Edmund Burke and Richard Nixon

What does the U.S. president from 1969 to 1974 have to do with the Irish-English political philosopher who analyzed the American and French Revolutions? Nixon's administration was brought down in a scandal, and he became the first - and, so far, only - president to resign.

Reflecting on Nixon's demise, one of his aides, Charles Colson, later commented that these events evoked from him a “frank acknowledgement of the human disposition to make wrong moral choices and inflict harm and suffering on others.” The official concluded that this observation is “empirically validated by thirty-five centuries of recorded human history.”

Responding to those who hope to refine our political system so that such scandals never happen again, Colson wrote, this “worldview has proven to be utterly irrational and unlivable. The denial of our sinful nature, and the utopian myth it breeds, leads not to beneficial social experiments but to tyranny. The confidence that humans are perfectible provides a justification for trying to them perfect ... no matter what it takes. And with God out of the picture, those in power are not accountable to any higher authority. They can use any means necessary, no matter how brutal or coercive, to remold people to fit their notion of the perfect society.”

Not only can we not fine-tune our system in order to avoid all future mis-uses of power, but it is exactly such an attempt which leads to the abuse of power, because this attempt to protect people from bad rulers is carried out by giving total control to the rulers.

The notion that humans and human society are perfectible entails, and is entailed by, the denial of any concept of natural law and the rejection of any standards of good and bad. But it is exactly this concept and these standards which have “historically proven to be the most dependable defender of human liberty,” according to Colson. “The commitment to a higher law,” he continues, puts one “on the front lines in resisting laws or actions contrary to that law.” It was Nixon's belief in the ultimate value of his own ability to organize a good society, his belief that his programs would be a great step forward for the nation, which caused him to decide to violate laws; if Nixon could truly create a little piece of utopia, then it would be OK to break a law or two to achieve this, right?

This “view was argued eloquently by the British statesman Edmund Burke during a famous 1788 debate in the House of Lords over the impeachment of the governor general of India. The governor general had claimed a right to arbitrary authority over the unruly nationals, arguing that they were, after all, used to despotism. Burke replied with these wonderful words: ‘My lords, the East India Company have not arbitrary power to give him [the governor general]. The king has no arbitrary power to give. Neither your lordships, nor the Commons, nor the whole legislature, have arbitrary power to give. Arbitrary power is a thing which no man can give ... We are all born, high as well as low, governors as well as governed, in subjection to one great, immutable, preexisting law ... This great law does not arise from our combinations and compacts; on the contrary, it gives to them all the sanctions they can have.’”

Burke, and Colson who here quotes him, points out the two-fold danger of utopian thinking: first, it justifies “by any means necessary” thinking, for if we can truly create a wonderful utopia here and now on earth, then it would certainly be worth breaking a few rules to get there, or even killing a few people to create a paradise for the human race; second, it places absolute power in the hands of a few people, or even one person, who has the alleged vision and knowledge about how to create this utopia, because that person has to control all the variables of society carefully and precisely in order to form the perfect organization.

Behind this kind of thinking, Nixon's aide continues, is the “notion that human nature is essentially good ... Utopianism says: if only we create the right social and economic structures, we can usher in an age of harmony and prosperity. But Christians can never give their allegiance to utopian projects.”

Burke had a realistic view of human nature. Humans are wonderful, rational, skilled, and creative, but they are not perfect. Humans will, from time to time, fail. They will sometimes choose evil instead of good. They will sometimes seek to harm instead of help, sometimes be selfish instead of selfless.

Burke rejected the type of view held by Hobbes, in which human nature is only selfish and violent; but he also rejected the views of Rousseau, which said that humans are naturally good. Burke saw humans as a mixed picture, sometimes doing good, and sometimes evil.

If we lose sight of the fact that humans are limited, if we trust too much in human plans and project, we end up at Watergate: Nixon's aide momentarily lost sight of those basic principles we call “rule of law” and “natural law”, and followed the president into the scandal; when it all came undone, he commented that “the human propensity to evil and disorder must be hemmed in by law and tradition.” Burke would have agreed.

Procter and Gamble and Racism and Class Warfare

Before we go any further, this posting is NOT asking anybody to boycott anything. I am not writing about the Procter and Gamble corporation; I am writing about the private activities of the owners and operators, and their families. You may go ahead and buy your soap in peace.

One of the founders of P&G was Clarence Gamble. In addition to selling soap, Mr. Gamble was also a hard-core racist. Having made his millions, he sought ways to fund his quest for racial purity. Enter Margaret Sanger and her organization, Planned Parenthood. She devised a scheme known as the "Negro Project", with the stated goal of reducing the birthrate among African-Americans. Gamble funded it generously.

This was part of a larger social movement at the time known as "Eugenics", the desire and attempt to control human breeding so that only the "best" and "fittest" people would procreate. There were various forms of Eugenics, from state eugenics (controlled by the government in the interests of the state), to vicious quests for "racial purity". Margaret Sanger would go on to be invited by the KKK to speak at one of their rallies; she happily accepted the invitation, and considered her speech there a success.

The Gamble family's racist quest continued into the next generation: Sarah Gamble Epstein, Clarence's daughter, publicly defends and supports the government of mainland communist China and its program of forced abortion against the will of pregnant women. She states that Americans should be "praising China for looking forward", and that Chinese women should know that it is "both patriotic and beneficial" to cooperate with the government's program of involuntary abortions.

Other financial leaders were involved in funding racist schemes: the Carnegie Institute, founded by industrialist Andrew Carnegie, funded the work of Charles Davenport, who took eugenics into the sphere of government policy. Following the ideas of Francis Galton, who first proposed the intentional breeding of humans, Davenport, and his assistant, Harry Laughlin, encouraged the U.S. government to reduce the immigration quotas for those seen as "racially inferior", including Jews. This was during the 1930's, when Hitler was gearing up for the Holocaust, which would begin in 1938. Jews who might have lived were denied admission to the U.S. and forced to remain in Germany. Laughlin praised the Nazi policies of enforced sterilization and breeding, and received an honorary doctorate in eugenics from the Nazi government.

Wesley Smith, an opponent of eugenics, writes that "eugenics springs from a poisoned intellectual well. The very idea that we have the right to decide which human traits to enhance and which to eradicate is what leads to trouble. Social pressures can oppress even without formal government actions. Besides, if the new eugenics became popular, it wouldn't take long for politicians to get into the act." The "new eugenics" to which Smith refers are the attempts at genetic engineering, combined with decisions based on pre-natal testing.

Author Harry Brunius asks, "what is the foundation of human dignity ... ? Or, more precisely, what is the ... basis for individual rights ... ?"

The Massacre at Chios

The French painter Eugene Delacroix immortalized the Massacre at Chios; this is one of his most famous paintings. The painting was originally exhibited in 1824, and purchased at that time by Charles X, king of France, for the Louvre museum. As a work of art, the painting has earned a place in history.

The picture also serves as a history lesson. The Massacre at Chios occurred in 1822. The Islamic armies of the Ottoman Empire were attacking Greece. These armies, launched from Turkey, encountered the small island of Chios on their way to Greece. Here, it became clear what their intent was. The island was not only a military objective, but also an example of the kind of human subjugation envisioned by the Muslim attempt at expansion. The women of the island were subjected to systematic mass rape; large numbers of the population were executed.

The events at Chios awakened Europe to the inhumane terror which was threatening, once again, to invade. Delacroix's painting was a wake-up call.

Pretzels, Bagels, and Culture

Approximately two thousand years ago, central Europe was the home of the Germanic tribes. The Roman expansion in Europe never succeeded in establishing a permanent foothold in the area north of the Danube and east of the Rhine, leaving this region as one of the few truly independent cultural centers of Europe.

These Germanic tribes - they were not Germans, though some of them would later be - gave us many cultural treasures, including literary masterpieces like the Icelandic Sagas, or the Nibelungen; they also gave us the basis of the English language. English, as students of Beowulf know, is derived largely from Germanic dialects like Saxon and Frisian, and only a few English vocabulary items came from Latin.

These founders of what would later become several nations - Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Germany, Prussia, Austria, Flanders, Iceland, and kingdoms like Saxony, Bavaria, Hessen, etc. - were innovators and experimenters. One interesting practice which they began was the boiling of a solution of lye and water. Lye is a caustic and dangerous chemical, sodium hydroxide, NaOH. This boiling mixture is toxic if consumed, and causes chemical burns on human skin. But into this liquid, they tossed lumps of bread dough. Scooping them out of vat, these lumps were then baked, often with salt. The lye was rendered non-toxic by the baking and by reacting with the bread dough, but it left a distinctive and pleasurable taste, and a glossy brown surface.

A few centuries later, the Germanic tribes would be exposed to the belief systems of Christianity and Judaism. This caused them to give up their habit of sacrificing humans on stone altars to the Germanic pagan divinities. But they didn't give up their lye.

Those Germanic tribes who converted to Christianity began to form their bread dough into the distinctive shape we now know as a "pretzel"; the Jews who settled in the area learned the practice from their Germanic neighbors, but opted for a simpler, circular shape - a bagel, from the Germanic word meaning "circle".

Newton vs. Leibniz

The intense debate between Leibniz and Newton about the nature of space-time has impacted the nature of physics to this day.

Leibniz writes that “space-time” (i.e., space and time) does not have an independent, real existence of its own. Rather, it exists only relative to objects. If we removed all energy and matter from the universe, there would be no space or time, Leibniz writes.

Newton writes that space-time is real, that it has an existence all of its own, independent of material objects. So Newton writes that if we removed all matter and energy from the universe, we would be left with empty space and empty time.

Leibniz writes that there is no such thing as “empty space-time”, and produces the following argument for this view. If, Leibniz says, we moved everything in the universe five feet in one direction, there would be no discernable difference between the state affairs before the move and the state of affairs after the move. Thus, Leibniz continues, there is no absolute location, but rather, location is merely relative. Therefore, space-time exists merely relative to objects, and does not have a real independent existence of its own.

Newton disagrees. Newton writes that, if we removed all matter and energy from the universe, and in its place we placed a bucket of water, and then we gradually begin to spin that bucket of water, eventually the water would spill over the edge. This would prove that the bucket is spinning. But, if the universe were devoid of all matter and energy in this experiment, the bucket would have to be spinning relative to something, and, Newton continues, that “something” would be the absolute, independently-existing space-time matrix.

Newton later revised this thought experiment to go as follows: in a universe emptied of all matter and energy, place two rocks connected by a string. If we spin these rocks around an axis point between them, tension will be detected on the string. This would prove that the rocks are indeed spinning. But they must be spinning relative to something, which would be the absolute independently-existing space-time matrix.

A very good account of this debate, describing both sides, can be found the following book:

Author: Sklar, Lawrence
Title: Space, Time, and Spacetime
Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1974, 1976, 1977
ISBN 0-520-03174-1

The book was written by a professor at the U of M, and is used in U of M physics courses. I strongly recommend this book. The section on the Leibniz-Newton debate is only part of the book; it discusses many other topics.

If you are taking a physics course this semester, you might ask your physics teacher about this.

So, who was correct? Leibniz or Newton?

J.S. Bach in Michigan?

Once, when an acquaintance praised Bach's wonderful skill as an organist, he replied with characteristic humility and wit, "there is nothing very wonderful about it. You have only to hit the right notes at the right moment, and the instrument does the rest."

Bach had twenty children. The love he felt for his large family is evident in a heartrending letter Bach wrote on behalf of an erring son who had incurred large debts and then left his town: "What can I do or say more, my warnings having failed, and my loving care and help having proved unavailing? I can only bear my cross in patience and commend my undutiful boy to God's mercy, never doubting that He will hear my sorrow-stricken prayer and in His good time bring my son to understand that the path of coversion leads to Him."

As Dr. Ingram demonstrated in lecture, Bach is one of the most productive, gifted, and seminal genius-composers in the history of music. One can easily devote years of study in order to fully explore Bach's music. We can only have the briefest of introductions to him now, so please consider examining him more fully on your own later.

There is a book entitled, "Gödel, Escher, and Bach", which explores the relations between the music of various composers on the one hand, and the concepts of algebra, artificial intelligence, and visual patterning in art on the other. This book is worth reading, because it shows the algebraic algorithms which various composers used in their works, and how those equations also show up in the visual arts (painting, drawing, etc.) and in literature.

Bach borrowed, e.g., the literary structure of chiasmus and created a musical analogue to it.

But Bach also has a Michigan connection!

Several years ago, a man was looking through some old used books in Frankenmuth, Michigan. He found and purchased some old German books. When he took them home and began to read them, he realized that these books were from the personal library of J.S. Bach! Bach had written many comments and notes in the margins of these books, just as most students do. The notes have been carefully copied from these books and published in a book of their own. "Bach's Marginalia" is an example of the kind of discoveries you can make if you have a good education and spend your time paging through old books!

At first, it might seem odd that Bach's book would end up in Michigan. But in the decades after Bach's death in 1750, millions of Germans came to the United States. In fact, more people came from Germany than from any other country. Naturally, these people brought all kinds of personal possessions with them, including a few old books!

Goethe, Faust, and Religion

How can we make sense of Goethe's seemingly self-contradictory views on religion? On the one hand, he makes no pretense of being a Christian, and yet on the other hand, he views the Christian Bible as the source of ultimate spiritual truth. Faust is filled with Biblical allusions. Christianity has both spiritual doctrines and moral doctrines, and Goethe endorses some of both. What is he up to?

One possible way to interpret Goethe would be to say that he is making the historical distinction between Christianity and the church. Christianity is a set of concepts and the actions entailed by the belief in those concepts. The church, on the other hand, is an institution. Goethe rejects both Christianity and the Church, but he rejects them separately, and differently. His rejection of the Church is absolute. His analysis of Christianity is more tentative and wavering. He seems attracted to some facets of Christian spirituality, but unable to embrace them.

We can trace these two through history, and see that often, Christianity opposed the church in many situations. In other situations, Christianity clearly sided with the church. Can you think of concrete historical examples?

So perhaps this was what motivated Goethe's somewhat schizophrenic views. Was Goethe trying to embrace the some of the views of Christianity, reject others, and at the same time distance himself from the church? Which sentences in Faust would be evidence for this?

Goethe had, in the final analysis, an inability to commit, either to a woman, or to a system of belief. He rejected both Christianity and atheism, used the word "pagan" to describe himself, and was nevery quite able to formulate a specific statement of what he actually did believe.

When we study about Goethe, we can take two approaches:

on the one hand, we can study about Goethe's life, his friends and business acquaintances, the influential thinkers of his day, and look at photographs of his house and how he decorated it, and then see how these things influenced, or are reflected in, the text of "Faust".

on the other hand, we can strictly ignore all the background information about Goethe and the times he lived in, and instead focus on the text of Faust alone, examining it carefully for clues about what Goethe thought and what he meant.

Which approach is the correct one?

What do the words "isogogics" and "hermeneutics" mean?

Louis XIV

During the later years of the reign of Louis XIV, a diplomat from Venice visited France and recorded numerous observations, including: “ ... Colbert has increased the treasury by 50 million in secure income; he has actually been the cause of the king's success. But he is deaf to the miserable cries of the oppressed peoples, and without feelings toward the misery of the poor, and unapproachable concerning the general appeals for help, in order to sacrifice for the needs and excessive demands of the ruler ... ”

The absolutism of Louis XIV drove some of France's most skilled workers - the Hugonauts and the Jews - to Prussia, where Hohenzollern dynasty was more welcoming, especially in the person of Frederick the Great. This absolutism also probably sowed the seeds of the French Revolution: the people of France had suffered under such harsh rule, and only people who were very desperate would see the bloody butchery of the French Revolution as an acceptable attempt at freedom. The burdens which Louis XIV placed upon society evoked the bitterness of Rousseau's criticism. The absolutistic attempt to enforce a religious belief system, even if it were well-intendend, created its very opposite: a nation in which there were nearly no Christians; France had many churches and priests, but actual Christianity was rarely, if ever, found.

So absolutism, in addition to being no fun, is ultimately self-defeating.

What are You Worth?

At the very beginning of our Humanities course, we read two samples of law codes from the Ancient Near East: Hammurabi and Moses. In many ways, these two leaders form a paradigmatic dichotomy. The Babylonian king Hammurabi sees human life as a commodity, which has a cash value, and can be traded or taken at will. Moses, leading a group of escaped slaves out of Egypt and organizing them into their own society, views human life as something with value and dignity, something which demands respect.

There are many other polarities between these two worldviews, and they continue today.

Hammurabi lives on today, in the words of a Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes: "I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand." Holmes sees human life as merely a series of material objects, like rocks or dirt. Representing Moses in our era, the Pulitzer-Prize winning author Saul Bellow, writes that if we agree with Holmes, "our humanity is at risk - it is at risk because the feeling that life is sacred has died away in this century."

Stereotyping Tolerance?

Public schools are constantly the targets of those who wish to shape public opinion on every topic from "Coke vs. Pepsi" to abortion. A recent salvo was fired by a group calling itself the "Southern Poverty Law Center", a name which calls forth sympathy, but which in fact designates a wealthy group of northern lobbyists. This organization mails a periodical entitled "Teaching Tolerance", but does this magazine instead engender negative cliches?

A recent issue addressed the topic of bullying. Nobody likes bullies or bullying. The article was illustrated with five cartoon-like drawings. In each of these, the "bully" was an overweight white male student, slightly taller than average, with blond hair and blue eyes. The "victims" of the bully represented the spectrum of race, gender, hair and eye color, etc., with one notable exception: none of the victims were white males.

What should we conclude from this?

Truth and the Man

Throughout history, the idea of univeral truth has been a tool of the oppressed who seek freedom. Those who seek to use power ruthlessly have little interest in pursuing absolute truths; they say or write whatever is useful in terms of reaching their goals as they exploit and oppress others. Those who suffer injustice at the hands of the power-hungry seek timeless and objective standards in their quest for liberty.

Oppressors like the Roman governor of an out-of-the-way province ask sarcastically, "what is truth?", as they do whatever is needed to increase financial revenue and promote their own political careers, even if it means killing an innocent Rabbi along the way, or executing thousands. Centuries later, genocidal dictators like Stalin would orchestrate famines in order to kill millions, and re-write the history books annually to cover their tracks.

The oppressed, like a rag-tag bunch of ex-slaves wandering through the Arabian desert, form a culture which seeks and values knowledge of what is true, independent of opinion or belief. This understanding of, and respect for, discovered reality, instead of manufactured propaganda, would ultimately blossom in the idea that "the truth will set you free."

Historical movements of those seeking freedom are based on the concept of objective truth, from the American Revolution's concept that a person's rights are "self-evident", to Cicero's defense against imperialism based on a "natural law"; but those whose desire for power is absolute and infinite inevitably come into conflict with, and find it necessary to deny, those truths which are also absolute and infinite - those same truths which are the source of freedom and justice will be opposed by those whose goals can be achieved only by taking away freedom and justice.

The search for transcendent truth not only motivates education, but it prevents any one group in society from imposing its subjective perspective on all the others.

Pax Romana - NOT!

Most history books list the years from 27 B.C. to 180 A.D., which is from the time that Augustus Octavian took power until the time that Marcus Aurelius died, as the "Pax Romana" - "the Roman peace".

In reality, this was an era filled with nearly constant military action. The empire was defending itself against attempted foreign invasions, and also against domestic uprisings in various provinces and annexed territories. Marcus Aurelius himself spent most of his career, not in Rome, but fighting in Europe with the army.

Perhaps the reason that this violent and war-torn era was named "the Roman peace" was because it was a time when, in terms of domestic politics, the authority and the power of the emperor remained relatively unchallenged. For nearly a century, prior to 27 B.C., the Roman world had been savaged by a vicious civil war. Only in comparison with this bloody power struggle of Roman against Roman could the later era be seen as peaceful.

If not a time of "peace," it could perhaps at least be described as an era of domestic political stability.

Who Killed Jesus?

For the last two thousand years, historians have discussed the death of Jesus. All agree that it is historically an important event, shaping culture for millenia aftward; but who is responsible for this murder? This question is somewhat controversial, and has even been considered by some people to lead to anti-Semitism.

We'll present four interpretive options:

First, we can see the Roman occupational forces as responsible for the death of Jesus. He was, after all, crucified by Roman soldiers, under the supervision of a Roman governor; the records of the event say that Pontius Pilate "turned him over to be crucified." Pilate and his soldiers can be seen as the killers.

Second, we can see Jesus as a victim of class warfare. The majority of ordinary Jews were tyrranized by the upper-class Jewish elite. Jesus represented a threat to the power of this aristocracy, teaching that an ordinary Jew could worship, study, and pray in his hometown synagogue, and did not need to make piligrimages to Jerusalem's Temple. This directly threatened both the economic and spiritual hegemony of the Jersualem power class. The hotel and restaurant industry in Jerusalem, a huge source of income with the thousands of pilgrims coming to the city, would evaporate overnight if a religious leader told them that they could stay home and worship in the neighborhood synagogue; the religious leaders in the Temple would likewise lose their status as the top-most layer of the spiritual hierarchy. It was these leaders who demanded that Jesus be crucified, in order to ensure their continued dominance over the majority of ordinary Jews.

Third, Jesus can be seen as a victim of human nature. The literary critic Rene Girard points out the societal pattern of finding scapegoats; Jesus made a convenient sacrifice for the political tensions of the moment.

Finally, Jesus may bear some responsibility - given a chance to offer a defense, Jesus declines to speak, virtually guaranteeing a death sentence. Under this interpretation, it might seem that Jesus manipulated events toward an outcome that one would normally strive to avoid.

Archeology and History

Archeologists are constantly digging up artifacts which interact with our historical narratives. These objects, by themselves, give us little information, and can, in fact, mislead us toward false conclusions about events and people. Taken in the context of text, they can, however, deepen our knowledge of what has happened and who did it.

("Archaeology" can be spelled with or without the second "a"!)

A recent example: in that highly disputed bit of land called "Israel", "Palastine", "Judea", or "the Levant", a team of archaeologists has recently discovered the earliest verified Christian church in Israel. It dates to the early 200's, and is located in the Valley of Armageddon, north of Jerusalem. Mosaics and inscriptions identified the site.

Questions quickly come to mind - why would oldest remaining Christian church in Palastine date from the early 200's, when we know that large numbers of Christians were there as early as 35 A.D.? Why are the Christian churches in other parts of the world so much older?

Texts give us the answer: during the first decades of Christianity, the followers of Jesus met in synagogues and in the Jersusalem Temple, because they were still viewed, at that time, as Jews. Yes, the early Christians were simply one type of Jew. There were several different varieties of Judaism at that time, and Christianity seemed, at first, simply like one more version of the Jewish faith. So there were no separate buildings designated as Christian churches.

When the Romans destroyed the Jerusalem Temple, and Christians and Jews were scattered across the Roman Empire, shortly before 100 A.D., the construction of Christian churches, as distinct from Jewish worship structures begins in larger numbers. So why do we find that oldest Christian church in Palastine is from around 200 A.D.? Why not one hundred years earlier?

In fact, there were many churches built a hundred years earlier in the Roman province of Judea. However, they were destroyed, and are not there for today's archaeologists to find.

Unlike the early churches in Greece and other areas of the Roman Empire, the churches in the Levant were the targeted for destruction. In the late 600's, Islamic armies swept through the area, destroying both Jewish and Christian worship structures.

That's why today's archeologists don't find old churches in that part of the world.

Renaissance Conflict!

In Florence, during that time period which we call the "Renaissance", lived the famous speaker Savonarola (born 1452). He gained his fame as a Christian critic of the popular arts and entertainment, and began a movement to reform society. Savonarola wanted to reduce the problems of alcohol abuse, the sexual exploitation of women, and a general attitude of people wanting to simply be entertained, instead of being productive and constructive and seeking intellectual challenges.

But Savonarola's good intentions went bad. At some point, he slipped away from his original Christian viewpoint, and instead merely claimed to be a Christian, while in fact actually seeking to control the lives of those around them, by trying to make them conform to his arbitrary standards. Instead of inspiring people with a hopeful message, he began to simply place a series of legalistic demands upon them.

What did the good, enlightened Renaissance people of Florence do to Savonarola? They simultaneously burnt and hanged him!

So, nobody really ends up looking very good in the this situation: Savonarola abandoned his attempt to help people and sought instead merely to control them. In return, the so-called "Renaissance" people, known for their "intellectual curiousity", decided to burn him at the stake. So much for the Renaissance!

An Emperor By Any Other Name

You've heard of "Charlemagne", and you've heard him mentioned as "Charles the Great" and even "Carolus Magnus" in Latin. These names are, obviously, all equivalent, but he would have answered to none of them. He was a Frank, and spoke Frankish until the day of his death. (His biographer and close friend, Einhard, says that Charlemagne investigated learning Latin, but decided not to do it.) He hired diplomats to speak in Latin for him.

His name, in the only language he ever knew, was simply "Karl". The Frankish language is a dialect of German, and a modern version of it is still spoken in the homeland of the Franks. This region, Frankenland (or "Franconia" in English), constitutes the northern half of the modern province of Bavaria. As his reputation grew, he became known as "Karl der Grosse" (properly "Karl der Große"), meaning "Karl the Great".

His people, the Franks, left their name on city of Frankfurt, which means literally "the ford of the Franks", because that is where the Franks crossed the river during the era which we call the "migration of peoples" (historians call this the "Völkerwanderung"). There are actually three towns named "Frankfurt", separated by several hundred miles. By these town names, one can re-trace the route of the Franks during the Völkerwanderung. Even Michigan has its Frankenmuth. The nation of France also bears the name of this Germanic tribe - a bit of irony!

Could it be that he became known as "Charlemagne" or "Charles the Great" because French-speaking and English-speaking historians didn't want to admit that the first and most powerful central European empire was formed and ruled by a German?

Constantine

So why do they call him Constantine "the Great"? Well, he did manage to unify a Roman Empire that was threatening to politically disintegrate; he moved the capitol from Rome to Constantinople (a/k/a Byzantium); he triggered an artistic creative spree of buildings and sculptures and mosiacs; and, perhaps most significantly, he legalized Christianity - taking this belief system from an illegal activity punishable by death or imprisonment to an accepted, and even admired, status within the empire.

Interestingly, Constantine did not illegalize the other belief systems in the empire - those versions of polytheistic paganism which had been responsible for executing hundreds of thousands of Christians. Rather, he showed them a type of tolerance which they had never shown to the Christians. Constantine thereby demonstrated what the Romans could expect from their first Christian emperor. Given a chance to exact blood revenge from his former persecutors, he chose not to do so. It is this voluntary surrender of power, the decision not to oppress, which would characterize a new era. Perhaps this is what makes him great.

Julius Caesar - Hero or Jerk?

The guy who almost was the first Roman emperor was amazingly popular - yeah, that's right, Julius Caesar never actually was emperor, but he almost was, and he was really quite well-liked by the average Roman citizen, at least for most of his career. Toward the end of his life, his popularity went down a little, because some folks suspected that his loyalties might be split between Rome and Egypt - or, more accurately, between Rome and Cleopatra, who ruled Egypt. But, anyway, he was well-liked by most of the people most of the time.

He worked to keep his popular status by handing out citizenships to some of the residents of the territories which had been added to the empire - they didn't resent being conquered so much, if they could get some benefit out of it. And he made sure that the average Roman citizen had access to the minutes of the meetings of the Senate.

But this popular guy also had his dark side. In the course of conquering Gaul, he boasted that he killed a million people, and sold another million into slavery. Now, these numbers might not be exact - it could be a little more, or a little less. But the bottom line is this: to kill anywhere near that many people, we're not talking about soldiers falling in battle. We're talking about genocide. We're talking about killing children, women, cripples, and old folks. We're talking about burning entire villages to the ground.

So maybe Julius Caesar wasn't such a nice guy, after all.

Cuturally Schizophrenic

Between 50 A.D. and 800 A.D., the Christian faith spread through Europe. The continent had previously been dominated by various systems of polytheistic paganism. The new faith did not immediately erase all traces of the earlier belief system. On the contrary, we can see “split personality” in European culture.

Consider Beowulf: this story reflects much of the blood-thirstiness and lack of regard for human life which was the culture of Norse mythology - yet, at the same time, traces of the Christian virtues of humility and helping other humans are found. So the characters evince simultaneously desires for blood-revenge and a selfless altruism: a truly mixed lot!

Likewise, the ideology of “courtly love” (which may be only a literary idea, and never carried out in real life) contains both traces of Christian pacifistic concepts, and traces of the pagan “warrior-cult” mentality.

The German folktale known as the "Nibelungenlied" was re-written in the 1200's to include references to Christian concepts of self-sacrifice to aid others, yet its main plot is one of pagan revenge and power-seeking.

When reading European literature, it is necessary to unravel the tangled strands of paganism and Christianity which mingled to yield characters who act in seemingly inconsistent ways: these individuals seem, at one moment, to be vicious polytheists - at the next moment, they appear to have the Christian ideal of respect for human life.

The Punic Wars

Rome experienced three wars with Carthage between 264 B.C. and 146 B.C.; they are called the “Punic” Wars because the early founders of Carthage were from Phoenicia. These wars would essentially determine whether Rome or Carthage would be the dominate geo-political power in the Mediterranean area.

In the first Punic War, Rome, led in part by a military hero named Regulus, won Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica.

In the second Punic war, Hamilcar, a Carthiginian leader, consolidated Spain under Carthage's rule. His son, Hannibal, attacked a Roman outpost in Spain, and then marched with elephants over both the Pyrenees and the Alps, and came close to the city of Rome itself. In panic, the citizens of Rome conducted human sacrifices to convince their idols to defend them. Hannibal did not take the city, due in part to a tactically disastrous hesitation on his part, and in part to the fact that the supply lines which were to bring him more troops and equipment were cut by the Romans. The Roman officer Scipio Africanus the Elder captured Spain, and then began to invade northern Africa. Hannibal abandoned his campaign in Italy and went south to defend the city of Carthage itself. By the end of this war, Carthage was stripped of its various territories, and reduced to a small area around the city of Carthage itself. It was forced to pay tribute to Rome.

The Roman politician Cato the Elder incited Scipio Africanus the Younger to attack Carthage in the third Punic War. Carthage was completely destroyed by the dominating Roman military.

These wars left Rome as the clear master of the Mediterranean region; world history would be very different had Carthage won these wars: your computer would have a font called “Times New Carthaginian”, and you would use “Carthaginian numerals”.