> Re-thinking: you might also be saying that any celebration of even a long-dead king might really be jingoism. But then I think it's the jingoism itself that should be done away with, not the celebration.
I think that we should celebrate people who advanced the society _on_ _purpose_ and not accidentally. Intentionality matters.
Such people were rarely in positions of power, and I'm not aware of any "good kings". Partly because effecting changes is never easy and partly because "good kings" could never grow when surrounded by rotten institutions.
But there have always been a lot of good people! Yet most are unknown to the public. For example, Thomas Paine or John Locke in the US history. There were even more fascinating stories, like this one about Beccaria: https://www.exurbe.com/on-crimes-and-punishments-and-beccari...
Edit: when talking dismissively about "good kings" I mean the ones that held absolute power. Not the modern European monarchs that are either figureheads or hold very little direct power.
OK, but what does advancing society on purpose look like, in the 800s? This is before the invention of the concept of progress. People could only aspire to be good in a way that equated loosely to "holy", which for Charlemagne seems to have included "scholastic", and I think that's as reasonably close to intentionally advancing society as you're going to get, at that time. You may prefer to venerate some Frankish monk instead, who valued scholarship without also killing thousands of Saxons, but such a person would be less influential and would probably also approve of mass slaughter of pagans anyway.
Beccaria is interesting, it's true. Nothing wrong with digging up the underrated and overlooked, if you can find them.
I suggest reading the blog article about Beccaria. This is a great example.
> You may prefer to venerate some Frankish monk instead, who valued scholarship without also killing thousands of Saxons, but such a person would be less influential and would probably also approve of mass slaughter of pagans anyway.
You're not making a good argument about why we should venerate mass murderers. It basically boils down to "sometimes it results in good things".
I think that we should celebrate people who advanced the society _on_ _purpose_ and not accidentally. Intentionality matters.
Such people were rarely in positions of power, and I'm not aware of any "good kings". Partly because effecting changes is never easy and partly because "good kings" could never grow when surrounded by rotten institutions.
But there have always been a lot of good people! Yet most are unknown to the public. For example, Thomas Paine or John Locke in the US history. There were even more fascinating stories, like this one about Beccaria: https://www.exurbe.com/on-crimes-and-punishments-and-beccari...
Edit: when talking dismissively about "good kings" I mean the ones that held absolute power. Not the modern European monarchs that are either figureheads or hold very little direct power.