good traits and fear of God, --a lot depends of getting them when one is young.

In terms of gaining good traits and fear of God, a lot depends of getting them when one is young. As Howard Bloom points out in The Lucifer Principle one's thought patterns at a certain point get hardened into one mind like a circuit board that after one places the connections in the right places, then heats it up to retain the connections.
That book is I think one of the great books to come out from the twentieth century [along with The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom. It is a wake up call that I think fell  mainly on deaf ears. Still I think some people got the idea.]

The whole issue of needing to work consciously one one traits was certainly a motivating factor of Reb Israel Salanter in creating the Musar Movement--that is the idea of learning medieval books on ethics. [The advantage of the Middle Ages in terms of this kind of study is that it was the period when the scholastic thinkers were at their peak in finding the balance between Faith and Reason. ]

The idea really did not end with the Middle Ages. A lot of good work was done later by the disciples of Reb Israel Salanter. They also wrote a few Musar books--some of which are remarkable [Navardok and the אור צפון and אור ישראל come to mind]

Orion

NGC 4676: when mice collide These two mighty galaxies are pulling each other apart.

NGC 4676: when mice collide

These two mighty galaxies are pulling each other apart. Known as the “Mice” because they have such long tails, each spiral galaxy has likely already passed through the other. The long tails are created by the relative difference between gravitational pulls on the near and far parts of each galaxy. Because the distances are so large, the cosmic interaction takes place in slow motion – over hundreds of millions of years. NGC 4676 lies about 300 million light-years away toward the constellation of Bernice’s Hair (Coma Berenices) and are likely members of the Coma Cluster of Galaxies. The above picture was taken with the Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys in 2002. These galactic mice will probably collide again and again over the next billion years until they coalesce to form a single galaxy.

Liftoff of the Apollo 17 Saturn V Moon Rocket from Pad A, Launch Complex 39, Kennedy Space Center, Florida, at 12:33 a.m., December 7, 1972. Apollo 17, the final lunar landing mission, was the first night launch of a Saturn V rocket." height="480"

questions about German Idealism

The two unstated questions about German Idealism I mentioned before were two world wars. These seems to me to be serious enough even if there were no more questions. But a further question is the fact that communists and socialists did in fact learn and study Hegel with extreme intensity [though they certainly disagreed with major points] and communism as shown clearly by Venezuela is pretty much a tragedy.

What makes this curious is that is hard to find any philosophers of the stature of Kant and Hegel unless you go back to Plato.
So where did things go wrong?

Karl Popper really went full steam ahead in his attack on Hegel, and yet seems to have missed the fact that communists were not implementing Hegel's system.
Still you have to ask: what is it about the USA Constitution that seems to get things right? (And even more startling is that the USA Constitution was a product of long experience in England. It was ad hoc.

Parliament was established not for any higher motives but because Edward I needed money. The Magna Carta was because the lords did not want King John lording it over them. Every single paragraph of the USA Constitution was made because in England that provision was found to be necessary,--not from any kind of philosophy.] 

 

[More or less. It is funny the major point of  Leftists is that whatever the USA does is wrong;-- when Leftist systems seems to be infinitely worse.]

[I should mention that the USA Constitution was not made up out of thin air but did have basis  on pretty good thinkers. I guess that would have to be the Natural Law people like Aquinas and John Locke.]

Sandra Lehman [a philosopher] once suggested to me that there is something about philosophy that takes away common sense. But I think she was touching on a larger issue. That in almost any subject one can get into it to the degree of losing all perspective.

In any case, I have mentioned before that the USA Constitution seems to work best with WASPs [White Anglo Saxon Protestants]. It could be suggested that for populations with some high percent of criminal DNA that it simply would not work. [Thus the USSR might very well have been necessary for that area.]

space x picture

space shuttle