A Wicked Company

The first longer book read on my iPad

this is how the great actor David Garrick called a group of intellectuals around Denis Diderot and Baron Paul Thierry von Holbach he had first met in Paris in 1763. The reason for Garrick's remark was that these people who regularly met at von Holbach's salon rue des Moulins in Paris were avowed atheists discussing the retarding effect of religion on Enlightenment. 

As Diderot put it: The priest, whose system is a tissue of absurdities, secretly wants to uphold ignorance; the reason is the enemy of faith, and faith is the base of the power, the fortune, and the social standing of the priest. Other known people enjoying the excellent food around von Holbach's table at various times were Edward Gibbon, Friedrich Melchior Grimm, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Benjamin Franklin.

"Light" Enlightenment
Other protagonists of the Enlightenment, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire, had likewise fought the Catholic Church while developing new deism. For both, a godless world is hopeless, as Voltaire wrote to Rousseau in 1756: No, I have suffered too much in this life not to expect another. All the subtleties of metaphysics will not make me doubt the soul's immortality for a moment; I feel it, I believe it, I want it, I hope for it, and I shall defend it to my last breath. 

Already Thomas Aquinas wrote in his Summa Theologiae about the anguish of the damned: Hell was just the ceasing of hope which meant for those living that hopelessness is Hell. Voltaire brought in his famous watchmaker when he stated: I have always regarded atheism as the greatest confusion of reason because it is as ridiculous to say that the arrangement of the world does not prove a supreme artisan, as it would be impertinent to say that a watch does not prove a watchmaker.

Radical Enlightenment
There was, however, this so-called radical Enlightenment advocated by Diderot and von Holbach Philipp Blom's book made me aware: The radical philosophers had demolished the great Church that centuries of Christian tradition had erected in the human soul - indeed, they had destroyed the very conception of a soul, leaving nothing but pure matter conscious of itself. There was no revelation, divine law, life after death, and, most importantly, no guilt induced by the age-old curse of original sin. Life was to be lived now. 

Diderot was the most radical proponent of Enlightenment when he stated: Christianity has committed the greatest possible abuse of the mind; to me, this religion is the most absurd and the most atrocious of dogmas; the most unintelligible, the most metaphysical, the most convoluted, and therefore the most subjected to divisions, sects, schisms, heresies; . . . the most vulgar, the most depressing, the most gothic and the saddest of ceremonies; the most puerile and the most unsociable in its morals . . . the most intolerant of all. . . . I would say that because man, who is naturally superstitious needs a fetish, the simplest and most innocent fetish is the best of all.

It was Diderot who had made von Holbach an atheist, as Blom describes: One day, the baron had come to see his friend at the workshop of an engraver, where Diderot was checking the drafts for illustrations that were to be part of the Encyclopédie [for which Diderot is famous for], plates dealing with botanical subjects. "But surely," the baron insisted, pointing to the intricate depiction of flowers, leaves, blossoms, and fruit stems, "all this beauty, all this ingenuity is proof of a higher intelligence?" Diderot had simply looked at him, unmoved, whereupon the baron literally broke down, weeping.

Eventually, Diderot and von Holbach extended their rejection of Christianity to all religions. Instead, they and the radical intellectuals around them venerated materialism, reason, and natural passions. They were against privileges for the aristocracy and absolute monarchs and criticized slavery.

The "Religious" Revolution
What looked like the ideal basis for the upcoming French Revolution was rejected by its protagonists like Robespierre, who instead followed the deism of Rousseau in creating a new state religion serving the Revolution: Oh, divine Rousseau, you taught me to know myself. . . . I wish to follow your venerated path. . . . Happy will I be if, in the dangerous course that an unprecedented revolution now lays out before us, I constantly remain faithful to the inspirations that I have drawn from your writings! As radical atheism was too difficult to accept by the French people brought up in the Catholic faith, a Supreme Being replaced the Christian God. Pierre Bayle already stated at the end of the 17th century: Ordinary people will believe anything because they are lazy and unwilling to analyze their beliefs.

Eventually, Rousseau's utopia of an ideal state ended in the Committee of Public Safety and bloody tyranny until the revolution had killed its children. 

Napoleon - when he had taken over and to be on the safe side - returned to the bosom of the Catholic Church, a fact the German writer Johann Gottfried Seume when he saw the dictator in Paris on July 14, 1802, on his way home from his Spaziergang nach Syrakus (Hike to Syracuse) sarcastically commented: He [Napoleon] could have become the savior of the major part of humanity, but he contented himself being the first re-born son of the Roman Church.

Kings to Be Strangled with the Guts of the Priests
One of the earlier French philosophers, Julien Offray de La Mettrie, had set the tone for the people in von Holbach's salon in his book L'homme machine (Machine man): After all, human existence is governed not by reason but by natural laws. We can never know why we are here, but we must simply live and die, no different from and hardly more lasting than mushrooms appearing after a rainfall or spring flowers by the roadside. We must simply learn to live with our urge for ultimate meaning and accept that it cannot be satisfied. 

This was strong stuff even for Diderot, although he agreed that nature is not concerned about good and evil. She has two ends: the conservation of the individual and the propagation of the species. And with the latter in mind, Diderot aims below the belt in his novel Jacques le fatalist: Physical love is "natural, necessary and right," but for most people, it seems easier to pronounce terrible words such as "kill" and "betray" than "that word." What hypocrisy, he scoffs. After all, "futuo" is no less common than the word "bread." It is known to every age and idiom.

For the contents of his book, Machine Man, La Mettrie was ousted even from liberal Holland, eventually finding refuge in Potsdam at Frederick the Great's court. Diderot and Holbach were warned and published their books and papers using pen names, thus avoiding persecution by the royal court and the church. 

So far, this symbiosis of the throne and altar somehow kept human morale. Still, the priest Jean Meslier attacked the charade in his testament that only became known in 1761: On the one side, the priests . . . command you on pain of eternal damnation to obey the magistrates, the princes, and the sovereigns, because God has put them in their place to rule over others; and the princes, on the other hand, enforce respect for the priests, give them good appointments and good revenues, and maintain them in the vain function of their false ministry. Meslier's maxim was that the world would only be happy once the last king had been strangled with the guts of the last priest. However, when the king and priest are absent, would chaos result?

The Moral Question
Friedrich Melchior Grimm had no illusions: Let us not be infants; let us not be frightened of words. The fact is that there is no other right in the world except the right of the strongest and that, since it must be said, this is the only legitimacy. 

Adam Smith being less pessimistic, asked: How can people, who are driven by self-interest, act morally, even altruistically? His answer was "compassion": The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it, and Hume added: Values are not God-given; they are not even universal - they are simply an abstract way of articulating what appears humane and valuable at a particular point in time.

Against this pessimistic attitude, the philosophers around Rousseau placed their "natural" religion: If only people could learn to listen to their inner voice, to trust the voice of nature speaking through them, then they would automatically be in unison with God's intentions, with his reason. What Rousseau calls the inner voice people should listen to, the Church would possibly call the Holy Spirit. 

Concerning inter-human relations, the proponents of moderate Enlightenment placed their hopes on a "social contract that could raise people above this state of murderous anarchy and allow individuals to flourish, protected by the security of laws ... 

In fact, Rousseau's ideal is the next best thing to a return to childlike simplicity: a community of contented, rural freeholders, living in harmony with nature and without competition, without property, oppression, or duplicity - a perfect kibbutz, in fact, long before the first socialist Zionist set foot in Palestine."

Diderot's Modern Ideas
In his rather pessimistic view of life, Diderot came to a conclusion somehow anticipating Darwin's ideas: What counts in nature is the propagation of the species. For him, morality boils down to a simple: Do good, and know the truth. That is what distinguishes one man from the next. The rest is nothing. The duration of life is so short, its real needs so narrow, and once one is gone, it matters so little whether one was someone or no one. In the end, one needs nothing but a dirty rag and four planks of pine.

Diderot also anticipated Darwin and the notion of DNA strands when he stated: Birth defects have shown that each characteristic of an organism is programmed by a "filament," and if such a filament is missing from the sheaf of information, the resulting organism will be deformed. He also postulates an "infinity of successive developments" by which each organism is perfecting itself, assuring the "survival of the species.

Atheism Harder Than Belief
Had not Noble Prize winner Jacques Monod called man's quest for God a genetic defect? And did not geneticist Dean Hamer postulate a God gene predisposing man towards spiritual or mystic experiences? If belief is natural, it is much harder to be a radical atheist than to believe in something. How would one interpret Diderot's attending mass when he returned from Holbach's salon to his parents' village?


P.S.: I just learned that the third president of the US, Thomas Jefferson, had an entire collection of philosophical books he possibly had acquired while he was in Paris from 1785 to 1789 serving his young country. Blom writes: The salon members' writings became integral to how the founding fathers thought about the nascent United States. Jefferson's handwritten catalog of books lists not only works by British empiricists such as Hume but also titles by Voltaire and a whole list of crucial books of the radical Enlightenment: the famous De l'esprit by Helvétius (the cause of the 1757 crisis of the Encyclopédie), Holbach's Système de la nature his Théologie portative (here interestingly attributed to Diderot), a set of Oeuvres philosophiques by Diderot, several anonymous or pseudonymous works such as Holbach's Christianity Unveiled ("by Boulanger," in Italian) as well as Raynal's Histoire des deux Indes and Beccaria's Of Crimes and Punishments, and a wide selection of precursors, such as Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Baruch Spinoza, and Pierre Bayle. Holbach's Paris library had the same books on its shelves—as philosophers, he and Jefferson spoke the same language. A notion straight from Holbach's table and the sum of the philosophical ideas defended there is the "pursuit of happiness."

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Baby-Gate

The problem child (Der Spiegel 6,2013)

A study commissioned by the German government reached a damning verdict on the country's efforts to boost its low birth rate. It says billions of euros are wasted on complex benefits and tax breaks that are largely ineffective and sometimes even counterproductive. The fact is that Germany has the one but lowest birth rate in Europe, with 1.36 births per 1000 people in a year, only beaten by Portugal with a rate of 1.32. 

Compare this to France's 1.99 ex aequo with the States and to an impressive 2.96 for Israel trying to keep up with the birthrate of the Palestinians. The government tried to keep the commission's report under the hood until after the federal election in the fall. Still, Der Spiegel published parts of it, risking that until September 22, German family policy will degrade into family politics.

The result of the study is dynamite in an election year, particularly since, against strong opposition, the Merkel administration recently pushed through the Kinderbetreungsgeld (child care allowance), also called Herdprämie (heard award), attributing €100 per month to women who stay at home looking after their children. 

However, according to the report, this recently added benefit meant to boost procreation is counterproductive. Some women will take the money rather than look for work. It means they are not only lost as taxpayers but also an additional charge to the federal budget with €2 billion yearly. 

The "heard award" comes on top of a "child supplement," "parental benefit," an "allowance for single parents," a "married person's supplement," a "sibling bonus," "orphan money," and "a child education supplement," not to forget the "child education supplementary supplement" as Der Spiegel enumerates. All this costs the taxpayer a total of €200 billion per year.

In discussing Germany's birthrate, the commission's report calls the efforts of all governments over the last 50 years to boost procreation a lost cause. Up to now, even Social Democrats have put their money into the traditional family, with the father earning and the mother staying at home, hopefully looking after many children. All the "experts" did not consider that an increasing number of women are moving into traditionally male professions making careers, thus having no time for babies when young. 

Nowadays, in Germany, more women are leaving university with a degree than men. If at all, women now are birthing late, remain with only one child, and frequently are single parent. The latter excludes these mothers from many present benefits tailored to traditional families. Therefore, the commission recommends massively extending the daycare, pre-, and all-day schooling facilities, three domains Germany needs to improve compared to its European neighbors.

Local experience in rural areas has shown that such measures will help increase birth rates, but the paradigm change is still unacceptable for many. The Christian Democrat Family Minister Kristina Schröder, 35, mother of a one-and-a-half-year-old child, defended the traditional values demanding, "The most important thing is to adapt working life more to the needs of families instead of going on requiring families to keep on adapting to the requirements of the working world." In fact, she is asking enterprises, particularly those needing a female workforce, to implement family-friendly measures locally.

Government money should be used differently, i.e., stimulating birth rates rather than supporting traditional family values. Fact is, what Social Democrat Manuela Schwesig said, "The government's policy on families is shaped by a picture of the family that is half a century old. Single parents or couples with children without a marriage certificate are virtually ignored."

Here we go again: Couples living together without a license and having babies are devilish for those defending traditional marriage.

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She Had High Hopes

but oops, there goes another doctor's degree. The line is referring to our Minister of Science and Education and giving once more tribute to Ol' Blue Eyes*.

Thirty-two years ago, Annette Schavan submitted a thesis titled: Person und Gewissen (Personality and Conscience) to Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf. On February 5, the University revoked her degree because, as a doctoral candidate, she systematically and deliberately presented intellectual efforts throughout her entire dissertation that were not her own. As such, she is guilty of intentional deception through plagiarism. The faculty board voting 12 to 2, arrived at the decision to declare German Science and Education Minister Annette Schavan's Ph.D. thesis invalid and to revoke her doctorate.
*I still remember that at one time, Sinatra had changed the lyrics of High Hopes singing: Vote for Kennedy ...

Cartoon found in Badische Zeitung of February 6, 2013: In Goethe's play Faust the titular character sitting in his study deliberates about the recent plagiarism revealed:

Now here I sit, a fool for sure!
No wiser than I was before:
Master, Doctor, what they call me,
Holding the titles already many years.
Still have to tremble all the time
That they will pin plagiarism onto mine.

Why "oops" another doctor's degree? Remember Defense Minister Karl-Theodor von und zu Guttenberg stepping down from his position in the spring of 2011 after it was proven that he had plagiarized large sections of his Ph.D.? He somehow fled Germany and is now hiding somewhere in the US, booed by students and professors alike whenever he tries to spread his wisdom on the relation between the US and Europe at one of the universities in the States. Nevertheless, Theodor kept his title of nobility. In contrast, without passing a bachelor's or master's degree - Annette directly wrote her thesis, an unusual practice at a German university - she is now without academic qualifications. Although even the political parties in opposition to the Merkel government acknowledge her excellent work, is this sufficient for a Minister of Science and Education to talk to her peers?

What makes me angry is that when von Guttenberg's thesis was under attack, Schavan declared openly: Pirating material is no trivial offense; for the protection of intellectual property is a great good. She had added that she was ashamed, not just secretly, concerning her colleague. What a pharisaical attitude compared to the title of her "was a thesis!"

While on an official trip to South Africa, Schavan told some waiting journalists: I will not accept the decision and shall file a suit against the University of Düsseldorf. Back from her business trip to South Africa, where she was attributed a doctor honoris causa, Annette Schavan resigned as minister on February 9, 2013.

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