Alexander Herzen: My Past & Thoughts

Alexander Herzen

Garibaldi

“I myself made Garibaldi’s acquaintance in 1854, when he sailed from South America as the captain of a ship and lay in the West India Dock; I went to see him accompanied by one of his comrades in the Roman war and by Orsini. Garibaldi, in a thick, light-coloured overcoat, with a bright scarf round his neck and a cap on his head, seemed to me more a genuine sailor than the glorious leader of the Roman militia, statuettes of whom in fantastic costume were being sold all over the world. The good-natured simplicity of his manner, the absence of all affectation, the cordiality with which he received one, all disposed one in his favour.”

Buchanan

(Buchanan, then ambassador in London, hosted a party for a Who’s Who of European radicals at the behest of President Pierce, who, according to Herzen, was “playing all sorts of schoolboy pranks” on the old governments of Europe at the time.)

“The sly old man Buchanan, who was then already dreaming, in spite of his seventy years, of the presidency, and therefore was constantly talking of the happiness of retirement, of the idyllic life and of his own infirmity, made up to us as he had made up to (Alexey) Orlov and Benckendorf at the Winter Palace when he was ambassador at the time of Nicholas. Kossuth and Mazzini he knew already; to the others he paid compliments specially selected for each, much more reminiscent of an experienced diplomatist than of the austere citizen of a democratic republic.”

Robert Owen

“Owen’s manner was very simple; but with him, as with Garibaldi, there shone through his kindliness a strength and a consciousness of the possession of authority. In his affability there was a feeling of his own excellence; it was the result perhaps of continual dealings with wretched associates; on the whole, he bore more reesemblance toa runined aristocrat, to the younger son of a great family, than to a plebeian and a socialist.”

Bakunin

(Herzen had discouraged one of his revolutionary projects.)

“Bakunin waved his hand in despair and went off to Ogarev’s (a friend of Herzen) room. I looked mornfully after him. I saw that he was in the middle of his revolutionary debauch, and that there would be no bringing him to reason now. With his seven-league boots he was striding over seas and mountains, over years and generations… He already saw the red flag of “Land and Freedom” waving on the Urals and the Volga, in the Ukraine and the Caucausus, possibly on the Winter Palace and the Peter-Paul fortress, and was in haste to smooth away all difficulties somehow, to conceal contradictions, not to fill up the gullies but to fling a skeleton bridge across them.”

It’s a good thing all these old nineteenth century idealists and revolutionaries never lived to see what would become of their dreams in the twentieth. To them it would have seemed a tragedy, in spite of spectacular technological advances. In many ways, it was.

Obama and the Rabbit People, Part Deux

More evidence of Obama’s opportunism, via a link on Instapundit. Well, at least he makes nice speeches in favor of human rights. That keeps him a step ahead of the opposition.

Ostentatious Piety in the Asylum

The blogosphere is a crazy place. Read posts and comments where you will, and you will find the online asylum is filled to bursting with people who are cocksure they know what is good and what is evil, and are quite convinced their standards apply to everyone else in the world. No matter whether they are leftists or rightists, infidels or true believers, they are all convinced they have a monopoly on the true morality. One typically finds them pointing out how people they happen not to agree with don’t quite measure up to their universal standard.

Now, certain as they are that they know the difference between good and evil (and assuming, of course, that human beings really are intelligent), one would think that they would be able to tell you, logically, and going back to first principles, why what they consider good is really good, and why what they consider evil is really evil. If so, one would be thinking wrong. Of all those currently strutting about on the moral high ground preening themselves on their superior virtue, you could probably count the number who could even make a convincing attempt with the fingers on one hand.

Good and evil have no objective existence, and yet our brains are hard wired to perceive them as not only real, but absolute. Even I, the philosopher king of this blog, perceive them that way. That would all be well and good if our situation were still the same as it was when morality evolved. It isn’t though. The world is now much more complex, and we are armed with nuclear weapons in place of sticks and stones. Second guessing mother nature is always a dubious proposition. Refusing to act as moral beings because we consider ourselves too clever and sophisticated for such atavistic nonsense is a strategy that is more than likely to blow up in our faces. Still, it would behoove us to occasionally step back and ask ourselves whether what we consider good and evil really promote our survival or not. These categories only exist in our minds because that’s what they did in the past. If they prompt us to act self-destructively in the new world we’ve inherited, perhaps its a sign we need to turn off the autopilot, and start relying on our reason.

A Note to the Professionally Righteous

I occasionally receive comments from people who are “appalled” and “indignant” about what I have to say. Allow me to suggest to those people that they take their comments elsewhere. I don’t care to let them use my little blog to announce to the world what it is they happen to be virtuously indignant about on any given day. There are many other blogs and forums that will be more than happy to pass on that urgent news for them.

Torture Update: Political Expediency Trumps Principle

Obama joins the rabbit people.

The very last thing we EVER want to do is risk our precious “security” if it’s merely a matter of ignoring a few obsolete human rights. Things have changed since the days of Patrick Henry. Life has become too dear and peace too sweet to quibble about the occasional need for chains and slavery. Of course, the chains and slavery are only for other people – you know, the “terrorists,” and we’re sure we know who they are.

Our Statesmanlike Poking of Sticks into the Russian Hornets Nest

According to Kim Zigfeld, “Obama has been hopelessly weak on the missile defense shield for Eastern Europe, and he has now mumbled his way through a summit meeting.”

I beg to differ. A “missile defense shield” in Eastern Europe will be completely useless as a missile defense shield because the enemies it is supposed to guard against, or at least the enemies it is supposed to guard against according to the public statements of the last two Administrations, will find many other ways to deliver nuclear weapons if they really want to. In other words, the only real “use” of this “missile defense shield” will be to provoke Russia. It seems to me that’s not really a wise thing to do. At least it didn’t work out very well for Austria-Hungary in WWI or Germany in WWII.

Intelligence: An Evolutionary Dead End?

The question of whether the evolution of high intelligence is really an effective long-term survival mechanism or a biological dead end is still an open one. We are likely to find out on a time scale that, compared to the one it took for us to evolve, will be extremely short. We are smart enough to create very destructive toys, but not smart enough to know how to play with them safely. We still don’t have toys nasty enough to enable us to self destruct completely, but, with a little imagination, it won’t be long.

Is “Man the Wise” a Misnomer?

We are less intelligent than we think we are. At best, we only see reality filtered through a fog of preconceived notions. Often, we are completely blinded by ideology, the steel box of ideas that define our in-group. We created the atomic bomb and landed on the moon, but those spectacular achievements weren’t the result of philosophical speculation. Neither could have been achieved without many experiments, many mistakes, and much stumbling in the dark. We have accomplished a great deal more with our brains than any other animal on the planet, but the comparison is merely relative. Our reason must still navigate through a sea of emotions and predispositions whose influence we are aware of only vaguely if at all. We don’t experience reality in itself, but only a fragment of it. We don’t perceive the fundamental nature of space and time. Rather, we perceive space and time in the manner that has been most effective in promoting our survival. It has not been necessary for us to truly understand what they are to survive. It has merely been necessary for us to navigate through them effectively. Apparently, our manner of perceiving space and time has been effective. After all, we have survived; we are still here. However, the framework we have been given presents us with certain logical difficulties, in the form of infinities. It seems to us that space and time must go on forever. Infinities are messy things. In this case they are a clue that, while space and time correspond to something real, we don’t understand that reality.