Fear in history

Bob Herbert’s “ An Absence of Class“ (March 23) is a timely call for decent Americans to rise up against fear, ignorance and divisiveness in our political life. .

We need to understand that it’s fear that is driving that behavior, fear that fear-mongering against “big government” is foundering on the spectacle of China’s very big government threatening our leadership in the race to the future, fear that a strategy of demonizing “socialism” in Europe fails to explain the effective performance of people-oriented capitalism there, fear that a decades-long campaign of fear, ignorance and divisiveness to block any move toward a more mature, sustainable society is finally failing,

Fear is a very powerful emotion that can cause pathological, irrational behavior when it finds itself trapped in a cage of reality with no way out.

Growing up in History - the book

This revolutionary book updates the ideas of two of the great thinkers about history, St Augustine, first century Bishop of Hippo in North Africa, and eighteenth century Italian historian Giovanni Battista Vico. It brings fresh insights into the long life story of our Western civilization by exploring Vico’s view that patterns of change of peoples in history can be understood by comparing the experiences of people in nations in different times in the context of St Augustine’s view that history is the education of the human race advancing in stages like our personal life-stages
There are many reasons to understand the process that produced Western civilization and will determine our future. We want to know how our world came to be, what it may become, and the lessons the past holds for our lives. A timely and particularly illuminating reason is the clash of civilizations in the 21st century, which calls for a new exploration of the history of Western civilization and its future in a world that faces it's modernity with perverse hostility.
To understand the dynamics of that process, and the meaning of aging and maturity in nations and people, Growing up in History applies a contemporary perspective to those ideas of St Augustine and Vico, borrowing from G. W.F. Hegel, Abraham Maslow, and chaos theory, an approach that has special relevance to understanding the growth of nations and people as they move through times of order and times to our chaotic 21st century. The lessons of that journey can tell us how people in the mature democratic nations of our global world can find inner freedom and happiness.

The Education of The Human Race

“The education of the human race, represented by the people of God, has advanced, like that of an individual, through certain epochs, or, as it were, ages, so that it might gradually rise from earthly to heavenly things, and from the visible to the invisible.
St Augustine, The City of God Book X.”

Summary

Posts in my Blogingon (rovion-on.blogspot.com) that refer to development of the mind are summarized in this blog

What is Wisdom?

In brief, wisdom is the power our brains acquire by learning the lessons of our history. From the infancy meanings stage of history we learn from the gods and parents who governed our infancy the the management of our basic needs for food and shelter, the values of love and caring and the terrors of their absence, and the manifold wonders of the world we live in. From the childhood security stage we learn how strong parental power can deal with the dangers and forces that threaten those needs and values, our beliefs and very existence. From the adolescent togetherness stage we learn how to join in relationships, laws and institutions that begin to provide those needs, values and security and struggle to end the governance of parental power. From the adulthood esteem stage we learn how to transfer those relationships, laws and institutions and that struggle to a fresh location and exploit the need for esteem to seize the wealth and possessions that replaced parental power And in the maturity self-actualization stage in same location of those gods and parents we learn from their regressions to the gods and parental abuses how to use those relationships to build new laws and institutions that replace the need for esteem with the need for self-actualization to replace those parental powers..
The internalization of all those lessons of history frees us from the constraining powers of all those stages of history and enable us to make pragmatic decisions that promote our full potential. Compare St Paul's Letter to the Romans 7,6