human fall, as there is for the Christian sin, and honestly, none of them make a heck of a lot of sense) and redemption (here it’s different from Christian redemption, where each individual redeems himself, but the species can’t be redeemed till the second coming. Um… scratch that. Perhaps not that different. It is assumed that the evils of the human species are because we are not designed to live in “capitalism” which these dodos seem to think is any kind of trade or hierarchy. They actually do call monarchies “capitalist” even absolute monarchies. And because we are distorted and made “evil” by this structure, when the communist state withers away into a perfect classless, communal society, we’ll be redeemed, as surely as by the second coming. Frankly, at least the second coming is more plausible from a scientific point of view. At least it doesn’t require a bloated, totalitarian state to behave in ways that no totalitarian, bloated state ever behaved. And while our species might have no experience of the Son of the Creator returning again in full glory this time to rule over us, we do have endless experience of totalitarian states.)

However, all of this mystical belief is dressed up in “science.” History is taught with the idea that it has an arrow and the arrow leads inevitably to collectivism, and because they only teach select portions of history, the poor kids are convinced of it.

This is partly what I meant by self-selected. The people who tend to gravitate left, PARTICULARLY those older than say 25, are the GOOD kids. This is something that is rarely appreciated, and poor things, they view themselves as daring rebels. It’s sort of pathetic, actually. (Having grown up in a village, I’ve had a great chance to observe human nature, and one of the inevitable funny twists of the human mind is that the most flexible of humans like to think themselves steadfast and inflexible. The kindest flatter themselves they’re cruel. Meek women think they’re termagants. I’m not sure why, really. It just seems to be an invariable part of the human “package.”)

They’re the people who went to school and listened really well, and answered what the teachers wanted to hear. They’re the ones who internalized lessons, and explanations, and the ones who want to have a system in which to integrate everything they learn. Everything has to “fit” in their world view.

I kind of understand that because I too like “grand unified theories.” It’s just that after the age of fourteen, I started discovery too many things that didn’t fit anything they’d taught me.

November 6, 2017

QotD: Bud Grant’s football philosophy

Filed under: Football, Quotations, Sports, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… you have to remember one thing: Football is entertainment; it’s not life or death. Once the game is over, you’re already talking about next year and the draft. It’s just entertainment. It’s like going to a play: When it’s over, you walk out the door and it’s over. There are no residuals to it. You’ve got to start all over again. If winning or losing is going to define your life, you’re on a rough road.

Bud Grant, quoted in “‘If Winning or Losing Is Going to Define You, You’re on a Rough Road'”, The MMQB with Peter King, 2016-02-01.

September 16, 2017

Moral and philosophical conflict in Wilhelmine Germany

Filed under: Germany, History, Politics, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At Samizdata, Paul Marks looks at intra-German conflicts that were played out during and after the First World War:

The conflict between German Generals Falkenhayn and Ludendorff was over a lot more than military policy – indeed Falkenhayn made some horrible mistakes in military tactics, for example allowing himself to be pushed into continuing the Verdun offensive much longer than he intended (at least much longer than he later claimed had been his original intention), and insisting that General Fritz Von Below recapture any position he lost to the British in the Somme offensive – an order that led to terrible German casualties.

The conflict may have been presented as a military one (between the “Westerner” Falkenhayn and the “Easterner” Lundendorff ) over whether to concentrate German military resources in the West or the East – but it was really a lot more than a dispute over military policy. Nor was it really a dispute over the form of government – as neither Falkenhayn or Ludendorff was a democrat. It was fundamentally a MORAL (ethical) dispute.

General Lundendorff had absorbed (even more than Kaiser Wilhelm II had) the moral relativism and historicism that had become fashionable in the German elite in the decades running up to the First World War – ideas that can be traced all the way back to (in their different ways) such philosophers as Hegel and (far more) Fichte, whereas General Falkenhayn still clung to concepts of universal justice (morality) and rejected such things as the extermination or enslavement of whole races, and the destruction of historic civilisations such as that of Russia. Lundendorff, and those who thought like him, regarded Falkenhayn as hopelessly reactionary – for example thinking in terms of making peace with Russia on terms favourable to Germany, rather than destroying Russia and using the population as slaves. In the Middle East Falkenhayn came to hear of the Ottoman Turk plan to destroy the Jews (as the Armenian Christians had been destroyed), and he was horrified by the plan and worked to frustrate it. Advanced and Progressive thinkers, such as Ludnedorff, had great contempt for Reactionaries such as Falkenhayn who did not realise that ideas of universal justice and personal honour were “myths” only believed in by silly schoolgirls. Falkenhayn even took Christianity seriously, to Lundendorff this was clearly the mark of an inferior and uneducated mind. And Falkenhayn, for his part, came to think that his country (the Germany that he so loved) was under the influence of monsters – although while their plans to exterminate or enslave whole races and to control (in utter tyranny) every aspect of peacetime (not just wartime) life remained theoretical, he never had to make the final break.

The conflict continued into the next generation. Famously Admiral Canaris (head of German military intelligence) became an enemy of the National Socialists – not because he was a believer in a democratic form of government, but because he believed that the Nazis were a moral outrage violating the most basic principles of universal truth and justice. But the point of view in Germany opposed to men such as Admiral Canaris. the point of view that made itself felt in such things as the German Declaration of War upon France in 1914 – a pack of lies, and (perhaps more importantly) a deliberately OBVIOUS pack of lies (in order to make a philosophical point – as the President of France, a philosopher, noticed at once), had long had nothing but contempt for the very idea of universal objective truth and justice.

I’d always thought that the rise of Fascism and Communism in the 1920s was primarily due to the political chaos and material privations suffered by German citizens through the latter stages of WW1 and continuing through the Versailles Treaty negotiations. Paul shows that the groundwork for both strains of totalitarian thought were already well underway even before the catastrophe of 1914. Of course, as I think I illustrated in the origins of WW1 posts, nothing about the situation in Europe at that time was simple or straight-forward.

August 24, 2017

The Story of Western Philosophy

Filed under: Education, Europe, Greece, History, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Published on 26 May 2017

Relevant mystery link: https://youtu.be/myc7eHGg5y4
If you notice any factual errors in this week’s video, please just bear in mind that life is ultimately meaningless in the first place.

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