BTZ42: WvB's epigraph and Elie Wiesel

[Smoke Teff]

Do you think that, practically speaking, the religiously-derived ethical education was of much use/impact for your average little German kid? (Not that the compulsory philosophically-derived ethics classes modern college students have to take seem to end up doing them much good...) 

Maybe it really was insufficient for a post-WWI world--which would fit into certain parts of what I take to be GR's cosmology, that the forces of evil have thoroughly stripped our old mythologies of their mystery and potency. 

Kant and Weber prioritize ethics, sure, though I'm not sure the work of two of a country's greatest thinkers tells us everything about what was going on inside the head of that country's average citizen. 



> On Jun 8, 2016, at 2:55 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
> 
> 
> > ... 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/20160608/338034b5/attachment.html>