#8 2nd Installment – Machiavelli, Morality, and Religion

For a brief moment, I’ll be discussing my thoughts on this paper written by Cary Nederman. This paper is about Niccolo Machiavelli, and I’ll be specifically discussing the 4^th chapter, Morality, Religion, and Politics. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/machiavelli/#4

Now most people know Machiavelli as the person who was involved in politics, and the author of books teaching lessons on how to rule with an iron fist, with disregard to common morals. This is true. For this reason, Niccolo is commonly referred to as the Father of Modern Politics. The controversy, however, resides in how people have interpreted his teachings. Cary points out that there are people such as Leo Strauss who have referred to Niccolo as a “teacher of evil”, and others such as Rousseau who love Niccolo’s teachings because they expose how rulers behave, as well as people in between, such as those who have associated with Benedetto Croce who claim Niccolo is more realistic in his teachings. Personally, I completely agree with Rousseau in exploiting how rulers behave behind closed doors. Even in modern times, there’s a lot of government and media practices which I feel the public isn’t fully aware of. As an example and interesting side-piece, I suggest reading this article on the CFR’s influence on American media. https://swprs.org/das-american-empire-und-seine-medien/

Conspiracies aside, even though Niccolo’s ideas were controversial and still are, I still feel like he deserves credit for what he’s done, and that these ideas were important to be brought into common knowledge for both leaders and followers. Honestly, I feel that Machiavelli said it best when he claimed a “head of state ought to do good if he can, but must be prepared to commit evil if he must”. 

I know, it’s not a statement that just rolls off the tongue. The whole “committing evil” part leaves a bit of an aftertaste. The reason I believe in this statement is because America specifically has elected both great and terrible leaders in its history, but even the best leaders have still committed mischievous acts. It’s an ugly truth, but I feel bad decisions are inevitable when you’re in charge something, especially a country. The best you can hope for being a ruler is making sure your country succeeds, and make the lesser of available evil decisions.

Moving on from politics, I wanted to discuss another side of Niccolo that I wasn’t aware of before, which was his stance towards religion. As you might’ve guessed from the context of this post, it’s quite possible they weren’t on the best terms. In fact, in his book Discourses, he apparently wrote that Christianity saps the vigor from human beings which is required to live a normal life. Going with the theme of author’s interpretations of Machiavelli’s beliefs in politics, people belief a wide variety of his perspective on organized religion. Some belief he was profoundly anti-Christian, others, a Pagan, and Viroli even defended Niccolo’s public appearance by pointing out Niccolo’s use of Biblical themes in his books. Although these authors all have great points, I’m inclined to believe that the man who exposed politics as a corrupt mind-game is most likely to believe that there is no God, simply from the information I’ve read thus far. But please comment and let me know what your thoughts are.

 My comments:

https://cophilosophy.blogspot.com/2018/04/david-hume.html?showComment=1525266199164#c2458721217196065140

https://cophilosophy.blogspot.com/2018/04/aldair-avalos-8.html?showComment=1525266853833#c730331254913552709

First Post:

http://cophilosophy.blogspot.com/2018/04/a-socratic-machiavelli.html