|
August 2003 September 2003 March 2004 April 2004 May 2004 June 2004 July 2004 August 2004 September 2004 October 2004 November 2004 December 2004 January 2005 February 2005 March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 June 2007 October 2007 February 2008 April 2008 May 2008 June 2008 July 2008 August 2008 September 2008 October 2008 November 2008 December 2008 April 2009 June 2009 July 2009 August 2009 September 2009 October 2009 February 2010 March 2010 April 2010 June 2010 July 2010 December 2010 January 2011 March 2011 May 2011 June 2011 July 2011 September 2011 February 2012
Copyright 2003-2011 The Charlotte Capitalist.
All rights reserved.
Contents may used with the explicit attribution to "The Charlotte Capitalist" at the permanent URL for the quoted post.
"The Charlotte Capitalist" is trademarked.
|
Sunday, January 30, 2011The Ultimate Cause of the Triumphs and Tragedies of Jewish CultureImagine A Culture… Imagine a relatively small culture brimming with influential intellectuals (Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand, Baruch Spinoza, etc.), ground-breaking scientists (Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Jonas Salk, etc.) and highly successful businessmen (David Sarnoff, Michael Dell, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, etc.) And then imagine the punishment of that culture not for its faults, but for its values and virtues. It is punishment that occurred not just once, but throughout time. It continues to this day. “Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Wednesday [January 26, 2011] slammed the international community, saying that ‘it has not put into practice the lessons learned from the horrors of the Holocaust.’” Prime Minister of Israel, Binyamin Netanyahu, Jerusalem Post It sounds like the backdrop for an Ayn Rand novel. But this is not fiction, this is history. It is the story of the triumphs and tragedies of Jewish culture -- and their causes. The Triumphs and Their Ultimate Cause While attempting to understand a specific culture, it is first important to understand what the concept “culture” is. Philosopher-novelist Rand wrote: “A nation’s culture is the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men, which their fellow-citizens have accepted in whole or in part, and which have influenced the nation’s way of life. Since a culture is a complex battleground of different ideas and influences, to speak of a ‘culture’ is to speak only of the dominant ideas, always allowing for the existence of dissenters and exceptions.” Ayn Rand, The Ayn Rand Lexicon Rand also identified that cultures have a “sense of life”: “A culture, like an individual, has a sense of life or, rather, the equivalent of a sense of life—an emotional atmosphere created by its dominant philosophy, by its view of man and of existence. This emotional atmosphere represents a culture’s dominant values and serves as the leitmotif of a given age, setting its trends and its style.” Ayn Rand, The Ayn Rand Lexicon The ultimate cause for the triumphs of Jewish culture in ideas, production, and new discoveries is neither altruism, nor collectivism, nor ethnicity, nor faith. At the core of the Jewish sense of life is the implicit acceptance of the value of the philosophy of reason -- the philosophy of Aristotle. "Reason is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses," wrote Rand. From man's faculty of reason flow the virtues of rationality and productiveness. Reason is each individual’s primary means of survival and flourishing. Reason is thus the primary value of human life. The essential part of the story of reason, Aristotle, and Jewish culture started about 800 years ago when the premises of three cultures were set -- with consequences today. Islamic culture (led by Al-Ghazali) explicitly rejected Aristotle. It remains mystical, altruistic, and collectivist. Christian culture (via Thomas Aquinas) took a middle ground on Aristotle. Today it seeks an impossible combination of luxuries and The Sermon On The Mount. Unhampered by the backward steps of Christianity and Islam, Jewish culture accepted Aristotle's reason on a much greater basis and as a result flourished. The following is a partial, high-level time-line of how Aristotle’s philosophy of reason became implicit in Jewish culture.
Centuries later, in the Enlightenment, Jewish thinkers such as Moses Mendelssohn advocated mixed, but reason-based philosophies which led to the Jewish Enlightenment known as the Haskaleh. Mendelssohn studied the works of Aristotle-influenced Maimonides.
It is clear from the time-line that Jewish philosophers for almost 1000 years have advocated the primacy of Aristotelian reason -- albeit not to the exclusion of faith. But it is this primacy of reason which is the cause for the triumphs of Jewish culture. By putting the value of reason into action, the virtues of rationality and productiveness allow individuals to understand the world and to create:
By putting their faculty of reason in action, Jewish individuals have flourished triumphantly. The Tragedies and Their Ultimate Cause The ultimate cause of the tragedies of Jewish culture is the exact opposite of the ultimate cause of its triumphs. The cause of the tragedies is based upon the hatred of reason. The European and Jewish Enlightenments began to fade throughout the 19th century. With that cultures all over the world, to varying degrees, began accepting more and more the irrational: mysticism, altruism, and collectivism. The remnants of reason and its implicit and explicit advocates came under attack. That trend continued throughout the 20th century and to this day. The consequence was and is tragedy for Jewish individuals.
“In the 19th and (before the end of the second World War) 20th centuries, the Roman Catholic Church adhered to a distinction between 'good anti-Semitism' and 'bad anti-Semitism'...The 'good' kind criticized alleged Jewish conspiracies to control newspapers, banks, and other institutions, to care only about accumulation of wealth, etc. Many Catholic bishops wrote articles criticizing Jews on such grounds...” Wikipedia To oppose the focus on caring “only about accumulation of wealth” is irrational. The Church's stance opposes the use of reason to raise oneself above subsistence and to flourish through productiveness. This is Jesus' Sermon On The Mount put into action.The Church's stance is also an example of the worst kind of collectivism – racism. “Conspiracy” and “control” are simply scare words. Using them results in more emotional impact that simply stating “Jewish partnerships to own newspapers, banks, and other institutions.” In addition, if individual Jews were involved in fraud or theft, for example, as part of the development or acquisition of these businesses, then those individuals should rightfully and objectively be charged with those crimes and receive a fair trial. But to smear an entire race over some alleged, unspecified whispering campaign is immoral. It is irrational and thus evil.
"'We are now at the end of the Age of Reason,' Hitler declared to Hermann Rauschning." The Ominous Parallels, Leonard Peikoff, p. 46. And as the members of the culture that accepted reason more than any other in Europe, it is Jewish individuals who became Hitler's target of un-reason.
Hitler was explicitly against reason. "People set us down as enemies of the intelligence," declared Hitler. "We are. But in a much deeper sense than those conceited dolts of bourgeois scientists ever dreamed of." Leonard Peikoff, "The Ominous Parallels", p. 48.And there is also this from Hitler: "A violently active, dominating, intrepid, brutal youth -- that is what I am after...I will have no intellectual training. Knowledge is ruin to my young men." Leonard Peikoff, "The Ominous Parallels", p. 48.In this case, the Jews were victims of Hitler's irrational hatred of reason. They were persecuted not for crimes against other humans, but for their use of reason in their careers. A rational individual would instead look to the unproportional achievements of Jewish culture, praise it, and ask how he could meet or exceed those achievements. It appears that President Roosevelt does not fit into the category of rational. Today, the anti-reason threat against Jews continues. In the same speech, Prime Minister Netanyahu stated: “There is an ayatollah regime, which is a member of the UN, and it knowingly and openly calls for the elimination of at least another six million Jews, and yet nobody says a word.” Prime Minister of Israel, Binyamin Netanyahu, Jerusalem PostThe “ayatollah regime” is an Islamic regime. Islamic culture, unlike Jewish culture, explicitly rejected reason 800 years ago. “After the two contemporaries, Ibn Rushd [Arab thinker Averroes] and Ibn Maimun [Jewish thinker Maimonides], no significant Arabic philosophers (Aristotelian or otherwise) appeared in Islamic culture - ever. In Islamic-Spain, the study of logic and philosophy (as parts of "alien learning") became extinct, extinguished by popular and theological hostility to non-Islamic culture.” Burgess Laughlin, The Aristotle Adventure, p. 124.Islamic culture remains today explicitly anti-reason: mystical, violent, and collectivist. It is not surprising that the two cultures that explicitly reject reason, Islamic and Nazi -- together and alone seek to destroy the culture that most accepts reason. Continuing The Triumphs, Preventing The Tragedies Regarding today’s Islamic threat to Jews, Prime Minister Netanyahu also said: “There are many good-hearted people and countries around the world. They feel in their hearts what I think, but that's not enough. Facing a regime which calls for our destruction and which is arming itself with weapons of mass destruction, a stronger mobilization of countries should have emerged… Here and there they mention it, but where is the fury, the rage, the international uprising that should have come from the advanced international community against clear statements calling for the destruction of the same people? It doesn't exist.” Prime Minister of Israel, Binyamin Netanyahu, Jerusalem Post Netanyahu is correct. An emotional “feel in their hearts” is not enough. A proper response to the un-reason “doesn’t exist”. The proper response doesn't exist because there is not an explicit acceptance of reason in Jewish – or any other – culture today. Ayn Rand identified the weakness of only accepting a value such as reason only implicitly: “A sense of life is not a substitute for explicit knowledge. Values which one cannot identify, but merely senses implicitly, are not in one’s control. One cannot tell what they depend on or require, what course of action is needed to gain and/or keep them. One can lose or betray them without knowing it.” Ayn Rand, The Ayn Rand Lexicon If Jewish culture is to continue its triumphs of reason and prevent tragedies of anti-reason in the future, it must embrace the Aristotelian value of reason explicitly and not simply implicitly. Ideas, science, and wealth flow from man's faculty of reason and the associated virtues of rationality and productiveness. Concentration camps, gas chambers, and the threat to Jewish individuals today flow from haters of reason. It is time for each one of us, Jew and non-Jew, to win the war against the enemies of rationality and productiveness -- and to gain the values of reason and freedom. The explicit embracing of the ultimate cause of Jewish triumph requires change. It is the Torah, not Aristotle, that is explicitly quoted in synagogues throughout the world today. As a result, Jewish culture does suffer to some degree from some irrational faults such as mysticism, altruism, and collectivism. Fortunately, these faults are accepted to a much lesser degree as compared to Islamic and Christian cultures. But as "the greatest British Jew", the late Rabbi Dr. Louis Jacobs was aware: "…(T)here is no conflict between Greek philosophy and Judaism because Greek philosophy is really nothing but Jewish philosophy. Jewish thinkers who opposed the whole philosophical enterprise scorned the notion that Aristotle had anything to teach the Jews, although even in these circles there is a kind of grudging admiration for the attainments of the Greek thinker." Rabbi Dr. Louis Jacobs If such a grudge exists, it is essential to remove it and to embrace man’s tool of survival and flourishing – reason. The spread of reason throughout the world logically leads to the view that each human being is an individual and not an entity to be sacrificed at the altar of un-reason – as has been practiced for most of human history. The acceptance of reason leads to individualism. Rand stated, "Individualism regards man—every man—as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being." Ultimately, it is individualism and not mysticism, altruism, and collectivism that is necessary for future triumphs and the prevention of future tragedies. And it is the explicit respect for individualism and its base of reason, which will provide those future triumphs and prevent those future tragedies for each one of us -- Jewish or not. Copyright Andy Clarkson. All rights reserved. Feel free to quote with full accreditation to Andy Clarkson and The Charlotte Capitalist. Link to: UPDATE: Welcome HBLers. Welcome Jewish Issues Watchdog readers. Welcome Rant from the Rock readers. Welcome Not PC readers. Link posted by Exalted Moments @ 5:01 PM 
Comments:
|
Thanks for sharring importent information in this blog.
Post a Comment
It was very nice. www.bestoffrm.com aşk flashları,yazili soruları # posted by <$BlogItemControl$>
 : 11:10 PM |
Technorati Profile