Scientists Discover Unbreakable 90-Year-Old Mobius Loop
I’ve written several posts over the years noting that modern art — at least the “shocking the bourgeois” brand of modern art — is a genre permanently trapped in the 1920s. Modern architecture often seems similarly trapped in the same decade, endlessly recycling the forms and styles created by Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier. Sarah Hoyt has an interesting post this weekend that describes much of today’s bourgeois intellectual life as permanently trapped in that decade as well, as a byproduct of WWI and its aftermath:
Like a child shocked by WWI and having both externalized the blame – Listen to a six year old, sometime “I didn’t break the vase. It was the cat.” Same thing “I didn’t cause death and carnage. It was capitalism and old white men.” – and misattributed it – states looking for resources and expanding their power through bureaucratic means was more important than competition for raw materials, whatever you heard in school – the idiot child that is Western civ continues rampaging through her room, tearing everything that made it comfortable and useful and a good place, and throwing it out the window.
No, of course I’m not saying everything about the early twentieth century was perfect. Yes, of course greater participation of women in both politics and work, a break down of social barriers and greater racial integration are a good thing. They’re also unique in the world today. Other than Western civilization and countries influenced by it, the evils of racism, sexism and rigid class (and tribe) structure are, if anything even more hardened than they were before.
That I’m saying is that Western civilization AND capitalism (particularly the greater affluence created by it) are what brought about the erosion of those ancient evils to which ALL OF HUMANITY is prey.
Blaming Capitalism or affluence or industrialization for those evils is like blaming the cat for removing the scones from the oven and eating them – with jam and cream, mind you. (Yes, younger kid did that. He seemed absolutely convinced it was true, too. He was four.)
And invoking to resist these evils the untamed primitive (No? “Smash capitalism” and well… OWS in general) which IS the found of these evils is not only insane, it is counterproductive.
It is also where our culture has been for the last twenty years, caught in a recursive loop where everything – such as the collectivist massacres and poverty around the world – that doesn’t fit the narrative is swept under the rug, and “shocking” things that shock no one are continuously hurled Tourette’s-like at the one civilization that COULD have been shocked by WWI or seen anything wrong with death on that scale. (Hint, other cultures BRAG of how many they kill/how many of them are killed in war.)
Which is why people like Christie and Heinlein are reviled. Because if you read them you might get the idea that well… there were people wanting to smash capitalism back in the twenties, and that they were poseurs and a little ridiculous. Or that women CAN be competent, brilliant and still wish to create a new generation of humans.
And then, where would we be?
The 1920s was the debut of the modern intellectual, as Tom Wolfe wrote in his essay “In the Land of the Rococo Marxist”:
After the First World War, American writers and scholars had the chance to go to Europe in large numbers for the first time. They got an eyeful of the Intellectual up close. That sneer, that high-minded aloofness from the mob, those long immaculate alabaster forefingers with which they pointed down at the rubble of a botched civilization-it was irresistible. The only problem was that when our neophyte intellectuals came back to the United States to strike the pose, there was no rubble to point at. Far from being a civilization in ruins, the United States had emerged from the war as the new star occupying the center of the world stage. Far from reeking of decadence, the United States had the glow of a young giant: brave, robust, innocent and unsophisticated.
But young scribblers roaring drunk (as Nietzsche had predicted) on skepticism, cynicism, irony, and contempt were in no mood to let such … circumstances … stand in the way. From the very outset the attempts of this country cousin, the American intellectual, to catch up with his urbane European model was touching, as only the strivings of a colonial subject can be. Throughout the twentieth century, the picture would never change (and today, a hundred years later, the sweaty little colonial still trots along at the heels of… sahib). In the 1920s the first job was to catch up with the European intellectuals’ mockery of the “bourgeoisie,” which had begun a full forty years earlier. H. L. Mencken, probably the most brilliant American essayist of the twentieth century, led the way by pie-ing the American version of same with his term: “the booboisie.” In fiction the solution was to pull back the covers from this apple-cheeked, mom’s-cooking country of ours and say, “There! Take a good look at what’s underneath! Get a whiff of the rot just below the surface!”-the way Sinclair Lewis did it in Main Street and Babbitt, for which he became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in literature, and Sherwood Anderson did it in Winesburg, Ohio. Anderson’s specialty was exposing the Middle American hypocrite, such as the rigidly proper, sexually twisted Peeping Tom midwestern preacher. He created a stock character and a stock plot that others have been laboriously cranking out ever since in books, TV, and movies, from Peyton Place to American Beauty.
Similarly, as the late Allan Bloom wrote in The Closing of the American Mind, America in general transformed itself into the post-WWI-era Weimar Republic on a mammoth scale:
This popularization of German philosophy in the United States is of peculiar interest to me because I have watched it occur during my own intellectual lifetime, and I feel a little like someone who knew Napoleon when he was six. I have seen value relativism and its concomitants grow greater in the land than anyone imagined. Who in 1920 would have believed that Max Weber’s technical sociological terminology would someday be the everyday language of the United States, the land of the Philistines, itself in the meantime become the most powerful nation in the world? The self-understanding of hippies, yippies, yuppies, panthers, prelates and presidents has unconsciously been formed by German thought of a half-century earlier; Herbert Marcuse’s accent has been turned into a Middle Western twang; the echt Deutsch label has been replaced by a Made in America label; and the new American life-style has become a Disneyland version of the Weimar Republic for the whole family.
In Germany, Nietzsche declared “God is Dead” in 1882; in the States, Time magazine would attempt to confirm the diagnosis 84 years later, in 1966. David Frum’s history of the 1970s is essentially a book about America’s decade-long collective effort at discarding its puritan roots and becoming 1920s Weimar in polyester pants and a Disco Stu shirt. Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism approaches the same transformation, but over a much longer timetable.
Eric S. Raymond calls it the “suicidalism” of the West. He points “back to Rousseau and the post-Enlightenment Romantics” and forward to describe how those post-WWI tendencies were and are still systematically exploited by transnational progressives and Islamic radicals in his essay “Gramscian damage.”
This is the first time I’ve seen ESR cited on a conservative website. Here’s hoping it won’t be the last!
Really?
You just haven’t been watching closely.
Actually, the “West” is not suicidal. Rather, Western (pseudo)- intellectuals seek to destroy Western civilization, and most of the people who live in it, in the hope that they can create a Utopia for themselves on the ruins thereof.
I find the “intellectual” obsession with World War One fascinating. They constantly talk about the way Europe was “left in ruins” by it. And that it was those ruins which compel them to “remake” civilization to this day.
In a word, bullshit.
The actual physical damage from World War One was largely confined to a narrow corridor running from the North Sea, across the Belgian/French/German border area, to end at the Swiss border. For four years, the various powers used their militaries to pound this strip of land into a moonscape, in the process killing or wounding about 13.5 million men. They almost bankrupted themselves fighting over… an area about the size and shape of Vermont and New Hampshire placed end-to-end.
In the end, the borders stayed pretty much where they’d been at the beginning. And other than a few bombing raids on London by Zeppelins (as a boy, I knew a retired American Army Air Force pilot who, as an RFC volunteer in 1915, shot one down over the Thames Estuary), and some rounds from the German “Paris Gun” landing in the Quai d’Orsay, the nations involved were fundamentally untouched.
But the deaths! Everyone cries.
Sorry. The January 1918 to December 1920 flu pandemic killed about three and a half times as many people, worldwide, as died “in Flanders fields”. I don’t see the “intellectuals” getting bent out of shape about a subtype of avian H1N1- unless they can’t get their doctor on the phone.
So, why is World War One so popular as a reason for intellectuals marching around, chanting, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go”?
Because it’s not a reason. It’s an excuse.
The pseudo-intelletual left doesn’t like our modern world one bit. They resent everything about it. They resent the fact that Joe Blow from Kokomo has a car, a TV, and a five-figure income. They resent the fact that Joe’s daughter goes to the same college their kids do. They resent the fact that Joe’s wife shops at a store where she can get anything they like, like maybe arugula, if she wants it. (Half the time, she doesn’t.)
Most of all, they resent the fact that Joe, his wife, and their daughter (who is 18- after all, she’s in college) all are able to vote. And probably do not vote for “the right people”, by the standards of the intellectuals.
In short, they resent the fact that unlike any past civilization, their self-defined “superiority” does not automatically confer “privilege”. They are not automatically a ruling class. And anyone else can have pretty much anything they do, if they want to pay for it.
(Renaissance Europe was a different story. Look up “sumptuary laws”, sometime. Our modern intellectuals would love to have those back, trust me.)
Also, while their opinions on what is Right, Proper, and Good are taken very seriously by their fellow intellectuals in The Only Places That Matter (New York, LA, etc.), they tend to be the subject of derision around the dinner table at Joe’s house. They resent the fact that Joe does not take them seriously, except when they say or do something which he and his see as threatening their rights, as citizens, or just as independent human beings. At which point, he can effectively oppose them- at the ballot box, and otherwise. Without breaking any laws they could use to “neutralize” him.
This just enrages them beyond comprehension.
How dare these… plebeians… oppose their betters!
The problem intellectuals have with our civilization has nothing to do with the “ruins of Europe in 1918″, really. There are much worse ruins in history to get exercised about, if “ruins” were the real reason.
I don’t see any of them waxing tragic about what London looked like in 1945, although they occasionally become indignant about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Largely because it dawned on them (about ten seconds after noon on 9 August 1945) that an A-bomb makes no distinctions between the ditchdigger and the philosopher- and unlike a stick of SC 1000s from a JU-88, just moving to the country until after the bombing’s over with probably won’t help much. (See “fallout”.)
I have always believed we owe a debt of gratitude to J. Robert Oppenheimer & Co. for completing the Manhattan District project on time, if not necessarily “under budget”. Not just for beating Germany, Russia, and Japan to the punch (yes, all three had A-bomb projects, and two of them started before we did), but also for creating a weapon powerful enough that even the intellectuals were afraid to use it, in their interminable efforts to remake the world into what they think it should be.
Which is why the intellectuals are reduced to screaming at us, lecturing us on our “lack of enlightenment”, and occasionally trying to use their “leverage” within the power structure to try to crush us under their (supposedly) patrician heels.
So far, that last gambit hasn’t worked too well, here in the United States, at least. Europe is a different story, but then Europe has always had a bad habit of taking its intellectuals seriously, especially when they are busy spouting drivel.
I believe the answer is to simply tell intellectuals, not “shut up”, sine they won’t and will claim they’re being oppressed, but rather to say to them, “You have the right to speak, but you don’t have a right to force others to listen to you. Nor does your right to speak include a right to be taken seriously.”
By the way, that’s a quote from Hubert Humphrey.
clear ether
eon
Excellent as usual….
Then,Bread and Circus.
Now.Government check and Kardashians/facebook/etc…
I can’t agree, eon, about your description of World War One.
World War I is not just an obsession of intellectuals. To a large extent, we have been living in the ruins every since. This was Christian civilization engaging itself in a monumental and pointless bloodbath, for no apparent reason. Every good instinct of mankind — patriotism, love of God and country, courage, and self-sacrifice, was exploited for a pointless, bloody and stupid war. The institutions and powerful classes discredited themselves, as did, to some extent, what started out in the 1880s as a wonderful technological revolution.
The first thing I thought in reading the thesis here was the 20s was “World War I.”
Yes, we need to watch the excesses of liberalism and progressivism. But we also need to recognize the massive cultural shock World War I was and remember those lessons, too.
Also, the 1920s were mostly determined by the people who survived the WWI trenches. Not by the dead ones.
I think “eon” simplifies things too much by comparing a simple body-count of WWI and the flu.
There is a fundamental psychological difference between surviving a flu, which is a natural disease, and surviving prolonged trench warfare, with all its shell-shocks, gas attacks and other unceasing man-made horrors, seeing how the best minds of the world are engaged in feverish thinking how to kill more people in less time, and how words like God and nation are used to drive masses of people to massacre each other without any really good reason.
One can very easily lose all faith in humanity after being exposed to such conditions for a long time.
Actually, the “Lost Generation”, as they described themselves, were not “survivors of the trenches”, for the very simple reason that few of them were ever in anybody’s army.
Most of the countries involved relied on volunteer forces early on, much as we do today. Drafts were a relatively late factor; Germany- late 1915, France same year, England late 1916, United States- most draftees entered the force after the Armistice, and many more who were “called up” were never actually inducted at all, due to the end of hostilities. (One of my grandfathers being in the latter category.)
The “intelligentsia” which made up the social lions of the day were, on the whole, never interested in fighting in the trenches, or anywhere else. And the nature of induction meant that as long as they didn’t volunteer, they didn’t generally have to worry about it.
Although a lot of veterans suffered from PTSD then, as they would in later wars (“shell shock” being the term used at the time), few of those who spent the Twenties decrying all the “destruction” of the war ever knew what it was first-hand, nor were they really interested. The Great War’s main psychological effect fell on average men who were in the ranks, and in England and France and Germany the upper-class types who filled out the officers’ corps in their armies.
These are two groups the “intellectuals” had no particular sympathy for. They regarded the average men as unenlightened boors, and the upper class types as inbred hereditary fools who, due to an accident of birth, were in positions of power and influence that rightly belonged to them, the intellectuals, based on their definition of “merit”. (“I’m smarter than everybody else.”)
One of the few really smart people of the era who got it and depicted it honestly was mystery writer Dorothy L. Sayers, who was hardly “upper class”. Like P.G. Wodehouse, her depiction of the manners and mores of the England of her day was scathingly accurate, but while Wodehouse restricted his work to the “upper class”, she took on pretty much everybody.
The juxtapositions are interesting. To see what the men who survived the trenches were really like, read any of her Lord Peter Wimsey novels. Wimsey was a Major in infantry, and his “gentleman’s gentleman”, Mervyn Bunter, had been his platoon sergeant in Flanders. Their wartime experiences colored their everyday lives from the first story to the last.
For an even more vivid portrait, specifically read The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club; George Fentiman is a nearly textbook example of what the War did to the men who fought it. It isn’t pretty, even though Fentiman was a “damned decent fellow” overall.
By comparison, for a look at the “Lost Generation” intellectuals who are held up today as exemplars of what the War really did to the European Zeitgeist, read Clouds of Witness. You’ll find that lot hanging out at the Soviet Club. Also read Murder Must Advertise; what weren’t plotting revolution were over at Tod Milligan’s snorting cocaine every Tuesday night.
By the way, most of Miss Sayer’s characters were based on people she actually knew in London and elsewhere. With, as Jack Webb used to say, the names changed to protect the innocent- and in some cases, the guilty as sin.
Did the “Great War” have an adverse effect on the psyche of Europe?
Undoubtedly.
Was it overdramatised by intellectuals seeking to justify their distaste for the society they lived in, and its refusal to bow down to them?
Absolutely.
clear ether
eon
Well Said, and comprehensively so.
American intellectuals are simply trying to catch up with their European counter parts, who have caused the deaths of millions, upon millions, of their countrymen/women. They won’t be satisfied until they’ve had gulags/death camps of their own.
So glad to see the recommendations by eon to the novels of Dorothy L. Sayers.
I can’t pretend to be an expert on WWI, but I will say I’ve always been haunted by an episode in the fictionalized memoir written by Noel Streatfield (the author of Ballet Shoes and other children’s novels), called A Vicarage Family (I’m pretty sure that’s right). As a teenager she had a cousin who died in the trenches, a young officer; on one of his leaves, he apologetically gave her some hint (“I had to tell someone,” that kind of thing) of the unbelievable horrors of having to lead men to their pointless deaths. Then he returns to the front and is killed. I think it would be hard to be of the class that raised its children to do the right thing, including go off to war for king and country, and accept leadership roles in this enterprise; and then not to feel violently repulsed by what it all had led to.
When Europe was, as you say, really reduced to rubble all over the place, after WWII, no one could ever say, “I wonder what it was all for.”
Isn’t it also possible to say that WWI, in the Sayers novels, seems to represent an experience apart, shared only by such as Wimsey and Bunter and, for example, that porter at the women’s college in Gaudy Night, something that other people can never apprehend–an experience characterized by their loyalty to one another and their abiding decency, despite what they were being put through? That’s different from ‘saving the world for democracy’ or at least ‘saving it from totalitarian nightmare,’ I think.
That was a brilliant little addendum to the essay, Eon.
Way back in the 1960s, before I died, I did a terrific conservative TV series for the BBC called “Civilization” that also wound up in its last episodes tracing the corrupting influence of both Rousseau and the tumultuous German psyche.
Thanks for the heads up, Kenneth.
The full-length versions of several, perhaps all of the episodes of your series are currently on YouTube, and well worth checking out. Here’s a link to the first segment.
Sir Clark, God bless him, is an unpaid lecturer post mortem emeritus in my home school. Genius!
Thanks for that link, Ed. It never occurred to me that series would be so easily available.
You have Sir Kenneth Clark commenting. I have to say, that’simpressive.
Especially from beyond the grave.
also replying to chas C Q.
I am immensely pleased to see any reference to the regrettablenessi of Rousseau.
His notion of the general will is where the Enlightenment became the Endarkenment.
Where Western civilization took its big wrong turn.
The path abandoned since 1775 should be readopted, it is the true and correct one.
May I also recommend historian Paul Johnson’s book Intellectuals?
Ah, cultural relativism, the argument that it’s an equally noble feat to stick a bone through your nose as land a man on the moon. Point it out for the idiocy it is.
And yet the current administration has turned NASA into a Muslim outreach organization which is in the process of selling off its assets in Florida. The country just shrugs and drives on.
Great thoughts by Spengler, especially, tho also Sarah Hoyt.
The WW I trauma led Western intellectuals to hate the West. The Vietnam debacle has led baby boom neo-intellectuals, and especially cultural leaders, to also denigrate Christian market capitalist culture/ civilization.
The fact that most pro-life Christian (bigger family!) types are also neo-cons willing to exert active US imperialist efforts makes for a confusing narrative.
Jacksonians.
Because I do believe that “demographics are destiny” to a big extent in a democracy, I’m sure the pro-life position will get culturally stronger.
But I fully believe that a democracy with 51% or more of the voters getting most of their income from the gov’t, which gets that benefit money from non-peaceful tax collection, is doomed to drift towards wanting a Ceasar. Actually, they’ll be wanting a Platonic Philosopher King, a benign dictator.
Only a culture of limited gov’t will be able to stop that tendency, as well as limited number of gov’t benefit recipients.
More than 51%. If you take the number who net do not contribute to, or who take from the gov’t trough (your number?) and add the now 21+% of Americans who are gov’t workers, you have approx 75% of the US being supported by the US (as in “us”) treasury.
That means every person who pays taxes is functionally supporting all gov’t programs, and 3 other people besides. No wonder the economy is still lagging. After paying for all that, who has anything left over for basic bread, much less a circus or two?
Not the topic of the text, but still. Always wondered if my math is off, or if now one else noticed.
Which (supporting 3 others) is a good reason to minimize to the fullest extent possible, the payment of taxes, and exposure to those tax laws.
correction to last line :”if no one else noticed”. Sorry.
And yes, I agree with your conclusions as to the desire for a benevolent dictator, and the corrective cure (limited gov’t). I would add a better educated and involved electorate as well, but I fear that is too much to ask.
As you do not know what “neo-con” means, you should stop using the term.
Well said. However as those numbers who demand benefits, and as you noted a limited form of government ceases to exist, the faster the state will collapse under the burden.
They may want the benign dictator, but what they actually get will likely be something far more ruthless and less benign.
However, I’m reading Colleen McCullough’s Rome series again, and am struck by how much her depiction of conditions and events surrounding the fall of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Roman Empire shadow and parallel conditions in our country today.
The grain dole featured in no small way.
Terms like “American imperialism”- which appeared in my schoolbooks around 1970, by the way – are exactly the sort of thing that is causing the trouble. What exactly is the US ruling? Micronesia? The constitution explicitly provides for a permanent Navy and enforcement of international law (whatever that is) and for all of the harm that American pressure occasionally does (to China, to Honduras, to Israel), the US is the only force for good in the world. I do not want to see a world left to the mercies of Russia and China.
There is plently of room for limited government and spending without that.
not ‘international law’
The Law of Nations. The Vattel Law of Nations
Schoolbooks? In the 70′s? They’ve been working on this for awhile, haven’t they? Of course, that’s the point of this article, but I hadn’t realized the education establishment had gone down the tubes so early.
The troubling thing is that demographics here may really be destiny. Are all the folks who remember when these suicidalistic ideas were laughable getting on retirement age? How much of the electorate has grown up since grade school thinking in that Stalinist propaganda terminology. How much of the electorate even questions its usefulness, and, by necessary implication, the underlying assuptions that support them. The bullet point list in the article sounds like the conversation of too many Liberals- capital L liberals, those for whom it is a faith, not a political position, much less an indication of an open mind; and that mindset in a majority of voters is a disaster if not reversed soon.
I am beginning to wonder if we are not too late trying to “educate” voters whose entire formal education goes against what it is we are trying to teach. We have no other recourse but to try, but that effort must include challenging, at school board meetings and in legislatures, the thoroughly rotted out educational establishment in this country.
Everything since Aristotle is commentary. We can add Augustine to our mix–call him Aristotle with a Christian bent. Seen through an Aristotilian or Augustinian lens, the neo-conservative or conservative lines of thinking in modern America are not up to the intellectual task of preserving (or conserving) an American culture that is particularly useful for anything.
The various commentators quoted here by Ed all have their own social agenda and like all writers with an agenda stand up a straw man who can suffer mortal blows and die so that the writer can prove his case about society’s ills.
The cultural problem we face today is in fact that “western capitalist post-enlightenment democracy” is deeply flawed and intellectually bankrupt. That culture valorizes the individual, even when he makes bad self-serving choices. Indeed, “capitalism” and Adam Smith’s lovely “invisible hand” embrace the collective power of individual bad choices to create the wisdom of the “free market.” Of course the free market and democracy are themselves myths designed to manufacture consent. “Free markets” are the social construction of a set of rules that assign certain property rights. Like wise “representative democracy” (or whatever term of art we use today) is simply a rule based means of guiding a group of people to a pre-determined end.
At bottom, no matter how you define the system, human nature remains the same. Man is sinful and cannot of his own accord change that. There is nothing about civil society that can change that. Man’s sinful nature will corrupt any system–no matter how much we like to pretend that there is something magical about the system that can redeem man.
Of course Aristotle rejects democracy and describes how democracy is doomed to failure. Aristotle also rejects what one might call a “pure” capitalism. Aristotle always preaches movement to a “mean.” A proper community in Aristotle’s world protects certain interests of the community above all, not the interests and freedom of an individual. Augustine shares Aristotle’s skepticism of the unbridled individual.
Of course for Augustine man finds his “justification” in surrender of himself to God. There is nothing that man or human reason can do to “save” man in Augustine’s world. Only God’s saving grace can save man.
Which is to say that the critics of western democracy and capitalism from the 1920s and the 1960s are right. Those systems they criticize are badly flawed. But those critics (and I am lumping together folks who clearly should not be lumped) are equally wrong because they center their answer in man himself. The “right” answer would be for the critics to find God and suggest that man would be better off when he acknowledged his limitations, and the fact that there can be a right order to things in the world. Indeed, the “right” answer is that there are certain inviolable principles which should guide human action. Further, there are certain types of virtues and ideals that should temper human conduct.
Of course the problem in the United States is that we pretend folks can find any God they choose. Which is clearly also wrong. Augustine did not suggest that man’s salvation lay in a palette of God’s. Salvation meant surrendering oneself to God.
“So much for those American “conservatives” who claim that religion is the base of capitalism—and who believe that they can have capitalism and eat it, too, as the moral cannibalism of the altruist ethics demands.
And so much for those modern “liberals” who pride themselves on being the champions of reason, science, and progress—and who smear the advocates of capitalism as superstitious, reactionary representatives of a dark past. Move over, comrades, and make room for your latest fellow-travelers, who had always belonged on your side—then take a look, if you dare, at the kind of past they represent.”
–Ayn Rand, who had Harry Huntington’s number before he was born.
Wow.
Do you lease gas rights?
great piece. I read Allan Bloom’s book in 1988. Thought I had wasted my whole college career.
Quite a few of us are looking at 2013 and recognizing that we are falsely attributing the cause of the global malaise to what has in fact been the only engines ever to pull society out of such conditions.
http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/19th-century-blueprints-for-20th-century-tragedies-is-a-repeat-pending-in-the-21st/ talks about the push for collectivism and economic planning that led to the Great War to show the British that laissez faire and individualism were not the future.
And we are still citing the exact same reasons for all the current education reforms. To gain a social, political, and economic Transformation based on Amitai Etzioni’s Communitarian vision and a Low Carbon Planned Economy. It’s as if all the lessons of the 20th were never really learned. Especially not at the UN.
It’s all because of Helvetica! Helvetica, spawn of evil, destroyer of crops, raper of women, emasculator of men! Stay away from Helvetica!
Someone call the Serif.
Charlie wins the Internets!
Nahh, Helvetica was a post-WWII phenomenon. Though come to think of it, given its roots in the 1920s Bauhaus…
Here, I hope, is the kind of pro-active post-postmodern posting Sarah favors. http://herbork.wordpress.com/2012/12/31/sermonette/
I’m glad someone pointed out the “you plebes all stink” mentality of some 1920′s literature, particularly that of Sinclair Lewis. His novels are full of elitist disdain of people who actually WORK for a living, whether industrialists or real estate agents. His prose is lovely (“The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist…”), his ideas pernicious and hateful, and unfortunately very influential. I do think it was more of a symptom rather than a cause, however. Sinclair was just playing to his base, and it got him a Nobel, so it evidently worked.
Sarah Hoyt has a better clue than most.
Didn’t the Progressive movement make great strides before WW1? Our intellectuals began copying Europe’s snotty ways years earlier.
One could also ask why the dysfunctional Europe that created WW1 was ever worth copying.
thanks for your essay.
I suppose i have a question: 1914, or 1917. My dad and I go ’round about this. He says 1914. But, didn’t European civilization throw a series of wars through the 18 and 19 hundreds? None of them seemed to upset the applecart quite so much. They had a 30 years war that split europe pretty effectively back into roman-ish, and german-ish, and steppe-ish lands. The Civil War in the US was a total war, but it left the pieces intact-ish. It seems to me like 1917 is when a new strain of thought set about eradicating everything western, mostly successfully. It’s hard to imagine Paul Tillich being taken as anything but an awful heretic before then. they’ve all hosted wars, but 1917 is the first time since the mongols entire cities were wiped off the map. as well, 96% of all orthodox priests were killed, in russia. the tsar was wiped out, and not even replaced in a few years. peculiar bureaucrats ruled for several lifetimes, rather than an interregnum like cromwell.
For decades we’ve known that some Americans were irrationally, reflexively anti-American, even when these beliefs and attitudes made them look absurd. They never believed in this country, but they believe that if they ever got temporary control of it and redistributed enough of what it makes they would succeed. If this isn’t a contradiction, then, there is no such thing as irony.
Pretty funny to quote Spengler approvingly in an essay denouncing the baleful influence of unsound German intellectuals. And you do know that there’s a heck of a lot of Heidegger lurking in Bloom’s thought? I also think that a dandy like Tom Wolfe, he of the white suits, may not be the best choice as a critic of affectation.
Hint: he’s not exactly a deep thinker.
You lot would be more credible as defenders of Western civilization if you actually knew something about Western civilization.
Wrong Spengler, you ninny.
Nope, I may be a ninny, but Oswald Spengler it is, as you can verify by following the link in the article. Spengler was the author of Der Untergang des Abendlandes, which was translated as the Decline of the West. He gets quoted with remarkable frequency by Conservative writers who are apparently attracted by his historical mysticism and cultural pessimism. (And yep, I’ve read the book, both volumes of which, as a matter of fact, I can see on the shelf about twelve feet away from where I’m sitting. I was enthusiastic about Spengler myself for about 96 hours back in 1963…)
Please don’t waste your time and energy on the likes of Jim Hitlerson. He has venomous opinions on every topic, even ones he knows nothing about. He is simply too ignorant to understand how ignorant he is. However, he thinks he knows everything about everything and thinks he has the solution to all of the world’s problems. The guy is what Thomas Sowell might call a self-anointed messiah. He believes that civilized and successful people and countries are intrinsically evil and he has a vicious hatred of Jews and Israel. His posts are often incoherent ramblings. He evades questions, he tells outright lies and he throws tantrums. Please don’t waste your time and energy on this immature, malignant, narcissistic, attention-starved, anti-Semitic demagogue.
‘soon all the “right thinking people” will hate you.’
Yeah but will they lose their hypnotic grip on “the booboisie.”
Thanks for link to Tom Wolfe’s essay.
To understand the relation between the trends that led to Nazi Germany and those present in the US in the 20th century there is no better book than Leonard Peikoff’s The Ominous Parallels.
In brilliantly reasoned prose, Peikoff argues that the deepest roots of German Nazism lie not in existential crises, but in ideas — not in Germany’s military defeat in World War I or the economic disasters of the Weimar Republic that followed, but in the philosophy that dominated pre-Nazi Germany. Although it was mediated by crises, Peikoff demonstrates that German Nazism was the inevitable climax of a centuries-long philosophic development, preaching three fundamental ideas: the worship of unreason, the demand for self-sacrifice and the elevation of society or the state above the individual.
“These ideas,” Peikoff says, “are the essence of Nazism and they are exactly what our leading universities are now spreading throughout this country. This is the basic cause of all the other parallels.”
You may also want to check out his current book: The DIM Hypothesis: Why the lights in the West are going out.
I was going to mention The Ominous Parallels as the best book on the deep similarities between Weimar culture and contemporary American culture. Glad to see someone beat me to it. The book was written 30 years ago, and the parallels have become only more ominous since then.
Heinlein? Honestly?
He started out the Future History series with a story of corporate conspiracy to suppress innovation. He changed his economic politics – Magic, Inc. is a great paen to the small businessman – but when he finally “wrote what he wanted”, well, his libertine society, in spite of his protestations, really has no place for children, as the adults are too busy sleeping in each others’ beds. We are living this today.
The stuff he was attacked for is great, though, as is the stuff he wrote when other people set the rules (the Saturday Evening Post / Boy’s Life stuff).
(You know in one of his books his character derides his most famous book, Stranger in a strange Land, as “some people will do anything for money”. Don’t know if he was serious.)
Your intellectuals sound a lot like Ron Paul.
I want to add one short comment – so many “rationalists” I see commenting around the new seem stuck in the 19th century. Causulity, the Steady State theory, a physics that we can be comprehended by human reason (as opposed to just math) – all these are gone. Arecheology has unearthed both the kingdoms of Judah and Israel (although it has far to go).
Sorry, need more proofreading (or a keyboard with larger keys).
Figuring out how “just math” is distinct from “human reason” might be good too.
I mean, I’m all for figuring that we math geeks are superhuman….
Don’t forget mechanical reasons and other oddities. By 1790, religion was prostrated and trampled in France. Intellectuals fled the Church and churches, taking with them their religious mentality. That is the problem. Deductive reasoning is a natural fit for the spiritual life. Use Inductive (scientific) reasoning and one gets into odditeis like the angel-carrying capacity of pinheads. Prudent use of Deductive reasoning is the best fit in spiritual matters in the place of worship and in the home. Out in daily life and the World of Work, Inductive reasoning rules as the world is a place ruled by the laws of physics and Nature. The industrial revolution is as much the spread of Inductive reasoning as anything else.
Those post-1790 intellectuals in effect brought Deductive reasoning with them, using it with their religious instincts and spreading the darn stuff all over the place where it functions poorly. Politically, they turned themselves into Doctor Frankensteins, crafting perfect political solutions which would then totter down to terrorize the villagers.
After the Napoleonic Wars, the 1825 Vienna conference of free-spending horny dudes (crowned heads) was to solve the problem of war in Europe. They recognized the laws of physics by identifying the invasion routes and saying those places should be neutral, such as the Low Countries. Everyone pledged to respect that. They made a mistake. The only enforcement for the treaty was the national defense budgets of Holland and Belgium. By the 1870s, the treaty was creaking. Belgium did not have enough money to put Germany in check. The great powers should have funded those defense budgets.
But wait, there’s more. Rabble spread over the US prairies, busting sod and growing wheat. The McCormick Reaper, a triumph of Inductive reasoning, joined with the rabble (US and Argentina) to gush wheat and tank the farmer profits in Germany and even in Russia. The Russians roamed in angst in the manor houses. The Germans on their little plots, guided by the headlight of Deductive reasoning, concluded their problems were caused by those darn Slavs having too much land.
And out of this mess the Deductive reasoners concluded the problem was the basic economic relationships in society? And that they should be put in charge by the masses to fix things?
If you do not believe in the higher power, your religious mentality may not be absent. It may be fully involved in philosophy and politics and making you feel good by running the Deductive reasoning. If a person tries to for example make airplanes with Deductive reaoning, they will probably end up wearing a barrel and in jail. If they use Deductive reasoning in economics and politics, the result with be the same, such as the mess of two World Wars. And if the wars are analyzed with Deductive reasoning, one will still end up in the barrel, wanting to put “turn the other cheek” into the State and Defense departments, and returning all the wealth stolen by evil capitalism, and similar sterling enterprises.
Got a real-life example of a Christian scholar seriously discussing how many angels can dance on a the head of a pin?
Meanwhile, consider how difficult inventing the calculus would have been without even a partial understanding of infinitesimals. Likely, Leibniz and Newton spent more time contemplating those angels than all the scholastics combined.
I’m guessing you aren’t so much up on medieval scholasticism. Any of the big cathedrals had a school and some major natural philosophers attached to them. Natural philosophy covered philosophy, theology, physics, optics and math, as well as the usual rhetoric, trig, languages, and so on.
They don’t necessarily get cited as much as the saints.
The angel on a head of a pin is a parody in a book. Abelard and Heloise are mostly known for a tragic love story. What made him famous, however, was a first book ” “Sic et Non” (yes, and no) covering all sorts of philosophical debates. Mind you, he’s a middle of the time-line guy, in all of this, and he’s only in one city. You’ll notice Notre Dame Cathedrals all over the place. That’s a lot of intellectual ferment.
He lost some sort of argument with St ???fat guy???? so he’s mostly a pocket-secret saint for Catholics. Chartres Cathedral had some wild philosopher’s corresponding with English cathedral inhabitants.
The first debates were students learning from a teacher, free-form, and the teachers debating in front of their students. The learning curve could be exponential- I think it’s rather like the internet, when a group of people start paying attention to a subject, free-form. There wasn’t a curriculum at first. They built on, to distinguish what was useful to know, and to provide certificates as scholars moved around, and as scholars died off- so, you sat at the feet of Master So and So- when he was young and vigorous, or old and senile? You sat at his assistant’s feet?
Mostly we don’t know what they knew, or how, because we don’t know what they are saying when they say ” I spent x years in Paris, Cologne, Berne….” Towns that are more obscure now would have had the more revolutionarily odd thinkers, for instance. It’s similar to the project at ?Columbia? now where they list out mathematicians, and who they study with- not just their subject of their dissertation, but who- because that would suggest similar approaches to different problems, I guess? I know the Economist has an article mentioning a wall of mathematicians and their influence. At the top is a name-venerator, which is somehow not officially correct, but he’s a brilliant mathematician, and how he approached name-veneration and math yielded topology and string theory, later.
Newton studied at a cathedral school, later. His first professor (I think) was a church-man, somehow.
The intricacy on display in cathedrals is a display of their math, for one.
For two, the Industrial Revolution was carried out mostly by non-conformists, who didn’t worship in cathedrals. They were not allowed to attend, or graduate, from cathedral schools, either Anglican, or Catholic. So, the 10% tithe for religious studies, and teachers, and so on, from the Industrial Revolution, mainly went to Quakers, Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists, and types like that. This held true in America. Carnegie libraries? Carnegie was a Baptist.
“Yes, of course greater participation of women in both politics and work, a break down of social barriers and greater racial integration are a good thing.”
Okay; then let me say it. Those are not good things. Women voting led to the socialism we now have. Integration led to the increased crime rate. Breaking down of social barriers led to the culture believing itself to be bad.
Let me suggest a slightly more nuanced interpetation….
1) Women voting AS WOMEN (as opposed to as free citizens, a role more typically associated with masculine thinking) led to socialism and the ‘Juliaism’ that we have today
2) Integration WITHOUT SIMULTANEOUSLY ENFORCING CULTURAL NORMS led to increased crime rates.
3) Breaking down social barriers WITHOUT AN UNDERSTANDING OF WHICH DIRECTION THAT MOBILITY SHOULD OCCUR led to a culture that hates itself.
In each case, the underlying problem was not expanding freedom, but ignoring that freedom is dependent upon responsibility. Emancipated women cannot expect to remain free if they maintain the dependent mindset, they will drag us all down with them. Integrated minorities must accept the broader cultural norms of the society that they integrate into, or they will destroy that culture as a man would choke upon a plum pit. Encouraging the elites to adopt the manners and belief systems of the lower orders, rather than encouraging the lower orders to embrace those of the elites degrades a culture and turns it towards self-destruction.
We cannot have it both ways…to be free, to be prosperous, to be enlightened, we must believe AND NOT BE AFRAID TO SAY that these things are good, and in fact better than to be enslaved, poor, and backwards. Those who adopt these beliefs should be welcome, but those who do not, are poison and should be treated as such.
Ed, you love her, don’t you? Sarah, that is. She writes like a breeze weaving between the trees in a forest grove outside the college library on a warm spring day. Send her a grade school “Valentine Be Mine” card.
She has as lot more sense than that reported for the original Spengler, imo. I only read the link you lunk. Limited value to that imo.
But I do note this. We are not Europe. We founded in Hebrew more than Greek and Greek more than Latin. Mostly in the same English-Scottish intellectual tradition Blackstone and Adam Smith were anchored at. Which is different than Dresden, Berlin and Paris. Our tradition is from Edinburgh and Amsterdam, Normandy and Geneva, born while adopting the Sephartic diaspora.
Yes WWI was a horrendous reset of Europe and all its cultural traditions. It blew out a whole generation of the elite — the officer corps was the children of the elite, they were more than decimated, for that class it was a wipe-out. But America was NOT part of that, we entered late, late late. We won the war, or were large part of the winning, but of the suffering we were only touched lightly.
We had our own reset event. That was the Civil War, and out of the Civil War social forces equal or stronger than those of Europe developed. Those include a American Socialism founded in actions first, and light on theory and intellectual discourse. Silver over gold, seeds in the ground, camps, and old age homes over paper and polemic, temperance rather than dystopia and utopia. Full of bluster and speeches, revival meetings. Grass roots. Out of that came the Bellamy Pledge of Allegiance, the board game Monopoly, great charity organizations that Hoover called in the relief of post WWI Europe, then starving.
Will America be lost, maybe? Our moral culture is base and debasing, but still it is communal and full of yearning to love all fellow humans. Or public schools and higher ed create an idiot generation, with no sense of history along with poor skills in every intellectual area, yet full of self-esteem and entitlement. A poisonous mix, that, yet they do have strong expectations of being nice to others — if only that did not come with a huge black spot of their cultural philosophy which encourages them to ignore and dehumanizingly caricature the ideas and persons expressing them that they consider not “politically correct”. Yet we do have an internet, any one can educate themselves online, to the WHOLE OF ALL HUMAN KNOWLEDGE. That’s quite powerful. Anyone in the world can learn how anyone else in the world is living, thinking, on a minute to minute basis. Everyone in the world, in any culture is seen as, or seeable as, a fellow human. That’s quite powerful. Ameircans do take actual experiences and making the most of them quite seriously. That’s why Europeans call us immature. We are not. We were beyond their ken at our birth, and continue to be.
We are not in the thrall of the mobius loop described here — in parts sure, but those are overwhelmed by natural Americanism.
“…It blew out a whole generation of the elite…”
A line from the new season of “Downton Abbey”:
All the boys we grew up with are dead!
Ah so! That and it helps that in the last two months I read through the Macy Dobbs detective novels by Jacqueline Winspear which pivot on the impact of the Great War upon Great Britain, and the non-fiction narrative history of WWI, “To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918″ by the American socialist Adam Hochschild.
It must be realized that of all cultures and political systems in the world, the West and capitalism are based more on the values expressed in Torah (consent of the governed, rule of law, respect for property, etc.) than any other system. I take this a yet another manifestation of the spiritual warfare against God, for the next phase is always and everywhere a proposal that is orthogonal to His Law in important respects. And the prime candidate for that phase for the present at least is socialism which is directly contrary to Torah.
Having said that, it would make a great article for someone steeped in Jewish culture to explain to those of us who love God’s Law how so many Jews can learn Torah and yet support socialism, a system that so openly violates it.
A question for Dennis Prager.
It’s hard to forget Dalton Trumbo and Erich Remarque in this. Their books influenced many people at an emotional horror level offering nihilism without offering any perspective that Western civilization was worth preserving and that the agony of the characters was the price we pay for preserving it and that it is worth preserving.
Long, but worthwhile:
Nihilism, by Eugene Rose