History with kid gloves and a gloss?

A response to AP Euro Bit By Bit,

By Paul Sargent, on youtube

I’ve enjoyed the videos I’ve seen so far – about a dozen. I especially liked your coverage of the Enlightenment and the foundations of modern constitutional democracy. I do have a couple of points I’d like to make, however. 

A minor one is brevity. Considering kids and adults spend an average of four hours a day on cell phones, tv, internet, video games and “social media”, I don’t think you need to apologize for a video being “long” at 7 minutes! 

Considering the importance of learning, and the utter waste of (4×7=) 28 hours a week on drivel, I don’t think that a 20, 30 or 60 minute history video should be viewed as onerous. 

North American children, youth and adults have been frankly infantilized by corporate culture, and a culture of narcissism. Playing to or speaking to the lowest common demoninator simply speeds up the downward spiral. Sooner or later our standards have to stop being allowed to slide, and instead be raised. 

Second, and more important, you refrain from virtually all editorial comment; but that is required of teachers, professors and social commentators. Machiavelli and Hobbes, for example, cannot ethically be painted in a neutral or positive light. There is a reason the term “Machiavellian” means an unscrupulous and dishonest person, hungry for power, and borderline or fully sociopathic. 

Machiavelli and Hobbes are the darlings of all emperors and most elites, along with Spencer, because they adore the justifications for their power lust, egomania and insatiable greed. It is not moral to gloss over them as if they are good guys with sound advice. Amorality is not something we should either teach or embody. It is nihilism, and nihilism is death of the soul.

Thomas Jefferson, by the way, answered Hobbes self-contradictory as well as elitist and authoritarian ideology by destroying it in one line: “If you cannot trust men to govern themselves, how can you trust them to govern others?”

As Chomsky said, “You’re either an aristocrat or a democrat.” You cannot be both. Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spencer, Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Mao, and the overwhelming majority of Western business and political elites, have strongly preferred aristocracy, in the broad sense – that is to say, oligarchy, or elite rule; and they have despised democracy. (See Chomsky’s, Necessary Illusions, and Year 501.)

When you talked glowingly about the Enlightenment, the American Revolution and modern constitutional democracy, you spoke as a democrat. But when you spoke of Machiavelli and Hobbes as if they were good guys and not snakes, and had sound advice, you unwittingly contradicted yourself completely, and spoke as an enemy of democracy. Which side are you on? You cannot be on both sides at once.

The land enclosures, likewise, were not simply “controversial” – they were predatory and genocidal, and an act of mass theft.  You cannot ethically gloss over such things.

Third, what happened to the Inquisition, the slave trade, and the genocide committed across the Americas, which incidentally funded the industrial revolution, and along with the enclosure acts which produced a veritable tsunami of virtual slave labour, allowed it to occur? 

Good job overall, and very enjoyable, but ease off of spoon-feeding, hyper-concision, and kid gloves treatment of social, political, spiritual and ethical issues, I would urge. Look what kids watch these days! They can handle a little truth, and they need it, and deserve it.

J. Todd Ring,

Author of, Enlightened Democracy,

And,

The People vs The Elite

PS:

Did I say I enjoyed your videos very much?! I write in a very frank manner, like Thoreau. It was meant as constructive criticism, friend. Overall, as I say, excellent job. Now, please do a series on inspiring people, like Socrates, Boethius, St. Francis, Hildegard of Bingen, Spinoza, Jefferson, Blake, Mark Twain, Emerson, Thoreau, Gandhi, Rosa Parks, MLK….!!!

March 2, 2021