People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.

“Stercus accidit”*…

As we try to understand the rifts afflicting our nation and world, many turn to Marx and his framework of class. But in a provocative essay, Catherine Nichols suggests that it was David Hume (in an 1752 essay that identified the unfettering of wealth from land) who identified the origin of our political divisions…

Describing the political map in terms of Left and Right is an accepted convention all over the world, almost to the point of cliché. Yet it is surprisingly complicated to explain whose interests lie on each side of this spectrum. For example, if the Left supports the interests of workers over the interests of employers, why are Left-leaning regions of the United States and elsewhere in the world among the richest? When Japan and South Korea sought to become economic powerhouses in the later 20th century, they adopted Leftist policies such as strong public education, universal healthcare and increased gender equality – if countries seeking to compete in capitalist arenas adopt broadly Leftist policies, then how do we explain why Leftists are always talking about overthrowing capitalism? And if the Left is somehow both the party of workers’ rights and the party of material wealth, then whose interests are supported by the Right? Given such contradictions, how did these terms become so central to modern politics?

The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ come from the seating arrangements in the National Assembly during the French Revolution, where the combatants used the medieval estate groupings to define their battle lines. According to their writings, land-owning aristocrats (the Second Estate) were the party of the Right, while the interests of nearly everyone else (the Third Estate) belonged to the Left. This Third Estate included peasants working for the landowners but also every other kind of business owner and worker. Decades later, Karl Marx offered a different analysis of capitalism: he put owners of both land and businesses together on one side (the bourgeoisie), while grouping workers from fields and factories on the other side (the proletariat) in a single, world-wide class struggle. The trouble with both these ways of parsing Left and Right is that voting patterns never seem to line up with class. Both historic analyses leave us with questions about the contemporary world – and not just the paradox of why so many Left-leaning places are so rich. Why, for example, do working-class conservatives appear to vote against their material interests, year in and year out, across generations?

The 18th-century philosopher and political theorist David Hume had answers to these questions, though he was writing decades before the French Revolution. While his essay ‘Of Public Credit’ (1752) was a warning about the dangers of Britain’s increasing reliance on debt financing, his apocalyptic vision of the future turned out to describe some features of our current political map surprisingly well. Hume was writing because he believed that debt financing had the power to upend Europe’s traditional power structure and culture by creating a new source of money divorced from tradition or responsibility: stocks and bonds. Unlike land, anyone with some cash could buy war bonds and get an immediate passive income in the form of interest. This was the thin end of the wedge caused by the debt financing that Hume believed was destroying every part of society. The governments of antiquity, Hume argued, saved money to use in battle and then waged wars in self-defence, or else to expand their territory. But the British had invented a new form of warfare that Hume saw no precedent for, even in the merchant states of Nicollò Machiavelli’s Italy: war for trade, funded with money borrowed from private stockholders…

[Nichols unpacks Hume’s observations (centrally, that three groups with stakes in the status quo, heretability, and the sanctity of “family and family hierarchy”tradition”– landowners, aging parents, and want to preserve old power structures, including the family– and traces their relevance, from Hume’s time to ours…]

… There are many reasons for people aligning Right or Left, which is why analyses of class and material interests fall short of describing the realities of people’s politics. Hume foresaw that these specific groups would resent the economic sea-change of the 18th century – and he was correct. Many people would rather have land and power than money and liberty.

Still, the power of the Right hasn’t doomed the Left – no more than the Spanish Inquisition doomed the rise of the Left in 18th-century England and France. As long as governments want to keep the value of their currencies from falling, someone in their ranks will be using the methods of the Left and inventiveness that brought us everything from our banking system to gay marriage. We don’t need to resurrect communism or focus narrowly on class, following Marx. The experiments are far from over, and we should remember that the Left is generally where money comes from in modern times. We give away too much power when we forget it…

Rethinking Right and Left: “Landholder vs stockholder,” from @catherinenichols.bsky.social in @aeon.co.

As for how it’s going at the moment (and further to Hume and the quote in this post’s title), see: “MAGA’s Betrayal of Small Business,” from @pkrugman.bsky.social.

* “shit happens”– often attributed to David Hume, reflecting his skeptical view that human understanding, particularly of cause-and-effect, is limited to habitual belief from experience, implying that unforeseen, messy outcomes (“shit”) inevitably occur in life despite our reasoning.

###

As we sort the Whigs from the Tories, we might recall that it was on this date 1656 that Blaise Pascal (writing under the pseudonym Louis de Montalte) published the first of his Provential Letters (Lettres provinciales), a series of eighteen polemical letters using humor to attack Jesuits for their use of  casuistry and their moral laxity. Though the Letters were a popular success, they had little immediate effect on politics or the clergy. But they influenced later French writers like Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and ultimately persuaded Pope Alexander to condemn “laxity” in the church and order a revision of casuistic texts.

source

Cult of the Supreme Being

Also known as (in French): Culte de l’Etre supreme. This cult was a form of Deism established by Maximilien Robespierre during the French Revolution.

This was supposed to be the intended state religion of France & a replacement for its rival, the Cult of Reason & also a replacement for Roman Catholicism. It went unsupported after the fall of Robespierre. This cult, along with the Cult of Reason, was officially banned by First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802.

The French Revolution led to many radical changes in France. One of the most fundamental changes was the official rejection of religion.

The 1st new major organized school of thought came out under the umbrella term: the Cult of Reason. The Cult of Reason purified a mix of mainly atheistic views into an anthropocentric philosophy. Anthropocentric is another word for Human Supremacy or Human Exceptionism. No gods were worshipped, at all, in the Cult of Reason.

The straight-up rejection of any or all godhead horrified Robespierre. He wasn’t a fan of Catholicism, but he had a special distain for atheism. He thought that a belief in a supreme being was important for social order. He’d quote Voltaire: “If God didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.”

In late 1793, Robespierre gave a fiery denunciation of the Cult of Reason & its advocates. He then gave his own vision for a proper Revolutionary religion. As 1 does. Devised entirely, almost, by Robespierre, the Cult of the Supreme Being was authorized by the National Convention on May 7, 1794 as the civic religion of France.

France, as of 2025, doesn’t have an official state religion. This was established by a 1905 law that bans the state government from funding, or recognizing any religion.

On May 7, 1794, the National Convention established the Worship of the Supreme Being. The opening articles of the Decree Establishing the Worship of the Supreme Being of the 18th Floreal of the Year II (Floreal was the 8th month of the French Republic calendar.) declared: 1) The French People recognize the existence of the Supreme Being & the Immortality of the Soul. 2) They declare that the best service of the Supreme Being is the practice of man’s duties. 3) They set among the most important of these duties the detestation of bad faith & traitors by caring for the unfortunate, respecting the weak, defending the oppressed, doing unto others all the good one can, & not being unjust towards anyone.

Robespierre dedicated festivals to the Supreme Being, to Truth, Justice, (& the American way…we’ll show ourselves out…), Modesty, Friendship, Frugality, Fidelity, Immortality, Misfortune, etc. The Cult of the Supreme Being was based on the creed of the Savoy chaplain that Jean-Jacques Rousseau had outlined in Book IV of Emile. Emile (or On Education) is a treatise on the nature of education & on the nature of man, written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who considered it to be the “best & most important” of all his writings.

To start off the new state religion, Robespierre declared that 20 Prairial Year II (June 8, 1797, also the Christian holiday of Pentecost.) would be a national celebration of the Supreme Being & future republican holidays were to be held every 10th day – the days of rest (decadi) in the new French Republican Calendar.

The Cult of the Supreme Being & its festival may have contributed to the Thermidorian Reaction & the downfall of Robespierre. With Robespierre’s death at the guillotine on July 28, 1794, the cult lost all official sanctions & disappeared from public view. It was officially banned by Napoleon on April 8, 1802 with his Law on Cults of 18 Germinal, Year X.

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#1802 #18thFlorealOfTheYearIi #1905 #20PrairialYearIi #28July1794 #7May1794 #8April1802 #8June1794 #anthropocentricPhiloshsophy #atheist #catholicism #cultOfReason #cultOfTheSupremeBeing #culteDeLetreSupreme #decadi #decreeEstablishingTheWorshipOfTheSupremeBeing #deism #emile #firstConsulNapoleonBonaparte #france #french #frenchRevolution #godhead #guillotine #humanExceptionism #humanSupremacy #jeanJacquesRousseau #late1793 #lawOnCultsOf18GerminalYearX #maximilienRobespierre #napoleonBonaparte #nationalConvention #onEducation #pentecost #romanCatholicism #thermidorianReaction #voltaire

Violence et légitimité chez  Rousseau : violence naturelle, violence d’État, violence révolutionnaire

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.contretemps.eu/violence-legitimite-rousseau-etat-revolution/

The Common Worldview Of Islam And The Modern West

The Common Worldview Of Islam And The Modern West

By Khurram Ali Shafique

‘O people of the Book! Come let us join together on the ‘word’ (Unity of God), that is common to us all.’ [Quran, 3:64].

With so much talk about seeking greater harmony between Islam and the West in our times, perhaps we need to think again about a very strong bridge that has already been existing between the two cultures for the last three hundred years.

Three hundred years ago, Europe was witnessing the great intellectual revolution that was later remembered as the Age of Enlightenment (roughly between 1715 and 1789, but other dates have also been suggested). The leaders of European Enlightenment revolutionized their societies. In many ways, this was the birth of the modern West as we know it today – the home of such ideals as solidarity, equality and liberty, belief in the goodness of human nature, lack of reliance on miracles in proving an idea or belief, and so on.

Interestingly enough, many of the radical writers of European Enlightenment admitted freely that these ideals could be traced back to the original teachings of Islam, although not the contemporary practices of the Muslim society. Europeans who credited Islam with these ideals at that time or a little later are too numerous to be listed here, but it may be mentioned that they included the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the German poet and philosopher Wolfgang von Goethe.

Those who wish  to find some more detail of this can look up the highly readable article ‘Rousseau’s Turban’ by Ian Collar (a modification of his paper originally published in a research journal in 2014). Of course, a lot more can be found in the excellent book by Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested (2006).

Hence, we have to politely disagree with Karen Armstrong when she argues that ‘Freedom of expression was an Enlightenment ideal’ and therefore, the Muslims who attacked ‘Charlie Hebdo’, were practically saying, ‘You attack our sacred symbol (the Prophet Muhammad); then we will attack yours!’

The truth is that the Enlightenment ideals were actually Islamic ideals according to some of the greatest leaders of Enlightenment itself. We can show respect to people like Edward Said, Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Karen Armstrong but we have to ask, with all due respect, if these noble intellectuals have not been denying history by presenting Islam and the modern West as two essentially different worldviews.

Not only Rousseau and Goethe would disagree with such a proposition but also some of the most influential Muslim writers of modern times, such as Iqbal. As he stated in his famous lectures in 1930, ‘European culture, on its intellectual side, is only a further development of some of the most important phases of the culture of Islam.’

Other Muslims who, according to him, held the same point of view included Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Syed Jamaluddin Afghani, Zaghlol Pasha, Mufti Alam Jan, Said Haleem Pasha, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Maulana Muhammad Ali Jauhar, Aga Khan III, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Reza Shah, King Amanullah Khan of Afghanistan, King Nadir Shah of Afghanistan and others.

These are the people who, between 1887 and 1946, practically shaped the Muslim world as we know it now. Even if one disagrees with them, one cannot deny the hard fact that both the modern West and the present-day world of Islam have been shaped by those who perceived these two cultures as two branches growing out of a single tree.

Does our education give us this awareness at any level anywhere in the world? Do we find it reflected anywhere in the interfaith dialogue? In the enormous literature published in the so-called ‘impact journals’? In the schools, colleges and universities in Europe and America? These are some of the questions that may be asked. From what little I know, all these questions are likely to be answered in the negative.

The point is not whether we agree with Rousseau, Goethe and Iqbal, or whether we take sides with Said, Nasr and Armstrong. What is important is that we should know both sides.

Perhaps it is more important to know the first side. It is no disrespect to Said, Nasr and Armstrong to say that the world we live in has not been shaped by them or even by the likes of them. It has been shaped by people like Rousseau, Goethe and Iqbal. To be unaware of the common worldview of those who shaped our world is to live in a complete delusion.

Postscript

In case you are wondering if it is a far-fetched idea for Islam and the West to have a common worldview, you may like to consider the following clip from the mainstream British movie The Kingdom of Heaven (2006).

#AgaKhanIII #Ataturk #CharlieHebdo #EdwardSaid #Europe #EuropeanEnlightenment #Goethe #IanCollar #Iqbal #JamaluddinAfghani #JeanJacquesRousseau #JonathanIsrael #KarenArmstrong #MaulanaMuhammadAliJauharAliBrothers_ #MuftiAlamJan #onlineCourse #Quran #SaidHaleemPasha #SeyyedHosseinNasr #SirSyedAhmedKhan

Geld wird unsere Gesellschaft nicht zusammenhalten 🔮 - DER verbreitetste und beliebteste Irrtum, wie gesellschaftlicher Zusammenhalt angeblich entsteht.

Genau dieses "Paradigma" gerät gerade erkennbar an seine internen Grenzen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSIQ7ejJLpw

#LeereKassen #Wirtschaft #Stagnation #Sozialreformen #GesellschaftlicherZusammenhalt #Kohäsion #Gesellschaftsvertrag #Rousseau #JJRousseau #JeanJacquesRousseau

#Quotes #JeanJacquesRousseau

“The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said ‘This is mine,’ and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: ‘Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody."