Against Modernity 2
I don't quite remember whether this is my favorite Feininger painting, he did many great ones. Among other things – he also did cartoons and some commercial work – he was an exponent of the Bauhaus aesthetic. He was the first faculty appointee of Walter Gropius there and a fine artist, indeed. And there lies the rub.
Although I never much liked him, I have to admit that I basically agree with Tom Wolfe's jeering of Bauhaus' ultimate impact on American architecture in the middle of the 20th Century. I can deal with the odd brutalist building, but most if it truly is appalling. The Europeans weren't such fools. La Defense is at the edge of Paris. They didn't bulldoze Notre Dame to put in a parking lot. Fuck the Anglo-American civilization: it is the filth of the planet.
The hideous glass rectangles which have defaced American cities should have planes fly into just about all of them built before 1980. But just because you were the first to do it, doesn't make it worthwhile, or even worth doing at all. See 'innovation', writ large nowadays.
I believe that alienation has it's place in life, especially when younger when you look around in uncomprehending horror at the people and things around you. You don't call it that, though. You call it other things. Eccentric is one. Anarchist is another. Asshole, yet another possibly apt appelation. All these things pass.
It dawns on you just how unspecial you are and how extraordinary ordinary people can be, if you give them a ghost of a chance. You remember that you don't know anything about anything and that listening is the best way to move a milimeter forward in life, which is all that can be hoped for. Happily, with a strong enough work ethic and will to succeed, one can end up semi-retired and brooding about it.
The Chinese, the Greeks, Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell and many others besides emphasized the importance of idleness. This is the secret to life. And happiness. The Greeks regarded it as barbaric to work for money. Wage-labor was considered abhorrent to the fledgling Republican Party and akin to slavery, which in the 19th Century mills and factories of New England, it freqently was, what? Worse than slavery.
The fundamental thing I hate about America is the busyness. Not busy people, those are two entirely different things. I'm incredibly busy, from before dawn until after dusk, but it is all entirely of my own volition. To me, that means everything. I could choose to do nothing, but that is an almost subhuman impulse. Or, a depressed one, stemming from God knows how many different justifiable origins.
But the Oversoul helps those who help themselves, and most people either don't want to help themselves, or simply can't. Those who can't, have an employer. It's funny, I think I've had this conversation with everyone on here. Having meaningful, important and helpful work for a boss is great. Just so long as the price is worth it. I don't think it is worth it, but we need people to do important professions, or society would collapse.
Which might not be the worst thing. When my Martian brain looks at the world, it seems obvious that the best outcome would be for American civilization, as it is presently arranged, to vanish. Rapture up the billionaires and their minions, probably we could liquidate several million people and just start over fresh.
I'm talking about the ideologists of catastrophy. They require a stern talking to. Perhaps. A bit more. But no, this is merely the way of the world, the ebb and flow of civilizational decline and rise. We had a good run, but this civilization is exhausted, and so is the entire West, just about, Germany included. Perhaps the neoliberal elements are actually doing the world a favor. Yes, America must die, so that the world may live.
I don't worry about the future anymore, in my heart. Every generations Cassandras end up having blown things out of proportion. We'll muddle through. We'll get past the Untermensch. We'll end up as a big fat Argentina, but with nuclear weapons and a bloated junk factory, with tech and kultcher subdivisions. Soon to be subsumed by China, which leads us now in every emerging technology that will matter. Turn out the lights, the party's over.
Nietzsche said a career makes people stupid, which it does, to a point. Your time is utterly controlled and dominated by this panoptic ogre that wants not just your sweat and muscle. It wants your soul. And most importantly, your time, which is fleeting. I didn't just read this stuff and say, yeah, that's right. No, it was born of then-bitter experience.
I spent a cumulative 9 years incapacited with sadness and revulsion (ie 'mental illness', which is fake half the time or so, see the heroic Thomas Szasz) unable to work, interact with people, speak – and for years on end – even think. AKA, idleness. Now, you have to have friends and parents of the highest excellence and sensitivity to just let you be, which almost never happens.
Again, der Mensch bezieht alles auf sich. We're drifting from the matter of modernity, about which I am somewhat conflicted. I like degenerate art. Not all of it, but most of it. I like degenerate music, in fact it's some of the best around, even if poor little Adorno couldn't hack the black American variant of it. But that's high art. What I hate is something more widely experienced, yet not widely understood?
It's a long-standing Chomsky and Adam Curtis-derived hobby horse. Bernays, Lippmann, the dawn of the system of propaganda out of World War I. It poisoned everything. Permanently, fatally. And then after the liberals had done that, the conservatives instinctively adopted and intensified it. Made it even worse.
It goes by other things. Instrumental Reason, from Horkheimer, and the attendant Culture Industry. That essay stands up today maybe more as a stylistic triumph, but the gist of it remains formidable. Scientism, best critiqued probably by Karl Popper (and Hayek, which makes sense in its own way). The spin off of course is math-driven and theory-driven microeconomics and econometrics.
Even if I despise the vulgar Randian form of capitalist-libertarianism, I have to hand it to Schumpeter, who was the most subtle and civilised of that gang. They did innovate an economics not so driven by mathematics and theory. It was closer to philosophy and hence close to human beings? I believe in markets, certainly they believe in me. And you.
But I loathe this crony-capitalist garbage, which has always existed since the early 19th Century. There was no libertarian golden age; something or other was always utterly fuct. And in many respects more barbaric than even today. The Golden Age ain't in us.
A corollary would be the utopian socialism, which I retain sympathy for, but realize is a pipe dream in the real world. I wouldn't be caught dead in a coop or collective, at least working for a wage in one. It's a good idea, a nice idea, but I'm incapable of going along with any consensus that is screwed up.
And consensus is almost always screwed up because the dummies and kooks get a say too. Or, the various corporate and government insiders connive the develop 'policy planning' and voila they win and you lose. Inside my head during these lengthy abstruse egoistic parliamentary blatherfests, in DC and elsewhere, I would be thinking. Nothing worth expressing, that's for sure. I don't want to be detained by the police, after all. Or worse. Preparation. Preparation. Preparation.
Not unrelatedly, the intensity and variety of delusions under which 'good citizen' liberals and conservatives languish are horrifying. You know, the normies. Enthusiastic voters. News-watchers. Well-informed NPR listeners. Less well-informed former Rush-bo fans. They're lost. Almost certainly irretrievably so. This country kind of had it all, but in the meantime of Neoliberalism, our cities ended up gone.
They don't quite recite it, these people, but if you can draw enough inferences, you learn the following, particularly if you've been conditioned by the bipartisan consensus. Corporations are People. Genocide is Democracy. Extinction is Freedom. Save the best for last, ponder it when staring at a screen, but really wanting to scream. Arbeit Macht Frei.
