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- Nietzsche’s attack on religion make more sense to me after making private study of Europe’s reformation wars. In a secular age — at least in the west — when religion is rather banal and benign, and ultimately irrelevant, it is easy to forget just how destructive some doctrinal differences were, can be.
- I’ve been thinking of early modern history in relation to the Jamal Khashoggi affair, an act of barbarity which belongs in another age. What happened to Jamal Khashoggi reminds us that beneath — right beneath — the present moment, is a vast reservoir of historical violence.
- Governments murdered people every day — that is not the issue here. The Crown Prince’s miscalculation was to murder Jamal Khashoggi in a way that easily captured the imagination. Sublime evil is bad PR these days.
- The Protestant consciousness was better adapted to the demands of modern capitalism than the Catholic consciousness — Weber’s thesis still has a stunning elegance. I wonder, accordingly, why economics and religion are still treated like separate subjects. God and gold, after all, are both signifiers of Value.
- States feed on crisis. The state is inevitably more powerful after a crisis: which is why it must create them.
- Modern politics is always theological, even when God is not involved.
- Global wars cluster around explosions of information. The printing press dovetailed with the reformation wars; World Wars I and II with the invention of mass media. The Internet will inexorably produce its own big war.
- Conversely, you might say that the numerous small wars that the Internet has already produced are tantamount to one big war: that the world wide web is a web of conflict.
