How to Philosophize with a Hammer: Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil and the Foundations of Western Thought

Nichze famously said of his own books, I write in a single sentence what it takes other men a book to write that it wasn't egotistical because it happened to be true. Beyond Good and Evil is a cardinal work, a prodramma to the entire intellectual and political history of the 20th century. brilliant, romantic, insightful, deep, psyches shattering, dancing bit of literary genius. He's had a remarkable impact on thought over the last 140 years. It's reasonable to say that he philosophized with a hammer because his thought is extraordinarily condensed. To read Nietze is daunting psychologically. He's like a motivational speaker. He's practical in a way that philosophers seldom are. Nian philosophy is a call to arms. To familiarize yourself with him is to arm yourself against the sea of troubles. And since you will encounter a sea of troubles, you better pray that you're armed. And this is one way to do it. Well, hello everyone. We're going to talk about nature's beyond good and evil. Essentially, that's what I'm going to attempt to cover in this seminar. And so, I subtitled this how to philosophize with a hammer. And that's actually a quote from NZ. Uh, what does that mean? I think it refers to two it it's there are two references implicit in that statement. One is that Nietze attempted to break down some of the implicit axiomatic suppositions that had undergurtded philosophy prior to his to the dawn of his thought. And so it's a technical phrase even though it's poetic, but it's also a psychological phrase. And I think it refers to it does refer to the impact that Nichch's thought can have on you if you come upon it unaware. He's had a remarkable impact on thought over the last 140 years. And anyone any singular individual who has a remarkable impact on thought has gone down very deep into the structure of our presuppositions and moved them around. You know, we have this intuition of depth, right? All of us know that there's a difference between something that's shallow and something that's deep. And if something inside you that's shallow moves, it doesn't move much of you. And if something inside of you that's deep is moved, it moves a lot of you at the same time. And Nietze was someone who philosophized in the depths. And so to read Nietze is daunting psychologically because there's a lot of things that you take for granted that orient you in the world that that make you free of anxiety that unite you with other people that give you a direction and a purpose that stabilize you psychologically and niche is one of those thinkers who goes down into the foundations and starts to shift them around and that can be very destructive. I mean N himself lost his Christian faith for example which is an an example of that of of of a destruction of axiomatic foundation. Now he attempted to rebuild something else in itstead. But that's no simple thing given that the entire edifice of Judeo Judeo-Christian thought was a collective endeavor unfolding over thousands and thousands of years to try to replace something like that in a single lifetime regardless of your degree of brilliance is one daunting challenge. Penetent isn't obvious that Niets succeeded but he did succeed in calling our attention everyone's attention to the nature of our unconscious and implicit axiomatic presumptions and also while taking a hammer to the foundations. I mean it was nature of course who famously pronounced that God was dead and that we have killed him by the way and that we'll never find enough water to wash away the blood. It wasn't a triumphalist statement. Um it it isn't reasonable to say that it was Nietze himself who produced the death of God that in that plagues our society at the current times because no one thinker is responsible for a transformation of that magnitude. But it is the case that he was able to synthesize that the criticism of Judeo-Christian ethics and bring it to a what would you say to to to express that more trenchently and explicitly than anyone else just like Freud not so long afterwards was able to formulate and make explicit the idea of the unconscious even though people had been working towards that realization in for centuries. And so uh how to philosophize with a hammer is to go down into the depths to look at the axiomatic foundations of philosophic thought and then to and to attempt to break that apart. And it's certainly the case that niche managed that to a great degree and we're still all of us whether we know it or not are still coping with that consequence. Nze knew for example that one of the consequences of that there would be two consequences of the death of God and one would be the collapse of a system of meaning that encapsulated people psychologically and socially. The collapse of that system of meaning niche believed would bring about two events. One would be the dawn of a universal nihilism, right? A sense of rootlessness and hopelessness that would pervade western culture and provide and and result in uh an intense and pervasive demoralization that and the dawn of the attraction of totalitarian ideologies that would rise to replace God. And Nietze was particularly concerned uh about the rise of anti-semitism. That was one which is obviously precient. But more importantly even than that was his prophecy that huge swaths of Europe, the western world for that matter and as it turned out the entire world would become enticed by the blandishments of something like a uh utopian communism and that the consequence of that would be the death of tens of millions of people in the 20th century. It's quite a remarkable piece of prophecy uh multi-dimensional prophecy because all of those things transpired and so the popular image of Nietze is a triumphant rationalist let's say celebrating the death of God but that's not accurate a not accurate representation in the least he was much wiser man than that now that doesn't mean that Nietze was uh uncritical admirer let's say of the Judeo-Christian ethic because he also believed that deep within Christianity was a spirit was a spirit embedded of resentment, slave morality that would view the world as a battle between that there was an what would you say a stream of roughly Christian thought that re viewed the world as a battleground between the oppressed and the oppressor, the slave and the master. He believed that Christianity was a manifestation of slave morality that was constantly driven by a form of envy and that that would culminate in uh in something extraordinarily destructive. Now I think Nietze thought was weak on that part to some degree. I mean Nietze is a very nuanced thinker and there's a difference between criticizing Christianity and criticizing Christ and Nietze is ambivalent on that front. I think it might be fair to say that he criticized institutionalized Christianity for its adoption of slave morality but didn't go so far as to assume that that was part of the e ethos of what was central to Christianity itself. Now Nze wasn't precisely a systematic philosopher. He wrote aphoristically. He wrote using narrative and and and using poetic tools which also made him a very strange philosopher and a very strange author and and uh professor alienated him from his from his uh academic community because he didn't write in a dry and academic manner. He had this prophetic and poetic uh temperament. And so he's a very creative philosopher rather than a rigorous philosopher. And so his thought jumps from place to place. Uh he distrusted systematizers. He was also very ill for much of his life and couldn't write in long bursts and tended to think for extended periods of time. And then to summarize all that thought in very short bursts of of of poetic pros. And that's also I would say in some part why it's reasonable to say that he philosophized with a hammer because his his thought is extraordinarily condensed. He'll offer you something apherisms, very short statements, paragraphs that are unbelievably dense. And what we're going to do, and I think what will be the most fun in this seminar is to take a variety of those paragraphs and apherisms and attempt to unpack them. You can do that endlessly. For example, in a book like Beyond Good and Evil, it's not really a book that you can sit down and read all at once because there's so much packed into it. And when I read a book, I often earmark a page if there's something that I might want to refer to later. And I've read whole books where I didn't earmark a single page. I don't even bother earmarking a book like Beyond Good and Evil because I end up earmarking both pages of every page. And so Nietze famously said of his own books, I write in a single sentence what it takes other men a book to write. Then he says, what other men can't even write in a book? Which is pretty good, eh? because it's it's a hell of an egotistical statement right off the bat. And instantly he tops it with an even more egotistical statement except that it wasn't egotistical because it happened to be true. And so there's whole fields of endeavor embedded inside Nietian thought. The whole corpus of psychoanalytic thought is embedded in paragraphs of of nichch's thought saying beyond good and evil and Jung for example uh was a student of nichches not directly an ad admire of nature he wrote he published eventually a400page I believe it was 1400 page book on seminar notes on the first one-third of thus spake zerustra so that's about 40 pages 1 1400 pages of exposition ition on that on onethird of what's a very small volume and so there's a tremendous amount to unpack in niche and so uh it's a mustard seed issue uh Christ compared the the kingdom of God if I remember correctly to a mustard seed this tiny little grain of possibility that can unfold into this remarkable structure and and poetic language in particular image imageladen language has that proclivity to to contain much more than you'd expect given the brevity of the statement. And that's because the meaning isn't just contained in the words, it's contained in the relationship between the words and the relationship between the phrases and the sentences and then the poetic relationship of the sentences to the corpus of thought that it refers to. And so it can pack a tremendous amount of information into a very small space. That's particularly true if you write poetically. And Nichi Nichze was a a prophetic and revelatory writer. Thus speaks Zerahustra, for example, is written in a kind of intense, emotionladen Old Testament language. And many people who are flirting with intellectual development fall in love with s with uh with thus speak Zerathustra, which is this poetic work uh poetic fairy tale narrative about a prophet who descends um back into his community with a revelation at hand. And it's not a good example of of the of the larger corpus of Nichzche's work because he's actually a very clear writer and thinker. But it is an example of the degree to which his philosophy wasn't dry rational cognition but infused with a sense of creative dynamism and and poetic inspiration. And again, that's partly what alienated him from the academic community of his time. And still in some some ways Nietze is still a fringe philosopher because he's got this intense romanticism about him. Makes him a dramatic character. He's more like a character in a DSKI novel, which is something that we'll touch on as as we move through this than than your than your let's say typical um your typical dest philosopher. He uh very very dynamic thinker. And so uh it's it's a great adventure intellectually and morally to read Nichza. He's a remarkable person truly truly prophetic individual. Jung believed that Carl Jung believed you know that people in some lived in in at different times at the same time. There's some people in the world now who are really living a hundred years in what will be the future. Right? They're the people who are establishing what the world's going to be far down the road. And there are people now who live hundreds of years in the past. And maybe the bulk of us are somewhere ensconced in the present, but there are a few people out there who are on the edge of what will be. And Dossi Nze were certainly on the edge of what would be in the mid 1800s. And they had some sense of what was going to unfold over the next 200 years and could see that with a kind of unairring accuracy. I suppose that's because they could like Jung there are people who are capable of seeing the deep undercurrents in society and seeing whi which way the wind was blowing or which way the zeitgeist was shifting the spirit of the times and I think it it's often people who are dreamers who are particularly capable of that because the dream tends to inhabit sort of the edge of the knowable and both ds well all three dsioski nichi and yung were intensely poetic and imaginative people, dreamers, and and and their writing is imbued with the spirit of the dream, the creative spirit of the dream. And that's partly that's partly, I suppose, what distinguishes a pro prophetic figure from a a more programmatic thinker is that they're more involved in the language and the language and the and the realm of the image and the dream. And that's that's a richer realm, although it's more difficult to make explicit. You know how hard it is when you remember a dream to even to be able to account for it programmatically and systematically to transform it into words. How much you lose when you do that. The dream gains in richness what it loses in precision and explicit content. And there there are geniuses who can stand on the border between the dream and and the word and translate the image and the dream into the word. And Nisha was definitely one of those figures. >> You're starting your own college. >> Yeah. Well, it's well started. The progressives hope for universal education at something approximating zero cost. That's what we've got. We can bring you the best lectures that you will be able to get anywhere in terms of their quality of content and also the production values. All the people we're bringing on board are existential philosophers in some real sense. We think that a humanities education should enrich your experience in every direction and be nothing but positive. Well, except also difficult and challenging, but that's also positive. Yeah, we certainly didn't have that when I was a kid. So, let's walk through his we're going to we're going to walk through his biography a bit so so you have some understanding of of the the structure of his life and then we're going to position him in his historical context so you have some sense of what's going on in Europe and the rest of the world at this time. And then we're going to turn to the exposition of some of his thoughts from uh beyond good and evil. So he only lived 56 years from 1844 to 1900. Uh was very ill for much of that time and so managed to accomplish what he did accomplish despite the fact that he was working constantly against insuperable odds. Uh he was so ill that he could only work as I said for short bursts of time. And uh you know one of the things that's remarkable and admirable about Nietze and worth thinking about from a practical and moral perspective is that despite the fact that he was extraordinarily ill u one of the villages he lived in in Switzerland he was regarded as the saint that was his nickname because he was such a pleasant person and was so good to everybody he met and was still struggling to wrestle with these deep questions despite the fact that he was so ill that he was half blind and could hardly write and was sick. to his stomach all the time and was suffering from some sort of illness that eventually manifested itself as a psychosis and then a series of strokes that killed him at a very early age. And you know that's worth thinking about too because you know our we have this sense that if terrible things happen to you, you'll turn out to be a terrible person and that that fact is justified by the presence of your unfair suffering. And well, you can understand that if you meet someone who's been terribly hurt, who is terribly ill, who isn't behaving properly, you can say, well, maybe if I was in that situation, I would behave the same way. But the problem with that is that you do come across people, and you'll come across them in your own life and maybe even be one of those to whom terrible things have happened and will happen, and that will be the case for all of us, by the way, who are still nonetheless doing everything they can to make the world better rather than worse. And I think that Nietze was definitely one of those people. And I, you know, I say that with all due care because it's it's certainly also the case that NZ and his philosophical hammerings did destabilize the entire structure of Western civilization. And you could think of him as someone destructive in that regard. But I've always thought of nature, especially in regard to Christianity, as the kind of critic you really want to have around, you know, because if you're if you're sure of yourself, but your foundations are unsettled and and and in need of repair, it might be your best friend who comes along and taps on the weakest spots so that you know where they are. And that might be initially very destructive to you because it might even speed the process of your crumbling. But if the consequence of that is that you can rebuild something out of the runes that's even stronger, then that's part of the process of creative destruction. And I think that Nietze was ironically I'm pushing it here possibly ironically an anti-Christian that he knew perfectly well that the best defense was a rigorous offense and that if you had respect for something you could take all the hammers and tongs you had at your disposal and apply it to that. And uh it's certainly the case that reading niche helped clarify my understanding of Christian eth the Christian ethos for example and and if you subject something to a radical criticism and it remains standing then that's an indication of its integrity and its utility. Now whether the Judeo-Christian ethos can actually withstand the Nietian criticism, you combine that with the Freudian criticism and the implicit criticism that emerged out of Darwin and say out of the Enlightenment period as well, then perhaps it's not obvious that anything remains at all. Although I think that's a pessimistic overstatement. We're going to find out that there's a lot more there down in the foundations that will withstand any challenge that than we ever imagined. And I think if we do discover that I think we're in the process of that that we can thank Nietze for laying the groundwork for that because without the questions that he had generated so trenchantly and so devastatingly then the quality of the answers would have been much lesser. So for example Jung we'll return to Yung for a moment. Jung was very much influenced by Freud especially in this formulation of the unconscious but he really spent his entire career trying to answer a question that na posed which was well on what basis should we erect our morality. So when Nze demolished the structure of western morality by by pointing to the death of God, Nietze proposed that human beings would henceforth have to create their own values. Right? Because Nietze also believed at least as a young man that God was a human creation rather than the other way around. And he believed once we dispensed with God that we would have to create our own values. And and you can understand that at at least on the surface as a reasonable proposition. If the values that once served us have now vanished, what else are we going to do but create our own values? And Jung took that suggestion extraordinarily seriously, asking, well, is it actually possible for an individual to create his or her own values? Because that's a nichian presupposition that we could do that. Now niche believed it would have to be a whole new kind of person that's the overman or the uber mench the superman who would be capable of doing that he knew it was a extraordinarily difficult task the psychoanal an analysts starting with Freud showed and also taking a page from niche that the problem with the idea that you might create your own values is that it's not obvious at all that you're the master of your own house so for Freud for example you were essentially a collection of loose biological ical inclinations, right? ID driven impulses that might serve you as lesser gods and pull you in all sorts of directions. For Freud, it was lust, aggression, and the impulse towards death were the p where your primordial gods and and they're instantiated within you at a biological level. And you're their play thing. You're their toy. It isn't obvious that you that you can be the master of your own values in a manner that would allow you to create them. And Jung took that idea e much much further because the the other question that emerges that what would be that even if you did create your own values let's say what would stop the person sitting beside you from creating their own values and and you creating your own values and why would you assume that those would have any union and if they didn't have any union then why wouldn't you assume that you just devolve into constant conflict. So part of the problem with the idea of generating your own values is well what unifies us and you might say well we don't need to be unified. It's like well you do if you don't want the hobbsian state of brutal nature to reign because if we're not united in our outlook and our values then as soon as you want something other than what I want we are definitely going to be at going to be at each other's throats. And so Jung started to delve into that as did the developmental psychologist Shan Pay trying to understand how it might be that how you might understand the boundaries of value construction. Like is there a universe within which values have to operate in order for them to unite a given person psychologically or for them to unite a multitude of people socially across large spans of time. You might think about that as the question of what constitutes a playable versus a non-playable game, right? Can it iterate? Can it sustain itself? Can it can it can it fortify itself across time? Maybe that's the kind of game you want to play if you ever get married. You want a game that you can continue to play, but also one that approves across time. And maybe those games have a set form or pattern of form that they have to occupy in order to have those properties. And of course Nietz speculated about that as well which is something that we'll see very brilliantly. Um you can see in his own thought the genesis of ideas that might have been the answer to the question that he posed and certainly were unraveled by other thinkers like Yung like Freud like P um to provide an answer to the to the questions that he offered. So he was born in 1844. At the age of 25, he was offered a a full professorship at the University of Basil in classical philology. He was he didn't even have a PhD at that time. He had to get an honorary PhD from another university. He was awarded an honorary PhD from another university, I believe, as a precondition for taking up that professorial position. It was unheard of at the time. And so it was obvious that Nichch's brilliance was recognized by the academic community uh at a very young age. And that's quite remarkable because he was a very romantic spirit, not a well- behaved person. Uh the fact that he was recognized by universities as a consequence of his stellar intellectual achievement is even more striking because he was a controversial person but so brilliant that despite the controversy he was a hot a hot intellectual property and those are relatively rare. So was a full professor of classical philology at the University of Basil and was devoted himself to the understanding of Latin and Greek texts. That's classical philology. In 1879 he resigned. In 1880 he collapsed with paralysis and this vascular dementia an emergent psychosis. All sorts of people have speculated on what might have been wrong with Nietze and no one really knows. Maybe it was syphilis. Maybe it was mercury poisoning from the treatment of syphilis. His father died very young of something that looked akin to a brain illness I think at the age of 36. And so maybe there was something hereditary going on. Um, other people have speculated that his own philosophy drove him to the edge of madness and then beyond. I don't believe that. I read Nichch's works in sequence and I don't believe that there's there's evidence of an emerging pathology that's a consequence of his thought. I might say that speculation about the death of God took his own foundations out from underneath him and he collapsed into, you know, a catastrophic and depressive nihilism and then died. And that does happen to people, but I don't think that that's fits with the facts. I do think instead that there's a fundamental optimism about Nietiian thought which is quite remarkable that's in keeping with some of his basic propositions because he believed that we weren't motivated by the will to survive but by the will to express what he called power and he had a very particularized definition of that that life consisted in the attempt to expend ourselves in life and he tried to live in accordance with that ethos and I think very successfully Let's look at the world in the late 1800s in the time period that he lived because it's a good idea to get a sense of the dynamism of the times and what sort of revolutionary um activities were underway and underfoot in Europe in the west when Nichi was formulating his thought. I mean very it's a very dynamic period that it it it's at the height of the of the industrial revolution the utter transformation of the world. I mean in 1865 if I remember correctly the typical person in the western world lived on less than a$150 a day in today's terms right just barely clinging to the edge of the margins of of of of hand-to-mouth sustainability the entire world was poor in a way that we can hardly imagine and that was starting to transform with incredible rapidity in this amazing uh transformation of the industrial and technological revolution that's raised the whole planet by now out of abject poverty and continues to do that at an ever accelerating rate. It's a very very dynamic time in the late in the in the last half of the 1800s. So we'll just let's just walk through some of the cardinal events. So in 1840 the US in the US the western expansion is continuing into what eventually becomes California. In 1840 I threw this in just because I was Canadian. Upper and Canada lower Canada merged into a single province. Canada was uh integrated as a state in 1867. We think of Canada as a new country, but it's actually quite an old democracy with an even older history. New Zealand was founded. 1842, Hong Kong was seated to Britain. Uh 45, Texas became the 28th state. In 1846, America, the US incorporated a huge swath of the Southwest, taking that territory from Mexico and incorporated Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana from the UK. In 1847, a physician named Semow Weiss proposed that surgeons should wash their hands when moving from patient to patient. It was an early manifestation of what later became the germ theory of pathogen transmission. And of course his colleagues him into insanity and death for his unmitigated gall in proposing such a uh demented theory. At that time surgeons used to pride themselves on the on the on the filth in some in in on their surgical uniforms because that showed how much surgery they had uh conducted. And so they'd move from patient to patient in a cloud of of myasma and and death. And women were killed with amazing regularity in hospitals because of the transmission of disease from one to another as a consequence of the filthy physicians who were attending to them. And Seml Weiss cottoned onto the fact that perhaps all this dirt and blood was not not a very good idea and he was eventually proved right although he wasn't around to see that. So 1848 the communist manifesto was published and so that's interesting as well because as I said Nietze prognosticated that the ideas that came to culmination in the communist manifesto would prove extraordinarily attractive to people motivated number one by envy and number two lost in the nihilistic chaos that's a consequence of the death of traditional morality. Do you do you have to orient yourself with some form of systematic thought? And the answer seems to be yes. Because otherwise the world's too complex. You have to be able to reduce the complexity of the world to something approximating a systematic uh perspective or you drown in in difficulty. And so if one system of value collapses, then another is going to beckon to you because you have to do something to organize all the multiplicitus proclivities of your psyche into something approximating a unity. So you you and and so what that means maybe is that we're always in the situation of the Israelites in the desert. You know, in the Exodus story, the Israelites leave the tyranny of Egypt. You could draw an analogy and say, "Well, we left the tyranny of the Judeo-Christian ethic." And where did we end up? Well, in the promised land, it's like, well, that isn't how the story goes. You go from the tyranny to the desert, not to the promised land. And one of the things that happens in the desert is that you're enticed into the worship of idols because you need some centralizing tendency, right, to guide you and to unite you. And so, if you lose one, there's going to be a terrible unconscious longing for another. And well, you see that manifested in the communist manifesto and you all know or perhaps you know of the terrible consequences that arose as a consequence of the formulation of that ethos. It was a new attempt to develop a system of axiomatic presuppositions, right? The basic foundations of a state that was almost entirely derived at least in principle from a rational approach. And the communists always insisted that they had a scientific materialism at the basis of their system of thought, which I think is a radical overstatement. First of all, it's not that easy to derive an ethic from science. And second, it isn't obvious at all that communism was driven by, say, love of the common man. Uh, I would say instead that it was driven to a tremendous degree by an unagnowledged and omnipresent envious resentment. And I would also say the proof of that is in the pudding which is that while the spirit of envious resentment taken to its logical conclusion would result in the deaths of many many people because the spirit of envious resentment is murderous to the core. And that is exactly what happened every time the communist pre presuppositions were actually realized in any given state. You know the the the radical leftist types say well that's not true communism but the perspeacious analysts of communism foremost among them soliten uh laid out in the early '7s an unassalable argument that the murderousness of the communist regimes was a necessary consequence of the a priaryy axims of the philosophical system. Same kind of idea there that in a phrase as innocuous as from each according to his ability, to each according to his need, which sounds extraordinarily compassionate and generous on the surface, has inside an ethos that if allowed to unfold in a natural environment, produces in the end result something that's u indistinguishable from the genocidal murderousness of Stellin and Mao. And you think, well, could that all be embedded in a phrase that innocuous? And perhaps the answer is well not all of that in that one phrase but in the cloud of ideas that surrounds that phrase certainly and the proof is when you planted that seed in various places the same tree grew and bore the same evil fruits. So 1848 first women's rights convention in the US at Senica Falls. 51 Louis Napoleon leads a coup in France. 52 Italy moves towards unification. We think of these countries as so ancient Italy for example but it wasn't unified in 1852. 53 to86 France and Britain defended the Ottoman Empire and defeated Russia. Commodore Perry in 1853 brought gunboats into the harbor in Tokyo and forced the opening of Japan. A great shock to the Japanese who regarded themselves as the center of the world and were radically overpowered by this overwhelming technology that the Americans could bring to bear. Uh that's an amazing story in and of itself. 1855 the Bessemer process enabled the mass production of steel. Of course, that revolutionized the construction of cities and the entire industrial landscape. first oil refinery in 1856 in Romania. A lot of things happening at the same time. 59 the Suez Canal was constructed. The Big Ben was completed in 1859. Darwin published the origin of species which was another death blow to the to a a kind of a kind of wrote Christianity I would say because the origin of species was the first account that provided a plausible mechanism whereby life might have generated itself rather than being part of the created order. And that was another uh another bit of philosophizing with a hammer although this time it occurred on the scientific front. Uh I mean when I was your age let's say uh it I would say that it was likely Einstein who was regarded as the foremost scientist of the last 150 years. But I would say it wasn't long after that before Einstein as profound as his contributions were was supplanted by Darwin. I I don't think there's a scientist of the last 150 years whose impact has been greater than that of Charles Darwin. The theory of evolution provided a uniting framework for all the sciences above the level of chemistry. is so an incredible work very hard on Darwin himself psychologically because he was a Christian and he knew that there was a tension between the implications of his work say and the narrative that had been laid out in the Christian ethos and it isn't obvious at all that he was able to reconcile that that gulf he was not pleased that his work was uh he was not pleased about the fact that there was a contradiction between his work and the faith that he abided by. He knew how useful that faith was in providing people with psychological unity and social purpose and and suffered from panic attacks, for example, for much of his life. And now it's never easy to diagnose someone who's here now when you talk to them, let alone retrospectively. But that's a tremendous amount of psychological tension for someone to to uh to bear as the first person who bears that. and and Darwin really did understand the implications of what he had written as well as understanding what he wrote. 1860 the first recording of human voice 61-65 that was the American civil war fought fundamentally over the issue of slavery. 1861 the Russians abolished surfom. So slavery was rife in Eastern Europe and in Russia up till that point. And it's part of the it's part of the universal heritage of mankind, right? I mean it's the it's not the existence of slave free societies that's the human norm. It's the reverse of that and the miracle I would say of the west is that and perhaps of the industrial revolution but also of the ethos that drove that revolution and distributed its fruits to such a wide range of people that slavery was regarded as intrinsically wrong. And then and then uh and on a wide enough scale and deep enough so that even people who were economically motivated perhaps to perpetuate slavery were forced starting in the UK to contend with the fact that regardless of its potential short and medium-term economic viability it was unethical to the core. So 1861 the Russians abolish surfum James clerk Maxwell publishes his famous equations uniting light and electromagnetism laying the groundwork for much of modern physics. Lincoln issued the emancipation proclamation deeming all men to be free in the United States in 1863. Manet exhibited the first impressionist painting which and those early uh exhibitions caused riots in Paris because the impressionists were forcing people or enticing people inviting people to see the world in a completely new way. When we look at impressionist paintings now we think well they're kind of classically beautiful but that's only because we now see like impressionist painters saw. They literally taught us to see the world in a different way. And that was very hard on people to begin with. So you have no idea how much the way you see the world is a consequence of you mimicking great artists across time. They've literally taught you even to to understand what constitutes beautiful even to note for example that there might be such a thing as beauty in the natural world and then to see that as part parcel of your day-to-day experience. That's all taught to us by great artists who are geniuses of perception obviously and they can see things where where where other people see just the predictable. They see miracles where other people just see the predictable and the familiar. Robert E. Lee in 1865 surrenders end of the American Civil War. Slavery is banned in the US with the 13th amendment and Lincoln is assassinated. It's 1865. Same year Mandle formulated the laws of inheritance. 1866 Maji restoration in Japan and the beginning of Japanese modernization which took place at an extraordinarily rapid rate. First transatlantic telegraphy cable 1867 purchase of Alaska and a devastating famine in Sweden. That's worth noting too. That's not that long ago, right? Sweden's a very modern, rich industrialized society. We can't even envision something like famine occurring there, but it's not that long ago when the world was was poor enough. So that even in relatively rich and developed nations, the threat of famine was often extremely real. 1869, Toltoy published War and Peace. 7071, the FrancoRussian War produced a united Germany and Italy. From 1875 to 1900, 26 million Indians perished from famine. And in 1876, 13 million in China. 1876 the US guilded age begins. So that's when the Americans really start to march forward on the world stage. The time of the great industrialists and this immense generation and distribution of wealth in this huge emergent democracy in North America. The beginning of the domination of the world by by the by Americans politically, economically and culturally. 76 of course the UK is still on the top of the world at that point. Queen Victoria as Empress of India. In 77, Serbia, Montenegro, Romania, and Bulgaria are become independent. Commercial telephone exchange in 78 in New Haven, Connecticut. And so that's the dawn of the connected age, right? The new internet, the telephone, and and uh well, everyone knows the consequences of that because now you carry that around with you all the time and spent half your life looking at it. 1879, Edison invents the light bulb. 1881 pogram p program p program p program p program p program p program p program p program p program p program pograms wash through Russia in the rise of this terrible flood of anti-semitic propaganda uh that's the early manifestation of what of course culminated in the holocaust and and also motivated in eventually the establishment of Zionism in the settlement of Israel uh 1884 first self-powered machine gun that's a bigger invention than you might think if you don't think about it because a machine gun makes one man into to an army. That's the end of horses in battle for obvious reasons. It's the ends of falances, of soldiers marching forward because all that means is you die. It It's the in initiation of an entirely new form of warfare and also of slaughter and mayhem on a scale that was completely unimaginable prior to the emergence of the machine gun. start saw that technology really start to make itself manifest in the First World War because it started out with standard battles using cavalry, using horses and horses were used throughout the entire First World War but with obviously with less and less success and part of the reason for trench warfare was the well the presence of machine gun hundreds of rounds of uh munitions in an amazingly short period of time. And we have guns now that'll fire like tens tens of thousands of bullets in a second. Just unbelievable devastating force. The force of an entire army in one machine. So 1885 first internal combustion car and the Singer sewing machine was popularized. 1889 the Eiffel Tower is inaugurated. This new tower of steel, right? And that becomes the the archetype I suppose of the skyscrapers that now dominate the landscape of the cities. Bicycles sweep Europe in 1890. 92 is the first gasoline tractor. The Olympic G games are revivified in Athens in 1896. A sign of the world coming together know as an integrated as an as an integrated society. Uh sports led the way there in some ways. 1898 the first Zeppelin airship. So now people can travel through the sky from place to place. The exposition Universal was held in Paris in 1900 featuring the new artistic movement Art Nuvo. All right. So that that that's a bit of an overview of of where we are in history and you can get a sense of the dynamism of the times especially the industrial spirit of the times right this this burgeoning widespread industrial economy that's lifting immense numbers of people out of sustenance level living which we tend to romanticize as fortunate 21st century city dwellers but was a pretty damn dismal difficult cold brutal miserable able ill-fed slog for 95% of people not very long ago. Oh,