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I gave a talk entitled “What Moves History: An Introduction to the Philosophy of History” at the Atlas Society’s summer conference several years ago. It is now available as a free audio download.
In the live lecture I referred to a flowchart, which is available here: Social Dynamics [pdf].
September 11, 2001 was almost ten years ago.
The Middle-East since then:
Yasser Arafat died, exact cause unknown, in 2004.
Saddam Hussein was executed in 2006.
Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011.
In 2009, Teheran, Iran saw political riots. 2010 saw major and minor protests in a dozen middle-eastern and north African countries spilling over into 2011, which has also seen an ouster in Egypt, a revolution in Tunisia, civil war in Libya, and an uprising in Syria.
What does this promise for the next decade?
I’ve always admired the Greeks — one must admire a culture that has a god for drinking and partying — but now the Lithuanians of old have risen in my affections. The Baltic pagans 
had not one but three deities devoted to beer and beer production: Raugutis, the god of beer; Raugutiene, Ragutis’s consort who is also the goddess of beer; and Raugupatis, the very important god of fermentation. Holy trinity, indeed.
So now that winter has passed and summer is on its way, which for me is the beer-drinking season, let us resolve to hoist a glass in honor of the pagan Lithuanians.
Should you like to verify for yourself that the tradition continues, Wikitravel’s Lithuania page has a section devoted to beer and drink. And here is a list of other important beer-related deities.
Australia’s Lorenzo Warby’s review of my Nietzsche and the Nazis.
Intriguing sideways connection to Heidegger and militarism: Warby also reviews Brian Daizen Victoria’s Zen at War, “a study of how Zen Buddhism became deeply complicit in Japanese militarism,” just as Heidegger’s mystically-charged writings became complicit in German militarism. Warby there points to this piece by Professor Jeremiah Reedy, who reports: 
“a German friend of Heidegger told me that one day when he visited Heidegger he found him reading one of [Daisetsu Teitaro] Suzuki’s books [on Zen Buddhism]: ‘If I understand this man correctly,’ Heidegger remarked, ‘this is what I have been trying to say in all my writings.’”
[Go to the Nietzsche and the Nazis page. Go to the StephenHicks.org main page.]
Following up on an earlier post about Only a God Can Save Us, here in four parts is my 40-minute interview with van Davis about his documentary on philosopher Martin Heidegger and his involvement with National Socialism:
van Davis’s documentary is available at Amazon.
The interview is also posted at CEE’s site.
Related:
Nietzsche and the Nazis page.
Go to the StephenHicks.org main page.]
Imagine that this is your life story:
You are born in Africa, possibly in Ethiopia or perhaps Chad, but as a child you are taken by Arab slavers and sold in Constantinople to the Sultan of Turkey, before long catching the eye of a Russian diplomat and spy, who acquires you and smuggles you out in order to send you to the Kremlim in Moscow as a gift to Peter the Great, who becomes your godfather and, impressed with your wit and obvious intelligence, has you given the best education, whereupon you grow up to be a first rate military engineer, being posted on campaigns from the Basque country to the Baltic (where you meet in Königsberg the then-mathematics tutor Immanuel Kant), along the way learning French (naturellement!) and studying mathematics, such that when you engage in further study in Paris, you charm not only the wives of noble women with your sexual charisma but meet and impress Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu, and Leibniz as one of the few people in the world who is proficient at Newtonian mechanics and the new calculus, leading you to be nicknamed “dark star of the Enlightenment,” 
although when you return to Russia you run afoul of a power struggle after Peter the Great’s death and are exiled to a place in Siberia 4,000 miles east of St. Petersburg and near the then-Chinese border, though some years later you are pardoned and return to further exploits of military engineering for which you are rewarded with large estates of your own, meaning, in 18th-century Russia that you become a slave owner yourself because of the serfs who come with the land, and all is well except that your first wife hates you because it was an arranged marriage against her will and she has cheated on you, leading to a divorce and your marriage to a woman of noble Scandinavian and German origin, with whom you have ten children, one of which would become General-in-Chief, the second highest rank in imperial Russia’s military, and one of which would become the grandfather of Alexander Pushkin, thought by many to be the greatest of Russian poets.
Except that your story is real, your name is Abram Petrovich Gannibal, and your biography is well told by Hugh Barnes’s Gannibal: The Moor of Petersburg.
According to Barnes, Peter the Great’s interest in the young Gannibal was both personal and social-reformer: “by educating the young Negro in a style befitting a prince, the tsar hoped to teach the nobility a lesson, ‘and to put Russians to shame by convincing them that out of every people and even from among wild men—such as Negroes, whom our civilized nations assign exclusively to the class of the slave—there can be formed men who, by dint of application, can obtain knowledge and learning, and thus become helpful to the monarch’” (p. 97).
Further, “[Peter] admired the African’s didactic spirit, and believed his formidable mathematical talents would unlock Russian potential: ‘Abram Gannibal furnished the most striking proof of the injustice of that odious prejudice which assigns to the Negro race a reputation of intellectual and moral inferiority. He had immense spirit, a prodigious facility for study, and a rare capacity for mathematics and diverse branches of the human sciences, although mathematics always served as the science-mére. He was also blessed with a noble and elevated character and an incorruptible probity’” (p. 129).
Barnes’s Gannibal is well worth reading for a colorful, quintessentially Enlightenment-era life.
[The image is of a memorial bust of Gannibal in the province of Pskov, Russia.]
I had no idea until I read this in Hugh Barnes’s Gannibal: The Moor of Petersburg:
“Until the end of the eighteenth century, even houses of wealthy Russians were barely distinguishable from peasant huts.”
Who knew?
(File under Humor, Sarcasm.)
More on Gannibal and Gannibal to come.
The line is from Martin Heidegger’s resigned and despairing Der Speigel interview, shortly before his death in 1976.
At Rockford College we are hosting a showing of Jeffrey Van Davis’s film on Martin Heidegger’s philosophy and his disturbing relationship with National Socialism. After the showing, we will have a panel discussion featuring director Van Davis, professors David Sytsma and Jules Gleicher of the Rockford College history and political science departments, respectively, and myself as moderator.
Heidegger is one of the most influential of all twentieth-century philosophers, yet he was also a strong supporter of National Socialism in Germany. Is there a connection between Heidegger’s philosophy and his Nazism or is the coincidence accidental? More generally, is there a connection between philosophical theory and political practice? Heidegger died in 1976 — what should we think of his never recanting his support for the Nazi movement even after the end of World War II and the Holocaust?
Time and place of the showing: March 4, 3 p.m., Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship, Burpee Center, Rockford College (campus map).
From the film’s website:
“Only A God Can Save Us” 
Length: 118 min.
Shot in 16mm, mini DV
Country of Origin: Germany
Shot in: USA, Germany, France, Holland
Persons featured in film:
Kardinal Karl Lehmann, Bishop of Mainz
Alfred Denker, Heidegger Biographer
Hugo Ott, Freiburg University
Victor Farias, Free University of Berlin
Tom Rockmore, Duquesne University, USA
Richard Wolin, City University of New York, USA
Ted Kisiel, Northern Illinois University, USA
Rainer Marten, Freiburg University
Emmanuel Faye, University of Paris
Bernd Martin, Freiburg University
Iain Thomson, University of New Mexico, USA
Jürgen Paul, Dresden University
Silke Seemann, Freiburg University
Rangvi Wesendonk
Axel Graf Douglas, Schloss Langenstein
Some of the topics covered in the documentary:
1. Heidegger’s concept of Being and the “turning” from Dasein to Sein
2. His humble beginnings and staunch Catholic education.
3. The Rectorship and his denunciation of teachers such as Nobel Prize winner Staudinger. His enthusiasm for Gleichschaltung of Frieburg University.
4. His highly manipulative love affair with Hannah Arendt.
5. His relationship to Edith Stein.
6. His refusal to give a word of reconciliation to Paul Celan who visited him in his hut at Todtnauberg.
7. The denazification process and his refusal to recant his support for Hitler.
More information at Van Davis’s site.
I have written about Heidegger here, here, and here.
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