LIBERTY FANATICISM LUTHER GANDHI WHIGGISM

One might say that our age is another age of Luther, or of many Luthers, around the world.

 

I have occasionally referred to the Reformation, as having been an unmitigated disaster for Western Civilization. I stand by that assessment. 

 

I recognize that I myself perhaps commit a sort of Whig fallacy by making such a statement. Fair enough. Call me a Contra Whig. In the old days, I would have been called a Tory.

 

Professor Kaiser is rather a Whig historian. He probably thinks the Reformation was a good thing, a natural result and continuation of the Renaissance, and led on to the Enlightenment, etc. This is classic Whiggish history. 

 

His Whiggism is modulated by the cyclicality of S & H, what one might call a generational boom and bust Whiggism, moving in generational crisis cycles, according to the theory, to ever higher ground, eventually, in the fullness of time.

 

Most Americans, and indeed most Europeans now, take a Whiggish view of one stripe or another.

 

Let's just call their view, generally, the Whig Interpretation of History.

 

I consider that I am in quite good, if relatively scarce, Contra Whig company, nonetheless.

 

Whiggism did not start out, moreover, in spite of what you read, in a liberal, tolerant, enlightened, reasoned refutation of oppressive ignorant despotic conservative intolerant Dark Ages Catholicism...

 

"One might say that the very action which precipitated the break with Rome was prompted by Luther's own intolerance of what he deemed wrong religion in other people. It might be argued that what Luther rebelled against was not the severity but the laxity of the Popes." The Whig Interpretation of History, pb, p 79

Rome had started out coddling Luther, in a way similar to how the British, 400 years later, coddled Gandhi, and then Hitler. Of course FDR coddled Stalin.... 

Both Rome, and the best in Britain, lived to deeply regret these things. So do I....