[FRIAM] Revising the American Revolution

[Jochen Fromm]

"What do we do when we discover that people who have achieved great things have also done great harms"Good question. The Greek philosopher Aristotle ("We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit”) was a teacher of Alexander the Great, who longed for world domination, conquered an empire and crucified people of cities who would not surrender. Great or not so much? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_the_GreatCharles the Great (748-814) could not read or write. He invaded Saxony and waged war for 30 years. Those who do not want to convert to Christianity were killed.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CharlemagneFrederick the Great, king of Prussia (1740-1786) invaded his neighboring countries and waged 3 wars over 22 years until he has turned his country into a military state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_the_Great-J.
-------- Original message --------From: thompnickson2 at gmail.com Date: 10/23/21  20:09  (GMT+01:00) To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <friam at redfish.com> Subject: [FRIAM] Revising the American Revolution Hi, everybody, I know.  Who has time to listen to podcasts.  Most of them are redundant and so can be listened to while making chicken pot pie.  But every once in a while there is one I have to listen to twice because it acquaints me with a bunch of stuff I never will dive into but which I really want to know.   https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-story-of-americas-founding-you-werent-taught-in-school/id1548604447?i=1000539039484 The interviewee here Woody Houlton, a promoter of the 1619 Project, whose goal is to recast the American revolution and particularly the constitution as counter revolutionary moves.  It puts me in mind of Charles Beard, an American historian who wrote in the 30’s a materialist history of the US which was largely buried during the McCarthy era.  (I hope I have this right, John)  The REAL revolution, on this account occurs after the Civil War with the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments.   What I love about this is that illuminates for me what is going on in our current debates over textualism.  The Textualists are trying to get us back to the pre-Civil War constitution which was dedicated to preserving the prerogatives of the privileged classes.  That’s the world they hanker for.   Another bell it rings for me concerns “cancel culture”.  Washington and Jefferson were in many ways, vile men:  Both were voracious land speculators in stolen Indian land and Jefferson, in his Idyllic Monticello, literally lived on top of the underground habitations of his slaves.                                                                                                                       What do we do when we discover that people who have achieved great things have also done great harms.  Basically it comes down to, Am I allowed to watch a Woody Allen Movie?  Perhaps, if I were to watch a Woody Allen movie, it would mean that I was NOT watching an equally good movie by an unknown film guy, that our worship of Lee and Washington and Jefferson crowds out the accomplishments of lesser known figures.   Shall we instead worship MLK, who I guess was an infamous philanderer?   I think the problem here is with WORSHIP, full stop.  But, then, if we don’t stand together in admiration of other people, how do we stand together.  How do we achieve coalition without charisma?   Nick Nick ThompsonThompNickSon2 at gmail.comhttps://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ 
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