The group’s two most prominent members were Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof. Here is one of Meinhof’s explanations:

“Auschwitz meant that six million Jews were killed, and thrown on the waste-heap of Europe, for what they were: money Jews. Finance capital and the banks, the hard core of the system of imperialism and capitalism, had turned the hatred of men against money and exploitation, and against the Jews … Anti-Semitism is really a hatred of capitalism.” [Source.]

Which is of course right out of Karl Marx: “What is the profane basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly god? Money. Very well: then in emancipating itself from huckstering and money, and thus from real and practical Judaism, our age would emancipate itself.
“As soon as society succeeds in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism—huckstering and its conditions—the Jew becomes impossible … The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.” [Source: “On the Jewish Question” (1843), in The Marx-Engels Reader, pp. 48, 52.]

Which is what Hitler agreed with: “Today I will once more be a prophet. If the international Jewish financiers, inside and outside Europe, succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevisation of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!” [Source: Hitler, speaking in the Reichstag on January 30, 1939.]

As did Goebbels, in speaking of “the money pigs of capitalist democracy”: “Money has made slaves of us.” “Money is the curse of mankind. It smothers the seed of everything great and good. Every penny is sticky with sweat and blood.” [Sources: Goebbels, 1929, quoted in Orlow 1969, p. 87 and Goebbels 1929, quoted in Mosse ed., 1966, p. 107.]

[Bonus question: Who said this?

“The worker in a capitalist state—and that is his deepest misfortune—is no longer a living human being, a creator, a maker. He has become a machine. A number, a cog in the machine without sense or understanding. He is alienated from what he produces.”

Answer: Joseph Goebbels, in his 1932 “Those Damned Nazis” pamphlet.]

“Why are business success and free markets so unpopular in some quarters? There are lots of reasons. One is that business is seen as immoral or boring or both. For the political left, business is money-grubbing and free markets merely let the strong exploit the weak. Even for many conservatives who reject the leftist account, business is what sober, responsible people do to pay the bills.

“Both sides miss the excitement, the nobility, and the romance of business. Ayn Rand’s vision of the entrepreneur — and of those who operate entrepreneurially within existing businesses — is of potentially heroic value creation. At our best, each person in business and in life is akin to the artist creating what was not there before.

“How does Rand’s vision of life and work fit into the current mainstream view of academia and party-in-power politics? Hollywood movies and humanities professors focus on rapacious CEOs and burned-out cubicle workers. Rand focuses on Howard Roark, Dagny Taggart, and the free market system that has empowered and enriched billions.”

Thanks to Rob Bradley of the Institute for Energy Research for the invitation.

Sandefur spoke last semester at Rockford College on the topic of “Market Entrepreneurs and Political Entrepreneurs: Some Legal and Constitutional Issues.” He is a Senior Staff Attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation, a public interest law firm based in Sacramento, California, and the author of Cornerstone of Liberty: Property Rights in 21st Century America.

My two-part video interview with Sandefur after his talk is viewable at the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship’s site.

Marxism and waiting for Godot

First formulated in the mid-nineteenth century, classical Marxist socialism made two related pairs of claims, one pair economic and one pair moral. Economically, it argued that capitalism was driven by a logic of competitive exploitation that would cause its eventual collapse; socialism’s communal form of production, by contrast, would prove to be economically superior. Morally, it argued, capitalism was evil both because of the self-interested motives of those engaged in capitalist competition and because of the exploitation and alienation that competition caused; socialism, by contrast, would be based on selfless sacrifice and communal sharing.

The initial hopes of Marxist socialists centered on capitalism’s internal economic contradictions. The contradictions, they thought, would manifest themselves in increasing class conflict. As the competition for resources heated up, the capitalists’ exploitation of the proletariat would necessarily increase. As the exploitation increased, the proletariat would come to realize its alienation and oppression. At some point, the exploited proletariat would decide that it was not going to take it any more and revolution would ensue. So the strategy of the Marxist intellectuals was to wait and mount a lookout for signs that capitalism’s contradictions were leading logically and inexorably to revolution.

They waited a long time. By the early part of the twentieth century, after several failed predictions of imminent revolution, not only was it becoming embarrassing to make further predictions, it was beginning to seem that capitalism was developing in a direction opposite to the way that Marxism said it should be developing.

Three failed predictions

Marxism was and is a class analysis, pitting economic classes against each other in a zero-sum competition. In that competition, the stronger parties would win each successive round of competition, forcing the weaker parties into more desperate straits. Successive rounds of capitalist competition would also pit the stronger parties against each other, yielding more winners and losers, until capitalism generated an economic social structure characterized by a few capitalists at the top and in control of the society’s economic resources while the rest of society was pushed into poverty. Even capitalism’s nascent middle class would not remain stable, for the logic of zero-sum competition would squeeze a few of the middle class into the top capitalist class and the rest into the proletariat.

This class analysis yielded three definite predictions. First, it predicted that the proletariat would both increase as a percentage of the population and become poorer: as capitalist competition progressed, more and more people would be forced to sell their labor; and as the supply of those selling their labor increased, the wages they could demand would necessarily decrease. Second, it predicted that the middle class would decrease to a very small percentage of the population: zero-sum competition means there are winners and losers, and while a few would consistently be winners and thus become rich capitalists, most would lose at some point and be forced into the proletariat. Third, it predicted that the capitalists would also decrease as a percentage of the population: zero-sum competition also applies to competition among the capitalists, generating a few consistent winners in control of everything while the rest would be forced down the economic ladder.

Yet that was not how it worked out. By the early twentieth century it seemed that all three of the predictions failed to characterize the development of the capitalist countries. The class of manual laborers had both declined as a percentage of the population and become relatively better off. And the middle class had grown substantially both as a percentage of the population and in wealth, as had the upper class.

Marxist socialism thus faced a set of theoretical problems: Why had the predictions not come to pass? Even more pressing was the practical problem of impatience: If the proletarian masses were the material of revolution, why were they not revolting? The exploitation and alienation had to be there—despite surface appearances—and it had to be being felt by capitalism’s victims, the proletariat. So what was to be done about the decidedly non-revolutionary working class? After decades of waiting hopefully and pouncing on any sign of worker dissatisfaction and unrest, the plain fact was that the proletariat was not going to revolt any time soon.

Consequently, the waiting strategy needed to be rethought.[1]

Chart 5.1: Marxism on the Logic of Capitalism

References

[1] Werner Sombart, a Marxist early in his career, was among the first to rethink: “It had to be admitted in the end that Marx had made mistakes on many points of importance” (1896, 87).

Bibliography [pdf] [html]

[The chapter from which this section of Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism (Scholargy Publishing, 2004) is excerpted can be downloaded as a PDF at the Explaining Postmodernism page. The full book is also available at Amazon.com.]

You will learn that Facebook is a “tool able to amplify an individual‘s alienation and narcissism, which, are a consequence of the mercantile form of social organization which has reached its climax in capitalism.”

You will nod in sage agreement that “Facebook is not a promising example of a new shift from capitalism to a new form of economy based on openness, peering, sharing and global action.” [Emphasis added.]

And you will realize the obvious truth “under Marxist theory” that the new social media are “disguised forms of advanced capitalism aimed at eroding space to more challenging modes of Internet collectivism.”

Take that, you social-media-using patsies. Tools of the Man once again.

(omg i gotta fb and tweet this asap to my peeps.)

Or it could also be, as my friend Steve put it in commenting on the above, that “Postmodernism is alive and well and taking stupidity to new heights.”

I like that guy.

“In the year 1789 … nothing else was talked of in Germany but the philosophy of Kant, about which were poured forth in abundance commentaries, chrestomathies, interpretations, estimates, apologies, and so forth.” That’s Heinrich Heine, who also wrote, “Our German philosophy is really but the dream of the French Revolution … Kant is our Robespierre.”

More soberly, German historian Friedrich Meinecke connected the philosophical “dream” to politics this way: “In the 1780s the critique of pure reason had conquered all minds, but in the following decade Kant’s thoughts on practical reason became the catalyst for a genuine social movement” (The Age of German Liberation, 25).

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, a very different kind of intellectual and political revolution had come to fruition in the 1780s.

Kant/Robespierre or Locke/Washington. It’s still our choice.

38. Authoritarianism

A fifth and final set of themes link Nietzsche with the Nazis. Both were anti-democratic, anti-capitalistic, and anti-liberal.

The Nazis were not friends of democracy, but they were extremely effective players of democracy. They announced from the beginning, in their 1920 founding Party Program, their authoritarian principles. Nonetheless, finding themselves in the democratic system that was the Weimar republic, they played mostly by the rules and out-democracied the other political parties. They used democracy to achieve anti-democratic ends.

Nietzsche’s political views are less developed and more ambiguous, but it is clear he favors some sort of aristocracy. “What is serious for me,” Nietzsche wrote in Beyond Good and Evil, is “the ‘European problem’ as I understand it, the cultivation of a new caste that will rule Europe.”[130] Again, while Nietzsche is unspecific, he does not necessarily mean an official political aristocracy—he more likely means the de facto rule by an exceptional few, whatever the formal and official political structures are. In this way, even though Nietzsche despises the impulses that give rise to democracy, he does not worry much about the actual political dominance of democratic forms of government. Those forms of government, he believes, will simply become instruments through which the exceptional individuals, most likely from behind the scenes, will achieve their goals. As Nietzsche puts it, democracy will be a tool of “a master race, the future ‘masters of the earth’ … philosophical men of power and artist-tyrants” who will “employ democratic Europe as their most pliant and supple instrument for getting hold of the destinies of the earth.”[131]

Nietzsche is not programmatic about what form the new aristocratic class will take or what specific goals it will pursue. He believes that will be up to the overmen themselves—they will create their own values and shape the vehicles of their realization. And Nietzsche did not think of himself as an overman—merely as a herald of their coming. But Nietzsche is extremely clear that any social method, however brutal, will be legitimate should the new aristocrats desire it. A healthy aristocracy, he puts it forcefully, “accepts with a good conscience the sacrifice of untold human beings, who, for its sake, must be reduced and lowered to incomplete human beings, to slaves, to instruments.”[132]

That is certainly anti-liberal and fits well with Nietzsche’s self-assessment that he is “not by any means ‘liberal’.”[133]

In addition to dismissing liberalism, Nietzsche dismisses capitalism as a dehumanizing economic system[134] and rejects individualism when it comes to matters of marriage and procreation. Marriage, he thought, should not be based on “idiosyncrasy”—that is, upon love and personal sexual attraction.[135] Rather, he suggested, marriage should be state-organized for breeding purposes.[136]

On all those points, the Nazis can and did find inspiration in Nietzsche.

References

[130] BGE 251.

[131] Note for BGE, quoted in Hunt 1991, p. 39.

[132] BGE 258.

[133] GS 377.

[134] D 2 6.

[135] TI 9:39.

[136] BGE 251.

[Bibliography]

[This post can also be downloaded as a PDF at the Nietzsche and the Nazis page.]

39. Summary of the five similarities

Again to summarize: we have five significant connections between Nietzsche and the Nazis:

1. The Nazis were strongly collectivistic, and Nietzsche, with some qualifications, also advances strongly collectivistic and anti-individualistic themes.

2. Both Nietzsche and the Nazis see zero-sum conflict as inescapable and as fundamental to the human condition.

3. Both are irrationalists in their psychological theories, downplaying radically the role that reason plays in life and emphasizing the power and the glory of instincts and feelings.

4. Both Nietzsche and the Nazis accept willingly—even longingly—that war is necessary, healthy, and even majestic.

5. And finally, both Nietzsche and the Nazis are anti-democratic, anti-capitalistic, and anti-liberal—and so, come the 1930s, the Nazis were in fundamental opposition to those nations to the West that were still broadly committed to democracy, capitalism, and liberalism.

[This post can also be downloaded as a PDF at the Nietzsche and the Nazis page.]

I vote for Francis Bacon.
.
.

The standard answer gives the honor to René Descartes.

Descartes’s claim to the title is based primarily on his epistemology — specifically his method of doubt. The method of doubt is both a challenge to previous, more authoritarian epistemologies and a re-invigoration of a skepticism that exercises philosophers to this day.

Bacon’s reputation is also based in epistemology — his re-introduction and expansion of inductive methods. His empiricism is also a challenge to authoritarian epistemologies and grounds much of the scientific method used by investigators to this day.

How do we decide matters such as who should be considered the founder or father of modern philosophy? Let me propose four criteria.

1. Influence on academic philosophy. Descartes’s skeptical challenges have generated a huge literature in academic philosophy. Yet a huge literature has also been generated developing empirical methods in philosophy of science along lines established by Bacon. My call: a tie between Descartes and Bacon, absent a quantitative measure of the literature.

2. Influence on philosophy as used by all thinkers. Baconian epistemology has been internalized by most modern intellectuals (especially in the sciences and social sciences) and is part of their normal professional practice, and the more sophisticated inductive methods are explicitly used as guiding principles. The hardcore Cartesian skeptical challenges are rarely used outside academic philosophical discussions. My call: Bacon.

3. The positive and the negative. Descartes’s legacy is essentially negative. He digs philosophy into a skeptical hole from which many haven’t escaped. Bacon’s legacy is essentially positive. He provides tools many have used to develop new knowledge. Clearly there is still much truth to C. P. Snow’s “two cultures” thesis, in which much of the humanities is skeptical and pessimistic while much of the sciences is progressive and optimistic. My call: Absent a quantitative measure of the literature, a tie between Descartes and Bacon.

4. Chronology. Bacon’s key works were published in the first quarter of the 17th century: The Proficience and Advancement of Learning (1605), The Wisdom of the Ancients (1619), Novum Organum (1620), and The New Atlantis (1626). Descartes’s key works were written in the second quarter of the 17th century, and some were not published until the third quarter: Rules for the Direction of the Mind (1628; published posthumously in 1684), Discourse on Method (1637), Meditations on First Philosophy (written in 1641, published in 1647), and Principles of Philosophy (1644). My call: Bacon.

So by simple philosophy math, Bacon wins by two.

Before we revise the textbooks, let me ask: Are there other criteria we should consider?

Why, for example, has the prosperity of North America been consistently higher than that of Central and South America? Both are rich in natural resources, both involve nations started from scratch, both imported (or had imported) lots of culture from Europe, both have a large ocean buffer between them and the Old World, and so on.

One major factor is colonial legacies. Colonizing powers bring with them differing economic, political, legal, and cultural institutions. When they leave, the now-independent nations inherit institutional frameworks. For example, they inherit policies, practices, and attitudes in these areas:

* Economics: property rights, contract rights, trade policies, attitudes towards manual work
* Politics: constitutions, democratic and republican practices, degrees of centralization or decentralization of power
* Law: codes of law, jury systems, independent (or not) judges
* Religion: freedom, tolerance, separation (or not) from politics
* Demography: treatment of indigenous populations, policies with respect to slavery, the status of women, openness (or not) to immigration

I’ve started reading J. H. Elliott’s 2006 Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (Yale University Press, 2006). Elliott is vastly read on the subject and he writes with his academic colleagues in mind, and I was struck by this formulation of a big-picture explanatory hypothesis:

Spain’s empire in America was an “empire of conquest” while Britain’s was an “empire of commerce” (p. xv).

Thoughts?

Hegel on worshipping the state

While a student at Tübingen, Hegel’s favorite reading had been Rousseau. “The principle of freedom dawned on the world in Rousseau, and gave infinite strength to man.”[88] As discussed in Chapter Two, Hegel was also engaged deeply with the latest developments of Kantian and Fichtean metaphysics and epistemology and their implications for social and political thought.

The political battle lines were clearly drawn for Hegel: If Rousseau’s account of human freedom is the correct one, then the Enlightenment account of freedom must be a fraud. Disappointed by the outcome of the Revolution in France, where it seemed like the Rousseauians had had their world-historical chance, Hegel also had nothing but disdain for England, then arguably the most developed nation of the Enlightenment: “of institutions characterized by real freedom there are nowhere fewer than in England.” The so-called liberalism of the so-called Enlightenment nations actually represented an “incredible deficiency” of rights and freedom. Only by updating the Rousseauian model dialectically and applying it to the German context could we find “real freedom.”[89]

So what is real freedom to Hegel?

“It must further be understood that all the worth which the human being possesses—all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State.”[90]

In the broader context of Hegel’s philosophy, human history is governed by the necessary working out of the Absolute. The Absolute—or God, or Universal Reason, or the Divine Idea—is the actual substance of the universe, and its developmental processes are everything that is. “God governs the world; the actual working of his government—the carrying out of his plan—is the History of the World.”[91]

The State, to the extent that it participates in the Absolute, is God’s instrument for achieving his purposes. “The State,” accordingly, “is the Divine Idea as it exists on Earth.”[92]

Given that the individual’s ultimate purpose in life should be to achieve union with ultimate reality, it follows that the “state in and by itself is the ethical whole, the actualization of freedom.”[93] The consequence of this, morally, is that the individual is of less significance than the state. The individual’s empirical, day-to-day interests are of a lower moral order than the state’s universal, world-historical interests. The state has as its final end the self-realization of the Absolute, and “this final end has supreme right against the individual, whose supreme duty is to be a member of the state.”[94] Duty, as we have learned from Kant and Fichte, always trumps personal interests and inclinations.

Yet mere membership as a matter of duty is not enough for Hegel, given the grandeur of the state’s divine historical purpose: “One must worship the state as a terrestrial divinity.”[95]

In such worship, Hegel believed, we finds our real freedom. For ultimately, we individuals are but aspects of the Absolute Spirit, and in so relating to it we are relating to ourselves. “For Law is the objectivity of Spirit; volition in its true form. Only that will which obeys law, is free; for it obeys itself—it is independent and so free.”[96] Freedom is thus the individual’s absolute submission to and worship of the state.

There is of course the problem of explaining all of this to the average individual. The average individual, in the course of living day-to-day life, often finds that the laws and other manifestations of the state do not seem like real freedom. In most cases, Hegel stated, that is because the average person is ignorant of what true freedom is,[97] and no amount of explaining the higher dialectic to that person will make the laws seem like less of an infringement upon freedom.

Yet it is also true, Hegel granted, that in many cases the individual’s freedoms and interests will genuinely be set aside, overridden, and even smashed. One reason for this is that the state’s general principles are universal and necessary, and so they cannot be expected to apply perfectly to the particular and contingent. As Hegel explained, “universal law is not designed for the units of the mass. These as such may, in fact, find their interests decidedly thrust into the background.”[98]

But the problem is not merely one of applying the universal to the particular. Individuals must recognize that, from the moral perspective, they are not ends in themselves; they are tools for the achievement of higher goals.

“But though we might tolerate the idea that individuals, their desires and the gratification of them, are thus sacrificed, and their happiness given up to the empire of chance, to which it belongs; and that as a general rule, individuals come under the category of means to an ulterior end.”[99]

And again, just in case we have missed Hegel’s point: “A single person, I need hardly say, is something subordinate, and as such he must dedicate himself to the ethical whole.” And again echoing Rousseau: “Hence, if the state claims life, the individual must surrender it.”[100]

Individual life is surrendered rather a lot when very special human beings come along to really shake things up and move God’s plan for the world forward. “World-historical individuals,” as Hegel called them, are those who, usually without knowing so themselves, are agents of the Absolute’s development. Such individuals are energetic and focused, and they are able to amass power and direct social forces in such a way as to achieve something of historical significance. Their achievements, however, exact a high human cost.

“A World-historical individual is not so unwise as to indulge a variety of wishes to divide his regards. He is devoted to the One Aim, regardless of all else. It is even possible that such men may treat other great, even sacred interests, inconsiderately; conduct which is indeed obnoxious to moral reprehension. But so mighty a form must trample down many an innocent flower—crush to pieces many an object in its path.”[101]

The innocent flowers should not object to their destruction. The World-historical individual is acting for the best interests of the whole. In that special individual the state is embodied, and the state is the future of the collective. Even while being destroyed, the innocent flower has worth only through—and so should glory in—his participation in that larger future.

Anticipating Nietzsche, Hegel argued that neither should the innocent flowers raise merely moral objections against the activities of the World-historical individuals. “For the History of the World occupies a higher ground than that on which morality has properly its position.” The needs of historical development are of higher standing than those of morality, and so “the conscience of individuals” should not be an obstacle to the achievement of historical destinies.[102] The trampling of morality is regrettable, but “looked at from this point, moral claims that are irrelevant, must not be brought into collision with world-historical deeds and their accomplishment.”[103]

References

[88] Hegel, in Rousseau 1755, xv.

[89] Hegel 1830-31, 454; see also 1821, §236.

[90] Hegel 1830-31, 39.

[91] Hegel 1830-31, 35-36.

[92] Hegel 1830-31, 39; also 1821, Add., 152, para. 258; p. 279.

[93] Hegel 1821, Add., 152, para. 258; p. 279.

[94] Hegel 1821, §258

[95] Hegel 1821, §272. Otto Braun, age 19, a volunteer who died in WW I, wrote in a letter to his parents: “My inmost yearning, my purest, though most secret flame, my deepest faith and my highest hope—they are still the same as ever, and they all bear one name: the State. One day to build the state like a temple, rising up pure and strong, resting in its own weight, severe and sublime, but also serene like the gods and with bright halls glistening in the dancing brilliance of the sun—this, at bottom, is the end and goal of my aspirations” (in H. Kuhn 1963, 313).

[96] Hegel 1830-31, 39.

[97] Hegel 1821, §301.

[98] Hegel 1830-31, 35.

[99] Hegel 1830-31, 33.

[100] Hegel 1821, Add., 45, para. 70; p. 241.

[101] Hegel 1830-31, 32.

[102] Hegel 1830-31, 66-67.

[103] Hegel 1830-31, 67.

Bibliography [pdf] [html]

[The chapter from which this section of Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism (Scholargy Publishing, 2004) is excerpted can be downloaded as a PDF at the Explaining Postmodernism page. The full book is also available at Amazon.com.]

So why is Wynand not just another Keating-type character? Why isn’t he literarily redundant to the development of the theme of The Fountainhead? Because Rand develops Wynand as more consciously aware of the strategy he is pursuing and of the risks it poses to his soul; consequently, Rand also develops Wynand as pursuing deliberate strategies to insulate himself from those risks.

Keating semi-consciously manipulates and meanders through life and ends up a selfless wreck of a man. Wynand consciously sees that risk but believes that he can achieve his goals in a corrupt world—and keep his soul intact enough to enjoy them—if :

1. He gets the right kind of power over other people.
2. He keeps a rigid separation of his work life and his personal life.

On the right kind of social power. Keating’s social power is based on schmoozing and lying. Wynand’s social power is based on money. Wynand makes a judgment here: a life of lying and schmoozing one’s way to the top is to commit to fakery and to losing one’s personal sense of what’s real and what’s illusory. By contrast, money as Wynand uses it is more honest. Wynand doesn’t fake; he is upfront when tempting employees with money to break their integrity, for example, or when trading the Stoneridge commission for Dominique. Keating will kiss you on the cheek, so to speak, while stabbing you in the back. Wynand will look you in the eye and straight-up make you an outrageous bribe.

On separating the public and the personal. Keating never figures out how to define his own personal values and draw his lines and so ends up letting himself be manipulated in his core values. Wynand defines his own personal values and ruthlessly resists all incursions upon them. He cultivates his own tastes in art, builds up his own collection of masterpieces, and keeps his art gallery off limits to the grubby masses. He spends significant time on his yacht, wandering the world at will, and again cultivating an oasis of meaningful privacy against a sordid world.

Wynand is thus a compromise character: In dealing with the external social world, he plays brilliantly the mutually-corrupting power-struggle game; but in his internal private life, he is committed to independence and integrity.

He is like Keating when at The Banner but like Roark when in his art gallery or on his yacht.

He is Roarkian in his ability to visual the end: doing things his own way according to his own highest independent standards. But he is Keating-esque in his judgment of the means necessary to achieve his ends: corrupting others and selling oneself in a base world to get power.

The next question: Does Wynand’s strategy work?

36. Instinct, passion, and anti-reason

Hitler was fond of saying, in private, “What luck that men do not think.”

Another significant point of agreement exists between Nietzsche and the Nazis: Both agree that the great conflicts will not be solved rationally, through the processes of discussion, argument, persuasion, or diplomacy. Both Nietzsche and the Nazis are irrationalists in their view of human psychology—and this has important social and political implications.

Think about democracy for a moment. In particular, think about how much confidence in the power of reason that democracy requires. Democracy is a matter of decentralizing political power to individuals by, for example, giving each individual a vote. The assumption of democracy is that individuals have the ability to weigh and judge important matters and cast a responsible vote. The expectation is that members of democracies will have ongoing discussions and arguments about all sorts of issues, and that they will be able to assess the evidence, the arguments and counter-arguments. And they will be able to learn from their mistakes and, when appropriate, change their votes the next time around.

It is not an accident that neither Nietzsche nor the Nazis were advocates of either democracy or reason.

Hitler considered a highly-developed intellect to be a weakness and too much reliance on reason to be a sickness. Germany’s recent problems, he believed, stemmed from too much thinking. “The intellect has grown autocratic, and has become a disease of life.” What Germany required was passion, a storm of emotion arising from deeply rooted instincts and drives: “Only a storm of glowing passion can turn the destinies of nations, but this passion can only be roused by a man who carries it within himself.”[119] Consequently, German training and propaganda were not directed toward presenting facts and arguments but rather to arousing the passions of the masses. Reason, logic, and objectivity were beside the point. “We are not objective, we are German,” said Hans Schemm, the first Nazi Minister of Culture.[120]

Here again there is an important connection to Nietzsche. Nietzsche too sees an opposition between conscious reason and unconscious instinct, and he disparages those who stress rationality—those who engage in what he calls the “ridiculous overestimation and misunderstanding of consciousness.”[121] In his own words, it is “‘Rationality’ against instinct,”[122] and he believes that rationality is the least useful guiding power humans possess. Humans came out of a long evolutionary line that relied on drives and instincts—and those drives and instincts served us well for millennia. Yet men eventually became settled, tamed, and civilized, and they lost something crucial:

“[I]n this new world they no longer possessed their former guides, their regulating, unconscious and infallible drives: they were reduced to thinking, inferring, reckoning, co-ordinating cause and effect, these unfortunate creatures; they were reduced to their ‘consciousness,’ their weakest and most fallible organ!”[123]

Note that Nietzsche says our unconscious drives are infallible, if only we can find them within ourselves again. It is our strongest, most assertive unconscious instinct that we should let rule our lives: “‘instinct’ is of all the kinds of intelligence that have been discovered so far—the most intelligent.”

And on this score, Nietzsche and the Nazis are in agreement: Both are fundamentally irrationalists—they do not think much of the power of reason, and they urge themselves and others to let their strongest passions and instincts well up within them and be released upon the world.

References

[119] Hitler, quoted in Langer.

[120] Schemm, quoted in Mosse 1966 xxxi.

[121] GS 11.

[122] EH: “The Birth of Tragedy” 1.

[123] GM II:16.

[124] BGE 218.

[Bibliography]

[This post can also be downloaded as a PDF at the Nietzsche and the Nazis page.]

37. Conquest and war

Now put the above three points together: collectivism, conflict, and irrationalism. What will the social results be?

If you believe wholeheartedly and passionately that your identity is found by merging yourself with your group—and that your group is locked in a mortal, zero-sum conflict with other groups—and that reason is superficial and that passion and instinct drive the world—then how will you assert yourself in that conflict?

For much of the nineteenth century, Western liberal capitalists had begun to wonder, hopefully, whether war was a thing of the past. In their judgment, progress had been made: During the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, much of the West had embraced the idea of individual rights—the idea that each individual has rights to life, liberty, property, the pursuit of happiness. In the nineteenth century, those rights had been extended in practice to women and slavery had been eliminated. Also in the nineteenth century came the full realization of the power of the Industrial Revolution and the idea that through technology and capitalism, economic production could be increased dramatically.

As a result, the liberal capitalists of the nineteenth century came to believe that we could solve the problem of poverty and eliminate most of our conflicts over wealth. They believed that with rising wealth and education, rational people could learn to respect each others’ rights, that there was more to be gained from trade than from war, and that peace was a natural state that mankind could achieve. The horrors of war could become a thing of the past.[125]

We know from tragic twentieth-century history the National Socialists’ eagerness to use war as their primary tool for achieving their international goals. We know their praising as fundamental the martial spirit and the beauty of the warrior soul. We know of their total recasting of education of children to achieve, as Hitler wanted “a brutal, domineering, fearless, cruel youth. Youth must be all that. It must bear pain. There must be nothing weak and gentle about it. The free, splendid beast of prey must once again flash from its eyes.”[126]

The “beast of prey” phrase is again rhetoric inspired directly by Nietzsche. On the importance and nobility of war, Nietzsche and the Nazis were in almost full agreement. Nietzsche praised war and urged its coming. He wished for a great purge that would wipe out most humans whose lives he thought worthless and an embarrassment to the human species. “All-too-many live, and all-too-long they hang on their branches. Would that a storm came to shake all this worm-eaten rot from the tree!”[127]

But he also longed for war as a means to inspire those humans who have potential to advance us toward the overman. To that end, Nietzsche believed that war is absolutely indispensable:

“War essential. It is vain rhapsodizing and sentimentality to continue to expect much (even more, to expect a very great deal) from mankind, once it has learned not to wage war. For the time being, we know of no other means to imbue exhausted peoples, as strongly and surely as every great war does, with that raw energy of the battleground, that deep impersonal hatred, that murderous coldbloodedness with a good conscience, that communal, organized ardor in destroying the enemy, that proud indifference to great losses, to one’s own existence and to that of one’s friends, that muted, earthquakelike convulsion of the soul.”[128]

And against those who believe that we have entered a more peaceful era and that perhaps war is no longer necessary, Nietzsche reminds us, in an especially chilling quotation: “The beginnings of everything great on earth [are] soaked in blood thoroughly and for a long time.”[129]

On this score, the Nazis were thoroughly Nietzschean. Rather than pushing for a recognition of the mutuality of human interests, as Western liberal capitalists had been doing for much of the nineteenth century—and rather than seeking reasonable and peaceful diplomatic solutions to the normal collisions of international politics—the Nazis committed fundamentally to war as their primary means of self-regeneration and dominance over the rest of the world.

References

[125] Richard Cobden in 1835: “The middle and industrious classes of England can have no interest apart from the preservation of peace. The honours, the fame, the emoluments of war belong not to them; the battle-plain is the harvest-field of the aristocracy, watered with the blood of the people.” Also John Stuart Mill: “It is commerce which is rapidly rendering war obsolete, by strengthening and multiplying the personal interests which are in natural opposition to it” (1909). Again Mill: “Finally, commerce first taught nations to see with good will the wealth and prosperity of one another. Before, the patriot, unless sufficiently advanced in culture to feel the world his country, wished all countries weak, poor, and ill-governed, but his own: he now sees in their wealth and progress a direct source of wealth and progress to his own country. It is commerce which is rapidly rendering war obsolete, by strengthening and multiplying the personal interests which are in natural opposition to it. And it may be said without exaggeration that the great extent and rapid increase of international trade, in being the principal guarantee of the peace of the world, is the great permanent security for the uninterrupted progress of the ideas, the institutions, and the character of the human race” (1909, Book III, Chapter XVII, Section 14).

[126] Hitler, 1933.

[127] Z, First Part, “On Free Death”

[128] HAH 477.

[129] GM II, 6.

[Bibliography]

[This post can also be downloaded as a PDF at the Nietzsche and the Nazis page.]

The ethics of altruism holds that others are standard of value. One is good to the extent one puts the interests of other first, acts to achieve their interests, and when necessary sacrifices one’s interests for their sake.

In The Fountainhead, Ellsworth Toohey is the major strategist of altruism, and in my reading he uses five distinct variants of altruism to achieve his ends:

(1) Altruism as a policy of collectivism for the purpose of mutual self support;

(2) Altruism as a tactic of the weak to protect themselves against the strong;

(3) Altruism as a tactic of the weak to get support from the strong;

(4) Altruism as a strategy of the weak to get power over the strong in order to rule them; and

(5) Altruism as a strategy by the weak to destroy the strong out of envy, hatred, or revenge.

History provides many examples of Type 1 altruism, in, for example, religious communities that isolate themselves and live communally. The key organizing concepts of such communities are collective assets, solidarity, and conformity.

In The Fountainhead, Type 1 is combined with Type 2 in the official philosophy Ellsworth Toohey uses when preaching to the masses — for example in his speech to the strikers of the building-trades union (I:9). The key concepts in Toohey’s speech are unity and brotherhood for its own sake, on the one hand; and on the other the aggression of the owners and the consequent role of unions as a self-protection agency to fight back.

Type 3 altruism appears less in The Fountainhead, e.g., in the tactics Keating’s mother uses to live vicariously, both psychologically and — later in the novel — materially, through him. (It is much more developed in Atlas Shrugged, e.g., in the strategy that Rearden’s mother and brother pursue to ensure that he will continue to support them.)

Type 4 altruism is the altruism of power-lust. One sub-plot of The Fountainhead is the battle between Gail Wynand and Toohey. Wynand pursues the common “master” power strategy of physical wealth and intimidation (e.g., of his business competitors), while Toohey’s strategy is to use psychological power. An example from late in the novel when Toohey explains his philosophy to Peter Keating, who is now an empty shell of a man:

“It’s only a matter of discovering the lever. If you learn how to rule one single man’s soul, you can get the rest of mankind. It’s the soul, Peter, the soul. Not whips or swords or fire or guns. That’s why the Caesars, the Attilas, the Napoleons were fools and did not last. We will. The soul, Peter, is that which can’t be ruled. It must be broken” (4:14).

Toohey’s particular tactics to achieve the strategy are designed to make the strong doubt themselves. Toohey elaborates in detail:

“There are many ways. Here’s one. Make man feel small. Make him feel guilty. Kill his aspiration and his integrity. . . . Preach selflessness. Tell man that he must live for others. Tell man that altruism is the ideal. Not a single one of them has ever achieved it and not a single one ever will. His every living instinct screams against it. But don’t you see what you accomplish? Man realizes that he’s incapable of what he’s accepted as the noblest virtue — and it gives him a sense of guilt, of sin, of his own basic unworthiness” (4:14).

Guilty individuals are weakened and much easier to manipulate and rule.

Type 5 altruism is the most disturbing case of altruism. Type 4 altruism is about achieving power in order to rule, but ruling is still a positive goal. Type 5 is about getting power as a means purely to destroy. Rand clearly sees it operative, but many readers wonder whether she exaggerates her enemies’ positions.

Rand provides many examples of Type 5 altruism in Atlas, especially in the characters Lillian Rearden and James Taggart. But it was first made explicit by Toohey when he explained to Keating the real purpose behind his communal organizing, his writings critical of individuality, and his promotion of mediocrities. When Keating whinily asks him what he really wants, Toohey snaps: “Howard Roark’s neck” — and then elaborates: “I don’t want to kill him. I want him in jail. You understand? In jail. In a cell. Behind bars. Locked, stopped, strapped — and alive” (4:13). Toohey has no positive goal: he only wants to destroy an outstanding man.

Toohey is a fictional character, so his words alone don’t have much evidentiary status. But plenty of real-life individuals give us the evidence we need to see Rand’s point:

St. Augustine included the spectacle of Hell as one of the viewing pleasures for those in Heaven: “the good go out to see the punishment of the wicked . . . so as to witness the torments of the wicked in their bodily presence” (“The Saints’ Knowledge of the Punishment of the Wicked,” 426 CE).

Church father Tertullian exulted over his imagined destruction of the world and the torments of kings, philosophers, poets, and athletes in Hell:

“that last day of judgment, with its everlasting issues; that day unlooked for by the nations, the theme of their derision, when the world hoary with age, and all its many products, shall be consumed in one great flame! How vast a spectacle then bursts upon the eye! What there excites my admiration? What my derision? Which sight gives me joy? Which rouses me to exultation?—as I see so many illustrious monarchs, whose reception into the heavens was publicly announced, groaning now in the lowest darkness with great Jove himself, and those, too, who bore witness of their exultation; governors of provinces, too, who persecuted the Christian name, in fires more fierce than those with which in the days of their pride they raged against the followers of Christ. What world’s wise men besides, the very philosophers, in fact, who taught their followers that God had no concern in aught that is sublunary, and were wont to assure them that either they had no souls, or that they would never return to the bodies which at death they had left, now covered with shame before the poor deluded ones, as one fire consumes them! Poets also, trembling not before the judgment-seat of Rhadamanthus or Minos, but of the unexpected Christ! I shall have a better opportunity then of hearing the tragedians, louder voiced in their own calamity; of viewing the play-actors, much more ‘dissolute’ in the dissolving flame; of looking upon the charioteer, all glowing in his chariot of fire; of beholding the wrestlers, not in their gymnasia, but tossing in the fiery billows …” (De Spectaculis, written 197–200 CE).

St. Thomas Aquinas echoed Augustine: “In order that the bliss of the saints may be more delightful for them and that they may render more copious thanks to God for it, it is given to them to see perfectly the punishment of the damned” (Summa Theologica, Supplement, Q. 94, Articles 1 and 3; written 1265–1274 CE).

And American “Great Awakening” leader, Jonathan Edwards gave a 1739 sermon entitled “The Eternity of Hell Torments” with the following disturbing affirmation:

“The sight of hell torments will exalt the happiness of the saints forever.” And: “Can the believing husband in Heaven be happy with his unbelieving wife in Hell? Can the believing father in Heaven be happy with his unbelieving children in Hell? Can the loving wife be happy in Heaven with her unbelieving husband in Hell? I tell you, yea! Such will be their sense of justice that it will increase rather than decrease their bliss.”

So Toohey is in “good” company, so to speak.

In a forthcoming journal article, “Egoism in Nietzsche and Rand,” I discuss these five strategies from The Fountainhead in fuller detail, Rand’s use of them in Atlas Shrugged, and I make connections and contrasts to Friedrich Nietzsche’s earlier harsh critique of altruism. The article is to be published in the next issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (Volume 10, Number 2).

Epistemological solutions to Kant: Irrationalism from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche

The Kantians and the Hegelians represent the pro-reason contingent in nineteenth-century German philosophy.

While the Hegelians pursued metaphysical solutions to Kant’s unbridgeable gap between subject and object, in the process altering reason into something unrecognizable to the Enlightenment, they had competition from the explicitly irrationalist wing of German philosophy. This line of development included major figures such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Denmark’s lonely contribution to the history of modern philosophy, Søren Kierkegaard.

The irrationalists divided over whether religion is true—Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard being theists, and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche being atheists—but all shared a contempt for reason. All condemned reason as a totally artificial and limiting faculty, one that must be abandoned in the bold quest to embrace reality. Perhaps Kant had prohibited access to reality—but he had shown only that reason could not get us there. That left other options open to us: faith, feeling, and instinct.

Schleiermacher (1768-1834) came of age in a Kant-dominated intellectual scene, and he took Kant’s cue for how religion could respond to the threat of the Enlightenment. Intellectually most active from 1799, with the publication of On Religion, Speeches to its Cultural Despisers, Schleiermacher more than anyone made happen the revival of Pietism and orthodox Protestantism over the course of the next generation. So great was Schleiermacher’s influence that, as theologian Richard Niebuhr put it, he “may justifiably be called the Kant of modern Protestantism.”[28]

As someone who came of age in the 1790s in Germany, Schleiermacher was broadly Kantian in his approach and embraced whole-heartedly the Kantian rejection of reason’s access to reality. Schleiermacher, like Kant, was deeply offended by the assault that reason, science, and naturalism had made on the true faith. Following Hamann, Schleiermacher held that feeling, especially religious feeling, is a mode of cognition, one that gives us access to noumenal reality. Except, argued Schleiermacher, these feelings are not so much directed outward as inward. One cannot grasp noumena directly, but one can phenomenologically inspect oneself, one’s deepest feelings, and therein find indirect senses of the divine ultimate.[29] As Hamann had stated, directly confronted religious feeling reveals one’s essential nature.

When one discovers one’s essential nature, the core self-feeling that one is forced to accept is that of absolute dependence. In Schleiermacher’s words, “The essence of religion is the feeling of absolute dependence. I repudiated rational thought in favour of a theology of feeling.”[30] One should strive to realize oneself by exploring and embracing this feeling of absolute dependence. This requires attacking reason, for reason gives one a feeling of independence and confidence. Limiting reason is thus the essence of religious piety—for it makes possible a fully-entered-into feeling of dependence and orientation toward that being upon which one is absolutely dependent. That being is of course God.[31]

In the next generation, Kierkegaard (“Hamann’s most brilliant and profound disciple”[32]) gave irrationality an activist twist. Educated in Germany, Kierkegaard was, like Kant, deeply worried by the beating religion had taken during the Enlightenment. So he was cheered—or at least as cheered as Kierkegaard could ever be—to learn from Kant that reason cannot reach the noumena.

The Enlightenment thinkers had said that individuals relate to reality as knowers. On the basis of their acquired knowledge, individuals then act to better themselves and their world. “Knowledge is power,” wrote Bacon. But after Kant we know that knowledge of reality is impossible. So while we still must act in the real world, we do not and cannot have the necessary knowledge upon which to base our choices. And since our entire destinies are at stake in the choices we make, we cannot choose dispassionately between options. We must choose, and choose passionately, all the while knowing that we are choosing in ignorance.

For Kierkegaard, the core lesson from Kant was that one must not try to relate to reality cognitively—what is needed is action, commitment, a leap into that which one cannot know but which one feels is essential to give meaning to one’s life. In accordance with Kierkegaard’s felt religious needs, what is needed is an irrational leap of faith. It must be a leap because after the Enlightenment it is clear that the existence of God cannot be justified rationally, and it must be irrational because the God that Kierkegaard finds compelling is absurd.

But such a leap into the absurd puts one in a crisis. It flies in the face of everything sensible, rational, and moral. So how should one deal with this crisis of both wanting and not wanting to leap into absurdity? In Fear and Trembling we find Kierkegaard’s panegyric to Abraham, a hero of the Hebrew Scriptures who in defiance of all reason and morality was willing turn off his mind and kill his son Isaac. Why? Because God ordered him too. How could that be—would a good God make such a demand of a man? That makes God incomprehensibly cruel. What about God’s promise that through Isaac the future generations of Israel would be born? The demand makes God a promise-breaker. What about the fact that it is killing an innocent? That makes God immoral. What about the immense pain that the loss of their son would cause in Abraham and Sarah? That makes God a sadist. Does Abraham rebel? No. Does he even question? No. He shuts down his mind and obeys. That, said Kierkegaard, is the essence of our cognitive relation to reality. Like Abraham, each of us must learn “to relinquish his understanding and his thinking, and to keep his soul fixed upon the absurd.”

Like Abraham, we do not know and we cannot know. What we must do is jump blindly into the unknown. Kierkegaard revered Abraham as a “knight of faith” for his willingness to “crucify reason” and leap into absurdity.[33]

Schopenhauer, also of the generation after Kant and a contemporary of Hegel, disagreed violently with the cowardly attempts to return to religion after the rejection of Enlightenment reason. While Hegel populated Kant’s noumenal realm with Dialectical Spirit and Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard felt or hoped desperately that God was out there, Schopenhauer’s feelings had revealed to him that reality is Will—a deeply irrational and conflictual Will, striving always and blindly toward nothing.[34] No wonder then that reason had no chance of comprehending it: Reason’s rigid categories and neat organizational schemes are wholly inadequate for a reality that is the opposite of that. Only like can know like. Only via our own wills, our passionate feelings—especially those evoked in us by music—can we grasp the essence of reality.

But most of us are too cowardly to try, for reality is cruel and frightening. This is why we cling to reason so desperately—reason allows us to tidy things up, to make ourselves feel safe and secure, to escape from the swirling horror that, in our honest moments, we sense reality to be. Only the bravest few have the courage to pierce through the illusions of reason to the irrationality of reality. Only a few individuals of special sensitivity are willing to pierce reason’s veil and intuit passionately the seething flow.

Of course, having intuited the cruel horror of the seething flow, Schopenhauer wished for self-annihilation.[35] This was the weakness that his disciple, Nietzsche urged us to overcome.

Nietzsche began epistemologically by agreeing with Kant: “When Kant says: ‘reason does not derive its laws from nature but prescribes them to nature,’ this is, in regard to the concept of nature, completely true.” All of the problems of philosophy, from the decadent Socrates[36] to that “catastrophic spider” Kant,[37] are caused by their emphasis on reason. The rise of the philosophers meant the fall of man, for once reason took over, men no longer possessed their former guides, their regulating, unconscious and infallible drives: they were reduced to thinking, inferring, reckoning, co-ordinating cause and effect, these unfortunate creatures; they were reduced to their ‘consciousness,’ their weakest and most fallible organ![38]

And: “how pitiful, how shadowy and fleeting, how aimless and capricious the human intellect is.” Being merely a surface phenomenon and dependent upon underlying instinctual drives, the intellect certainly is not autonomous or in control of anything.[39]

What Nietzsche meant, then, with his passionate exhortations to be true to oneself, is to break out of the artificial and constricting categories of reason. Reason is a tool of weaklings who are afraid to be naked in the face of a cruel and conflictual reality and who therefore build fantasy intellectual structures to hide in. What we need to bring out the best possible in us is “the perfect functioning of the regulating unconscious instincts.”[40] The yea-sayer—the man of the future—will not be tempted to play word-games but will embrace conflict. He will tap into his deepest drives, his will to power, and channel all of his instinctual energies in a vital new direction.[41]

References

[28] Niebuhr, in Schleiermacher 1963, ix.

[29] Schleiermacher 1799, 18.

[30] Schleiermacher 1821-22, Section 4.

[31] Schleiermacher 1821-22, 12.

[32] Berlin 1980, 19.

[33] Kierkegaard 1843, 31.

[34] Reality, Schopenhauer wrote, is a “world of constantly needy creatures who continue for a time merely by devouring one another, pass their existence in anxiety and want, and often endure terrible affliction, until they fall at last into the arms of death” (1819/1966, 349).

[35] Schopenhauer: “we have not to be pleased but rather sorry about the existence of the world, that its non-existence would be preferable to its existence” (1819/1966, Vol. 2, 576). As for mankind: “nothing else can be stated as the aim of our existence except the knowledge that it would be better for us not to exist” (1819/1966, Vol. 2, 605).

[36] Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “Why I Am So Wise,” 1.

[37] Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 11.

[38] Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, II:16.

[39] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 478.

[40] Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, I:7.

[41] In Beyond Good and Evil (252), Nietzsche shares the view that the deepest battle is the Enlightenment, with its roots in English philosophy, against the Counter-Enlightenment, with its roots in German philosophy: “They are no philosophical race, these Englishmen: Bacon signifies an attack on the philosophical spirit; Hobbes, Hume, and Locke a debasement and lowering of the value of the concept of ‘philosophy’ for more than a century. It was against Hume that Kant arose, and rose; it was Locke of whom Schelling said, understandably, je méprise Locke [I despise Locke]; in their fight against the English-mechanistic doltification of the world, Hegel and Schopenhauer were of one mind (with Goethe)—these two hostile brother geniuses in philosophy who strove apart toward opposite poles of the German spirit and in the process wronged each other as only brothers wrong each other.” See also Daybreak: “The whole great tendency of the Germans ran counter to the Enlightenment” (Section 197).

Bibliography [pdf] [html]

[The chapter from which this section of Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism (Scholargy Publishing, 2004) is excerpted can be downloaded as a PDF at the Explaining Postmodernism page. The full book is also available at Amazon.com.]

Judy Estrin, CEO of JLabs, is the co-founder of seven technology companies. She was the Chief Technology Officer of Cisco Systems from 1998 to 2000 and has served on the boards of Rockwell and Sun Microsystems. Currently, she is on the Board of Directors of the Walt Disney Company and FedEx. Most recently, she is the author of Closing the Innovation Gap (McGraw-Hill, 2008). I met with Ms. Estrin in Menlo Park, California to explore her thoughts on educating and managing for entrepreneurship and innovation.

The issue also features two recent guest speakers to Rockford College — Joshua Hall and Jerry Kirkpatrick — and congratulates three student prize winners: Erin Filak, Kristy Luck, and Elliott Welsh.

More Kaizen interviews with leading entrepreneurs are at my site here or at CEE’s site here.

Seaford’s theme: “the monetisation of the Greek polis in the sixth and fifth centuries BC contributed to a radical transformation in thought that is, in a sense, still with us. Academics—perhaps because they are more interested in texts than in money—have emphasized rather the role of alphabetic literacy in the radical intellectual changes of this period.” (p. xi)

He then notes a striking coincidence: “The earliest surviving texts in the Greek alphabet were written shortly before and concurrently with the monetization of the city-states.” (p. 10)

Both alphabetic literacy and money involve a leap of abstraction.

Written texts are abstract representations of knowledge that are portable, easily transmittable among many people, and good for long-term storage.

Money is an abstract representation of wealth that is portable, easily transmittable among many people, and good for long-term storage.

Money is to the economic realm what texts are to the intellectual realm: empowering tools. Cultures that develop literacy become smarter and more knowledgeable. Cultures that develop money become more productive and wealthier.

So I wonder if there is a deep, common connection in the ancient Greek culture that led to both great innovations’ developing at almost the same time.

[Images: The text is a very early Greek alphabet. Source: The Schoyen Collection. The coin is an Athenian "owl" from around 450 BCE. Source: Money Museum.]