BTZ42: WvB's epigraph and Elie Wiesel

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

 > ... ethics. Germany did not make them a compulsory part of education, 
as all nations now must.

I don't know what this refers to. In a historical perspective, German 
schoolkids were among the earliest in Europe to receive religious 
instructions including ethical teaching, because Luther and others 
thought that parents couldn't do the job properly.

 > Ganz allgemein gilt, dass der Religionsunterricht in Deutschland in 
der Schule eine vergleichsweise starke Stellung besitzt. Darin spiegelt 
sich geschichtlich gesehen eine Entscheidung der Reformation, die von 
Anfang an die Schule auch für die religiöse Erziehung in Pflicht 
genommen hat. Hinter dieser Entscheidung stand wiederum die Wahrnehmung, 
dass die Eltern in vielen Fällen nicht willens oder in der Lage wären, 
die religiöse Erziehung zu übernehmen. Deshalb, so etwa Luther, sollte 
die Schule - und d.h. das Gemeinwesen - in diese Aufgabe eintreten. <

http://www.rpi-loccum.de/material/aufsaetze/frieschw

Sure, this was ethical teaching in the form of Christian religious 
education (10 commandments, Sermon on the Mount etc.) - philosophy, as 
in alternative in secular times, wasn't introduced before the 1970s (in 
socialist East Germany there was a-religious ethical teaching in schools 
since the late 1940s, though) - and it will certainly not always have 
been good ethical teaching on how to treat Jews correctly. But to say 
that Germany had, compared to other European nations, a lack in ethical 
education appears to me as a pseudo-explanation without empirical basis. 
Also when you look at philosophy. While Hegel is indeed not very 
interested in ethics, Kant ("Primat der praktischen Vernunft") puts it 
in the center of his philosophy! And in 1919 Max Weber said that 
politicians have to balance out an ethic of moral conviction 
("Gesinnungsethik") by an ethic of responsibility ("Verantwortungsethik").
But perhaps you mean something else?



On 07.06.2016 16:06, Smoke Teff wrote:
> I was skimming some of the Weisenburger in advance of leading this 
> next episode, here. Was reading the full source for /GR/'s epigraph, 
> which source Weis calls "a little homily by Wernher von Braun."
>
> WvB opens: "Today, more than ever before, our survival--yours and mine 
> and our children's--depends on our adherence to ethical principles. 
> Ethics alone will decide whether atomic energy will be an earthly 
> blessing or the source of mankind's utter destruction."
>
> He says the desire for ethical action comes from a belief in A) a Last 
> Judgment and B) an immortal soul "which will cherish the reward or 
> suffer the penalty decreed in a final Judgment."
>
>
> Reminds me of seeing Elie Wiesel speak maybe five or six years ago 
> (with all kinds of protests going on outside the building).
>
> He said he has been persistently plagued by the question (from others 
> and from himself) of how WWII Germany, then the most well-educated, 
> culturally/technologically advanced civilization the world had ever 
> known would also be capable of producing such atrocity. And the 
> pursuant question of how something like that might be avoided.
>
> He said the answer was ethics. Germany did not make them a compulsory 
> part of education, as all nations now must. Knowledge becomes is at 
> best worthless, at worst dangerous, without ethics.
>
> Apologies if I've mentioned this around here before.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20160608/5002c6e2/attachment.html>