PERHAPS 21st WESTERN (I.E., AMERICAN) POLITICAL CULTURE IS IN THE MIDDLE OF ITS OWN MACHIAVELLIAN MOMENT

J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, with a new afterword (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 1975, 2003) ("'The Machiavellian moment' is a phrase to be interpreted in two ways. [] In the second place, 'the Machiavellian moment' denotes the problem itself. It is a name for the moment in conceptual time in which the republic was seen as confronting its own temporal finitude, as attempting to remain morally and politically stable in a stream of irrational events conceived as essentially destructive of all systems of secular stability. In the language which had been developed for the purpose, thus was spoken of as the confrontation of 'virtue' with 'fortune' and 'corruption'; and the study of Florentine thought is the study of how Machiavelli and his contemporaries pursed the intimations of these words, in the context of those ways of thinking about time . . . " Id. at vii-viii. "It is notorious that American culture is haunted by myths, many of which arise out of the attempt to escape history and them regenerate it." Id. at 545.).

MODERNISM IS STILL US

J. W. Burrow, The Crisis of Reason: European Thought, 1848-1914 (The Yale Intellectual History of the West) (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2000) (Modernism "genuine novelty is marked . . . by its wholesale refusal to present novelty in the guise of revival and therefore its renunciation of the comforts and inspirations of the past. The renunciation was not absolute . . . but it was comprehensive enough and it was itself a novelty. In the century and a half before 1900, to go back no earlier, innovation in the arts and radical rejections of the dominant conventions had characteristically taken the form of revivals." Id. at 236."One thing the [First World War] had been widely expected to produce was a new cultural epoch. Yet though, as a collective experience, it was far more shattering, more apocalyptic, than could have been imagined, it did not. [] But essentially, with some modifications in its expressive languages, the post-war avant-garde was still recognizably the pre-war one. In a sense the latter is still ours. Experiment has become the norm. [] Post-modernism in literature, for all the critical volubility expended on it, looks more like a gloss on Modernism than its historical grave-digger. Modernism is our tradition." Id. at 252- 253.).

THE PROGRESSIVE MEDIEVAL ATTITUDE TOWARD POVERTY

Marcia L. Colish, Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400-1400 (The Yale Intellectual History of the West) (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 1997) ("Theorists on poor law considered what attitude should be taken toward poverty and poor people and how the poor should be treated. A striking feature of medieval views of poverty is that, despite the positive revaluation of work found . . . in Benedictine monasticism, the work ethic did not entail the glorification of wealth or the idea that poverty is a sign of vice. Work, to be sure, was praised by monastic writers as a source of moral discipline, breeding humility in the individual and community spirit. A means of supporting the abbey and of serving its extramural neighbors with its surplus, work was also seen as an offering to God and a form of prayer. At the same time, throughout the Middle Ages, theologians and canonists agreed with monastic writers that poverty can have a positive moral value. What determines whether it has this value is whether poverty is embraced voluntarily. Voluntary poverty was one of the central vows taken by monks and nuns and the friars gave it still more emphasis as an aspect of the imitation of Christ. All agreed that the value of voluntary poverty is that it frees those embracing it from worldly cares, the better to serve God and neighbors. On the other hand, when poverty is involuntary, either because one is born into that state or because of economic reverses, poverty is neither a virtue not a vice but a misfortune. All medieval thinkers concurred that it is wrong to punish an involuntary poor person on either count. The appropriate moral response is to help the poor, making special provisions for them not extended to others." Id. at 326-327.).

RENE GUENON 18

Rene Guenon, Symbols of Sacred Science (Collected Works of Rene Guenon), translated from the French by Henry D. Fohr, edited by Samuel D. Fohr (Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis, 1962, 2001).

RENE GUENON 17

Rene Guenon, Insights into Christian Esoterism (Collected Works of Rene Guenon), translated from the French by Henry D. Fohr, edited by Samuel D. Fohr (Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis, 1954, 2001).

RENE GUENON 16

Rene Guenon, Initiation and Spiritual Realization (Collected Works of Rene Guenon), translated from the French by Henry D. Fohr, edited by Samuel D. Fohr (Hillsdale, NY: Sophia Perennis, 1952, 2001) (From "Against Popularization": "Perhaps the most difficult thing in the world to bear is the foolishness of a great number, and even the majority of men, especially in our time, a foolishness which grows ever greater in the measure that the intellectual decline characteristic of the last cyclic period becomes more general and accentuated. To this must be joined ignorance, or more precisely a certain kind of ignorance that is closely linked to it, one wholly unconscious of itself and asserting itself all the more audaciously in the degree that it knows and understands less, and as a result is an irremediable evil for those afflicted by it. Foolishness and ignorance can in short be united under the common name incomprehension; but it must be understood that to endure this incomprehension in no way implies that one must make any concessions to it, nor even abstain from correcting the errors it give rise to and doing all that is possible to prevent it from spreading, which, moreover, is very often a most unpleasant task, especially when the obstinacy of some people obliges one to repeat many times what normally it should suffice to say only once. This obstinacy which one thus comes up against is, furthermore, not always exempt from bad faith; and, to speak the truth, bad faith itself strongly implies a narrowness of view which is after all only the result of a more or less complete incomprehension; thus real incomprehension and bad faith, or stupidity and malice intermingle in such a way that it is sometimes very difficult  to determine the part each plays." Id. at 1, 1-2. Does not this capture the state of discourse--especially political discourse and, specifically race discourse--in twenty-first century America?).

THE GERMAN WAR, 1939-1945

Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945: Citizens and Soldiers (New York: Basic Books, 2015) ("The German War presents a [] problem: how to uncover the fears and hopes of the society from which the victors and perpetrators came in order to understand how Germans justified this war to themselves. To focus in this question I have tried to develop both a sense of breadth and of depth: breadth by using 'micro' snapshots of opinions, drawing on what eavesdropping reporters for the regime picked up from public conversations or military censors from sampling the mail bags; depth by following a select cast of individuals, drawn from a wide range of backgrounds, over a considerable period of time, exploring how their personal hopes and plans were entwined with their changing experiences of the war. Doing this has made the voices of the victims less prominent than in Witnesses of War but they are never absent: without their contrasting perspective, we would not know how differently--and often solipsistically--Germans framed their understanding of the war." Id. at xxiii-xiv.).

Nicholas Stargardt, Witnesses of War: Children's Lives Under the Nazis (New York: Knopf, 2005) ("Hunger was the most common pain children experienced during and after the war, and they soon learned that their parents could not take it away. Like adults, children turned food fantasies into elaborate games, creating make-believe recipes or enacting the queues in front of soup kitchens. They saw how hunger drove adults to fight, steal and prostitute themselves; and they became participants in the bitter accusations and counter-accusations of theft which tore families apart. . . . Hunger drove children to beg and to risk their lives smuggling goods. It also taught them to distrust strangers: however unhappy their own families were, in most cases these remained the only social institution to which children could turn. The children's homes in Theresienstadt were the exception to this rule. In most other homes and orphanages children starved. In the extremities of the Warsaw ghetto, passers-by might throw a sheet of newspaper over the children who had died in the street, but hunger also drove other children to ignore the corpses altogether and to retreat into the make-believe world of games. Hunger invaded all social relationships, teaching children wariness and self-reliance, and it left its mark on their bodies and their minds." Id. at 364. "During the war, adults and children in the German cities failed to notice the forced laborers who cleared their streets of rubble after the bombing, just as German refugees fleeing westwards in 1945 had ignored the death marches of the concentration camp prisoners in their midst. In this complete nationalisation of empathy lay the fatal work of Nazism, which had legitimized any act of barbarity towards Untermenschen as long as it helped the German cause. Despite all the evidence before them, many Germans did not reflect on what they were seeing." Id. at 370-371.).