Humanities Seminar Notes

University Life in the Good Old Days!

2012-01-06T07:12:00.002-05:00

What was it like to be at a university, when universities were still a new idea? The world's first university was up and running by 1088 A.D. in Bologna, Italy. How was it organized?

The early universities were very loose in structure, compared with the institutions of later eras. The professors who taught there were very much "freelance" businessmen. If you wanted to teach, you simply posted a notice about when and where you would be lecturing, and what the topic of your lecture was. Students didn't pay the university, but rather they paid each professor individually. A professor could get a higher price for his lectures if he had the reputation of being a good teacher. What helped him build that reputation? If his students could pass the comprehensive examinations given by the university. In such as a system, there was a great deal of freedom for both professors and students.

Eventually, both groups realized that they had something to gain by uniting. The professors formed a guild, much as other Medieval tradesmen (bakers and cobblers, for example) did. Students formed unions. The guild for professors was called a collegium - the origin of our words 'college' and 'colleague'. The guild helped to stabilize prices and set standards for what students could expect.

The student unions found that they could bargain lecture prices downwards when they bargained as a group: a negotiating tactic which has many parallels. The students would also boycott a certain professor's lectures if his teaching was found to be defective. The student body was self-governing: they wrote and enforced their own rules upon their fellow students.

The first generation of universities were independent of both ecclesiastical authority and the power of nobles. They were organized and operated by laymen - by ordinary Christians, not employees of the church. This led to a certain amount of speculative freedom in theology: professors taught students from the text of Scripture - Hebrew and Greek - instead of from the church's interpretation of Scripture. In areas of politics, too, there was a chance to discuss divergent views.

Eventually, however, the nature of the universities would change. Their success led to growing numbers of students, and more universities, and the demand for more facilities. To fund the infrastructure - libraries, dormitories, lecture halls, cafeterias - required more funding than the freelance structure could provide, and so the universities looked for sponsors with deep pockets. Most universities would end up being funded either by local nobility, or by the church. If funded by regional aristocrats, the political teachings of the university might be somewhat self-conscious in light of the view of the local duke, earl, or baron. If funded by the church, the theology department might keep its speculations a bit more tame.

The university movement started in Bologna, and spread throughout Europe in a couple of centuries. A notable exception was Spain - of which Portugal was still a part - which lagged behind the rest of the continent in terms of cultural development. It was still recovering from the damage of several centuries of occupation by Islamic armies.

The university of Paris is often considered the high point of Medieval academic life. Founded by William of Champeaux and Abelard of Brittany around 1170 A.D., it is an example of the more developed stage of the university. Although William and Abelard are listed as the 'founders' of the university, this is not entirely clear; like Bologna, the university in Paris was formed in part by merging several older schools. In any case, it soon developed the more formalized structure typical of the university after its founding phase. The teaching faculty - the term magister was retained - was no longer purely freelance, but rather had to be licensed to teach by the university. One the one hand, this helped to ensure quality; on the other hand, it could generate a limiting force on academic freedom. The university in Paris was organized around four faculties: theology, cannon law, medicine, and the arts. 'Cannon law' is the body of regulations applying to those who work for the church. 'The arts' - or 'the liberal arts' as we now call them - includes disciplines such as mathematics and physics.

The teaching methods of the university at this stage consisted of two main practices. The first was dictation and lecture. The printing press, and the revolutionary changes it would bring into intellectual life, had not yet been invented. (Gutenberg would do that in the 1400's.) Student brought large quantities of blank paper with them to lectures, sometime bound into a book form, other times as loose sheets. The professor would read very slowly a text - perhaps a couple paragraphs of Aristotle or Cicero - and the students would copy exactly what he said (this was the 'dictation'). After the students had captured the text, the professor would then go on to deliver what we would consider a normal university lecture about those texts, taking questions at the end. Over the course of several years at the university, a student would create for himself several books this way: the collected dictations and lecture notes. Since it was impossible to buy textbooks (no printing press!), students literally had to make their own.

The second teaching method which dominated at the universities was debate. This was crucial, not only to learning the subject matter at hand, but also to forming the creative intellects which would make the major scientific discoveries of the Middle Ages. A debate would begin with a question posed. Often it was in the form of a statement, and the implied question following it was "is this true or not?" Students were assigned to prepare evidence for the debate, and the professors acted as umpires or referees. A student, or team of students, on one side of the question would offer data to support the statement - quotes drawn from pagan philosophers, from Holy Scripture, and from the church fathers; evidence could also be based on original reasoning from the students. On the other side of the question, the same procedure was followed: students presented data to attempt to prove the statement false. The professors judged the work according to the quality of the argumentation. After such a debate, students then changed sides, and were required to argue in favor of the other view - thus students became thoroughly familiar with both sides of the argument. This method was used in teaching all subjects.

It can be seen how this type of instruction - requiring students to become familiar with both sides of a dispute, encouraging them to develop sophisticated logic to out-maneuver the students on the other side of the debate, and allowing them to use their own original reasoning in addition to the data found in texts - created several generations of shrewd and clever mathematicians, astronomers, philosophers, physicists, and theologians. The large amount of intellectual creativity generated during the Middle Ages was responsible for advances and progress in various academic disciplines. The relative lack of progress made in subsequent times (during the Renaissance) was hidden by the fact that the Renaissance would claim as its own many of the intellectual creations properly belonging to the Middle Ages.

Socrates Exits

2011-12-20T08:52:00.002-05:00

Among the earliest dialogues written by Plato are four which report the arrest, trial, and execution of Socrates. Although they are more historical than some of Plato's later dialogues, and give up a relatively life-like impression of Socrates, we are hesitant to rely on their details for factual history. And although they give us good examples of characteristically Socratic argumentation, their philosophical valued is often sadly overshadowed by the drama surrounding the death of Socrates.

The dialogue called 'Euthyphro' recounts a discussion about the exact definition of 'piety' - placing the matter of precise definitions in the spotlight, typical for Socratic thought, and a great contribution to the history of philosophy. Piety is central to the narrative across the four dialogues, because one of the charges brought against Socrates, at least in Plato's version of the trial, is impiety.

Second in the series is the 'Apology' - a defense speech made by Socrates at his trial. Here the dramatic nearly drowns the philosophical. Important issues are raised, but the dialogue is written in such a way that one wonders if Plato's main purpose was to create sympathy for Socrates, rather than ponder abstractions. The defense is not much of a defense; Socrates continues his habit of critiquing or even insulting certain prominent Athenians, even some who are part of his jury. One may speculate that Socrates wanted to be convicted. There are good examples of ironic 'Socratic ignorance' - a sort of epistemological humility - and he accuses Athenians of loving money more than justice. He denies the charge of impiety, points to the lack of any monetary gain from his activities, claims that he's being accused because he exposes the ignorance of others, shows that he lacks any motive for the additional charge of corrupting his fellow citizens, and - intriguingly - speculates that the charges brought against him may be a cover-up. Indirectly and implicitly, questions are raised about the democratic government of Athens: can democracy be so good, if it yields the manipulated verdict for Socrates? What might be covered up? This dialogue has been fuel for the view a Socrates as a martyr for the cause of free speech, and for comparison with the trial of Jesus.

After his trial, Socrates awaits his execution in jail, which provides the setting for the dialogue called 'Crito' - friends offer Socrates a chance to escape from prison and live elsewhere, but he declines, not wanting to live the rest of his life as a fugitive. The dialogue wrestles with the tension between deontological and teleological ethics, with definition of justice, and with the search for a rationalist foundation for ethics. Several propositions contain embryonic forms of a social contract theory. Socrates also advances a paternalistic view of government. By declining the offer of escape, Socrates effectively chooses death a second time - the first time having been his calculated behavior at his trial - and again invites comparison with Jesus. The dialogues is structured nicely, inasmuch as one can list precisely the arguments given for and against the notion that Socrates should escape.

Finally, the dialogue entitled 'Phaedo' gives us a discussion of the immortality of the soul, as Socrates faces his death. Here again the argumentation is definable, with four separate arguments for immortality.

These dialogues, taken as a group, do indeed offer some insight into the specific nature of Socratic philosophizing, and raise powerful questions; the delivery is marred, however, by Plato's tendency toward drama. Later Platonic dialogues tend to be more sober, less popular, and deliver a keener, more intelligent, philosophy.

A Better Way

2011-12-14T08:47:00.002-05:00

Although old textbooks still sometimes view feudalism in bad light, current scholars have come to see how it provided a better societal structure than either the Roman Empire which preceded it, or the Renaissance absolutism which followed it. Feudal structures were decentralized and therefore more flexible and responsive to local conditions; they involved mutual obligation rather than autocratic authority, allowed for negotiated outcomes rather than arbitrary decrees. Historian Irma Simonton Black writes that

In the High Middle Ages, the feudal system worked like this. A great and powerful lord loaned to one of his noble followers a tract of land to plant and to use. The follower, or vassal, had to pay for the use of the land by furnishing fighting men when his lord needed them. He promised loyalty by kneeling and placing his hands between those of the lord. The vassal's chief service was to fight for his lord, but in peacetime he owed other services. Usually he attended his lord's court for a certain time each year. And he had to make a gift of money on special occasions such as the marriage of the lord's oldest daughter, or the coming of age of the lord's oldest son.

Almost every lord was a vassal, and almost every vassal was a lord. There was only one person in the entire nation who was not under a lord: the king or queen. But even the king or queen did not have absolute authority; rather, he or she had to negotiate with lords, or barons, of the nation. This prevented the despotic imperialism of Roman Empire from returning, and prevented the absolutism of later ages from starting. Most vassals were also lords: as they had pledged to help their lord, so their vassals had pledged to help them. Only the serfs had no vassals below them:

Even the greatest lords were vassals of the king, who was in theory the owner of all the land in the kingdom. The whole system was supposed to be an elaborate network leading to the king. But in practice, the king was very often at the mercy of his powerful vassals, who had their own armies an courts to compete with his.

To maximize freedom, it was necessary that the king or queen not be high above everyone else in the society; otherwise, the royal ruler would be tempted into autocracy. The existence of powerful nobles provided a sort of check and balance, or a division of powers.

A vassal inherited his his right to use land from his father, and in turn he passed it on to his oldest son. In time, noble families forgot that their land had originally been loaned to them by their lord. They held control over their enormous holdings and administered them as their own.

Naturally, most of the economy revolved around agriculture. Although there were trades, like working with wood and metal, and even banking systems, most people were involved in farming. Most of the farming was done by serfs:

The main duty of a serf was to help his fellows take care of the noble's broad fields. In addition, nobles allowed their serfs little strips of land to plant for themselves. On this they raised food for themselves and their families, and perhaps a little extra to sell.

Although serfs were economically dependent upon, and bound to, their lords, the ability to raise extra crops to sell provided a measure of autonomy; the ability to raise crops to feed their families provided a measure of motivation. This prevented Medieval Europe from facing some of the agricultural problems which had faced the Roman Empire.

Bush on Islam

2011-10-11T20:02:00.003-04:00

In the days following the attacks of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush gave a number of important speeches. His words would set the tone for America's response to terrorists. In particular, he gave focus to a view of Islam as a world religion:

The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That's not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don't represent peace. They represent evil and war. When we think of Islam, we think of a faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world. Billions of people find comfort and solace and peace.

President Bush's words shocked many. Not only Americans, but all around the world, people had associated Islam with violence and terror. Bush was challenging people to acknowledge the peaceful face of Islam, and to acknowledge the existence of peaceful and moderate Muslims.

America counts millions of Muslims amongst our citizens, and Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country. Muslims are doctors, lawyers, law professors, members of the military, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, moms and dads. And they need to be treated with respect.

In the weeks after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Bush went on to say that

the terrorists are traitors to their own faith, trying, in effect, to hijack Islam itself.

These statements by the President constitute an analysis of a religious faith, and, like any analysis, must ultimately be subject to an objective judgment which will show it to be true or false. Is President Bush correct in saying that Islam

teaches the value and the importance of charity, mercy, and peace.

or when he says that

All Americans must recognize that the face of terror is not the true face of Islam. Islam is a faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world. It's a faith that has made brothers and sisters of every race. It's faith based upon love, not hate.

and continuing to generalize that Islam is a religion of peace?

If President Bush is correct, then it would mean that not only are there moderate and peaceful Muslims in the United States, which we already know, but that there might be moderate and peaceful Muslims in other nations - and there are. But are there enough of them to make a significant political difference? Are there enough of them to throw off the harsh dictatorships which have oppressed nations in the Middle East for the last one thousand years? This question takes the form, in the year 2011, of the so-called 'Arab Spring' - the hint that individual freedom might overthrow the orthodox Islam of the region: that personal liberty might undermine the rigid control imposed by those Muslims who adhere to the teachings of the Qur'an.

Could it be that nominal Muslims will generate a new wave of freedom and liberty in the Middle East? We must watch and wait to learn the answer.

Why the Hate?

2011-04-21T10:08:00.007-04:00

The twentieth century was by far the bloodiest century in the history of the human race. (Let's hope that the twenty-first century is better!) What motivated the bloodshed of World War One, World War Two, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, not to mention the Spanish Civil War, and dozens of other armed conflicts? Historians identify a number of causes: nationalism, socialism, communism, and industrialism. (My hypothesis is that all wars are fought over three things: land, money, and power.) Whichever cause you choose from this list, they all have a common thread: they are all ideologies or motives which ignore one or more essential parts of human nature, and which deny or ignore higher sources of meaning. Despite sometimes high-sounding rhetoric or propaganda, these ideologies all flirt with nihilism. Dinesh D'Souza writes

in the past hundred years or so, the most powerful atheist regimes — Communist Russia, Communist China, and Nazi Germany — have wiped out people in astronomical numbers. Stalin was responsible for around twenty million deaths, produced through mass slayings, forced labor camps, show trials followed by firing squads, population relocation and starvation, and so on. Jung Chang and Jon Halli day's authoritative recent study Mao: The Unknown Story attributes to Mao Zedong's regime a staggering seventy million deaths. Some China scholars think Chang and Halli day's numbers are a bit high, but the authors present convincing evidence that Mao's atheist regime was the most murderous in world history. Stalin's and Mao's killings — unlike those of, say, the Crusades or the Thirty Years' War — were done in peacetime and were performed on their fellow countrymen. Hitler comes in a distant third with around ten million murders, six million of them Jews.

D'Souza does well to remind us that Naziism systematically removed all traces of religion from German cultural life: buildings that had been churches were used as propaganda centers for the Party; it was forbidden to read from the New Testament aloud in public; and symbols such as crosses were removed and replaced with swastikas. Hitler could not tolerate the idea that a Jewish Rabbi would provide benefits to all mankind by embracing the pacifism and non-violence which Hitler hated. The Nazis worked to remove every trace of Christianity from German life: they knew that Christians would not fit well into their plans to dominate the world and carry out genocides. The few remaining Christians were forced into hiding, where they organized underground resistance movements which would eventually save the lives of thousands of Jews by smuggling them out of Germany to safety and freedom. They also organized assassination attempts on Hitler.

So far, I haven't even counted the assassinations and slayings ordered by other Soviet dictators like Lenin, Khrushchev, Breszhnev, and so on. Nor have I included a host of "lesser" atheist tyrants: Pol Pot, Enver Hoxha, Nicolae Ceaucescu, Fidel Castro, Kim Jong-il. Even these "minor league" despots killed a lot of people. Consider Pol Pot, who was the leader of the Khmer Rouge, the Communist Party faction that rule Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Within this four-year period Pol Pot and his revolutionary ideologues engaged in the systematic mass relocations and killings that eliminated approximately one-fifth of the Cambodian population, an estimated 1.5 to 2 million people. In fact, Pol Pot killed a larger percentage of his countrymen than Stalin and Mao killed of theirs. Even so, focusing only on the big three - Stalin, Hitler, and Mao - we have to recognize that atheist regimes have in a single century murdered more than one hundred million people.

The millions of deaths in the twentieth century - mankind's bloodiest century - were fueled by various ideologies which demanded that humans pay ultimate allegiance to political formulations and leaders. Such belief systems leave no room for devotion to any type of God. Nationalism demands loyalty to the state; communism and socialism demand loyalty to the collective plan; industrialism demand loyalty to financial profit. Anyone who would give loyalty to God - and to His ideals of peace and non-violence - would run afoul of the ideologies which created the most lethal wars in the history of the world.

Religion-inspired killing simply cannot compete with the murders perpetrated by atheist regimes. I recognize that population levels were much lower in the past, and that it’s much easier to kill people today with sophisticated weapons than it was in previous centuries to kill with swords and arrows. Even taking higher populations into account, atheist violence surpasses religious violence by staggering proportions. Here is a rough calculation. The world’s population rose from around 500 million in 1450 A.D. to 2.5 billion in 1950, a fivefold increase. Taken together, the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the witch burnings killed approximately 200,000 people. Adjusting for the increase in population, that’s the equivalent of one million deaths today. Even so, these deaths caused by Christian rulers over a five-hundred-year period amount to only 1 percent of the deaths caused by Stalin, Hitler, and Mao in the space of a few decades.

Communism, whether the Leninist-Stalinist version found in the old Soviet Union, or Mao's version in China, or Castro's version in Cuba, or Pol Pot's version in Cambodia, is explicitly and essentially opposed to the freedom of religion. And in each case, mass killing was the result of this attempt to exterminate man's natural desire to think about the concept of God.

Can anyone seriously deny that Communism was an atheist ideology? Communism calls for the elimination of the exploiting class, it extols violence as a way to social progress, and it calls for using any means necessary to achieve the atheist utopia. Not only was Marx an atheist, but atheism was also a central part of the Marxist doctrine. Atheism became a central component of the Soviet Union's official ideology, it is still the official doctrine of China, and Stalin and Mao enforced atheist policies by systematically closing churches and murdering priests and religious believers. All Communist regimes have been strongly anti-religious, suggesting that their atheism is intrinsic rather than incidental to their ideology.

Although the Nazis fought against the Soviet Union, and directed their propaganda against various forms of Communism, they shared the Communist hatred of religion.

Nazism was a secular, anti-religious philosophy that, strangely enough, had a lot in common with Communism. While the Communists wanted to empower the proletariat, the Nazis wanted to empower a master race. For the Communists the enemy was the capitalist class; for the Nazis the enemy was the Jews and other races deemed inferior. The Communists and the Nazis treated the Christian churches as obstacles and enemies. Both groups proclaimed that they were engaging in revolutionary action in order to create a new type of human being and a new social order freed from the shackles of traditional religion and traditional morality.

During the nineteenth century, the concept of "social Darwinism" led to the ruthlessness that would characterize some elements of the next century. In order to regard humans as expendable at the whim of circumstances beyond their control, it was necessary for social Darwinists like Hitler to reject any notion of a Higher Power, e.g. God, who would endow humans with any innate dignity or value.

If Nazism represented the culmination of anything, it was that of the nineteenth-century and early twentieth- century ideology of social Darwinism. As historian Richard Weikart documents, both Hitler and Himmler were admirers of Darwin and often spoke of their role as enacting a "law of nature" that guaranteed the "elimination of the unfit." Weikart argues that Hitler himself "drew upon a bountiful fund of social Darwinist thought to construct his own racist philosophy" and concludes that while Darwinism is not a "sufficient" intellectual explanation for Nazism, it is a "necessary" one. Without Darwinism, there might not have been Nazism.

What lesson can the twenty-first century learn, in order to avoid mass murder and genocide?

Whatever the cause for why atheist regimes do what they do, the indisputable fact is that all the religions of the world put together have in three thousand years not managed to kill anywhere near the number of people killed in the name of atheism in the past few decades. It's time to abandon the mindlessly repeated mantra that religious belief has been the main source of human conflict and violence. Atheism, not religion, is responsible for the worst mass murders of history.

Disproportionate Response?

2011-04-11T08:40:00.002-04:00

Recent event surrounding the alleged burning of a Qur'an (Koran) by an American political activist in Florida illustrate the dynamics of response to various cultural stimuli.

Terry Jones burned a copy of the Islamic text as a political statement. Debate continues about whether his action was good or evil. In either case, however, his deed falls into a context of public burning: in Islamic countries, flags and Bibles are often publicly burned as an expression of intense hatred toward other cultures. America and Europe have long chosen the tactic of not reacting, or under-reacting, to this hatred. We do see or hear protest or outcry every time an American flag is burned in a Muslim nation, or when a Bible is defaced, desecrated, or otherwise dishonored. The non-Islamic world sees such actions as expression of thought, which - however distasteful - our notion of freedom allows.

By contrast, one single instance of a burning Qur'an is met with an amazing level of response in the Islamic nations. Dozens of people were killed in rioting, and Hamid Karzai demanded that the U.S. government punish Terry Jones for exercising his symbolic freedom of speech. Indeed, Karzai went to great efforts to ensure that his Afghani subjects were informed, in detail, about both the burning and Karai's response to it. (Whether Karzai acted out of Islamic piety or personal political calculation remains an open question.)

As the Special Assistant to the President and White House Communications Director noted, many Muslims

believe beheading or stoning is the right response to an insult to Islam. And not only that.

Residents of Islamic nations who embrace Christianity face

the death penalty for apostasy and was forced to flee his own country. In some Muslim countries, death is the prescribed punishment for Muslims who convert, for Christians who seek converts and for any who insult Islam.

Remember that "insult" here includes political cartoons in newspapers, or making of documentary films about Islamic culture's treatment of women. Specifically, the former refers to Danish sketches made in 2005 (an order was given for the artist to be executed by assassins); the latter refers to the murder of artist and filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004. In these cases, the principle is that Islamic culture sees killing as an appropriate response to words or symbolic actions, while non-Islamic cultures respond to words and symbolic actions with opposing words and symbolic actions. The one response is disproportionate, the other proportionate and in kind.

Stoning is also seen as proper punishment for women who commit adultery. In Pakistan recently, the governor of Punjab and the Cabinet minister for religious minorities, both Catholics, were assassinated. Why? Both had opposed a law under which a Christian woman had been sentenced to death after some farmhands accused her of blasphemy. The governor was murdered by his own bodyguard, who was then hailed by 500 religious scholars who urged all Muslims to boycott the governor’s funeral ceremony, as he had gotten what he deserved. In the last two years, Christians have been burned alive by Muslims in Pakistan, and by Hindu extremists in India. Christian churches have been torched and scores of the faithful massacred on holy days in Iraq and Egypt. Few of these atrocities have received

significant media attention. A second principle comes into play: words and symbolic actions in non-Islamic cultures are scrutinized in the public media, while no questions are raised about the propriety of words or actions in Muslim nations. An American who burns a Qur'an is subject, at the least, to intense analysis and public rebuke, while deaths and death-threats in Islamic nations pass with little notice.

Which brings us to a re-examination of the idea that America can help bring democracy to the Middle East. First, we might ask if this is possible. Second, if it is possible, would these nations use democracy to elect governments which restrict freedom rather than expand it?

American Religion?

2011-03-28T07:17:00.002-04:00

Historians have spent thousands of hours, and gallons of ink, analyzing the religious beliefs of the men who founded the United States of America: from Thomas Jefferson's youthful embrace, and later rejection of, deism to Washington's spiritually-motivated decision to free his slaves; from the traditional Christianity of beer-brewer Samuel Adams to the nontraditional theism of Thomas Paine; from Ben Franklin's abandoning deism to author his own prayer book to the religion of John Adams which sometimes placed more emphasis on the moral than the spiritual.

Although the Founding Fathers disagreed with each other, and historians disagree about what the Founding Fathers meant and believed, one thing is clear: spirituality was central to them as individuals, and to their process as a group in forming the nation via the texts of the last few decades of the 1700's. As Wayne Baker writes:

The one belief that unites our founders is the conviction that religion was the moral backbone of the new republic. Only religion - whatever that religion might be - could get people to rise above their self-interest and become citizens who cared about others.

One the one hand, we might be tempted to express disappointment that the Founding Fathers were often inclined to reduce spirituality to morality: to see religion merely as the path to civil justice. On the other hand, we can be thankful that they saw this clearly - and created the possibility for both liberty and honor.

Badly-Written History

2011-01-13T08:20:00.003-05:00

Sadly, lots of good history is ruined by bad history books. The more interesting the historical topic, the greater the chances that someone has written something rather ill-advised about it. A recent mathematics textbook offered the following sidebar:

Most people have heard of Galileo, a colorful Professor of Mathematics at the University of Pisa. The final part of his career centred on an epic battle with the Spanish Inquisition on the validity of the Copernican view of the solar system.

Read carefully, this paragraph offers a stunning paradox: Galileo, who lived in Italy and never set foot in Spain, could not have had any meaningful interaction with the Spanish Inquisition! The author clearly had some vague notion of a disagreement between Galileo and a religious institution, but failed to check for any real facts.

It is true that Galileo, despite his sincere belief in the Roman Catholic faith, did attack, not the faith, but rather the institution of the church. Despite his attacks on the church, however, Galileo was never jailed, never tortured, never executed. He never received any meaningful consequences for his actions.

The author of the math textbook ruined what could have been an interesting historical sidebar, and instead offers us a comedy of errors.

Parallel Cases of Unintended Consequences

2011-01-12T08:48:00.002-05:00

Sometimes unanticipated consequences are beneficial, as in the case of the medieval policy of setting up large hunting reserves for the nobility, preserving green space, often as parks, throughout England and other places in Europe. Sometimes unforeseen consequences are harmful, such as the Islamic policy of exiling numerous philosophers, writers, and thinkers during the Middle Ages, which led to a decline in scientific and technological advancement in the Middle East regions. A third class of unexpected consequences create the very opposite of the hoped-for effect: policies of the Czarist government of Russia in the late 1800's were designed to prevent any type of rebellion or revolution against the Tsar, but the harshness of these policies in fact fueled the desire for such an uprising.

History is full of unintended consequences; two parallel cases involve efforts to reform an organization which led to the unintended founding of new and different organizations.

In 1517, Martin Luther did not intend to create a new church; rather, his intent was to reform the existing church - to correct some of its errors and problems. The resistance of the existing church led to the formation of what would become the Lutheran church.

Likewise, in 1775, the Founding Fathers of the United States did not begin with the intent to form a new nation; rather, they (George Washington, Ben Franklin, Samuel Adams, etc.) intended merely to procure their legal rights as Englishmen, and obtain their lawful representatives in Parliament and the rights granted to them by the Magna Carta. It was the resistance of the English government which ultimately caused the Americans to for a separate nation.

The events for which Martin Luther and George Washington became famous were, therefore, unintended consequences!

Teddy Roosevelt and the Coin Controversy

2011-01-11T08:16:00.002-05:00

The United States Congress has legislated that the phrase "In God we trust" is the official motto of nation. After voting this into law, it has been re-approved every year, by both Democrats and Republicans. It has appeared on coins and paper money for over a century.

From time to time, various political groups - communists, libertarians, left-wingers, and atheists - have challenged the propriety of the motto, either in the press, or in court. Notice that atheists are here categorized as a political group: in such a circumstance, it is not philosophy which motivates, but public affairs.

Jews, Muslims, Christians, and others have been content with the motto because it is sufficiently generic.

Perhaps a more interesting challenge to the motto came, not from an atheist, but rather from religious Christian who happened also to be the President of the United States. Theodore Roosevelt had long felt that placing God's name on a coin was actually disrespectful to Him, and for two reasons: first, because a coin is the object of greed and materialism; second, because it had led to a number of jokes about politics, money, and banks.

Roosevelt, who had given several speeches urging the American public to read the Bible regularly, saw his opportunity in 1907, when a new coin was being designed. He directed the mint's artist to omit the motto, which had been on coins for over fifty years by that time. Public sentiment, the Congress, and eventually the Supreme Court would uphold the motto, which remains the official expression of the government to this day.

It's Off to Work We Go!

2010-12-17T08:35:00.002-05:00

The tension between the way elitists view work and a more moderate view of work runs through history. The nobles of Athens viewed themselves as superior in all ways to their slaves, and saw this superiority confirmed in the fact that the slaves had to work. Work was one of the worst things that could happen to a person in the minds of the Greek aristocracy of the classical era, and it was a badge of shame.

By contrast, the emerging Judeo-Christian tradition saw something respectable in work. The dignity of every human life lent itself to labor, and human effort dignified the task. Yale's Kenneth Latourette describes the attitude toward work among the monks of the early middle ages:

The Benedictine rule and the many derived from it probably helped to give dignity to labour, including manual labour in the fields. This was in striking contrast with the aristocratic conviction of the servile status of manual work which prevailed in much of ancient society and which was also the attitude of the warriors and non‑monastic ecclesiastics who constituted the upper middle classes of the Middle Ages ... To the monasteries ... was obviously due much clearing of land and improvement in methods of agriculture. In the midst of barbarism, the monasteries were centres of orderly and settled life and examples of the skillful management of the soil. Under the Carolingians monks were assigned the duty of road‑building and road repair. Until the rise of the towns in the eleventh century, they were pioneers in industry and commerce. The shops of the monasteries preserved the industries of Roman times ... The earliest use of marl in improving the soil is attributed to them. The great French monastic orders led in the agricultural colonization of Western Europe. Especially did the Cistercians make their houses centres of agriculture and contribute to improvements in that occupation. With their lay brothers and their hired labourers, they became great landed proprietors. In Hungary and on the German frontier the Cistercians were particularly important in reducing the soil to cultivation and in furthering colonization. In Poland, too, the German monasteries set advanced standards in agriculture and introduced artisans and craftsmen.

In addition to being centers of learning, preserving the intellectual treasures of Greek and Roman civilization, the monasteries were also centers of work, and of giving a value and meaning to work. Here we see the emergence of notions which speak indirectly to human equality and human dignity. This might perhaps explain why Europe didn't embrace institutionalized slavery to the extent that other continents did: European culture, and western civilization, could not bring itself to believe that one man was inferior to others merely because he found himself in the role of a manual laborer.

Napoleon's Big Mistake

2010-12-02T08:10:00.002-05:00

The crushing defeat which Napoleon's French army experienced in Russia is legendary: Tolstoy wrote a novel about it; films have been made of it. But exactly how did this loss come about? How did an allegedly "great" military leader like Napoleon end up so badly?

To begin, we need to examine two assumptions, as phrased by Joseph C. Goulden (from the University of Texas):

that he was a consistently brilliant military general who ranks as one of the foremost battlefield commanders in history, and that his most calamitous defeat, in his 1812 campaign in Russia, was chiefly a result of "General Winter," the fierce cold and snow that caught his Grande Armee deep inside Russia, hundreds of miles from home.

Perhaps Napoleon wasn't such an excellent commander, strategist, and tactician; and perhaps the Russian victory wasn't merely due to the weather, but rather to the skills of the Russian military.

Napoleon made basic military blunders in the campaign, chiefly by overextending his lines of supply and not providing the logistics necessary to support his army.

In a fight against lesser opponents, those blunders might not be fatal.

ut the Russian high command contained intellectual generals who studied military history and knew how to apply the lessons learned to the battlefield. The commander in chief, Mikhail Kutnzov, shrewdly chose to avoid a set battle with Napoleon's superior force. Instead, he relied upon a tactic perfected centuries earlier by the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus, who used small unit harassing actions to wear down a larger enemy through attrition. The "Fabian strategy" worked to perfection (and the concept survives today as part of special operations doctrine).

In addition to an intelligent and skillful leadership, the Russian military had another advantage: horses. Dominic Lieven (from the London School of Economics) writes that:

immense herds dwelt on the steppe lands of southern Russia and Siberia,

and

In many years, the greatest hero of the Russian war effort in 1812-1814 was the horse [which] fulfilled the present day functions of the tank, the lorry, the aeroplane and motorized infantry.

Goulden concludes that

Napoleon could not replace the thousands of horses he lost during the campaign; hence Russian light cavalry relentlessly harassed his retreating columns.

A final Russian advantage was in the field of military intelligence:

Another area in which the Russians enjoyed an overwhelming advantage was espionage. Czarist agents in Paris and elsewhere elicited intelligence from many levels of Napoleon's government.

As the tide turned, and Napoleon's advance turned into a retreat, the war became one of attrition:

Once Napoleon was put on the run, he desperately fought major rear-guard battles that further depleted his ranks.The Russians, meanwhile, put together a massive logistics operation - 850 carts daily for food and forage, stretching back hundreds of miles. Czar Nicholas and his advisers made an astute political decision: They were not fighting "France" but Napoleon and his insatiable ambitions. His officers strictly enforced an edict to troops to "preserve the strictest discipline and treat the civilian population well." (One cannot resist comparing this conduct with the Red Army's brutality in the waning days of World War II.)

The Russian army of 1812/1814 understood what the Soviet-Russian army of 1945 did not: raping, torturing, and killing the civilian population, along with stealing their goods, burning their houses, and creating famines by annihilating their farms and food supplies are non-productive ways for occupying soldiers to behave. Even as the Russian army of 1814 crushed Napoleon's ego, it won the respect of the lands through which it fought. By contrast, the Soviet army of 1945 earned the contempt of the world by sadistically mistreating civilians.

The legendary proportions of Napoleon's humiliation could, and have, filled books; but

one statistic suffices:Napoleon's Grande Armee numbered 450,000 soldiers when the campaign began. Only 6,000 returned home.

What Did Adam Smith Believe?

2010-12-01T10:53:00.002-05:00

The personal religious beliefs - which are to be distinguished from the private religious beliefs, if any - of Adam Smith are interesting for at least two reasons: first, because they shed some light on his influential economic writings, and second, because Smith, aside from economics, is worth studying, given his multi-disciplinary intellect and his engagement in cultural society of some of the most brilliant minds of history.

The exact range and character of Smith's religious beliefs is the subject of some controversy, and the path he took in negotiating what seems to have been the poles in his religious universe - the radical skepticism of his friend David Hume and the Christian Stoicism of his mentor, Francis Hutcheson - is unknown to us. It is presumptuous, and perhaps a little dangerous, to lean too heavily upon Smith's religious beliefs to draw conclusions about his economic analysis.

In any event, Smith seems to have been a member of the Presbyterian Church, gave generously during his life, and left large sums of money to charity upon his death.

James Madison and Public Reason - The Basis for the U.S. Constitution

2010-12-01T09:41:00.002-05:00

Just as Thomas Jefferson was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, so James Madison has often been called "the Father of the Constitution" - both men were implementing a set of ideas into political realities.

To begin with, they wanted to dispel rumors about what the American Independence movement was really about. A series of misunderstanding clouded then, and in some history classrooms still clouds, the goals of the new nation.

One is that the Founders and the Constitution they created had a peculiarly modern and atomistic view of society. According to this myth, the Founders concerned themselves not with the formation of citizens engaged in a common enterprise, but with institutions that played individuals and interest groups off against one another in order to prevent the dominance of one or another faction.

Such an understanding may well be part of twenty-first century politics, but it was not part of Jefferson's view, when he wrote: "Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." The understanding of democracy demanded that citizens be educated, not only in the narrow sense of learning texts and facts, but also in the broad sense of developing a moral and practical philosophy. If citizens are to vote, they need a set of intellectual skills which will allow them to analyze complex debates about public virtue, and they need to have developed an ethic and the self-discipline to follow that ethic. Such are the prerequisites for a viable democracy. This also belies another misunderstanding of our constitutional system, which

suggests that the Founders (and Madison in particular) were guilty of anti-democratic elitism,

as Bradley Watson of Claremont Graduate University explains. Although widespread, this notion is undermined by the consistent expansion of suffrage and citizen participation in government, an expansion which began immediately after the ratification of the Constitution and continued steadily. One of the first steps of this expansion of broad-based was the Bill of Rights itself: the ink on the Constitution was barely dry, and already the rights of powers of the citizens over against the government were being expanded. A variation of this slander against Madison

relies on the more positive but still distorting label of aristocracy.

On the contrary, James Madison, was

a man deeply concerned with the ideas of civic virtue, citizen character, and common purpose, albeit in the service of the truly republican principles of the Declaration of Independence,

and

was well aware that event he cleverest institutional mechanisms are not substitute for the primary check on government: respectable public opinion. The spirit of a regime - that which gives force and direction to its fixed constitutional principle - is manifested and communicated in such opinion. The distinction between sound and unsound opinion runs throughout the founding debates and is evidenced in the structure of the Constitution itself.

At the core of American Independence movement

was the authority of the people and the sovereignty of informed public opinion. And so in Madison we see clearly the extent to which America is based on far more than the pursuit of self- or class-interest.

The "authority of the people" manifests an non-elitist and non-aristocratic outlook; the "informed public opinion" shows how education and ethical reflection forms citizens and is necessary for a sustainable democracy.

The importance of maintaining the cool and deliberate sense of the community as a governing force unites Madison's thoughts and actions into a coherent whole.

In order to carry out the debates and discussions which power a democracy, one needs a sense of community which is strong enough to patriotically bind together citizens who disagree. As citizens are formed, they engage in these debates at a more civilized level. Perfection would not achieved:

Madison rejected the idea of human perfectibility and the inevitability of progress in human knowledge. And yet he was not pessimistic about man's capacity for self-government: If respectable collective opinion were allowed to operate, a free people would be able to control their government and themselves.

The supreme focus of government is not its institutions and procedures, but a community of virtuous citizens.

Madison never doubted the fundamental natural truth revealed to the modern mind - that all men are created equal, and that consent to government is therefore q requirement of justice.

An infrastructure which allows communication is necessary, but only as effective as the level of ethical reflection in its supervisors. The participation of citizens is necessary, but only as salutary as power of the character formation.

Augustine in a Nutshell

2010-11-30T18:14:00.002-05:00

Augustine was an extremely influential thinker, writer, philosopher and theologian. He was the man that synthesized many different elements of later Roman society, like classicism, stoicism, rationalism and Christianity. He sometimes called himself a Christian classicist, and saw no problem with combining these terms. And by doing this, he appealed to a wider group of Romans, especially the intellectuals, who finally found Christianity a rational belief that was in concert with their own interests and ideas. Augustine was passionate about God and Christianity, and expressed it with completely new methods. And yet, he went back to the past to find elements that could tie in to Christianity. By doing that, he was able to make Christianity a better fit and more comfortable for the Roman scholars. He was able to remove their objections to Christian theology. The historian Albert Outler stated, “Augustine has played a major role in every intellectual renaissance in the West since the time of Charlemagne. There are Augustinian accents in modern philosophy, and, in a sense, Augustine in the most influential contemporary theologian.”

It is no coincidence that Gregor Mendel (the geneticist) was an Augustinian scholar, as was Thomas Bradwardine the physicist. The Augustinian notion that human reason is powerful, yet susceptible to making mistakes, led to the modern concept of observational science: first, the need to independently confirm observations and replicate them; second, the identification of specific sources of experimental or observational error.

How Glorious Was It?

2010-11-30T17:57:00.002-05:00

The political events which ended the reign of James II of England - he was overthrown in part because he was Roman Catholic, and in part because he policy toward France was seen as weakening England's global power - laid the foundation for the American Revolution a century later, and

was traditionally believed to derive much of its gloriousness from its absence of significant bloodshed, except in Ireland (which, revealingly, was not thought to count), a blessing usually put down to the fact that its central drama - the overthrow of James II, England's last Roman Catholic king - was essentially a conservative affair. According to this version of events, the replacement of James with the dual monarchy of the Dutch prince William and his wife (and James’s daughter) Mary was an easy sell, a restoration as much as a revolution, intended by a good number of its supporters to return hallowed (if sometimes fictional) English liberties to their central place in a constitution threatened by the newfangled ways of a monarch in thrall to a foreign religion and, no less sinisterly, to the absolutist ideology of

France's Louis XIV. Those who wanted to get rid of James II were revolutionaries, not in the sense that they wanted to create a new form of government, but rather in the sense that they wanted to return to an older form of government, which gave them all the rights and freedoms in the Magna Carta. James II represented an absolute monarchy instead of the constitutional monarchy which had given English citizens freedom for several centuries. The "Glorious Revolution" - as it has been known ever since - did indeed overthrow the government,

but so far as possible (even during the tricky 1688–89 hiatus) it did so in a way that was in accord with existing law — and who could object to that?

As Oxford's Andrew Stuttaford rhetorically asks. Despite the relatively low body count, the Glorious Revolution was indeed historically significant as the American Revolution which took the same intellectual path, or the French Revolution which took the opposite ideology.

Ensuring Peace Inside the Institution

2010-11-30T17:47:00.002-05:00

Augustine is not only known as the thinker who presented Christianity to the pagan Roman society in a manner which made it intelligible, respectable, and appealing to many in that culture, but he also worked to preserve the harmony inside the infant church as it faced some of its first major debates.

Augustine was also responsible for creating some unity within the church, as rival factions and critics, threatened to splinter the church apart. Two main rivals to Augustinian Catholic Christianity were the Donatists and the Pelagians. The Pelagians were group that followed the teachings of Pelagius, a British ascetic, who believed that salvation was given through human will and effort. Pelagius believed that Adam’s ‘Original Sin’ did not taint all of mankind. He believed that humans had a good deal of freedom and autonomy. Augustine had a different belief. Augustine believed in Paul’s ideas regarding Original Sin and salvation. He believed that everyone is born with Adam’s sin, and thus deserve eternal damnation. But God, being forgiving, allows people to be saved. He believes that salvation is a gift from God. Thus, mankind has no role in determining his eternal fate. This idea became known as ‘predestination’. Augustine was firm in his beliefs. He believed that humans have free will, but it had no impact on whether they are saved. Ultimately, the teachings of Pelagius were rejected by the Council of Carthage in 418 A.D. Interestingly, the Catholic Church never adopted Augustine’s interpretation on salvation, and believed instead that salvation was a combination of faith and good works. The debate continued. However, later Protestants, like John Calvin, revived Augustine’s concept of predestination. The fact that Augustine silenced a rival and influenced Protestantism showed his great impact. No doubt, the Romans of his time took notice.

The Donatists were another group that threatened to splinter Christianity into separate sects. The Donatists, named after a Christian man named Donatus, argued that a member of the clergy that had either renounced their faith in a time of persecution, or had sinned in other ways, could not be a member of the church. Thus, they could not give out the sacraments, like the eucharist. They were worried that Christians taking part in this religious rite were not getting the benefits of it, as it was done in an improper manner. So, in essence, the question was, can a clergyman who has fallen from the church in some manner, give the sacraments? Augustine argued they still could. In fact, the debates between the Donatists and Augustine were legendary. Augustine did not relent on any of the issues. He argued persuasively and with reason. His debate with the Donatists forever changed the identity and government of the Church. The fact that he debated publicly the merits of Christianity could not help but be influential to the scholars of Rome.

Augustine's contributions to these discussions worked to sharpen the concept of "grace" - the notion that God's love for human beings is unearned, unmerited, and undeserved. God gives good things to people, not because they deserve it, but because He is generous.

The concept of "predestination" is both complex and misleading. No man can earn or choose salvation from God: man is passive in this process, and God is actively giving the salvation. But once God has given the salvation, man can become active, and choose to reject the free gift. Involved here is a fine distinction between those instances in which the human will is free, and those in which is determined. The discussions continue to this day about the exact meaning of the word "predestination."

Byron: from Scoundrel to Hero

2010-11-16T10:28:00.002-05:00

The British poet Byron squandered his extreme popularity in a series of scandals and flamboyant displays of pure egotism. Once beloved by the reading public, his reputation was so bad that he eventually had to leave England and roamed through Italy, Switzerland, and other parts of Europe. David Pryce-Jones, a scholar at Eton and Oxford, recounts the story from that point:

Back in London, the Greek Committee was established to fight for Greece's independence from the Ottomans. Here was a more rewarding cause than anything in Italy or South America, where Byron also thought of venturing. Several of his friends were members of this committee, and they arranged for him to be their official agent in Greece, well aware of the publicity he was bound to attract. He spent a fortune on specially designed helmets and uniforms, and on the costs of the voyage. Eventually he established himself on the Greek mainland at Missolonghi, more a mud-patch than a proper town.

Byron needed a cause: his life, full of potential at the beginning, had proven empty in the pursuit of mere pleasure and in the attempt to glorify his ego. He now wanted something outside himself: something bigger than himself. He was finally ready to be in the service of something other than himself. Old habits die hard, however, and there was still plenty of swagger in his altruism.

The cause needed Byron: Greece had been attacked, invaded, and occupied by the Islamic army. The resistance was no match for the Muslim military. A famous Englishman like Byron would bring resources to their struggle for freedom.

There he subsidized Greeks and wild Albanians, irregulars who valued his money far more than freedom. He imagined himself at the head of Byron's Brigade, leading a charge and driving the Turks out. Reality overtook fantasy when he caught some sort of fever and suffered mysterious and fatal convulsions. A lonely and untimely death followed; he was only 36.

An instance of Luther's dictum that each man is simultaneously saint and sinner: Byron's effort to help the Greeks was riddled with his own flawed nature, which overflowed into the mercenaries he hired. A moral paradox: he was indeed engaged in a noble task, to help the oppressed victims; but Byron, like all humans, carried his own ethical failings with him even as he did something clearly good.

The Greek Committee and his friends were quick to build the legend that Byron had sacrificed himself in the cause of Greek independence, a hero and martyr for the sacred ideal of freedom.

And indeed, Byron was a martyr who sacrificed himself - not as he might have hoped, gallantly on a battlefield - but rather in diseased mud. Yet his efforts did indeed help the effort to relieve the Greeks from the tyranny of the Islamic military. His life, and death, helped his fellow human beings - both because of his efforts, and despite his person.

The Inner World and the Outer World

2010-11-16T10:12:00.002-05:00

The human experience of seeking peace and meaning in life has two sides: to have inner peace is a very different thing than to have out peace. To be sure, both are good. The logic of observing the external world of appearances, whether appreciating the beauty of nature or measuring chemicals in a laboratory or analyzing the trends of world history, is different than the logic of internal reflection and meditation.

Augustine found that answers to the world were not just found outwardly in nature, but inward, in the self. “The foregoing analysis of St. Augustine’s life and philosophy has shown that the chief influence of religion was to turn his attention to the inward of subjective aspects of reality. This led him to discover and emphasize philosophical principles drawn, not from the realm of nature, but from the self,” wrote W. Wylie Spencer. This attitude really appealed to philosophers, especially Platonists. In order for Augustine to appeal theologically to people, he first had to produce a clear philosophy. And he did. He wrote a lot about many different topics. He was clear and succinct in his beliefs and arguments. His philosophy was unique and genuine. Spencer continues: “To this it may be added that the account given by St. Augustine of his search for truth and understanding confirms the judgment that original work was done in the construction of his final philosophy, but, after all, the content of his philosophical system is the surest test of originality.” Augustine’s philosophy and theology have an interesting relationship, but ultimately they supported each other. By creating this original inward-focusing philosophy, the theological system that followed was much more appealing to the intellectuals.

Adam Smith - Not for Beginners

2010-11-16T07:29:00.002-05:00

Many students are familiar with the name Adam Smith, and have a few loose associations between that name and a concepts such as free market capitalism and economic equilibria. But he is worthy studying more closely: his nuanced writings cannot be simplified to a few bullet points on a note card. The notion that economies can be self-correcting mechanisms maintaining a sort of balance is part of a larger philosophical outlook, including perhaps Thomas Malthus and John Locke, which saw this same process of homeostasis applied to populations and politics - just as an economy keeps prices from being to high or to low through the interactions of supply and demand, so Malthus thought that populations would keep themselves at sustainable levels by means of corrective measures like wars, plagues, and famines; Locke's embrace of democracy in the form of majority rule was a mathematical averaging of political opinions, designed to keep a government from straying to far from a central balance.

This type of thinking was a response to what Smith, Locke, Malthus, and others (notably David Hume and Thomas Reid) saw as faulty attempts to theorize about political, moral, and ethical questions. Surveying the errors of various social theories, they saw, as Prof. Paul A. Rahe writes, people mistakenly thinking that

political and moral obligations have their foundation in a crass calculation regarding one's own security and material well-being, in a self-forgetting passion for the public good, or in a heroic and selfless will informed by the categorical imperative.

Such notions are both incorrect and doomed to failure, as both reason and experience show, because pure self-interest as a motivation will not sustain a society, because passion for the public good is easily fooled into destructiveness, and because the categorical imperative will instruct about what is right but cannot motivate.

Adam Smith, in place of these failed ethical frameworks, proposes something more subtle: a theory grounded

in the human capacity for sympathy and the natural human desire to garner respect and be genuinely worthy of it.

There is both a hint of selflessness and a bit of self-interest here: this mix is perhaps more realistic about human nature.

Morality is neither selfless nor what we would call selfish, but it is self-regarding. Men, as Smith understands them, are not isolated operators who calculate their interests. They make their way within civil society, and they are embedded in a social nexus in which they find that they have obligations.

Smith rejected naive utopianism, and instead looked for practical ways in which we could make the world, not perfect, but good enough to maintain a just society.

Time Before Time

2010-11-04T10:15:00.002-04:00

Probably the first philosopher to precisely analyze the concept of time, using the tools of modern mathematics and physics, was Zeno of Elea (circa 500 B.C.) - which also makes us realize how old "modern" mathematics and physics really are! Ever since, the most brilliant philosophers have pondered the nature of time. All the great ones - Aristotle, Leibniz, Newton, Kant, Husserl - have striven to define the word "time." Augustine, writing around 400 A.D., is no exception.

Augustine systematically explained the history of man from Adam and Eve to his present. One hang-up Romans had with Christianity was that it did not seem to fit properly into the history of the world as they viewed it. Also, Christians had failed to answer some basic questions about time and creation. For example, there was an issue about what God was doing before creation. Augustine argued that time did not exist before creation. Anthony Kenny characterizes Augustine’s response to the Roman questions: “Rejecting the answer ‘Preparing hell for people who ask inquisitive questions’, Augustine responds that before heaven and earth were created, there was no time. We cannot ask what God was doing then, because there was no ‘then’ when there was no time. Equally, we cannot ask why the world was not created sooner, for before the world, there was no sooner.” Augustine believed that time was really only in the mind. While a tough concept, he gave an answer that at least satisfied some intellectuals. He also explained the history of man, from a Christian perspective. He’s able to explain all the earlier civilizations, and their role in history, and explain how all of it was in concert with Christianity. He believed that God has been with mankind since creation and Adam and Eve and could show it. It was an interpretation of time and history that Roman scholars could understand at an intellectual level.

Against a backdrop of pagan mythologies, which told stories about the tragic fates of those who ask questions, Augustine relished the idea of intellectual exploration. Instead of polytheism's mythological warning against inquisitiveness, Augustine eager engaged in mental exploration, including speculations about the nature of time.

Gender and History

2010-11-04T09:55:00.002-04:00

Understanding one's gender, and how one's gender influences ones' thinking and social interactions, is of interest to philosophers, psychologists, and anthropologists. We also see gender as an important topic in history. One need only think of the wars between Frederick the Great and Empress Maria-Theresa to agree, or to consider the progress which took place as the Judeo-Christian tradition removed some of the limits placed on women by earlier societies. In fact, it can be said that a necessary foundation for any society is the discovery of gender roles. Robert Lewis wrote:

After a lifetime of studying cultures and civilizations, both ancient and modern, the eminent anthropologist Margaret Mead made the following observation: "The central problem of every society is to define appropriate roles for men." Author George Gilder adds: "Wise societies provide ample means for young men to affirm themselves without afflicting others."

Psychologically, men are far more fragile than women. Men struggle with their identity much more than women do. Though feminists would have us believe that poor self-esteem is largely a female problem, caused primarily by social inequities, the evidence tells a different story. "Men, more than women," says David Blankenhorn, "are culture-made." For this reason, a cultural definition of manhood is critical.

Why would Margaret Mead, herself obviously a woman, stress that the "central" task for any society is to discover the correct roles "for men"? As an anthropologist, she had analyzed the data: the vast majority of major crimes, violent crimes, burglaries, vandalism, and graffiti are committed by men. Essentially all rapes are committed by men. Drunk driving is disproportionately male. Margaret Mead saw that men, if they do not discover their proper roles in society, are dangerous and destructive. Conversely, if men find, or are shown, the roles they ought to assume, they are productive.

The Start of Scholasticism

2010-10-14T11:13:00.002-04:00

The ancient roots of Scholasticism were Aristotle and Augustine. Centuries after both of them were dead, the philosophers of the Middle Ages created the logical style of analysis which we call Scholasticism, and which formed the foundation for modern physics, mathematics, and chemistry. Scholasticism was characterized by rational debate, in which various viewpoints were examined carefully. As a movement, it reached its high point by around 1250 AD, and was on its way out by the 1400's. It lay dormant during the Renaissance era, when there was neither interest in logical debate, nor openness to competing viewpoints. Scholasticism was re-incarnated as modern philosophy in the disputes between Descartes and John Locke, and in the innovations of Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle.

But can we say that Augustine himself was a Scholastic? Usually he is identified as a "root" of Scholasticism, as one who laid the foundation for it, but not as a Scholastic proper.

Augustine was a scholastic in the sense he reconciled human reason with Christian faith. Scholasticism was actually a popular movement in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, gaining most of its momentum before and after the Crusades and the reading of Greek, and the study of Aristotelian reasoning into Western Europe. The classics of Greek and Rome were never fully lost: from 476 AD onward, there was a continuous reading and study of the great Latin and Greek authors. The claim that the classical heritage was lost to Europe during the "dark ages" is both false and widely-accepted. Famous scholastics from that era like Pierre Abelard, Anselm, and Thomas Aquinas owe a great deal to Augustine. Augustine understood that Christianity was the same kind of truth that Plato and Aristotle discussed. That being the case, then all Christian concepts could be understood using reason, with the exception of God. To Augustine, God was beyond reason, and works in ways humans cannot understand. By showing that reason is a basis to understanding Christianity, Roman scholars could identify with the religion in a deeper manner. It made sense. He said, in one of his sermons, that “If you cannot understand, believe so you can understand.” In essence, he’s saying that faith is a precursor to knowledge. They are not contradictory. After all, you can't know anything unless you believe it. In fact, he believed that faith cleared the mind of confusion. “The skeptic concentrates on the weak points in human knowledge. The man of faith looks and see that there are points of strength also.” In his book City of God, he talks about how reason is a clear characteristic of God’s city. By espousing scholastic ideas, he made Christianity appealing to an even wider group of skeptics. However, this viewpoint of faith and reason will be subject to various interpretations during the middle ages: the Scholastics will present competing theories to explain how faith and reason work together.

In any case, Augustine, although he probably shouldn't be labeled a Scholastic in the technical sense of the word, clearly contains the main currents of Scholastic thought, if in embryonic form.

Architecture and Philosophy

2010-10-14T08:37:00.002-04:00

In a strange and difficult-to-describe way, there is a connection between architecture and philosophy: between conversation about life after death and the shape of a stained-glass window; between the logical analysis of time and the curve of a stone arch. It is no mere coincidence that, for example, the great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was also an architect. "The disposition of Gothic sculpture," write Ann Mitchell,

is more controlled, since it is confined to the important unites of the building, the load-bearing capitals (in England, the keystones), and finally the facade and portals.

The organized nature of Gothic sculpture corresponds to the mathematical elegance of the philosophical books being written at the same time:

The logical quality is particularly apparent in the cathedrals of the Ile de France whose basis of design shows striking parallels with the forms of the current philosophical system known as Scholasticism. Its major work, the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, is another of the encyclopedic series of this period. Erwin Panofsky in his Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism has defined the system's three requirements. First, a presentation of the totality of knowledge (theological, moral, natural, and historical). This we have seen in the sculpture of the facades of the cathedrals. Secondly, an arrangement of this knowledge according to a uniform system of division and subdivision. This is best illustrated by the uniformity in design of a sector of the apse, the whole apse, and the choir. And thirdly, these divisions, though related to the whole, should be quite distinct; for example, the cross-section of a pier should explain the whole structure of the church. From the last quarter of the thirteenth century to the end of the middle ages, Scholasticism was beginning to be replaced by other systems and no longer had the same influence; nor was its effect felt so strongly outside the Ile de France.

The emphasis on reason during the era of Scholasticism and Gothic architecture made it an era which gave birth to the concepts which eventually became modern physics, chemistry, and mathematics.

From Plato to Jesus

2010-10-14T07:59:00.002-04:00

One of Augustine's claims to fame is that he presented the internal logic of Christianity to Rome's educated classes, who had previously dismissed the new faith as superstition. How did he get them to see the step-by-step rationality of this concept of God, which was new to Rome, but had a long heritage in the Ancient Near East? Augustine understood that the Roman reader could not penetrate the Hebraic style of the New Testament: Jesus was a Rabbi, who presented his ideas in a typically Jewish fashion. The New Testament was a book written by Jews, for Jews, about Jews - and Roman readers were used to Greek philosophy and Latin poetry, which have very different internal logical structures. Augustine repackaged the concepts of Jesus into the language and style of Classical philosophy, and this made them accessible to the Roman reader.

In particular, Augustine was able to make a close link between Platonism and Christianity. He found they had similar themes, like dualism, the theory of the soul, and anti-materialism. The Neo-Platonists, sometimes just called the Platonists, were a group of intellectuals in the 4th and 5th century who studied the works of Plato and believed themselves to be his intellectual heirs. To clearly make that tie between what they were doing and what Christianity was all about was one of the greatest accomplishments of Augustine. “As a Christian, he is sure that he will never depart from the authority of Christ; as a Platonist he is confident that reason will find in Platonism what agrees with Christianity,” writes Peter Brown. Plato believed that the world is broken in the physical and metaphysical realms. The physical realm could not to be trusted. The metaphysical realm contained the ideas of truth and beauty. It was full of goodness. It was a realm that’s beyond physical, so it denied materialism. Augustine saw a very similar link between the metaphysical realm and heaven.

Coming to America

2010-10-14T07:26:00.002-04:00

The greatness of America, in innovative science and technology, or in expanding democratic freedoms to include more and more people, arises from its roots. What we call "American" ideals are actually European concepts: the dignity of every human life, freedom of expression, offering equal opportunity - such notions were brought to this continent by Swedes, Norwegians, Poles, Danes, Czechs, Swiss, Austrians, and others. How did this flow of people arrive in America, and why? Thomas Sowell, one of the first African-Americans to earn a doctorate from Harvard, writes:

Later, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the currents of the French Revolution, the conquests of Napoleon, and the Restoration of autocratic rule by the Congress of Vienna after Waterloo all profoundly affected German emigration. About half the overseas German emigrants of the post-Waterloo era went to South America, but from 1830 until World War I, most German overseas emigration was to the United States - as high as 90 percent or more in some years.

This wealth of intellectual creativity - inventors working on everything from telescopes to rockets, from pharmaceuticals to metallurgy - came to America looking for a safe environment in which to work, when their homelands became turbulent, oppressed, or overtaxed:

The rise of liberal and radical opposition to German autocracy led to the abortive Revolution of 1848, after which many fled to escape persecution, or in despair of achieving greater freedom, or simply to find greater social and economic opportunity elsewhere. Nearly a million Germans moved to the United States during the decade of the 1850's.

The timing was crucial - these newcomers would tip the scales in favor of Abraham Lincoln's abolitionist Republican party, and boldly promote the Republican agenda of ending slavery.

The presence of German settlements facilitated the movement of more Germans to the same country, and indeed often to the same region or city. But this depended on the good or bad experiences of earlier emigrants. The South American experience of early German emigrants provided warnings to others in Germany to change their destinations.

Just as harsh conditions dampened the early enthusiasm for moving to South America (who really wants to live in the Amazon rain forest?), the outbreak of the Civil War temporary reduced emigration to the United States for several years.

There were reductions of immigration to the United States associated with the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War in Europe, and especially World War I. But in between, German immigration to America was massive. During the decade of the 1880's, about a million and a half Germans moved to the United States.

Again, note the timing - from Europe came the impetus, for example, to allow women to vote. Expanding notions of liberty were the heritage of the great philosophers and cultures, brought to America by these millions.

In the twentieth century, there were usually more immigrants to Germany than emigrants from Germany. Even after the Nazi regime came to power in 1933, repatriated Germans exceeded those leaving. Those leaving, however, included some of the leading German intellectuals and scientists - including a German Jew who would later give the United States the decisive military weapon of World War II, Albert Einstein, a pacifist who ushered in the nuclear age.

America benefited by welcoming some of the greatest minds - the spoils, plunder, and loot which the victors took from World War II were not in the form of jewels and gold, but in the form of intellectual leadership.

Augustine and the Search for Truth

2010-10-11T10:44:00.003-04:00

Human being habitually search for truth, and this essential feature creates the possibility for cross-cultural communication. Specifically, Augustine was able to show his Roman readers that they what they valued in Greek philosophy was the same quest for ultimate realities that we find in Augustine's explanation of theology.

Augustine found some key links between the ideas of classical thinkers and Christianity. “Augustine sought to carve out a space for Christianity that was both dignified and classical on the one hand and unyielding on the other.” And both he and the classical philosophers were on a quest for truth. By seeking truth through both philosophy and religion, he appealed to a whole new group of individuals. Christianity was completely foreign to many Romans. They could not relate to the concept of Jesus as savior, the trinity, or ideas of Original Sin. To make Christianity more comfortable for the Romans, there needed to be some commonalities to their previous culture. Augustine provided this link. He was able to show the Romans, through his dynamic sermons, teaching and writing that the two cultures were not so different. Albert Outler, a historian, wrote, “He is misunderstood, however, unless his reader realizes that, in his own eyes, Augustine saw himself as an heir to the tradition of classical culture, as one vitally concerned to appropriate its values and to measure its claims by the norm of Christian truth,” By connecting his Roman culture to classical culture and Christianity, Augustine was doing something that previous Christian thinkers were unable to do. “Augustine deserves to be known on his native ground as a late Latin author whose Christian faith transvalued the classical tradition which formed the nucleus of his culture.” And by doing this, he made Christianity more comfortable to the Romans, especially the intellectuals.

Augustine enabled Roman readers to see that what they found in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle was linked to what they found in the New Testament: the human mind exercising its rational powers to explore meaning and existence.

Playing Defense

2010-10-11T10:41:00.001-04:00

Although Karl Martell (also “Martel”), called “Charles the Hammer” (born 686, died 741) was Mayor of the Palace (“major domo”) of the kingdoms of the Franks, he is remembered for winning the Battle of Tours in 732, which saved Europe from the Emirate of Cordoba's expansion beyond the Iberian Peninsula. Martel's Frankish army defeated an Islamic army, which had crushed all resistance before it. The Muslims had previously invaded Gaul and had been stopped in their northward sweep at the Battle of Toulouse (721).

The Battle of Tours earned Charles the cognomen “Martel” for his victory. Many historians believe that had he failed at Tours, Islam would probably have overrun Gaul, and perhaps the remainder of Europe.

The Battle of Tours probably took place somewhere between Tours and Poitiers. The Frankish army, under Charles Martel, consisted of veteran infantry, somewhere between 15,000 and 75,000 men. Responding to the Muslim invasion, the Franks had avoided the old Roman roads, hoping to take the invaders by surprise. From the Muslim accounts of the battle, the Muslims were indeed taken by surprise to find a large force opposing their expected sack of Tours, and they waited for six days, scouting the enemy. On the seventh day, the Muslim army, consisting of between 60,000 and 400,000 horsemen attacked. The Franks defeated the Islamic army and the emir was killed. While Western accounts are sketchy, Arab accounts are fairly detailed that the Franks formed a large square and fought a brilliant defensive battle. The Muslims were not ready for such a struggle, and should have abandoned the loot that hindered them, but instead trusted their horsemen, who had never failed them. Indeed, it was thought impossible for infantry of that age to withstand armored mounted warriors. Martel managed to inspire his men to stand firm against a force that must have seemed invincible to them, huge mailed horsemen, who in addition probably badly outnumbered the Franks. But bickering between the Islamic generals caused the Muslims to abandon the battlefield, leaving Martel a unique place in history as the savior of Europe, and the only man to ever manage such a victory between such disparate forces. Martel's Franks, virtually all infantry without armor, managed to withstand mailed horsemen, without the aid of bows or firearms, a feat of arms unheard of in medieval history.

Although it took another two generations for the Franks to drive all the Muslim attackers out of Gaul and across the Pyrenees, Charles Martel's halt of the invasion of French soil turned the tide of Islamic advances, and the unification of the Frankish kingdoms under Martel, his son Pippin the Younger (also known as “Pepin the Short”), and his grandson Karl the Great (“Charlemagne”) prevented the Islamic armies from expanding over the Pyrenees.

Fueling the Growth of Christianity

2010-10-06T12:44:00.001-04:00

Before Augustine, Christianity had appealed mainly to the lower classes, even women and slaves, with a promise of eternal life and equality, at least at the spiritual level. But Christianity was not popular with the elite and educated classes in Rome. Many powerful Romans believed it a religion of pacifists and the weak. James J. O’Donnell, a modern Augustinian scholar, wrote, “But in the fourth and fifth centuries, Christianity was far from certain to survive and thrive.” Moreover, Christianity had failed to appeal to the Roman intellect: it was Hebrew wisdom, which was a different style of thought, even when translated into Greek and Latin. Augustine was the philosopher that bridges this gap. But why was Augustine able to make Christianity acceptable to the educated classes of Roman society? He did so because he was able to use classical philosophy to express Christian theology, thereby expressing Christian doctrine with clear thought, passionate discourse, and succinct logic. When the Hebrew concepts were rephrased in terms of classical philosophy, the Roman aristocracy understood them, and the numbers of highly-educated Romans converting to the new faith increased. Although controversial, he was enormously influential and brought unity to the church. He showed that Christianity met the moral and intellectual needs of well-educated Romans who were both socially and politically powerful, and in doing so, helped to make the religion popular among Romans of all social classes.

Augustine - the Basics

2010-10-06T12:32:00.000-04:00

St. Augustine was an extraordinary philosopher, teacher and bishop born in Northern Africa in 354 AD. His home of Thagaste, a city 200 miles from the coast of the Mediterranean, was firmly within the borders of Rome’s vast empire. This area was rich in ethnic and religious diversity, and for many centuries, it thrived. But by the mid-fourth century, the Roman Empire, including the area around Thagaste, was in decline. There were significant economic and social problems, intensified by a military that no longer could manage all of its borders. W. Wylie Spencer, a historian, said, “Augustine lives his life through, thinks his thoughts, and writes his philosophy in the midst of the most turbulent epoch of change to be found anywhere in the ages between the Greek illumination and the modern rebirth of philosophy.” During this era of constant change, Christianity was gaining momentum. Christianity had become a legal religion in 313 with Constantine’s Edict of Toleration, but it wasn’t until 378 that Christianity was made the official state religion of the Roman Empire.

Augustine in Context

2010-09-21T09:27:00.002-04:00

Augustine was born in Northern Africa in 354 AD. His birthplace of Thagaste, a city 200 miles from the coast of the Mediterranean, was firmly within the borders of Rome’s vast empire. This area was rich in ethnic and religious diversity, and for many centuries, it thrived. But by the mid-fourth century, the Roman Empire, including the area around Thagaste, was in decline. There were significant economic and social problems, intensified by a military that no longer could manage all of its borders. During this era of constant change, Christianity was gaining momentum. Christianity had become a legal religion in 313 with Constantine’s Edict of Toleration, but it wasn’t until 393 that Christianity was made the official state religion of the Roman Empire. During most of Augustine’s life, then, Christians were a legal but embattled and oppressed minority group. Before Augustine, Christianity had appealed mainly to the lower classes, even women and slaves, with a promise of eternal life and equality, at least at the spiritual level. But Christianity was not popular with the elite and educated classes in Rome. Many powerful Romans believed it a religion of pacifists and the weak. There were already serious divisive issues that threatened to splinter the church. Moreover, Christianity was perceived as failing to appeal to the intellect. Augustine will be the philosopher who shows it to be otherwise. Why was Augustine able to show Christianity to be appealing to the educated classes of Roman society? Augustine was able to rephrase the concepts of Christian theology into the wordings of Classical philosophy. The original formulations of Christian thought were cast in the setting of Hebrew wisdom literature, which was mystifying to the Roman reader. Augustine recast the Jewish wisdom of Jesus and New Testament into clear Roman-style thoughts, passionate discourse, and succinct logic. Although controversial, he was enormously influential and brought unity to the church. Augustine revealed what Hebrew literary style had kept hidden from Roman eyes: that Christianity met the moral and intellectual needs of man.

He became known as Augustine of Hippo, because he worked mainly in that town. It is only a few miles from Thagaste.

Augustine had a classical education. He studied the writings of classical figures like Vergil, Cicero and Plato. He wrote his letters and books in polished Latin style.

He expressed Christian concepts in the language of Platonic philosophy. Augustine believed Platonic dualism and Christianity have a clear link. He presented his own version of Plato’s Theory of Ideas (The Ideas exist within God). He formulated a Christian Neo-Platonism.

Augustine was an early scholastic, or more accurately a proto-Scholastic, in the sense that he reconciled human reason with Christian faith. When Scholasticism flourishes, centuries after Augustine, there will be a conflict between the Augustinian Scholastics, influenced by Platonism, the Thomist Scholastics, influenced by Aquinas’s study of Aristotle.

Augustine systematically explained the history of man from Adam and Eve to the present. He is one of the earliest philosophers to understand the connection between philosophy and history, and to develop a philosophy of history. He had a clear and well-argued vision of time. In exploring the nature of time, he not only explored the philosophy of history, but also the connections between philosophy and physics. Augustine’s view of history and time incorporated all of mankind.

He examined both similarities and contrasts between Cicero’s stoicism and Christianity. He didn’t like all aspects of stoicism, but could see a tie between Natural Law and God’s universality. Some aspects of morality were similar.

He was constantly on a quest for truth and self-examination. He turned religion into an inward and subjective journey, not with answers found in nature, but within the self. His autobiographical writings are self-critical.

Augustine created unity within the church when rivals like the Donatists and Palagians threatened to separate the church. In resolving these conflicts, he organized logical principles still used today by philosophers.

In 410, Rome was sacked by Visigoths. Many Romans blamed the increasing popularity of Christianity for their misfortunes. He creates, in the City of God, a clear rationale as to why Christians should still be faithful despite the horrors they were experiencing: both from external invaders and from their fellow Romans who made the Christians into scapegoats regarding the invasions. He also demonstrated that the Visigoths attacks in Rome were not caused by the new faith, but that the attacks might have been worse if not for the moderating presence of the belief.

Afghanistan's History

2010-09-17T10:32:00.002-04:00

As a region, not a political unit, Afghanistan "was always part of somebody's empire, beginning with the Persian Empire in the fifth century B.C.," according to Boston University's Thomas Barfield. Afghanistan has been conquered and occupied continuously "for 2,500 years."

From Cambridge University, Andrew Roberts writes:

The reason that Alexander stayed in Afghanistan so briefly was that there was so little to keep him there, in terms of wealth or produce; he went to Afghanistan to pass through into India. Afghanistan had already been conquered by the Median and Persian Empires beforehand, and afterwards it was conquered by the Seleucids, the Indo-Greeks, the Turks, and the Mongols. The country was quiet for most of the reigns of the Abbasid Dynasty and its successors between 749 and 1258. When Genghis Khan attacked it in 1219, he exterminated every human being in Herat and Balkh, turning Afghanistan back into an agrarian society. Mongol conqueror Tamerlane treated it scarcely better. The Moghuls held Afghanistan peaceably during the reign of Akbar the Great, and for well over a century afterwards.

When Alexander took Afghanistan, he wasn't taking it from the Afghanis, but rather from the Persians. And when it ceased being part of Alexander's empire, it became part of the Seleucid Empire. There is no phase of independence. In fact, the very name "Afghanistan" was inflicted on the nation by outside conquerors, when the peaceable inhabitants were forced by invading Muslim armies, after thousands of them had been executed merely as a show of power, to accept Islam as the state-imposed religion.

Hardly any of these empires bothered to try to impose centralized direct power; all devolved a good deal of provincial autonomy as the tribal and geographical nature of the country demanded in the period before modern communications and the helicopter gunship. Yet it was they who ruled, and the fact that the first recognizably Afghan sovereign state was not established until 1747, by Ahmad Shah Durrani, illustrates that the idea of sturdy Afghan independence is a myth.

The government of 1747 didn't last long, as Afghanistan was part of the British Empire during the 1800's. Despite stories of a British defeat in 1842 with 16,500 casualties, the Afghanis didn't offer any substantial resistance to the English. The reality was that the casualties were mainly non-British, and the few British who died were the victims of the commanding officer's stupidity. In any case, the English hold on the territory wasn't loosened. Andrew Roberts continues:

For all the undoubted disaster of Britain's First Afghan War, the popular version of events is faulty in several important respects. It is true that 16,500 people died in the horrific Retreat from Kabul, but fewer than a quarter of them were soldiers, and only one brigade was British. The moronic major-general William George Keith Elphinstone evacuated Kabul in midwinter, on Jan. 6, 1842, and the freezing weather destroyed the column as much as the Afghans did; one Englishwoman recalled frostbite so severe that "men took off their boots and their whole feet with them." Wading through two feet of snow and fast-flowing, freezing rivers killed many more than jezail bullets did, and despite Lady Butler’s painting of assistant surgeon William Brydon entering Jalalabad alone on his pony, in fact several hundred — possibly over a thousand — survived the retreat and were rescued by the punitive expedition that recaptured Kabul by September 1842. Early in 1843, the governor-general, Lord Ellenborough, sent Sir Charles Napier to capture Sind, and thereafter Afghanistan stayed quiet for 30 years. Sir Jasper Nicolls, the commander-in-chief of India, listed the reasons for the defeat at the time as: "1. not having a safe base of operations, 2. the freezing climate, 3. the lack of cattle, and 4. placing our magazines and treasure in indefensible places."

So the 16,500 casualties turns out to be actually less than 4,000 - and instead of one lone survivor, there were many. Of those who did die, the causes of death were not combat-related, or even war-related. But the real bottom line is that English dominance remained. The tales not told are of the 1880 battle, for example, in which the British army suffered almost no casualties while retaining control of Kandahar.

After the 1747 government's brief independence, the next real shot at having their own state was in 1919:

After 1880, in the words of Richard Shannon’s book The Crisis of Imperialism, “Afghan resistance was subdued and Afghanistan was reduced to the status virtually of a British protectorate” until it was given its independence in 1919.

Although independent again for several decades, it was rather unstable - a long string of assassinations kept the government rather shaky. Finally, the Soviet Union occupied it for several years, and when they left, the Taliban would be the next invader.

The lesson: although the Taliban imposed a harsh cruelty on the Afghani people, they were simply the most recent power to occupy the nation. While the Taliban were brutal foreign rulers, the contrast between the Taliban and previous eras of Afghani history is not that the Taliban were foreigners who established their rule over Afghanistan, but rather than they were ruthless in doing so. Afghanis have been accustomed, for centuries, to not having their independence and being part of someone's empire, but Taliban's Islamic severity set them apart from previous imperial governors.

The Turning Point

2010-09-09T07:11:00.002-04:00

Greek philosophy in the archaic era is quite different from Greek philosophy in classical era. What are the differences? What caused the changes?

In the archaic era, the pre-Socratic philosophers lived largely outside of Greece in the Greek-speaking Mediterranean colonies. They were interested in topics related to physics, astronomy, mathematics, biology, and chemistry. They came from a comfortable middle-class or merchant class, having leisure time to think about such topics. Living away from mainland Greece, they were more adventurous in personality, corresponding to the frontier nature of their surroundings. They were optimistic, because the colonies abounded with financial and political opportunities.

During the classical era, the philosophers lived mainly in Greece itself. While retaining interests in physics and metaphysics, they were very interested in social and ethical questions. They were men of less influence and less wealth.

Certain factors in Greek society may have caused philosophers to focus more on political and moral questions: the Peloponnesian War, begun because of Athenian greed, and carried out under pretentious propaganda, weakened Greece and removed optimism. The fabled democratic government of Athens turned out to be, in reality, a system of bribery and extortion, leading to incidents such as the death of Socrates. Greek heroes, like Themistocles, revealed themselves to be savage and brutal, capable of atrocities. (Remember that Themistocles engaged in human sacrifice on the evening before the Battle of Salamis to ensure his victory.) Small wonder that someone like Plato would write a detailed discussion of the question: what is justice?

Religion in France during the French Revolution

2010-08-23T06:35:00.003-04:00

Various governments of France, beginning with the start of the French Revolution in 1789, implemented the following policies:

The deportation of clergy and the condemnation of many of them to death,

The closing, desecration and pillaging of churches, removal of the word “saint” from street names and other acts to banish Christian culture from the public sphere

Removal of statues, plates and other iconography from places of worship

Destruction of crosses, bells and other external signs of worship

The institution of revolutionary and civic cults, including the Cult of Reason and subsequently the Cult of the Supreme Being,

The large scale destruction of religious monuments,

The outlawing of public and private worship and religious education,

Forced marriages of the clergy,

Forced abjuration of priesthood, and

The enactment of a law on October 21, 1793 making all nonjuring priests and all persons who harbored them liable to death on sight.

The climax was reached with the celebration of the Goddess “Reason” in Notre Dame Cathedral on 10 November.

Under threat of death, imprisonment, military conscription or loss of income, about 20,000 constitutional priests were forced to abdicate or hand over their letters of ordination and 6,000 - 9,000 were coerced to marry, many ceasing their ministerial duties. Some of those who abdicated covertly ministered to the people. By the end of the decade, approximately 30,000 priests were forced to leave France, and thousands who did not leave were executed. Most of France was left without the services of a priest, deprived of the sacraments and any nonjuring priest faced the guillotine or deportation.

The March 1793 conscription requiring Vendeans to fill their district's quota of 300,000 enraged the populace, who took up arms and fought. They stated that, in addition to opposing the conscription, they were fighting above all for the reopening of their parish churches with their former priests. A massacre of 6,000 Vendée prisoners, many of them women, took place after the battle of Savenay, along with the drowning of 3,000 Vendée women at Pont-au-Baux and 5,000 Vendée priests, old men, women, and children killed by drowning at the Loire River at Nantes in what was called the "national bath" - tied in groups in barges and then sunk into the Loire.

With these massacres came formal orders for forced evacuation; also, a 'scorched earth' policy was initiated: farms were destroyed, crops and forests burned and villages razed. There were many reported atrocities and a campaign of mass killing universally targeted at residents of the Vendée regardless of combatant status, political affiliation, age or gender. By July 1796, the estimated Vendean dead numbered between 117,000 and 500,000, out of a population of around 800,000.

The irony is that these atrocities - ruthlessly carried out against anyone who was a Christian, or even seemed to be a Christian - were the product of a revolutionary government which had come to power, in part, to seek freedom of religion!

Bossuet

2010-08-23T06:21:00.002-04:00

Although a French Roman Catholic, Bossuet was interested to appeal also to Protestant readers. He wrote some of his books deliberately to explain his views to both Catholics and Protestants, using a style accessible to both groups, and offensive to neither. He believed that Catholicism was correct, and Protestantism mistaken, and that rational persuasion can be used in discussing these two competing interpretations of the faith - not emotional appeals or violence.

Louis XIV liked his style, and so Bossuet became the teacher of Louis XIV’s son.

Bossuet then wrote, partially as a textbook for the future king, that the duties of absolute ruler are: promoting the welfare of state; fostering religion and justice as the good constitution for the welfare of society; making peace; opposing false religion; and being humble because political power is a gift.

Ultimately, Bossuet could not accept the harsh absolutism of Hobbes, and moved beyond it, stating that the royal authority was limited by (a) the king's duty to be paternal to his subjects, (b) the king's duty to behave rationally, and (c) the king's accountability to God, from Whom political power comes.

The History of Hygiene

2010-08-08T09:38:00.003-04:00

Whether you call us "Western Civilization" or "European Culture," we're pretty clean people: we take showers and baths, and between those, we wash our faces and hands. We shampoo our hair, and wash our clothes and dishes. We clean our houses and wash our cars. How did we get to be this way?

We started off well: the Greeks and Romans were clean folk, who bathed regularly.

Despite the stereotypes, the Middle Ages were also a clean time: people took a dive into the nearest river or pond, scrubbed themselves clean, and washed their clothes as well. In fact, soap-making was a big deal in the Medieval Era.

Soap-makers were members of a guild in the late sixth century. Karl the Great ("Charlemagne") even wrote about soap: a Carolingian document, dating to around 800, and sometimes attributed to Charlemagne, mentions soap as being one of the products the stewards of estates are to tally. Soap-making is mentioned both as "women's work" and the produce of "good workmen" alongside other necessities such as the produce of carpenters, blacksmiths and bakers. Although some historians have mistakenly called them the "Dark Ages," these were, in fact, pretty sanitary times.

But then we got dirty. Those murky segments of time known by various names - the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Age of Ideas, the Age of Reason, etc. - were years in which people relied more on a dash of cologne or some white powder on the face than on actual washing.

Professor Lynn Thorndike, at Columbia University, writes that "Francis Bacon tells us that people bathed less in his time than they used to do."

How did our culture ever get clean again?

As the English expanded their colonization efforts, they encountered fastidiously clean cultures in southern Asia (India) and eastern Asia (China). Through contact with these cultures, the English learned, or re-learned, the habits of cleanliness. From England, the trend spread to Europe. And from Europe, to the Americas, to Australia, and other outposts of Western Civilization.

And so we are clean!

Women Move Forward Through History

2010-06-14T13:22:00.002-04:00

The early Roman Catholic Church had clear, established roles for men and women. Although some formal leadership positions were open only to men, the Roman Catholic system actually gave women higher status than they had in previous systems (in Roman, Greek, or Norse polytheism, for example, the full humanity of women was denied). Although in some folk versions of Roman Catholicism women were considered inferior to men and easily coaxed by the devil, in the large culture of the faith, they were seen as able to take positions of spiritual authority. Although women spoke less in church, and did less in terms of teaching, and had less to do with the administration of the sacraments, they nonetheless made themselves heard and understood in high-level discussions about both abstract theology and the concrete practices of the church. While there was a popular attitude that women were not to participate in conversations about religious issues or leadership in the church, they did in fact do so, and with the blessing of the hierarchy and even the pope.

Specifically, women had some routes in which to express their religious zeal in the Middle Ages, including joining a monastery. In fact, medieval nunneries flourished. Scholastica, the twin sister of Benedict, started a monastery. Other nuns in Europe like Brigid of Ireland and Hilda, Abbess of Whitby, were prominent in areas of teaching and learning. There are many examples of women who were able to exercise their talents in a multitude of areas. Why is there this contradiction between the official thought and practice of the church, which acknowledged women's full humanity and embraced their participation, and the harshly anti-woman attitude in some of the local folk cultures? Was this a hangover from a pre-Christian paganism which saw women as less than fully human? As Christianity progressively rooted out the subtle traces of polytheistic mythologies from European culture, we see the forward movement of women toward equality, not only in the church structure, but in civil rights as well: ultimately, women would be allowed to vote, own property, etc., as a result of the eradication of pre-Christian paganism.

There are plenty of examples of Christian women who were able to rise above these pagan cultures and contribute in amazing ways to Western Civilization. Was Christianity actually liberating to early Christian women?

One of the clearest examples is Hildegard of Bingen. She was not only acknowledged by the pope as an official teacher of theology for the church, but she was also empowered to advise, council, and even rebuke royalty when she determined that the kings and princes had failed to act ethically. This was amazing leadership for anybody in the 1100's, man or woman.

Social Behavior in the Plague

2010-06-14T08:58:00.002-04:00

History, ancient and modern, is full of plagues. The most famous one, perhaps, is the Black Death of the 1340's. The most recent one might be the 1918 influenza outbreak. Modern researchers speak of epidemics and pandemics, which are similar to a plague in the broad sense of the word. The word plague itself also has a narrower meaning, a specific disease: the Bubonic plague.

In the early part of the second century a plague broke out in the city of Antioch in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey). A Roman solider dispatched a rescript to his superiors in Rome giving his report of the outbreak in which his writes that in light of the fact that the disease was spreading, the politicians, medical doctors and even family members had fled the city, and that he too found it necessary to pull his troops back to the periphery of the city to avoid contagion.

This solider then adds a curious detail: only one group remained in Antioch to tend to and bring comfort to the dying. It was, he reports, a sect of disciples of a man executed by his fellow Roman Pontius Pilate several decades previous. The solider found it incomprehensible that people would risk their very lives to bring comfort to the vulnerable and dying. These were early members of the sect of Christians.

In the Easter Letter from around 260 AD written by Dionysius, he indicates that while many Christians, especially the leaders, died, other Christians had survived the plague. Like most survivors, they were immune and were able to nurse many over the course of the plague. Others who had gained immunity by surviving the plague did not choose to care for the sick. This got the attention of the Roman officials. They desired that all citizens should demonstrate this concern.

Later, the Roman Emperor Julian, who hated these "Galileans", sought to get the pagans to imitate their care, but without success. Plagues reinforced faith rather than government edicts. Christianity embraced an new idea foreign to Roman mythologies; God expects his followers not only to worship him, but to care for others. This new religion, Christianity, demanded that its followers care for the sick, even the ailing Roman officials who had been involved with torturing and killing the Christians before the plague broke out. Caring for other humans beyond family ties, beyond business or political interests, as a religious requirement was a revolutionary idea.

Schools During the Industrial Revolution

2010-06-14T08:18:00.002-04:00

John Pounds (1766 - 1839) was a teacher and Christian born in Portsmouth, and the man most responsible for the creation of the concept of Ragged Schools. These were schools which were totally free to the children living in the industrial slums of the large English cities; these inner-city neighborhoods were the direct result of the Industrial Revolution. After his death, Thomas Guthrie (often credited with the creation of Ragged Schools) wrote his Plea for Ragged Schools and proclaimed John Pounds as the originator of this idea.

Pounds was severely crippled in his mid-teens, from falling into a dry dock at Portsmouth Dockyard, where he was apprenticed as a shipwright. He could no longer work at the dockyard, and from then onwards made his living as a shoemaker.

He would scour the streets of Portsmouth looking for children who were poor and homeless, taking them in to his small workshop and teaching them basic reading, writing and arithmetic skills. This small workshop was often host to as many as 40 children at any one time.

Many years after his death, John Pounds has become a local hero in his birthplace of Portsmouth. Today a chapel named in his memory stands in Old Portsmouth. He was one of many Christians who worked to relieve the misery caused by the Industrial Revolution.

Rome Gets Stupid

2010-06-11T14:24:00.000-04:00

Tenney Frank, in his book Life and Literature in the Roman Republic describes how the quality of literature decreased in the late Roman Republic. He notes that the literary writers acquiesced to the wishes of the audience. He writes "It is not surprising, therefore, that these audiences – eager for entertainment which might exclude all possibility of having to exercise the intellect – finally demanded an extravaganza that appealed solely to eye and ear," and the entertainment fare available catered to the whims of the audience.

Getting Valuable Things from the Past

2010-06-01T13:18:00.002-04:00

Historians Will and Ariel Durant, whose socialist and communist leanings have made some of their books rather controversial, finished their book about the decades leading up to the French Revolution by summarizing the both the radical destructiveness of revolutionary trends and the stabilizing calmness of more organically sustainable change.

Tradition is to the group what memory is to the individual; and just as the sapping of memory may bring insanity, so a sudden break with tradition may plunge a whole nation into madness, like France in the Revolution.

The Durants considered their book to be about "The Age of Voltaire," but they perhaps missed one of the more interesting points to be made in this context: that Voltaire himself produced some texts in the radical Robespierre-Rousseau direction, and other texts in a more calmly reasonable Burke direction.

A Turning Point

2010-06-01T13:10:00.003-04:00

As we observe how cultures and civilizations consciously re-design themselves over the centuries, occasional short texts can crystallize and highlight the developments. Take, for example, a quote from Homer, as the characters in his book contemplate their gods:

This is the lot the gods have spun for miserable men, that they should live in pain, yet themselves have no sorrow.

Homer's words capture a view of life as it was common before the development of Western Civilization or the Judeo-Christian tradition. Consider the contrasts: Homer's gods formed a "lot" for man, meaning that there was a fixed destiny or fate; now, in European culture, we see that there is chance for change, that people can influence their futures. Rather than a dispassionate deity contemplating our suffering, we have a concept of a God who is saddened by our suffering, and who voluntarily accompanies us in that suffering.

This change in society's concept of God over the centuries fuels the change in other social notions: that it is good to help the poor, that it is good to work for peace and seek to end wars.

Reformation Recap

2010-05-20T07:57:00.001-04:00

The Reformation

There are many who know of Martin Luther solely by the words that he spoke at the Diet of Worms in April 1521, “My conscience is captive to the Word of God, here I stand; I can do no other. God help me.” However, these words, as thrilling as they are, cannot alone capture the full essence of Luther and what he believed.

To understand Luther, it is necessary to know the background that brought him to utter those words. To do this, we will review the major historical events previous to the Diet of Worms, the reactions against Luther, and three major tracts that he wrote during the crucial year of 1520.

The Indulgence Controversy of 1517 was more the occasion rather than the cause of the Reformation. The true cause of the Reformation was Luther’s investigation of the Tanakh and New Testament prior to 1517. Through his personal struggles, Luther came to realize that these sacred texts taught that forgiveness was not something to be earned, but rather a free gift from God.

Luther began to compare his conclusions with what the Church had taught. As a faithful monk, Luther had done everything, and more, that the Church commanded. Rather than bringing a settled peace, his attempts only heightened his despair. The understanding that salvation was a gift graciously bestowed by God rather than something earned by his own merits opened Luther’s eyes to the nature of the Church’s teaching.

Thus when John Tetzel came to Mainz, Germany proclaiming the indulgence, Luther’s ire was aroused. The Ninety-five Theses that he attached to the door of the Castle Church on October 31, 1517 rapidly circulated throughout Europe. News of his action quickly reached Rome. Papal officials were caught between feelings of outrage over the audacious actions of a monk and incredulity that someone would dare question the authority of the Church. Rather than attempting to suppress Luther, Rome remained undecided as to whether his actions were heretical or merely mistaken.

In Germany, events continued to progress. In April 1518, Luther defended his teachings at Heidelberg before members of the Augustinian order. As a result, Martin Bucer and Johannes Brenz were won to the cause of the Reformation. Luther’s interview with Cardinal Cajetan (Thomas de Vio) failed to bring a retraction from Luther.

In January 1519 the entire situation was thrown into confusion by the death of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian. Attention was now diverted from Luther to the task of electing a new Emperor. In June of that year, after months of intrigue and bribery, Maximilian’s grandson, Charles V, was elected as the new Holy Roman Emperor. However, the Papacy had incurred a great debt to the German elector, Frederick the Wise, and Pope Leo X had to agree to his demand that Luther not be sent to Rome for trial but that he would be tried on German soil.

In June 1519, Rome sent its foremost German theologian, John Eck of Ingolstadt, to crush Luther at Leipzig. However, the Augustinian monk refuted the arguments of Eck and stood his ground. It became apparent that the Papacy was facing a true “German Hercules” as Luther was now called. The Papacy paused to regroup and this gave a time of respite to Luther.

In October 1519 Charles V was crowned as the Holy Roman Emperor five months after his election. There was no doubt as to where Charles stood on the issues regarding Luther. He was determined to crush the heretic and restore the true faith to his territory. However, before he could move against Luther, events in Spain caused him to absent himself from Germany for over a year. It would be in late 1520 before Charles would have opportunity to return to Germany.

Meanwhile, Luther appealed to the Pope explaining his actions and asking Leo to assist with the reformation of the church. However, rather than receiving assurances of the Pope’s support, the Pope responded with the promulgation of the bull Exurge Domini that begins with the words, “Rise up, Lord, rise up, Peter, rise up, Paul, rise up, all saints, for a wild boar has invaded your vineyard … there has reached our ears, yes, what is worse, alas, we have seen and read with our own eyes the many and various errors of which several were already condemned by councils … ” Luther was given sixty days in which to recant or be condemned.

However, it was one thing to promulgate the bull, it was another thing to have it placed in Luther’s hands. It was October 1520 before the Papal bull finally reached Luther. Luther had heard of its issuance, but it could not be enforced until it had actually been placed in his hands.

The months after the issuance of the Papal Bull were the most difficult of Luther’s life. There was no reason to believe that Luther had started with the intention of rebelling against the Church. He was not interested in rending its unity. However, he did believe that reformation was imperative and that Pope Leo X would be the first to call for it if he but realized the gravity of the situation. It was a crushing disappointment to Luther to hear that the bull had been pronounced against him.

Whatever may have been Luther’s personal feelings at this turn of events, there was no doubt that these months were among the most productive in his life. Tract after tract flowed from his pen defending the reform of the church. However, there were three tracts that merit special attention. They were entitled To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and The Freedom of a Christian. Luther’s works occupy numerous volumes in their various editions. A strong case could be made that these three tracts, about three hundred pages in their modern reprints, may be the most important things that he ever wrote. They were written in August, October, and November of 1520. They summarized Luther’s reasons for the reformation.

Although written nearly five hundred years ago in German and Latin, even in their English translation, they exhibit a vigor and passion that cannot be denied. Luther opened his heart concerning the need for reformation and, at whatever cost to himself, nailed his flag to the mast as he had previously nailed the Ninety-five Theses to the Castle Church door.

On August 18, 1520 To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation was published. The tract was addressed to the nobility because Luther believed that any reformation of the Church was directly dependent on their support. In this broadside against the teachings of the Church, Luther destroyed the three lines of defense that the Church had erected to justify its teachings. Those three walls included the distinction between the clerical and the lay members of the Church, the claim that the Pope was the supreme interpreter of Scripture, and the teaching that the Pope was the supreme authority in the Church. In the second and third parts of the treatise Luther dealt with particular offenses against the people of Germany and gave practical proposals for reform of these abuses.

The writing was controlled indignation against Rome’s treatment of the German nation, religiously and politically. However, Luther’s basic thesis stood out on every page: “the priesthood of all believers.” Rome claimed exclusive power over the priesthood that had been transformed into a sacrificial system by the Mass.

The Pope’s claim that he alone had the authority to interpret correctly the Scriptures also fell. There was no biblical justification for such a claim. The same was true for the superiority of the Pope over Church Councils. Any Christian had the right, even the responsibility, to call for a council of the Church when it became evident that reformation was needed.

Toward the end of the treatise, Luther hinted that this was but the opening salvo in his campaign against Rome’s claims. True to his word in October 1520, in The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Luther attacked the citadel of Roman power. The title of his second tract was taken from the Babylonian conquest of Judah in the sixth century B.C. As Babylon took Judah into captivity, so Rome had taken the sacraments into captivity. In his first treatise, he had demolished the walls of Rome’s defenses, now he went to the center of the power that Rome held over the souls of men. That power was concentrated in the Sacramental system by which the grace of God was conferred upon men. All people recognized that a sinful man could not approach a Holy God by his own merits. All were in need of the grace of God. Rome taught that God had given all grace to the Church and it was the function and prerogative of the Church exclusively to dispense that grace to the faithful by means of the sacraments.

In The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Luther discussed the seven sacraments. However, the majority of the book dealt with the sacraments of the Eucharist and Baptism. A true sacrament was comprised of two elements: a phrase of institution or promise by the Jesus, and a visible sign that accompanied it.

Concerning the Eucharist, Luther’s first complaint was that the cup was withheld from the laity. This was in direct contradiction of the words of Christ that participants were to partake of both kinds. However, this was subordinate to Luther’s denial of the doctrine of transubstantiation. This doctrine taught that the elements of the Eucharist were changed into the body and blood of the Lord by the priest’s act of consecration. Luther equated his teaching on the Eucharist with the position of John Wyclif and John Hus, whose teachings had been condemned by the Church as heresy. Luther boldly stated that the doctrine of transubstantiation had never been taught in the church for the first twelve hundred years of its existence. Instead, Luther saw the text as presenting the doctrine of consubstantiation, in which the bread and wine are present along with the body and blood.

In his third complaint regarding the Eucharist, Luther charged Rome with teaching that participation in the Eucharist was a good work and a sacrifice of the Lord. As a result, the necessity of faith had been banished from the sacrament.

In this tract, Luther attacked the Church at its central teaching. As a result, there could be no turning back. The choice was between a complete recantation and casting himself on the mercy of the Pope or continuing forward toward what appeared to be certain destruction. However, not everyone was convinced that these were the only available options. Karl of Miltitz, a Saxon nobleman who previously had attempted to reconcile the two sides, made one final effort. Through the influence of Johann von Staupitz and Wenceslaus Link, the heads of the Augustinian order, Miltitz persuaded Luther to write a conciliatory letter to Pope Leo and to include a devotional tract especially written to explain his teachings on the Christian life.

Luther agreed to this and in November he wrote a letter to Pope Leo X. In the letter, Luther distinguished between the Pope, whom he believed was a captive of the Roman Curia, and Church officials. Although the letter was written in a respectful tone, Luther did not hesitate to remind the Pope that he was responsible for the reformation of the Church. This was not the humble submission that Leo had demanded in his bull against Luther. Whether Leo ever received the letter is unknown to this day.

Accompanying the letter was a tract entitled The Freedom of a Christian. It was one of the most irenic of Luther’s writings. It was the application of Luther’s theology to the Christian life. One of the charges made against Luther’s teaching was that it would lower the moral condition of the people. If Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith were true, people no longer would be required to obey the law of God. This charge is ironic when one considers that the moral conditions in Rome could hardly have gotten any worse.

In The Freedom of a Christian, Luther made a distinction between the law and the gospel. The law showed a person his need of salvation. Once the person had received salvation, he was free from the penalty of the Law. However, he was not free to live as he pleased and to ignore God’s laws. On the contrary, he had been set free from sin to serve others with an attitude of gratitude and love. Thus the Christian was both enslaved and free. He had been freed from sin and had become the servant of all.

There were a number of persons in the Papal Court who commented favorably on the teaching of this tract. However, undergirding it was a theology that differed greatly from the theology of Rome. While Luther demonstrated that his theology would not lead to lawlessness, it was a theology based on faith in Christ and not on the Church. Although he wrote in a conciliatory tone, Luther did not retreat from his position.

This final attempt at reconciliation proved futile. Luther finally received the Bull on October 10, 1520 and was given sixty days to submit. He gave his answer on December 10 when he burned the Papal bull, the canon law and other books. Thus the road was opened to the Diet of Worms where, in April 1521, Luther uttered this declaration, “Here I stand, I can do no other. God help me. Amen.”

The American Dream - Still Alive?

2010-05-17T16:52:00.002-04:00

The city of New York bears a special connection to that ambiguous yet powerful concept called the American Dream. What is it? Millions of immigrants have arrived in New York, more than most other cities on our continent. They arrived here to begin a new life. For what were they looking? New York University lies in the heart of the city; an NYU alumnus writes:

People don't dream all their lives of escaping the hellish countries they live in and pay their life savings to underworld types for the privilege of being locked up in a freezing, filthy, stinking container ship and hauled like cargo for weeks until they finally arrive in

cities like Moscow, or Beijing, or Baghdad, or Kabul. No, they sacrifice to get to America, and often the point of entry is New York. Why? Because America stands for, or at least has until now stood for, the concept that drives much of humanity: freedom. What is that concept:

Freedom was the ideas that inspired our Founders, that moved them to break the free of an oppressive regime and envision a better system of government. The framers of our Constitution were determined to establish a governmental structure that would ensure freedom. They understood that freedom was the exception rather than the rule in world history, and were determined to right that wrong.

How do we create a system in which the freedom of the individual, or personal liberty, is protected?

In order to safeguard liberties, they knew they would have to impose limitations on government - limitations that would be etched in a permanent (though amendable) Constitution and would be bolstered by a complex scheme of checks and balances among the various levels and branches of government.

This concept of freedom and liberty has been attacked over and over again through the decades and centuries - by the imperialist power which wanted to keep us as a colony, by the concept of slavery in the American south, by the Nazis, by the Communists, by Islam - but we insist on being free:

One of the principal drawbacks of freedom is that it is inherently vulnerable to attack. By its very nature it permits, and perhaps even invites, assaults from within and without. But freedom is worth fighting and dying for, and Americans have always risen to the challenge.

There are thousands of organized people outside the USA who hate the fact that we have freedom, and they want to stop our concept of liberty, and they want to kill us. There are also people inside the USA who don't like liberty, and would rather have government programs dictate to us about how we should live. But freedom is our political goal, liberty is our political value.

Are We Evil?

2010-05-05T07:46:00.002-04:00

A small but significant group of anti-intellectuals, hiding behind the titles of "Ph.D." and "professor" (titles which they have not earned but rather merely obtained by endlessly reformulating the same mantras of political correctness), have urged, in various ways, that Western Civilization be despised and rejected as the source of most, if not all, of the world's misery.

To replace the discarded European (or Eurogenic or Eurocentric) Culture, they propose not the serious study of other civilizations and cultures, which would be admirable, but rather a lack of any serious cultural study, advanced under the deliberately misleading name of multiculturalism.

Just as these anti-educators lack any rigorous knowledge of the civilization they reject - pretending to understand Aristotle without being able to decline a Greek noun, or to explore Shakespeare without have read more than a couple of his plays - so also they have no experience of the cultures they pretend to promote - hailing Afrocentrism without being able to read Ethiopic or Nubian, and saluting Asian wisdom without ever having read the works of Confucius.

This ignorance need not bother the multiculturalists, inasmuch as they do not promote the study of other cultures, but merely pretend to promote such learning. What they actually promote is the endless repackaging of the few simple axioms of a mis-guided, state-centered program of social engineering: their goal being, not knowledge, but the ability to control and re-design society.

Where such ideologues have gained control of educational institutions, the results are predictable. A 1992 report from the Excellence in Broadcasting Network summarizes the situation:

A few years ago, radical students at Stanford University protested against a required course in the great texts of Western civilization. They organized a march, led by the Reverend Jesse Jackson, with a chant, "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture's gotta go." And Stanford capitulated and abolished the Western civilization requirement. It was replaced with watered-down courses in which books were supposed to be examined from the perspective of "race, class, and gender."

Note that not only are certain texts (Aristotle, John Locke, etc.) to be removed from study, but also the way in which we study the remaining texts (those approved by the self-appointed Thought Police) is to be reformulated to ensure that students are not permitted to extract actual meaning or knowledge from the texts, but rather merely use the text as a springboard while jumping into a meaningless sea of emotional experience.

Multiculturalism is billed as a way to make Americans more sensitive to the diverse cultural backgrounds of people in this country. It's time we blew the whistle on that. What is being taught under the guise of multiculturalism is word than historical revisionism; it's more than a distortion of facts; it's an elimination of facts. In some schools, kids are being taught that the ideas of the Constitution were really borrowed from the Iroquois Indians.

Only if students have not been allowed to access information about the Roman Republic, the Magna Carta, the Glorious Revolution of William and Mary, and Dante's essay on monarchy could they possibly believe that the United States Constitution is the product of Native American tribal government. Therefore, the multiculturalists work to ensure that students are not allowed to access those bits of historical evidence, and denounce Humanities courses which expose students to those facts and texts.

Locke's Rational Foundation

2010-04-23T07:07:00.003-04:00

Two central concepts in modern theories of government were formulated and proposed by John Locke: first, that the legitimacy of a government derives from the consent of the governed; second, that the method of majority rule is most effective in pursuing the goals for which governments are instituted. Locke derived these political views from his more purely philosophical understanding of how the human mind works, and how it attains accurate knowledge, identifying and dismissing falsehoods. Merely because we believe a statement strongly and passionately, writes Locke, is no reason to grant that statement any more probability of being true than another conflicting statement:

For, if strength of persuasion be the light which must guide us; I ask how shall any one distinguish between the delusions of Satan, and the inspirations of the Holy Ghost? He can transform himself into an angel of light. And they who are led by this Son of the Morning are as fully satisfied of the illumination, i.e. are as strongly persuaded that they are enlightened by the Spirit of God as any one who is so: they acquiesce and rejoice in it, are actuated by it: and nobody can be more sure, nor more in the right (if their own belief may be judge) than they.

We must not ask how strongly a proposition is believed, for the strength of the belief in no way correlates to the probability of its being true; rather, we must how rational a belief is:

Reason must be our last judge and guide in everything. I do not mean that we must consult reason, and examine whether a proposition revealed from God can be made out by natural principles, and if it cannot, that then we may reject it: but consult it we must, and by it examine whether it be a revelation from God or no: and if reason finds it to be revealed from God, reason then declares for it as much as for any other truth, and makes it one of her dictates. Every conceit that thoroughly warms our fancies must pass for an inspiration, if there be nothing but the strength of our persuasions, whereby to judge of our persuasions: if reason must not examine their truth by something extrinsic to the persuasions themselves, inspirations and delusions, truth and falsehood, will have the same measure, and will not be possible to be distinguished.

In the above paragraph, Locke is writing that reason will not tell us if a proposition is true, but reason will tell us if it is from God; and if it is from God, then it is true. A slightly different method for judging the rationality of a proposition appears a few pages later in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding:

But it is not the strength of our private persuasion within ourselves, that can warrant it to be a light or motion from heaven: nothing can do that but the written Word of God without us, or that standard of reason which is common to us with all men. Where reason or Scripture is express for any opinion or action, we may receive it as of divine authority: but it is not the strength of our own persuasions which can by itself give it that stamp. The bent of our own minds may favor it as much as we please: that may show it to be a fondling of our own, but will by no means prove it to be an offspring of heaven, and of divine original.

Reason and revealed text are here shown to be in harmony; they form a single continuous decision procedure for determining the truth-value of a given proposition. In this, Locke rejects the mere claim of a person who may claim to have received a supernatural revelation from God - such a claim carries no value in itself:

In what I have said I am far from denying, that God can, or does, sometimes enlighten men's minds in the apprehending of certain truths or excite them to good actions, by the immediate influence and assistance of the Holy Spirit, without any extraordinary signs accompanying it. But in such cases too we have reason and Scripture; unerring rules to know whether it be from God or no. Where the truth embraced is consonant to the revelation in the written word of God, or the action conformable to the dictates of right reason or holy writ, we may be assured that we run no risk in entertaining it as such: because, though perhaps it be not an immediate revelation from God, extraordinarily operating on our minds, yet we are sure it is warranted by that revelation which he has given us of truth.

Locke builds a case for the notion that to be human, and to be rational, grants access to truth - equal access. From this theorem, it is possible to move on to logical arguments for majority rule, and for the proposition that the consent of the governed is the source of a government's legitimacy. If we deny Locke's epistemology, we are obliged to deny his politics; if we reject his understanding of how humans access truth, we embrace dictatorship and governments indifferent to their subjects.

The Uses of History

2010-04-13T11:26:00.004-04:00

Many thinkers have studied history and concluded that, from its lessons, a series of reforms for government or for society should be undertaken. Edmund Burke concluded from his study of history, however, that the chief lesson to be learned is that such reforms are often wrong-headed and should not be taken: the lesson of history is that sweeping reforms don't work.

Historian David Bromwich, teaching at both Princeton and Yale, puts it this way:

Burke adopts the premise that history is an adequate weapon of criticism. However, he does so in order to question the practicability of just those large-scale reforms which had been relied upon as a clear effect of historical research. History ... is the repository of all the existing evidence of our nature, the record of how our moral and cognitive life came to be what it is. Yet history, Burke sees, may also challenge the notion that, by the exercise of theoretical reason, we can actually perfect human nature.

Instead of sweeping reform, Burke suggests that the lesson of history is that we need to preserve our habits, customs, and traditions: without them, we are lost. He departs from other writers in not relying so much on the concept of natural law, and instead relying on our inherited social structures, which could not be deduced from natural law. He does not pretend or imagine that our civilization is perfect - on the contrary, he is keenly aware of injustices, and pleads, for example, that the British should treat their Indian subjects more humanely. But Burke sees that sweeping reforms usually collapse, or go awry, and end up with the very opposite of their intended goals: the French Revolution, seeking freedom, ended up placing its people under a dictatorship harsher than the Bourbon absolutists. The move toward justice and freedom, according to Burke, is a slow, cautious, and organic growth based on tradition, not rejecting it. Bromwich notes that Burke's writing

contains the following nonpopulist statement of republican prudence: "The people have no interest in disorder. When they do wrong, it is their error, and not their crime." What can this observation be supposed to say about human nature in general? The first sentence does not quite assert that the people have an interest in order. One might even read a Hobbesian moral into the two sentences together: those who wield power, like those who suffer it, need some limitation upon the restless desire" that produces disorder; but only the prudent organization of political life will bring that. Burke would then be urging a tolerant remedy for natural errors. Yet there is also a suggestion that such organization is difficult to attain; that, once achieved, it starts to earn respect from the mere fact of duration; and that, becoming a part of what the people have an interest in, it will grow obscurely attached to their self-interest.

Habits and customs give stability to human societies: without them, there would be chaos and insecurity. Traditions are not valuable because they are old; they are valuable because they help people.

In his way of thinking, historically sanctioned practices are to be cherished for something apart from themselves. The value they represent, and in the name of which he defends them, is order.

This enable Burke, in opposition to liberals, to embrace various cultures and viewpoints. Living and writing in England and Ireland in the 1700's, he saw value in the supposedly "primitive" cultures of Britain's colonies:

For Burke, any history, any set of inherited practices (that of the village culture in India, for example, which Warren Hastings and his "Jacobins" of the East India Company were destroying) will very likely be acceptable, so long as it has issued in order. This, as distinct from pastness or power or success, is his final point of reference. But he makes one restriction on the understanding of order itself. An order of the sort familiar in Europe is appreciable only to the extent that it permits modification through.

A little background: Burke was involved in proceedings against the leaders of the East India Company. He saw that their treatment of the Indians was not respectful of their traditions, and was cruel to the point of criminal.

Burke's concept of tradition was not opposed to change; in fact, he saw it as the road to change, because another lesson of history is that traditions and cultures continually change. Burke asked only that we make the type of changes which history shows to be successful - changes as the organic outgrowth of our traditions, rather than defiant attacks on them.

Blake and History

2010-03-23T08:48:00.002-04:00

Approaching the works of William Blake from many different angles, one encounters the centrality of relationship to God. His poetry, his paintings, his engravings, and other events in his life mirror his strong and independent spirituality. Blake, like most passionate Christians, wasn't very impressed by the church - true faith, he thought, was found in the use of one's mind. Religious institutions, like the church, were at best nice options, at worst, harmfully oppressive systems.

Blake made his bold religious claim that "there is no natural religion," entering an important debate in his era. On the one hand, there were those asserted that there is such a thing as a "natural religion," meaning a significant knowledge of God available through the five physical senses and human reason's ability to process the data yielded by those senses; in this group we would find individuals such as Descartes and Leibniz. On the other hand, there were those who agreed with Blake, positing that instead of "natural religion," humans could have a more accurate form of knowledge in "revealed religion": knowledge of God shown to the human race in the form of inspired texts; in this camp, we find John Locke, Robert Boyle, Michael Faraday, and Isaac Newton.

Blake's careful analysis of religious belief led to his interpretation of the French Revolution as a spiritual event rather than a political or economic event. The shuffling of different governmental forms in Paris was merely the surface: a deeper cosmic struggle was, in Blake's mind, the cause of atrocities and mass executions.

Initially enthusiastic about the overthrow of the absolutist monarchy in France, Blake began a long poem in praise of the revolution. When the "reign of terror" began, however, his hopes soured, and he saw, in part, a noble cause gone bad, led astray by evil influences, and in part a cause which from its very beginnings had a sinister strain hidden beneath its claims to merely seek liberty. Blake saw this, not as a political struggle between social classes, but rather as a struggle between good and evil, between love and selfishness, and between selflessness and sin.

The Invisible Hand

2010-03-23T05:57:00.002-04:00

Adam Smith's complex and influential writings on philosophy, politics, and economics contain, among other concepts, his metaphor of an "invisible hand," the natural process by which an equilibrium or homeostasis is reached in everything from chemistry to economic, from biology to politics. This force directs human activity without the knowledge or consent of individuals, and thus merely self-centered actions are finally seen as part of the cosmic harmony:

The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.

Analyzing the passage above, we might imagine a wealthy person eating a meal in a restaurant, a meal which will cost many times what a simple meal, prepared at home by a poor person, would cost. At the end of the meal, both the rich man and the poor man will have approximately the same result - several hundred calories in their stomachs. But the rich man will have spent much more than what was necessary, in the process, have placed cash into the economic system: paying the wages of the waiters and waitresses, and other employees of the restaurant, the farmers and food-suppliers. The rich man's excess expenditures will have furnished the wages by which several poor people will have purchased their food.

Thus, even if an individual were purely selfish, and had no desire to aid others, his economic activity will, in fact, provide wages which effectively distribute wealth among his countrymen:

But the annual revenue of every society is always precisely equal to the exchangeable value of the whole annual produce of its industry, or rather is precisely the same thing with that exchangeable value. As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it.

In fact, Smith argues, that by acting merely selfishly, the consumer does not only good, but the maximal good, because he will spend so as to maximize efficiency and gain, whereas someone who spent in an attempt to be unselfish will reward work which is less than optimally productive: attempts at economic altruism do not nudge the society toward equilibrium points, but it is precisely at those points that benefit and utility for every person in that society is maximized.

Arguments about Atheism in France

2010-03-12T11:36:00.003-05:00

In the 1700's, the idea of atheism emerged as a topic of debate in France. As a result, the topic has remained one of discussion every since, and the percentage of the world's population who believe in atheism rose to somewhere between 0.5% and 1%, where it remains today. Exact figures vary, but given the world's population, the number represents a significant quantity of people.

Those who promoted atheism in that era were Jean Meslier (whose atheistic book was published upon his death in 1729), Baron d'Holbach (who published in 1770, living until 1789), and Jacques-André Naigeon (publishing in 1768, and living until 1810). Only the latter-most of these three lived to see the unfolding of atheism in the mass executions of not only priests, but ordinary folk who professed belief during the French Revolution.

Those who refused to embrace atheism included Voltaire, Rousseau, and Francois Rabelais, although the last of these three actually lived just prior to, and not during, the attempt to popularize atheism. The mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes was personally involved in his faith in God, but did not directly or publicly engage in the atheist debate.

Outside of France, others who declined to adopt the atheist viewpoint included Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, and John Toland, among many others.

The defense against atheism's attack was based on the work of previous philosophers, many of whom lived long before this contentious phase of French history, but who anticipated many of the issues, and assembled cogent reasoning: Johannes Scotus Eriugena, Nicholas of Cusa, William of Ockham,William of Ockham, Leonardo da Vinci, and Niccolò Machiavelli.

The effect, almost three centuries later, is that France's atheism rate is more than twice the world average; in fact, France has the highest atheism rate in the world - even more than Russia, China, or North Korea, where atheism has used police and military force to make itself felt.

Atheism peaked in popularity in the twentieth century, resulting in history's bloodiest wars (WWI and WWII) and several massive genocides. In the twenty-first century, atheism seems to be on a decline: as the results of research in various fields, from DNA to space-time physics, gradually makes itself felt, specialists in those fields see atheism as either unlikely or implausible.

Re-Thinking the Anglican Reformation

2010-03-10T11:37:00.002-05:00

Generations of students have heard roughly the same narrative about the founding of the Church of England: King Henry VIII wanted to divorce his wife, Catherine of Aragon, but the Pope refused to allow this. Technically, we're talking about an annulment, not a divorce, and the Pope's decision was complex, because Holy Roman Emperor Karl V had imprisoned the Pope for a period of time, making communication between Henry VIII and Pope very difficult. But the broad outline of the story remains.

And the broad outline of the story is wrong.

It's a fun story, providing a juicy scandal and a simple explanation for England parting ways with the Roman Catholic Church. That's why the narrative is popular. But it's incorrect.

If we consider the details, we begin to see the problems:

First, are we really to believe that Henry would command millions of Englishmen to change their deeply-held religious beliefs merely to enhance his chances of having a male heir? And that these millions would cheerfully comply for the same reason? Vast masses of people rarely change their inner spiritual faiths merely because someone commands them to do so; often, embrace their religion all the more rationally in the face of such irrational attacks. And Henry didn't use force or violence to compel belief.

Second, if Henry wanted a new wife, there would be much easier ways to get rid of the old wife. Changing both the spiritual faith of the nation, and also the institutional church, was an effort of tectonic scale. It would have been much easier to have Catherine murdered or exiled, and Henry had shown himself willing to use both tactics in other cases. Why would he use such an arduous and circumlocutious method?

Third, Henry and his subjects were both aware of the text and the tradition of the Magna Carta. English kings weren't supposed to meddle in the functioning of the church. To be sure, Henry did meddle, but not in such a blatant way. Had Henry forced the Anglican Reformation, it would have been clear to everyone in Britain, and he would have faced the same wrath which bore down on King John in 1215.

So, for the above three reasons, we must reject the narrative that the English Reformation was driving by Henry's desire for an annulment. If so, then we must further ask, which other story might be more accurate? The following facts give us the elements for a veracious view of the Anglican Reformation:

* The Anglican Reformation was accompanied by a change in the operating language of the church: services and other church functions would be conducted in English instead of Latin

* The Pope had made no secret of his political involvements, and appointed church officials in England, even though he considered England unimportant, and even though he had never set foot in England.

* There was a steady stream of money, gold, and silver leaving England and going to Rome. This was a drain on the British economy.

Considering these facts, we can see a narrative which would explain why not only Henry, but large segments of the English aristocracy would favor a Reformation, for reasons which are more plausible than the king's desire for a divorce.

The Senate Begins

2010-03-04T09:19:00.002-05:00

On April 6, 1789, the United States Senate began. Its first tasks were to organize its own rules for operating (how it would discuss, debate, and vote), to hire a secretary, and to hire a chaplain.

In the spirit of the "separation of church and state," the senate would not seek spiritual guidance from any church, but rather have its own chaplain, who would preach and pray with senate directly from the New Testament, and not from any church's tradition.

Until a chaplain could be elected, the senators took turns praying and reading from the Bible at the beginning of each day's meeting.

After discussion, and after considering several candidates, Samuel Provoost was elected as the first chaplain of the senate on April 25. Since that day, every daily session of the senate has begun with the chaplain's prayers and Bible readings.

Sixty-two different people have held the job; they have come from a variety of religious backgrounds (Lutheran, Episcopalian, Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, Congregationalist, Roman Catholic, Seventh Day Adventist, etc.), but each has had to renounce her or his affiliation to a church, so that the "separation of church and state" could continue. In fact, some of the founding fathers boasted that, with this separation, the U.S. government could more more Christian than the church, because the chaplains, once they had taken office, could not identify themselves as part of this or that church, but merely as Christians.

This year (2010), the senate's chaplain is Barry C. Black, from Baltimore. He is the nation's first African-American senate chaplain.

Voltaire's Warning

2010-03-02T07:47:00.003-05:00

In a haunting aphorism, Voltaire warned both his contemporaries and posterity that

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

Like Hobbes, Bossuet, and Locke before him, Voltaire understood that theories of government are based on prior understandings of human nature. If your view of human nature is accurate, you have at least a chance of forming a rational political theory. But if your understanding of what it is to be a human being is incorrect, then your view of the relationship between society and government will be not only irrational, but also dangerous.

One need only think of names like Josef Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot, and Daniel Ortega to understand these dangers.

But seemingly innocuous and even well-intentioned misunderstandings lie behind these epic brutalities. Kindhearted and benign philosophers, speculating about how to form ideal societies, can unintentionally fuel barbaric dictatorships. It was this about which Voltaire was warning us.

Our first example comes from Carl Rogers, a writer who has made excellent contributions to the fields of psychology and counseling. There is no doubt that his writings have benefited progress in these fields. But Rogers also committed at least one major gaffe, when he wrote that

Experience leads me to believe that it is cultural influences which are the major factor in our evil behaviors.

Likewise, Abraham Maslow discovered precise insights into human thought, and is a scholar of major stature. Yet he too made the occasional blunder:

Sick people are made by a sick culture; healthy people are made possible by a healthy culture.

The bottom line impact of these texts is to invite would-be revolutionaries to re-design, not governments, but societies, in the hopes of re-casting human nature itself.

If cultures were the source of evil, then it would be the noble duty of philosophers to re-wire societies. If this were true, then by re-configuring our cultures, we would be able to rid ourselves of evil. These views firstly eliminate personal responsibility, and secondly demand social revolutions until that arrangement of culture is found which does not nudge humans toward evil.

When Voltaire issued his warning, he perhaps had at least one specific individual and one specific situation in mind: the philosophy of Rousseau and the French Revolution. Rousseau's views can be summarized briefly as the assertions that humans are born essentially good, that society makes them evil, that humans and society are perfectible, and that society, not the individual criminal, bears the blame for evil. Voltaire was acquainted with Rousseau's views; he was not acquainted with the French Revolution, which occurred after his death, but Voltaire and others could foresee the general trend which produced the large-scale atrocities which would constitute the revolution.

Rousseau's thought, and the revolution which it fueled, were based on the premise that it was society, not government, which needed to be changed. This premise leads to the conclusion that anyone who functions in society (which is pretty much everybody) must follow the directives given by those who are in the process of re-designing society. Absolute obedience is needed; the social engineers need everyone to play his part according to instructions. If a person fails to take his place in the new order, it is morally justifiable (to the social engineer) to get rid of that person in the most expedient manner: which is why thousands of innocent civilians, including women and children, were executed in the French Revolution. The people must patiently follow instructions, because in the course of re-designing society, we'll have to keep tweaking and adjusting until we get it just right.

Of course, as we see in the French Revolution, we never do get it "just right" - as the revolutionary leaders of France kept issuing new and different plans every few months, often in contradictory fashion, to adjust French society until they had it just right. In attempting to get to this imagined society, more and more areas of human life must come under the control of the social engineers (most of whom probably honestly did believe that they were going to do something really beneficial for people), and so control of the press, religion, and speech were handed over to the revolutionaries, so that they could adjust more precisely the details of society: and so the revolution which was begun in order to create more freedom ended up taking away more freedom.

To contrast the French Revolution of 1789 with the American Revolution of 1776, we can say that the Americans left their society largely intact, and merely changed their government. The result was that the French, who began with radically large claims to freedom, ended up with less freedom; while the Americans, who began with more modest claims to freedom, ended up with more freedom.

Two Concepts of Society

2010-02-24T14:08:00.002-05:00

Repeatedly in history we see two ideas of what human society is, or should be. Whether in the form of Cicero versus Julius Caesar, or the political candidates in the 2010 elections in America, these notions remain essentially the two versions of human community, despite myriad re-packagings over the centuries.

The first, although not exactly corresponding to the writings of Aristotle, is close enough that we can call it Aristotelian. The key element of this understanding of society is the concept of inter-connection. In society, each individual is connected with other individuals via a smorgasbord of relationships: parent/child, employer/employee, friend/friend, spouse/spouse, coach/player, etc. Interconnection reflects a deeper interdependence among human beings, and each contributes and receives in a variety of ways. Society is, in this view, a network.

The alternate view, while not precisely taken from the texts of Plato, is close enough that we may call it Platonic. In this view, society cannot self-manage, but rather needs the state to maintain it. The government forms the basis and both supplies and organizes society. Individuals stand on the foundation, which is the state, and carry out their roles, empowered and directed by the state. The key element here, then, is the direct dependence of the individual upon the state.

The choice presented by these two models is, thus, either interdependence of members of society upon one another, or the dependence of all members of society directly upon the government.

Intolerance

2010-02-19T07:40:00.002-05:00

History is filled with examples of humans treating other humans terribly. The history of the Jews living in Spain under the Islamic occupational armies is no exception. What is different about this series of atrocities, however, is a concerted propaganda effort made to portray this era a one of tolerance. A public relations effort tells us that the Jews lived in freedom and prosperity after the Muslims invaded Spain. Nothing could be further from the truth.

As subjects of an occupational army (the Arabic word is "dhimmi"), Jews were denied civil rights, forced to pay extra taxes, and subject to harassment, persecution, and occasionally death at the hands of the invaders. At Princeton University, Professor Bernard Lewis writes:

The claim to tolerance, now much heard from Muslim apologists and more especially from apologists for Islam, is also new and of alien origin. It is only very recently that some defenders of Islam have begun to assert that their society in the past accorded equal status to non-Muslims. No such claim is made by spokesmen for resurgent Islam, and historically there is no doubt that they are right. Traditional Islamic societies neither accorded such equality nor pretended that they were so doing. Indeed, in the old order, this would have been regarded not as a merit but as a dereliction of duty. How could one accord the same treatment to those who follow the true faith and those who willfully reject it? This would be a theological as well as a logical absurdity.

Lewis explains the essential worldview which underlies the way in which the Muslim armies treated the Jews in Spain:

Unbelievers, slaves, and women are considered fundamentally inferior to other groups of people under Islamic law.

Also at Princeton, Professor Mark Cohen has exposed legends of Islamic tolerance in Spain as "myth" and "propaganda" used to justify the fact that Islam's invasion of Spain in 711 A.D. was an unprovoked attack against a peaceful region which offered no military resistance.

During the years after 711 A.D., the Jews in Spain were no allowed to build or repair synagogues, or to celebrate many of their usual feasts and holidays. As the years went on, Muslim soldiers orchestrated pogroms: large riots against the Jews, smashing the shops and houses of the Jews, murdering many of them, and forcing the others to flee the region. Major pogroms occurred in Cordoba in 1011, and in Grenada in 1066.

Jews fled for safety to regions of northern Spain which were being liberated from the Islamic invaders. Just as the propaganda tells us that the Muslims ushered in an era of tolerance, so it also tells us that, when Spain was freed from these invaders, the Jews would suffer intolerance. In fact, we see just the opposite: when the "Reconquista" was partially completed, the flow of Jewish refugees was away from the territories under Islamic control, toward the liberated territories, which offered them more liberty.

While Muslims were persecuting Jews in the south, other areas of Spain, enjoying departure of those occupational soldiers, opened up social and economic opportunities to the Jews: Garcia Fernandez, Count of Castile, (974), placed the Jews in many respects on an equality with Christians; and similar measures were adopted by the Council of Leon (1020), presided over by Alfonso V. In Leon, the metropolis of Christian Spain until the conquest of Toledo, many Jews owned real estate, and engaged in agriculture and viticulture as well as in the handicrafts; and here, as in other towns, they lived on friendly terms with the Christian population.

Alfonso VI, the conqueror of Toledo (1085), was tolerant and benevolent in his attitude toward the Jews, for which he won the praise of Pope Alexander II. To estrange the wealthy and industrious Jews from the Moors he offered the former various privileges. In 1076, he not only granted the Jews full equality with the Christians, but he even accorded them the rights enjoyed by the nobility.

Who is Tamerlane, and Why Should we Care?

2010-02-19T06:49:00.002-05:00

Tamerlane was a conqueror from Central Asia who built a large empire in the second half of the 1300's. He never set foot in Europe, and although he exchanged numerous letters with European rulers, they were mainly about military and economic matters, so he had no significant interaction with Western Civilization. Yet he became a popular figure in European legends and storytelling. Why?

The Ottoman Empire, at that time, was placing significant military pressure on Europe. It cost money, effort, and lives for the Holy Roman Empire to maintain a large defensive force on the southeastern edge of Europe. These attacks had been directed against Europe for decade upon decade, until finally the Crusades had been launched as a counter-offensive.

And then Tamerlane attacked the Ottoman Empire from the east. This meant that the Turks could not direct all their forces into invading Europe, but rather had to divert substantial assets to defend themselves against Tamerlane. This, in turn, gave Europe a little break. Hence Tamerlane's popularity in the West.

The fact that Tamerlane was a Muslim didn't stop him from attacking the Ottoman Empire, which was also Muslim. The farmers of southeastern Europe were thankful for a respite from constant incursions by Islamic soldiers, and were quite content to have the Muslims trouble each other for a while.

Important Distinction

2010-02-18T11:32:00.002-05:00

In ordinary life, we tend to be sloppy with our ideas and words. This sloppiness may arise from being in hurry. In any case, we slow down, and sort out our words more carefully, when we rise above everyday life and deal in the realm of philosophy and scholarship. Locke reminds us of this when he writes that people who

will with any clearness speak of the dissolution of government, ought in the first place to distinguish between the dissolution of the society and the dissolution of the government.

Locke was interested in the right of the people to dissolve a government, but certainly not to dissolve society. We have a strong interest in our right to dissolve a government: we want to ensure that we have justice, and that our rights are not violated. We have a strong interest in maintaining our society, and seeing that it is not dissolved: because our society is based on principles of Western Civilization and European Culture, the dissolution of our society would yield injustice and the violation of rights.

Only a few decades after Locke wrote the above, Thomas Paine, participating in the formation of a new form of government in America, expressed a similar thought:

Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.

Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him, out of two evils to choose the least. Wherefore, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows that whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others.

The principle of limited government, the roots of which can be seen as far back as the structure of the Roman republic, and more recently in the Magna Carta, in motivated by the desire to preserve society. If government is not limited, it will harm society. The more narrowly we limit the activities of government, the broader freedom we give society to flourish.

Lessons from Haiti's Earthquake

2010-02-02T14:01:00.004-05:00

As the world's electronic media processes the misery caused by the recent severe disaster in Haiti, historical and economic principles are visible.

The world's governments have responded quickly, sending help in various forms: medicine, food, clothing, and relief workers. As is often the case, the United States leads the world, sending more aid than other nation.

But as impressive as the millions sent by governments may be, that aid is dwarfed by the billions sent by charities and other relief organizations. Responding faster, and with more resources, non-governmental organizations (NGO's) not only are the real source of help for those who suffer, but they also illustrate well an economic and historical pattern: private-sector charity trumps government programs.

For any form of human need, a government program is a poor answer. Charitable giving, by contrast, is more effective, more flexible, quicker, and less wasteful.

From tsunamis to droughts, from earthquakes to famines, meaningful and significant help can never come from any form of government. It comes from individuals who decide to give, and from the organizations to which those individuals give. Governments use money taken by threat of force (taxes), and distribute it through large offices which take a percentage of that money to pay their employees, their photocopiers, telephones, filing cabinets, and staplers: a recipe for inefficiency and ineffectiveness.

Volunteer organizations and private-sector charities are focused on goals: distributing food and medicine, building school and hospitals. Government aid agency are focused on providing continued employment for government workers, regardless of whether or not actual human needs are addressed.

Peace Corps Memories

2010-01-31T17:26:00.004-05:00

At a gathering of people who recently had finished their Peace Corps time, participants shared their experiences. They'd spent time in various locations - Africa, South America, Asia, and others. They'd engaged in various forms of help to developing nations - education, medical work, structural engineering, etc. They came from a variety of backgrounds, in terms of their own religions, educational levels, and socio-economic status. They had encountered a broad spectrum of cultures, languages, and religions.

Discussing their observations, a common thread emerged: they all agreed that the United States was the best place to be a woman.

Stories of countries in which women are not allowed to vote, cultures in which women must ask permission of their male relatives before making decisions, societies in which women are essentially still bought and sold, and a general relegation of females to a lower status were plentiful. It is a clear pattern that, outside of western civilization, women are stilling waiting for the simplest forms of equality. In Saudi Arabia, women are not even allowed to drive cars or obtain a driver's licence.

To be sure, America still owes women some more justice: domestic violence against women still happens here, and rape is often unpunished, or too lightly punished. But, according to the reports of the returning Peace Corps workers, there's no place that they'd rather be women than in the United States.

Diplomatic Complexities at Vienna

2009-12-27T08:26:00.003-05:00

The months of negotiations between scores of diplomats representing dozens of nations at the Congress of Vienna are among the most intricate international conferences ever. Trying to form a new working relationship among the countries of Europe in the wake of the twenty-five years of chaos and bloodshed caused first by the French Revolution, and then by Napoleon, was a very challenging task. Many different issues were involved, from taxes to water rights, from agriculture to military strength. Metternich had the idea of holding this congress once peace was very probable:

Napoleon had finally been defeated and forced to abdicate on April 11, 1814, by the combined might of a Quadruple Alliance of Russia, Prussia, Britain, and Austria, with the help, finally, of most of the lesser European powers. His empire, which had at one time encompassed most of Europe, had collapsed in a rush that left physical destruction and enormous political turmoil in its wake. The political disarray was a matter not only of order among states but also of internal order within states. The French were without a ruler, until the coalition of powers who had brought down Napoleon restored the brother of Louis XVI to the French throne: Louis XVIII.

Not only France needed to re-constitute its internal government, but also a number of other nations, which had been overrun by Napoleon, and had lost their internal structure. Historian Charles Mee continues:

The aristocrats - the monarchs, the princes, and the plenipotentiaries who still held their positions after the defeat of Napoleon, or resumed them - were frightened of what the revolution had loosed. They were intent upon restoring not only order among nations but among classes. They mean to restore a concerted and collaborative aristocracy to the rule of Europe.

The treaty that ended the war included Article 22 that called for a congress to be held in Vienna, beginning October 1, 1814, to engage in a general settlement of European affairs.

These negotiations would be delicate and complex:

Since none of the powers was strong enough to impose its will on the others, the situation was ideal for the practice of diplomacy - in which the success of each negotiator would be contingent upon, among other things, the position, strength, will, perceptiveness, persuasiveness, dexterity, and deviousness of all. This was the ground for personal diplomacy that diplomats relish.

These discussions would not be a matter of straightforward simple logic and calculation, but neither would they be inflamed by passion and emotion. The formative idea for much of the congress would be the concept of balancing power among the countries of Europe. Even this would not be a simple mathematical exercise, because Metternich saw that the

idea of equilibrium was too mechanical, too focused on a balance of the external relations among nations. Metternich believed a balance of power must exist not only externally among nations but also internally among factions and classes. The external and internal equilibria buttressed each other; they could not be separated without threatening the survival of the whole society.

He believed, too, that the only acceptable outcome for the congress would be a "legitimate" settlement. By legitimate, however, Metternich meant ... a settlement in which all the powers felt they had a vested interest, and so would commit themselves to maintain the settlement out of conviction, not force. Legitimacy was what the powers would agree was legitimate.

The complexity of these situations meant that sometimes, a diplomat would need to conceal his own intentions and goals, and make it seem as if others were forcing him to do what he secretly wanted to do. The future of the kingdom of Saxony was on the table: should it remain independent, or be absorbed into other nations?

The complexities involved in these calculations can only barely be suggested. The diplomats worked with hundreds of dependent variables that changed from day to day, all of them contingent upon all the others.

At the same time, the delegates had to struggle, as Metternich understood so well, with the calculations of domestic politics. While Metternich might be prepared to sacrifice Saxony, he would have to do it with extreme care, and without anyone crying out, since his biggest political antagonists in Austria were opposed to sacrificing Saxony and might defeat his entire policy if he were to expose this one element of it prematurely.

With patience (the talks went on for months), it worked:

Finally, on October 22, Metternich allowed himself to be persuaded to agree to Prussia's possession of Saxony, but only in the event that the united front against Russia was successful.

Metternich thereby obtained Prussia's help in putting pressure on Russia. The frustratingly slow pace of the negotiations quickened, when it was learned that Napoleon was attempting to make a comeback.

Despite Napoleon's best efforts to insinuate his representatives into the negotiations at Vienna, and to divide and confuse the powers there, in fact his reappearance caused the diplomats in Vienna to unite. And just two weeks after Napoleon arrived in Paris, the duke of Wellington was in Brussels to take command of a new allied army there.

The nations were rallied to the cause of defeating Napoleon, and quickly agreed to combine their military forces. Napoleon's attempted comeback ended quickly. Re-energized and encouraged, the congress resolved many diplomatic debates quickly.

Even the tertiary issues were now promptly settled. A Swiss confederation of twenty-two cantons was formed; its neutrality, and the inviolability of its territory, was guaranteed.

The arrangements formulated in Vienna would shape Europe for the next century. Until World War One, these treaties would keep Europe largely peaceful.

What had been achieved? The Congress of Vienna confirmed the leaders of Europe in the belief that no one power could be allowed to dominate the Continent and that all powers, certainly all the major powers, must work together to preserve the peace and the status quo - seeing themselves as contingent parts of a larger balance of powers on the continent.

The Hun and the Pope

2009-12-26T09:34:00.005-05:00

In the late 440's and early 450's, Attila expanded his empire into Europe, taking over regions as far north as Denmark, as far south as Italy and Greece, and as far east as portions of Gaul. The western Roman empire, now politically distinct from the eastern, was already in decline, and ill-equipped to defend itself. Christianity had been legal for over a century, but large segments of the population clung to old polytheistic religions. Some of them blamed Christianity for weakening the empire, claiming that the presence of Christians angered the old Roman gods, and that these gods would no longer keep the empire strong. As Attila and his army progressed southward along the Italian peninsula, most of Europe wondered whether the city of Rome itself would be destroyed. In this atmosphere, a leading Christian was bold enough to schedule a meeting with the Hun king. Historian Charles L. Mee gives us the details:

When Leo the Great, the bishop of Rome, rode out of the Eternal City in the year A.D. 452 to meet Attila the Hun, Leo had no arms, no army, no armor, no bodyguards, no great retinue of ambassadors and advisers, advance men and area specialists, no makeup men and publicists, no claque of courtiers, flatterers, or other hangers-on. He went out with only a few fellow churchmen riding alongside him and a couple of lesser officials of the enfeebled and fading Roman Empire.

Attila, the man Leo went to meet, came to the encounter at the head of a large, well-armed, infamously rapacious, battle-hardened army of Huns on horseback: more than three hundred thousand of them according to some sources, men who had a reputation - at the time, if not among recent, more skeptical scholars, who regard him at a comfortable distance - for roasting pregnant women, cutting out the fetus, putting it in a dish, pour water over it, dipping their weapons into the potion, eating the flesh of children, and drinking the blood of women. They supported themselves, as they rode through the countryside, with pillage and extortion. They ate horse-meat and drank vast amounts of wine. Even the Goths were terrified, according to the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus, when the Hunnish cavalry swept into battle, with dazzling speed, howling and yelling, and dashing in all directions at once.

While some modern historians doubt the reports of this savage behavior, others are inclined to accept it, given similar atrocities committed in wars of the 1600's, or even by revolutionaries in the twentieth century.

The Huns, said Ammianus, were "almost glued to their horses," which was part of the secret of their success in war. And if Attila followed his usual custom, he did not dismount when he met the pope, but instead stayed on his horse, one leg thrown casually over the horse's neck, surrounded by mounted companions, ready to turn and scatter at any moment.

The two men met because Attila and his followers, having plundered the northern Italian peninsula, were on their way south, with the apparent intention of sacking the city of Rome. Leo's task was to persuade Attila not to move on down the peninsula and plunder and burn the center of Western civilization.

Sadly, we have no exact records of the discussion between Leo and Attila. Leo, speaking from a position of very little power, had to think of something to say to Attila to make the Hun king hesitate. What would make the Huns turn away from attacking Rome?

What seems most likely, astonishing as it may be, is that Leo told Attila the truth. The truth was that there was a plague raging in Rome, and that if Attila brought his soldiers there by might die of the plague. Such a warning would have struck Attila with considerable force: Alaric had died of the plague after he sacked Rome.

Alaric, king of the Visigoths, had pillaged Rome in 410 A.D., alarming Roman society. Augustine had written his famous book in response to those who said that the Roman gods had caused the Visigoths to attack Rome; the gods were allegedly angry that the Romans were allowing Christians to exist in the city, and pagans were demanding a return to the mass execution of Christians. Augustine had argued that the Visigoths would have attacked Rome regardless of the religion of the city's inhabitants. In any case, Alaric had indeed been killed by the disease shortly after conquering the city, a fact which was well-known to Attila.

To be sure, it may be that Attila had already heard of the plague from others, of as some historians have said, that his army had already been struck by the plague, and his forces were growing weaker moment by moment - and that all Leo did was to add the finishing touch.

Riding with Leo were Avienus and Trigetius, two Roman officials. Why didn't they carry out this diplomatic errand? Why bring along the leader of a religious group, a religious group viewed somewhat suspiciously by many Romans? Why not only bring him along, but why put him in charge of this task? Why not let Roman officials speak for the Roman government? Leo wasn't part of the Roman government, but he was known for his integrity. Leo was honest, and when all of Rome was terrified, concerned about whether the entire city might be destroyed, they trusted Leo. Even those who wanted the Christians executed were willing to put the fate of their nation in the hands of a Christian, because they knew that Leo's reputation for honesty would cause Attila to listen.

But why was it necessary for Leo to make this long trip just to tell Attila what Attila might already have heard from others, or Avienus or Trigetius could quite as easily have said? Perhaps because Leo was the only credible voice in the empire, the only Attila, having been lied to repeatedly by emissaries of the empire, could be counted on to believe. This is why diplomats so often insist, odd as it may seem, that truthfulness is the first among the virtues of a successful ambassador. Delivered at precisely the right moment, it can alter the course of history.

Attila turned back from Rome. He took his army and withdrew from Italy.

There are many unanswered questions about this encounter: what would have happened had Leo not gone to see Attila? How much did Attila know about the plague?

What difference did this meeting between Leo and Attila finally make? In the years that followed, not even Leo could keep the Roman Empire from final dissolution. By the end of the century, all the remnants of the empire in the west had been incorporated into Germanic kingdoms, and the great empire of antiquity was gone forever.

Leo's feat, then, was no so much about adding a few more years to life of the Roman empire, but rather about creating a foundation for a new phase of world history. Yes, he did save Rome for a while longer, but Rome was inevitably falling, and it had started falling before Leo took a leadership position among Rome's Christians. Leo created a safe zone for a new European culture, shaped by Frankish-Germanic culture and Christian spirituality, to take root, and he created this incubator by means of honest diplomacy, not by means of deception. Attila knew that, even if Leo was in some sense an enemy, Leo could be trusted.

The Quick Trip from Freedom to Slavery

2009-12-25T09:35:00.004-05:00

How can societies quickly and easily become subject to ruthless fascism and totalitarianism? How can leaders, who begin their political careers seeking to bring freedom, wind up imposing harsh absolutism on their nations? We find this over and over again: Robespierre in France, Stalin in Russia, Pol Pot in Cambodia, Mao in China, and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua.

There is a seductive process which turns liberty into tyranny, and which even makes people think that they're doing a good thing as they gradually remove freedom from their society. How does this happen? Perhaps an example will show us: let us take toothpaste for our pattern.

We all know that we should brush our teeth several times a day. It's healthy for us, and we will benefit from this habit over the years. In a free society, however, each person will choose whether or not he will brush his teeth, how often, and when. Nobody will force him to do it, and nobody will be forced to do it.

Personal liberty means that we are free to make bad choices (not brush our teeth), and that we will be exposed to the consequences of those choices (we will then have rotten teeth). But there exists the political temptation to save people from the consequences of their bad choices, and to try to prevent them from making those bad choices in the first place. This political temptation is so seductive because it seems that we're doing something good: we're helping people. But in fact, we are harming people, because we are taking away their individual liberty.

Imagine, then, that someone makes a law, that everybody must brush his teeth three times a day: morning, noon, and night. That's a good thing, right? Because this way we are, after all, making sure that everyone has healthy habits, right? Wrong! We are limiting personal freedom, and it gets worse: because a law is useless unless we have a way to verify that people are complying with it. We must then allow the police to enter anyone's house, with no warning or notice, to inspect that person's teeth and toothbrush. Still worse: we must then have legal actions, because a law is no good unless there are measurable consequences for violating it. We will then start fining or imprisoning people who have failed to brush their teeth in the prescribed manner.

Yes, our example is silly, but observe the principle: motivated by a desire to benefit society, we have followed the slippery slope into totalitarianism, giving rights to the government instead of to the individual.

The difficult thing about freedom is this: we must allow people to make bad choices, and to suffer under the consequences of those choices. We all know it's bad to smoke cigarettes, to borrow too much money, to drink too much alcohol, or to fail to do one's homework. It would be good if everyone avoided these mistakes. But if the government forces people to avoid these mistakes, we've removed their liberty - which is ultimately worse than the consequence of those mistakes.

On the other hand, if the government tries to rescue them from the consequences of their mistakes, we again violate the principle of freedom: true liberty includes faces the all the risks of life, and occasionally falling prey to them.

Living in a truly free society isn't always pleasant: we will watch as people misuse their liberty to do unwise, unhealthy and dangerous things, and we will see them suffer the logical effects of those decisions. But if we interfere, even with good intentions, we will find that we have made the worst decision: we will have chosen to give away our freedom.

Ancient Wisdom in Tomorrow's Newspaper

2009-12-25T09:13:00.002-05:00

The history of the world does indeed repeat itself over and over again - the same principles and questions come into play, but always in different situations, places, and times - involving different people. This "same only different" quality of history jumps out of the daily news about our world to the reader who is familiar with past civilizations. A recent article by David Brooks, writing in the New York Times, points out four fictions in the minds of voters about their elected leaders. Brooks probably doesn't realize that he has simply re-discovered political notions which would have been familiar to Zeno of Citium and Thales, to Cicero and Edmund Burke:

The first fiction was the government is a contest between truth and error. In reality, government is usually a contest between competing, unequal

schemes and plans. The concept is here that government isn't a chance to implement some ideal plan in the real world; rather government is about practical compromises. Which leads to realize that

The second fiction was that to support a policy is to make it happen. In fact, in government power is exercised through other people. It is only by coaxing, prodding, and compromise that presidents actually get anything done.

Moses and Abraham couldn't abolish the barbaric practice of human sacrifice in a single, revolutionary stroke of the pen. It took generations and decades to persuade, first their own culture, and then other civilizations, to see human life as extremely valuable. Likewise, men like William Wilberforce, Chancellor Metternich, and Abraham Lincoln worked through complex webs of politics to abolish slavery. We can't make things happen in straightforward sweeping revolution, because

The third fiction was that we can begin the world anew. In fact, all problems and policies have already been worked by a thousand hands and the clay is mostly dry. Presidents are compelled to work with the material they have before them.

We don't get a blank slate or a clean table in civil government. We are simply the latest tweak or revision on many layers of precedent and decision. We can make meaningful change, but it must be envisioned within the context of the existing culture. Any attempt to wipe the slate clean and start over with a new world leads only to chaos and bloodshed, as in the French Revolution, and simply opens the door to exploitation and dictatorship, as in the case of Napoleon.

The fourth fiction was that leaders know the path ahead. In fact, they have general goals, but the way ahead is pathless and everything is shrouded by uncertainty.

Even the most brilliant leader doesn't know the future. Humans make plans, but plans are ever subject to revision in the light of new developments or unexpected circumstances. The quality we hope to see in our leaders is not some prophetic ability to see the future, but the skill and wisdom to deal with whichever unknown and unforeseeable events and conditions are in the future. Such wisdom is not an idealistic projection, but rather the practical ability to deal with what actually is. As distasteful as it is, the truth remains that compromise is an essential ingredient in successful governing.

Politics and Human Nature

2009-10-16T07:47:00.002-04:00

From at least the time of Aristotle, if not earlier, until the present day, political theories are built upon an understanding of human nature. Different understandings of human nature yield different ideologies. In the words of William Voegeli at Claremont McKenna College,

human nature is something we can understand and a basis on which we can found a political order

Thus, Aristotle saw human nature as essentially social, designed for the basic relationships of marriage, parenthood, and workplace; his political theory saw society as unfolding organically from the basic facts of human nature. Hobbes, on the other hand, saw humans as essentially selfish and violent; his view requires a government which strictly controls society to preserve peace and safety (Hobbes will later revise this view, which appears in the first half of his book, the Leviathan).

Before we develop any political theory, then, we must first answer this question: what are the unchanging and essential features shared by all human beings? What is it that makes us human? Across different races, religions, languages, cultures, and locations, we all have certain basic characteristics. This is why it is possible for people to understand each other, and this is the basis for any understanding of society on the one side, government on the other, and the relationship between the two. What is human nature?

JFK Quotes Thucydides

2009-10-08T14:13:00.002-04:00

In 1963, President Kennedy toured Germany, giving several speeches. He hoped to strengthen the working of NATO against the communists who were threatening to take over Europe. Pointing out that the western nations needed to set aside their individual interests in order to protect their common freedom, he offers the following comment about the Pelopponesian war:

Our partnership depends on common political purpose. Against the hazards of division and lassitude, no lesser force will serve. History tells us that disunity and relaxation are the great internal dangers of an alliance. Thucydides reported that the Peloponnesians and their allies were mighty in battle but handicapped by their policy-making body - in which, he related “each presses its own ends... which generally results in no action at all... they devote more time to the prosecution of their own purposes than to the consideration of the general welfare - each supposes that no harm will come of his own neglect, that it is the business of another to do this or that-and so, as each separately entertains the same illusion, the common cause imperceptibly decays.”

Thucydides brings to our attention the political problems which seem to occur over and over again through the centuries.

Will Obama Meet with the Dalai Lama?

2009-10-06T19:00:00.002-04:00

The Dalai (often spelled "Dali") Lama is the leader of most, if not all, of the world's Buddhists. By millions of non-Buddhists, he is viewed as a source of wisdom and moral insight. He was warmly welcomed in Washington by President George H.W. Bush, and later, President George H.W. Bush awarded him the medal of honor. Why, then, has President Obama said, at first, that he would not meet with the Dali Lama? And only after pressure from conservative Republicans stated that he will reconsider his decision, but has not yet actually said that he would meet with him?

Obama hesitancy to meet with the world's foremost Buddhist leader, whether or not he ever actually does, is motivate by his fear of angering the mainland Chinese communist government, and its supporters among American left-wingers. Although Obama seeks to pose as a figure of religious tolerance, Buddhism is not politically correct among the leaders of communist China.

Conversely, the two presidents Bush, known as publicly Christian, embrace the Dali Lama as a symbol of religious freedom, understanding that the intolerance of the Maoist Chinese government toward the Tibetan Buddhists is essentially the same as the anti-Christian leaning which pervades certain branches of the American media, bureaucracy, and educational institutions.

Politics makes odd bedfellows; religion does, too: President George W. Bush warmly embraced the Dali Lama, yet President Obama is hesitant to decide if he will even speak with him, much less support him.

The BBC Discovers "Grim secrets of Pharaoh's city"

2009-09-30T07:17:00.003-04:00

A recent BBC television documentary tells us that "Evidence of the brutal lives endured by some ancient Egyptians to build the monuments of the Pharaohs has been uncovered by archaeologists. Skeletal remains from a lost city in the middle of Egypt suggest many ordinary people died in their teenage years and lived a punishing lifestyle. Many suffered from spinal injuries, poor nutrition and stunted growth. The remains were found at Amarna, a new capital built on the orders of the Pharaoh Akhenaten, 3,500 years ago."

Little had been known about the daily life of those who built the city, or lived in it during the relatively brief time it was inhabited: "Archaeologists from a British-based team made a breakthrough when they found human bones in the desert, which had been washed out by floods. These were the first bones clearly identifiable as the workers who lived in the city; and they reveal the terrible price they paid to fulfill the Pharaoh's dream," writes BBC reporter John Hayes-Fisher.

"The bones reveal a darker side to life, a striking reversal of the image that Akhenaten promoted, of an escape to sunlight and nature" says Professor Barry Kemp who is leading the excavations. Painted murals found in the tombs of high officials from the time show offering-tables piled high with food. But the bones of the ordinary people who lived in the city reveal a different picture. We have here an example of a political leader whose carefully-crafted public image and message hid a harsh reality.

"The skeletons that we see are certainly not participating in that form of life," says Professor Jerry Rose, of the University of Arkansas, US, whose anthropological team has been analyzing the Amarna bones. "Food is not abundant and certainly food is not of high nutritional quality. This is not the city of being-taken-care-of." The population of Amarna had the shortest stature ever recorded from Egypt's past, but they would also have been worked hard on the Pharaoh's ambitious plans for his new capital. The less-than-average height of the workers indicates poor nutrition. The temples and palaces required thousands of large stone blocks. Working in summer temperatures of 40C (104F), the workers would have had to chisel these out of the rock and transport them 1.5 miles (2.5 km) from the quarries to the city. The bone remains show many workers suffered spinal and other injuries. "These people were working very hard at very young ages, carrying heavy loads," says Professor Rose. "The incidence of youthful death amongst the Amarna population was shockingly high by any standard." Not many lived beyond 35. Two-thirds were dead by 20.

But even this backbreaking schedule may not be enough to explain the extreme death pattern at Amarna.

Even Akhanaten's son, Tutankhamen, died aged just 20; and archaeologists are now beginning to believe that there might also have been an epidemic here.

This corroborates the historical records of Egypt's principal enemy, the Hittites, which tell of the devastation of an epidemic caught from Egyptians captured in battle around the time of Tutankhamen's reign. It appears this epidemic may also have been the final blow to the people of Amarna.

Whether or not some type of plague was responsible for a percentage of these deaths, it remains clear that most of the deaths were caused by the harsh conditions of forced labor. This type of slavery also meant that the short lives lived prior to those deaths was one of pain and suffering.

All of which serves to remind us that, despite the sunny propaganda of the Pharaoh's government, this was essentially a pagan society which placed very little value on human life. Three or four thousand years after the fact, we can still be misled by the images of a Pharaoh interested in a more enlightened culture; in reality, this was still a society which saw cruelty as perfectly acceptable.

Hieroglyphs written at the time record that the Pharaoh, who was father of Tutankhamun, was driven to create a new city in honour of his favoured god, the Aten, with elaborate temples, palaces and tombs. Along with his wife Nefertiti, he abandoned the capital Thebes, leaving the old gods and their priests behind and marched his people 200 miles (320km) north to an inhospitable desert plain beside the River Nile. The city, housing up to 50,000 people, was built in 15 years; but within a few years of the Pharaoh's death, the city was abandoned, left to the wind and the sand. For more than a century archaeologists looked in vain for any trace of Amarna's dead.

Having finally found the builders and inhabitants of Amarna, they have found also evidence of the heathen harshness which caused Moses, who led the rebellion and escape of Hebrew slaves from Egypt, to legislate the moderation and eventual end of slavery. The laws of Moses, which require humane treatment for slaves, which mete out legal consequences for owners and overseers who beat or strike slaves harshly, and which finally emancipate slaves after six or seven years of service (thereby eliminating lifelong servitude), are in part a reaction exploitation and cruelty which the Egyptian leaders saw as reasonable methods to achieve their building goals. One of several ironies is that the construction of Amarna was carried out under the rhetoric of promises about returning to a sunny and more natural way of life. The promises of a cheerful community hid the reality of cruelty. Sadly, this level of cruelty was more the norm than the exception in the early phases of the Ancient Near East. Only after the ideologies of Moses became widespread would humane treatment of servants be seen as a desirable goal.

Dating Hammurabi?

2009-09-17T06:49:00.002-04:00

As historians and archaeologists sift through the piles of cuneiform tablets (some clay, some stone) from the Ancient Near East, establishing dates for various events is a priority. Some events can be fixed very precisely: we know that Sennacherib was murdered in January of 681 BC, for example.

We likewise have clear information about the years of kings like Cyrus, Darius, David, Saul, Solomon, and Xerxes. We have only approximate information concerning the years of Abraham and Moses.

Other events have so far eluded exact dating: there is no doubt the Hammurabi was politically active in the 1700's, but we lack a clear consensus about the years his reign began and ended. Some scholars place his coronation prior to 1750 BC, others after.

Given that these data have been both translated and transliterated, alternate spellings should not surprise us: Hammurabi can also be Hammurapi. An interesting, but unproven, hypothesis identifies Hammurabi with Amraphel in Genesis 14:1; Amraphel is there identified as the ruler of Babylonia. If this were true, Abraham would thus have come into personal contact (or conflict!) with Hammurabi.

On Being Human

2009-09-12T12:10:00.003-04:00

The deceptively simple question, "what is a human being?", has occupied the time and attention of many thinkers over the centuries. Although we are aware of the dangers of materialism, and careful to avoid viewing humans as merely structures of flesh operating under the control of instincts and various biological processes, it is equally important to avoid the opposite extreme, and deny any importance to the material aspects of human life. The philosopher Mark Levin writes that an essential part of being human is a person's

ability to adapt his behavior to overcome his weaknesses and better master his circumstances. One of the fundamental ways man adapts is to acquire and possess property. It is how he makes his home, finds or grows food, makes clothing, and generally improves his life. Private property is not an artificial construct. It is endemic to human nature and survival.

Levin is telling us that the right to own private property is more than a political luxury. It is a necessary ingredient to a truly human civilization.

Play-By-Play at the Congress

2009-08-16T06:07:00.007-04:00

The Congress of Vienna lasted from October 1, 1814 until June 9, 1815. There was much negotiating and talking; progress was sometimes very slow. Despite the starting date, nothing really got done until well into November. There was a several-month delay while Prussia, Russia, and several other countries debated how they would share the territories of Poland and Saxony, two countries which were effectively dismantled at the Congress. There were hundreds of kings, princes, chancellors, secretaries, ministers, and other diplomats at the event. Dorothy Gies McGuigan, at the University of Michigan, gives us an account:

No international gathering of such scope as the Congress of Vienna had ever been held in the history of Europe. No precedent existed for handling the intricate questions of procedure, of organization, of decisions on agenda and credentials.

This event was unique in the history of the world: the first large multiparty summit.

The design of the Congress was Metternich's. It had taken shape in his mind as early as the spring of 1813, when he had proposed peace to France, Russia and England and had won Napoleon's tentative assent to such a congress ... It had been Metternich who had proposed Vienna as a meeting place for the sovereigns as soon as the Battle of Leipzig was won, and it had been he who had written into the Peace of Paris the invitation to "all powers engaged on either side in the present war" to send delegates to Vienna.

Metternich, chancellor for Austria and the Habsburg Empire, had been present when the Peace of Paris, the treaty which ended the Napoleonic wars, was drafted.

From the beginning, Metternich had envisioned the Congress of Vienna not merely as a concert of powers meeting to put back together a Europe splintered by war and conquest but as a glittering Peace Festival to mark the beginning of a new era.

The preceding twenty-five years (ten years of French Revolution and fifteen years of Napoleonic dictatorship) had been so brutal and bloody that Metternich envisioned the Congress of Vienna as ushering in an era of peace: peace maintained by the diplomatic balance of legitimate powers. In fact, the Congress of Vienna succeeded in creating one of the most peaceful epochs in world history.

Certainly neither Metternich nor anyone else had imagined the size of the throng that would gather in Vienna in the sunny days of autumn to be participants or onlookers at the Congress. The idea of an international meeting to shape a new world on principles of moderation justice had captured the imagination of Europe. In the intoxicating air of victory and of peace - the first real peace Europe had known in twenty-five years - everyone was ready for a holiday.

As the discussions dragged on for months, autumn changed into winter. Progress was slow, but agreements were being reached: new boundary lines were drawn on the map of Europe, and new alliances were being formed.

Snow fell all night on the last night of the year, and in the morning the baroque angels on the roofs of palaces and churches stood knee-deep in snow. It seemed a double good omen that New Year's Day of 1815 fell on a Sunday, and that fresh snow covered the world, as if all the scars and shabbiness, the quarrels and violence of an old world and an old year were effectively buried from sight.

Early that morning a courier's carriage, mud-splattered, ice-covered, pulled up to the door of Castlereigh's house in Minoritenplatz. Had had been on the roads since Christmas Eve, carrying to Vienna from Ghent the good news that England had ended the war with America and peace had been signed.

This information boosted spirits in Vienna. Not only could a peace plan for Europe be developed, but it would now include large parts of the rest of the world.

For the first time in many years no war was being fought anywhere in the Western Hemisphere.

One of the most important issues to be settled was whether or not there would be a single country known as Germany. In the centuries prior to the Congress of Vienna, that space on the map of Europe, which we now know as Germany, was filled with dozens of small and large kingdoms, principalities, and free cities; they were united by a common German language and culture, but not by a common political structure - each of them was an independent state. Many German-speaking people had the desire to unite these regions (Saxony, Bavaria, Alsace, Lorraine, etc.) into a single country to be known as Germany. Would this happen at the Congress of Vienna? There were also leaders who opposed this move, who did not want a united Germany - these leaders were mainly the rulers of smaller Germanic kingdoms, who would lose power when their territories were united into a larger country.

The last Congress issue to be hammered out was the future of Germany. The original plan for a federation of German states, drafted in the early weeks of the Congress, foundered on the Saxony-Poland quarrel and the resulting division between Austria and Prussia. In the end Metternich and Wessenberg produced a plan joining the thirty-eight German states in a loose confederation under a Diet at which Austria was to preside. The Diet would draft a set of laws; under one of the articles of the proposal each of the sovereigns was to grant his subjects a constitution.

The solution was a deep disappointment to German nationalists such as Stein and Humboldt, as well as to Austrian imperialists, among them Stadion and Schwarzenberg, who had hoped for the revival of an empire under Habsburg leadership.

In the end, it was a compromise, in which nobody got everything he wanted, and everyone got a little of what he wanted: a typical example of balanced diplomacy in action.

Yet it is doubtful whether a more powerful union could have been forged among the German-speaking countries in 1815. The German kings created by Napoleon and the small princes fought fiercely for their sovereignty. Feelings of particularism were still stronger than those of nationalism: people felt themselves to be Bavarians and Prussians and Saxons before they felt themselves to be Germans. The mutiny of Saxon troops against the Prussian army command in May was but one evidence of the strong bond of loyalty that still existed between subject and King. Metternich's loose German confederation was a beginning.

Finally, the Congress of Vienna created not only a lasting political peace, but began the abolition of slavery, and the extension of civil rights.

More important, crucial questions of human rights appeared on the Congress agenda, and if none was forthrightly resolved, two did appear as recommendations in the final act. The traffic in slaves was condemned rather than abolished. Civil rights for Jewish men in German cities was confirmed where they already obtained and a recommendation was included that they be extended. Both Metternich and Hardenberg had favored the extension of full civil rights to Jews, but other delegates on the German Committee - notably the Hanoverian - had resisted.

The fact that questions of human rights were debated at an international gathering was an important first in history.

And though the voices of the Congress had often been angry, passionate, vituperative, and the hands more than once had been dangerously close to swords, in the end the voice of persuasion and of reason had won out. The most important accomplishment of the Vienna Congress was just that: a powerful demonstration that grave international problems could be resolved through diplomacy rather than through arms.

This was the triumph of Metternich's conservative approach; for this accomplishment, he known, together with Burke, as one of the founders of modern political conservatism. Other conservatives, William Wilberforce and Abraham Lincoln, would finish the task of abolishing slavery.

Legitimacy and Balance

2009-08-15T19:25:00.002-04:00

The diplomat and statesman Metternich is known mainly as the organizer of the Congress of Vienna, but that event was the product of Metternich's diplomat work in the preceding years, and would unfold in his work over the following years - and that work was guiding by the two principles of Metternich's foreign policy: legitimacy and balance. Oxford University's Alan Palmer describes how the Congress of Vienna began:

The people of Vienna had been surprised to learn in June that Emperor Francis was to be host to the peacemakers. Perhaps they had even been a little disconcerted; for this was a new role for the Habsburgs and a new experience for their city.

The emperor Franz (as it is more commonly spelled) had, at Metternich's prompting, organized a peace conference to provide a stable future for Europe in the wake of twenty-five years of violent bloodshed: the ten years of the French Revolution and the fifteen years of Napoleon's dictatorship.

Now in 1814 a cavalcade of of sovereigns and statesmen was about to descend on the city, and it was by no means clear how they were to be accommodated, how their business was to be conducted, or how their retinues were to be fed and foddered through the winter months. There was no formal invitation, merely an announcement that the Congress would open on 1 October. The heads of the five reigning dynasties and of 216 princely families flocked to Vienna.

Europe's power politics were dominated by five superpowers: England, France, Austria, Prussia, and Russia. Here Metternich's diplomatic principles would be put into play: to balance the powers, the boundary lines of European maps, and the political alliances between Europe's sovereign states, would be reorganized so that no one nation could assert itself over the others. This would keep the peace. Those sovereign states were to be ruled by legitimate governments - as opposed to illegitimate governments, like those of the French Revolution, which had neither legal nor moral right to rule. Legitimate governments had the obligation to help each other against attempted overthrow by illegitimate powers; thus peace would be kept as the government helped each other, instead of opposed each other.

Metternich was opposed to that political movement known as "nationalism":

He rejected the idea that community of language, sentiment or race provided a basis for political unity ... nationalism and liberalism remained equally abhorrent doctrines to him, the product of that French Revolution against which he saw himself in conflict throughout his life. In their place ... he offered a threefold creed: a belief in an essential community of interests which bound together the European States; a belief in the need for vigilance against political excess; and a belief the virtues of a balanced order, both between governments and between classes within society.

At the university, Metternich studied both political science, and the career of his own father, who was likewise a diplomat, and who had made a successful career

seeking in 1791 to play off against each other the rival Belgian patriot factions.

Younger Metternich learned the secret of his father's success in the university's political science lectures:

good government depends for survival upon a balance between extremes ... the concept of a stable equilibrium appealed [to Metternich].

Later in life, Metternich would put these principles into action. Representing Austria and the Holy Roman Empire,

he insisted that Austria's central position on the continent made it essential for her to think, not so much of territorial compensation, as of 'laying the foundations of a European political system' ... only Vienna could establish the equilibrium which Europe needed for her convalescence.

A balance of power, carefully negotiated and administered by Metternich, would heal Europe after twenty-five years of warfare. He saw his employment in the Holy Roman Empire, and later in the Habsburg Empire, as an opportunity to create peace for all of Europe. (The Holy Roman Empire would end in 1806, to be partially replaced by the Habsburg Empire.)

This carefully established balance, enacted in 1815 as the Congress of Vienna finalized its negotiated outcomes, would soon be tested by military actions as the Greeks defended themselves against Islamic occupational troops in the 1820's. European powers were agreed that the Greeks could resist the invaders, but the manner in which the European powers allied themselves to support Greece could lead to unintended effects. The English diplomat George Canning, whose views sometimes were the same as Metternich's,

was pledged to Greek autonomy while he remained convinced that any re-drawing of the map in Eastern Europe, however small in the first instance, would disturb the whole balance of the continent.

The Battle of Navarino (November 1827) would help the Greeks regain their freedom, but struggle would be long and complex.

The Revolutionary Mr. Burke

2009-08-15T18:55:00.003-04:00

Edmond Burke is known for his opposition to the French Revolution; in a series of shockingly accurate predictions, he pointed out that it was designed to end in massive bloodshed, political chaos, and social ruin. But Burke wasn't opposed to all revolutions: he specifically applauded the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and the American Revolution of 1776. Connor O'Brien, professor at the University of Dublin, describes Burke's reasoning:

The second English revolution, of 1688, known to its heirs as the Glorious Revolution, was not Utopian at all, but deliberately limited, pragmatic, and pluralist. The double objective was to end the arbitrary and Romanist rule of James II, without reviving the [anti-Romanist trends of Cromwell's first English revolution].

Burke approved of the Glorious Revolution because it was pragmatic: it did not seek to overthrow or change society, but merely the government. It was limited, because it did not seek to change all aspects of government, but merely some of them. And it was pluralist, because in encouraged the Christian concept of religious tolerance.

The American Revolution began out of quite limited grievances and objectives, and certainly without any Utopian agenda. As soon as definite revolutionary purpose emerged, the model was England's Glorious Revolution, with George III cast in the role of James II.

In Burke's mind, the American Revolution was a replay of the Glorious Revolution. The key was limited change to a few aspects of government, rather than smashing both government and society entirely.

The Glorious Revolution was essentially a dynastic and sectarian adjustment. The American Revolution was essentially the secession of colonists from an empire. The first real full-blooded secular revolution, the first large and determined attempt to construct a secular Utopia, after a wholesale destruction of existing arrangements - together with the people who were seen to represent and defend these arrangements, was the French Revolution.

Burke's view could be summarized as: fix it, reform it, don't destroy it. But the French Revolution was an attempt to destroy one civilization and create another in its place. Some historians see the French Revolution as the birth of Fascism.

Because Burke had supported the American Revolution, some people expected him to also support the French Revolution.

In Burke's view, however, the colonists had deserved support, not because they had asserted abstract rights ... but for resisting the withdrawal of liberties which they had long enjoyed as British subjects.

In this understanding of the American Revolution, George Washington and the other Founding Fathers were defending an established social order, while George III of England was attempting to introduce something new and different. The Founding Fathers were defending their traditional rights under the Magna Charta, but King George III was trying to institute a new system in which those rights would be taken away.

By contrast, the French Revolution was attacking a long-standing society; Burke saw this in its reliance on the writings of Rousseau. Burke wrote:

Their great problem is to find a substitute for all the principles which hitherto have been employed to regulate the human will and action ... True humility, the basis of the Christian system, is the low, but deep and firm foundation of all real virtue. But this, as very painful in the practice, and little imposing in the appearance, they have totally discarded.

Burke goes on to examine Rousseau's life: fathering many illegitimate children, and refusing to support them or their mothers in any way, he sent these infants to squalid orphanages, where they would soon die of childhood diseases. Burke equates Rousseau's personal failings with the institutional failure of the French Revolutionary government, which would execute thousands of unarmed innocent citizens.

Metternich Changes Things!

2009-08-14T16:41:00.003-04:00

At Drew University, Prof. John von der Heide wrote a book assessing Metternich's influence on world history. In the late 1790's and early 1800's,

Metternich rose to fame in a prolonged contest with Napoleon and prevailed. He went on to create a stable international arrangement on the European continent that would last for more than thirty years.

Other historians would assert that Metternich's arrangement would last for almost a century, not merely thirty years. In either case, a decisive moment happened in the 1790's, when Metternich visited England, and met Edmund Burke; although the two men differed greatly in their political theories, they would both become known as leaders of the conservative movement in their time. Burke

upheld monarchy and denounced natural right ... Burke attacked the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen

Burke had supported the American Revolution, and its Declaration of Independence; he saw them as fundamentally different: seeing the American colonies as basing their quest for independence on the clear historical rights of citizens as set forth in the Magna Carta, but the French Revolution as being based, not on the overthrow of a government, but on the overthrow of a society:

To Burke historical precedent, custom, and tradition were the practical foundation for law and government. Metternich admired what he saw of Great Britain's government, and Burke's defense of the established order. Burke also wrote on "the similitude throughout Europe of religion, laws and manners." Metternich's subsequent defense of a state system was reinforced by Burke's thinking. Metternich would share the conservative thinker's view that the power of France should be contained.

Oddly, Metternich would approve of England's parliamentary system, a prototype of democratic republicanism as it would take root in America, while rejecting the same system for his own native country. In the wake of twenty-five years of violence (between ten years of French Revolution, and fifteen years of Napoleon's dictatorship, millions would die), Metternich was interested in a political peace which would ensure safety for all of Europe. He

was sure that no power by itself could maintain the peace. A harmonious coalition had defeated Napoleon, and harmony would be vital to protecting the fruits of victory. A balance of power in central Europe was necessary for Austria above all, it seemed to Metternich.

In post-Revolutionary, post-Napoleonic Europe, to protect innocent lives, legitimate governments were necessary. Revolutionary France, and Napoleonic France, had been only too willing to sacrifice lives for political gain. Metternich wished to value human life above national power politics: he was firmly against nationalism:

Restoring the House of Bourbon in France was more in step with Metternich's regard for, and understanding of, legitimacy.

Metternich, of course, is most widely known for organizing the Congress of Vienna. This international gathering would preserve peace in Europe for decades into the future.

The Final Act, singed on June 9, 1815, had concluded the Congress of Vienna and redistributed the territory in accordance withe Big Four's wishes and transformed "compensation" and "legitimacy" into practical policy.

In the century after the twenty-five years of bloodshed, as in the century before, the major powers in Europe would be England, Prussia, Russia, Austria, and France. France's temporary humiliation (hence the reference to the "Big Four") would be reversed by the skills of Talleyrand, France's representative at the Congress of Vienna. But Spain, Poland, Sweden, and Holland were relegated to a second-string status.

Do Historians Make Good Politicians?

2009-07-10T16:56:00.002-04:00

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., was a professor of history at Harvard University. When Kennedy won the 1960 election, one of his first moves was to invite Schlesinger to be part of his administration. Schlesinger would have great influence on Kennedy's decisions, somewhat in domestic policy, but mainly in foreign policy. Contemplating how different psychological views of human nature can lead to different governmental forms, Schlesinger wrote:

The very concept of leadership implies the proposition that individuals can make a difference. This proposition has never been universally accepted. From classical times to the present day, eminent thinkers have regarded individuals as no more than the agents and pawns of larger forces, whether the gods and goddesses of the ancient world or, in the modern era, race, class, nation, the dialectic, the will of the people, the spirit of the times, history itself. Against such forces, the individual dwindles into insignificance.

Schlesinger is here comparing two views of history: some see history as the inevitable unfolding of social and historical trends; others see history as a series of significant choices made by individual people. The view that humans never make significant decisions is often called "determinism": if history is an inevitable unfolding of social forces, then we are all merely pawns in the grand game. Schlesinger continues:

Determinism takes many forms. Marxism is the determinism of class. Nazism the determinism of race. But the idea of men and women as the slaves of history runs athwart the deepest human instincts. Rigid determinism abolishes the idea of human freedom - the assumption of free choice that underlies every move we make, every word we speak, every thought we think. It abolishes the idea of human responsibility, since it is manifestly unfair to reward or punish people for actions that are by definition beyond their control. No one can live inconsistently by any deterministic creed. The Marxist states prove this themselves by their extreme susceptibility to the cult of leadership.

Here we must remember that Schlesinger served in the Kennedy administration, when Marxist governments, or at least governments which called themselves Marxist, were a serious threat to world peace. Additionally, there were still a few people who still took seriously the idea of trying to organize a nation around Marxist principles. Although Marx, and his version of communism, have been largely discredited now, we can still learn from these reflections on politics and psychology. Applying the principle further, Schlesinger notes:

More than that, history refutes the idea that individuals make no difference. In December 1931 a British politician crossing Park Avenue in New York between 76th and 77th Streets around 10:30 PM looked in the wrong direction and was knocked down by an automobile - a moment, he later recalled, of a man aghast, a world aglare: "I do not understand why I was not broken like an eggshell or squashed like a gooseberry." Fourteen months later an American politician, sitting in an open car in Miami, Florida, was fired on by an assassin; the man beside him was hit. Those who believe that individuals make no difference to history might well ponder whether the next two decades would have been the same had Mario Constansino's car killed Winston Churchill in 1931 and Giuseppe Zangara's bullet killed Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. Suppose, in addition, that Adolf Hitler had been killed in the street fighting during the Munich Putsch of 1923 and that Lenin had died of typhus during World War I. What would the 20th century be like now?

Human beings make significant choices, and those choices have consequences, for good or for evil. This is the lesson of history which Schlesinger attempted to translate (successfully or unsuccessfully) into American policy during the Kennedy administration.

Random Reformation Thoughts

2009-05-27T16:27:00.002-04:00

Luther posted his 95 theses in the year 1517, but his views weren't completely finalized on many topics. The theses of 1517 were actually rather mild toward the papacy. By 1532, Luther had crystallized his more mature views, which were different than those in the 95 theses. The theses marked the beginning of Luther's critique of ecclesiastical practices, but only a beginning. Luther intended his 95 theses more as a starting point for discussions, and not as a statement of his views. His hope was to inspire an academic discussion among the university's professors and students; he got that, and much more! Luther was surprised by the explosive reaction to his theses.

The rise of "humanism" (not to be confused with "secular humanism") was instrumental in the Reformation. The notion was that logical, rational investigation of the texts was the path to objective truth. This lead to research in the original languages of the texts, Hebrew and Greek. Human beings, as rational and independent creatures, could each examine these texts, and discover for himself or herself the truth. Scientific reflection upon the nature of language dictated that it was better to read the languages in the original than in a translation, thus the Latin translation was regarded as "inferior" to the original Hebrew text. Yet at the same time, the desire to allow each person to independently discover the truth drove the Reformers to offer translations, not in Latin, but in the common languages of the people (German, English, etc.). Translations were available before the Reformation, notably the Gothic language edition of the fourth century, and Wycliffe's English translation of 1382. But the Reformation popularized such translations.

Between the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, both Roman Catholicism and Lutheranism experienced a type of "return to the source". The task was to strip away fifteen centuries of mere tradition, and see what the texts actually said. The institutions and practices of either group may be judged as good, bad, or otherwise, but each had to justify itself with reference to a Mediterranean Jewish peasant who preached 1500 years earlier.

The popularizing of the translations meant that people had to confront difficult passages in the text. The particular statement that "not one person is righteous - all have sinned" caused consternation. Luther's Reformation argument asserted that human failure dictated that entry into the afterlife was a divine gift - an unearned ticket into paradise. The Roman Catholic side countered that a person would have to work very hard to earn admission into heaven. The debate continues to this day.

Because humanism and the Reformation pointed the individual toward the text, and asked the individual to examine and discover for himself or herself, a new sense of "the force of intellectual conviction" arose. Luther stated his views, not because these views were handed down by his parents and grandparents, but because he had studied the texts and the languages himself. Luther claimed that his views were dictated by logic: no other conclusion could logically be drawn from the evidence in the text, he said. This process of analyzing evidence until one is "convinced" of an answer is the foundation of scientific revolution. "Intellectual conviction" was, in the eyes of the humanists, not a choice, but the inescapable result of study. One does not choose to believe that the earth is a sphere: one is presented with so much evidence that one can't believe otherwise.

After Luther's death, the German principalities negotiated a religious tolerance treaty in 1555, which continued for centuries, broken only by the Thirty Years War (1618 - 1648). This allowed Lutherans and Roman Catholics (and later Calvinists and Zwinglians) to live together without armed conflict. A by-product of this was also more tolerance shown toward the Jews. In the years after 1555, Jews migrated to Germany from France, Italy, Spain, England, Poland, and Russia. It is an irony of history that between 1555 and 1938, the safest place in Europe for a Jew to be was Germany. What made the Holocaust such a monstrosity was that many of the Jews who were murdered by the Nazis were the descendants of Jews who had moved to Germany to escape persecution in England and France. The Reformation and the treaty of 1555 paved the way for tolerance in the following centuries.

Some historians include a debate called "the Averroist dispute" in the history of the Reformation; this debate, triggered by an Arabic philosopher whose books were studied among the European philosophers, was interesting, but not actually part of the Reformation. The Averroist dispute can be summarized as a dispute about whether God was simply a "force" or whether God had a "personality" (i.e., emotions, desires, plans, etc.). The Averroist dispute was not directly involved in the Reformation, but was a symptom of a growing engagement of humanist reflection on theological issues.

Economics, Religion, and Nationalism

2009-05-27T10:42:00.002-04:00

The decline of religious belief opened the door to nationalism. If people do not have an allegiance to God, then the state becomes the ultimate value, and there is no limit on the right of the state to control and manipulate the individual. On the European Continent, active participation in spiritual life began a downward trend in the mid-1700's; this tendency continued until the mid-1900's. In the late 1800's and early 1900's, synagogue and church attendance was at an all-time low. (Of course, mere attendance itself means almost nothing; it can, however, be an indirect indicator of true spiritual activity.) So the decline in religion allowed the nationalistic state to take the rights from the individual; "might makes right" - when religious belief has declined, the state can do whatever it deems appropriate, and there is no recourse.

When there is no sense of higher values, then a nationalistic claim that the government should reign supreme and unchallenged over society faces no resistance.

Nationalism as such tends to blend with socialism; the state's right to demand ultimate loyalty and the state's ownership of property and control of markets go hand-in-hand. Thus high taxation and governmental intervention in societal affairs (education, health care, etc.) are marks of nationalism.

"Free market" capitalism tends to oppose nationalism, both because it will allow for the possibility that at some point, imports and exports become more desirable than domestic commerce, and also because it exerts a downward pressure on taxation.

J.M. Keynes and Your Wallet

2009-05-18T06:23:00.003-04:00

The British economist John Maynard Keynes had a tremendous influence during the first half of the twentieth century, and even today his ideas are embraced by some leaders, in the U.S.A. and elsewhere. Keynes made the bold assertion that in was not only acceptable, but even good, for a government to intervene in an otherwise free market. He thus worked against the "classical liberalism" of Adam Smith and John Locke, who emphasized an individual's right to make decisions. A government can set prices for buying and selling, and decide how much you will earn at your job. Keynes wrote that it was more important for a government to control the entire economy (in order to ensure that it was running smoothly) than it was for each person to have choice; stated differently, Keynes felt that collective economic security was more important than individual human freedom.

Keynes himself did not enthusiastically embrace the idea of deficit spending, accumulating into governmental debt, but many of his followers interpreted his theories in a way which did exactly that. Most notably, President Franklin Roosevelt understood (or misunderstood) Keynesian economics to give permission for the massive debt and deficits of the New Deal programs. Roosevelt's justification was encapsulated in the slogan "we owe it to ourselves." It may be trouble if one individual gets into massive debt (say, by buying a large house or a fancy car), but if a nation signs itself into debt, that's fine, because we borrow the money "from ourselves" (from banks, or from individuals who purchase government bonds), and we owe it "to ourselves", and so, Roosevelt argued, we could continue borrowing huge amounts indefinitely, and never even really intend to pay it all back, as long we made small regular payments. This is the advent of "structural debt": debt as a standing part of the budget, rather than a one-time debt which one plans to pay off.

Whether or not FDR's massive debts helped the American economy remains a matter of dispute: many economists write that it was the large-scale factory activity of WWII which actually re-started the economic and nudged it toward prosperity.

The Roosevelt version of Keynesian economics governed much economic thought until the difficulties of the mid 1970's, when various economists and politicians questioned the wisdom of amassing a huge national debt. Since that time, there has been much discussion about how to reduce both annual deficits and the larger accumulated debt.

One of several objections to such standing debts is summarized in the phrase "generational theft": if a group of national leaders, the youngest of whom is perhaps in her or his late 40's, and the majority of whom are in their 50's or 60's, create, for example, a fifty-trillion-dollar national debt, it is clear that they will, given their life expectancies, have no part in paying this debt. It will be left to the next several generations of Americans, people who are now fifteen or twenty years old, to pay the bill. Hence, one generation is literally robbing another.

Crime and Punishment - and Nietzsche?

2009-05-07T09:09:00.002-04:00

Many different readers - who disagree with each other on nearly everything else - will agree that Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment seems designed as a response to several ideas proposed by Friedrich Nietzsche. Raskolnikov, the main character in Crime and Punishment, embraces an amoral viewpoint and something like the Superman concept; both are central to Nietzsche's thought. Raskolnikov attempts to live out these philosophies, is tortured and frustrated in so doing, and finally finds clarity and peace of mind by rejecting them; seemingly, Dostoevsky's repudiation of Nietzsche's thought.

There is, however, a problem: we lack evidence that Dostoevsky had heard of, or read any of, Nietzsche's writings or ideas. In fact, by the time Crime and Punishment was printed in 1866, Nietzsche had not yet published or written any of his major books. He had published a few smaller and less significant works; it is technically possible that Dostoevsky could have seen them, but they don't contain clear and developed expression of Nietzsche's thought.

So how can Dostoevsky apparently reply to thoughts which hadn't yet been written?

Both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky had access to the same works of earlier authors; both were exposed to intellectual trends of their day. Both had access, for example, to Darwin, Marx, and Kierkegaard. We can see both as responding to them. Nietzsche embracing the deterministic nihilism of Marx and Darwin, rejected Kierkegaard's proposal that humans can engage in a social ethic which acknowledges the value of human life and the possibility of humans making significant and meaningful choices. Dostoevsky, rejecting Darwin and Marx, agreed with Kierkegaard that only by embracing an existential view of human life, crystallized in the act of confession, which simultaneously acknowledges the possibility of responsibility and the hope of redemption, will a human being reach clarity and peace of mind.

So, without having read Nietzsche, Dostoevsky effectively replies to him, because both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky were responding to the same stimuli: Dostoevsky not only gives his response to the stimuli of Darwin, Marx, and Kierkegaard, but peremptorily offers counter-arguments to alternative responses.

February 12, 1809

2009-05-07T08:51:00.002-04:00

In an interesting juxtaposition, two very different men were born on the same date: Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. Both men would exert influence on their societies, and ultimately the world; both exemplified questions which are relevant to the very core of human existence. Yet they represent opposites.

Lincoln would stress the value of every human life, and therefore the law's obligation to treat all humans equally; he saw principles of justice as arising from the rational design of the universe.

Darwin, assuming that irrational chance governed the universe, stressed that life spontaneously arose from a random mix of inanimate chemicals; determined by the physical patterns of molecular reactions, humans make no significant choices, and have no deeper meaning in life.

Lincoln faced the terrifying weight of existential choices which a human can authentically make, including the responsibility for the outcomes; but he opened the door for a sense of hope that freedom and meaning are possible.

Darwin envisioned a world in which humans were free from the terrifying thought of having to take responsibility for their choices and actions; but in the process, he lost the possibility of an authentic existential freedom, of any principled rationality in the structure of the universe, and of transcendental meaning in human life.

No Time for Shakespeare?

2009-04-21T07:27:00.005-04:00

Reflecting on the giddiness of rallies in the 1980's, in which students chanted, "Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Western Civ has got to go!", Professor Mark Woodhouse (at Georgia State University), a little calmer, wrote in 1996:

An objective evaluation of competing points of view is impossible since all points of view are to some extent biased by race, gender, and culture. All that's left to do is to describe different perspectives, including those formerly considered inconsequential, and attempt to balance past biases - which might entail leaving Plato and Shakespeare out of the curriculum altogether.

Apparently, because we've read too much Shakespeare and Plato for the last hundred years, we should stop reading them now, in an attempt to "balance" perspectives. (The quote comes from his book, Paradigm wars: Worldviews for a New Age). He seems to have an underlying assumption that all texts are of equal value; he seems also to assume that the definitive measure of a text is the race, gender, and culture of its author.

An African woman would presumably want her readers to appreciate her book because it's well-written, and grapples with timeless human questions; she presumably would not want her audience to value her text merely because of her gender, race, and culture.

Yet, analyzing Woodhouse's willingness to toss Shakespeare into the recyclers, Prof. Michael Zimmermann (at Tulane), calls Woodhouse's book "insightful, engaging, and comprehensive," and says that it "is an indispensable guide to new conceptual pathways that may lead to the radical and constructive alterations needed to guide humankind in the 21st century."

We can be thankful that these viewpoints represent a small minority of university-level educators, and that the vast majority are still willing to tolerate Shakespeare and Plato.

Study That Language!

2009-03-26T09:29:00.003-04:00

It's amazing how many of history's geniuses have studied Hebrew: Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, and William Blake, to name but a few. They did more than take a couple of classes - these men devoted years to researching the grammar and vocabulary of this ancient language and its texts. What ultimate influence did this have on their other famous endeavors?

Islamic Armies Attack Italy

2009-03-23T07:55:00.002-04:00

Many of us would be startled if we are told that in the ninth century, a Muslim fleet based in Sicily sailed up the Tiber and occupied and sacked Rome for days, until it was defeated and expelled by the the armies of the Holy Roman Empire and other Frankish contingents. This attack took place on August 28, in the year 846 A.D., when the Islamic military arrived at the mouth of the river Tiber and sailed into Rome.

The Muslim invasion of Italy is often overlooked in history books, because the massive Islamic attacks on Spain and Yugoslavia get more attention. Although the attack on Italy was smaller than the other Muslim assaults, it is worth studying, because it is part of the larger historical trend which characterized these centuries.

Logically enough, the Islamic advance on Italy was made possible after Muslim armies had occupied and subjugated, in stepping-stone fashion, the islands of Sicily, Corsica, and Sardinia.

Despite the fact that the military action in Italy was smaller than the massive incursions into Spain and Yugoslavia, its historical importance lies in the fact that the Islamic military succeeded in opening a third front; this forced the Europeans to spread their defensive forces more thinly, to the strategic and tactical advantage of the Muslims.

Further south of Rome down along the Italian peninsula, Islamic forces staged both temporary raids, as well as occupying various provinces on a longer-term basis, sometimes holding a region for several years.

Delacroix's Paintings

2009-03-14T11:16:00.001-04:00

Delacroix's painting of the Massacre at Chios, shows sick, dying Greek civilians about to be slaughtered by the Muslims. One of several paintings he made of this contemporary event, it expresses sympathy for the Greek cause in their war of independence against the Islamic empire, a popular sentiment at the time for the French people. Delacroix was quickly recognized as a leading painter in the new Romantic style, and the picture was bought by the state. His depiction of suffering was controversial however, as there was no glorious event taking place, no patriots raising their swords in valour, only a disaster. Many critics deplored the painting's despairing tone, calling it "a massacre of art". The pathos in the depiction of an infant clutching its dead mother's breast had an especially powerful effect, although this detail was condemned as unfit for art by Delacroix's critics. A viewing of the paintings of John Constable prompted Delacroix to make extensive, freely painted changes to the sky and distant landscape.

Delacroix produced a second painting in support of the Greeks in their war for independence, this time referring to the capture of Missolonghi by Muslim forces in 1825. With a restraint of palette appropriate to the allegory, Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi displays a woman in Greek costume with her breast bared, arms half-raised in an imploring gesture before the horrible scene: the suicide of the Greeks, who chose to kill themselves and destroy their city rather than surrender to the Islamic army. A hand is seen at the bottom, the body having being crushed by rubble. The whole picture serves as a monument to the people of Missolonghi and to the idea of freedom against tyrannical rule. This event interested Delacroix not only for his sympathies with the Greeks, but also because the poet Byron, whom Delacroix greatly admired, had died there.

Father Copernicus, the Roman Catholic Priest

2009-03-11T12:03:00.002-04:00

Nicholas Copernicus was a Polish priest, who first advanced the doctrine that the sun and not the earth is the center of our system, round which our planet revolves, rotating on its own axis. His great work, De Revolutionibus orblure coelestium, was published at the earnest solicitation of Cardinal Schömberg and the Bishop of Culm. It was dedicated to Pope Paul III, with his permission. No objections or difficulties were raised against Copernicus by any official of the Roman Catholic church. Neither Paul III, nor any of the nine popes who followed him, nor the Roman Congregations raised any alarm.

On the contrary, Copernicus was rewarded with honors by the Pope, and became an influential individual within the Roman Catholic church. In sum, the heliocentric solar system was warmly received by the established church of the day.

The Complex Mr. Newton

2009-03-04T21:02:00.004-05:00

Isaac Newton was, beyond question, one of the most brilliant scientists and mathematicians who ever lived.

He invented calculus and the reflecting telescope; he discovered the gravity equation, the gravity constant, and the laws of motion. He correctly analyzed the refraction of light.

But most of his time and effort were directed to spiritual questions. He excelled in his ability to read Hebrew and Greek, and wrote extensive commentaries on the Tanakh and the New Testament. His commentaries are so detailed that he began to calculate astronomical observations using the Hebrew calendar, in which months have names like "Nisan", rather than the standard English calendar. In fact, he wrote and published more books about religion than he wrote about mathematics and science put together.

As modern scholars study Newton in great detail, two different interpretations emerge, hinging on this question: was Newton a Christian?

Those scholars who believe that Newton was a Christian cite the following facts as evidence: Newton clearly regards the Hebrew and Greek texts of the Bible as authoritative and historical; Newton refers to Jesus as the Savior of all mankind; Newton understands that the Resurrection is a physical, bodily event, and not a mere metaphor.

Those who write that Newton was not a Christian point to the facts that Newton practiced a form of alchemy which was more like magic than science, and traditional Christianity frowns on the practice of magic, and that Newton called Jesus "the Son of God" but rejected the usual understanding of the Trinity, writing that Jesus is only partially, and not fully, divine, and therefore Newton declined write that Jesus is God.

So was Newton a Christian? You decide.

No Hating Allowed!

2009-02-28T17:02:00.003-05:00

Our society sees hate as an undesirable thing. As early as Kindergarten and preschool, we are taught not to hate; some legislators even want to pass laws prohibiting what they call "hate speech" in public settings.

But how did our culture obtain this dislike for hate? Why do we have this aversion to hatred?

Our civilization has been greatly influenced by the New Testament, one of the most widely-read documents on the plant. A little analysis of this text is illuminating: the Greek words which underlie the English translation into words like hate, hated, hating, and hates occur between 11 and 38 times in the entire text. If we classify these occurrences, we find situations of people hating each other, people hating God, people hating things, people accusing others of hating them, and a few other circumstances. The one case which we do not find is God hating any person. According to the New Testament, God hates some things, but He never hates a human being.

God hates, for example, violence, stealing, lying, and other such things; but He doesn't hate any man, woman, or child. Although He hates violence, He doesn't even hate the person who commits it.

This extreme tendency to avoid hatred is the source for our culture's antipathy to hatred.

It also sets our community, whether you call it Western Civilization or European Culture, apart from other nations, in which hatred is allowed, encouraged, and even required of its population. Given our society's efforts to get rid of hatred, it is difficult to understand that in other parts of the world, leaders teach and encourage hatred.

Rousseau's Religion

2009-02-07T18:38:00.002-05:00

Hobbes, Bossuet, and Locke all embraced some form of the Christian belief system (either Anglicanism or Roman Catholicism). While Rousseau affirmed the necessity of religion, he repudiated the doctrine of original sen, which plays so large a part in all different versions of Christianity (in Émile, Rousseau writes "there is no original perversity in the human hear"). His endorsement of religious toleration would be ironic, had he not meant it seriously: he claims to be tolerant, but in the same chapter of the Social Contract demands that anyone who doesn't agree with his idea of a "civil religion" be put to death! His assertion that true followers of Jesus would not make good citizens was based on his claim that Christian soldiers wouldn't fight as savagely as pagan soldiers.

Rousseau's political critique of Christianity was twofold: first, that it divided religion from the government; second, that Christianity asserts that no ordinary human is perfect. Rousseau, on the other hand, believed that religion had to be united and intertwined with the government, and that human beings are born perfect: and that human beings and human society can be perfected and kept perfect if only we will follow his guidelines!

Population and Economy

2009-01-26T14:44:00.003-05:00

A nation's population can be either static, growing, or shrinking. Most of the earth's nations have growing populations. A territory with a static or shrinking population may experience short-term growth, but cannot experience long-term growth. It will suffer an inevitable decline.

But not every nation with a growing population will experience a growing economy. A population can grow slowly, moderately, or rapidly. The most favorable economic conditions are found in a moderately growing population.

A rapidly-growing population may outrun the economy's ability to provide basic services. A slowly growing population will not have enough workers to support its children and retirees: this is the source of the America's current problems - not enough workers. A moderately growing population also provides new jobs at precise rate for young adults entering the workforce, unemployment is thereby reduced.

So go get married and have babies!

The Invasion of Spain

2009-01-24T11:01:00.002-05:00

Tarek ibn Ziyad was the Muslim general who led the Islamic conquest of Spain in 711 A.D. The Muslims forged an empire in Spain that was not defeated until 1492.

When Ziyad's forces landed at Gibraltar (Gibr Tariq, "rock of Tarek") on the Spanish coast, he famously burned the fleet to the waterline as a warning to his men that they must conquer or die in the cause of jihad. He also offered other incentives, among them mass looting of property and the rape and sexual enslavement of women. Islamic historian Al Maggari gives part of Ziyad's speech as follows: "You have heard that in this country there are a large number of ravishingly beautiful Greek maidens, their graceful forms are draped in sumptuous gowns on which gleam pearls, coral, and purest gold, and they live in the palaces of royal kings."

Why did Ziyad refer to the Spanish women as Greek? The main Christian targets for the Muslim armies up to that point were the Greek Byzantines, hence the reference to "Greek maidens." Turks often still use the word "Rûm" (meaning Roman) to refer to Christians or Europeans in general, as the Byzantines were the Eastern Romans. The common Arab word "Ferengi" for Europeans means "Franks," and came much later when they encountered the Western Christian Crusaders. This same word was borrowed by science fiction writers for one of the "Star Trek" spinoffs.

He conquered and enslaved peaceful people and instituted an imperial occupation that lasted for seven centuries, and his view of "violence against women" was anything but progressive. Remember, the attack on Spain in 711 A.D. was unprovoked. Not content with military victory, the Islamic army plundered both the material wealth and the human lives of the territory.

In Islam, the women and children of infidels defeated in jihad became the property of Muslims, and this sick fate befell countless millions of people over the course of the centuries during which Muslims attacked Europe.

Islamic historians have preserved the speech which Ziyad gave after his troops landed on the Spanish shore, and he burned their ships:

Oh my warriors, to where would you flee? Behind you is the sea, before you, the enemy. You have heard that in this country there are a large number of ravishingly beautiful Greek maidens, their graceful forms are draped in sumptuous gowns on which gleam pearls, coral, and purest gold, and they live in the palaces of royal kings: the spoils will belong to yourselves.

Despite the fact that the attack on Spain was unprovoked, and the Spanish taken by surprise, they did have some defensive operations. The Gothic king Rodrigo (also called Roderick) kept a defense for about a year after the invasion.

Roderick, immediately upon securing his throne, gathered a force to oppose the Arabs and Berbers (Mauri) who were raiding in the south of the Iberian peninsula and had destroyed many towns under Tariq ibn Ziyad and other Muslim generals. While later Arabic sources make the conquest of Hispania a singular event undertaken at the orders of the governor Musa ibn Nosseyr of Ifriqiya, it seems that the Arabs began disorganised raids and only undertook to conquer the peninsula with the fortuitous death of Roderick and the collapse of the Visigothic nobility. The Saracens invaded "all Hispania" from Septem (Ceuta).

Roderic made several expeditions against the invaders before he was killed in battle in 712. The location of the battle is debatable. It probably occurred near the mouth of the Guadalete river, hence its name, the Battle of Guadalete.

The Arabs took Toledo in 711-712 and executed many nobles still in the city on the pretense that they had assisted in the flight of Oppa, a son of Egica.

When Roderick was killed in action, the defense quickly collapsed, and the Muslims captured the entire country, carrying out the plans. Village after village suffered the same fate: the men were killed, the women raped and made into concubines, the children taken as slaves; after taking whatever grain and livestock they wanted for their army's provisions, the Islamic military burned the fields, slaughtered the remaining animals, and left the elderly to starve. Spain was quickly reduced to a wasteland.

What Puzzled Pliny

2009-01-22T10:26:00.002-05:00

Pliny the Younger was a governor, who monitored a territory for his boss, the emperor Trajan. Pliny is famous for his letters, which give us an insider's view of the political workings of the Roman Empire.

One set of letters between Pliny and Trajan concerns the Christians. Pliny confesses that this new religious group is growing in number, and that he doesn't really understand what they believe; he reports that they aren't committing crimes or creating civil disturbances. Yet Pliny and Trajan develop a plan to imprison, torture, and execute Christians, seemingly because they refuse to acknowledge the emperor as divine. Under Pliny's leadership, thousands of Christians were executed.

But Pliny continued to ponder this new religion. What bothered him most, as we see in his letters to Trajan, is that a free Roman man would willingly join an organization which turned the social order upside down. Pliny reports that the leaders of the local Christian group were two female slaves - two women who were at the bottom of the hierarchy for three reasons: they were women, they were slaves, and they were not Roman citizens. Yet these two women were leading a group which included male free Roman citizens. Pliny couldn't understand why these men would acknowledge these women as leaders. It was this feature of the early Christian church which puzzled him; even as he executed them in large numbers, he kept trying to understand them. We don't know if he ever did.

An Outsider Looks at Westen Civilization

2009-01-20T08:57:00.011-05:00

[We can learn to look at our European society in a fresh way when we read the observations of someone who comes from a different culture. Dinesh D'Souza was born in Bombay, India, and has spent much of his life studying the western tradition. His observations:]

When Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal,” he called the proposition “self-evident.” But he did not mean that it is immediately evident. It requires a certain kind of learning. And indeed most cultures throughout history, and even today, reject the proposition. At first glance, there is admittedly something absurd about the claim of human equality, when all around us we see dramatic evidence of inequality. People are unequal in height, in weight, in strength, in stamina, in intelligence, in perseverance, in truthfulness, and in about every other quality. But of course Jefferson knew this. He was asserting human equality of a special kind. Human beings, he was saying, are moral equals, each of whom possesses certain equal rights. They differ in many respects, but each of their lives has a moral worth no greater and no less than that of any other. According to this doctrine, the rights of a Philadelphia street sweeper are the same as those of Jefferson himself.

This idea of the preciousness and equal worth of every human being is largely rooted in Christianity. Christians believe that God places infinite value on every human life. Christian salvation does not attach itself to a person’s family or tribe or city. It is an individual matter. And not only are Christians judged at the end of their lives as individuals, but throughout their lives they relate to God on that basis. This aspect of Christianity had momentous consequences. Christianity is largely responsible for many of the principles and institutions that even secular people cherish—chief among them equality and liberty.

Though the American founders were interested in the examples of Greece and Rome, they also saw limitations in those examples. Alexander Hamilton wrote that it would be “as ridiculous to seek for [political] models in the simple ages of Greece and Rome as it would be to go in quest of them among the Hottentots and Laplanders.” In The Federalist Papers, we read at one point that the classical idea of liberty decreed “to the same citizens the hemlock on one day and statues on the next….” And elsewhere: “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.” While the ancients had direct democracy that was susceptible to the unjust passions of the mob and supported by large-scale slavery, we today have representative democracy, with full citizenship and the franchise extended in principle to all. Let us try to understand how this great change came about.

In ancient Greece and Rome, individual human life had no particular value in and of itself. The Spartans left weak children to die on the hillside. Infanticide was common, as it is common even today in many parts of the world. Fathers who wanted sons had few qualms about drowning their newborn daughters. Human beings were routinely bludgeoned to death or mauled by wild animals in the Roman gladiatorial arena. Many of the great classical thinkers saw nothing wrong with these practices. Christianity, on the other hand, contributed to their demise by fostering moral outrage at the mistreatment of innocent human life.

Likewise, women had a very low status in ancient Greece and Rome, as they do today in many cultures, notably in the Muslim world. Such views are common in patriarchal cultures. And they were prevalent as well in the Jewish society in which Jesus lived. But Jesus broke the traditional taboos of his time when he scandalously permitted women of low social status to travel with him and be part of his circle of friends and confidantes.

Christianity did not immediately and directly contest patriarchy, but it helped to elevate the status of women in society. The Christian prohibition of adultery, a sin it viewed as equally serious for men and women, and rules concerning divorce that (unlike in Judaism and Islam) treated men and women equally, helped to improve the social status of women. Indeed so dignified was the position of the woman in Christian marriage that women predominated in the early Christian church, and the pagan Romans scorned Christianity as a religion for women.

Then there is slavery, a favorite topic for the new atheist writers. “Consult the Bible,” Sam Harris writes in Letter to a Christian Nation, “and you will discover that the creator of the universe clearly expects us to keep slaves.” Steven Weinberg notes that “Christianity…lived comfortably with slavery for many centuries.” Nor are they the first to fault Christianity for its alleged approval of slavery. But we must remember that slavery pre-dated Christianity by centuries and even millennia. It was widely practiced in the ancient world, from China and India to Greece and Rome. Most cultures regarded it as an indispensable institution, like the family. Sociologist Orlando Patterson has noted that for centuries, slavery needed no defenders because it had no critics.

But Christianity, from its very beginning, discouraged the enslavement of fellow Christians. We read in one of Paul’s letters that Paul himself interceded with a master named Philemon on behalf of his runaway slave, and encouraged Philemon to think of his slave as a brother instead. Confronted with the question of how a slave can also be a brother, Christians began to regard slavery as indefensible. As a result, slavery withered throughout medieval Christendom and was eventually replaced by serfdom. While slaves were “human tools,” serfs had rights of marriage, contract, and property ownership that were legally enforceable. And of course serfdom itself would eventually collapse under the weight of the argument for human dignity

Moreover, politically active Christians were at the forefront of the modern anti-slavery movement. In England, William Wilberforce spearheaded a campaign that began with almost no support and was driven entirely by his Christian convictions—a story powerfully told in the recent film Amazing Grace. Eventually Wilberforce triumphed, and in 1833 slavery was outlawed in Britain. Pressed by religious groups at home, England then took the lead in repressing the slave trade abroad.

The debate over slavery in America, too, had a distinctively religious flavor. Free blacks who agitated for emancipation invoked the narrative of liberation in the Book of Exodus: “Go down Moses, way down to Egypt land and tell old Pharaoh, let my people go.” But of course throughout history people have opposed slavery for themselves while being happy to enslave others. Indeed there were many black slave owners in the American South. What is remarkable in this historical period in the Western world is the rise of opposition to slavery in principle. Among the first to embrace abolitionism were the Quakers, and other Christians soon followed in applying politically the biblical notion that human beings are equal in the eyes of God. Understanding equality in this ingrained way, they adopted the view that no man has the right to rule another man without his consent. This latter idea (contained most famously in the Declaration of Independence) is the moral root both of abolitionism and of democracy.

For those who think of American history only or mostly in secular terms, it may come as news that some of its greatest events were preceded by massive Christian revivals. What historians call the First Great Awakening swept the country in the mid-eighteenth century, and helped lay the moral foundation of the American Revolution. Historian Paul Johnson describes the War for Independence as “inconceivable…without this religious background.” By this he means that the revival provided essential support for the ideas that fueled the Revolution. Jefferson, let us recall, proclaimed that human equality is a gift from God: we are endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights. Indeed there is no other possible source for them. And Jefferson later wrote that he was not expressing new ideas or principles when he wrote the Declaration, but was rather giving expression to something that had become settled in the American mind.

Likewise John Adams wrote: “What do we mean by the American Revolution? The war? That was no part of the Revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The Revolution was in the minds of the people…a change in their religious sentiments.” Those religious sentiments were forged in the spiritual inclinations of Americans.

That same spirituality continued into the early nineteenth century, leaving in its wake the temperance movement, the movement for women’s suffrage, and most importantly the abolitionist movement. It was the religious fervor that animated the abolitionist cause and contributed so much to the chain of events that brought about America’s “new birth of freedom."

And finally, fast forwarding to the twentieth century, the Reverend Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech referred famously to a promissory note and demanded that it be cashed. This was an appeal to the idea of equality in the Declaration of 1776. Remarkably, King was resting his case on a proclamation issued 200 years earlier by a Southern slave owner. Yet in doing so, he was appealing to a principle that he and Jefferson shared. Both men, the twentieth-century pastor and the eighteenth-century planter, reflected the influence of Christianity in American politics.

Christianity has also lent force to the modern concept of individual freedom. There are hints of this concept both in the classical world and in the world of the ancient Hebrews. One finds, in such figures as Socrates and the Hebrew prophets, notable individuals who have the courage to stand up and question even the highest expressions of power. But while these cultures produced great individuals, as other cultures often do today, none of them cultivated an appreciation for individuality. And it is significant that Socrates and the Hebrew prophets came to bad ends. They were anomalies in their societies, and those societies—lacking respect for individual freedom—got rid of them.

As Benjamin Constant pointed out, freedom in the ancient world was the right to participate in the making of laws. Greek democracy was direct democracy in which every citizen could show up in the agora, debate issues of taxes and war, and vote on what action the polis should take. The Greeks exercised their freedom solely through active involvement in the political life of the city. There was no other kind of freedom and certainly no freedom of thought or of religion of the kind that we hold dear. The modern idea of freedom, by contrast, is rooted in a respect for the individual. It means the right to express our opinion, the right to choose a career, the right to buy and sell property, the right to travel where we want, the right to our own personal space, and the right to live our own life. In return, we are responsible only to respect the rights of others. This is the freedom we are ready to fight for, and we become indignant when it is challenged or taken away.

Christianity has played a vital role in the development of this new concept of freedom through its doctrine that all human beings are moral agents, created in God’s image, with the ability to be the architects of their own lives. The Enlightenment certainly contributed to this understanding of human freedom, though it drew from ideas about the worth of the individual that had been promulgated above all by the teachings of Christianity.

Let me conclude with a warning first issued by one of Western civilization’s greatest atheists, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The ideas that define Western civilization, Nietzsche said, are based on Christianity. Because some of these ideas seem to have taken on a life of their own, we might have the illusion that we can abandon Christianity while retaining them. This illusion, Nietzsche warns us, is just that. Remove Christianity and the ideas fall too.

Consider the example of Europe, where secularization has been occurring for well over a century. For a while it seemed that secularization would have no effect on European morality or social institutions. Yet increasingly today there is evidence of the decline of the nuclear family. Overall birthrates have plummeted, while rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock births are up.

Nietzsche also warned that, with the decline of Christianity, new and opposing ideas would arise. We see these today in demands for the radical redefinition of the family, the revival of eugenic theories, and even arguments for infanticide.

In sum, the eradication of Christianity—and of organized religion in general—would also mean the gradual extinction of the principles of human dignity. Consider human equality. Why do we hold to it? The Christian idea of equality in God’s eyes is undeniably largely responsible. The attempt to ground respect for equality on a purely secular basis ignores the vital contribution by Christianity to its spread. It is folly to believe that it could survive without the continuing aid of religious belief.

If we cherish what is distinctive about Western civilization, then—whatever our religious convictions—we should respect rather than denigrate its Christian roots.

CSI: Chaucer

2009-01-13T06:41:00.004-05:00

A number of historians have come to the conclusion that Geoffrey Chaucer, author of The Canterbury Tales, was murdered.

The motive: Geoffrey had been a friend and policy advisor to King Richard II. When Henry IV took the throne by force (Richard II was imprisoned and died shortly thereafter), the new king would have naturally been somewhat suspicious of Chaucer. Could Henry IV really trust Chaucer, when Chaucer's friend had died as a direct result of the power grab by Henry IV?

There is circumstantial evidence: Chaucer spent his last days in Westminster Abbey, where the church could offer him immunity from prosecution (this is the historical concept of "sanctuary"). When Chaucer did mysteriously die, he was not given the impressive funeral one would expect for someone with literary, political, and social connections.

The Jewish Lutheran and the Atheistic Nazi

2009-01-02T08:27:00.002-05:00

The German poet Heinrich Heine (1797 - 1856) is known for his insightful analysis of societal trends. His own life was marked by the same style of careful thinking, as he wrestled with his unusual identity as someone who was both Jewish and Christian - an unusual religious category that scholars now call "Messianic Judaism". As a baptized Lutheran, he embraced the ideas of Jesus as presented in the New Testament, but saw them as arising from the Tanakh, and not contradicting it.

Heine was also known for his uncanny ability to see how societal trends would develop in the future. He once wrote that "where they burn books, they will ultimately also burn people," recognizing a tendency which would emerge almost eighty years after his death (the first mass book-burnings by the Nazis took place in 1933; Heine's books were among those burned).

He also understood what would unleash the Nazis and their hatred: "Christianity - and that is its greatest merit - has somewhat mitigated that brutal German love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame. This talisman is fragile, and the day will come when it will collapse miserably. Then the ancient stony gods will rise from the forgotten debris and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes, and finally Thor with his giant hammer will jump up and smash the Gothic cathedrals. Do not smile at my advice - the advice of a dreamer who warns you against Kantians, Fichteans, and philosophers of nature. Do not smile at the visionary who anticipates the same revolution in the realm of the visible as has taken place in the spiritual. Thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder. German thunder is of true Germanic character; it is not very nimble, but rumbles along ponderously. Yet, it will come and when you hear a crashing such as never before has been heard in the world's history, then you know that the German thunderbolt has fallen at last. At that uproar the eagles of the air will drop dead, and lions in the remotest deserts of Africa will hide in their royal dens. A play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll."

This long quote from Heine is worth reading carefully: he indicates exactly how the Nazis took over German society. Their first step was to dismantle Christianity and its pacifistic tendencies. Only then could they begin their plans of mass murder. The Nazis also, as Heine predicted, resuscitated forms of ancient Germanic paganism; the Norse mythologies were much more suited to the Nazi desire for war. And while the French Revolution was the worst case of cold-blooded atheistic mass murder that Europe had ever seen, Heine indicates that Germany will see something even worse. In 1933, when the book-burnings began, the Nazis had already infiltrated German churches, and were influencing preachers to talk about nationalist politics instead of the New Testament; by 1938, the few Christians left in Germany were meeting in secret, and the buildings that used to be churches were being used for giving nationalist speeches on Sunday mornings. So it was in that same year that the Holocaust began with Kristallnacht. As Christians organized underground networks to smuggle Jews out of Germany to safety, the Nazis, who sometimes called themselves Christians, met in the churches to ponder the warrior-virtues of Thor and Wotan.

Heinrich Heine's insights were, sadly, correct.

Did He, or Didn't He?

2008-12-29T15:04:00.002-05:00

In the 1980's some historians suggested that the Russian composer Tchaikovsky engaged in same-sex genital contact. Some additionally suggested that a secret society ordered him, or blackmailed him, into committing suicide. What is the evidence?

Just nine days after the first performance of his Sixth Symphony, in 1893, in St Petersburg, Tchaikovsky died.

Some musicologists believe that he consciously wrote his Sixth Symphony as his own Requiem. In the development section of the first movement, the rapidly progressing evolution of the transformed first theme suddenly “shifts into neutral” in the strings, and a rather quiet, harmonized chorale emerges in the trombones. The trombone theme bears absolutely no relation to the music that preceded it, and none to the music that follows it. It appears to be a musical “non sequitur”, an anomaly — but it is from the Russian Orthodox Mass for the Dead, in which it is sung to the words: “And may his soul rest with the souls of all the saints.” Tchaikovsky was buried in a graveyard in St Petersburg.

Until recent years it had been generally assumed that Tchaikovsky died of cholera after drinking contaminated water. However, a controversial theory published in 1980 and based only on oral history (i.e., without documentary evidence), explains Tchaikovsky’s death as a suicide.

In this account, Tchaikovsky committed suicide by consuming small doses of arsenic following an attempt to blackmail him over his homosexuality. His alleged death by cholera (whose symptoms have some similarity with arsenic poisoning) is supposed to have been a cover for this suicide. According to the theory, Tchaikovsky’s own brother, also homosexual, helped conspire to keep the secret. There are many circumstantial events that some say lend credence to the theory, such as wrong dates on the death certificate, conflicting testimony from the brother and the doctor about the timeline of his death, the fact that Tchaikovsky’s funeral was open casket, and that the sheets from his deathbed were merely laundered instead of being burned. There are also passages in Rimsky-Korsakov’s autobiography years later about how people at the funeral kissed Tchaikovsky on the face, even though he had died from cholera. These passages were deleted by Russian authorities from later editions of Rimsky-Korsakov’s book.

The suicide theory is hotly disputed by others, who argues that Tchaikovsky could easily have drunk tainted water because his class regarded cholera as a disease that afflicted only poor people, or because restaurants would mix boiled water with cool, unboiled water; that the circumstances of his death are entirely consistent with cholera; and that homosexuality (“gentlemanly games”) was widely tolerated among the upper classes of Tsarist Russia. To this day, no one knows how Tchaikovsky truly died.

Tchaikovsky’s childhood fits the out-dated stereotypical theory of homosexuality: hovering, emotionally high-strung mother, distant father. Tchaikovsky’s younger brother turned out gay, too. Only fourteen when his mother died, Pyotr was devastated by the loss.

After that, his closest female connection was with a rich widow he never met. For fourteen years, he carried on a devoted and remarkably intimate correspondence with her, who supported him financially but insisted on no personal contact. Early on, an apparently serious proposal to an opera singer was called off, and a midlife marriage to a love-struck student was brief and disastrous.

But two of Tchaikovsky’s greatest works were completed in the shadow of that spectacularly ill-starred marriage. It’s hard not to read autobiography into the opera, with its worldly-wise young nobleman spurning a lovesick girl. But one historian has gone so far as to read sexual conflict into the first movement of the Fourth Symphony.

The most hotly contentious issue, though, is Tchaikovsky’s death. For decades, the official story was that he had died of cholera after downing a glass of unboiled water. But in a 1979 article, one historian argued that the composer committed suicide when an unofficial “honor court” threatened to expose his advances toward a young man.

It was a fanciful scenario based on whisperings over the years, but there remains no hard evidence. “We don’t know what caused Tchaikovsky’s death,” a U of M historian in Ann Arbor says. “That is the bottom line.”

But he adds, “The suicide theory just doesn’t make any sense to me.”

To sum it all up, the theories of the 1980’s were this: Tchaikovsky engaged in same-sex genital contact; he was discovered; he was blackmailed into committing suicide.

In order to accept those theories, it would be necessary to prove the following: (1) that Tchaikovsky engaged in those sexual activities; (2) that it was discovered; (3) that there was an organized conspiracy to blackmail him; and (4) that he complied.

One more thing would have to be proven: that it Tchaikovsky’s social circle, homosexuality was condemned to the point that it would entice a man to suicide. In fact, many of the more notorious artists of that era were “out” and flamboyant homosexuals. Why would Tchaikovsky have even cared, if he were a homosexual, and someone exposed that fact?

The unsatisfying conclusion we must draw is this: we have too little evidence to say conclusively whether or not Tchaikovsky engaged in same-sex genital contact. His private life will remain forever that: private.

Too Simple

2008-12-23T08:31:00.002-05:00

We know that two factors are mainly responsible for slowing economic growth and causing poverty: taxes and government regulation.

If this is so, why not simply get rid of both?

This is clearly overly-simplistic, and not realistic. But this line of thought highlights the concept of a "necessary evil": we must have some amount of taxes, and some amount of government regulation, even though we know that they will cause harm. The best we can do is keep them to a minimum. To be practical, and not idealistic, we realize that we cannot create an economic utopia. There will be no perfect prosperity. But we can continually strive to make things better than they are. Although we won't arrive at perfection, we can persistently minimize taxes and government regulations, and thereby create the best chances for all citizens to enjoy a better income.

The Net Effect of Government

2008-12-23T08:03:00.002-05:00

When we examine theories of government, starting perhaps with Plato and Aristotle, moving on to Polybius and Cicero, and then to Dante's essay on monarchy and the Magna Carta - and finally on to Hobbes, Bossuet, Locke, Rousseau, and still more modern thinkers, we remember the important law of unintended consequences. In the case of government, this takes the form of the general proposition many actions will attain the very opposite of their goal.

When the government declared a "war on poverty" in the 1960's, the only measurable result has been the increase in poverty, the creation of a permanent underclass, and designation of large inner-city areas as ghettos.

When the government wanted to reduce the production, sale, and consumption of marijuana, heroin, cocaine, and other similar substances, the final outcome was the large-scale establishment of organized crime to import such drugs, or manufacture them domestically, and retail them.

History teaches us that, if there is an important situation or problem, society should address that problem directly; society should not ask the government to fix the situation. If society does request government intervention in an important concern, the result is most likely that the problem will not be fixed, but become only worse.

It is certainly tempting to ask the government to help us with our problems; but it is also usually a disaster when we do so.

The Battle of Badr

2008-12-04T13:46:00.002-05:00

Muhammad heard that a large Quraysh caravan, laden with money and goods, was coming from Syria. "This is the Quraysh caravan containing their property," he told his followers. "Go out and attack it, perhaps God will give it as a prey." He set out toward Mecca to lead the raid. But this time the Quraysh were ready for him, coming out to meet Muhammad's three hundred men with a force nearly a thousand strong. Muhammad seems not to have expected these numbers and cried out to Allah in anxiety, "O God, if this group perishes today, you will be worshipped no more."

Despite their superior numbers, the Quraysh were routed. Some Muslim traditions say that Muhammad himself participated in the fighting, others that he exhorted his followers from the sidelines. In any event, it was an occasion for him to see years of frustration, resentment, and hatred toward his own people, who had rejected him, avenged. One of his followers later recalled a curse Muhammad had pronounced on the leaders of the Quraysh: "The prophet said, 'O Allah! Destroy the chiefs of the Quraysh, O Allah!" and names the chiefs one by one.

All the men named were captured or killed during the battle of Badr. One Quraysh leader pleaded for his life, "but who will look after my children, O Muhammad?"

"Hell," responded the Prophet of Islam, and ordered this chief to be killed.

Another Quraysh chieftain was beheaded. The Muslim who severed the head proudly carried his trophy to Muhammad: "I cut off his head and brought it to the apostle, saying 'this is the head of the enemy of God.'"

Muhammad was delighted. "By God than Whom there is no other, is it?" he exclaimed, and gave thanks to Allah for the death of his enemy.

From being a tiny, despised community, the Muslims were now a force with which the pagans of Arabia had to reckon - and they began to strike terror in the hearts of their enemies. Muhammad's claim to be the last prophet of the One, True God appeared validated by a victory against enormous odds.

Islam grew and spread as various cities and tribes were defeated in battle; this encouraged the Muslims, and many of the non-Muslims in the area chose to convert to Islam rather than be killed in battle.

Muhammad the Raider

2008-12-04T13:01:00.004-05:00

Muhammad already had experience as a warrior before he assumed the role of prophet. He had participated in two local wars between his Quraysh tribe and their neighboring rivals Ban Hawazin. But his unique role as a prophet-warrior would come later. After receiving revelations from Allah through the angel Gabriel in 610, he began by just preaching to his tribe the worship of One God and his own position as prophet. But he was not well received by his Quraysh brethren in Mecca, who reacted disdainfully to his prophetic call and refused to give up their gods. Muhammad's frustration and rage became evident. When even his uncle, Abu Lahab, rejected his message, Muhammad cursed him and his wife in violent language that has been preserved in the Qur'an, the holy book of Islam: "May the hands of Abu Lahab perish! May he himself perish! Nothing shall his wealth and gains avail him. He shall be burnt in a flaming fire, and his wife, laden with firewood, shall have a rope of fiber around her neck!" [111:1-5]

Ultimately, Muhammad would turn from violent words to violent deeds. In 622, he finally fled his native Mecca for a nearby town, Medina, where a band of tribal warriors had accepted him as a prophet and pledged loyalty to him. In Medina, these new Muslims began raiding the caravans of the Quraysh, with Muhammad personally leading many of these raids. These raids kept the nascent Muslim movement solvent and helped form Islamic theology - as in one notorious incident when a band of Muslims raided a Quraysh caravan at Nakhla, a settlement not far from Mecca. The raiders attacked the caravan during the sacred month of Rajab, when fighting was forbidden. When they returned to the Muslim camp laden with booty, Muhammad refused to share in the loot or have anything to do with them, saying only, "I did not order you to fight in the sacred month."

But then a new revelation came from Allah, explaining that the Quraysh's opposition to Muhammad was a worse transgression than the violation of the sacred month. In other words, the raid was justified. "They question you, O Muhammad, with regard to warfare in the sacred month. Say: warfare in it is a great transgression, but to turn men from the way of Allah, and to disbelieve in Him and in the Inviolable Place of Worship, and to expel His people from there, is a greater sin with Allah; for persecution is worse than killing" (2:214,217). Whatever sin the Nakhla raiders had committed was overshadowed by the Quraysh's rejection of Muhammad.

The general principle which Muhammad took from this particular incident was this: to launch a military attack during the sacred month of ceasefire is OK, if you're killing people who have rejected Muhammad's ideas.

Like a Hot Potato!

2008-11-18T06:59:00.005-05:00

The following numbers, although approximate, enlighten nonetheless: around 30 A.D., Europe was 100% pagan. The only possible exceptions were tiny Jewish communities that might have existed in Rome and in some of the Greek city-states. Numerically, these would have been insignificant, if they existed at all; we know that, a few decades later, they did exist.

This means that all of continental Europe, from Spain to Finland, from Italy to Greece, was dominated by a belief system which featured polytheism, human sacrifices, and - in its primitive stages - ritual orgies. This pre-religious quasi-spirituality (for it was neither fully, but perhaps both partially) consisted of myth and magic. Myth is the attempt to explain; magic is the attempt to control. Mythological explanations were offered for the weather, for childlessness, and for military victories or losses. Magic tried to manipulate harvests, human fertility, and the outcomes of battles. Lacking was any sense of personal relationship between the human and the deity.

This, then, was mindset which dominated the area.

By 400 A.D., the majority of the European landmass will be inhabited by populations which contain a significant minority of Christians; some areas will even have a majority of Christians. By 800 A.D., the composition of all of Europe will be approximately 45% Christian and 10% Jewish; the remaining 45% will claim to be Christian. Paganism will be essentially gone; possibly, tiny groups of Druids or others remained for a few more decades in hiding.

Given that paganism had dominated the continent (as well as most of the world) for around five thousand years, it vanished with shocking speed. Although a few centuries may seem like a long time to you and me, it's a mere instant in the grand scheme of world history.

Two questions remain to be asked: Why did people so easily relinquish their old belief system and embrace a new one? And what was the net effect of this change?

To the first question, we may note that ancient paganism had little with which to endear itself to practitioner, and so it would be easy for those people to let go of it. It lacked any sense of personal bond to the gods worshipped, and lacked concepts of forgiveness, comfort, and charity. It encouraged a sense of manipulation along multiple vectors - humans manipulating deities, deities manipulating humans, humans manipulating each other, and even deities manipulating each other. It nudged cultures toward desperation and fear; it spoke of gods who behave erratically, unreliably, and even hostilely toward humans.

By contrast, the Judeo-Christian influence spoke of hope, friendship, and mutual aid. It encouraged humans to accept the unalterable facts of existence, rather than hope for a magical change. It recognized the limits of human knowledge and reason, rather than inventing mythological explanations for those things which lie beyond human power; it revealed a Deity who liked humans and desired friendship with them.

The net effect of polytheism's decline was manifold: most obviously, human sacrifice was ended. Beyond that, there was a change in the very idea of what it meant to be human: every human life became seen as valuable and worthy of respect. The buying and selling of people, whether in slavery or in marriage, ended; women were given a voice in their own lives and decisions. Torture was considered inappropriate, and a conflict of ideas was viewed as an opportunity for a healthy debate, not a physical conflict.

Did European culture live up to these noble ideas which were introduced by the Judeo-Christian tradition? Not always. There are glaring examples in which the Europeans failed, at certain times, to respect human rights. But there were also times at which they did the right thing: times at which they respected the dignity of the individual. And this set them apart from what they had been a few hundred years earlier - significant progress - and it also set them apart from the other cultures of the world.

Moses vs. Hammurabi

2008-11-04T07:13:00.002-05:00

The outlook of Moses is one which leads, ultimately, after centuries, to the advances of modern physics, because it leads to a view that the universe is systematic, and uniform regarding time and space and gravity; Moses ultimately points the way to the conclusion that the universe is susceptible to rational analysis, because it is organized according to the rational laws of mathematics. The philosophical view that the world is ultimately based on reason and algebra and geometry is the foundation for modern science.

The culture which descends from the civilization of Hammurabi is one that, after several generations, will ultimately de-emphasize the natural sciences, and chemistry and physics in particular, because it sees the universe as random and meaningless.

If we look at the last several centuries of scientific, mathematical, and engineering innovation, it does not come from the philosophical children of Hammurabi, but rather such technological advancement springs from the philosophical offspring of Moses. A statistical analysis of the number of patents filed in these areas suffices to show this; one can also look at where high-tech firms do business, and who they hire. Westerners are often brought in to do high-tech work in parts of the world; if locals living there are interested in pursuing technological research, they generally leave the country.

The ethic of Moses will lead ultimately to the view that certain legal punishments are “cruel and unusual” – the ethic that crimes may not be punished with fury, wrath, and vengeance, but rather that every human – even a criminal or a slave – still deserves a modicum of decency in treatment, because every human is still worthy of respect and dignity.

The ethic of Hammurabi will ultimately lead to routine applications of punishments such as the amputation of hands, drowning, strangling, public floggings, burnings, skinning, etc.: those very same punishments which the society of Moses ultimately has rejected. In these parts of the world today, no punishment or torture is considered "too cruel". The understanding of human rights, on the one hand, and civil rights, on the other hand, is lacking in these places. This is the legacy of Hammurabi.