There are people who are interested in factual clarifications and I suspect they make up most of your readership. I like to think I am one of those people. Your writing patiently takes apart many of the nostrums that govern modern opinion, and I have always valued a point of view that challenges conventional wisdom.
I got a sense of tiredness from your second-to-last paragraph. Please don't give up! I, for one, would miss your blog, and I'm sure there are many others who feel the same way.
Interesting opinions , some i agree with although i believe political thinking is derived from life as we know it and we dont all know it the same , we never will as the greeks today will tell you.
Economists , scientists , philosophers , politicians , are any of them wholly correct and free of corruption in presenting their views ? Ive not found one yet , i put that down to human nature , everyone has their price but what good are they if they are willing to present lies to us and falsify evidence , we spend too much time trying to get to the truth , what a waste , do they realize we dont trust them anymore ?
UK , Russia , EU , Ukraine , Afghanistan , an interesting melting pot of choice , to get a realistic answer to the questions about why they chose the path they did and do the missing ingredient the great influencer and enforcer has to be covered , sadly it doesnt get a mention but talking of facts it is certainly a fact that the USA pushed and cajoled all of these in the direction chosen by the great master of the universe the USA , it still is , what a cesspit ,
if the USA wants your stuff hand it over or they will apply tariffs
if the USA dont like certain countries around the world and want to make them suffer they will , as the great big bully that they are , impose sanctions on them and then they will threaten all other countries around the world that if they too dont also impose sanctions and continue to trade with that country the USA dont like they too will have sanctions imposed on them , then if any of them break the USA,s sanctions rule the USA will send round their heavies , now called the big armada .
The USA has lived above its means so long that its deindustrialization has seen jobs sent overseas to get it done cheaper for bigger USA profits , but only profits for the already rich, USA debt is staggering its in the trillions of dollars , they now plan to abandon that debt and try and switch away from using the dollar to using a bitcoins , this is basically a transfer of ownership from state into private hands and if those trying to push it through succeed , any dollars held by anyone across the world will be worthless bits of paper or worthless entries in ledgers and bank accounts overnight.
The USA is killing its own people , grabbing them off the street pulling them out of their home or their car trying to grab children from their schools , from shops and restaurants to imprison them until its decided if they can be released or sent to a prison in El Salvador.
The USA wants to control every drop of oil in the world , if you dont agree to hand over control to them or sell your oil cheaply to them thry will kidnap your president or prime minister or take over your country and everything in it or even attack it and use extreme force just ask Iraq , since the weapons of mass destruction lies all Iraqs oul is controlled by USA , the USA sell it worldwide all monies received go into a USA bank in new york and if Iraq does what its told and fills its government and industry leaders with people the USA like then USA will give Iraqi government some of their oul money but as was recently experienced by Iraqi government when then employed someone in their government whos religious slant was shia rather sunni their IRAQI OIL MONEY from new york was stopped .
I didn't know the man personally, but I have watched a lot of interviews, shows, and presentations from him. He struck me as humble, always stressing "to the best of our current knowledge". He seemed to genuinely want to educate people and engage in good faith debate when he disagreed with others.
To the best of my knowledge I've never heard anyone say anything to the contrary of my opinion of him, nor have I heard anyone suggest that he was wrong. Look him up on youtube, there's lots of stuff there, and judge for yourself.
Carl Sagan was not the fount of all true knowledge. Sagan was an out and out ('naive') materialist - fair enough, if you also are a materialist. But many of us beg to differ, in varying degrees and directions, from this sort of drab position.
He did though, have an personable presentation any time I've seen him on video or in writing.
Did I say he was the fount of all true knowledge? I admire the guy. Watch A Pale Blue Dot on youtube, its less than 5 min long.
Its one of the most beautiful and inspiring things I've ever heard, and it encourages people to work together for the betterment of mankind.
He explicitly said on more than one occasion that he did not deny the existence of God or a creator, but as of yet he had not seen any credible evidence that there was one. He also pointed out the fallacy of there needing to be a watchmaker. He also said he did not expect to find evidence of God or a creator, but if presented with credible evidence he would change his mind.
I think we've all gathered by now that happy endings are anathema to you. Unfortunately for you there are lots of happy endings about, as well, of course, as plenty of the other kind which you seem to prefer.
An extremely well written presentation that illustrates a lot of your usual concerns but seems to go well beyond them.
The confusion in the world can be explained by a long period of reality suppression by the elites in our culture and now, unsurprisingly, we cannot tell the difference between appearances and reality.
A devastatingly simple yet profound diagnosis that has me smiling appreciatively even as it depresses me even more.
The elites do not pay attention to reality because they do not have to. Consequences are for the little people to deal with.
This is why things like "COVID", "Hurricanes" and "the Taliban" have them so tied up in knots. These are enemies that cannot be readily bargained with, bought off, or convinced to bother someone less important.
Thank you very much for this insightful article. It very much chimes with how I view society: I often wonder whether I am the only person who sees the emperor has no clothes, and it makes it hard for me to interact with others, who always seem to have fallen for one Appearance or another. As if you are the only sober person in a world full of drunks. (And where being sober is increasingly viewed as an offence, which feels very threatening).
I used to work as a financial journalist, but when my children some years ago could opt out of economics class in high school, I advised them to do it: I told them economics as taught in schools these days is like astrology: a very complex theory that requires many years of study to master, but which unfortunately holds no truck with reality whatsoever. This was in the time we saw "zirp" and "nirp"; phenomena that were quite out of range from normal economic theories , and which caused a lot of of awkwardness and stutters, but did not lead to the conclusion that the theories must be wrong. Your article sheds light on this strange attitude, which is seen in more and more aspects of science and politics.
"It very much chimes with how I view society: I often wonder whether I am the only person who sees the emperor has no clothes, and it makes it hard for me to interact with others, who always seem to have fallen for one Appearance or another."
Sad isn't it? Lonely too. You aren't the only one who sees this, but you are in a very, very small minority. Welcome to the club. I find it's best to keep my mouth shut and carry on as best I can, and mostly just hang out by myself. Pointing out the logical fallacies of the herd in one's community just gets one shunned as "the local idiot". What is one to do?
A very nice and reasonable essay, except some points. E.g. the passage about astronomy:
“Tradition … ascribed to Plato the task then given to astronomers to reconcile the actual movements of the heavens, which were quite well understood by his time, with the fact that, nonetheless, the orbits of heavenly bodies had to be circular. But why? I hear you ask. We know that the orbits are in fact elliptical: why couldn’t the Greeks simply accept the evidence of their eyes and get on with other things?”
“The evidence of our eyes” is not at all that the orbits of planets are elliptical: what we observe are complicated and seemingly irregular movements - a superposition of the movement of the planet and our own movement along the orbit of the Earth. The orbits are elliptical only from heliocentric point of view (Copernicus and, 18 centuries before him, Aristarchus).
Or the passage about a Soviet journalist in the US:
“… he was obliged to write articles about how shadowy groups of financiers chose the two candidates and then the President, and retrospectively justifying the eventual winner as of, course, the candidate that the capitalists must have wanted all along, although he knew it was always more complicated than that.“
There is little doubt that since the collapse of the Soviet Union the man continued to write what the new bosses wished of him: that the US is the model of democracy, etc. Now one can wonder if his old assertions were closer to reality more than the new ones — I am afraid, they were, and this fact is worth to be observed.
1. "The apparent, observable structure of the universe could not, therefore, be used as evidence to deduce its real nature. Indeed, the reverse was true. And because the circle was the perfect form, all observations and phenomena had to ultimately be reconciled with that fact, no matter how complicated the manipulation of the Phenomena needed to be....
My argument here is that the legacy of this kind of a priori, closed-circle reasoning has had a much greater effect on western culture than we might imagine, and that tits method—starting from an arbitrary position and doing whatever violence to facts is necessary to fit them in—not only underlies a lot of our general culture today, but even influences much of what passes for political thinking, not least by those who don’t believe they are using it."
If there is one thing that would explain The Rise Of The West it is the idea that you look to the empirical evidence as it in fact is (or is not), and ignore what the forms or the traditions tell us about what kind of what evidence should be there.
It is this change in mindset that gave rise to the scientific method, which in turn made the world something that could be understood as it is and thus controlled. This is the source of the West's power.
2. "And certainly not in the case of Ukraine. I was interested to hear about the “initiatives” of the European Commission over the last few years, wondering if they had somehow discovered a new source of weaponry or manpower to continue the fight. No, all these manoeuvres were just clever wheezes to make more money appear. (And by “money” in the modern sense we mean ones and zeroes in bank accounts, not something you can take out and spend.)"
Surely by now, you know that governments are masters at financial legerdemain, at finding creative, even dishonest, even nakedly fraudulent ways to finance their pet projects, and the european political class has no priority other than the War On Russia.
Attributed to the writer G.K. Chesterton, "when you stop believing in God, you'll soon believe in anything." It implies that a lack of a solid spiritual foundation can lead to a loss of common sense and a search for security in "any nonsense."
It reminds me of when I did a literature review of Central Bank Independence back in the mid-90s. All the papers seemed to define CBI as a CB focused on keeping inflation down, and would then determine whether the CB was independent by how well it was doing at keeping inflation down. And then there was the paper that found no significant correlation between CBI and GDP growth but still claimed that countries with CBI were better off.
Don't know if people noticed much, but Philosophy degrees back in the day were often structured in terms of categories as opposed to themes. General Philosophy, Philosophical Logic, Moral Philosophy etc. instead of Themes. Maybe they still are, especially in the more traditional places.
If I am wiser today, I might prefer to have written an essay then about Universals (or general terms or ideas) by referring to this divergence.
Philosophy is so much more interesting, alive and accessible when viewed through the prism of Themes such as Appearance vs Reality, probably the most preeminent among them, through which nearly all others must pass, repeatedly.
NB: Isaiah Berlin's essay The Hedgehog and the Fox ostensibly about Tolstoy's view of history might be of interest and further thought.
The answers are not always where they should be , thats not an accident , those with greater wealth have greater control , of everything , they dont want everyone to be better educated , education then gets politicized , universities become the enemy of those with the greater wealth they fear competition and fear exposure of their wrongdoing , again i will say this is human nature , being good and being fair does not come naturally to people who want more or to those who already have more and dont want to lose it.
I have always thought that Tolkein was a scholar of early English history, touched by a an unfortunate Romanticism; looking in vain for a heroic mythologised, specifically English Anglo-Saxon history in the literature. It is a dangerous ambition for prose historians to indulge, as the literary mythology didn't exist., save by borrowing or creating it. The Anglo-Saxons are not sound material for Romanticism.
It seemed to me Tolkein must have read the new literary Fantasism of George McDonald or slightly later, David Lindsay (he was a historian, his instinct is to look for sources); and tried imaginatively to create out of it a usable Anglo-Saxon mythology, of a great struggle between the heroism of an uplifting Anglo-Saxonism in its struggle with the Norman Yoke; although both were history that is, essentially prosaic. It has, however proved a saleable literary commodity in a commercial world.
I always thought that Tolkien's Hobbits had it easy. All they had to do was to chuck The One Ring into Mouth Doom and the problem was fixed for all eternity.
In our world, we can't get rid of power. Even if we don't like it, don't want it, wouldn't take it, all that means is that someone else will, and we may not like what that someone else does with his new-found power. Not only can we not live without it, those around us may use it against us.
Even worse, power is What Gets Stuff Done. We can't live with it, we can't live without it.
Except it wasn't. Tolkien didn't write much about the Fourth Age which follows the defeat of Sauron, but in what he did there are dark hints of the continuing existence of evil.
Which is hardly surprising, given that he was a staunch Catholic.
Moreover, the books, unlike the films, show that throwing the One Ring into the flames didn't destroy evil. Sauron was waiting for the Hobbits in the Shire.
"some schools in certain parts of France have had to stop teaching Evolution because of threats made against teachers"
It seems this claim would need a reference. Gemini says, "It is false that evolution has been banned or can no longer be taught in French schools. Biological evolution remains a core part of the national science syllabus, taught from primary school through high school."
I enjoy your essays so please take this as some well meaning commentary. The abbreviated assessment of the development of Christianity that is made to serve the argument that humans are inclined to create a metaphysical system and then retrofit the facts to fit the system is a generalization that veers into error. I don't dispute the genral correctness of the thesis, but the claims made about Christianity are incorrect or incomplete. In respect to the doctrine of the Trinity, disputes about the nature of the OT God existed in second temple Judaism - the subsequent doctrine did not need to massage facts into place but to articulate and resolve the tensions that existed since Genesis. One can argue about the interpretation but it is demonstrably not the case of the doctrine putting the texts in a straightjacket. A good book on this is fr Stephen de Young's 'Religion of the Apostles'.
A second and more serious error is conflating the Church with the Roman Church and the Reformation. An easy mistake to make as a Westerner, who with their Catholic and secularist curated histories (Didrot's comments on the Byzantines encapsulate this entirely) forget (or are commanded to forget) that the majority of Christianity was in the East and that it had it's own thousand years of different, - arguably more authentic development than the papacy under the dictates of the Frankish and German kings - and that it also hasn't disappeared from history, although the Muslim conquests devastated it. East Christianity never really made the claims or tried to seize the texts of the scriptures as all around indisputable facts of the workings of the world, since that is not the focus of the religion at all - but inner transformation and the relationship of God and Man. What you describe is a Catholic illness, born from scholasticism and wholly inherited by the Reformers and it was indeed, for the reasons you describe, and others, Western Christendom's undoing.
Interesting. However, Aurelian makes a claim about Islam that I question, "But Islam did not do this: it retains, for example, the formal hostility to Evolution that Christianity eventually gave up". After the Iraq Invasion of 2003, the State Department gave scholarships to promising young Iraqis to study at US universities, Fulbright Scholarships. They joined about fifteen others at our English Language Institute for preparation for American university work (US universities have a peculiar academic culture) and to improve their English skills.
I used to give the students short pieces of academic literature to familiarize themselves with academic language in English. One that referenced Darwin's Theory of Evolution caused considerable controversy, mainly from my South American students. I proposed a debate for the next class (debate is an outstanding language learning tool).
I asked the students to physically 'pick a side' for the debate. To my surprise, all my Muslim students went to the Evolution side. The debate was good. Afterwards, I asked my best Muslim student (from Mosul) why, being devoutly religious, they had chosen to defend Evolution. My student said, "Mr Edward, in the mind of Allah, all is possible."
Aurelien,
There are people who are interested in factual clarifications and I suspect they make up most of your readership. I like to think I am one of those people. Your writing patiently takes apart many of the nostrums that govern modern opinion, and I have always valued a point of view that challenges conventional wisdom.
I got a sense of tiredness from your second-to-last paragraph. Please don't give up! I, for one, would miss your blog, and I'm sure there are many others who feel the same way.
S.
I second that.
Here here!!
Interesting opinions , some i agree with although i believe political thinking is derived from life as we know it and we dont all know it the same , we never will as the greeks today will tell you.
Economists , scientists , philosophers , politicians , are any of them wholly correct and free of corruption in presenting their views ? Ive not found one yet , i put that down to human nature , everyone has their price but what good are they if they are willing to present lies to us and falsify evidence , we spend too much time trying to get to the truth , what a waste , do they realize we dont trust them anymore ?
UK , Russia , EU , Ukraine , Afghanistan , an interesting melting pot of choice , to get a realistic answer to the questions about why they chose the path they did and do the missing ingredient the great influencer and enforcer has to be covered , sadly it doesnt get a mention but talking of facts it is certainly a fact that the USA pushed and cajoled all of these in the direction chosen by the great master of the universe the USA , it still is , what a cesspit ,
if the USA wants your stuff hand it over or they will apply tariffs
if the USA dont like certain countries around the world and want to make them suffer they will , as the great big bully that they are , impose sanctions on them and then they will threaten all other countries around the world that if they too dont also impose sanctions and continue to trade with that country the USA dont like they too will have sanctions imposed on them , then if any of them break the USA,s sanctions rule the USA will send round their heavies , now called the big armada .
The USA has lived above its means so long that its deindustrialization has seen jobs sent overseas to get it done cheaper for bigger USA profits , but only profits for the already rich, USA debt is staggering its in the trillions of dollars , they now plan to abandon that debt and try and switch away from using the dollar to using a bitcoins , this is basically a transfer of ownership from state into private hands and if those trying to push it through succeed , any dollars held by anyone across the world will be worthless bits of paper or worthless entries in ledgers and bank accounts overnight.
The USA is killing its own people , grabbing them off the street pulling them out of their home or their car trying to grab children from their schools , from shops and restaurants to imprison them until its decided if they can be released or sent to a prison in El Salvador.
The USA wants to control every drop of oil in the world , if you dont agree to hand over control to them or sell your oil cheaply to them thry will kidnap your president or prime minister or take over your country and everything in it or even attack it and use extreme force just ask Iraq , since the weapons of mass destruction lies all Iraqs oul is controlled by USA , the USA sell it worldwide all monies received go into a USA bank in new york and if Iraq does what its told and fills its government and industry leaders with people the USA like then USA will give Iraqi government some of their oul money but as was recently experienced by Iraqi government when then employed someone in their government whos religious slant was shia rather sunni their IRAQI OIL MONEY from new york was stopped .
"Economists , scientists , philosophers , politicians , are any of them wholly correct and free of corruption in presenting their views ?"
Carl Sagan?
How can you always tell ?
I didn't know the man personally, but I have watched a lot of interviews, shows, and presentations from him. He struck me as humble, always stressing "to the best of our current knowledge". He seemed to genuinely want to educate people and engage in good faith debate when he disagreed with others.
To the best of my knowledge I've never heard anyone say anything to the contrary of my opinion of him, nor have I heard anyone suggest that he was wrong. Look him up on youtube, there's lots of stuff there, and judge for yourself.
Carl Sagan was not the fount of all true knowledge. Sagan was an out and out ('naive') materialist - fair enough, if you also are a materialist. But many of us beg to differ, in varying degrees and directions, from this sort of drab position.
He did though, have an personable presentation any time I've seen him on video or in writing.
Did I say he was the fount of all true knowledge? I admire the guy. Watch A Pale Blue Dot on youtube, its less than 5 min long.
Its one of the most beautiful and inspiring things I've ever heard, and it encourages people to work together for the betterment of mankind.
He explicitly said on more than one occasion that he did not deny the existence of God or a creator, but as of yet he had not seen any credible evidence that there was one. He also pointed out the fallacy of there needing to be a watchmaker. He also said he did not expect to find evidence of God or a creator, but if presented with credible evidence he would change his mind.
So what does anyone propose to do about it?
Give me a hint , what can i do ?
If I had answers, I would have spoken them long ago.
Nowhere is it written that there has to be a happy ending.
I think we've all gathered by now that happy endings are anathema to you. Unfortunately for you there are lots of happy endings about, as well, of course, as plenty of the other kind which you seem to prefer.
What I want has nothing to do with it.
Not apparent from your posting. You are a nihilist.
Thank you Aurelian.
An extremely well written presentation that illustrates a lot of your usual concerns but seems to go well beyond them.
The confusion in the world can be explained by a long period of reality suppression by the elites in our culture and now, unsurprisingly, we cannot tell the difference between appearances and reality.
A devastatingly simple yet profound diagnosis that has me smiling appreciatively even as it depresses me even more.
Thanks again.
The elites do not pay attention to reality because they do not have to. Consequences are for the little people to deal with.
This is why things like "COVID", "Hurricanes" and "the Taliban" have them so tied up in knots. These are enemies that cannot be readily bargained with, bought off, or convinced to bother someone less important.
Thank you very much for this insightful article. It very much chimes with how I view society: I often wonder whether I am the only person who sees the emperor has no clothes, and it makes it hard for me to interact with others, who always seem to have fallen for one Appearance or another. As if you are the only sober person in a world full of drunks. (And where being sober is increasingly viewed as an offence, which feels very threatening).
I used to work as a financial journalist, but when my children some years ago could opt out of economics class in high school, I advised them to do it: I told them economics as taught in schools these days is like astrology: a very complex theory that requires many years of study to master, but which unfortunately holds no truck with reality whatsoever. This was in the time we saw "zirp" and "nirp"; phenomena that were quite out of range from normal economic theories , and which caused a lot of of awkwardness and stutters, but did not lead to the conclusion that the theories must be wrong. Your article sheds light on this strange attitude, which is seen in more and more aspects of science and politics.
"It very much chimes with how I view society: I often wonder whether I am the only person who sees the emperor has no clothes, and it makes it hard for me to interact with others, who always seem to have fallen for one Appearance or another."
Sad isn't it? Lonely too. You aren't the only one who sees this, but you are in a very, very small minority. Welcome to the club. I find it's best to keep my mouth shut and carry on as best I can, and mostly just hang out by myself. Pointing out the logical fallacies of the herd in one's community just gets one shunned as "the local idiot". What is one to do?
A very nice and reasonable essay, except some points. E.g. the passage about astronomy:
“Tradition … ascribed to Plato the task then given to astronomers to reconcile the actual movements of the heavens, which were quite well understood by his time, with the fact that, nonetheless, the orbits of heavenly bodies had to be circular. But why? I hear you ask. We know that the orbits are in fact elliptical: why couldn’t the Greeks simply accept the evidence of their eyes and get on with other things?”
“The evidence of our eyes” is not at all that the orbits of planets are elliptical: what we observe are complicated and seemingly irregular movements - a superposition of the movement of the planet and our own movement along the orbit of the Earth. The orbits are elliptical only from heliocentric point of view (Copernicus and, 18 centuries before him, Aristarchus).
Or the passage about a Soviet journalist in the US:
“… he was obliged to write articles about how shadowy groups of financiers chose the two candidates and then the President, and retrospectively justifying the eventual winner as of, course, the candidate that the capitalists must have wanted all along, although he knew it was always more complicated than that.“
There is little doubt that since the collapse of the Soviet Union the man continued to write what the new bosses wished of him: that the US is the model of democracy, etc. Now one can wonder if his old assertions were closer to reality more than the new ones — I am afraid, they were, and this fact is worth to be observed.
Possibly the funniest article I've read in months. Keep them coming.
1. "The apparent, observable structure of the universe could not, therefore, be used as evidence to deduce its real nature. Indeed, the reverse was true. And because the circle was the perfect form, all observations and phenomena had to ultimately be reconciled with that fact, no matter how complicated the manipulation of the Phenomena needed to be....
My argument here is that the legacy of this kind of a priori, closed-circle reasoning has had a much greater effect on western culture than we might imagine, and that tits method—starting from an arbitrary position and doing whatever violence to facts is necessary to fit them in—not only underlies a lot of our general culture today, but even influences much of what passes for political thinking, not least by those who don’t believe they are using it."
If there is one thing that would explain The Rise Of The West it is the idea that you look to the empirical evidence as it in fact is (or is not), and ignore what the forms or the traditions tell us about what kind of what evidence should be there.
It is this change in mindset that gave rise to the scientific method, which in turn made the world something that could be understood as it is and thus controlled. This is the source of the West's power.
2. "And certainly not in the case of Ukraine. I was interested to hear about the “initiatives” of the European Commission over the last few years, wondering if they had somehow discovered a new source of weaponry or manpower to continue the fight. No, all these manoeuvres were just clever wheezes to make more money appear. (And by “money” in the modern sense we mean ones and zeroes in bank accounts, not something you can take out and spend.)"
Surely by now, you know that governments are masters at financial legerdemain, at finding creative, even dishonest, even nakedly fraudulent ways to finance their pet projects, and the european political class has no priority other than the War On Russia.
Attributed to the writer G.K. Chesterton, "when you stop believing in God, you'll soon believe in anything." It implies that a lack of a solid spiritual foundation can lead to a loss of common sense and a search for security in "any nonsense."
It reminds me of when I did a literature review of Central Bank Independence back in the mid-90s. All the papers seemed to define CBI as a CB focused on keeping inflation down, and would then determine whether the CB was independent by how well it was doing at keeping inflation down. And then there was the paper that found no significant correlation between CBI and GDP growth but still claimed that countries with CBI were better off.
Don't know if people noticed much, but Philosophy degrees back in the day were often structured in terms of categories as opposed to themes. General Philosophy, Philosophical Logic, Moral Philosophy etc. instead of Themes. Maybe they still are, especially in the more traditional places.
If I am wiser today, I might prefer to have written an essay then about Universals (or general terms or ideas) by referring to this divergence.
Philosophy is so much more interesting, alive and accessible when viewed through the prism of Themes such as Appearance vs Reality, probably the most preeminent among them, through which nearly all others must pass, repeatedly.
NB: Isaiah Berlin's essay The Hedgehog and the Fox ostensibly about Tolstoy's view of history might be of interest and further thought.
Mortimer Adlers's "Great Ideas" guides to his Great Books series take a thematic approach like the one you're suggesting.
I would also recommend Whitehead's _Adventures of Ideas_.
The answers are not always where they should be , thats not an accident , those with greater wealth have greater control , of everything , they dont want everyone to be better educated , education then gets politicized , universities become the enemy of those with the greater wealth they fear competition and fear exposure of their wrongdoing , again i will say this is human nature , being good and being fair does not come naturally to people who want more or to those who already have more and dont want to lose it.
Concerning Human Nature, it might be interesting to read The Dawn of Everything by David Weingrow and David Graeber
I have always thought that Tolkein was a scholar of early English history, touched by a an unfortunate Romanticism; looking in vain for a heroic mythologised, specifically English Anglo-Saxon history in the literature. It is a dangerous ambition for prose historians to indulge, as the literary mythology didn't exist., save by borrowing or creating it. The Anglo-Saxons are not sound material for Romanticism.
It seemed to me Tolkein must have read the new literary Fantasism of George McDonald or slightly later, David Lindsay (he was a historian, his instinct is to look for sources); and tried imaginatively to create out of it a usable Anglo-Saxon mythology, of a great struggle between the heroism of an uplifting Anglo-Saxonism in its struggle with the Norman Yoke; although both were history that is, essentially prosaic. It has, however proved a saleable literary commodity in a commercial world.
I always thought that Tolkien's Hobbits had it easy. All they had to do was to chuck The One Ring into Mouth Doom and the problem was fixed for all eternity.
In our world, we can't get rid of power. Even if we don't like it, don't want it, wouldn't take it, all that means is that someone else will, and we may not like what that someone else does with his new-found power. Not only can we not live without it, those around us may use it against us.
Even worse, power is What Gets Stuff Done. We can't live with it, we can't live without it.
"... and the problem was fixed for all eternity."
Except it wasn't. Tolkien didn't write much about the Fourth Age which follows the defeat of Sauron, but in what he did there are dark hints of the continuing existence of evil.
Which is hardly surprising, given that he was a staunch Catholic.
Moreover, the books, unlike the films, show that throwing the One Ring into the flames didn't destroy evil. Sauron was waiting for the Hobbits in the Shire.
'Power' is not what gets stuff done - 'people' are what gets stuff done. No people = no power.
People are simply one form of power.
Think carefully about what you said there - it goes against your usual theme.
Good piece; I sent it to one of the editors of Real World Economics Review.
"some schools in certain parts of France have had to stop teaching Evolution because of threats made against teachers"
It seems this claim would need a reference. Gemini says, "It is false that evolution has been banned or can no longer be taught in French schools. Biological evolution remains a core part of the national science syllabus, taught from primary school through high school."
I enjoy your essays so please take this as some well meaning commentary. The abbreviated assessment of the development of Christianity that is made to serve the argument that humans are inclined to create a metaphysical system and then retrofit the facts to fit the system is a generalization that veers into error. I don't dispute the genral correctness of the thesis, but the claims made about Christianity are incorrect or incomplete. In respect to the doctrine of the Trinity, disputes about the nature of the OT God existed in second temple Judaism - the subsequent doctrine did not need to massage facts into place but to articulate and resolve the tensions that existed since Genesis. One can argue about the interpretation but it is demonstrably not the case of the doctrine putting the texts in a straightjacket. A good book on this is fr Stephen de Young's 'Religion of the Apostles'.
A second and more serious error is conflating the Church with the Roman Church and the Reformation. An easy mistake to make as a Westerner, who with their Catholic and secularist curated histories (Didrot's comments on the Byzantines encapsulate this entirely) forget (or are commanded to forget) that the majority of Christianity was in the East and that it had it's own thousand years of different, - arguably more authentic development than the papacy under the dictates of the Frankish and German kings - and that it also hasn't disappeared from history, although the Muslim conquests devastated it. East Christianity never really made the claims or tried to seize the texts of the scriptures as all around indisputable facts of the workings of the world, since that is not the focus of the religion at all - but inner transformation and the relationship of God and Man. What you describe is a Catholic illness, born from scholasticism and wholly inherited by the Reformers and it was indeed, for the reasons you describe, and others, Western Christendom's undoing.
Interesting. However, Aurelian makes a claim about Islam that I question, "But Islam did not do this: it retains, for example, the formal hostility to Evolution that Christianity eventually gave up". After the Iraq Invasion of 2003, the State Department gave scholarships to promising young Iraqis to study at US universities, Fulbright Scholarships. They joined about fifteen others at our English Language Institute for preparation for American university work (US universities have a peculiar academic culture) and to improve their English skills.
I used to give the students short pieces of academic literature to familiarize themselves with academic language in English. One that referenced Darwin's Theory of Evolution caused considerable controversy, mainly from my South American students. I proposed a debate for the next class (debate is an outstanding language learning tool).
I asked the students to physically 'pick a side' for the debate. To my surprise, all my Muslim students went to the Evolution side. The debate was good. Afterwards, I asked my best Muslim student (from Mosul) why, being devoutly religious, they had chosen to defend Evolution. My student said, "Mr Edward, in the mind of Allah, all is possible."