“Hegel took God out and substituted History instead. With Hegel, it always helps to capitalize History. The role of History, however, is so like the role of God in the Christian story that the two are largely indistinguishable. History guides and directs everything we do, even when we’re not aware of it. History cannot lose the fight to produce that ultimate civilization. The victory has been predetermined.

Of course, History was a blind force and not a conscious being who could answer prayers–but that distinction is less significant than you’d think. Even most devout believers don’t expect God to actualy talk directly to them. Instead, they expect to have to interpret messages from the Almighty through signs and signifiers. Hegel thought we could do the same with History.”

So Hegel and his philsophical followers, having let God sneak back under the tent, have blown a humongous hole in the “by reason alone” bit. Indeed they–and for that matter the Philosophes–are “Christian heretics” even though they’ve denied the divinity or even the existence of Christ, Creation and Sin, because they still believe in progress. Anyway, having admited religion back to the debate, Marx & Co have flunked “by reason alone,” and so are outside today’s definition of Western Civ’s core values, EXCEPT:

“Communism is as thoroughly Western as capitalism is..”

I don’t think these statements are consistent with one another.

Oh! And please note that the Anti-slavery movement, and the Civil Rights movement to follow, are led by those not quite-Westerners who keep using God in their thinking–specifically, in both cases, Christian ministers.

You can make the belief in progress rather than “reason alone” the core Western value. It saves the Communists–but it also lets us Christians back in. Can’t have it both ways.

I refuse–I point-blank refuse–to spend my old age debating how much of Plato’s accounts of Socrates are accurate, and now much Plato piggybacking on Socrates. I do think the observation that Plato was using as a model Sparta, and didn’t know Sparta very well, is telling. It is not a thing which could be said of Aristotle, who was my counterexample. All the “root and branch” society builders seem to have a better society somewhere else they don’t know very well. Contemplate Rousseau’s first-hand knowledge of child-rearing. It seems typical of the breed.

And I have not opposed reformers. Aristotle too had an idea of an improved polis, but it was based on a study of 300 constitutions, and how things worked in existing ones. Many good things have come from reformers. You change one thing, and see what happens. Emancipation worked. Prohibition didn’t. Careers for women worked. The Federal government regulating private train schedules didn’t. It’s called pragmatism, and it’s heavily based on real-world experience.

Our disasters have come when someone decides he can imagine a complete society–obviously, because of his brilliance, a vast improvement on existing ones. I can’t think of a major effort along these lines which hasn’t slaughtered children as enemies of the improved state, and they all seem to have body disposal problems. There is a story that Gallifet in 1871 made a point of shooting the oldest communards, because THEY ought to have known better. He may have had a point.

Now, Jane would like to make Communism, Fascism and, logically, the French Revolution, Christian heresies,but that’s not the entire picture. Each of them required not a variant Christianity, but REJECTING Christianity–moving Heaven from the next world to this, and binning a whole slough of commandments which would only have gotten in the way of the new world–and surely, one can just think up a suitable code of ethics instead of defering to superstition or tradition, anyway! That’s when the body count starts to rise–mostly overseen by bright fellows who went to good schools.

The sort of people who think they can imagine a completely new society have had a run of better than two centuries now, and the body count is in the low eight figures. I think it’s time we stopped regarding them as decent people. Of course they should be studied–like cancer in a medical school.

But a good grounding in History is sufficient for practical purposes. Let the Philosophy departments seek willing victims.

But it’s always been perfectly obvious to me that a great many movements, most noticeably the political ones, operate in exactly the same way as many religions do and call upon faith in the very simplistic way I was taught to as a child. I’ve had lengthy arguments with people who disagree with me, so there are people who don’t see the comparison.

You have your scripture and your approved interpretations of it in the form of the writings of the originator and the early (and, if the ‘ism’ has been on the go long enough, later) followers. You have an organization to propagate and develop the ideas. You have methods of dealing with people who disagree with the dogma – see the infighting in the feminist movement, the animal rights (not welfare) movement, and of course, the various branches of communism. Even the process by which the Canadian Progressive Conservative Party was replaced by the Conservative Party could be construed in the same way!

I confess I tend to think of ‘Western Civilization’ as ‘Anglophone Civilization’, even though I know better. It’s just sloppy thinking on my party – as when I made some comment on the historical economic position of Ireland in Europe to an African who stared at me bewildered for a minute, and then said ‘Oh! You mean ‘Western Europe’!’. Which I did. I know intellectually that Western Europe isn’t the whole continent, but I tend not to talk as though I do.

I think I’ve got a magpie mind – I pick up and remember and use odd bits of information – weren’t the Durants once considered an example of a rather indecent marriage because she was so young at the time – but of course it turned out to be successful? I must go and google…