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So the conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it—perhaps as much more valuable as roots are more vital than grafts.
out of the strife of the sexes and the classes, comes a creative tensile strength, a stimulated development, a secret and basic unity and movement of the whole.
Ceative destruction
insecurity is the mother of greed, as cruelty is the memory—if only in the blood—of
Man’s sins may be the relics of his rise rather than the stigmata of his fall.
Holy terror
regularity and thrift more profitable than violence,
the Industrial Revolution changed the economic form and moral superstructure of European and American life.
economic production suggested mechanistic materialistic philosophies;
Thrasymachus could announce that might was the only right.
A shallow sophistication prided itself upon its pessimism and cynicism.”15 It is almost a picture of European and American cities after two world wars.
Fuck cynicism
21 men and women have gambled in every age. In every age men have been dishonest and governments have been corrupt; probably less now than generally before.
Who will dare to write a history of human goodness?
Pinker
May we take as long to fall as did Imperial Rome!
to enjoy without qualm the pleasures that harm neither others nor ourselves, and to feel the tang of the open air upon our liberated flesh.
Haidt; to fuck a chicken
It has conferred meaning and dignity upon the lowliest existence, and through its sacraments has made for stability by transforming human covenants into solemn relationships with God.
It has kept the poor (said Napoleon) from murdering the rich. For since the natural inequality of men dooms many of us to poverty or defeat, some supernatural hope may be the sole alternative to despair.
Harry frankfurt
Only when priests used these fears and rituals to support morality and law did religion become a force vital and rival to the state.
The Roman Catholic Church labored to reduce slavery, family feuds, and national strife, to extend the intervals of truce and peace, and to replace trial by combat or ordeal with the judgments of established courts. It softened the penalties exacted by Roman or barbarian law, and vastly expanded the scope and organization of charity.
Claiming divine origin and spiritual hegemony, the Church offered itself as an international court to which all rulers were to be morally responsible.
the Thirty Years’ War in seventeenth-century Germany.
Francis Bacon, while tipping his hat occasionally to the bishops, was proclaiming science as the religion of modern emancipated man.
Name of tfhe rose
pantheistic philosophy, as in Spinoza;
the massive attack of the French Enlightenment upon Christianity;
the revolt of Paris against the Church during the F...
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Burke alert
The replacement of Christian with secular institutions is the culminating and critical result of the Industrial Revolution.
Catholicism survives because it appeals to imagination, hope, and the senses; because its mythology consoles and brightens the lives of the poor; and because the commanded fertility of the faithful slowly regains the lands lost to the Reformation. Catholicism has sacrificed the adherence of the intellectual community, and suffers increasing defections through contact with secular education and literature; but it wins converts from souls wearied with the uncertainty of reason, and from others hopeful that the Church will stem internal disorder and the Communist wave. If another great war should
...more
We.found a catholic
In America the rationalism of the Founding Fathers gave place to a religious revival in the nineteenth century.
Does history warrant Renan’s conclusion that religion is necessary to morality—that a natural ethic is too weak to withstand the savagery that lurks under civilization and emerges in our dreams, crimes, and wars? Joseph de Maistre answered: “I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be; I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.”31 There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.
Mm hmm
History, according to Karl Marx, is economics in action—the contest, among individuals, groups, classes, and states, for food, fuel, materials, and economic power.
Political forms, religious institutions, cultural creations, are all rooted in economic realities.
Rich enough insight to yield generations of analysis and argumentation
Agamemnon, Achilles, and Hector would never have been heard of had not the Greeks sought commercial control of the Dardanelles;
economic ambition, not the face of Helen “fairer than the evening air clad in the beauty of a thousand stars,” launched a thousand ships on Ilium; those subtle Greeks knew how to cover naked economic truth with the fig leaf of a phrase.
Art as superstructure
The Crusades, like the wars of Rome with Persia, were attempts of the West to capture trade routes to the East;
the discovery of America was a result of the failure of the Crusades.
the middle classes had risen to economic leadership, needed legislative freedom for their enterprise and trade, and itched for social acceptance and political power.
he underestimated the role played by noneconomic incentives in the behavior of masses:
the self-fertilizing fury of mobs, as in the Gordon riots of June 2–8, 1780, in London, or the massacres of September 2–7, 1792, in Paris.
Well put
“the men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all.”
Fire
So the bankers, watching the trends in agriculture, industry, and trade, inviting and directing the flow of capital, putting our money doubly and trebly to work, controlling loans and interest and enterprise, running great risks to make great gains, rise to the top of the economic pyramid. From the Medici of Florence and the Fuggers of Augsburg to the Rothschilds of Paris and London and the Morgans of New York, bankers have sat in the councils of governments, financing wars and popes, and occasionally sparking a revolution.
This is why i wish the bank were more central in gsme off thrones
The poor, finding their status worsened with each year—the government in the hands of their masters, and the corrupt courts deciding every issue against them—began to talk of violent revolt.
Good sense prevailed; moderate elements secured the election of Solon, a businessman of aristocratic lineage, to the supreme archonship.
he established a graduated income tax that made the rich pay at a rate twelve times that required of the poor; he reorganized the courts on a more popular basis; and he arranged that the sons of those who had died in war for Athens should be brought up and educated at the government’s expense.
Gi bill
Tiberius Gracchus, an aristocrat elected as tribune of the people, proposed to redistribute land by limiting ownership to 333 acres per person, and alloting surplus land to the restive proletariat of the capital. The Senate rejected his proposals as confiscatory. He appealed to the people, telling them, “You fight and die to give wealth and luxury to others; you are called the masters of the world, but there is not a foot of ground that you can call your own.”
plebs,
Octavius defeated him at Actium, and established the “Principate” that for 210 years (30 B.C. – A.D. 180) maintained the Pax Romana between the classes as well as among the states within the Imperial frontiers.
Jacqueries
Jacques in tale of two cities
The government of the United States, in 1933–52 and 1960–65, followed Solon’s peaceful methods, and accomplished a moderate and pacifying redistribution; perhaps someone had studied history. The upper classes in America cursed, complied, and resumed the concentration of wealth.
We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation.
A little simple
The capitalist, of course, has fulfilled a creative function in history: he has gathered the savings of the people into productive capital by the promise of dividends or interest; he has financed the mechanization of industry and agriculture, and the rationalization of distribution; and the result has been such a flow of goods from producer to consumer as history has never seen before.
relatively free
And enabled by other regulations
basic democracy rules the process insofar as most of the articles to be produced, and the services to be rendered, are determined by public demand rather than by governmental decree.
