…but someone with an uncommon eye
for the overall danger that “humanity” itself will degenerate,

someone like us,
who has recognized the outrageous contingency
that has been playing games
with the future of humanity so far
– games in which no hand
and not even a “finger of God” has taken part!

– someone who has sensed
the disaster that lies hidden
in the idiotic guilelessness and credulity
of “modern ideas,”
and still more
in the whole of Christian-European [American] morality:
someone like this will suffer from an unparalleled sense of alarm.

In a single glance he will comprehend
everything that could be bred from humanity,
given a favorable accumulation and intensification of forces and tasks;
he will know with all the prescience of his conscience
how humanity has still not exhausted its greatest possibilities,
and how often the type man
has already faced enigmatic decisions and new paths:

– he will know even better,
from his most painful memories,
the sorts of miserable things that generally shatter,
crush, sink, and turn a development of the highest rank
into a miserable affair.

Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by Judith Butler, aphorism 203

The Republican convention in Milwaukee proceeds apace. Despite my intention to avoid viewing any of the spectacle, I happened to catch a interview segment. Two delegates from Illinois were interviewed. Both were politicians I had viewed and listened to in the post. One is a well-to-do farmer from Southern Illinois. The second man is the currently serving mayor of Aurora Illinois, Richard Irvin. An African American, he passionately pressed the argument with his interviewer that the Republican party was a comfy habitat for Black Americans. I was not surprised at this, notwithstanding while speaking he was surrounded by a majority white male crowd, the spiritual descendants of the slave traders, and slave holding planters of the old South.  Their ancestors would have owned his.

In a past times politics was of mild interest to me. At present by contrast conservative thought has been weaponized by the Republican party. An ill wind blows, a storm gathers for racial, gender, and non-citizen minorities if the Republicans successfully achieve control of both houses of congress and the White House.

A friend reminded me of the fresco painted by Raphael for Pope Julius II, The School of Athens.  Plato’s Academy is depicted, with Plato and Aristotle being the focal point of the painting. Plato gestures upward, a symbolic nod to philosophical idealism that was later adapted by Christianity.  Aristotle’s hand gestures toward the earth, a nod to his insistence that we pay attention to nature, to the earth, our home, – that “matter” matters.

Those two contrasting viewpoints, philosophies, haunt the political divide that now roils our country. What is most fundamental, supremely important? “Values” that you believe are divinely given, or a “this world” secular bearing?

The header graphic is a cartoon which Raphael would have used as a preliminary step to painting the fresco.