But Einstein was only one of many thinkers and artists for whom “time” had become a central concern. The cubist visions of Picasso and Braque presented a perception of “simultaneity,” of “everythingatonce” rather than “one-thing-at-a-time.”
Wars, when they erupted, increasingly were likely to be intrastate rather than interstate. Kissinger, the power politician focused on nation-states and national interest, looked on this future with gloom. He knew he had no answers.
Many factors went into building political power among nations, from the most unchanging, like geography, to the most mutable and evanescent, like public opinion or morale. Population, raw materials, industrial capacity, technology, and leadership all contributed to power, but for Morgenthau no factor was more important than national character.
And yet, with his love of the Western tradition, Strauss insistently denied that the Nazis could be traced back to Europe’s Christian heritage. To believe such a thing was to grant a victory to the Third Reich and its nihilistic destruction of the past. “Only someone completely ignorant would say that anti-Jewish thugs are a matter of Christianity,” he declared. “Of course not.” Hannah Arendt agreed. In 1945 she wrote that Hitler and the Third Reich owed “nothing to any part of the Western tradition, be it German or not, Catholic or Protestant, Christian, Greek or Roman. Whether we like Thomas Aquinas or Machiavelli or Luther or Kant or Hegel or Nietzsche. . . . They have not the least responsibility for what is happening in the extermination camps.”
The myths are, in the first place, a necessary ingredient of social life. A society in which they would be eliminated in favor of exclusively scientific beliefs would have nothing in common with the human societies that have existed and do exist in the real world, and is a merely imaginary fantasy. Here once more our investigation must be concrete. Certain derivations or myths under certain circumstances are socially useful, others detrimental; when the circumstances change, so may the effects of the myths. The doctrine of the divine right of kings is scientifically ridiculous.
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