One More Quote, if I May, Please!

1) New blog on the kid : GWW got Aristotle and St Thomas wrong. · 2) HGL's F.B. writings : What Mechanism? Are "Angelic Movers Outside Natural Sciences"? · 3) Φιλολoγικά/Philologica : GWW vs Plato, HGL vs GWW · 4) New blog on the kid : Was There No Celestial Mechanics for Tychonian System? Oh, yes! · 5) Φιλολoγικά/Philologica : One More Quote, if I May, Please! · 6) HGL's F.B. writings : Sungenis Countering Flat Earthers - with Some Lacks in his Argument · 7) Φιλολoγικά/Philologica : Any Fathers NOT Supporting Round Earth? Any Authorities that DO support Angelic Movers? · 8) HGL's F.B. writings : Debating with Sungenis, Mainly

GWW calls a heading "Is There a Copernican Conspiracy?" We are now on pages 92-93.

GWW

As there are many honest scientists and biblical exegetes who might reveal these facts to the public, there are just as many uneducated ones who are oblivious to them, or knowledgeable but dishonest ones who hide them. Still others are afraid to reveal them and hope that few people will seek to become educated and make provocative inquires, for then the proverbial cat will be out of the bag. Alexander von Humboldt, the founder of modern geography and of whom Charles Darwin said that he was “the greatest scientific traveler who ever lived,” and, of whom, after his death, Geoffrey Martin said “no individual scholar could hope any longer to master the world’s knowledge about the Earth,” acknowledged geocentrism’s viability but also fear of revealing it:

Reference to Geoffrey Martin

Geoffrey J. Martin and Preston E. James, All Possible Worlds: A History of Geographical Ideas, p. 131. If there was anyone who knew his trade, it was Humboldt. In addition to the thirty volumes he wrote about his geographical field studies, in 1845, at the age of 76, he wrote the book Kosmos, which is said to contain everything he knew about the Earth. The first volume, a general overview of the universe, sold out in two months and was promptly translated into many languages. Humboldt died in 1859 and the fifth and final volume was published in 1862, based on his notes for the work.

Humboldt
Alexander von Humboldt
1769 – 1859

I have known, too, for a long time, that we have no arguments for the Copernican system, but I shall never dare to be the first to attack it. Don’t rush into the wasp’s nest. You will but bring upon yourself the scorn of the thoughtless multitude. If once a famous astronomer arises against the present conception, I will communicate, too, my observations; but to come forth as the first against opinions which the world has become fond of – I don’t feel the courage.

Reference

Quoted in F. K. Schultze’s synopsis and translation of F. E. Pacshe’s Christliche Weltanschauuing (cited in De Labore Solis, p. 133). Also cited in C. Schoepffer’s The Earth Stands Fast, C. H. Ludwig, 1900, p. 59.

NOTE

With such a culture of personal deference, you do not need any conspiracy.

And this is the culture of Prussia, the place where Humboldt was from.

What shall we say of Prussia? Here I will get to Gilbert Keith Chesterton. A man who had the sense of loving Austria and Bavaria, and hating Prussia (with a brother dead fighting the Prussians in The Great War).

I first go to my Βιβλιογράφικα/Bibliographica blog. Here I find a page for Chesterton, Belloc and other English and French Catholics and other mystery writers, which links to G. K. Chesterton's Works on the Web of which I always forget the url. On which I do not find what I sought as a direct link, so I google g k chesterton koepenick and get a good hit:

Thoughts Around Koepenick
from 'All Things Considered'
http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/20620/

I now get back to his works on the web and find that 'All Things Considered' is from (1908).

Chesterton

Soldiers have many faults, but they have one redeeming merit; they are never worshippers of force. Soldiers more than any other men are taught severely and systematically that might is not right. The fact is obvious. The might is in the hundred men who obey. The right (or what is held to be right) is in the one man who commands them. They learn to obey symbols, arbitrary things, stripes on an arm, buttons on a coat, a title, a flag. These may be artificial things; they may be unreasonable things; they may, if you will, be wicked things; but they are weak things. They are not Force, and they do not look like Force. They are parts of an idea: of the idea of discipline; if you will, of the idea of tyranny; but still an idea. No soldier could possibly say that his own bayonets were his authority. No soldier could possibly say that he came in the name of his own bayonets. It would be as absurd as if a postman said that he came inside his bag. I do not, as I have said, underrate the evils that really do arise from militarism and the military ethic. It tends to give people wooden faces and sometimes wooden heads. It tends moreover (both through its specialisation and through its constant obedience) to a certain loss of real independence and strength of character. This has almost always been found when people made the mistake of turning the soldier into a statesman, under the mistaken impression that he was a strong man. The Duke of Wellington, for instance, was a strong soldier and therefore a weak statesman. But the soldier is always, by the nature of things, loyal to something. And as long as one is loyal to something one can never be a worshipper of mere force. For mere force, violence in the abstract, is the enemy of anything we love. To love anything is to see it at once under lowering skies of danger. Loyalty implies loyalty in misfortune; and when a soldier has accepted any nation's uniform he has already accepted its defeat.

Nevertheless, it does appear to be possible in Germany for a man to point to fixed bayonets and say, "These are my authority," and yet to convince ordinarily sane men that he is a soldier. If this is so, it does really seem to point to some habit of high-faultin' in the German nation, such as that of which I spoke previously. It almost looks as if the advisers, and even the officials, of the German Army had become infected in some degree with the false and feeble doctrine that might is right. As this doctrine is invariably preached by physical weaklings like Nietzsche it is a very serious thing even to entertain the supposition that it is affecting men who have really to do military work It would be the end of German soldiers to be affected by German philosophy.

NOTE

Chesterton was, unless mistaken, prophetic. Germany (as in Prussian state of 1870!) did loose two wars after the Koepenick incident.

But even more to our point here:

Chesterton

The most absurd part of this absurd fraud (at least, to English eyes) is one which, oddly enough, has received comparatively little comment. I mean the point at which the Mayor asked for a warrant, and the Captain pointed to the bayonets of his soldiery and said. "These are my authority." One would have thought any one would have known that no soldier would talk like that. The dupes were blamed for not knowing that the man wore the wrong cap or the wrong sash, or had his sword buckled on the wrong way; but these are technicalities which they might surely be excused for not knowing. I certainly should not know if a soldier's sash were on inside out or his cap on behind before. But I should know uncommonly well that genuine professional soldiers do not talk like Adelphi villains and utter theatrical epigrams in praise of abstract violence.

NOTE

We really do see a parallel to Humboldt here.

They think the soldier is wearing the right hat, and so they submit.

And those who criticise them "in Germany" (Bavaria might have had more sense than Koepenick, back then!) do very much hang the argument on the hat instead of hanging the hat on the argument.

But what has this to do with modern scientific community?

We cannot believe modern science comes from Prussia, can we?

Well, the attitude of Humboldt has had opportunity of spreading from Prussia.

How? Through Communism.

What has Communism got to do with Prussia? Everything! Marx and Engels were Prussians, though living in spiritually related Victorian England. And Lenin was partly Swedish, at a time when Swedish élite was heavily influenced by ... the Prussian one.

I now go to his works on the web again and consult one or other of his final works, Well and Shallows or The Thing.

On Well and Shallows, I find a promising chapter heading, THE BACKWARD BOLSHIE.

Chesterton

AFTER all, the Bolshevist is really a Victorian. His is a nineteenth-century dream, even if it be a twentieth-century reality. It is notably so in the aspect which now makes the dream a nightmare; I mean the mad optimism about the advantages of machinery.

...

Marx was much more of a Victorian than Morris. He may not have been technically a subject of Queen Victoria, though it is quite likely that he was. By geographical extraction I suppose he was a German--like Queen Victoria's husband and more remotely, Queen Victoria herself. By real or racial extraction he was a Jew; like Queen Victoria's favourite Prime Minister and a good many other persons unnecessary to mention. But the late Victorian period was the very period at which the Jews, and especially the German Jews, were at the very top of their power and influence. From the time when they forced the Egyptian War to the time when they forced the South African War, they were imperial and immune.

...

Now, as a matter of fact, our heads have in many ways advanced a little, since the days when our own Five Year Plan filled England with filth and smoke. Some rather deeper questions have arisen; questions about the individual, about the purpose of life, about religion in history, and so on. Philosophy, even Thomist philosophy, is heard again in Paris and Oxford.

Now Marx had no more philosophy than Macaulay. The Marxians therefore have no more philosophy than the Manchester School.

...

NOTE

I was actually wrong to recall Chesterton considered Marx specifically Prussian.

But it is not a really long stretch, is it?

Marx was, via Feuerbach (a Bavarian of the type that admires Prussia), and Hegel (a West German with less resistance to Prussia than Bavarians have) a disciple of Kant (a Prussian from what is now Kaliningrad).

Anyway, outside Bavaria and Austria, the culture of men like Humboldt was very predominant in the Germanies, at least in cities.

And that is, irrespective of any philosophical discipleships (I am not sure what the reference to Macaulay is supposed to imply, unless it means Macaulay was like Marx Epicurean - which Marx was while still a "Christian" and during his thesis in philosophy), was the culture from which we get so many masters of the modern world like Marx, Engels, Lenin - and who have been especially prominent in the Scientific Community.

Unfortunately, the unhealthy attitude of Humboldt, against sticking out ones neck (Sungenis has Italian American heritage and I was partly raised in Austria!) is even in my own limited experience alive and well. In what would otherwise be a scientific community.

One example: when I was visiting the Freie Universität Berlin back in 2004/2005 (ending March 17th 2005), I was giving a project description to a professor. Namely of collecting the areas of vocabulary in which Indo-European languages do NOT concur with each other. If feet and hearts and eyes and ears and knees are the same from India to Ireland, hands simply aren't. Nor are heads. My point being a scenario in which original Indo-European was less a mother tongue than a failed lingua franca, like Medieval Latin. And I also added my purpose was to counter the idea that Indo-European linguistics and rate of language changed prove ages older than Deluge for a proto-Indo-European language.

This was NOT well received, and the answer was very brief: "here we do science".

Obviously that Prussian professor believed in the kind of scientific culture in which you don't stick your neck out, everything is reglimented by people wearing the right hat, like it was supposed to be in Koepenick.

And as obviously, this is not the real accent of a real scientist. But before asking "what conspiracies are there" we should ask what culture is there. And it is a culture in which Protestant views of "fallen man" have become Prussian views of inadequate individual reason. One in which the collective reason can become deified and anyone refusing that idolatry can be accused of taking himself for God, because he takes himself as equal of the collective which he is immediately up against.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre University Library
Tuesday after III Lord's Day in Lent
1.III.2016