manetho and the king lists

Manetho was a Greco-Egyptian priest born at Sebennytos in the Nile Delta, and lived during the reign of Ptolemy I. He is of significant importance to the study of Egyptology because he wrote a detailed history of Egypt which gives us the basic structure for the chronology of Ancient Egypt that we use today.

Manetho divided Egyptian history into dynasties which were essentially ruling houses, of which 30 are recognised and used today. These date from unification around 3100 BC up until the death of the last native Egyptian ruler Nectanebo II in 343 BC. Two additional dynasties were then added onto these; the 31st or Second Persian Period, and the 32nd or Macedonian rulers followed by the Ptolemies. While his work has been very useful to scholars, his history covers thousands of years, and while he had perhaps some documentation to assist him that is not available to us today, he lacked the capability of modern scientific archaeological examination and the accumulated data we have today. Nevertheless, his system is so entrenched that we still today, continue to try to “fit” our modern understanding of Egyptian history into his framework.

It is ironic that although great reliance is placed upon Manetho and his “Egyptian History”, no full text of his work actually survives! Manetho’s history is known to us because several writers whose works have survived have quoted extensively from it. These writers included Josephus, writing in the late first century AD, Sextus Julius Africanus, writing around the year 220 AD, and Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, writing in the early 4th century AD. Around five hundred years later the works of Sextus Julius and Bishop Eusebius were used as a basis for a history of the world, written by George the Monk, the secretary to the Byzantine Patriarch Tarasius (784-806 AD).

Other sources of evidence for the dating and chronology of Ancient Egypt include:

THE PALERMO STONE:
A 5th Dynasty black basalt slab in several pieces, and now in the Palermo Museum in Sicily, with further fragments in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and the Flinders Petrie Museum in London. The stone is inscribed on both sides and records some of the last pre-dynastic kings, plus the kings that followed, up until the reign of Neferirkare in the mid 5th Dynasty.

THE ROYAL LIST OF ABYDOS (above):
In the Hall of the Records at the Temple of Abydos, Seti I and his young son the future Ramesses II, are shown worshipping the cartouched names of 76 of their ancestors. However, “unacceptable” predecessors, such as Hapshepsut and Akhenaten are conveniently omitted from this list. The list also does not have records of any of the kings from the Second Intermediate Period.

THE ABYDOS KING LIST:
A badly damaged duplicate of the Royal List of Abydos was discovered in the nearby temple of Ramesses II.

THE ROYAL LIST OF KARNAK:
A list of kings from the first kings down to Tuthmosis III. It records the names of many of the obscure kings from the Second Intermediate Period, and is now housed in the Louvre Museum in Paris.

THE ROYAL LIST OF SAQQARA:
Discovered in the tomb of the royal scribe Thunery at Saqqara. Originally this list had 58 cartouches, but now only 47 remain, running from Anedjib of the 1st Dynasty up to Ramesses II, and once again omitting those names from the Second Intermediate Period.

THE ROYAL CANON OF TURIN (above):
Currently in the Museo Egizio, Torino (to which it owes its name) this papyrus is the best surviving chronology of the Ancient Egyptian pharaohs, but is unfortunately the most damaged. Originally listing over 300 kings, it is written in a fine literate hand, around 1200 BC. It lists the dynasties of the kings with the lengths of each reign in years, months and days. It also includes the names of ephemeral rulers or those ruling over small territories and, as such, are barely known nowadays, being usually unmentioned in other sources. The list includes the Hyksos rulers (often left out of other King Lists), although they were not given cartouches, and a hieroglyphic sign was added to indicate that they were foreigners. Because of the poor condition, piecing the fragments together is like trying to solve an immense and almost impossible jigsaw.

Full article here

Manetho

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Manetho (or Manethon, Greek: Μανέθων, Μανέθως) was an Egyptian historian and priest from Sebennytos (ancient Egyptian: Tjebnutjer) who lived during the Ptolemaic era, ca. 3rd century BC. Manetho wrote the Aegyptiaca (History of Egypt). His work is of great interest to Egyptologists, and is often used as evidence for the chronology of the reigns of pharaohs.

Full article here

Primary Sources of the Old Kingdom

By Jaromir Malek

The Egyptian Old Kingdom ended over 4,000 years ago, but amazingly we still have access to a number of primary sources dating from the era. Jaromir Malek uncovers the evidence.

Full article here

A Saline lagoon nestles inside the crater of Rocas Bainbridge off the coast of Santiago Island, Galapagos Archipelago, Ecuador.  Cores taken from this and the many other saline lagoons found in the Galapagos provide some of the oldest and most complete records of the frequency of El Nino events.

Source:  Historical Atlas [P.27]

Related El Nino material here

Kim Peek, the savant who inspired Rain Man, dies at the age of 58

UK Mail Online   23 December 2009

The man who inspired the title character in the Oscar-winning movie Rain Man has died.

Kim Peek was 58. His father, Fran, says Peek had a major heart attack on Saturday morning and was pronounced dead at a hospital in the Salt Lake City suburb of Murray.

Peek was a savant with a remarkable memory and inspired writer Barry Morrow when he wrote Rain Man, the 1988 movie that won four Academy Awards and took £100million at the box office.

Fran Peek said his son met Morrow at a convention in the early 1980s and the writer was taken with Peek’s knack for retaining everything he heard.

Morrow wrote the script, and the movie went on to win Oscars for best film and best actor for Dustin Hoffman, whose repetitive rants about being an excellent driver and the TV show People’s Court were a hit with moviegoers.

Although the character was technically fictional, Fran Peek said his son was every bit as amazing as Hoffman’s portrayal of him.

And Kim’s true character showed when he toured the world, helping dispel misconceptions about mental disabilities.

‘It was just unbelievable, all the things that he knew,’ Fran Peek said on Monday.

‘He travelled 5,500 miles short of three million air miles and talked to 60million people.’

Kim Peek stands on the steps at the Salt Lake City Library in Salt Lake City. Peek, the man who inspired the title character in the Oscar-winning movie “Rain Man” has died at the age of 58

After his birth in 1951, Peek’s parents were advised to place him in an institution for the mentally disabled.

They refused and he was brought up alongside his brother and sister in Utah.

In his later years, Peek was classified as a ‘mega-savant’ who was a genius in about 15 different subjects, from history and literature and geography to numbers, sports, music and dates.

But his motor skills were limited; he couldn’t perform simple tasks such as dressing himself.

National Public Radio’s Howard Berkes reported for the American broadcaster from Salt Lake City about the 58-year-old.

He said: ‘Peek had severe mental handicaps but reportedly remembered everything he read and heard. He had difficulty with simple things like turning on lights or dressing himself, but his memory was legendary.

‘Give him a date and he’d describe its events. Name a place and he’d name the zip code.’

‘Rain Man made Peek so famous he travelled the globe, displaying his talents as the real “Rain Man”,’ he added.

Nasa studied him because his memory got better as he aged. But in the end, his memory was sharp but his heart gave out.

Peek was born with macrocephaly, damage to the cerebellum, and, perhaps most important, agenesis of the corpus callosum, a condition in which the bundle of nerves that connects the two hemispheres of the brain is missing.

There is speculation that his neurons made other connections in the absence of a corpus callosum, which results in an increased memory capacity.

According to Peek’s father, Fran, he was able to memorise things from the age of 16-20 months.

He read books, memorized them, and then placed them upside down on the shelf to show that he had finished reading them, a practice he maintained.

He read a book in about an hour, and remembered almost everything he had read, memorising vast amounts of information in subjects ranging from history, literature, geography and numbers to sports, music and dates.

His reading technique consisted of reading the left page with his left eye and the right page with his right eye and in this way he could read two pages at time with a rate of about 8-10 seconds per page.

He could recall the content of some 12,000 books from memory.

Peek did not walk until the age of four, could not button his shirt and had difficulty with other ordinary motor skills, presumably due to his damaged cerebellum, which normally coordinates motor activities.

In psychological testing, Peek scored below average with an IQ of 73.

But unlike many savants, Peek showed increasing social skills, perhaps due to the attention that had come with being perceived as the ‘real Rain Man’.

His father says that his sense of humour had been emerging since 2004 or so.
Also, he had developed well beyond the stage of being a mere repository of vast amounts of information; his skills at associating information he remembers were at least one of the signs of creativity.

He displayed difficulty with abstractions such as interpreting the meanings of proverbs or metaphorical terms of speech.

Although never a musical prodigy, Peek’s musical abilities as an adult were receiving more notice when he started to study the piano.

He apparently remembered music he heard decades ago and could play it on the piano, to the extent permitted by his limited physical dexterity.

Daniel Christensen, a professor with Utah University’s Neuropsychiatric Institute said: ‘He had a depth and breadth of knowledge and a memory that was just unbelievable.

‘He was unique – I don’t know if there will ever be another person quite like Kim.’

In 1984, script writer Barry Morrow met Peek in Arlington, Texas; the result of the meeting was the 1988 movie Rain Man.

The character of Raymond Babbitt, although inspired by Peek, was portrayed as having autism.

Dustin Hoffman, who played Babbitt, met Peek and other savants to get an understanding of their nature and to play the role with accuracy.

Peek’s father later said that until meeting the actor, his son could not look into another person’s face.

The movie caused a number of requests for appearances, which increased Peek’s self-confidence.

Barry Morrow gave Kim his Oscar statuette to carry with him and show at these appearances.

Kim also enjoyed approaching strangers and showing them his talent for calendar calculations by telling them on which day of the week they were born and what news items were on the front page of major newspapers.

Peek had also appeared on television. He traveled with his father, who took care of him and performed many motor tasks that Peek found difficult.

Fran Peek says the funeral will be next Tuesday in Taylorsville. Details are pending.

Full article here

See video of Kim Peek here…

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1237758/Kim-Peek-savant-inspired-Rain-Man-dies-age-58.html#ixzz0acYCq1TS

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev

Kremlin chief Dmitry Medvedev has urged young Russians to remember the victims of Josef Stalin’s purges and warned them against attempts to “rehabilitate those responsible for exterminating their own people.”

Medvedev said the was concerned that the majority of younger Russians could not name a victim of Stalin’s brutal regime.

His comments, on the day Russia honours the victims of Soviet repression, come amid what rights campaigners see as a creeping attempt by some politicians to whitewash the legacy of the Soviet Union’s most feared dictator.

Speaking in a video blog posted on the Kremlin’s web site, Medvedev said: “Two years ago sociologists conducted a poll and nearly 90 percent of our citizens, young people aged 18-24, could not even name prominent people who suffered or died in the years of the repressions,” Medvedev said. “This cannot but cause concern.”

“There is no justification for the repressions,” he said.

The day of remembrance for the victims of repression was introduced 18 years ago by the first post-Soviet Kremlin leader, Boris Yeltsin, who believed that facing up to the horrors of the past was essential to build democracy after years of repression.

Stalin is still the subject of heated debate in Russia, nearly two decades after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union.

For some Russians, Stalin was a cruel tyrant who sent millions to their deaths by building a totalitarian system that corrupted the ideals of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

But polls show that the majority of Russians consider Stalin to have been a tough war leader who defended the motherland from attack and built the Soviet Union into a mighty superpower.

Rights campaigners have been alarmed by what they see as an attempt by officials – especially strong during the 2000-2008 presidency of Vladimir Putin – to justify the atrocities of Stalin’s rule by focusing on his achievements.

Recent Russian teachers’ manuals have described Stalin as an effective manager who acted rationally in conducting a campaign of terror to modernise the Soviet Union.

Historians say such a view of Stalin ignores the millions of innocent people who either perished or had their lives torn apart under his rule.

In recent years, Russia has been especially angered by what it sees as attempts by foreign politicians to denigrate the Soviet Union’s massive sacrifices in defeating Nazi Germany in what Russia calls the Great Patriotic War.

But Medvedev said that Russians should also beware of attempts to revise the history of repression.

“We pay much attention to fighting the falsification of our history,” Medvedev said. “For some reason we often think that this is all about resisting attempts to review the results of the Great Patriotic War.”

“But it is also important not to allow the restoration of historical truth to be used as a pretext to rehabilitate those responsible for exterminating their own people,” he added.

Medvedev said the state should try to promote interest in the day of remembrance, which is not a national holiday and which usually attracts few public expressions of emotion.

“The memory of national tragedies is as sacred as the memory of victories,” he said. “We need to study our past and overcome indifference and the desire to forget its tragic sides.”

Herald Scotland   31 October 2009

Full article here

Bad driving is in the genes

Bad driving may be down to faulty genes, research has suggested.
By Rebecca Smith  29 October 2009   UK Telegraph

Scientists in America found people with a particular fault in their genetic make-up performed 20 per cent worse in driving skills tests than those without.

Three in ten people may carry the affected gene, a team from University of California Irvine said.

The study is published in the journal Cerebral Cortex.

The gene fault affects production of a protein that helps keep memory strong and may be linked to co-ordination. People with the variant also don’t recover as well after a stroke.

A driving test was taken by 29 people — 22 without the gene variant and seven with it.

They were asked to drive 15 laps on a simulator that required them to learn the nuances of a track programmed to have difficult curves and turns. Researchers recorded how well they stayed on the course over time. Four days later, the test was repeated.

Results showed that people with the variant did worse on both tests than the other participants, and they remembered less the second time.

 Full Article here

A diver explores the sunken settlement beneath the waters off southern Greece

Lost Greek city that may have inspired Atlantis myth gives up secrets

Helena Smith in Athens

guardian.co.uk, Friday 16 October 2009 

 

The secrets of a lost city that may have inspired one of the world’s most enduring myths – the fable of Atlantis – have been brought to light from beneath the waters off southern Greece.

Explored by an Anglo-Greek team of archaeologists and marine geologists and known as Pavlopetri, the sunken settlement dates back some 5,000 years to the time of Homer’s heroes and in terms of size and wealth of detail is unprecedented, experts say.

“There is now no doubt that this is the oldest submerged town in the world,” said Dr Jon Henderson, associate professor of underwater archaeology at the University of Nottingham. “It has remains dating from 2800 to 1200 BC, long before the glory days of classical Greece. There are older sunken sites in the world but none can be considered to be planned towns such as this, which is why it is unique.”

The site, which straddles 30,000 square meters of ocean floor off the southern Peloponnese, is believed to have been consumed by the sea around 1000 BC. Although discovered by a British oceanographer some 40 years ago, it was only this year that marine archaeologists, aided by digital technology, were able to properly survey the ruins.

What they found surpassed all expectations. Thanks to shifting sands and the settlement’s enclosure in a protected bay, the exploration revealed a world of buildings, courtyards, main streets, rock-cut tombs and religious structures. In addition, the seabed was replete with thousands of shards of pottery.

“We found ceramics dating back to the end of the stone age, which suggested that the settlement was occupied some 5,000 years ago, at least 1,200 years earlier than originally thought,” said Henderson, who co-directed the underwater survey.

“Our investigations also revealed over 9,000 square meters of new buildings. But what really took us by surprise was the discovery of a possible megaron, a monumental structure with a large rectangular hall, which also suggests that the town had been used by an elite, and automatically raised the status of the settlement.”

More than any other underwater site so far, the find offers potential insights into the workings of Mycenaean society.

“It is significant because as a submerged site it was never reoccupied,” said Elias Spondylis, who co-directed the survey as the head of Greece’s underwater antiquities department. “As such it represents a frozen moment of the past.”

Marine geologists have yet to work out why the settlement sank. Theories include sea level changes, ground subsidence as the result of earthquakes, or a tsunami.

“It is very likely a combination of the first two,” said Dimitris Sakellariou, at the Greek Institute of Oceanography. “As the world’s oldest submerged city it is truly amazing. It not only shows how people lived at the time is also of great interest to natural scientists because the waters around it are so shallow.”

Locals in the nearby town of Neapolis are delighted. “Older generations always knew something was there but we had no idea about the extent of it,” said Neapolis’s mayor, Yiannis Kousoulis.

It is the first time a sunken city has been found in Greece that predates the time that Plato wrote his allegorical tale of the sunken continent of Atlantis.

“Atlantis was a myth but it is a myth that keeps underwater exploration going,” said Sakellariou. “Less than 1% of the world’s ocean floors have ever been surveyed. This is an extraordinary find but there is still a lot more down there that has to be found.”

Full article here

Libs forgetful on ETS origins

Opinion: 15-October-09 by Joe Poprzeczny   
WA Business News

THE undemocratic origins of the economic catastrophe set to befall Australian business, deceptively dubbed the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), are becoming clearer.

Readers may recall a recent column (‘Liberals backed the wrong horse, September 10′) that highlighted how the Liberals had lost their way by backing Labor and Greens moves to impose this mega-tax.

But growing numbers of Liberal MPs are belatedly realising that it paves the way for ever-bigger government, precisely what their party was created to thwart.

Put differently, Malcolm Turnbull and Julie Bishop are transforming the 66-year-old Liberal Party into something indistinguishable from Labor and Bob Brown’s Greens.

Many now see both as sideswiping Robert Menzies’ life’s work to build a level-headed conservatism that ensured Australians remained free of over-enthusiastic, hoax-driven bureaucratic and political controls.

The scheduled ETS mega-tax will, as Queensland Nationals Senator Barnaby Joyce said, mean: “Everywhere there is a power point in your house; there is access to a new tax for the Labor government.

“A new tax on ironing, a new tax on watching television, a new tax on vacuuming. If you go to the super-market, Kevin (Rudd) will be in the shopping trolley with you because there will be a new tax on food.

“Want to go overseas, want to go to Cairns for a holiday? Don’t worry; Kevin is on the plane with you because there is a new tax on aviation fuel.”

It’s taxing with a vengeance.

Senator Joyce’s warnings have started resonating with Liberals and others across the nation.

Coal miners, for instance, have just launched an advertising campaign across key east coast mining regions warning that the Rudd-Brown-Turnbull ETS could lead to mine closures.

Australian Coal Association executive director, Ralph Hillman, warned: “The proposed plan would not cut carbon emissions while costing regional Queensland thousands of coal industry jobs.”

Big employing Anglo-American’s chief executive, Cynthia Carroll, said the ETS could cost Australia’s coal industry $14 billion in its first decade of operation.

It’s important to note the coal miners are only the first of what could be many to highlight this job-killing mega-tax.

Other miners and businesses will be similarly disadvantaged and all Australian working families will be slugged by the ongoing ETS’s ripple effect whenever buying anything, travelling, or just relaxing at home.

But back to that question: how and when did the Liberals begin embracing the ETS?

How did a party that so doggedly combated, throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the dead hand of socialism, bank nationalisation, and greater centralism, then sought by Labor, get itself into such a predicament?

The first thing to note when seeking an answer to this crucial question is that neither Labor nor the Greens should be blamed, since they weren’t in power when it happened.

The Greens, it must be stressed, emerged from a disparate group of fringe political activists from the 1980s, including varying shades of Communists. Their distinguishing feature was disregard for business and commercial endeavour – the lifeblood of all modern societies.

Greens are obsessed with instituting ever more controls and promoting impractical and costly pie-in-the-sky schemes about energy generation and usage – also the lifeblood of any modern economy.

Science and scientific reasoning and deduction certainly aren’t their longest and strongest suits.

Here they are no different to Mr Turnbull and Ms Bishop.

When was the last time either of those two highlighted the fact that more than 30,000 American scientists have urged their legislators by petitioning not to adopt the United Nations-devised Kyoto Protocol that’s set to help de-industrialise Western economies, significantly boost taxation burdens and ensure ever greater power for numerically boosted central governing bureaucracies?

The answer is never. Both have followed Senator Brown’s long-established proclivity for carping about unsubstantiated global catastrophes.

Alleged global warming will be remembered as the biggest hoax since Orson Welles’ 1938 Martian invasion stunt.

But back to that question: what’s the origin of the impending ETS?

Readers may be surprised to learn that it hails not from Labor or Greens ranks, but rather from policymakers from within the last Howard government.

Not widely known is the fact that coalition MPs were presented with the ETS mega-tax in October 2007.

Only in recent weeks have growing numbers of Liberal MPs understood how this happened.

And, as it’s steadily dawned on more of them, some have been pressing Mr Turnbull and his ETS spokesman, Ian Macfarlane, to come clean and tell all.

Mr Macfarlane has consequently distributed the coalition’s 22-page 2007 Clean Energy Plan, which was drawn up belatedly for the last federal election campaign, promising what many have now realised was, and remains, party policy.

Liberal MPs have also realised how easily they were snowed and who did the job – none other than Messrs Howard and Turnbull.

The way it happened was that Mr Howard had earlier arranged for his top bureaucrat, Peter Shergold, to get a roadmap on how to implement an ETS.

By June 2007, the Shergold Report was ready. Here’s how one newspaper reported its release.

“Dr Shergold said work should begin now on setting targets, establishing emissions monitoring systems, creating legislation, setting up an independent regulator, allocating permits and engaging international partners.

“Dr Shergold added that the Kyoto Protocol was fundamentally flawed because it lacked a pathway for developing nations to cut emissions.

“’We need to move beyond Kyoto,’ he said.

“But he said Australia needed to commit to reducing emissions ahead of any comprehensive global response.”

So Mr Howard, with Dr Shergold, created precisely what Mr Rudd now wants imposed, that is, “reducing emissions ahead of any comprehensive global response”.

That’s big and tough talk indeed.

Step two came in October 2007, just before the federal election.

Mr Howard and his environment minister, Mr Turnbull, decided the Shergold Report would become coalition policy.

The 22-page Clean Energy Plan for Australia was a lift from that report.

Because non-Labor MPs were desperately scampering about trying to hold their seats in the face of the coming Rudd landslide, few gave the Shergold-devised Howard-Turnbull policy close inspection.

Most failed to recognise they’d been landed with a new policy, lock-stock-and-barrel, that Mr Rudd would so totally embrace.

However, now that the full taxing and job-killing implications of their Shergold-Howard-Turnbull program are coming to be understood and fully appreciated, most want another bite at that cherry.

But they’re now in opposition and Mr Rudd is determined to make the big taxing plan law.

Not surprisingly, Nationals Senator Ron Boswell insists he can’t recall an ETS proposal ever reaching the coalition party room for debate.

“I think it’s one of those things which has slipped through … I am sure we didn’t go to an election with a strong policy that would have disadvantaged mining and primary industry,” he said.

Wrong, Senator Boswell.

Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi also says he doesn’t believe the policy ever reached the party room.

“I understand there was an agreement between the prime minister and Mr Turnbull,” he said. “It was announced unilaterally just prior to the election.”

So two wealthy Sydney lawyers who qualify for lifelong indexed pensions decide unilaterally for 21 million people and have the audacity to claim that’s democracy.Full article here

Psalm 34:17

Stuff White People Like

Zeitgeist

by Scott Locklin on October 05, 2009

A Genealogy of Morals

One of my fundamental beliefs about culture and humanity is that morals and folkways are subject to natural selection. You need not believe in sociobiological bilge to share this belief; you merely need to agree that some ideas confer advantages over others.

The classic example is the Levantine disdain for pork chops; not a bad idea to avoid parasites in primitive Middle Eastern countries. It doesn’t matter how the idea of avoiding pork chops originated; people have weird ideas all the time. What matters is that the custom was useful enough, and it has been handed down to modern Jews and Muslims the world over. The reason for it is no longer true in the civilized lands, since trichinosis is no longer a problem in, say, America, but this is a very recent development, and in many parts of the globe, it is still a good idea to avoid pork. Culture and morality are machines for transmitting basic survival truths across generations.

I also believe that most people tend to want to be thought of as moral. As such, when you kick the props out from underneath historical morality and folkways, people will still find their own soi-disant moralities, and develop ways to think of themselves as moral people.

This is the probable reason for the old G.K. Chesterton saw, “He who does not believe in God will believe in anything.” (The quote might be apocryphal but it’s no less true.) Of course, if you’re a theist, you probably don’t need to think about the problem of what morality to hold; but those of us without strong religious beliefs need some extra mental furniture to make sense of modern life.

In 21st-century America, life is soft enough that our over-educated upper-middle classes are able to do away with moral codes that serve a purpose, and adopt more byzantine ones which demonstrate their freedom from concern. I see this as a form of conspicuous consumption, a status marker for viewing themselves above the lower orders. A hundred years ago, wealthy men who were above the concerns of the peasantry would sprout preposterous top hats and hire a servant. Fifty years ago, if you had a job among the gentle people, you’d wear a nice suit.

Nowadays, that sort of “I have arrived” directness is seen as gauche; membership in “polite” society is reserved for people who display the proper contempt for reality in manner and folkway.

After all, if “you have arrived,” you need not believe in those outdated things the lower orders believe in by necessity. Flouting ancient moral codes is the postmodern version of the proverbial rich guy lighting cigars with $20 bills.

But this also means it’s not quite clear to arrivistes what the correct morals and folkways to believe in are exactly.

The moral codpiece as status marker certainly was confusing for me. I am, after all, a mere bumpkin from a suburb of a military base. The morality of my hometown taught me that personal bravery is a moral virtue and pacifism or cowardice is foolishness. My hometown taught me that sexual morality was better than personal decadence, that thrift, self-reliance, honesty, patriotism, and industry were better than debt, sponging off others, ideology, political correctness, and consumerism. And in my day, we didn’t have Christian Lander’s webpage to tell us how to behave.

The main status marker I was able to discern about the higher social class was they feel entitled to cross the street into moving traffic, like important people do in college towns. This proved to be a helpful sort of Rosetta Stone for me. Looking both ways before you cross the street is a sort of basic moral teaching about the laws of physics—thanks mom! Denial of these laws proves you are an important person above concern. While crossing the street into moving traffic is a violation of moral law with potentially immediate consequences, the same principle can be applied to moral law that operates on a longer time scale. The most fashionable ways of doing things consists of denying basic strategies for survival. Armed with this basic piece of information, one is able to derive all the other moral laws the gentle classes use to distinguish themselves from pipe fitters.

When human beings decided to build complex societies in the agricultural age, priesthoods arose to codify and pass on moral culture to the populace at large. In modern America, that priesthood consists of what you learn in graduate school and the New York Times editorial page. Higher education is the ultimate status marker with a certain class of people these days.

The idea that “brains” will make a better world is deeply ingrained. The problem, of course, with higher education is that it is a world removed from consequence. You can believe any fool thing you like if you’re an academic.

In modern Academia, you’re more likely to be rewarded if you say something completely silly. This sort of status climbing by moral absurdity probably originated in the status insecurity of post WW-II academia. How do you distinguish yourself from the older, more cultured guy in the cube next to you once you have tenure? You most likely can’t compete with him on an intellectual level, so it’s best to count coup on his moral enlightenment—and the more removed your belief system is from reality, common sense, and tradition, the better.

Mencken meant something a little different when he referred to the “booboisie.” But his term fits the status-seeking moral codpiece class better than any other large group of people in America today. What else can you call someone who distinguishes himself from the Lumpenproletariat by crossing the road into traffic?

The modern booboisie belief system is presently self-reinforcing, in that it creates social problems that booboisie experts will claim to have solutions for. Once the booboisie did away with traditional sexual morality and gender roles, for example, it created a need for an entire class of jobs and expertise.

Legions of social workers, professional feminists, jailers, policemen, doctors, and psychologists are now needed to deal with the consequences of the sensible, ancient moral imprecations against passing yourself around like a tray of tea biscuits.

People who espouse such things gain status with their moral codpiece people, and they gain status in training legions of lesser experts needed to deal with this sort of idiocy. Once the booboisie did away with the sensible puritan values of thrift and self-control, thus cementing their place among the anointed cool ones, legions of financial engineers, social workers, debt counselors, lawyers, and other professionals become necessary to deal with the national consequences of acting foolishly. Once the ancient god of “Terminus” is slain, vast multitudes of “diversity instructors,” policemen, court translators, and other such professional trouble-making trouble-fixers become necessary.

Training such people is probably pleasant work, much like being a revival tent preacher. Once you establish yourself as an extremely moral person who doesn’t believe in patriotism, borders, or nationality, you’re a lot more likely to find work in this line. What boggles my mind is that nobody notices that these industries were not necessary back in the dark ages when people believed in common sense ideas like borders and nationality.

The problem with all this, of course, is the Broken Window Fallacy of economics. You can’t run a nation whose economy is based on breaking windows then repairing them—not for long anyway. We’ve done fairly well in supporting large numbers of harmful and useless people via vast increases in the productivity of a small group of people.

Ultimately though, the moral codpiece of the booboisie is a bubble. Reality is that which doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it. There are faint glimmers of this in academia. Even the most cement-headed of academics have begun to notice that, for example, the moral codpiece of “diversity” doesn’t make anyone happy.

Students have begun to notice that learning business swindles pays off better than learning the latest moral codpiece from some booboisie in the English literature department who have almost entirely ceased to teach anything remotely resembling knowledge. To say nothing of the “quelle horreurs” which are occurring as Darwin’s army ceases amusing itself tilting at creationist windmills and gets down to the business of exposing human beings for the unpleasant creatures we actually are.

People will always form status hierarchies, and human beings will always have a strong desire to conform to moral codes. The question remains whether or not the present status hierarchy based on crossing the road into traffic will last long enough to see us all run over by a renewable energy hybrid bus, or if such behavior will be laughed into deserved oblivion. The latter is the only way out I can see. It worked on the American ruling class in the 1960s. Laughter is probably the best weapon we have against numskulls. It’s also a heck of a lot of fun.

So, the next time some prune-faced lackwit in a hair shirt attempts to lecture you on their moral superiority to reality, keep the image in mind of some self-important bozo crossing the road into traffic, confident some white paint will protect them from two tons of steel piloted by a monkey. Laughing at their looney tunes ideas of reality is ultimately the only defense against modern insanity.

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The Fear of God

Evropa

by E. Christian Kopff on October 07, 2009

Among the most subversive aspects of the Enlightenment Project is its insistence on the radical incompatibility of Christianity with the Classical and Germanic traditions. In his Regensburg Address (2006), Pope Benedict correctly insisted that Europe was created by the uniting of the Classical and the Biblical, a process culminating in the conversion of the Germans. As with Classical and Christian, the influencing was a two-way street, described well by James C. Russell as The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity (1994). German art portrayed gentle Jesus, meek and mild, as a warrior chief. Jesus’ lordship was interpreted in the light of German tradition, as we find it in Tacitus’s Germania.

On the field of battle it is a disgrace for a chief to be surpassed in valor by his followers and for the followers not to equal the valor of their chief. To leave a battle alive after their chief has fallen means livelong infamy and shame. To defend and protect him, and to let him get the credit for their own acts of heroism, are the most solemn obligations of their allegiance.

 

Tacitus’s description is confirmed by the great Anglo-Saxon poem, The Battle of Maldon (14). The English chief allows marauding Vikings to land so that the ensuing battle will be more glorious. After he is slain, a few cowards ride away to everlasting shame, but most of his followers fight to the death in the hopeless but glorious struggle. German converts re-interpreted spreading the faith as following the lord Jesus into battle and understood martyrdom as the German virtue of preferring death to deserting their liege.
Despite the humorous title, David Gless in From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents (1998) makes a powerful case for the validity of a grand narrative informed by the notion that what is distinctive and vital in the West derives from the assimilation and mutual interaction of Classical, Christian, and German. When great periods of creativity and freedom appear in Europe and America, they are often associated with those who value the three traditions, not as inassimilable entities, but as containing complementary elements which are essential for human fulfillment and societal greatness.

All three traditions were formative and creative in the High Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the American Founding. When Dante writes about his political ideas in Monarchia, for instance, he describes an empire that is Roman, Christian, and German. Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967) described the Classical, Christian and German (or Common Law) traditions behind the American Revolution (though he also began the bad habit of privileging one tradition over the others, in his case, English Whig thought.) As Carl Richard noticed in The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (1994),

To the founders, there was but one worthy tradition, the tradition of liberty, and they would not have understood the modern historian’s need to distinguish between the classical and Whig traditions and to measure the influence of one against the other.

Thomas Jefferson first came to the attention of his fellow Virginians in 1774 by his essay “A Summary View of the Rights of British North America.” He based his argument on the fact that the ancestors of the British Americans had twice exercised a “right which nature has given to all men,” that is, emigrating from one land to a new one: the first time when the Anglo-Saxons followed Hengist and Horsa to Britain, the second time the English colonization of North America. The colonists’ position is often explained as a defense of their claim to the rights of Englishmen and this argument does play an important role in the debate. In “A Summary View,” however, Jefferson stakes out a claim to the colonists’ rights not only as Englishmen but as Germans.

The Germanic origin of the English tickled the funny bone of Benjamin Franklin, who composed a bogus “Edict from the King of Prussia” in 1773, in which Frederick the Great of Prussia makes the same demands on the English that Parliament was making on the colonies. Jefferson took the idea seriously. On July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress appointed Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin “to a committee to bring in a device for a seal for the United States of America.” Jefferson’s suggestion is reported by John Adams:

Mr. Jefferson proposed, the children of Israel in the wilderness led by a cloud by day, and a pillar by night—and on the other side, Hengist and Horsa, the Saxon chiefs, from whom we clam the honor of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed.

Jefferson’s suggested seal was devoted to two groups of settlers, the Chosen People of the Bible and the colonists’ German ancestors. For him the American nation was based on the Bible and the German tradition. As Gilbert Chinard wrote, in 1776 “Jefferson’s great ambition was to promote a renaissance of Anglo-Saxon primitive institutions on the new continent.” This was no youthful whim. Jefferson always insisted on and was eventually successful in ensuring that Anglo-Saxon be taught at the University of Virginia. “This is the true foundation of Jefferson’s political philosophy,” Chinard concluded. “No greater mistake could be made than to look for his sources in Locke, Montesquieu, or Rousseau. Jeffersonian democracy was born under the sign of Hengist and Horsa, not of the Goddess Reason.”

The Founders were traditionalists in law, religion, and politics, and they believed in the coherence of the Christian, Classical, and German traditions, supporting and enriching one another. The congregationalism of their Protestant church polity supported the federalism of their secular politics and both were strengthened by the idea of “checks and balances” they derived from ancient history, like Polybius’s account of the Roman Republic. And their idea of a citizen as a farmer-soldier-citizen drew on Greek, Roman and German traditions.

The results of the Germanization of medieval Christianity continued to live in popular as well as learned religious life. When I was a boy, Protestant congregations still sang “Onward Christian Soldiers” to music composed by Sir Arthur Sullivan of Gilbert and Sullivan fame. (Sabine Baring-Gould composed the words.) Today almost every Protestant hymnbook has re-written the words of “Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus, Ye Soldiers of the Cross” to eliminate lines that breathed the spirit of Tacitus’ Germans and the Anglo-Saxons of The Battle of Maldon:

Ye that are men now serve Him against unnumbered foes.
Let courage rise with danger and strength to strength oppose.

That popular hymn presented Jesus as the warrior king He was for the first German converts.

Those days are gone, of course. Today almost every appearance of the words “man” and “men” has been erased from hymnals. This recent phenomenon is an assault not only on masculinity but also on the Christian, Classical, and Germanic traditions. The American way of life can be restored only by a return to the traditions that shaped it. Many forces oppose that restoration, but, as the old hymn used to remind us, men do not retreat before unnumbered foes, whether they stand among the troops of Gideon in the Book of Judges or the Three Hundred Spartans at Thermopylae or on the walls of the Alamo. As Bismarck said of his Germans, “We fear God, but nothing else in the world!”

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