Engineering & Brief Update

A tale of two bridges:

Here is the suspension section of the Oakland Bay Bridge:

Designed in the early 1930s and completed in 1936, the bridge spans one of the world’s busy shipping lanes into the port of Oakland. Hundreds of ships, including giant container ships, sail beneath this bridge every year, and have for decades.

Look a little closer:

Notice that giant steel-reinforced tower right in the middle? And those towers holding up the suspension cables are gigantic chunks of steel siting on their own little islands of steel and concrete.

Back in 1936, this bridge won all the engineering awards, not the more scenic and famous Golden Gate Bridge being built a few miles away at the same time. Later engineers opined that it was really wildly overengineered, that the tower in the middle was unnecessary. The original engineers put it there to make double and triple sure that, were a ship to run into it or one of the other towers, the bridge would stay up.

Almost 90 years later, it’s still standing. Having driven over it hundreds of times, it certainly feels solid, for what that’s worth.

Now look at the late Francis Scott Key Bridge, opened in 1977:

Now, I’m no engineer, but that thing looks like one good whack with a big boat, and it’s collapsing domino-style – Oh! Oops!

May the souls of the men who died in the collapse rest in peace, and may the Spirit comfort their loved ones left behind.

Next, I’ve been super busy and ill the last, oh, 2 months. Life has been eventful. I’ve been scarce around these here parts. Now, I have to fix up a couple rooms at Recusant Ranch for family visitors who are coming for my mother in law’s funeral.

She died a month ago, in her sleep in her own bed, after 86 years of life, leaving 11 children, 20+ grandchildren, and 4 great-grandchildren. We should all be so blessed. She lived with us, and my wife had taken care of her, for the last 6 and half years. Now, the family is gathering, half of whom live on the East Coast or in England, which is why there was such a long delay for the funeral. 50+ kids, grandkids, spouses, and great grand kids are coming in. I’ll be accompanying my daughter who will be singing Schubert’s Ave Maria at the funeral mass.

Anyway, school is out May 25th. I should have time to blog then. I kind of miss it.

Kulturkampf and Prussian Anti-Catholicism – Here We Go…

Just came across this while googling around:

In a popular cartoon of 1875, the French artist and writer Felix Regamey lampooned the powerful Chancellor of Germany, Otto von Bismarck. In the cartoon, the Chancellor tries to pull a rope attached to St. Peter’s Basilica and declares to Satan that he intends to destroy the papacy. Satan replies, “I have been trying to do it all my life. If you manage it, I shall give you full marks.”

Regamey’s cartoon was a humorous but biting expression of Catholic resentment and anger across Europe for one of the most forgotten events of the 19th century: the persecution and oppression of the Church at the hands of the German government under Kaiser Wilhelm I and his “Iron Chancellor” Bismarck. For a period of nearly 20 years, from 1871 to 1890, Catholics in the German Empire, especially in the German states of Prussia, Bavaria, Hesse, Baden, and occupied Poland, faced legal disabilities, imprisonment, and exile, all in the name of German national pride and unity. For their part, Catholics and Germans of good will fought for their rights, defended the Catholic faith and institutions, and above all, refused to allow a secular government to trample on the Holy See and their beloved pontiff Bl. Pius IX.

The name given to the struggle in the German Empire was the Kulturkampf, meaning the struggle for culture, or the culture war. It proved only the first of many similar conflicts between anti-religious governments and the Church that afflicted Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but the Kulturkampf had even greater ramifications than its counterparts in Italy, France, and Spain. The clash in the German Empire laid the groundwork for the repression of Catholics in Germany and Europe under Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

German Catholics under the Iron Fist: Bismarck and the Kulturkampf by Matthew Bunson

And so on. All of this comports well with my other reading, but it’s nice to see it all brought together. That’s both the problem and the goal: this stuff, all the horrors of education history, is right out there in front of our eyes – just generally scattered in bits and pieces over many different sources. My job is to bring it all together. The author lists 4 books in his bibliography – guess I’ve got 4 more books to read.

A couple more paragraphs specifically on education:

Surprisingly, however, Bismarck’s strongest supporters in the Prussian Landtag and then in the Reichstag were the Liberals. The Liberal Party in Germany had long opposed absolutism and called for constitutional government, but they were also united in their antipathy for the Catholic Church; many Liberal leaders were anti-clerical and ardent students of the German Enlightenment. This hatred for the Church naturally extended into their calls for a pure German culture freed from the supposed superstitions, dogmatism, and obscurantism of the Church. Their influence in German politics increased in the middle of the 19th century, when they used public sentiment for German nationalism to their advantage. Their presence increased steadily in the Landtag after 1860, and in that year they were permitted to introduce harsh anti-Catholic educational measures in traditionally Catholic Bavaria.

And

In March 1873, the Landtag passed a series of laws drafted by Adalbert Falk, the German minister of education, that regulated Catholic life in Prussia. The new laws were then approved for the entire German Empire on May 15, 1873 by the Reichstag and came to be called the Maigesetze (May Laws). Ecclesiastical punishments were prohibited save in purely spiritual matters. In areas of religious law, appeal was permitted to the state, and from the state’s decision there would be no further ecclesiastical appeal.

All seminarians, both Catholic and Protestant, had to study at state-controlled high schools and universities, where they had to pass an examination in German culture, including history, philosophy, and literature. Once ordained, all priests and clergy faced state approval before they could be appointed to any positions. If the Church installed an unapproved priest or bishop, the offending cleric was removed and charged with a civil crime.

Once the basic framework was in place through the May Laws of 1873, a new round of even tighter restrictions was launched. In 1874, the government decreed that bishops who were deposed by the state could be replaced only by a prelate acceptable to the state. Appointments of pastors over parishes were no longer the right off local bishops but were given to the parishioners or local government officials. In 1875 all priests were stripped of any stipends or endowments granted by the government. That same year, all religious orders and communities in the Empire were outlawed except for those engaged directly in nursing or hospital care. Marriage was decreed a mandatory civil ceremony and taken completely out of ecclesiastical hands. These acts climaxed on June 20, 1875, when all Church property was confiscated. By 1875, over 200 priests had been arrested, along with over 130 newspaper editors. Five bishops in Prussia had been forcibly deposed, and nearly 1,000 parishes had been stripped of their priests.

Is it surprising that the Minister of Education is the one cracking down on Catholics? Feature, not bug, and I’m sure it appealed very much to the Americans in Prussia studying at their universities and bringing back their schooling system.

Anyway, good stuff. I’m getting to the end of my research (ha! I slay me!). Just need to unpack and reread a few critical sources, then compile, compile, compile, then finish writing The Book.

Germany & Chesterton

I suppose I should open with a Chesterton quotation, because he has a couple things to say about Germans. But, nah. Suffice it to say that Ol’ GK noted a strange contradiction in how the German government (he was a lover of people, including German people, but not so much of governments): Germany was both the greatest power on earth, far superior to those French and English posers, yet, when the German army won a battle against them, it was a great triumph over dangerous, unreasonable foes. All this mixed in with a persecution complex. GK was writing this sort of thing during WWI and the period leading up to WWII, but before it got completely nasty. He died in 1936.

That’s an aside. On the reading front, have 3 books on Germany running concurrently. The first is the Pinson’s Modern Germany. Pure background reading – I need some context for the Prussian education reform movement in the first part of the 19th century. I’m up to the middle of the 19th century so far, and will at least a little farther. At some point, maybe 1900, the information will become less relevant to my needs.

So far, the major finds are a discussion of German Romanticism, German nationalism versus ‘cosmopolitanism’, and the influence of Napoleon and the French Revolution – much more complex than I suspected. It helps to think of Fichte, and by extension Hegel, as Romantics. Add in their fundamental rejection of objective reality – Fichte, quite explicitly as a student of Kant, Hegel more subtly – and all this business of predicting the future becomes more, I want to say coherent, but maybe consistent. Fichte seems to really believe that Humanity (which exists only a conception in his own mind) is progressing through 5 – not 4, not 6 – stages, at the end of which it becomes, essentially, God – as Fichte imagines God. These things are so because that’s how Fichte conceives them. All this also goes a long way toward explaining how Fichte was both rigorously moral and insufferable.

The other two – Raack’s the Fall of Stein and Simon’s the Failure of the German Reform Movement 1807-1810, are again attempts to focus in on the period during which the University of Berlin was founded, the age-segregated classroom model was invented and the ideas of Fichte embodied in that model were disseminated around the world.

Eh. A few helpful bits, but nothing earth shaking yet. But they’re shortish books, at least. I next need to find out more about German immigration during the Kulturkampf.

The key here, for me, is that such books as these presume a fairly high level of familiarity with the basic historical trends – they discuss the how and why, but assume you already know the what. So it’s off to the internet to look things up. That’s how I end up with three books going at once and take a couple months to read them.

On the Chesterton front, last night I finished my reread of the Ball and the Cross. Only rarely do I end a book and start immediately to reread it. This is one of those times, and – whoa. This story may not be for everyone, but for me? Wow. I picked up on so much I’d missed the first time through. It’s typically broad in outline – a crazy world thinks sane people crazy – and is full of Chesterton’s idealized conversations – you know, where one character lays out a philosophical position in some detail over the course of several pages, while he and his interlocutor are running for their lives, say.

But the punch at the end, which left me going ‘that’s it?! You’re going to stop there!?’ is a little mind-banding.

The Ball and the Cross was written over 1905-6; Benson’s The Lord of the World was written in 1907. Mere coincidence? I think not. Maybe.