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Entry: Tenderness Leads to the Gas Chamber Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/tenderness_leads_to_the_gas_chamber#27538 Post contents: The entire founding of modern politics is utterly wrong, something that Hannah Arendt correctly saw. Aristotle, Thomas, and Dante correctly saw that virtues of the <i>honestum</i>, as opposed to the useful virtues, must take first place. For the ancients, the useful virtues were the concern of the household and the market, and the honorable virtues were the concern of politics. Arendt correctly saw that modern politics completely reverses this order and relation. Our honorable virtues are now private matters, and the useful are the realm of politics. The result, she says (correctly), is that we're going to get such sorry examples of a human being in a figure like Eichmann. cf. her <i>The Human Condition</i> and <Eichmann in Jerusalem</i>. Aristotle also said that the honorable virtues could be taught, but the moderns (Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Hume) assume human being a chiefly, if not exclusively, creatures of passions, largely a violent passion, and can be checked only by another passion, fear. Start out with that modern assumption, and you're going to get Eichmann as well. Blame it all on Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau. And I must tell Paul Gottfried that if Lockean grounds are bad, Hobbesian are even worse. Sent at: 2008 08 30