Posts Tagged ‘ Post-Modern ’

Artistry is Dead

Artistry is Dead.

How can I disagree?

But poetry has changed what is is, evidently in response to this. It has developed new styles of writing and criticism – for the few who still are interested in it. Whether this new poetry is better or not, no one can say. It has to be judged on its own merits – which are rather esoteric.

It is also true that programming (for the Internet) has developed new standards of excellence – here again, for those who can understand it. It too can be considered an art – and an important one.

Recorded books have also reached a new excellence, with talented performers providing a new experience. I am now listening to The Brothers Karamazov, narrated by Fredrick Davidson, who gives an excellent performance. I now know much more about late 19th Century Russia, a culture that provided us with much of our classical literature.

The wasteland is not total.

2011
03/15
CATEGORY
Internet
Literature
Poetry
Software
2 comments

We Know Everything Already

This is the basic belief of our post-modern, globalized world. Globalization has been poorly defined, although I have tried to do so – and defined it as the takeover of a power complex: the global integration of all power structures. This means nothing to the people in this complex, because they have been instructed to know nothing. Why? Because they already know everything, and any additional so-called “knowledge” would only pollute this perfect knowledge.

I am getting a lot of blank stares from my readers right now: “What on earth is this guy talking about?” (Or even less polite language.) Or more likely, an instant judgment that whatever it is, they don’t want to know about it. Automatic filtering is taking place at the unconscious level – where most of our decision-making goes on.

The subject of the unconscious is a huge one, and I want to spend some more time on it. There are quite a few people (cognitive, behavioral-modification psychologists, for example) who deny its existence completely. In their view, if something is not physical it does not exist.  This is an extreme view, almost impossible to defend philosophically – but they are not interested in that. They are expressing the core belief of our new religion – which only exists in our collective unconscious.

It is interesting that no one was aware of the unconscious until Freud discovered it. Perhaps it was a product of modern society in its final phases – when it had hide much of its behavior, because it was morally unacceptable. This didn’t work, and the modern world self-destructed.

Not too long ago I became interested in knowing what this modern world was – and made a serious effort to find out. Strangely enough, no one else seemed interested in knowing this. This amazed me at the time, but now I understand it. The post-modern world does not what to know about the world it came from! But this is not all, it doesn’t want to know much of anything! Why?

Because they are not supposed to know. And being a fearful people, they obey this instruction faithfully. This brings up my next important subject: our new religion. Man is a naturally religious creature, and always creates new religions appropriate to his times.

For our unconscious society, he has created an unconscious religion. This is very useful, because its beliefs are also unconscious – and cannot be critically examined. Nevertheless, some of them are clear enough because it is so closely identified with the power complex – in fact it is part of this complex. At this point I need to make a historical diversion.

The Modern world was a product of the Medieval world. And a key component of that world was The Church. An important activity of that church, an activity which has persisted into our time, was the destruction of heresies – by a mass killing of their adherents. Islam, a close cousin of Christianity, did the same thing. In summary: the Medieval World was a religious world, but this religion was a conscious religion.

By contrast, the post-modern world (which is still in the making) has an unconscious religion – which also persecutes its heresies, but only in its collective unconscious. A persecution which is nevertheless totally effective – and even more so.

It is now time for me to make my Grand Summary. I am aware of the parallel here to the one made by the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov:

The Grand Inquisitor is a parable told by Ivan to Alyosha in Fyodor Dostoevsky‘s novel The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880). Ivan and Alyosha are brothers; Ivan questions the possibility of a personal, benevolent God and Alyosha is a novice monk.

The Grand Inquisitor is an important part of the novel and one of the best-known passages in modern literature because of its ideas about human nature and freedom, and because of its fundamental ambiguity.

Our new religion believes that the world has been perfected (by our highly-advanced technologies), and now stands in a position similar to that of the Christian Church in the Middle Ages – which was the direct representative of God, who was perfect.

The believers in this new religion are therefore perfect themselves – and already know everything. True, they occasionally need to be reminded of things they already now – and this is the function of the news. And also to provide spectacles for their viewer’s edification: scenes from all over the world, from places which have not reached perfection – and are therefore really important.

Stated this way, this belief is unacceptable. But we must remember we are dealing with unconscious beliefs here, which do not have to justify themselves rationally – or even to admit their existence. They can easily deny they exist, without effecting their power in the least.

2011
03/13
CATEGORY
Uncategorized
1 comment

From Keats to Williams

I am taking this analogy from Robert Pinsky in his book The Situation of Poetry, chapter three, The Romantic Persistence - which I have already referred to in my posting Ode to a Nightingale.

He next analyzes William Carlos Williams’ poem The Term, which I have reproduced here:

A rumpled sheet
of brown paper
about the length

and apparent bulk
of a man was
rolling with the

wind slowly over
and over in
the street as

a car drove down
upon it and
crushed it to

the ground. Unlike
a man it rose
again rolling

with the wind over
and over to be as
it was before.

This is clearly poetry, with all its enjambments – but without the exalted language of Keats – something the modern poets went great lengths to avoid.  Pinsky’s point is that they were part of the same tradition – cleverly disguised.

My point is that Pinsky, and nearly everyone else, has missed the main point: that people (and nature) have been eliminated from our culture. Pinsky almost realizes this on the bottom of page 63:

(To a limited extent, the poem also invites us to consider the rolling, man-sized bit of rubbish as a “term” or metaphor for a man. However, to consider this meaning as anything but secondary tends to make the phrase “unlike a man” bathetic, or a corny observation about mortality…

Pinsky has out-smarted himself here – but he has also kept himself respectable – which is evidently more important. He doesn’t want to sound like a insane revolutionary – and say that in the transition from the modern world to the post-modern world we have lost our selves, our humanity.

In real life, the paper would have been torn to shreds by the car. But since it is really a post-modern person, and therefore not real, it is unaffected by this violent encounter.

2011
02/25
CATEGORY
Poetry
The Self
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In a World Dominated by Things, People Become Things Too

They become super-people – despising ordinary people and their paltry needs. They become obsessed with grand schemes, such as The Market and its needs instead. They become destructive, and eliminate all human progress – serving Power, and nothing else.

As an objective philosopher, one might wonder why being obsessed with technology makes people murderous. I think this new identity, as something all-powerful – brings back, and re-energizes the Terrible God of the ancient world, which we got from the Hebrews. Which became incorporated into the unconscious foundations of Christianity. Which became incorporated into our religious-secular world. And which is destroying it.

This world consists of The West (The US and the EU), the East (China and Japan), with Islam and Israel right in the middle. There are numerous minor players too, but they can be ignored for now. In all cases, power is the main issue, mainly economic power, but also in the case of Islam: religious power.

These two kinds of power form the conflict between the West and Islam. The East simply concentrates on taking advantage of everyone else, regardless of religious or ideological conflicts – and seems to be winning.

2010
10/27
CATEGORY
Sociology
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The End of the World Has Already Happened

This assertion may amuse you, or at the very least seem like an exaggeration, but I assure you I am serious. This is not the first time sweeping fundamental changes have happened without anyone being aware of them. Indeed social unawareness during severe social upheaval is the case, rather than the exception.

Only much later, after thoughtful inquiry, do these changes become apparent. This is what constitutes history – which is not something that happens naturally, but something that only happens in advanced societies, such as the Greeks, who originally conceived of it. The Modern World revived this skill, and we can now use it to reflect on our own history.

So what do I mean the world has already ended, something lunatics and religious fanatics have been saying for thousands of years – although they usually place the blessed event sometime in in the near future? I will give it to you straight: people are destroying the world – which happens to include them.

This is really not too hard to understand. People have always worshiped supernatural powers of all kinds. And a new supernatural force has overwhelmed them more than any in the past: their advanced technologies. Things they (or actually a tiny number of them) have made, but seem to be forces from another planet; a powerful new secular religion.

Humans have always worshiped power also, which has always been its own kind of religion. The powerful few have ruled the powerless many. Power has always been enhanced by technology, for example, agriculture, metallurgy, and writing. This is what changed us from scattered hunter-gatherers to large-scale civilizations. A profound change if there ever was one. On balance, it is not clear if that was an improvement or not – but it doesn’t matter, it happened, and once it did, there was no turning back.

About five hundred years ago, in Northern Europe, another profound change occurred: the appearance of the Modern World. This produced Democracy, where power was transferred to The People. Naturally, the Few resented this, and were determined to subvert it. Unexpectedly, they received a powerful new ally: high technology. This transformed power into an irresistible global phenomena.

The combined effect of high technology on people and on their power structures produced a synergy that changed everything. People turned against their former world (the real world, the natural world) and started to destroy it, because they saw it as inadequate – and welcomed back the rule of power – now greatly enhanced.

I am not just referring to what we call environmental destruction here, that is only part of the picture. And I am not even referring to the destruction of our indigenous cultures, which has happened also. I am talking about everything.

This is what I mean by the end of the world.

This does not mean there is nothing left. Quite to the contrary, the world has never been so full of people – mostly wretched souls, it is true. And even among the affluent there is no lack of what appears to be people. But these are greatly altered people – so profoundly altered they are not really people anymore. These are the kind of empty people to whom destruction of the world seems natural and beneficial.

And who, at an unconscious level, welcome the end of the world.

2010
05/14
CATEGORY
The Self
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We Live in the Wreckage of the Modern World

In human society, there is the ever-present danger of despotism. Indeed, throughout history this has been the normal situation – the rich and powerful ruled to suit themselves.

The Modern World was able to overcome this tendency and establish governments that favored the newly industrious middle class – one that protected their property rights – but also, as a necessary part of that protection, their personal rights. As John Locke correctly noted, you cannot have one without the other. The government and the economy was supposed to serve the people (or at least the proper kind of people), and not the other way around.

This is no longer the case. The upper crust, which gets thinner all the time, gets the whole pie. What happened?

We forgot ourselves, that’s what happened. We paid so much attention to our bewitching new technologies, such as the movies, that they became our new reality – not the natural world (including ourselves) we had originally been so interested in. This is what make the modern world: an interest in the natural world – not the supernatural world.

And at the same time these new technologies made the business world  much more powerful. Financial independence became impossible: everyone had to work for it. It was not interested in the rights of the people because these people now worked for it, and had to follow its rules.

The end result was a transfer of power from the people to the power complex – which now became a universal despotism – one that seemed so natural it was enforced by the very people it subjugated. They still remembered what the traditional world (the pre-modern world) was like and this seemed like a return of normalcy – the return of a universal religion. The modern world was promptly forgotten.

And not only forgotten, but actively destroyed. Why we destroyed it, I am not sure. It is always difficult to determine people’s motives from their actions. But it seemed like we were possessed by a foreign spirit – one that we gotten from all our new things - one that hated people.

As a result, people were destroyed. We, as another kind of being (what I sometimes call techno-beings) live in the wreckage of our past.

2010
05/11
CATEGORY
Economy
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The World is Reasonable

The modern world had three main beliefs: in the importance of reason, in the worth of the individual, and that a better world was possible. All of these were interrelated, but we no longer believe in any of them.

Let’s start with the belief in reason. We now consider their belief in reason to be a highly overrated. It seems clear to us that reason is inadequate. The emotions, especially when expertly manipulated by the media (the product of high-technology), are much more powerful – and for us, power is everything.

It makes no sense to speak of the worth of the individual when have largely ceased to exist – overwhelmed by our advanced technologies. Torture is now considered acceptable, and any objections that the individual rights are being violated are pushed aside. The security of the whole is much more important. People have been merged into higher concerns - new religion whose main concern is business, whose main concern is power.

As for the last: a belief that a better world is possible. This is one of the theme songs of Obama, who can carry on like a black preacher – while, below the surface, continuing to act as the agent of power. And nobody notices.

Note the common element here: the return of the rule of power, which is typical of traditional (non-modern) cultures. We now live in a post-modern world.

I want to say more about the belief in reason. I am listening to an excellent course Birth of the Modern Mind: The Intellectual History of the 17th and 18th Centuries. Professor Alan Charles Kors is passionate about his subject, but I have to listen to some of his lessons twice to get the message – mainly about the importance of reason for these people: the intellectuals, such a Newton and Locke, that formed the modern world.

Educated Europeans believed that they had a new understanding—of thought and the human mind, of method, of nature, and of the uses of knowledge—with which they could come to know the world correctly for the first time in human history and with which they could rewrite the possibilities of human life.

We are no longer interested in intellectuals, disparage them – and consider ourselves superior to them. To put it another way: we are proud of our ignorance. We are truly post-modern in our minds and in our thinking.

2010
05/08
CATEGORY
Uncategorized
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Destroying the World in the Name of Progress

I want to discuss two things today. One of which you will be familiar with (more or less) and one which is probably new to you. The first is morality, remember what that is? The second is the post-modern world – which for many people, including some intellectuals who ought to know better, appears to be invisible: they cannot see it. It is the elephant in our collective living room that is shitting on the rug – but which we strenuously deny is there – even though we are holding our noses at the same time.

As an aside, I know something about the smell of elephant droppings. I was in Sri Lanka, in its religious center of Kandy, when there was an important religious festival going on. Two elephants were imported for the occasion, I suppose to make it seem more important. I was impressed by how much they ate, you had to be a rich man to support one – and of course, by the quantity of what came out the other end.

Fritz Perls, the father of Gestalt Therapy, categorized social small talk in three ways, the most trivial as chicken shit, and the most ponderous as elephant shit. I forget what the middle level was, but for him it was all the same thing: a way of avoiding what really needed to be changed. But I have digressed, let me return to a discussion of morality.

The most most important characteristic of post-modernism is its lack of morality – or to be more accurate, its reversion to a pre-modern morality: the rule of power. It doesn’t take a genius to see this, it is a plain as the nose on your face – but as in the case of the emperor who had no clothes, we are forbidden to notice it.  Modernity was like a suit of new clothes that we quickly abandoned – and then denied we ever had them. Ask anyone what the modern world consisted of – and all you will get is a blank look.

The formation of the modern world was begun by the Reformation – which basically was disgust at the corruption of the Church. There were also some side-currents, such as the desire of the German princes to be independent, but that was the main thing: the insistence on honesty – the fundamental backbone of morality. There is nothing subtle about this, everyone knows what it is. It seems to be built into human nature.

Vicious religious wars were fought over this. Religion is something people get worked up about. All kinds of things began to happen, such as the Renaissance, a flowering of the arts. Humanism, a renewed interest in classical culture. And the Scientific Revolution – a new way of looking at the world – an ability to see what the real world was really like. Something we are no longer interested in.

But I almost forgot the most important thing: the Enlightenment, which concerned itself with morality and improving the world. This is what has been abandoned by the post-modern world – which simply concerns itself with making money and amassing power – as demonstrated by the success of China. But let me back up a bit.

The Protestant Ethic, the emphasis on morality, had an unexpected side-effect: it made the Protestant countries rich. The reason for this is not hard to understand: honesty is necessary for business to thrive. And this, coupled with scientific developments, produced affluence.

It also produced the Industrial Revolution, which caused immense suffering for most, and immense wealth for a few. This has progressed to its logical conclusion: the end of the modern world – since it was diametrically opposed to the Enlightenment, and morality.

Let me restate: morality was necessary to construct a just society – and as a side-effect, an affluent society.

Something else was produced by the modern world: modern man – or perhaps we could put it the other way around. It could be said that they created each other. The result was a strong belief in the dignity and worth of the individual: human rights. And as a result, these individuals created a whole new world: the modern world – the most remarkable event in mankind’s history.

By contrast, America now practices torture routinely, and Americans are no longer interested in their civil liberties – as long as they can still go to their shopping centers. Post-modern man is a pale shadow of his modern predecessor. A degenerate race.

2010
02/21
CATEGORY
Uncategorized
2 comments
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