Comments on: The Dialectic: Can Germany and France Make Europe Great Again?

By: Peter Isackson

Peter Isackson — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 19:03:43 +0000

As for France and Germany making Europe great again, as a French citizen and designated expert by the European Union, I certainly have an interest in seeing that happen. But it's a pipe dream. All European leadership has been sucked into the black hole of defending a defunct world order run from Washington, Wall Street and Silicon Valley. The latest folly is Europe's desire to save itself by duplicating the US military industrial complex, which is equivalent to destroying the last vestige of its cultural identity. Vassals don't have to think. But this is even worse. Thinking has long been suppressed in the US as irrelevant, impertinent and unproductive, a trend Trump has accelerated. But the Donald didn't invent it. Europe's leaders have followed suit. Anti-intellectualism reigns across the West.

By: Peter Isackson

Peter Isackson — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 18:46:09 +0000

Thank you Atul and Glenn, my very dear friends. It's always delightful to be reminded that there are still proponents of that aberration of thinking that's been appropriately called the Whig version of history. I'm speaking of the worldview that places post-medieval Europe at the center of the universe. Now that 85% of humanity, essentially in non-anglophone cultures, no longer believes in it, I was beginning to doubt that it still had some life in it. But that outmoded worldview has its own historical importance. It's what used to be taught in our schools as "the truth." The fact that schools in the US and Europe no longer succeed in inculcating the Whig view of history in today's youngsters is due not to a heightened interest in the subtleties of history itself,but rather because of our enlightened nations' voluntary neglect of history altogether in favor of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math), the only subjects worth being educated about. I second nearly everything Anton says, but would add that the Arabs Chinese and Indians were creating modern science centuries before 1543 (Al Biriuni beat Copernicus by 400 years). The sole difference is that their aim was not to use it to conquer the world and extract its resources!

By: Anton Schauble

Anton Schauble — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 16:22:47 +0000

In reply to Anton Schauble. The truth is that the rise of Europe is all about the rise of science, and the rise of science would have happened with or without Luther and, for that matter, with or without Descartes. Greco-Roman learning was never completely dead, even though it had to survive a thousand years of internecine war (which the Protestant Reformation and Enlightenment nationalism only added to). When Greco-Roman learning re-blossomed in the Renaissance, the birth of science was only a matter of time. In the meanwhile, it was medieval Catholics who figured out the laws of optics and algebra and chemistry and — for what it's worth — who laid out the conceptual and contractual basis of capitalism, which would turn modern science into the unstoppable productive engine it would eventually become. And though it's fashionable to give credit for the scientific method to Francis Bacon, that honor really belongs to Roger Bacon — a Franciscan priest. I get it, religion-bashing is fun, and I'm sure it wins you points with the posh crowd. But I and, I'm sure, plenty of other loyal 51�Թ� readers and listeners don't tune in for lazy anti-Catholic tropes that have more to do with repeating clichés than taking an honest, intellectual look at history.

By: Anton Schauble

Anton Schauble — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 16:22:02 +0000

It’s a little silly to say that the Copernican revolution was all about realizing “man is not the center of the universe” in the same breath as saying that the essence of European modernity is the turn to the individual. Which was it? Is man the most important thing in the universe or not? Any student of the intellectual history knows that it was the Middle Ages that were cosmocentric, and the modern age that is anthropocentric, anyway — not the other way around.

This sort of neo-Protestant, triumphalist narrative might be popular in England and New England, where you gentlemen hail from intellectually, but it ill suits people claiming to take “the pagan view of history.” The pagan view of history is the cyclical view. It was Christianity that introduced to Europe the linear conception of history — a view for which you’ve illogically given credit to Copernicus.

Again, it makes little sense to note (however rightly) that Lutheranism was about much more than just religion right before blaming religion for the savagery of the Thirty Years War. Was it about religion or not? And was a war that saw His Most Christian Majesty on the same team as Gustav II Adolphus really about religion?