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The General Crisis of the 17th Century

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Re: The General Crisis of the 17th Century

#21

Post by amyjess »

btilly wrote: post #13
ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that's a very Protestant, Whiggish view of things. Catholic Emancipation in the UK wasn't complete until 1829 for example. The idea of the Glorious Revolution as ushering in a democratic and free era was really only true if you were an Anglican, slightly less so for Dissenters, and very much less so for Catholics (both in Britain and Ireland). I think a lot of those crises in Europe were just continuations of t…

I deliberately stated a very mild form of the idea because that is what actually seems to have been accepted relatively early on. The stronger idea that we should actually treat people with different beliefs as we would like to be treated in turn took a lot longer. For instance the lot of many faiths in the UK started improving with the toleration act of 1668. Why were Catholics excluded? Because there had been actua…

> The US was fundamentally no better, and in practice worse despite the Bill of Rights

You also have to remember that until the Fourteenth Amendment was passed, the Bill of Rights only applied to acts of Congress ("Congress shall make no law...") and not to state legislatures.

Re: The General Crisis of the 17th Century

#22

Post by JonnieCache »

ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #19
btilly wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I deliberately stated a very mild form of the idea because that is what actually seems to have been accepted relatively early on. The stronger idea that we should actually treat people with different beliefs as we would like to be treated in turn took a lot longer. For instance the lot of many faiths in the UK started improving with the toleration act of 1668. Why were Catholics excluded? Because there had been actua…

And yet your own hereditary monarch in 2015 has to be an Anglican.

That's been recently changed. Catholics are now allowed, and men no longer take precedence over women.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perth_Agreement

The whole thing is still, to quote Doug Stanhope, "some dungeons and dragons bullshit", but at least its not immutable even today.

Re: The General Crisis of the 17th Century

#23

Post by ZanyProgrammer »

ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #19
btilly wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I deliberately stated a very mild form of the idea because that is what actually seems to have been accepted relatively early on. The stronger idea that we should actually treat people with different beliefs as we would like to be treated in turn took a lot longer. For instance the lot of many faiths in the UK started improving with the toleration act of 1668. Why were Catholics excluded? Because there had been actua…

And yet your own hereditary monarch in 2015 has to be an Anglican.

"However, the ban on Catholics and other non-Protestants becoming sovereign and the requirement for the sovereign to be in communion with the Church of England remained."

Re: The General Crisis of the 17th Century

#24

Post by DubiousPusher »

bgilroy26 wrote: post #7
ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that's a very Protestant, Whiggish view of things. Catholic Emancipation in the UK wasn't complete until 1829 for example. The idea of the Glorious Revolution as ushering in a democratic and free era was really only true if you were an Anglican, slightly less so for Dissenters, and very much less so for Catholics (both in Britain and Ireland). I think a lot of those crises in Europe were just continuations of t…

Re:whiggish-ness https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/pers...

Thanks for posting this. That essay is fantastic. It's actually a perfect complement to that article and the discussion happening in this entire thread.

It beautifully highlights the modern historian's crisis.

You cannot distill history into a framework because any unique set of events seem to be reproduced somewhere else in history with different outcomes.

You must distill history into a framework otherwise it's impossible to reason about and understand.

Re: The General Crisis of the 17th Century

#25

Post by jotm »

pluma wrote: post #11
btilly wrote: post #2

Regardless of what you think about whether these crises were connected, they did give rise to a rather important idea. At its heart, the idea is that, "I won't kill you for your beliefs if you aren't going to kill me for mine." This may seem like common sense today, but historically we only arrived at it after having plenty of opportunity to deal with the aftermath of people being willing to kill each other for havin…

This is actually exactly how I've recently heard the Peace of Westphalia[0] described (which ended the Thirty Years War in Germany): it established the idea that nations are independent "wholes" with their own laws, religion and politics, and that that's okay. The ideas encoded in the agreement are basically the reason we think of events like the Crimean secession[1] as an unconstitutional Russian annexation regardle…

Uh, I think if people seceded by a real public vote, they should be allowed to, regardless of what the constitution says.

People in a region voted to be independent, hence they are, they're their own nation. Forbidding that is a violation of their basic freedoms.

Now, I do think that Russia influenced the Crimean vote and plunged Ukraine into chaos, but if it was an honest, impartial vote, they should be allowed to self-govern or join the Russian federation, it's their choice...

Re: The General Crisis of the 17th Century

#27

Post by scarmig »

amyjess wrote: post #18
aaronem wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> developing and understanding frameworks for grouping historical events This is called "historiography", and were it more commonly taught in US primary and secondary schools, fewer Americans would think of "history" as being dull -- an endless stream of bare facts lacking context is indeed dull as dishwater; it's in the drawing and analysis of narrative that all the interest lies.

I've always felt that people would enjoy history more if teachers would remember that history contains story .

In fact, etymology-wise history preceded and begat story. It was only as an analogy to history that we invented that signifier for the concept of story.

Re: The General Crisis of the 17th Century

#28

Post by ddlatham »

jotm wrote: post #25
pluma wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually exactly how I've recently heard the Peace of Westphalia[0] described (which ended the Thirty Years War in Germany): it established the idea that nations are independent "wholes" with their own laws, religion and politics, and that that's okay. The ideas encoded in the agreement are basically the reason we think of events like the Crimean secession[1] as an unconstitutional Russian annexation regardle…

Uh, I think if people seceded by a real public vote, they should be allowed to, regardless of what the constitution says. People in a region voted to be independent, hence they are, they're their own nation. Forbidding that is a violation of their basic freedoms. Now, I do think that Russia influenced the Crimean vote and plunged Ukraine into chaos, but if it was an honest, impartial vote, they should be allowed to s…

If the Confederate States of America held a public vote to secede - do you think it would have passed? If it passed, do you think the United States should have let them secede?

Re: The General Crisis of the 17th Century

#29

Post by walterbell »

JonnieCache wrote: post #22
ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet your own hereditary monarch in 2015 has to be an Anglican.

That's been recently changed. Catholics are now allowed, and men no longer take precedence over women. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perth_Agreement The whole thing is still, to quote Doug Stanhope, "some dungeons and dragons bullshit", but at least its not immutable even today.

> at least its not immutable even today

We've since moved to immutable trade agreements.

Re: The General Crisis of the 17th Century

#30

Post by trhway »

norea-armozel wrote: post #16
lkrubner wrote: post #12

There are some interesting comparisons between (what the economist Tyler Cowen refers to as) The Great Stagnation Of 1973-now, and The Really Great Stagnation of 1650-1740. Restraining the comparison to the English speaking nations, we can say: 1.) Both episodes begin with a cultural revolution that has no precedent (the arrival of militant Protestantism versus the arrival of the counter-culture of the 1960s) 2.) Bot…

It probably ends with commercial fusion power or a similar technological gain on power generation. Cheap power makes most of the stuff we use or make much cheaper. Which leads to a major change in the living standard and expectations (imagine access to electricity being seen as a right since power generation would outstrip demand if something like fusion became viable).

it correlates with climate change nicely - the 1650 was the time of the Little Ice Age which significantly affected the production of food and everything else. The fusion power (or similar) would allow to mitigate and finally overcome the current climate change catastrophe (the fact that it moves slowly doesn't make it less serious - just like a huge container ship - the mass/inertia makes for the speed in collision :) which is starting to cause real economic damage (cattle growing in Texas, agriculture in CA for example). And it is just the beginning...
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