One of the strangest figures of the first half of the 20th century was Charles Edward, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, who began his life as an English prince, the grandson of Queen Victoria, but as an adolescent was plucked from his life at Eton and transported to Germany where he had unexpectedly inherited a dukedom. What happened then is described in his DNB entry:
The duke still felt close to his old home in England…. The outbreak of the First World War found the duke in England and faced him with a painful dilemma. He told his sister he would like to fight for England, but duty demanded his return to Coburg, where people were turning against the ducal house for its English connections. A show of patriotism was imperative. A lame leg from a bobsleigh accident made active service impossible at first, but Charles Edward supported his own Coburg troops on the eastern and western fronts throughout the war and his sympathies became more German as the years passed. In Britain he was denounced as a traitor. Forced to abdicate the ducal throne of Coburg in November 1918, he was stripped of his British titles in 1919, but there was still some sympathy for him in the British establishment, where it was remembered how German nationality had been forced upon him.
A disappointed man, in the early 1930s Charles Edward was drawn to the Nazi party by its confident militarism, which was strongly reminiscent of imperial Germany, and by fear of communism. He attended Nazi rallies and held several appointments, becoming president of the German Red Cross in 1933 and a party member in 1935. He longed for better relations with Britain: as president of the Anglo-German Fellowship he visited England and was active in canvassing the prince of Wales and other prominent men thought to be pro-German. In this way the Nazi regime sought to make use of his connections. His enthusiastic reports to Berlin reflected hope, but not reality: he idealized memories of Eton and never understood that by the 1930s his boyhood contemporaries saw him as a foreigner.
The Second World War shattered Charles Edward's hopes of closer friendship between England and Nazi Germany and brought personal grief. His second son and son-in-law were killed in action and his adherence to Nazism deepened. He never acknowledged the brutality of the movement and remained unrepentant even when placed in an internment camp in 1945.
From devoted Etonian to unrepentant Nazi. Quite a journey.
This piece of mine is half-essay and half-homily.
John Ruskin, from The Crown of Wild Olive (1866):
All good architecture is the expression of national life and character; and it is produced by a prevalent and eager national taste, or desire for beauty. And I want you to think a little of the deep significance of this word 'taste;' for no statement of mine has been more earnestly or oftener controverted than that good taste is essentially a moral quality. ‘No,’ say many of my antagonists, ‘taste is one thing, morality is another. Tell us what is pretty; we shall be glad to know that; but preach no sermons to us.’
Permit me, therefore, to fortify this old dogma of mine somewhat. Taste is not only a part and an index of morality — it is the ONLY morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is, ‘What do you like?’ Tell me what you like, and I'll tell you what you are.
Also from Sara, Pattern Recognition - Comment Magazine:
It can be hard to fully appreciate this kind of design for the astonishing, radical statement in its provision: that the babies of strangers carry the kind of dignity that is tantamount to those of close kin and tribe. It’s an idea that had to be invented, that goes against the self-preserving optimization of communities adapted for fitness. This kind of dignity makes claims on a collective, perhaps a polity. “Design for dignity” is easy to affirm at the high level of uncontroversial principles, but in practice it too often takes on the straightforward structure of unidirectional charity, as though dignity were a good or service extended from those who somehow “have” it to those who somehow lack it. A sharper term from theologian Helmut Thielicke might get us closer to what’s true: Dignity is not a possession to be more fairly meted out but a universally contingent relational force — a bracing state of human dependency on divine sustenance, a vitality on which each human life hangs every second. Thielicke called this an “alien dignity”: the shape of a reality utterly not of our own making. Our task is first to recognize it before wielding it — to recognize it in ourselves as in others, and perhaps to recognize its force in the designed DNA of the inherited built world, a form of material argumentation that so easily goes to sleep in our imagination. You don’t need to have a maximalist theory of the state — either for or against — to see the sense of possibility on offer.
If you don’t accept the optimized project rubric for having children, then you should think all the way through what an alternative rubric might be, and how it might shift the very foundations undergirding family-making, period. But most people short-circuit well before what Kierkegaard called “thinking a thought whole” — taking seriously a line of reasoning all the way through to its implications. For most people opining on selective abortion, including many of my counterparts in disability advocacy, it feels better to say publicly: You’re missing the heart of the matter, your judgments are misguided, I would never do what you did. And afterward, in any sustained conversation, most people will shrug and concede that each couple makes “the decision that is right for them.” We manage our collective uncertainty by redounding to the sole good of private choice: the project rubric. But it feels much better to see ourselves occupying the rightly-calibrated rhetorical high ground.
A lot can be said in a phrase, and Sara’s comment that most Americans consider whether to have children and how many children to have under the “optimized project rubric” — that is a powerful phrase because it is so concisely accurate.
You know, I’ve seen the Uffington White Horse and it doesn’t really look like this.
In which I explain why I’d like to be the first biographer of Bob Dylan.
(I also posted this to BlueSky because I want to see how long it will be before someone responds, “Actually, there are already several biographies of Bob Dylan.”)
Gary Saul Morson and Julio M. Ottino:
Artificial intelligence can process vast datasets, identify patterns invisible to human perception, and generate explanations with remarkable coherence. Faced with such capabilities, it is tempting to believe that uncertainty can finally be overcome — that the future can be rendered legible in advance.
But the deeper effect of AI lies in its ability to reorganize the past. Given sufficient data, AI systems can produce narratives that make outcomes appear coherent, even inevitable. They can identify correlations, reconstruct causal chains, and highlight what they regard as signs foreshadowing what followed. The result is not necessarily false, but it is selective.
In this way, AI functions less as a predictor than as a powerful engine of narrative compression, reducing the apparent space of possibilities by presenting a single path as the path. What was once understood as a field of possible alternatives becomes retrospectively legible as an inevitable sequence, reducing many “futuribles” to one. The danger here lies in premature coherence, the sense that complexity has been resolved when it has only been reorganized into a persuasive form.