Reform and Reaction

Frederick William III of Prussia at first seriously considered ways of fulfilling the promise he had made in 1815 to establish constitutional government.

Economic reformers succeeded in enacting the Prussian Customs Law of 1818, which united all the Prussian territories into a customs union free of internal economic barriers; this later formed the nucleus of a national customs union.

In 1834 the Zollverein, or Customs Union, including most of the states of the German Confederation, came into existence.

To those, whose hopes had risen so high during the Wars of Liberation, the peace settlement of 1815 seemed to be an instrument of blind reaction.

In place of the Holy Roman Empire the peacemakers of the Congress of Vienna had established a new organization of German states with a federal Diet meeting in Frankfurt am Main. Delegates were appointed by and responsible to the rulers whom they served.

By the end of 1820 the reform movement came to a complete halt. It had succeeded in altering the political and economic structure of society, but it had been unable to establish a tradition of liberal government and national loyalty in Germany.

Although the critics of the established order could be defeated, they could not be silenced. There were now men in the German states who refused to submit without question to princely authority and to seek freedom only in the inner recesses of the soul.

The liberals, or moderates favoured a monarchical system of authority, but the crown was to share its powers with a parliament elected by the men of property. Influence in public affairs should be accessible to all male citizens who had demonstrated through the acquisition of wealth and education that they were capable of exercising the franchise intelligently. Their path of civic wisdom was the happy medium between royal absolutism and mob rule, a medium that had been established in Britain by the Reform Bill of 1832 and in France by the regime of Louis-Philippe. The liberals favoured the transformation of the German Confederation into a national monarchy in which the states’ rights would be curtailed but not destroyed by a central government and a federal parliament.

The democrats, or radicals, looked with scorn on the golden mean between autocracy and anarchy that the liberals sought. They preferred an egalitarian form of authority in which not parliamentary plutocracy but popular sovereignty would be the underlying principle of government. While they were forced to accept the crown as a political institution, they nevertheless sought to transfer its power to a parliament elected by universal male suffrage. While not as influential as the moderates, the radicals remained an important source of opposition to the established order.

Growing criticism of the restored political order forced conservatives to define their ideological position more precisely. The old theories of monarchy by divine right or despotic benevolence offered little protection against the assaults of liberalism and democracy. The defenders of legitimism began to advance new arguments based on conservative assumptions about the nature of man and society.

The relationship between the individual and government, so the reasoning went, cannot be determined by paper constitutions founded on a doctrinaire individualism. Human actions are motivated not solely by rational considerations but by habit, feeling, instinct, and tradition as well. The impractical theories of visionary reformers fail to take into account the historic forces of organic development by which the past and the present shape the future. An enduring form of government can be built only on the traditional institutions of society: the throne, the church, the nobility, and the army. Only a system of authority legitimated by law and history can protect the worker against exploitation, the believer against godlessness, and the citizen against revolution. According to these tenets, the political institutions of the German Confederation were valid, because they represented fundamental ideals deeply embedded in the spirit of the nation.

The hard times that swept over the Continent in the late 1840s transformed widespread popular discontent in the German Confederation into a full-blown revolution. After the middle of the decade, a severe economic depression halted industrial expansion and aggravated urban unemployment. At the same time, serious crop failures led to a major famine from Ireland to Russian Poland. In the German states, the hungry 1840s drove the lower classes, which had long been suffering from the economic effects of industrial and agricultural rationalization, to the point of open rebellion. There were sporadic hunger riots and violent disturbances in several of the states, but the signal for a concerted uprising did not come until early in 1848 with the exciting news that the regime of the bourgeois king Louis-Philippe had been overthrown by an insurrection in Paris (February 22–24). The result was a series of sympathetic revolutions against the governments of the German Confederation, most of them mild but a few, as in the case of the fighting in Berlin, bitter and bloody.

But even more important was the attempt to achieve political unification through a national assembly representing all of Germany. Elections were held soon after the spring uprising had subsided, and on May 18 the Frankfurt National Assembly met in Frankfurt am Main to prepare the constitution for a free and united fatherland. Its convocation represented the realization of the hopes that nationalists had cherished for more than a generation. Within the space of a few weeks, those who had fought against the particularistic system of the restoration for so long suddenly found themselves empowered with a popular mandate to rebuild the foundations of political and social life in Germany.

Once the spring uprising was over, the parties and classes that had participated in it began to quarrel about the nature of the new order that was to take the place of the old. There were sharp differences between the liberals and the democrats. While the Frankfurt parliament was debating the constitution under which Germany would be governed, its following diminished and its authority declined. The forces of the right, recovering from the demoralization of their initial defeat, began to regain confidence in their own power and legitimacy.

By the time the Frankfurt parliament completed its deliberations in the spring of 1849, the revolution was everywhere at ebb tide. The constitution that the National Assembly had drafted called for a federal union headed by a hereditary emperor with powers limited by a popularly elected legislature. By the summer of 1849 the revolution, which had begun a year earlier amid such extravagant expectations, was completely crushed.

Source: The age of Metternich and the era of unification, 1815–71.

Humboldt

National cultural revival

Enabling students to build individual character by choosing their own way was the ideal for education envisaged by Humbolt.

Berlin University profoundly influenced education throughout central, eastern, and northern Europe, after being founded in 1810 under the influence of Wilhelm von Humboldt. Among the scholars he appointed were Friedrich Carl von Savigny, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

Friedrich Froebel arrived in Berlin in 1812, after studying at Frankfurt and Göttingen .

Universities built on the Humboldtian model have provided students with the ability to address recalcitrant problems, leading to major scientific breakthroughs with important economic effects.

Starting with Johns Hopkins University, American universities were early to adopt several of the German educational and scientific principles. During the 20th century these principles have been recognised as valuable in most of the world.

Bildung

A sense of fulfilling one’s nature or purpose in response to the challenges of a particular historical and societal context.

Our understanding of the world is not a spectator sport, but more like an active ingredient in societal renewal.

Bildung is about our responsibility for and participation in an evolving process of social maturation that reimagines culture, technology, institutions and policies for the greater good.

Bildung entails a dynamic world view that values independence of mind and spirit grounded in ecological and social interdependence.

These qualities of heart and mind are not optional extras for the transition to a better world:

  • how well we learn to perceive and feel and know differently,
  • our capacity to question our assumptions,
  • our inclination to empathise with strangers,
  • to relate wisely to what is old and new,
  • to perceive the relationship between parts and wholes

Our task is not so much to “be the change we want to see in the world”, it rather is to become the change we want to see in the world.

Jon Amos Comenius is considered by many to be the father of the idea of universal or democratic education. A Czech philosopher and theologian who lived from 1592 to 1670, he declined the offer to be President of Harvard University. His genius lay in grasping that since learning is as natural as breathing or eating or sleeping, education should be seen as an aspect of nature’s formative process; and since nature is often experienced as sacred, and we are part of nature, an organism’s lifelong disposition to learn is the wellspring of meaning and purpose in life.

The authors of The Nordic Secret, Lene Rachel Andersen and Tomas Bjorkman argue that Bildung lies at the heart of their story of how the Nordic countries developed from poor agrarian and mostly authoritarian societies, to affluent, stable and relatively happy social democracies. They encapsulate the idea as follows:

“Bildung is the way that the individual matures and takes upon him or herself ever bigger personal responsibility towards family, friends, fellow citizens, society, humanity, our globe, and the global heritage of our species, while enjoying ever bigger personal, moral and existential freedoms. It is the enculturation and life-long learning that forces us to grow and change, it is existential and emotional depth, it is life-long interaction and struggles with new knowledge, culture, art, science, new perspectives, new people, and new truths, and it is being an active citizen in adulthood. Bildung is a constant process that never ends.”

The notion that we become ‘more’ human through various forms of maturation or development lies at the heart of Bildung, and sets it apart from other forms of education. This notion has many intellectual forebears and Hegel is certainly one of them. In The Phenomenology of Mind he writes:

“The spirit is never at rest but always engaged in ever progressive motion, in giving itself new form.”

Returning to Bildung as praxis, the profound interplay of biological, psychological, social and spiritual features of life is reflected in a line from the classic 1943 text, Education through Art, by Herbert Read:

“The aim of imaginative education…is to give the individual a concrete sensuous awareness of the harmony and rhythm which enters into the constitution of all living bodies and plants, which is the formal basis of all works of art, to the end that the child, in its life and activities, shall partake of the same organic grace and beauty. By means of such education we instil into the child that ‘instinct of relationship’ which, even before the advent of reason, enable it to distinguish the beautiful from the ugly, the good from the evil, the right pattern of behaviour from the wrong pattern, the noble person from the ignoble.”

Source: Why sustainable prosperity depends upon reimagining education | Essay by Jonathan Rowson · CUSP­

A healthy society that is attuned to nature and other sources of intrinsic value depends upon making this educative process the axis upon which society turns.

Piaget, J. (1993) John Amos Comenius Prospects (UNESCO, International Bureau of Education), vol. XXIII, no. 1/2, p. 173-96. Available Online

Bushfires

Black Thursday

‘When the smoke turned day into night’

William Strutt depicts the bushfires which engulfed Victoria on Black Thursday, 6 February 1851. The city of Melbourne was filled with dust, smoke and a rain of cinders, the glow of which could be seen from far out at sea.

“I can never forget the morning of that scorching Thursday, ever after memorable in the annals of the Colony as “Black Thursday”. The sun looked red all day, almost as blood, and the sky the colour of mahogany. We felt in town that something terrible must be going on up country and sure enough messenger after messenger came flocking in with tales of distress and horror.”

William Strutt in his journal.

Widespread bushfires covered a quarter of Victoria, approximately 5 million hectares. Approximately 12 lives, one million sheep and thousands of cattle were lost.

After an intense drought throughout 1850 and extreme heat, the weather reached record extremes. By eleven it was about 47 °C (117 °F) in the shade. The air cooled to 43 °C (109 °F) by one o’clock and rose to 45 °C (113 °F) around four o’clock. A strong furnace like wind came from the north and gained power and speed as the hours passed. The hot north wind was so strong that a ship at sea came under burning ember attack and was covered in cinders and dust.

Bushfires become possible, because of inappropriate landscape management by settlers. The people, who for tens of thousands of years had maintained tracts of walkable land and hunting grounds, where displaced by sheep eating the yams, which they cultivated as a major food source.

Dandelion

The first recorded use of dandelion was in China. By the eleventh century, Arabic cultures were sharing its use. Soon all of Europe was using dandelion in their kitchens. The name dandelion is from the French, dent de lion, from Latin dens leonis meaning “lion’s tooth”, in reference to the jagged edged leaves. .

In North America, dandelion was originally introduced by European settlers, who used the young leaves as a salad green. Dandelion salad is often accompanied with hard boiled eggs.

After pollination, the dandelion flower matures into a white fluffy “blowball”.

This comprises single fruits each attached to a tiny brush-like parachute called a “pappus” – which has about 100 individual bristle filaments. This structure allows the seed to remain aloft over distances of 100 km or more when the air is warm and dry.

Dandelion prefers loose, rich, healthy soil, but it can grow just as readily in compacted, rocky, and dry soils. It grows at altitudes ranging from sea level to 10,500 feet, in broad and open meadows as well as in the inner city sidewalk cracks. Dandelion has the ability to adapt to its environment, no matter how challenging.

Dandelion is also a transformer, loosening compacted soil by growing deep roots, creating a micro climate that draws earthworms to change and rejuvenate the soil, drawing nutrients and toxins to the surface for use and transformation. Dandelions gently and firmly changes those conditions that no longer serve its environment through practical, gentle, and intentional transformation.

Dandelion is an aid in activating compost, making it a useful agent for getting transformative energies moving quickly and keeping those energies moving despite minor setbacks.

These bright yellow flowers open with the first morning light and close again in the evening. Dandelion is one of the first to flower in spring and one of the last to go dormant in the winter. Dandelion invites us us to be equally aware of the conditions under which we can best use the power we have.

Dandelion is an aid to its community, transforming its environment so more delicate plants can grow, providing a wealth of nutrients to a wide array of herbivores and omnivores, and providing bees and other insects with nectar when other plants cannot bloom.

It is a plant who asks us to share our energies and ourselves with our communities in an effort to nourish the world.

Crop (Noun/Verb)

A sculpture about the clash between Western and Indigenous knowledge and what is “left out or discarded as not important or of having any value”, while also being a strike against “the myth” that the Aboriginal people had no agriculture.

“The yam daisy represents a point where Western science and indigenous knowledge came into contact,” says summit director and Canberra landscape architect Neil Hobbs.

“[to the Europeans] the yam daisy was just a field of flowers and not a crop.”

The exhibition’s tagline is Interventions in the Landscape and one clear example of that was Brisbane artist Archie Moore’s Crop (Noun/Verb) in which he has half-buried 700kg of encyclopaedias as a border for a garden of yam daisies, next to the otherwise clean lines of Bowen Place.

He went on Gumtree and to op shops to source the Funk and Wagnalls and World Books and Britannicas, which were in surprising short supply.

“These books represent Western knowledge and are very America-centric,” he said. “When I looked up ‘yam’ there were ones grown in Florida and South-East Asia and China, but no mention of Australia.”

Moore, who is known for tackling issues related to Aboriginal identity, has selected 20 encyclopedias to be partly buried alongside the daisies, packed into one-metre-square boxes, in Bowen Pace in a symbolic gesture.

Lavender

helps you relax and could even treat anxiety

In folk medicine, it has long been believed that odorous compounds derived from plant extracts can have anxiolytic effects.

Among them, linalool, one of the terpene alcohols in lavender extracts, has been reported to have the anxiolytic effects. However, the anxiolytic nature of the linalool odor itself as well as its potential action through the olfactory system has not been thoroughly examined.

In this study, we examined the anxiolytic effects of linalool odor with light/dark box test and with elevated plus maze (EPM), and found that linalool odor has an anxiolytic effect without motor impairment in mice. The effect was not observed in anosmic mice, indicating that it was triggered by olfactory input evoked by linalool odor. Furthermore, the effect was antagonized by flumazenil, indicating that the linalool odor-induced anxiolytic effect was mediated by γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA)ergic transmission via benzodiazepine (BDZ)-responsive GABAA receptors. These results provide information about the potential central neuronal mechanisms underlying the odor-induced anxiolytic effects and the foundation for exploring clinical application of linalool odor in anxiety treatments.

Linalool Odor-Induced Anxiolytic Effects in Mice

The Empathic Wall

“Modern Affect theory begins with the work of Silvan Tomkins (1962, 1963). Observing the face of his newborn son, Tomkins saw what looked like “emotion” displayed on the face of an organism with none of the history, none of the life experience we have always considered necessary for the development of emotion. “Certainly the infant who emits his birth cry upon exit from the birth canal has not ‘appraised’ the new environment as a vale of tears before he cries” (Tomkins, 1982, p. 362). Nonetheless, the crying infant looks quite like a crying adult this cry of distress must have been available to the infant courtesy of some pre-existent mechanism triggered by some stimulus acceptable to that mechanism.”

Written in 1986 by Don Nathanson, The Empathic Wall and the Ecology of Affect originally appeared in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child.

Download the article now.

Donald Nathanson

For too long those who explain emotional discomfort on the basis of lived experience and those who blame chemistry have been at loggerheads.

As Dr. Nathanson shows, chemicals and illnesses can affect our mood just as surely as an uncomfortable memory or a stern rebuke.

Linking for the first time the affect theory of the pioneering researcher Silvan S. Thomkins with the entire world of biology, medicine, psychology, psychotherapy, religion, and the social sciences, Dr. Nathanson presents a completely new understanding of all emotion.

Drawing on every theme of the modern life sciences, Donald Nathanson shows how nine basic affects—interest-excitement, enjoyment-joy, surprise-startle, fear-terror, distress-anguish, anger-rage, dissmell, disgust, and shame-humiliation—not only determine how we feel but shape our very sense of self.

This is a revolutionary book about the nature of emotion, about the way emotions are triggered in our private moments, in our relations with others, and by our biology.

Pieroth

In 1976 in recognition of over 300 years and to distinguish its unique and exquisite wine the Pieroth family revived an old tradition.

Naturally occurring Cobalt in local sands used to make the glass, turned the glass bottles blue. Today embossed with the Pieroth family crest the bottle is recognised and found on the tables of wine lovers in over 20 countries known simply as the ‘Pieroth Blue’.

Pieroth started as a small family winery in the Nahe region of Germany in 1675.

The Burg Layer Schlosskapelle vineyard is the flagship estate of the Pieroth family.

This beautiful Kabinett wine is soft and elegant. The bouquet has a fresh slightly floral nose, accompanied by subtle green apple, white peach, honey, tea and lime flavours. Light bodied and well balanced, with lively fresh acidity makes this the ultimate white wine for all occasions.

Made by Hutschenreuther in 1982 exclusively for Pieroth.