The Genealogy of Concern Trolling
Been dipping into League favorite Max Nordau lately, where I found this gem of 19th-century concern trolling:
The nations which emancipated the Jews have mistaken their own feelings. In order to produce its full effect, emancipation should first have been completed in sentiment before it was declared by law. But this was not the case. The history of Jewish emancipation is one of the most remarkable pages in the history of European thought. The emancipation of the Jews was not the consequence of the conviction that grave injury had been done to a race, that it had been treated most terribly, and that it was time to atone for the injustice of a thousand years; it was solely the result of the geometrical mode of thought of French rationalism of the 18th century. This rationalism was constructed by the aid of pure logic, without taking into account living sentiments and the principles of the certainty of mathematical action; and it insisted upon trying to introduce these creations of pure intellect into the world of reality. The emancipation of the Jews was an automatic application of the rationalistic method. The philosophy of Rousseau and the encyclopedists had led to the declaration of human rights. Out of this declaration, the strict logic of the men of the Great Revolution deduced Jewish emancipation. They formulated a regular equation: Every man is born with certain rights; the Jews are human beings, consequently the Jews are born to own the rights of man. In this manner, the emancipation of the Jews was pronounced, not through a fraternal feeling for the Jews, but because logic demanded it. Popular sentiment rebelled, but the philosophy of the Revolution decreed that principles must be placed higher than sentiment. Allow me then an expression which implies no ingratitude. The men of 1792 emancipated us only for the sake of principle.
It works pretty well as a mad libs.
And Jews were allowed to build synagogues in the same hemisphere where they murdered Our Lord!Report
Let me quote Goethe:
“If the healthy nature of man is operative as a whole, when he feels himself in the world as in a great, beautiful, dignified, and valuable whole, when harmonious well-being grants him a pure, free rapture, then the universe, if it could experience itself, rejoicing and admiring the peak of its own becoming and being, would arrive at its own good. For to what purpose all this display of suns and planets and moons, of stars and milky-ways, if, in the end, a happy human being does not instinctively rejoice in his existence.”
If only we were so rationalistic and principled.Report
Actually a lot of abolitionists in the US and around the world used the same logic, based upon the brotherhood of man.Report
Yeah, yeah.
And only 4 out of 5 dentists surveyed recommend sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum– which is clearly a threat against Jewish teeth out of that one guy.Report