Everyone is equal because everyone has the same chance of revieving Grace.
There is no hierarchical idea in Christianity, that only certain good people will be saved.
Everyone is ”of value”.
Religion becomes individualistic after a while (ie. In protestantism, not the case in eg. Christianity).
John Locke on tolerance:
is a reasoning started from a protestant view
indiviudals need to make the choice for themselves, they need to be open to God, and they need to believe, and if there is an instance of power that tries to force you to choose the right religion, this does not help.
There needs to be toleration in the sense that it is not certain which protestant denomination is correct. Because it is personal, and because we are not completely sure which is the right one, the government should not interfere with religiousness.
The general atmosphere before was that things could be arranged with the necessary sacraments; ”it can be arranged → to go to heaven”
the individualism of today is not a religious individualism.
What is a remarakable parallel with the protestant tradition is that in the liberal society, everyone is of the same value. Whatever one chooses to make one’s life justifiable, nothing shall be said of it.
If one chooses personally live a life collecting post stamps, that is okay.
No one should interfere. And this makes it ”equal” somehow.
Unless your hobby diminishes other’s liberty of course.
We do not have a very hierarchical idea of what we need in life; what we need to live off of; or to do; etc.
However, this seems hypocritical, as some people seem to have more free choice to live as they wish than others, and suddenly our system is a system based on sorities paradoxes, at least at first glance.
The idea that the possibility to be justified is up to the individual, is related to the protestant line of thought; to focus on the inside, the individual choice and its conditions.
Weber says that capitalism is the result of the protestant way of thinking, and their work ethic and whatever. The protestants don’t want luxury, they wanna hurt themselves and they want more money in order to get more money in reinvesting. No dionysus.
So, from protestantism, to a lot of violence. Wonderful segue.
The 30 years war I guess?
Most Flemish people came originally from France, being escaped Hugenots. But then Philip II of Spain ordered the end of protestantism Spanish Netherlands, and much of Flanders remained so after the murders of the Spanish, though most of the Netherlands proper didn’t.
So why are people able to become so aggressive?
Why does everyone wanna erase the other?
What is in our human psychology?
If we meet another person, we can either say something positive to them, which pleases us and them at the same time; or we treat them like trash, behaving as if they do not exist or as if one is stupid and so on.
For human beings it is not only about eating, but we also need a bunch of respect and stuff like that.
If one person encounters another, and that person is aggressive, how does one defend oneself? By getting buddies.
So if you are with a lot of people who act like you, a person that is aggressive towards you, is aggressive towards the entire tribe, the us.
So we talk about in- and out-group.
We need to kick out all the people who are evil.
For Douglas this was the enclavistic approach.
This is mechanic solidarity, solidarity based on conformity.
The first victims of this kind of mentality then are people like migrants in our day and age. If one seems like a migrant, this invades the pureness of the in-group.
So in mass-psychology (which is considred pseudoscientific now a days btw), in the solidarity of the in-group, there is no difference, everyone lives up the same ideals, and so everyone who doesn’t fit that vague description must DIE. The Uber-ich (imagine an umlaut).
But it is true that we are far more fragile in our relationships that we like to think.
We risk to have such a conflict on more or less whatever.
Someone who explored and delved into this kind of field of enquiry was the NAZI Carl Schmitt (you’re really going off the deep end here, gonna bring up heidegger any moment).
We have a friend and enemy distinction according to him, which is very harsh and violent.
So one is very aggressive towards those that have a different goal than oneself.
One of the sollutions that LIBERALS had, was to make the issue personal, and to say that the issue is only relative, and so it doesn’t exist anymore. LEFT wing destroyed.
You don’t know exactly what is right and wrong, so you can choose for yourself, and whatever you choose, it’s okay. This diffuses the problem. Just like talking to our racist uncle at christmas dinner.
The choice to relativise is powerful then as a tool for diffusing awkward situations.
Carl Schmitt was against this strategy, because he thinks this destroys all the value. One has to be able to convince more than one person for it to be really convincing: wow real strong argument here. So we need to care about religion because religion convinces a lot of people and so we need to keep being religious and kill all the heretics. Whatever I do is correct as long as my identity is confirmed in religion.
Without this, we risk a society without goals, categorical projects, or things with which one can engage in. What one needs in life is a kind of project, something that is worthwile.
It suffocates one’s values, there is no longer anything sacred in the world.
In Plato and Aristotle, the question is about how does one need to live in order to live a good life.
But in modernity, there is a different way of approaching ethics. Ethics is instead a result of a kind of agreement. A kind of awareness that if we want to live together, we need to obey certain things and be loyal to agreements we have made with each other. If someone then has been wronged, that person receives a right to complain. So rather than the philosophy being about individuals living their lives, it is about a result of a common commitment. So modernity is actually more communal than ever before!
Hugo De Groot (Grotius):
Known for his political work on international law, but also translated a lot of greek and latin texts in dutch.
He developed an approach on law which was different from Thomas Aquinas, in the sense that he was thinking about what rules do we need to follow among human beings, even if we assume that God does not exist. He wanted to develop a law that can be considered apart from humans.
How can we most naturally organise society in a way that is respectful to all.
And so on it is not about developing oneself, but rather about what one’s duties to other people are.
Grotius influenced Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, and even Hegel. Grotius was BIG.
We started the story with Tomasello. Ethics came from joint intentionality. We know that if we contribute, then we can expect the same from the rest of the group, and they from us.
How should I live? Vs What is my duty?
The battle between the strict Franciscus Gomarus and the open-minded Jacobus Arminius (don’t know what he wanted to say with this.
Hobbes: England 1558-1603: In England, we have Queen Elizabeth who had a lot of control of the court. This was a strategy to deal with religious conflict. If we homogenise society, there can be no conflicts. Kick out all the catholics, and may everyone be proper English anglicans.
After Charles V, Cromwell took over. Had a big civil war. This was the first time a king was executed.
So Hobbes situation is in the middle of this kind of situation.
On one side you had the royalists, who defended the idea that the King is sent by God and rules because of God. When God creates the world, then all the kings are the descendents of the original leaders of the world.
Then there are the republic people: we want to have a free city with no master and authoritative leader, like the romans against their original kingdom. So they are free because they develop their own rules and ideas somehow.
Hobbes takes a position between these two kinds of approaches.
In trying to figure out what morality is about, Hobbes refueses to connect with the scholastic essentialism and Aristotelianism. He starts brand new, in trying to understand reality, by understanding the feelings that ordinary people have. He wants to understand ethics by analysing the human psychology. Not by having our sophisticated ideas about the soul and so on analysed, but instead by analysing very ”natural” things. It is a start of a kind secularised, or ”scientific”, way of analysing ethics; moving only on how we experience certain ethical phenomena.
Instead of starting a kind of metaphysical theory, he wants to start by basic observations.
When one observes human beings, they seem very busy with their own. They are guided by what feels agreeable, and have a tendency to preserve themselves first. They want to try to survive much like animals. And if we take that into account, how can people then be social? How can we then have collaboration?
If people are not in society, they will be hostile to each other.
Imagine that a bunch of people organise a party:
how will they do this?
They will try to make decisions together, by figuring out what needs to be done and by whom.
The moment they agree to organise a party togeter, they no longer think on their own. They decide together.
So together, the person who represents this group then, represents the ”we”.
Hobbes believes that the state is not just a bunch of individuals who do what they like, but that from the moment they form a society, they organise things as a unit, and so therefore are a person, their own identity, ”the we”.
The moment we have a person who takes the lead, then we have someone who represents this ”we”.
As long as she does that in such a way that she protects the community, she will then be recognised as its authoritative instance. If one does not subject to the ”we”, then one is not prepared to collaborate.
So we need to submit to a kind of authority that represents us, but whatever that authority does, is our responsibility, as ”we” give them that authority.
So what if that person misuses that authority?
When the king is not able to protect the people, then he is no longer the representative of them. MANDATE OF HEAVEN-CODED I LOVE CHINA OOORAHH.
Now, the king cannot do as they like because that will be detrimental to the we that they are also a part of.
Hobbes witnessed what happened when people refused to subject themselves to the will of the king. In this kind of community, there is nothing less of what the ”we” has to accomplish, and so on we have a war against all, though in Hobbes case it was a quite normal but bloody civil war.
Society, then, needs this kind of figure in order to not return to the state of nature; everyone will be insecure, they may be harmed and there is no instance representing the ”we” anymore.
One of Hobbes earliest jobs was to translate the history of the pelopenesian wars, in which he had a lot of sympathies already with Sparta. On Hobbes, consult Skinner.
Hobbes idea of the Leviathan is that it is an amalgam of people that build up the nation, and which has the king as its head.
There needs to be a preparedness to submit towards the will of the we.
This is in a sense what we do in normal life.
And so we do not want that kind of freedom, as if we have that, we will never have society, and no one will be able to do more.
If we have a republic, then the council that makes the decision, is once again the same sort of instance.
This is not only so because suppression is a good on its own, but rather because it is a good strategy through which to reduce injustices.
Eg. Congo wherein the East, there is no longer any state and so they are currently living in a state of nature (I would not call this a good example).
As such there needs to be a monopoly on violence. If it is not so, everyone kills each other as they like.
What do we do then, if the one who represents the state goes crazy, or otherwise becomes problematic? How can society change this state of affairs?
Hobbes was later on despised. He wasn’t religious enough and was quite pessimistic about people in the state of nature.
”In such condition, there is no place for industry: because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving etc etc.”
For Hobbes, morality appears from the moment we turn from a multitude of individuals into a singular unit of society; when there are responsibilites and duties and so on.
Anyhow, there is an important historical shift after Hobbes, even if we might think his colonialism support is icky.
Will this kind of society, similar to Homer’s, lead to a kind of enclavistic rebellion, given that we are back in a hierarchical society now?
Norbert Elias, The Civilising Process; The world was ass before, but after civilisation came to it, everyhing is great in my ivory tower of Basel!
Steven Pinker: we are a lot less violent now than before! WOW! (not historically accurate)
At least the professor kind of agrees with this; not sure why he wanted to tell us the opposite then… (though he still believes in modernisation theory at least partially).
Hobbes can be associated with homogenising social structures. Everyone under authority decides how everyone should be so that fight does not happen among the people.
The position of Locke:
We need to instead seperate state and church. We need to individualise a relativise the issue of religion to the point that the state cannot interfere, and so there should be no state-level problems like civil war, since it is not the job of the society as a whole to judge.
Locke hated caths. He also hated non-believers like africans.