https://asiatimes.com/2021/07/xi-jinpin ... an-moment/For a century after its completion in 1832, Faust commanded the attention of the whole literary world. Samuel Taylor Coleridge published a partial translation in 1821, and Percy Shelley tried his hand at a few scenes. The most influential Victorian critic, Matthew Arnold, took it for granted that Goethe was the greatest writer after Shakespeare.
The malign influence of T S Eliot, not to mention the Anglo-Saxon aversion to Germany after two world wars, buried Goethe’s reputation in the English-speaking world, and today it is unusual to meet Americans who know the work. That is a pity, because Faust may be the best window that Western analysts have into the mind of the world’s most powerful man.
This essay and another one appears to be sliding into the memory hole for the position D.P. Goldman seems to be taking which is pro-China not because he favours them, but because they are getting it right.......
A culture with no particular attachment to either Christian culture or the Enlightenment yet takes those accomplishments seriously is arrayed against a Western civilisation that hates herself and wants to die. Is it burglary when the scavenger picks up the silver tossed out the window by the heirs of a priceless estate gone mad?.....
https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2021/05/31 ... e-n1451094China offers its undergraduates a deep dive into the Western mind–Greek, Latin, and Continental European (although there also are a couple of offerings on John Rawls). Why? China appreciates Western creativity and wants to learn the trick. China’s hierarchical society doesn’t foster creativity (that is, tolerate the eccentrics and oddballs who discover things like General Relativity) as well as the West, to be sure. But learning the philosophy and music of the West is the next best thing.
Under Mao Zedong, China had a “cultural revolution” that destroyed its universities and sent academics (and many others) into exile to “learn from the peasants” in remote villages). Now WE are having our own cultural revolution, as a Chinese acquaintance taunted me, complete with “struggle sessions” and “criticism and self-criticism” over supposed systemic racism.
Our brightest young people are out trying to devise the next killer app. The way things are going, we will be geeks in a new Roman Empire. The dissipated, infertile Greeks fell to the intellectually inferior Romans, who absorbed the parts of Greek culture they found useful and, in their own way, preserved it. As we burn down our own culture, China may become the last refuge of classical philology, Western philosophy, and classical music.
