Seikilos Epitaph – Song of Seikilos:
The Seikilos epitaph is the oldest surviving example of a complete musical composition, including musical notation, from anywhere in the world. The song, the melody of which is recorded, alongside its lyrics, in the ancient Greek musical notation, was found engraved on a tombstone, near Aidin, Turkey (not far from Ephesus). The find has been dated variously from around 200 BC to around AD 100.
That’s pretty darn awesome. You can read more about it here.
The August 2011 City Journal featured a fascinating article entitled, “The Age of Ships, subtitled, “A time before passenger jets, when ocean liners were ‘the greatest of the works of man’”.
Author Michael Anton covered the history and technology behind the luxury ocean liners in the era after Titanic, before airplanes displaced ships as the dominant means of passenger travel across the Atlantic Ocean. The competition between commercial lines was fierce, especially to be able to cite the fastest Trans-Atlantic crossing times.
There are lots of interesting tidbits, but I especially liked the story Vladimir Yourkevitch, who fled Russia after the Communist takeover and had to take a job in France as a riveter in the Renault factory. The image of an immigrant factory worker trying to persuade the chairman of a major French shipyard that his revolutionary new ship hull design would work is something straight out of fiction. But it did indeed work, and that ship would later set one of the speed records.
(Read the full text of “The Age of Ships“.)
Recently, the Washington Post published a good short essay by James Loewen on Five myths about why the South seceded. Those myths are:
If you’d like to do some serious reading on the Civil War, I highly recommend James McPherson’s stellar history of the Civil War, Battle Cry of Freedom. And I’d recommend the stellar trilogy of historical fiction by Jeff and Michael Shaara: Gods and Generals, The Killer Angels, and Last Full Measure.
This course by historian Eric Daniels is just now available for purchase through the Ayn Rand Bookstore, and I highly recommend it. (I highly recommend everything by Dr. Daniels, in fact!)
Religion in American History
by Eric DanielsThis course investigates the historical development of religion in American history from the importation of the Puritan theocracy in the seventeenth century to the growth of evangelical ideas in the twenty-first. It illustrates how religion developed institutionally and in American culture. Dr. Daniels evaluates the role religion has played at crucial moments in our history and arms listeners against those who would give religion a central role today.
(4 hrs.,35 min., with Q & A)
The March 4, 2010 issue of US News & World Report has a nice interview with John Lewis on his new book Nothing Less Than Victory: Decisive Wars and the Lessons of History.
Here’s a sample:
Why should nations go to war?The actual goal of war, what we want, what we’re after when we fight, shouldn’t be the destruction of the hostile world. The reason we’re fighting… is because another side has decided to attack. The purpose of a war is to reverse that hostile decision. What we were after in Japan in 1945—and in Germany, for that matter—was to end those countries’ drives for aggressive military dominance.
(Read the full article.)
Crossposted from Politics without God.
My husband Paul Hsieh (of Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine) recently pointed me to an essay by Eric Raymond entitled Deism and the Founding Fathers. I’d definitely recommend reading the whole essay, but I wanted to except a few critical passages:
Religious conservatives are fond of replying by pointing excitedly at the references to “Nature’s God”, “Divine Providence”, and the “Creator” in the Declaration of Independence.
Raymond then quotes the relevant passages of the Declaration:
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights;
And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.
Raymond then cites some other passages in Jefferson’s writings where he displays as obvious hostility to Christianity. So Raymond asks, “Of what ‘God’, if not the Christian one, was Jefferson speaking?” He replies:
The answer to this question — which also explains the references in the Declaration of Independence — is that Jefferson, like many intellectuals of his time, was a Deist. The “Creator” and “Nature’s God” in the Declaration of Independence, and the God of Jefferson’s altar, is not the intervening Christian God but the God of Deism.Deism was an early attempt to reconcile the mechanistic world-view arising from experimental science with religion. Deists believed in a remote sort of clockmaker-God who created the universe but then refrained from meddling in it afterwards. Deists explicitly rejected faith, revelation, religious doctrine, religious authority, and all existing religions. They held that humans could know the mind of God only through the study of nature; in many versions of Deist thinking, the mind of God was explicitly identified with the laws of nature.
Thus “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God”; in Deist thought these concepts blurred together. The phrase “endowed by their Creator” could be rendered accurately as “endowed by Nature”. In modern terms, this is an entirely naturalistic account of human rights.
That’s exactly right. Finally, Raymond notes:
Jefferson’s “altar of God” quote and the references in the Declaration of Independence are easy to misconstrue today because Deism did not long outlive the Founding Fathers. In their time it functioned as a sort of halfway house for intellectuals who rejected traditional religion but were unwilling to declare themselves atheists or agnostics. As the social risk of taking these positions decreased, Deism waned.
Given the bravery of the early Americans in opposing the British Empire, I doubt that intellectual cowardice was the reason for their deism. I suspect — although I’ve not much researched the subject — that they accepted some version of the Argument from Design. Absent a solid grasp of the fact that physical laws are the necessary expression of the identity of entities and absent an explanation for the great diversity and complexity of living organisms, the Argument from Design would seem quite plausible. It’s still flawed, purely on philosophic grounds, but the mistake was understandable in the 18th century. Deism was the rather benign result of that mistake.
Today, people have far less excuse for believing in God’s existence on such grounds, as the scientific and philosophic objections to the Argument from Design are well-known and devastating. They have no excuse for leaping from such arguments to claims about the truth of Christianity. The Argument from Design, even if sound, could not lend the slightest bit of support to the myths and dogmas of Christianity.
For more, see my three podcasts on the Argument from Design: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. Part 4 is forthcoming.
In Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead, there’s a scene where villain Ellsworth Toohey looks at the New York City skyline and muses about modern civilization:
…Look at it. A sublime achievement, isn’t it? A heroic achievement. Think of the thousands who worked to create this and of the millions who profit by it. And it is said that but for the spirit of a dozen men, here and there down the ages, but for a dozen men — less, perhaps — none of this would have been possible. And that might be true.(Part 2, Chapter
When I first read that passage, I wasn’t sure whether it was historically accurate or not.
But as it turns out, there a number of crucial innovations that some claim to have only been invented and/or discovered once in history, then spread to the rest of humanity from that single source.
I can’t vouch for the accuracy of all of the following, but some purported examples include:
And probably the most crucial to Western civilization:
Logic (Aristotle)
If these claims are true, then it may indeed be the case that our modern technological society (including my ability to compose this blog post on a MacBook Pro and upload it onto a remote web server where it can then be read by people around the world) would not exist were it not for a half-dozen mostly-anonymous innovators.
The Objectivism Seminar is working through Dr. Leonard Peikoff’s all-too-topical book, The Ominous Parallels. In it, he explores what gave rise to to the fascist, totalitarian regime of Nazi Germany — and analyzes whether and how a fascist, totalitarian regime could emerge here in America.
Peikoff summarized the results, social and political:
The Objectivism Seminar is working through Dr. Leonard Peikoff’s all-too-topical book, The Ominous Parallels. In it, he explores what gave rise to to the fascist, totalitarian regime of Nazi Germany — and analyzes whether and how a fascist, totalitarian regime could emerge here in America.
The chapter closes by saying:
The poor hated the rich, the rich hated “the rabble,” the left hated the “bourgeoisie,” the right hated the foreigners, the traditionalists hated the new, and the young hated everything, the adults, the Allies, the West, the Jews, the cities, the “system.”
The remains of a mighty Persian army said to have drowned in the sands of the western Egyptian desert 2,500 years ago might have been finally located, solving one of archaeology’s biggest outstanding mysteries, according to Italian researchers.Bronze weapons, a silver bracelet, an earring and hundreds of human bones found in the vast desolate wilderness of the Sahara desert have raised hopes of finally finding the lost army of Persian King Cambyses II. The 50,000 warriors were said to be buried by a cataclysmic sandstorm in 525 B.C.
“We have found the first archaeological evidence of a story reported by the Greek historian Herodotus,” Dario Del Bufalo, a member of the expedition from the University of Lecce, told Discovery News.
Read the whole story for details.
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