Switzerland and Thought

 Noticed the other day in Berlin in Lights: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1918-1937:

I spent the evening with Pellegrini, the painter, Dürr, the writer, and Oeri, the editor of the Basler Nachrichten. Dürr advanced, clearly and fascinatingly, the theory that Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Jacob Burkhardt, Gottfried Keller, Jeremias Gotthelf, Nietzche, Gobineau, and all the rest of the great intellectuals active in Switzerland around the middle of the nineteenth century (Gobineau was a legation counsellor at Berne) were pushed into aversion to democracy and conversion to an aristocratic philosophy of life by the spectacle presented by the victory of Swiss democracy.  1831 saw the beginning in Switzerland of a cultural levelling process which lasted until about 1875 and produced to a varying degree detestation, fear, hate, and contempt among all these men. The lower middle class, which mistook its semi-education for culture, came to power and pushed the old, highly cultivated patrician families aside. Switzerland thus forestalled developments all over Europe. at the same time there arose in the cantons petty tyrants who pursued a harsh, ruthless rule on the lower-middle-class's behalf. Since then Switzerland has become conservative.

I was very interested by this exposure of where the roots of Nietzche's 'Superman' concept and his hostile attitude toward democracy lie, and secondly, to learn that they did not derive from purely idealistic notions but were the upshot of political experience and factional sympathies aroused by his Swiss environment.

(Entry of Thursday, 21 July 1927)

 Dürr is not further identified, that I can see. Ian Buruma provides many illuminating notes, but not on Dürr.

At the Strand

 Last weekend, we were in New York, and I had a quick look at The Strand. I'd have had a longer look, had I been clearer on the geography of Manhattan--I thought that 5th Avenue was west of Broadway at 12th Street, which is not so. In the few minutes I had, I saw nothing that I really needed.

On my way out of the store, I heard an exclamation from a young woman who had just found a book she wanted on the $3 outside carts. She was even more delighted when she discovered that the book was signed by the author. Her friend took a couple of pictures showing her holding it up. I wish that I could remember book or author: I think that the book had to do with circumstances of women, perhaps of young women, perhaps of young women of color. I'm glad it found its way to the hands of someone who so much appreciated it.

Apologies to My ISP

Yesterday at work, I was surprised to see my browser balk at the certificate for a Yahoo.com URL. This led me to take a closer look: as earlier with my webmail, the certificate was issued by OpenDNS, the certifying authority was Cisco Umbrella. I checked with the network guys, and indeed Cisco Umbrella is doing some special handling with URLs not from a set of trusted domains.

I had not seen this particular bit of handling in quite a while. The way that it works apparently is that the firewall emulates a browser with the incoming data, accepting and unencrypting it. If the data is not judged malicious, the firewall passes it back along to the PC's browser. But in order to do so it must provide its own certificates, hence OpenDNS, certified by Cisco Umbrella.

I don't know that this is better than a simple block. Google Chrome gives explicit warnings about expired or bad certificates, and can be configured to refuse a connection to servers with bad certificates. At work, it is so configured.

I was wrong, therefore, to blame my ISP for my PC's refusal to connect to webmail this weekend.