REVIVAL OF SANSKRIT

It would be quite misleading, however, to suppose that the agents of the EIC were all about making a profit for shareholders, amassing fortunes for themselves and intimidating Indian opponents. John Malcolm was not the only company man to take a serious interest in learning about his cultural environment. Warren Hastings, for example, achieved fluency in Bengali and had a decent working knowledge of Urdu and Persian. Fascinated by India’s Hindu and Buddhist past, which had faded from sight during seven centuries of Muslim rule, he pioneered the revival of Sanskrit and sponsored the first ever English translation of the Bhagavad Gita. In 1784 he supported the prodigiously polyglot Sir William Jones in founding the Calcutta Asiatic Society, which became the centre of a cultural revival that would blossom into the Bengal Renaissance, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. So great was Hastings’ cultural enthusiasm that he once declared, ‘In truth, I love India a little more than my own country.’
…..

 In general, when people encounter a foreign culture, they are bound to try and understand it in their own, familiar terms. In so doing, they become aware of elements that do not fit and at that point they recognise cultural difference, which might alarm and repel them, but equally might fascinate and attract them. In this particular case, Hastings clearly admired what he encountered. Besides, it is quite hard to see how his translation of the Bhagavad Gita served to entrench British domination. On the contrary, the comparative philology developed by William Jones undermined the Eurocentric assumption of the primacy of Graeco-Roman language and civilisation. According to Nirad Chaudhuri, in rescuing classical Sanskritic civilisation from oblivion, Hastings, Jones and other European Orientalists ‘rendered a service to Indian and Asiatic nationalism which no native could ever have given. At one stroke it put the Indian nationalist on a par with his English ruler.’ It gave him the material out of which to build ‘the historical myth’ of a Hindu civilisation that was superior to Europe’s.

Nigel Biggar, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (40-42). [2023] HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.

`

EMPIRES

This unscrupulous indifference to historical truth indicates that the controversy over empire is not really a controversy about history at all. It is about the present, not the past. An empire is a single state that contains a variety of peoples, one of which is dominant. As a form of political organisation, it has been around for millennia and has appeared on every continent. The Assyrians were doing empire in the Middle East over four thousand years ago. They were followed by the Egyptians, the Babylonians and the Persians. In the sixth century BC the Carthaginians established a series of colonies around the Mediterranean. Then came the Athenians, followed by the Romans and after them the Byzantine rump. Empire first appeared in China in the third century BC and, despite periodic collapses, still survives today.

From the seventh century AD Muslim Arabs invaded east as far as Afghanistan and west as far as central France. In the fifteenth century empire proved very popular: the Ottomans were doing it in Asia Minor, the Mughals in the Indian subcontinent, the Incas in South America and the Aztecs in Mesoamerica. Further north, a couple of centuries later, the Comanche extended their imperial sway over much of what is now Texas, while the Asante were expanding their control in West Africa. And in the 1820s King Shaka led the highly militarised Zulus in scattering other South African peoples to several of the four winds, conducting at least one exterminationist war.

Set in this global historical context, the emergence of European empires from the fifteenth century onwards is hardly remarkable. The Portuguese were first off the mark, followed by the Spanish, and then, in the sixteenth century, by the Dutch, the French and the English. The Scots attempted (in vain) to join their ranks in the 1690s and the Russians did so in the 1700s. What is remarkable, however, is that the contemporary controversy about empire shows no interest at all in any of the non-European empires, past or present. European empires are its sole concern, and of these, above all others, the English—or, as it became after the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707, the British—one. The reason for this focus is that the real target of today’s anti-imperialists or anti-colonialists is the West or, more precisely, the Anglo-American liberal world order that has prevailed since 1945.

Nigel Biggar, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (15-16). [2023] HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.

THINGS CHANGE

The Arrow 3 anti-ballistic missile defense system, manufactured by Israel Aerospace Industries, whose CEO is the son of a Holocaust survivor—will be purchased by the German Air Force for the protection of German civilians.

Things change.

Jeff Jacoby
[son of a Holocaust survivor]

8-22-2023

A GERMAN BOMB

Strasbourg’s emancipation brought two significant discoveries. Thirty miles southwest of the city, at Natzweiler, GIs overran their first concentration camp. Most of the seven thousand inmates still alive had been evacuated to the east, but ample evidence of atrocity remained. Built in 1941, Natzweiler had housed French résistants, Jews, homosexuals, and others deemed socially unfit; many had toiled in nearby granite quarries or munitions factories. A chamber built in an adjacent hotel had been used for poison-gas experiments, mostly against Gypsies imported from Auschwitz, and it was said that victims chosen for extermination were plied with sweets and cakes. Other human experiments involved typhus, yellow fever, and mustard gas. The corpses of gassed Jews were trucked by the score to a Strasbourg anatomy laboratory for dissection or preservation in alcohol as part of an SS study on “racial inferiority.” Other bodies were cremated, with families reportedly charged seventy-five Reichmarks to retrieve a clay urn of ashes. Seventeen thousand had died at Natzweiler and its satellite camps.

The second discovery was no less portentous. Close on the heels of Leclerc’s armored spearhead was an American intelligence unit code-named ALSOS, carrying secret instructions from the physicists J. Robert Oppenheimer and Luis W. Alvarez on clues to look for in investigating “the Y program”—the German atomic bomb effort. Evidence discovered in Paris and at the Philips factory in Eindhoven pointed to the University of Strasbourg as a key atomic research center. ALSOS agents darted through laboratories, offices, and homes, arresting German physicists and chemists; they retrieved unburned scraps of scientific papers stuck in the chimney of a potbelly stove. Their chief target, the physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, a close collaborator of the Nobel Prize– winner Werner Heisenberg, was away in Germany, but his papers, computations, and correspondence remained in Strasbourg to be confiscated by the agents. 

As Lieutenant General Leslie R. Groves, Jr., the director of the Manhattan Project, later wrote SHAEF, the Strasbourg seizures provided “the most complete, dependable and factual information we have obtained bearing upon the nature and extent of the German effort in our field. Fortunately it tends to confirm our conclusion that the Germans are now behind us.” Far behind: top secret assessments found that “the enemy had made practically no progress” in building a bomb, that “the effort is not large,” and that “no evidence was uncovered of any uranium work on a production scale.” Despite the Y program’s supposedly high priority, captured documents showed that German scientists had been forced to file a “certificate of urgency” for permission to buy “two slide rules for carrying out a project of military importance.” Colonel Boris T. Pash, the ALSOS commander, reported that interrogations and other evidence confirmed that “the Nazis had not progressed in atomic development as far as our own project had early in 1941.”


Rick Atkinson, (10-22-2013). The Liberation Trilogy Box Set (Kindle Locations 41756-41766). Henry Holt and Co.. Kindle Edition.

SAMUEL JOHNSON

Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature. Particular manners can be known to few, and therefore few only can judge how nearly they are copied.

The irregular combinations of fanciful invention may delight a-while, by that novelty of which the common satiety of life sends us all in quest. But the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted and the mind can only repose on the stability of truth.

Samuel Johnson
Preface to Shakespeare (1755)

LIBERAL EDUCATION

The Humanities and the Mission of Liberal Education

Khoa Sands
TCR Emerson Prize Winner
Princeton Class of 2026
 
The humanities are in crisis. Across the country, enrollment in humanities fields is at an all-time low. The priorities of students, universities, and the government have shifted toward STEM fields: The Washington Post reports that as computer science majors increased by 34 percent over the past five years, history majors declined by 12 percent, and English majors by 23 percent over the same time frame. Last February, a lengthy New Yorker article proclaimed “The End of the English Major.”
 
There are many reasons for this decline, from shifting student preferences to federal funding for STEM, and the incessant messaging that the humanities are useless and that studying the liberal arts will leave students broke and unable to find jobs. And then, of course, there are the constant culture wars within humanities fields themselves, from the continued relevance of the Western canon to the debate over historical “presentism.” In the background of all this is the slow but steady decay in academic standards, evidenced by rampant grade inflation and the frightening lack of academic writing skills among students—despite the consistent efforts of university writing centers.
 
The decline of academic standards and writing and the decline of humanities nationwide are connected. Both are rooted in a conception of the mission of higher education as a training ground for future workers. Under this idea of the university, it is no wonder that fields like engineering and computer science are significantly more popular than the humanities—the professional applicability of an applied sciences degree is far more self-evident than that of an English or history degree.
 
This model of higher education has become so culturally ubiquitous that most attempts to defend the humanities are attempts to defend their utility and pragmatic applications. The value of the humanities must be in their ability to develop useful skills like critical thinking, communication, argumentation, and writing. However, these skills are difficult to quantify, and one may doubt how well many students have been trained to actually write and think critically. In addition, the study of big humanistic issues is necessary for any leader, in business, government, or otherwise. But we cannot all be leaders, and limiting the study of humanities to would-be leaders would directly contradict the spirit of liberal education.
 
The humanities in general—and scholarly excellence in particular—cannot be successfully defended by utilitarian calculations of marketability or career applications. What is needed is a higher idea of higher education itself, centered on the pursuit of wisdom, and of truth as its own end. Simply preaching the utility of critical thinking or the value of a specific social agenda birthed in the academy will never be adequate.
 
The popular societal conception of higher education is as a pragmatic means, most commonly towards career and money. However, money is not an end; it is the very epitome of a means. The maximization of optionality, credentials, or utility is not a true goal. The pragmatic university treats education as a means, highlighting specialization over broad philosophical inquiry, policy over politics, and professionalization over liberal education itself. Under this model, each course or assignment is simply a step toward the next grade, internship, degree, or job. It is obvious how this has led to a decline in academic standards, both in the academy as well as in secondary education. In high school, with the goal of college admissions perpetually around the corner, it is easy to do the bare minimum requirements to receive a good grade, without any true understanding. Schools are complicit in this, emphasizing courses (such as the AP curriculum) that teach toward tests and confessional writing (the very same kind common in the college admissions essay) over academic writing.
 
A more sophisticated model of the pragmatic university is the idea that higher education exists to build a better world. Under this model, the humanities serve some social agenda, usually a variant of modern progressive liberalism. This value of humanistic inquiry is still not the pursuit of truth as its own end but rather linked to the social goals embodied in that conception of building a better world. However, neither does this lend itself to scholarly excellence, as evidenced by the blatant and rampant political mischaracterization of the American Revolution in the "1619 Project."
 
What is the value of the humanities and liberal education? Liberal education exists to pursue truth for the sake of truth, to treat knowledge as an end in itself, and to orient ourselves towards the higher end of human flourishing, rather than towards pragmatic means such as money or career. Without this consideration of higher purpose beyond materialist careerism or socio-political agenda, liberal education and the humanities will continue to decline.