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Max Planck: Mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten
Used book in good condition, due to its age it could contain normal signs of use
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Published December 1, 2005
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June 19, 2024
Verstehe ich etwas von Physik? Nicht wirklich. Verstehe ich etwas davon was es heißt ein guter Mensch zu sein? Das hoffe ich doch.
Max Planck wurde in eine Familie voller gelehrter Personen geboren und wurde schon früh gefördert. Nicht nur körperlich sondern auch akademisch und musikalisch. Besonders hervorzuheben sind bereits in jungen Jahren seine Charaktereigenschaften der Bescheidenheit und Prinzipentreue. Sie zeigen sich durch sein ganzes weiteres Leben hindurch.
Nachdem er seinen Doktor und Professor in theoretischer Physik gemacht hat, ging er nach Kiel und dann nach Berlin. Er gilt als Begründer der Quantenphysik und war mit vielen großen Wissenschaftler seiner Zeit gut bekannt oder befreundet. Er erhielt schon zu Lebzeiten den Nobelpreis.
Während der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus setzte er sich für die Wissenschaft ein und nahm bewusst Abstand zu dem neuen Regime. Daher geührte ihm auch die Ehre Namenspatron der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zu werden.
Ich hatte es noch nie, das es mir leid tat über den Tod einer Person zu lesen. Planck wird auf diesen ca. 160 Seiten sehr nahbar und persönlich beschrieben. Es kam mir vor als kannte ich ihn bereits. Sein Leben war vielleicht nicht das Ereignisreichste, aber er war eine absolut wertvolle Person und Persönlichkeit.
Max Planck wurde in eine Familie voller gelehrter Personen geboren und wurde schon früh gefördert. Nicht nur körperlich sondern auch akademisch und musikalisch. Besonders hervorzuheben sind bereits in jungen Jahren seine Charaktereigenschaften der Bescheidenheit und Prinzipentreue. Sie zeigen sich durch sein ganzes weiteres Leben hindurch.
Nachdem er seinen Doktor und Professor in theoretischer Physik gemacht hat, ging er nach Kiel und dann nach Berlin. Er gilt als Begründer der Quantenphysik und war mit vielen großen Wissenschaftler seiner Zeit gut bekannt oder befreundet. Er erhielt schon zu Lebzeiten den Nobelpreis.
Während der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus setzte er sich für die Wissenschaft ein und nahm bewusst Abstand zu dem neuen Regime. Daher geührte ihm auch die Ehre Namenspatron der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zu werden.
Ich hatte es noch nie, das es mir leid tat über den Tod einer Person zu lesen. Planck wird auf diesen ca. 160 Seiten sehr nahbar und persönlich beschrieben. Es kam mir vor als kannte ich ihn bereits. Sein Leben war vielleicht nicht das Ereignisreichste, aber er war eine absolut wertvolle Person und Persönlichkeit.
May 5, 2021
It gives a vicarious pleasure to read about the lives of men who not only distinguished themselves as great scientists but who – despite the odds against it – achieved greatness as human beings as well, great in the sense of having exhibited the life of the virtues. The case of Max Planck is of especial importance to Germans because not only was he graced with uncommon humility and human decency, he represents a slender thread of institutional continuity between the pre-war years that saw the flourishing of German culture at possibly its finest and the post-war years of the founding of the modern German democratic republic, winding its way through the dark period of the first world war and the utter disaster of the Nazi era. As long as one is thus apprised of its genre: more a saint’s life [Heiligenlegende, vita sanctus] than a critical biography, one can find much to appreciate in Armin Hermann’s compact paperback presently under review.
What we may expect from Hermann is a descriptive narrative of the main events and leading personages in his subject’s life, not an analytical investigation of any of its intellectual themes. And this is what we get, embellished with extensive quotations from letters and reproductions of photographs and other documents, such as his handwritten doctoral examination. The first sections present Planck’s family background and early Laufbahn. How gifted and precocious the young man was, who flourished under the outstanding education to which his family’s middle-class status entitled him! He could have pursued a career as a classical philologist or musician but elected to study mathematics instead, from which he in short order turned to the natural sciences. Hermann continues with a detailed account of Planck’s university studies, doctorate at 21 and habilitation at 22, then after a painfully extended hiatus during which he lived at his parents’ home, a first academic appointment to the University of Kiel in 1885. Having secured his professional and financial wherewithal, marriage to Marie Merck followed soon thereafter in 1887 and before long the call to Berlin came in 1888.
Hermann – himself a trained physicist – takes care to sketch the budding scientist’s philosophical attitudes towards his professional vocation. The following extract proves illuminating:
Hinter den auf der Erde und am Himmel vor sich gehenden ständigen Veränderungen suchte der Forscher, seitdem es überhaupt eine Naturwissenschaft gibt, unveränderliche Gesetzmäßigkeiten. So formulierte René Descartes schon 1644, allerdings noch nicht ganz richtig, das Gesetz von der Erhaltung der Bewegung, das wir heute den Implulssatz nennen. Descartes sah in der Unwandelbarkeit der Bewegungsgröße eine Manifestation der Vollkommenheit Gottes, Auch diese Überzeugung wurde, wie vieles andere, im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert säkularisiert. Geblieben aber ist die Auffassung, daß es von allen menschlichen Subjektivitäten unabhängige Naturdinge gibt und daß es dem Menschen möglich ist, diese ‹‹für die Ewigkeit geschaffenen›› Gegebenheiten zu erkennen. In ganz besonderem Maße strebte Max Planck danach, in den Gesetzen der Natur das ‹‹Absolute›› aufzuspüren: ‘Ausgehen können wir immer nur vom Relativen. Alle unsere Messungen sind relativer Art. Das Material der Instrumente, mit denen wir arbeiten, ist bedingt durch den Fundort, von dem es stammt, ihre Konstruktion ist bedingt durch die Geschicklichkeit des Technikers, der sie ersonnen hat, ihr Handhabung ist bedingt durch die speziellen Zecke, die der Experimentator mit ihnen erreichen will. Aus allen diesen Daten gilt es das Absolute, Allgemeingültige, Invariante herauszufinden, was in ihnen stekt’. (p. 27)
In two succeeding chapters, Hermann reconstructs the thought-process by which Planck was led to his revolutionary discovery of the blackbody radiation law and the inauguration of the golden age of German physics – the erection, from the ground up, of the radically revised framework of physics known as the quantum theory. Here, too, one notices a shift in emphasis, as the author tends to slide over into a tale of the personalities involved and away from scientific detail.
In any case, although Planck maintained an impressive record of publication into an advanced age, by the end of the 1910’s his original intellectual contribution to science was mostly complete. Thus, the biographical account becomes concerned with the personal tragedies that befell Planck during the first world war and with his public service during the Weimar years. At this time, Planck was head of the prestigious Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften and rector of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin. One of his coups was to bring Einstein to Berlin. During the economic chaos of the post-war years Planck played a key leadership role in rationalizing support for young scientists and in distributing funding to research institutes.
Almost half of the book is devoted to Planck’s late-life period during the rise of the Third Reich as well as to Planck’s experiences as a refugee from the Allied campaign of strategic bombing knowingly directed against civilians. The last act in Planck’s life revolves around the refounding in 1948 of what is in his honor now known as the Max Planck Gesellschaft. One gathers a sense of what it was like for an honorable man to strive to maintain standards of decency during the overall descent into moral darkness. Yet, one gains the impression that, for all his Ehrlichkeit, even at an advanced age Planck still has the naïveté of a boy as he faces with incomprehension the evils of Nazi rule.
Since the whole issue is of critical importance and topical, we shall append an extended digression. How can we explain Planck’s attitude? The more one reflects on German history, the more convinced one becomes that the Prussian state did indeed demand of its citizens the devotion that properly belongs to God alone (for centuries before the Nazis arrived on the scene in the 1920’s). Relevant texts are Exodus 20:1-3; Deuteronomy 6:4-6; Matthew 22:15-22. Greek terms: reverence or veneration [douleia] for saints and their icons; versus adoration for God [latreia]. Jesus teaches us to render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar and unto God what belongs to God – pace Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, §§238, 249, 257-258, 260-261, 270-271, above all the following:
Die wesentliche Bestimmung aber über das Verhältnis von Religion und Staat ergibt sich nur, indem an ihren Begriff erinnert wird. Die Religion hat die absolute Wahrheit zu ihrem Inhalt, und damit fällt auch das Höchste der Gesinnung in sie….Staat und Gesetze, wie die Pflichten erhalten in diesem Verhältnis für das Bewußtsein die höchste Bewährung und die höchste Verbindlichkeit; denn...in ihrer Wirklichkeit ein Bestimmtes, das in eine höhere Sphäre als in seine Grundlage übergeht….Wenn nun die Religion so die Grundlage ausmacht, welche das Sittliche überhaupt und näher die Natur des Staats als den göttlichen Willen enthält, so ist es zugleich nur Grundlage, was sie ist, und hier ist es, worin beide auseinandergehen. Der Staat ist göttlicher Wille, als gegenwärtiger, sich zur wirklichen Gestalt und Organisation einer Welt entfaltender Geist….Insofern die religiöse Gemeinschaftlichkeit von Individuen sich zu einer Gemeinde, einer Korporation erhebt, steht sie überhaupt unter der oberpolizeilichen Oberaufsicht des Staats….Die Verschiedenheit beider Gebiete kann von der Kirche zu dem schroffen Gegensatz getrieben werden, daß sie als den absoluten Inhalt der Religion in sich enthaltend, das Geistige überhaupt und damit auch das sittliche Element als ihren Teil betrachtet, den Staat aber als ein mechanisches Gerüste für die ungeistigen äußerlichen Zwecke...als bloßes Mittel begreift….Das Element des höheren Geistigen, des an und für sich Wahren, ist auf diese Weise als subjecktive Religiosität oder als theoretische Wissenschaft jenseits des Staates gestellt, der als der Laie an und für sich, nur zu respektieren habe, und das eigentliche Sittliche fällt so bei ihm ganz aus….Aber es ist ein zu blindes und seichtes Verfahren, diese Stellung als die wahrhaft der Idee gemäße anzugeben. Die Entwickelung dieser Idee hat vielmehr dies als die Wahrheit erwiesen, daß der Geist als frei und vernünftig, an sich sittlich ist, und die wahrhafte Idee die wirkliche Vernünftigkeit, und diese es ist, welche als Staat existiert.
Read closely, dear reader – in this striking passage, Hegel divinizes the state expressis verbis! Planck’s unquestioning allegiance to Prussian political theology is after all consistent with his being a pantheist (cf. Spinoza’s theologico-political treatise) – if the world is ruled by implacable fate, who could contest the power of the state and the prince of this world? On this subject, vide Paul in Colossians 1-2, esp. 2:9-15; Ephesians 1:15-23; 2 Thessalonians 2:3-4 and foremost Romans 8:38-39: ‘For I am certain of this: neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nothing already in existence and nothing still to come, nor any power, nor the heights nor the depths, nor any created thing whatever, will be able to come between us and the love of God, known to us in Christ Jesus our Lord’.
Ever since the founding of the Church, there has been a long history of contention between the spiritual and temporal powers – a phenomenon unique among world religions to Christianity. Leaving aside the Roman and Byzantine empires, Anglophone readers will probably be most familiar with the murder of Thomas Becket in the Canterbury cathedral in 1170 by king Henry II and with the celebrated Magna carta of 1215 arbitrated between the English nobles and king John; the former had gone into rebellion to resist the encroachments of the crown on their traditional liberties and on those of the church. After the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation in the early modern period, an inherently sectarian and schismatical movement, it will not appear as very surprising that once one had broken off from the universal church what remained of a religious organization would be attracted by and settle into the gravitational well of the temporal power and become a plaything of worldly men actuated solely by worldly ambitions. Luther was confronted with the problem that after going into schism he did not have on his side any bishops who stood in the apostolic tradition, and it would obviously have been a joke to appoint bishops outside the apostolic line of succession; he resolved the impasse by inviting the Prussian bureaucracy to assume the place of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Thus, the Protestant Reformation and the exaltation of the secular power of the absolutist nation-state it underwrote constitute the diametrical opposite of the medieval conceptions of Christendom and libertas ecclesiae (watchword of the papal reform party during the investiture controversy of the eleventh century).
For the Protestant Erastian, the concept of speaking truth to power does not, and on principle logically cannot, exist—it would be a contradiction in terms! In sixteenth-century England, the martyr-saints Thomas More and John Fisher alone had the courage to stand up to king Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy; everyone else in England of the time, whether in the gentry or in the Anglican ecclesiastical hierarchy, was too dependent upon the crown for his worldly social standing and emoluments to dare to contest its brazen overreach. Indeed, we have in recent years become all-too familiar with the evangelical Protestant tenet that Christianity itself exists for the sole purpose of the glorification of the American nation-state – as one can infer from the common and revealingly gauche practice during the Christmas holidays of putting up yard displays of a crèche depicting the holy family kneeling before a prominent American flag, where the spotlight is squarely on the obligatory flag idol and not on the infant Jesus.
All along, American fundamentalists in the decades after the collapse of the erstwhile mainline liberal Protestant establishment and the rise of Falwell’s Moral Majority and German Protestants under the Prussian emperors have probably been equally beholden to their respective worldly princes, but with this difference: the Germans were highly intelligent and superbly well educated and upheld—indeed, to a considerable extent invented—exacting norms of critical scholarship and scientific rigor. Contrast Wilhelmine Germany with America: there, rampant anti-intellectualism evinces a congenital flaw of American fundamentalism, the reasons for its staying power having been exhaustively analyzed by Richard Hofstadter in his brilliant Anti-intellectualism in American Life from 1963.
What does this all bode for the remainder of the twenty-first century? That the fate of the world lies in the hands of utterly uncultured men? Clearly, if one rejects science, one can scarcely expect to be in a position to make a great scientific discovery nor will one be at all equipped to face the daunting challenges of the twenty-first century. For those old Germans in the decades leading up to the outbreak of World War I had not yet entirely lost a theological concept of beauty, as by our day most everyone certainly has. Everyone then would have studied and been moved by Plato’s matchless dialogue, the Symposium, as a schoolboy, what is more in the original Greek. What ensues once the theological conception of beauty has been extinguished? When contemporary Republicans look at the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, for instance, what incenses them almost beyond measure is the sight of oil reserves lying idle without anyone getting wealthy from them, least of all friends of those who occupy high positions in government. The old-fashioned conservatism of a Theodore Roosevelt, who felt that the public ought to set aside some virgin lands as a sacred trust in perpetuity and avow to refrain from exploiting their natural resources, implies a certain level of respect for what already exists that must strike those on today’s right as intolerably quaint and which anyway is flatly inconsistent with the technological understanding of being. Nobody, after all, is ever going to amass a great fortune off the wildlife there, in such a remote location – therefore it has no right to exist! Children always and everywhere love wild animals and would wish their continued existence, but we adults are loath to heed Jesus’ counsel and become like such little ones as they. The service to Mammon precludes – as Jesus warns us – a heartfelt [inwendige] appreciation of the priceless beauty of God’s creation, when everything has been reduced to its bare monetary value. And the beauty of a polar bear pales in comparison with the beauty of each and every human being (born or unborn) whose lives we so routinely and indifferently dispose of in the police state our once great country has become.
What we may expect from Hermann is a descriptive narrative of the main events and leading personages in his subject’s life, not an analytical investigation of any of its intellectual themes. And this is what we get, embellished with extensive quotations from letters and reproductions of photographs and other documents, such as his handwritten doctoral examination. The first sections present Planck’s family background and early Laufbahn. How gifted and precocious the young man was, who flourished under the outstanding education to which his family’s middle-class status entitled him! He could have pursued a career as a classical philologist or musician but elected to study mathematics instead, from which he in short order turned to the natural sciences. Hermann continues with a detailed account of Planck’s university studies, doctorate at 21 and habilitation at 22, then after a painfully extended hiatus during which he lived at his parents’ home, a first academic appointment to the University of Kiel in 1885. Having secured his professional and financial wherewithal, marriage to Marie Merck followed soon thereafter in 1887 and before long the call to Berlin came in 1888.
Hermann – himself a trained physicist – takes care to sketch the budding scientist’s philosophical attitudes towards his professional vocation. The following extract proves illuminating:
Hinter den auf der Erde und am Himmel vor sich gehenden ständigen Veränderungen suchte der Forscher, seitdem es überhaupt eine Naturwissenschaft gibt, unveränderliche Gesetzmäßigkeiten. So formulierte René Descartes schon 1644, allerdings noch nicht ganz richtig, das Gesetz von der Erhaltung der Bewegung, das wir heute den Implulssatz nennen. Descartes sah in der Unwandelbarkeit der Bewegungsgröße eine Manifestation der Vollkommenheit Gottes, Auch diese Überzeugung wurde, wie vieles andere, im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert säkularisiert. Geblieben aber ist die Auffassung, daß es von allen menschlichen Subjektivitäten unabhängige Naturdinge gibt und daß es dem Menschen möglich ist, diese ‹‹für die Ewigkeit geschaffenen›› Gegebenheiten zu erkennen. In ganz besonderem Maße strebte Max Planck danach, in den Gesetzen der Natur das ‹‹Absolute›› aufzuspüren: ‘Ausgehen können wir immer nur vom Relativen. Alle unsere Messungen sind relativer Art. Das Material der Instrumente, mit denen wir arbeiten, ist bedingt durch den Fundort, von dem es stammt, ihre Konstruktion ist bedingt durch die Geschicklichkeit des Technikers, der sie ersonnen hat, ihr Handhabung ist bedingt durch die speziellen Zecke, die der Experimentator mit ihnen erreichen will. Aus allen diesen Daten gilt es das Absolute, Allgemeingültige, Invariante herauszufinden, was in ihnen stekt’. (p. 27)
In two succeeding chapters, Hermann reconstructs the thought-process by which Planck was led to his revolutionary discovery of the blackbody radiation law and the inauguration of the golden age of German physics – the erection, from the ground up, of the radically revised framework of physics known as the quantum theory. Here, too, one notices a shift in emphasis, as the author tends to slide over into a tale of the personalities involved and away from scientific detail.
In any case, although Planck maintained an impressive record of publication into an advanced age, by the end of the 1910’s his original intellectual contribution to science was mostly complete. Thus, the biographical account becomes concerned with the personal tragedies that befell Planck during the first world war and with his public service during the Weimar years. At this time, Planck was head of the prestigious Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften and rector of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin. One of his coups was to bring Einstein to Berlin. During the economic chaos of the post-war years Planck played a key leadership role in rationalizing support for young scientists and in distributing funding to research institutes.
Almost half of the book is devoted to Planck’s late-life period during the rise of the Third Reich as well as to Planck’s experiences as a refugee from the Allied campaign of strategic bombing knowingly directed against civilians. The last act in Planck’s life revolves around the refounding in 1948 of what is in his honor now known as the Max Planck Gesellschaft. One gathers a sense of what it was like for an honorable man to strive to maintain standards of decency during the overall descent into moral darkness. Yet, one gains the impression that, for all his Ehrlichkeit, even at an advanced age Planck still has the naïveté of a boy as he faces with incomprehension the evils of Nazi rule.
Since the whole issue is of critical importance and topical, we shall append an extended digression. How can we explain Planck’s attitude? The more one reflects on German history, the more convinced one becomes that the Prussian state did indeed demand of its citizens the devotion that properly belongs to God alone (for centuries before the Nazis arrived on the scene in the 1920’s). Relevant texts are Exodus 20:1-3; Deuteronomy 6:4-6; Matthew 22:15-22. Greek terms: reverence or veneration [douleia] for saints and their icons; versus adoration for God [latreia]. Jesus teaches us to render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar and unto God what belongs to God – pace Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, §§238, 249, 257-258, 260-261, 270-271, above all the following:
Die wesentliche Bestimmung aber über das Verhältnis von Religion und Staat ergibt sich nur, indem an ihren Begriff erinnert wird. Die Religion hat die absolute Wahrheit zu ihrem Inhalt, und damit fällt auch das Höchste der Gesinnung in sie….Staat und Gesetze, wie die Pflichten erhalten in diesem Verhältnis für das Bewußtsein die höchste Bewährung und die höchste Verbindlichkeit; denn...in ihrer Wirklichkeit ein Bestimmtes, das in eine höhere Sphäre als in seine Grundlage übergeht….Wenn nun die Religion so die Grundlage ausmacht, welche das Sittliche überhaupt und näher die Natur des Staats als den göttlichen Willen enthält, so ist es zugleich nur Grundlage, was sie ist, und hier ist es, worin beide auseinandergehen. Der Staat ist göttlicher Wille, als gegenwärtiger, sich zur wirklichen Gestalt und Organisation einer Welt entfaltender Geist….Insofern die religiöse Gemeinschaftlichkeit von Individuen sich zu einer Gemeinde, einer Korporation erhebt, steht sie überhaupt unter der oberpolizeilichen Oberaufsicht des Staats….Die Verschiedenheit beider Gebiete kann von der Kirche zu dem schroffen Gegensatz getrieben werden, daß sie als den absoluten Inhalt der Religion in sich enthaltend, das Geistige überhaupt und damit auch das sittliche Element als ihren Teil betrachtet, den Staat aber als ein mechanisches Gerüste für die ungeistigen äußerlichen Zwecke...als bloßes Mittel begreift….Das Element des höheren Geistigen, des an und für sich Wahren, ist auf diese Weise als subjecktive Religiosität oder als theoretische Wissenschaft jenseits des Staates gestellt, der als der Laie an und für sich, nur zu respektieren habe, und das eigentliche Sittliche fällt so bei ihm ganz aus….Aber es ist ein zu blindes und seichtes Verfahren, diese Stellung als die wahrhaft der Idee gemäße anzugeben. Die Entwickelung dieser Idee hat vielmehr dies als die Wahrheit erwiesen, daß der Geist als frei und vernünftig, an sich sittlich ist, und die wahrhafte Idee die wirkliche Vernünftigkeit, und diese es ist, welche als Staat existiert.
Read closely, dear reader – in this striking passage, Hegel divinizes the state expressis verbis! Planck’s unquestioning allegiance to Prussian political theology is after all consistent with his being a pantheist (cf. Spinoza’s theologico-political treatise) – if the world is ruled by implacable fate, who could contest the power of the state and the prince of this world? On this subject, vide Paul in Colossians 1-2, esp. 2:9-15; Ephesians 1:15-23; 2 Thessalonians 2:3-4 and foremost Romans 8:38-39: ‘For I am certain of this: neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nothing already in existence and nothing still to come, nor any power, nor the heights nor the depths, nor any created thing whatever, will be able to come between us and the love of God, known to us in Christ Jesus our Lord’.
Ever since the founding of the Church, there has been a long history of contention between the spiritual and temporal powers – a phenomenon unique among world religions to Christianity. Leaving aside the Roman and Byzantine empires, Anglophone readers will probably be most familiar with the murder of Thomas Becket in the Canterbury cathedral in 1170 by king Henry II and with the celebrated Magna carta of 1215 arbitrated between the English nobles and king John; the former had gone into rebellion to resist the encroachments of the crown on their traditional liberties and on those of the church. After the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation in the early modern period, an inherently sectarian and schismatical movement, it will not appear as very surprising that once one had broken off from the universal church what remained of a religious organization would be attracted by and settle into the gravitational well of the temporal power and become a plaything of worldly men actuated solely by worldly ambitions. Luther was confronted with the problem that after going into schism he did not have on his side any bishops who stood in the apostolic tradition, and it would obviously have been a joke to appoint bishops outside the apostolic line of succession; he resolved the impasse by inviting the Prussian bureaucracy to assume the place of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Thus, the Protestant Reformation and the exaltation of the secular power of the absolutist nation-state it underwrote constitute the diametrical opposite of the medieval conceptions of Christendom and libertas ecclesiae (watchword of the papal reform party during the investiture controversy of the eleventh century).
For the Protestant Erastian, the concept of speaking truth to power does not, and on principle logically cannot, exist—it would be a contradiction in terms! In sixteenth-century England, the martyr-saints Thomas More and John Fisher alone had the courage to stand up to king Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy; everyone else in England of the time, whether in the gentry or in the Anglican ecclesiastical hierarchy, was too dependent upon the crown for his worldly social standing and emoluments to dare to contest its brazen overreach. Indeed, we have in recent years become all-too familiar with the evangelical Protestant tenet that Christianity itself exists for the sole purpose of the glorification of the American nation-state – as one can infer from the common and revealingly gauche practice during the Christmas holidays of putting up yard displays of a crèche depicting the holy family kneeling before a prominent American flag, where the spotlight is squarely on the obligatory flag idol and not on the infant Jesus.
All along, American fundamentalists in the decades after the collapse of the erstwhile mainline liberal Protestant establishment and the rise of Falwell’s Moral Majority and German Protestants under the Prussian emperors have probably been equally beholden to their respective worldly princes, but with this difference: the Germans were highly intelligent and superbly well educated and upheld—indeed, to a considerable extent invented—exacting norms of critical scholarship and scientific rigor. Contrast Wilhelmine Germany with America: there, rampant anti-intellectualism evinces a congenital flaw of American fundamentalism, the reasons for its staying power having been exhaustively analyzed by Richard Hofstadter in his brilliant Anti-intellectualism in American Life from 1963.
What does this all bode for the remainder of the twenty-first century? That the fate of the world lies in the hands of utterly uncultured men? Clearly, if one rejects science, one can scarcely expect to be in a position to make a great scientific discovery nor will one be at all equipped to face the daunting challenges of the twenty-first century. For those old Germans in the decades leading up to the outbreak of World War I had not yet entirely lost a theological concept of beauty, as by our day most everyone certainly has. Everyone then would have studied and been moved by Plato’s matchless dialogue, the Symposium, as a schoolboy, what is more in the original Greek. What ensues once the theological conception of beauty has been extinguished? When contemporary Republicans look at the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, for instance, what incenses them almost beyond measure is the sight of oil reserves lying idle without anyone getting wealthy from them, least of all friends of those who occupy high positions in government. The old-fashioned conservatism of a Theodore Roosevelt, who felt that the public ought to set aside some virgin lands as a sacred trust in perpetuity and avow to refrain from exploiting their natural resources, implies a certain level of respect for what already exists that must strike those on today’s right as intolerably quaint and which anyway is flatly inconsistent with the technological understanding of being. Nobody, after all, is ever going to amass a great fortune off the wildlife there, in such a remote location – therefore it has no right to exist! Children always and everywhere love wild animals and would wish their continued existence, but we adults are loath to heed Jesus’ counsel and become like such little ones as they. The service to Mammon precludes – as Jesus warns us – a heartfelt [inwendige] appreciation of the priceless beauty of God’s creation, when everything has been reduced to its bare monetary value. And the beauty of a polar bear pales in comparison with the beauty of each and every human being (born or unborn) whose lives we so routinely and indifferently dispose of in the police state our once great country has become.
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