It’s a common misconception that myths, legends, and fairy tales have lost all their power in the modern world. Nothing could be more inaccurate. Here I’m not discussing covert mythologies like belief in progress, though of course a strong case can be made for that. I mean myths and legends in the modern sense of the term, the colorful stories of marvels that we hand to children and teenagers, or leave for those adults who haven’t had the taste for wonder beaten out of them—the kind of story that everyone, at least in public, cheerfully describes as mere make-believe.
What most people never notice is that the stories nobody bothers to take seriously quietly define the world for the people who learned them as children or who treasure them as adults. It’s precisely the fact that nobody treats them seriously as models for reality that they slip past the walls of mental censorship and do their work. Look at the way that science fiction, the cheap-thrills reading matter of geeky kids across America and Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, ended up defining the future most people in the Western world still expect, despite a cascade of disappointments that would have deep-sixed any merely rational opinion about the subject.
For that matter, I’ve written at some length about how clichés from the Star Wars franchise and the vast legendarium of JRR Tolkien have warped the thinking of the privileged classes of the Western world, helping (among other things) to cause the disaster unfolding as I write this on the eastern plains of Ukraine. Raise children on tales that insist that as long as you know you’re one of the good people, everything will work out in your favor, and the kind of stunning cluelessness that guides US and NATO foreign policy follows as the night follows the day.
The people who listened in awe to the premieres of the four operas of The Nibelung’s Ring didn’t grow up on such stories. Nor, for that matter, did Richard Wagner. What shaped their youthful imaginations was the Romantic movement in European art and literature, and its enthusiastic revival of medieval and Renaissance culture. Did you know that during the heyday of the preceding Classical movement, Shakespeare’s plays were considered vulgar trash? Those were among the things the Romantics brought back into fashion, just in time for the young Wagner to be bowled over by them. (A wry passage in his autobiography describes his boyhood attempt to write a Shakespearian tragedy; he killed off so many characters in the early acts that he had to bring back a whole string of them as ghosts in the fifth act to finish up the plot.)
With its embrace of passion, enthusiasm, and those reasons of the heart which the mind never does figure out, the Romantic movement was a necessary counterbalance to the Classical cult of bloodless reason, and where it succeeded best it accomplished much. Not everything the Romantics tried to accomplish worked well, however, and this is where we start trying to make sense of the political and economic subtext of Wagner’s operas.
Yes, there are such things as Romantic politics and Romantic economics. What’s more, those of my readers who have even the dimmest recollections of the 1960s counterculture already know much more about those than they think. To make the connection between Wagnerian opera on the one hand, and love beads, long hair, and rock music on the other, we’re going to have to circle back a very long way before either one and talk about Joachim of Fiore.
Joachim was an Italian monk who lived in the twelfth century, and he became one of the most influential mystics of the Middle Ages. He spent a lot of time in rapturous states communing with God and the angels, and became convinced that these experiences gave him the key to the way that the narrative of the Book of Revelation was unfolding in the history of his time.
In Joachim’s view the entire history of the world was divided into three ages: the Age of the Father, which ran from the creation of the world until the birth of Jesus; the Age of the Son, which ran from then until the year 1260; and the age of the Holy Spirit, which would proceed from that point until the end of the world. In the coming age of the Holy Spirit, he taught, a spirit of love and concord would solve all conflicts among human beings. The Catholic church would wither away because its hierarchy would no longer be necessary, and freedom guided by love would replace the rule of law.
That wasn’t his only prediction, by a long shot. When King Richard the Lionheart was on his way to the Third Crusade, he took the time to stop at Joachim’s monastery to ask the mystic to predict the outcome of his adventure. Joachim assured the king that the Crusade would promptly vanquish the armies of Saladin and restore Jerusalem to Christian rule. He was, of course, dead wrong. Most of his other predictions fared no better. That is to say, Joachim was a profound mystic but a lousy prophet.
Joachim’s comments about the future of the Catholic church, and his conviction that the Antichrist would be a pope, didn’t exactly endear him to the Vatican, either. His ideas were duly condemned as heretical by a couple of church councils. That simply guaranteed that they would become popular among Christian radicals, and were thus adopted by later movements that only medieval historians remember these days—the Amalricians, the Dulcinians, and above all the Brethren of the Free Spirit, who believed that the age of the Holy Spirit had arrived, that humanity had been freed of sin and returned to the conditions of the Garden of Eden, and who invented most of the hippie lifestyle seven hundred years in advance.
All these ideas sank deep roots into European culture. They proceeded to get mixed up with popular stories of the land of Cockaigne, another forgotten but pervasive theme in European culture and its descendants abroad. Americans who grew up around the time I did will remember Burl Ives singing “The Big Rock Candy Mountain.” It’s a song about the hobo’s paradise, where there are cigarette trees and lemonade springs, all the cops have wooden legs and all the bulldogs have rubber teeth, and where “they hung the jerk who invented work.” Yeah, they let children listen to songs like that when I was a boy.
The land of Cockaigne is that kind of place. In Cockaigne, roast pigs stroll through the landscape with knives in their backs and invite you to take a slice, wine and beer bubble out of springs in the ground, and loaves of bread grow on trees. In Cockaigne, nobody has to work because everything you want is there for the taking, and the one difficulty you face is eating enough that the poor roast pigs don’t have to wander around feeling unappreciated because nobody’s made a meal of them yet. In ages where poverty was pervasive and famine a regular occurrence, such tales are popular.
Fast forward to the seventeenth century. By then, the grip of Christianity on the collective imagination of western Europe was slipping as our civilization’s Age of Reason dawned, and the old dreams started to take on secular forms in response. The Diggers, Levellers, Fifth Monarchy Men, and other radicals of the English Civil War era were at the cutting edge of that process. Some of them took the secularization process seriously, and tried to come up with visions of the future that were plausible without divine intervention. That’s where we get such odd ideas as elections in which every adult citizen can vote, civil rights that extend even to the poor and laws that are enforced against the rich, and the end of the aristocratic monopoly on real estate so that every family can own its own home and farm.
Yet the old utopian dreams of the coming age when peace, brotherhood, and plenty would show up all by themselves didn’t go away. For a while, they remained the property of those who still took Christianity seriously. That changed with the coming of Romanticism, and with the great pioneer of Romantic politics and economics, the eccentric French theorist Charles Fourier.
I’ve written about Fourier more than once in these essays, and for good reason. Though most of our present-day radicals and reformers have never heard of him and many of those who have go out of their way not to talk about the weirder aspects of his thought, Fourier remains the guiding spirit of the Western world’s radical traditions. Dig down past his ramblings about lemonade oceans and cuddlesome anti-lions, and you’ll find the essential principle that underlies the entire history of the progressive end of Western political and economic thought: the claim that human nature is so completely dominated by the institutions under which we live that changing those institutions will inevitably bring about a change in human nature.
We may as well use Marxism as an example here, as it’ll doubtless be brought up soon enough. One of the essential presuppositions of Marxist thought is that the selfish scramble for wealth that dominates life in capitalist and precapitalist societies, all the way back to the immediate aftermath of primitive communism, results from social institutions that enshrine the principle of private property. Before that principle became central to social life, Marxist theoreticians have argued at great length, the greed and selfishness that govern modern life did not exist. This is one of the core theoretical justifications for the claim that once socialism replaces capitalism, people will become naturally cooperative and generous, contributing their labor for the good of all so that everyone can receive what they need.
That, in turn, is the fundamental flaw of Marxism in practice, because that predicted change in human nature doesn’t happen. Marxists in power have tried every imaginable inducement to make it happen, up to and including trying to wipe out everyone who was more than ten years old at the time of the revolution so that the evil influences of capitalist society would be expunged once and for all—that was Pol Pot’s strategy in Cambodia.
It didn’t work. It never does. I’ve come to believe that this is the reason so many Marxist regimes become such brutal tyrannies. It’s not that they or their leaders are naturally evil, it’s that the people they rule just will not behave the way Marxist theory expects them to behave, no matter what. Eventually the cognitive dissonance becomes so extreme that the Party leaders lose their cool completely and start screaming in sheer frustration, and pretty soon people are being herded by the thousands to labor camps and mass graves.
The same problem afflicts the other radical political and economic schemes that have followed Fourier’s tracks down to the shores of the lemonade oceans of his dreams. There are of course exceptions. For example, worker-owned cooperatives work extremely well—in fact, they arguably work better than their capitalist rivals, since nobody’s starving the business of capital by skimming vast amounts of wealth off the top. Some other spinoffs from the progressive movement also have the capacity to work in practice, as I’ve discussed in an earlier post.
The thing to keep in mind here is that none of the systems that work expect human nature to change. All of them assume that under the new system, people will be just as greedy, selfish, and lazy as ever. The employees in a worker-owned cooperative, for example, know that they’ll be getting paid a share of the cooperative’s profits every year, so they have the most crassly selfish reason imaginable to work hard and keep the assembly line moving smoothly. The other systems that work arrange for incentives of the same sort, and so they don’t have to resort to the brutal methods Marxist regimes end up having to use.
All of this was already baked into the cake once Fourier’s theories became the template for progressive politics across the Western world. To make sense of their impact on Wagner’s operas, however, it’s essential to remember that most of this wasn’t clear yet in his time. Fourierism itself had already been tried, and had failed miserably: of the hundreds of Fourierist phalansteries (his term for a commune) established in various corners of Europe and the Americas, none lasted for more than a few years, because Fourier’s claim that labor guided by passional attraction would be four times as productive as ordinary labor simply didn’t work. The radicals of Wagner’s time took this as evidence that there was something wrong with Fourier’s theories, but didn’t reject the broader thesis that a change in institutions could transform the world into the utopia of their dreams.
That was when Romantic politics collided with Romantic worship of the Middle Ages, with disastrous results.
As we saw two weeks ago, the Classical movement in Western society idolized Greek and Roman antiquity, reimagining them as a Utopia of perfect reason and self-control that neither Plato nor Cicero nor any other ancient Greek or Roman could have recognized at all. The Romantic movement responded by doing exactly the same thing to the Middle Ages, creating an imaginary world of sturdy peasants singing as they worked, brave knights gazing adoringly at their lady loves, and so on through a well-stocked warehouse of medieval clichés. That can be productive when you apply it to art and literature. It’s not so useful when you apply it to politics and economics—and especially not if you do it the way many European radicals did back when Wagner was young, enthusiastic, and caught up in the politics of his day.
In the little German-speaking countries of central Europe, you see, there was no shortage of aristocrats. Every little statelet had its own royal or ducal court, with French-speaking courtiers dressed in fancy and expensive outfits, babbling about the latest books from Paris and the latest music from Vienna, and everyone else recognized that these individuals were a very overpriced and useless luxury that could be scrapped without a qualm. The ideal of the radicals in those days was those sturdy peasants singing as they worked, with their traditions of local self-government.
Thus the idea spread that if only the superstructure of the state could be gotten rid of, the peasant world of their imagination would promptly reestablish itself and everyone would live happily ever after. That was the central theory of anarchism, as promoted by Wagner’s good friend Mikhail Bakunin and a great many others. Their hope was that if the state could be torn down, society would organically self-organize along the lines of the medieval peasant communities of the Romantic dream. It apparently never occurred to them that the state they despised had self-organized just as organically out of the very communities of the early medieval period they lionized, and that tearing it down would simply set the cycle moving again.
You can see this kind of Romantic socialism in its native habitat in William Morris’s fine utopian novel News from Nowhere, which you can download for free here. Morris was more or less contemporary with Wagner and had creative gifts that were just as spectacular in their own way, and he drew very heavily from the same revival of Germanic myth and legend that inspired Wagner. (Among other things, he worked with an Icelandic scholar to produce the first English translation of the Volsunga Saga.) Morris’s idea of a socialist utopia is very green and bucolic, and the Middle Ages as he imagined them peeps out from behind every bush and shrub.
That’s also the source of the back-to-the-land dream that played such an important role in the twilight of the 1960s counterculture. The United States never had a medieval peasantry of its own, so Appalachian backwoods folk were drafted into the same role; that’s why so many hippies had a copy of The Foxfire Book on the bookshelf and a mountain dulcimer hanging from a hook on the wall. It’s also why that arch-Romantic and passionate medievalist JRR Tolkien played such a massive role in the imagination of the counterculture. More broadly, the US counterculture of the 1960s was for all practical purposes a hopelessly unoriginal knockoff of the European counterculture of the 1840s. The music was different, and so were the drugs—alcohol and opium played roughly the same roles in the latter as cannabis and LSD in the former—but the spirit was the same, and so was the aftermath.
In 1848 and 1849, the European radicals succeeded in pulling off the spontaneous, joyous revolutions that the radicals of 1968 never quite managed. Being Romantics heavily influenced by anarchism, however, the European revolutionaries had made no plans to hold onto power once they seized it. Having done all they thought was necessary, they waited for utopia to arrive by way of spontaneous self-organization.
What arrived instead were the forces of reaction. Across the German lands, the petty kings and grand dukes fell back briefly to strongpoints outside the urban centers, gathered their forces, and swept back into power, brushing aside the barricades and the revolutionaries without too much trouble. It’s a more dramatic and violent version of what happened after 1968, when the hippie counterculture collapsed in on itself, and most of its participants drifted back to the “square” jobs and lifestyles they claimed they were rejecting forever.
The stakes were higher in 1849, and so were the penalties for failure. When the revolutionary movement in the little kingdom of Saxony collapsed, Richard Wagner—who had been one of the leaders of the revolt—fled the country with a price on his head. Like many other revolutionaries of the time, he found refuge in Switzerland, and spent years there living in serious poverty, writing essays and composing music for cutting-edge operas nobody wanted to perform. He also spent a lot of time reading philosophy. Before we can make sense of where that led, we’ll have to talk about philosophy, and another utterly forgotten movement that remains alive but unacknowledged in today’s Western cultures.
At this link is the full list of all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts. Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below and/or in the comments at the current prayer list post.
* * *
This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests.
May Falling Tree Woman’s son’s girlfriend’s mother Bridget in Devon UK, who has recently started to sit up and converse after more than six weeks of bedridden tracheotomy following a life-threatening fall from a horse, be blessed and healed and returned to full health.
May Corey Benton, whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, be healed of throat cancer.
May Heather’s brother in law, Patrick, who is dying of cancer and has dementia, go gentle into that good light. And may his wife Maggie, who is ill herself, find the strength and peace she needs for her situation. (Update on Patrick’s condition here)
May Neptune’s Dolphins’ husband David, who lost one toe to a staph infection last year and now faces further toe amputations due to diabetic ulcers in his left foot, be blessed and healed, and may the infection leave his body for good.
May Rebecca, who has just been laid off from her job and is the sole provider for her family, quickly discover a viable means to continue to support her family; may she and her family be blessed and sustained in their journey forward.
May Kyle’s friend Amanda, who though in her early thirties is undergoing various difficult treatments for brain cancer, make a full recovery; and may her body and spirit heal with grace.
Tyler A’s wife Monika’s pregnancy is high risk, and has now successfully entered the third trimester; may Monika and baby Isabelle both be blessed with good health and a smooth delivery.
Lp9’s hometown, East Palestine, Ohio, for the safety and welfare of their people, animals and all living beings in and around East Palestine, and to improve the natural environment there to the benefit of all.
* * *
Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
Some beliefs are immortal…The belief that human nature can be changed and “improved” will last as long as there are humans on the planet…
What is it about wacky French philosophers and their outsized effect on western thought? Rousseau and Condorcet convinced everyone that all people are born wonderful; Fourier created the unrealistic vision that drives a quasi-religious belief in Socialism as a viable structure since the 19th Century; the comic group of Post-modernists of the sixties with their utterly garbled and incomprehensible (even in French) nonsense that has become the basis of Academic “thought” since the latter third of the 20th Century? What is the yearning so many have, the wish that this sugar-candy-mountain vision of a perfectible society can be possible if we just click our heels together and wish really hard?
I greatly enjoy these weekly reading. Thank you so much!
I’m reading Beasts by John Crowley this week… so leos are in my head.
Anti-Lions drinking lemonade is another thing entirely.
Joachim of Fiore? You haven’t been reading Eric Vogelin, now have you, JMG?
This brings to mind one of the funniest programs I ever saw on PBS. Some group decided to do a “back to nature” thing, farming by hand, without power tools. I vaguely remember it was supposed to be a 2 year effort. It barely made it pass 2 days. A bunch of city folk from Boston dropped off in the boonie. The whining was truly epic.
OT but… speaking of Golden Ages and Cheap Thrills, since it was National Radio Day yesterday, I posted my Cheap Thrills article from last year, “Radios Next Golden Age” (originally in New Maps) up on my website if anyone cares to take a look:
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/radios-next-golden-age
Brother JMG,
I’ve had Wagner and the Ring Cycle on my radar for some time but it was this series of posts that pushed me to request DVDs of the New York Met Opera’s performance of the entire Ring Cycle. Watched Das Rheingold last night, and was surprised at how quickly the time passed. I was expecting a slog, but as is often the case, the reality differed significantly from the expectation. I won’t be able to play the whole cycle out over a series of 4 days, but I am still glad I have finally dived in. Plus another plug for public libraries. Woohoo.
Your essay this week reminds me of a visit to New Harmony, Indiana, I made a few years back. At the Historic New Harmony Atheneum, the museum guide talked about the early history of the community, its origins as a religious colony and its subsequent (and brief) transformation into a utopian community under Welsh industrialist and socialist Robert Owen. After showing the tour group the Owenites’ proposed model city (an image is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Harmony,_Indiana#/media/File:New_Harmony,_Indiana,_por_F._Bates.jpg), the guide asked us if we had any idea why the city failed to materialize. I responded that none of the intellectuals involved knew the first thing about the tradecraft and workmanship needed to build that marvelous city, and that there were only intellectuals involved in the social experiment. The guide laughed at my response and said I was spot on. I explained that haven’t learned nothing in my decades of providing support to the tenured and those seeking tenure.
1848 was quite the year in France too. Revolt in February, king abdicates. Revolt in June, 1500 dead, 15,000 shipped to Algeria. In December President Bonaparte is sworn in.
Three years later he organizes a coup against himself and becomes Emperor. I’m sure it makes perfect sense to the French.
There was definitely something in the air about mid century.
The 1849 revolutionary martyr looks like 1989’s Tank Man.
I don’t know how it is on your side of the ponds, but here in the German-speaking world a lot of the antivax movement, among which I count many friends, is cuddling heavily with ideas of paradise and Schlaraffenland (the German version of the land of Cockaigne if I read that correctly). If only we could get rid of the evilly evil warmongering elites, we would live in peace with our Russian brothers whose leader has been treated so wrongly and pushed into war, when all he wants is to live peacefully in the borders Russia had in 1991. And then our collective consciousness would leap up to 5-dimensional thinking and we would all have free energy from thin air and so on.
This is very interesting to read for me, because I was once one of those hippies who fled to the countryside and tried to live a simple life, raising food and spinning wool, etc. But now that I’m older and wiser, I still harbor a great deal of respect for the effort that we made, primarily to try to create a new way of living that challenged the materialistic, competitive, warmongering society that we had been born into. I know the whole movement was ridiculously naive, but I’m glad I was part of it, even though I have never been so hungry for so long and I hope I never will again. I had canned (for the first time) applesauce and yellow squash, and someone else had wheat berries that we could ground up for flour. Living on pancakes gets old real fast.
Anyway, I’m glad I did it. I’m glad I learned from it– even though it failed, I learned so much. And I still hold firmly to the principle of living as simply as possible and enjoying whatever’s left of life that’s right here around me.
Thank you so much for your posts.
“What most people never notice is that the stories nobody bothers to take seriously quietly define the world for the people who learned them as children or who treasure them as adults. It’s precisely the fact that nobody treats them seriously as models for reality that they slip past the walls of mental censorship and do their work.”
This is why my comic Etherwood (free here: https://tapas.io/series/Etherwood/info), which is based heavily on the ideas of this forum, isn’t presented particularly seriously. People are more receptive to ideas when they’re not a direct attack or argument. It took me a long time to realize the level of influence the Harry Potter novels had on my thinking patterns and consciously readjust to counter it – despite their haphazard and clearly nonsensical worldbuilding.
I hadn’t realized that Anarchism was a direct result of the Romantics. Now that you’ve said it, though, it makes perfect sense. I’m plenty romantic myself, but I’ve never been able to comprehend people (both right-libertarian anarchists and anarcho-communists) who think that anything good would result from the lack of a state. Even lacking any historical knowledge, one would think an ordinary (miserable) experience of middle school ought to reveal the unvarnished baseness of regular people.
Is there a way other than repeated, costly failure that can moderate adults old enough to know better, or is fleeing the country with a price on your head the most effective teacher?
Thoroughly enjoyable and timely essay, JMG. I’m not sure if any promises of lemonade oceans or cuddly anti-lions have yet been made at the Democrat convention in Chicago – but it’s not over yet, so I guess it is still possible! 😊 Of course, they have already made some pretty draft promises such as $25k gift for first-time home buyers which, as El Gato Malo explains, could have absolutely disastrous unintended consequences (here: https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/how-to-fix-home-affordability-in). Meanwhile, in Canuckistan the loonie lefties in power are frantically trying to push through thought-crime legislation (Bill C-63) and other laws that amount to “bend your knee to our progressive agenda or we’ll destroy you” and some of us wonder how long it will be before your sentence, “Eventually the cognitive dissonance becomes so extreme that the Party leaders lose their cool completely and start screaming in sheer frustration, and pretty soon people are being herded by the thousands to labor camps and mass graves” manifests. Guess we just have to look across the pond at the UK as the signs of what’s to come. Cheery thoughts, eh?
Even though I am more a Romantic than Classicist at heart (barring my love of Stoicism), I am glad that the USA was founded during the 18th century Classical period in which a rather dark view of human nature encouraged the creation of a system of government with checks and balances up the yin-yang. It seemed to work pretty well for a while; certainly, better than most modern ‘democracies’.
Looking forward to the next installment in which we found out what good old Wagner rotted his brain with while hiding out in Switzerland.
Encouraging competitiveness through prestige is a common rout. “Prestige” being borrowed from biology to describe species that compete by providing, like birds building nests for example, as opposed to competition through “dominance” like having a bigger body and perceived ability to fight. With elite society competing through prestige you still get insufferable rich people but they at least pretend (and sometimes even do) give away money. I dont think any system will avoid constant social maintenance however, which is where these more philosophical ideas go wrong in practice, they dont account for the cost of social maintenance and once their ideas become stale, instead of adapting, they collapse. I think if we want to look at good policy we may want to explore Ancient Egypt simply because they existed for so long! i expect they adapted well by absorbing external cultures and groups yet had a very measured approach to immigration
Here’s an interesting claim I recently read on the Internet: When Hitler’s Third Reich came to power in Germany, a lot of the membership of the Communist Party of Germany fled to the Soviet Union. The result of this was that more German communists ended up dying by Stalin’s hand than by Hitler’s. It remains quite a testament to the failure of revolutionary Marxist ideology that even being one of the people with the supposedly correct views wouldn’t necessarily save one from the gulag.
For those interested, the New York Met Opera announced two weeks ago that they will be producing the ring cycle again for the 2027-28 season, their first production of Wagner in over twenty years.
Quin, thank you for this as always,
Pyrrhus, the fascinating thing is that I know of no trace of that attitude anywhere in the world before around 600 BC. It may be a much more specific tradition of thought than it seems at first glance — and in that case, there’s at least some hope that like other really bad habits of thought, such as the Divine Right of Kings, it may eventually die out.
Renaissance, little as though people in the English-speaking world like to think of this, France really was the center of European culture for many centuries, and so its intellectuals too often embody the refined, triple-distilled essence of Europe’s crazed hubris and insanely inflated sense of entitlement. Of course human nature, like everything else, must submit to the omnipotent ideologies of European humanity! After all, we’re destined to trample the stars beneath our seven-parsec boots! (That’s nice, Mr. Derrida. Now calm down, stop trying to get out of your straitjacket, and swallow your meds…)
Kyle, you’re most welcome.
Justin, a fine book. In my headcanon it takes place thirty years or so after Little, Big and about a century before Engine Summer. Oh, and if the Union for Social Engineering sounds like a certain organization in my tentacle novels, there’s good reason for that.
Mary B, I read him about thirty years ago. Generally speaking he’s not my cup of tea but he made some good points. My take on Joachim draws more from Norman Cohn’s writings.
Mary, that must have been hilarious. I forget which tech mogul has been going around insisting that farming is simple, all you have to do is stick seeds in the ground. If I were crueler than I am I’d wish that he had to feed himself from the land. His bleached bones would be found promptly enough.
Justin, thanks for this. As long as you don’t claim that it’s going to happen by itself, due to the inevitable historical dynamic of radio-dial-lectical materialism, I have no complaints.
Brother Monster, that’s always the way of it, isn’t it? If intellectuals want to change the world, rather than simply huffing their own brain farts, they need to either learn some practical skills or sit down, shut up, and listen for a while to people who have such skills.
Siliconguy, the 1848-9 revolts spread all over Europe. It was quite a time.
Geoff, it’s the same spirit, and had about as much effect in the longer term.
Njura, that’s really, really sad to hear. Not surprising — in Germany, even more than elsewhere in Europe, that sort of giddy delusion seems to be hardwired into the cultural substrate — but sad.
Katherine, oh, I get that. I spent a couple of years at one of the lingering remnants of that era in Bellingham, Washington, living in a cabin with no heat, electricity, or water, tending goats and chickens, and working in an organic garden, while going to college classes in my off hours. It was worth doing, even though it wasn’t even remotely self-supporting; I learned an enormous amount about myself, got comfortable with being very poor, and picked up survival skills that made things a lot easier during my time as a struggling author. But I also know that it’s not a realistic option in any broader sense.
Sirustalcelion, yes, I’d thought that that was one of the things Etherwood was meant to do — it’s a subtle and constructive approach. I try to do much the same thing with my fiction, and also more generally by placing myself out here on the fringes and making sure nobody respectable takes me seriously. As for failure, even that doesn’t teach most people. I’m not sure what will do it.
Ron, what we’re seeing is the Western managerial class in terminal crisis. It’s precisely because they’ve lost their cool completely, and can’t understand why everyone doesn’t just do what corporate neoliberal ideology says they ought to do, that they’re shrieking, flailing, and abandoning everything they once claimed to believe in. I’m really starting to think that having convinced themselves that the only alternative to their ideology is bona fide Evil Fascism, now that their ideology has failed them, they’re subconsciously embracing an identity as Evil Fascists — and that also means they will engineer their own defeat, because the Bad Guys must always lose.
Alex, good. Imperial China’s another good example — 3000 years is a pretty solid run for a civilization. That said, nobody designs a civilization — like everything else that endures, they have to grow naturally.
Mister N, yep. It’s an ugly record.
Joshua, I’m not sure whether to cheer or wince. They might do something worth watching — or they might turn out the kind of embarrassment I satirized in The Nyogtha Variations, with all the characters dressed up as marshmallow Peep candies. (Wotan was a bright yellow marshmallow rabbit with one ear bitten off.)
JRR Tolkien’s works sank their claws into me since the day I was born. Literally, my middle name is in Sindarin. The one that resonates with me as an adult is actually the Silmarillion, which I find is very well suited to living in an age of decline. There’s a lot of partial, temporary victories, and flat-out defeats for the protagonists in that one, plus some unlooked for successes that usually have substantial downsides. Set into that backdrop, the Lord of the Rings doesn’t have the effect of making me feel the good guys are bound to win. Not least because I am very fond of elves, and the ending of Lord of the Rings was far from an unalloyed victory for them. I actually think part of the reason I love Middle-Earth so much is because even when they win there is a price to be paid for victory, and even in defeat there’s often something that was salvaged and will be important later. Gondolin falls, Earendil survives and shames the valar into sending the army of the west. Morgoth is defeated and the surviving elves and edain go on to found new realms, but Beleriand sinks into the sea and Sauron escapes to return and cause trouble later.
I can’t fix the world, and I don’t think many of the things in this world that are going wrong will be halted any time soon. But I can make a difference at the margins, and I don’t know what the effects of my efforts will be. I don’t know the final outcome. God often does do amazing things with unpromising materials. I believe it is worth the effort to try.
I just finished Little, Big. Engine Summer is up next actually. I hadn’t realized I was going to read them in your headcannon order. I can see that with Beasts so far. USE -the Union for Social Engineering is a bit too plausible for my tastes, but I can see how that showed up in the Hali books.
As for radio, not at all. If anything it would have to do more with the triolectics of Situationist thinker Asger Jorn instead… but the piece is just more of an idea of what radio can become again in a time of decline when we are embracing older technologies and bringing new life back into them. No actual Utopia required. The DJs will still get sick of going to the station and fight with the others there, the actresses and actors in the radio plays might hate their scripts, and the amateur radio geeks who set up BBS systems might still have trouble getting dates and spend more time hanging out with vacuum tubes.
Better living through retrovation.
Synchronicity strikes: last night I was pondering on such modes of expression as “It’s 2024, why do people still X” or “…why haven’t we gotten rid of Y yet”, where Y is some mode of thinking currently considered unfashionable. And the answer is, of course, that they’ve assumed, as a matter of course, that human nature can simply be legislated or otherwise “systemmed” into changing. People still do X and we haven’t gotten rid of Y “even” in 2024 because the humans of 2024 are no substantively different in their nature than the humans of 1224 or of 2024 BC; the only things that have really changed are our justifications and our toys.
It’s funny because the stated goal of socialism is to bring industry under the control of the working class. Worker-owned cooperatives are a great and practical way to do that. You don’t even need bloody revolution to do it.
And yet the hardliner Marxists disdain worker-owned cooperatives and instead want to have all industry owned by the state and controlled by an elite caste of bureaucrats, which does not give control of industry to the workers in any meaningful way. 🤔 It’s almost like they’re hypocritical elitists!
Current popular culture is a good guide to what society will become. When I was young, popular cultural heroes climbed mountains, explored the depths of the oceans, fought bravely in World War 2 and made earth-shattering scientific discoveries. These days, popular cultural heroes use doubtful methods to turn money into more money. Draw your own conclusions.
All that said, few would deny that ordinary people respond to behavioural incentives. I don’t mean by that just high-level laws and organisation, but also the subtle rewards and punishments that society uses to mould behaviour. A society that values engineering and technology, and where accordingly people are encouraged to study these subjects at the public expense, will be different from a society which values the ability to make money quickly. This applies at all levels. In almost fifty years of working in and with large organisations of all types in many countries, I’ve seen a general decline in honesty and effectiveness as the rewards offered have changed. This is a slow and subtle process, but it is unmistakable. As organisations contract, hierarchies are flattened and pay differentials grow, ambitious and unscrupulous people rise to the top, and people who just want to do a good job leave in disgust or just give up. Even at working level, incentives can warp behaviour: if you work in a widget shop and are paid by the number of widgets you sell, you will, unconsciously, start to pressure people to buy more of them, whether they need them or not.,
Governments play an absolutely determinant role in providing incentives. Series of random examples. Countries where health professionals are paid a salary and health-care is free have different, and generally better outcomes than countries where they are paid by the consultation or test and patients have to pay the bills, because the incentives are different. Countries which encourage property ownership through tax concessions have different demographics from countries where governments build cheap public housing for rent. Countries where governments primarily build roads have different demographics from countries where they build public transport. And so on.
And this affects the way that people behave morally. In parts of Africa I am familiar with, state employees are paid rarely, if at all. So a policeman or a customs official expects to be paid extra for doing their job so their families can eat Getting your driving licence renewed requires a payment. Businesses routinely pay bribes to get anything done. Politicians need to find financial backers, in return for giving favours. The way to wealth is not to start a business, but to attach yourself to a rent-seeking scheme based on exploitation of natural resources or foreign investment. And all of this is a perfectly rational response to incentives. And the reverse is true, obviously. To take an example I’m familiar with, the transformation of the British state in terms of honesty and efficiency between, say, 1850 and 1920 is absolutely extraordinary. In Britain, as in some other countries, the incentives changed. (Now, unfortunately, distorted incentives are moving most western states back in the direction of Africa.)
I’ve never actually met anyone, of any political persuasion, who thinks that you can change human nature by fiat. But history shows pretty clearly that you can change human behaviour by changing incentives.
@Pyrrhus #2
„The belief that human nature can be changed and “improved” will last as long as there are humans on the planet…“
And for some unfathomable reason, it‘s always the nature of the others which is supposed to change and improve, and never one‘s own… 😉
Milkyway
Peter Zeihan quips that the rest of the world wants to understand America, you need to understand that the great availability of fertile land relatively close to navigable waterways means that belief that hard work always pays off could survive for generations, and when that belief is violated ( say Sputnik), America reinvents it self.
@#3 Renaissance Man.
Robert Heinlein, science fiction author, said something to the effect that there are two kinds of people: those who believe people should be controlled, and those who just want to be left alone.
Possibly to the point: Politico’s headline reads “This is not the 1968 convention. Could it be 1860?”
I’m reminded of an anecdote in Eleanor Agnew’s book, Back From the Land, where a hippie homesteading lady described going for water in the winter with two buckets on a milkmaid style yoke, and chopping a hole in the ice with an axe. The washbasin in her cabin wasn’t plumbed, and the water ran out between the floorboards underneath the drain hole, or froze, more or less. It dawned on me that the reason that they didn’t have a gravity fed rainwater cistern for supply and a greywater system for disposal was that the more the situation sucked, the better they liked it. Looking back at the era as a semi-modern alternative energy geek, I hadn’t realized the ways in which it was an ideological project. Of course people are eventually bail out of that kind of situation for $2 taco night if it’s at all possible.
The 1848 revolts as a meme ended up today as the 2012 Musical “Les Mis” and I can still remember people singling along to “Do you hear the people sing?” And that’s as far from the hippie/Romantic era as you can get.
@Alex Thurber
Ancient Egypt has a pretty simple explanation. It’s all geography.
It has a river that provided transportation, and that brought fertile soil annually. It was surrounded by deserts, so it couldn’t easily be attacked in force by land. The good soil meant that more than a subsistence level could easily be grown, allowing cities and specialists like scribes. The Egyptians didn’t exactly reach cultural heights; all that advantage was used mainly to build fancy tombs for their kings.
When other people learned to build bigger boats, Egypt’s isolation disappeared and it became a grain-growing province of of a bigger world.
JMG (and Company):
Any good recommendations on how best to experience Wagner’s Ring cycle? I don’t exactly have the funds to fly to Vienna anytime soon so most likely going to rely on streaming/youtube etc. But if you have any recommendations on versions to watch and/or local US productions worth keeping an eye on in the next year or so, I’ll take em.
Thanks!
Chris
I have a copy of ‘news from nowhere’ that I read from time to time casually. The piece does have the capacity to relax the reader, immersing them into a world that to me feels closer to a fantasy world than anything else. You can escape into a fantasy story and similarly you can escape into the world that news from nowhere portrays. All the characters are amicable and friendly, happy and living their best life. They seem to comply quite willingly with the way Marxist theory expects them to behave. The internal drive for power that compels humans to compete is just ‘safetied’ out of the world Morris built. Without honestly exploring counter revolutions, system decay, the book is closee to the realm of fantasy than political fiction.
I have heard marxists argue that the Soviet Union did not have a fair chance at success due to the West putting a knife to their throat during the cold war. I don’t know…
I had the chance to travel there after communism fell. Yekaterinburg had a distinct dystopian look and feel in the early 90s. Everything was made from concrete, soot from factories and coal burning covered everything, some of the people looked transparent due to lack of vitamins, public Street crime was just an everyday experience… very much the opposite of the world ‘news from nowhere’ predicted. I guess downtown Hamilton Ontario where I live is sort of in a similar state though to be honest.
Boss,
I’m very sorry, because I wish it were not so.
You don’t get to impose your non-native intellectually derived “rules” on someone else’s language.
Die Nibelungen is a plural. You want to jack a genitive onto that, fine. But it stays plural. Like sugar.
Yes I’m a nerd with a Phd and decades of teaching military kids. USAFA and West Point.
@ChirstopherRichard: I’ve heard that sometimes the Metropolitan Opera streams live operas to movie theaters -hopefully they will be able to do that in a few years when they put on the Ring for their 2027-28 season. That might give people some more options.
https://www.cinemark.com/met
https://www.amctheatres.com/programs/the-met
I haven’t done that before, but our friend Joe, who played viola with the CSO enjoyed several operas from the Met this way and didn’t have to leave Cincinnati.
John–
I’m realizing that in my own idealist vision, the civic-minded Jeffersonian yeoman farmer stands in the place of those sturdy, singing peasants.
Springtime of Nations! Not much happend in russian partition then(repression after last one were still going strong), the prussian one had it’s uprising, unsuprisingly failed one . There were polish fighters in various revolution e.g. Józef Bem in Hungary. In congress kingdom we had romantic uprising in 1830 and in 1863, each of them bigger failure than the last. Still dumb uprising tradition and “martyrology” yet lives on. Funnier still, there’s more time spend on the failed ones in schools than the ones we have won(we had those). Of course november and february uprisings were bigger but the the one’s from 1919-1921 were won.
BTW, emigrees after 1830 inspired Wagner to write polonia overture in 1836, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se2xd_6ctm4
Pygmycory, I get that. It’s one of the saddest things about all the ninth-rate Tolkien knockoffs is that they abandon the sense of the Long Defeat that makes Tolkien’s own work so profound.
Justin, oh, I figured. I just couldn’t resist the pun.
Brendhelm, bingo.
Enjoyer, Marxism is founded on total contempt for the working class. They’re simply the patsies in whose name the Marxist cadres seize and hold power.
Aurelien, I’d suggest a different view. Popular culture and social incentives aren’t independent variables; they responds to changes in the real economic and ecological situation. Back when the British Empire and the US both had abundant resources and plenty of room, it made perfect sense for people to aspire to constructive achievements. Now that Britain has been in headlong decline for a century and the US for around half that time, that’s changed, because constructive achievements are rare in a declining society while profiting off others is much easier and more profitable. Governments can’t change that — they simply respond to it.
Bradley, I wonder if Zeihan has ever read Frederick Jackson Turner. That “great availability” started going away at the end of the 19th century with the closing of the frontier, and the frantic attempts to “reinvent” America are simply ever more desperate efforts to pretend that it ain’t so.
Patricia M, if it is, the Democrats are the Whig Party, and will break apart into fragments and cease to exist shortly.
WRW, gravity fed cisterns and graywater systems require knowledge and resources. Are you sure they had either one?
Patricia M, zing! Square on target.
Chris, that I can’t tell you; I mostly listen to it on CDs. Anyone else?
Ian, News from Nowhere was the beta version. The Soviet Union was the actual release.
Petra, you may be a nerd with a Ph.D. but you could use a review of German grammar. The opera cycle we’re discussing is titled, in German, Der Ring des Nibelungen. (You can check the German language Wikipedia entry here if you doubt that.) The word des, as I trust you recall, is the German masculine singular genitive article, and it shows you that Nibelungen is a genitive, not a plural. I understand that a lot of people mix that up, but I’m not sure why; the Ring was always and only Alberich’s, never that of the Nibelungs as a people.
David, it’s a common view!
Katylina, I’m not sure why so many people fixate on the failed revolutions — we have that in the US in the form of romantic attachment to the Confederacy of our Civil War era.
I would argue that Wagner’s greatest opera is Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, set in early modern Nuremberg and composed concomitantly with the Ring. He finished most of Siegfried and then stopped work on the ring to finish first Tristan and then Die Meistersinger. I wonder if he was tired or embarrassed about that youthful yearning for the peasantry singing, as seen in perhaps Tannhäuser and turned to works that reflected his more adult understanding of life.
That he eventually returned to the 25-year project we can all be grateful for. But Die Meistersinger is a love song to the glories of town living, and commerce and guilds. It’s a different Wagner; it’s his only comedy. I hope you’ve had time to make experience of it yours, JMG. “I laugh and cry as I write it” he wrote.
I find the reference to Appalachia and the place it held (and still somewhat holds) in the 1960s counterculture very thought provoking. I’m the child of old hippies (who indeed had a hand crafted dulcimer in my childhood home) and with that passage immediately recognized how my parents had that romantic outlook to Appalachia-and how that mindset was transferred to me in youth. I grew up by The Outer Banks in NC (where my family has been forever-thus my online name for this blog) but Appalachia has held a mythical bucolic quality for my imagination since childhood. I think I see/understand where that is coming from now thanks to that segment of the essay. As always, thank you.
Hi JMG,
The mogul who you mentioned is Mike Bloomberg. I admitted I do have dark thoughts of him and his quick-and-easy corn farm in the long descent.. To be fair, the man is far more competent than a lot of spineless corporate suits.
I try my hand for years in growing vegetable and am getting better but the work is both labor and knowledge intensive. The difficulties are far beyond the fancy business models and presentations’. One can’t bluff nature with his MBA’s credential and business jargons.
Kind regards,
JMG,
People fixate on failed revolutions because it lets them imagine an alternate reality where the revolution succeeded and the oceans are brimming with lemonade. Successful revolutions, on the other hand, are a grim reminder that human beings can never achieve the paradise promised by revolutionaries.
Thanks for this. It enriches some lived experience with mental scaffolding upon which to see the patterns.
I spent some time at a job (farm and campground) where the first step was to shadow and learn how everything was done, and change nothing about the processes until they could be followed. The point was to understand the system as a whole, a training strategy they developed after countless mistakes made by many people coming in with book knowledge and “ideas” but no experience. It seems like a good measure of whether to take an intellectual seriously is to see how much skin they had in the games they played. Did they live their ideologies, and if so, were they in an ivory tower or among the riff raff of common life where their ideas would be tested. It feels like ideas such as workers co-ops come from people with both education and experience and that’s why they work.
Sadly, we live in a time where those two things are camps in the false binary of city/educated/liberal vs rural/experienced/conservative. So one side is ignorant of lived experience and promotes pie-in-the-sky policies while the other denounces education and often promotes dismantling all policies. Sadly, eschewing education and all governance often throws out baby and bathwater. I’m watching this play out daily in my workplace and community, and lamenting the lack of third way thinking that uses history and the scientific method to inform daily lived experience and come up with actual solutions.
Perhaps unsurprisingly this all resembles what you’ve long identified in our culture – onward and upward progress forever vs apocalypse now. Insert face in palm.
Thanks again.
Oddly enough I discovered yesterday that after Richard Wagner left his position as Court Conductor in Dresden, his replacement was Karl August Krebs, the adoptive son of Johann Baptist Krebs, whose work I have been translating.
JMG
Thanks for this series on Wagner.
I remember the socialist paradise. It’s the walled garden of childhood…
I read through Tolkien’s books again recently and found the chapter “The Scouring of the Shire” to be most thought provoking. Everyone seems content to put up with tyranny. Then I read The Rape of Nanking, and I’m currently rereading Maps of Meaning. I need to read some lighter books.
My current ear worm is CCR’s Run Through the Jungle.
Hi John,
In your opinion, is it fair to classify “Wokeism” as essentially Marxist? Judging from HOW things are being packaged and delivered from the Progressives, it feels, to me, very similar to something Pol Pot or Mao might have endorsed.
But I don’t feel competent to personally compare Wokeism and Marxism. And that ignorance can be a real weakness when trying to react appropriately. Someone asked me this question a couple of days ago, and I had to admit that I honestly didn’t know enough to directly answer the question.
I was clear enough, when I was younger, to conclude that Communism would be a great system for ants; but ants aren’t humans. I feel exactly that way about Woke, but I don’t have the philosophical background reading to speak authoritatively that. I do have a quick retort when people ask me about White Privilege: I point out that I am actually Slavic, and the word Slav derives from slave . . . .
Thanks for any guidance on this question. I think it would be beneficial to everyone here, and probably everyone we know, if we had more insight on Woke vs. Communism vs. Marxism.
Synchronicity: I, too, just finished “Little, Big” and since my mom, at 102, just had a stroke and I’m spending about 4 hours/day sitting in her hospital room, I’m beginning to re-read it. It’s a very beat up copy I got thru inter-library loan; I wonder how many people have been reading it on the toilet. (I wash my hands often.) In it, there are at least three humans being reborn as animals or trees. What’s a good follow up from Crowley? I am reminded of “100 Years of Solitude” in many ways.
Great essay, JMG.
How did Romantic idealists reconcile the sheer naughtiness and sexual deviancy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance? The Borgia family springs readily to mind, and they were hardly alone in their freakiness.
Oddly enough, I’ve found some of the same sense of the Long Defeat in the warhammer franchises. The elves of warhammer fantasy in particular – there’s a rather memorable scene in one book where an elf called Teclis is flying over the largest elven city of Lothern and noticing exactly how many homes are now empty, how much of the city is now occupied by humans, and how much worse the situation has become over the 300 or so years he’s been alive. And wondering just how much longer they can keep staving off disaster before the whole project crumbles, he being on the way to deal with one such crisis at the time. As it happens, only a few years. The End Times were coming up very shortly. I hate the End Times, but the sense of creeping doom in that scene feels familiar.
And in Warhammer 40,000, the Imperium of Man is a decaying nightmare of a dystopia that is gradually getting nibbled away at by various threats. The situation is gradually getting worse – one step forward two steps back – or at least its supposed to be. If they want that to continue to be believable, the space marines need to stop curbstomping everybody else every time they show up in a novel!
It’s a major theme in Doctor Zhivago that people stopped talking naturally and sincerely after the revolution, and for some people even in the years leading up to it. Not only out of fear of persecution, but even among friends and family, by contamination from the artificial sloganeering around them. I take this to be a consequence of the cognitive dissonance between the avowed aims of the revolution and the harsh reality.
I have tried hard to come up with examples of utopian thinking that predate the Axial Age, but so far haven’t thought of any. There were some kind of revolutions already in Sumer in the 3rd millennium BC, but I think they aimed for a literal “revolution”, what we would call a restoration of the good old ways.
Another reason that ‘educators’ focus on failed revolutions, is that they don’t want the peasants getting ideas that overthrowing the ruling elite might actually succeed. I think this might be why all the other commentators I follow, talk about “civil war”. War is when the government tells you who the enemy is (and by definition, backs your efforts to defeat them). Revolution is when you figure it out for yourself.
Well JMG, this may or may not have been your intention, but I ordered a copy of The Communist Manifesto after reading this. I think at one point you said we should, once a month, read something we want to fling across the room, so I’m finally getting around to doing that.
@David #36, civic minded Jeffersonian yeoman are getting scarce on the ground. My Midwestern and back to New England agrarian ancestors were that type.. I was raised by one in the 50’s and 60’s and my grand fathers and great grandfathers were of that ilk. However their habitat – the agrarian small farm, small business, small town culture I knew as a child was destroyed starting in the 70’s and the generational transfer of that culture has been disrupted. They are still around but in steady decline.
I guess that mskes you a pundit.
I remember the 1960s very well. I was in my 20s when the hippie culture began. By the end of the decade, I was a wife and a mother.
Fortunately I grew up on a farm and was smart enough to avoid the back-to-the-land movement.
The hippie area here in Toronto was in a section called Yorkville. Now Yorkville is crowded with ritzy condos and upscale stores.
Now when I tell my grandkids about “the good old days” they listen politely for a few minutes and then start texting their friends. Bummer.
I have been watching Wagner’s Ring Cycle and am now halfway through Gotterdammerung. The version I’m watching is the Vienna State Opera on You Tube, for those who may be interested.
The reason it’s taking so long is that I have other things going on, one of which was reading Warren Johnson’s Muddling Toward Frugality. The first part of the book was interesting and informative, but then he discusses possible scenarios to proceed through the end of the industrial age. The book was published about 45 years ago and that part has not aged well. It was a bit painful to read. His solutions were not utopia but he presented a rosier future than what we got.
One thing I’ve learned in my 80+ years is that the idea of a utopia is nothing more than wishful thinking. Humans have too many faults for a utopia to exist.
Mr. Nobody–re Stalin’s killings. The Irish band The Waterboys recorded a song “Red Army Blues” about a WW II Soviet soldier who is being sent to the Gulag because he had had contact with American troops in Germany.
re Le Miz–due to lack of good teaching of world history I suspect that many American viewers of Les Miz confuse the revolution of 1848 with that of 1789–being totally unaware that Europe was wracked by riots and revolutions mid-19th century, but having heard of The French Revolution, the one of 1789, guillotines, etc. .
On 60s back to the land movement–obviously handicapped by lack of funds. Almost all arable, fertile land was already in the hands of farmers and land prices were high. I recall discussions in Whole Earth Catalog of places still open to home steading–some in Alaska, or of affordable land in lower 48. Mostly in states not very welcoming to California hippies, such as the deep South or the rugged, rural West. Some communities across the country also made efforts to keep communes out by restrictive zoning–not allowing large parcels to be broken into smaller, affordable parcels.
I’ve been following Matt Taibbi’s examination of the Democratic Party’s embrace of censorship–labeling unpopular or anti-government views as “misinformation” that must be suppressed for our protection. Definitely IMO a step on the road to “we’re fascists now.”
Rita
The thing about revolutionary ideals of our modern era is that they are almost always urban phenomenon. This always gives a warped view of rural and peasant reality, but also misses the point entirely that peasants and landed aristocrats are actually two sides of the same coin; the latter organically arises out of the former, and both are opposed to the Bourgeoisie and proletariat (who are most often the urban revolutionaries).
Thinkers like Ellul and Spengler hammered this point but it is something that is so often missed by would be back to the landers everywhere. It ends up less commune, more Antebellum South. Whether this is good or bad is besides the point.
Hi John Michael,
There’s an old saying which is a quote from some long forgotten farmer: “I don’t see too many folks ’round here with dirt under their fingernails.” An astute observation. Heading back to the land only works if you’re prepared to work – hard. It’s common sense because if there was such an easy path available to uber output (sorry man, I’m getting into this Wagnerian mode) on the land, big corporate entities would have exhausted that long ago. If I may cheekily suggest, the same is true of renewable energy technology, which works best at hippy scale mode one.
Man, you know, I’ve visited the killing fields in Cambodia (I may have mentioned this before) and that dark day killed in me any utopian notions of pork pie and lemonade futures. Anyway, I don’t eat such food stuffs. But it’s an instructive experience.
You know what though? I’m beginning to come around to the idea that such challenges to the status quo, inevitably end badly in the short term, but you know, maybe in the longer term they do introduce some minor pressure relief to a system – until the next crisis hits civilisation smack in the head, as you say with a two by four.
Cheers
Chris
Hey JMG
On the subject of utopian visions, it occurs to me that Thomas Moore’s “Utopia” is definitely a vision of Classical politics, that is a counterpoint to the vision of Romantic politics in “News from Nowhere”. I read Utopia for the first time many months ago, and it definitely surprised me with how (from modern viewpoints) un-utopian it is, such as the Utopians saying it is perfectly moral to conquer land from other people if they are not using it productively, which was the sentiment acted upon quite frequently by the British when they took over Australia from the Aborigines. It is definitely a “reason over feeling” kind of book.
Thomas, it’s a fine opera! My favorite Wagner opera is Parsifal, hands down, but I can listen to (and enjoy) all of his operas.
Croatoan, well, I’ve got a handcrafted mountain dulcimer in my apartment right now, for what it’s worth. You’re most welcome.
Foxhands, okay, I really hope somebody makes Bloomberg try it himself sometime. He needs to have more contact with reality.
Dennis, that may well be it.
Hearthculture, very reminiscent indeed. Trying to show people that there can be a path between the extremes is a hard slog.
Kerry, hmm! I didn’t know that. Interesting.
Piper, Tolkien really was a romantic, wasn’t he?
Gnat, the “woke” movement, such as it is, isn’t as coherent as Marxism. It’s more a general outburst of rage on the part of a privileged upper middle class managerial elite against everything they think stands in the way of the fulfillment of their fantasies. Marxism, murderously dysfunctional as it is, is still an intellectually coherent ideology. “Wokism,” if we can call it that, isn’t — it’s a four-year-old having a meltdown and shrieking “I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!” at everyone in sight.
Phutatorius, I wish I knew of something to follow on it!
Kimberly, by ignoring it, of course. Romantics are good at that.
Pygmycory, hmm! Interesting.
Aldarion, it’s been too long since I read Pasternak; thank you for the encouragement.
Bootstrapper, that makes sense. I notice that the US and state governments are massively downplaying the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, which begins next year…
Luke, I think it’s an excellent idea to read Marx. I also recommend reading Hitler. It’s always good to know what you’re fighting against.
Justin, more a pundidahdahdit ditditdah dahdit…
Annette, I still have my old copy of Johnson’s book, and yeah, it’s hard to read that section and notice just how many chances to make a less dismal future we discarded.
PumpkinScone, a valid point.
Chris, well, we’ll see! There’s a lot of pressure right now that needs relief.
J.L.Mc12, More was classical through and through; most of the intellectuals of the late Renaissance were.
The revolution in Les Mis is the 1832 Revolution. The French to overthrow their government with revolutions many times (1789, 1830, 1848, 1870). Getting things to turn out the way they intended was another matter, but the French of those days had a uniquely successful track record for successful revolutions.
Curiously Les Mis is about the one revolution that was quickly crushed, not about any of the more numerous successful ones. That reflects Broadway’s values not anything inherent in revolutions. The play also gives no background to how the failed 1832 revolution was an attempt to rectify the betrayal of the 1830 revolution. The by then quite old Lafayette played a major role in the betrayal.
@milkyway #25
Changing oneself is the work of good religions. Being transformed, becoming a better person, born again, initiated, all of that is religious talk, at least in our era. I get a strong impression the ancient Greeks thought self change the realm of philosophy, but as I don’t read Greek, that impression is from translations.
For “if only everyone would just”, then, in our time we turn to politics, and the truism that never in history has “everyone just”. Other times probably did it differently, but with equal failure.
@David, by the lake, #36
Mine also!
Gnat (#46)
I am no longer a Marxist but I was one long ago and believe that I know enough of Marxism and modern Marxists to say that Marxism wants nothing to do with identity politics. From a Marxist perspective, identity politics is a kind of pretend revolution that suppresses awareness of class and of the role of class. It is a way to ignore the needs of the vast majority of those in the identity category for the benefit of the elite within the identity category. For example, the emergence of a solid Black professional class in recent decades has been an accomplishment that Americans can and should be proud of, but the Black working class has been hammered by the same deindustrialization as the working class as a whole. Wokeism hides that reality. Marxism sees that reality as core.
As an example, Kamala Harris’s father is a Marxist economist and seems to want nothing to do with her campaign or its identity politics.
I am not sure I can do justice to the Woke perspective. I find it too distressing the way that valid and important claims for redress and for freedom have been hijacked in the service of careerism, pettiness, and narcissism. But wouldn’t the Woke see Marx as just another dead white guy? Given his extensive writings, he must surely have written something that could be used to prove that he was a racist or sexist or something and therefore of no value to the human race whatsoever.
I grew up romanticizing the Confederacy. One is meant to learn and grow out, go beyond. The Southern war effort was poorly supported, according to at least one scholar, by the very polite genteel class that brought the whole mess about. It is tragic, and all too human. I’ve come to think that our elites in this country share much in common with the elites of the South just prior to 1860. Probably why they hate them so much, they can’t learn from them, because that might tell them about their own status. Remove the shadow and you can see in the mirror. It took a hundred years for the South to even start recovering.
Rita Elizabeth Rippetoe (#56)
Al Stewart had the hit song “Roads to Moscow” back in the 1970s about Soviet troops captured (in huge numbers) by the Nazis in the initial days of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, the retreat, then the counter-attack, and eventual victory, followed by the Gulag for so many of the few who survived the Nazi POW camps.
I heard again for the first time in decades a few months ago. I had forgotten the last part and was stunned to be reminded. Such a sad song.
It is as though Saruman had won the battle in the Shire at the end of the Lord of the Rings.
It’s not just woolly-headed college students and Marxists that believe outlandish things. One of my favorite Wall St fairy tales is that shareholders are the owners of the company, and also that somehow, through some mysterious portal, company money is shareholder money. How many times have I heard this, especially on business news shows? Cracks me up every time.
Shareholders do have certain rights with respect to the company but the right of use and possession, which is an old-fashioned definition of ownership, is not among those rights. They do have the right to a fractional share of any dividend declared and similarly with respect to proceeds of liquidation. And other stuff too.
But, if you as shareholder are convinced of your exalted status, just try helping yourself to some of that yummy company cash, especially in a publicly traded corporation.
You will be getting visitations, not from the spirit world, nor from outer space, but rather more probably from the nearest FBI office and then from your friendly local IRS auditors.
Even just try overstaying for a short while in the company lobby, you know, the one that you Mister Bigshot Shareholder think that you own, in which case you will no doubt be making an acquaintance with one or two goons from corporate security.
Did anyone think that there would be no quid pro quo for limited liability? But then, who does own the company? Short answer? Nobody does.
@JMG
I find that when you discuss the Middle Ages, you tend to discuss the early part of the Middle Ages that belongs to the Faustian culture, rather than the part that belongs to the magician civilization. I think one of the reasons why our “modernity” can resonate with the Middle Ages The reason is that the Middle Ages (at least the middle and late periods) itself is the “modernity” of another civilization.
For example, the Legend of King Arthur and One Thousand and One Nights are stories that can be understood with modern secular thinking. The Holy War in the Middle Ages also had the sentiment of the modern national unity movement. Although Europe in the Middle Ages was undoubtedly feudal, under the call of the Crusades, they were able to mobilize a group of armies with the purpose of seizing/recapturing land. , and the same goes for their opponents (in fact the Arabs do better because, in order to maintain cohesion, they discourage non-Arabic speakers from embracing Islam)
This seems to be one of the reasons why Western intellectuals did not like the Middle Ages after the end of the Middle Ages (from the Renaissance to the Age of Enlightenment). The Crusaders were considered brutal due to their total war nature, and the popular novels and art of the Middle Ages were considered vulgar. It was not until the birth of modernity of Faustian in 19 century that these medieval things could be understood and accepted.
I have an idea that science fiction novels are actually a kind of secularized pseudo-prophecy, the difference is that its authors openly say that they do not believe in their stories, because the stories themselves are oriented to the future, and they have no idea how people in the future will deal with this kind of story.?
“The thing to keep in mind here is that none of the systems that work expect human nature to change. All of them assume that under the new system, people will be just as greedy, selfish, and lazy as ever. ”
This is one of the main concepts in Niccolo Machiavelli’s “The Prince.” Macchiavelli gives pragmatic advice on how to get rid of troublemakers and maintain an orderly and peaceful princedom, with incentives for good behavior. After conquering a neighboring princedom, he advises the ruler to keep taxes, laws and customs the same– Advice that might have made for less violence if the US had followed it after taking over Iraq.
His is a more practical viewpoint that is far different from Romanticism. For the most part, his principles work, but I still find them troubling.
“I’m not sure why so many people fixate on the failed revolutions — we have that in the US in the form of romantic attachment to the Confederacy of our Civil War era.”
Failed revolutions haven’t had the chance to disappoint, like successful ones always do (to varying degrees, of course, but I don’t know of any that didn’t leave at least a large section of its supporters feeling unbetrayed). One can always imagine what could have been if it succeeded, without any direct and inescapable counter-arguments from reality.
I think the enduring cultural appeal of anarchism has to do with this as well: whenever they received a chance to establish truly independent stateless communities, anarchists got swiftly and mercilessly crushed by other forces operating in the same vacuum of power… and so can say without lying that their dreams never transfromed directly into nightmares, unlike those of some other leftists. Unless you count what resulted from the actions of others, and they cannot be blamed for that (though I might quibble here; surely they could and should have accounted for differently-minded people having other plans).
@JMG,
> Across the German lands, the petty kings
Strictly speaking, there were no kings in German states: within the Holy Roman Empire, only the ruler of Bohemia had the right to call himself king; there were no royal courts, either. The king of Prussia was such only *in* Prussia, basically a Polish-speaking territory outside of borders of the Empire, and basically because no one thought Prussia was important enough to really matter.
>the peasant world of their imagination
You make it sound as local self-government was something lost in the fogs of time. But in Wagner’s time it was still very much a reality in many corners of Europe, most notably in the Alps and Scandinavia (where it still survives today in some forms), but also in Southern Europe: land in the Kingdom of Sardinia was communal until the Editto delle Chiudenda of 1820; the rest of Italy had to wait until the unification in 1861, but in some townships the traditional rights of the legnaticum, foliaticum, etc. still exist today.
>It apparently never occurred to them that the state they despised had self-organized just as organically out of the very communities of the early medieval period they lionized
Ah, that is the key to explain much of recent European history.
The modern state evolved organically in Britain, France and the Netherlands, and to some extent in Spain. But it did not evolve organically in the latecomers among the European nations (Germany, Italy, Russia and the successor states to the Hapsburg Empire).
Those countries were playing catch-up and had to do in a few decades what France and Britain had done in several centuries. They did so by edict, not organically. So it was not unthinkable that those edicts could be retracted.
Compare it to industrialization in the UK and China: the British had >250 years to get used to modernity, Chinese peasants some 30 years. Many elderly Chinese must think that going back to the world of the novel The Good Earth is just a matter of all agreeing to stop doing the silly modern things and going back to the land.
Finally, I am not very comfortable with the idea that there are “Classical” and “Romantic” politics, culture, economics. Goethe himself could not tell where the one started and the other ended, and certainly contributed to both; so did Byron and Shelley. Probably, most of their contemporaries had a bit of both.
Petra, the confusion about if it is “der Ring der Nibelungen” or “der Ring des Nibelungen” has to do with the similarity of both phrases: between them, only one phoneme is changed. Germans could, and would succumb, too, to this confusion, partly because not everyone knows that in Wagner’s opera, there is only one ring-bearer, Alberich.
As for romantic politics, as the twentieth century showed, it can catastrophically run off the rail even without communism, as the bloody consequences of nationalist extremisms in the Balkans after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, or the history of National Socialism and its cultural and political fore-bears show only too clearly.
Fine business! .–. ..- -. Well done, sir.
I thought I’d look up some Wagner puns, and found this book along the way. “The Laughing Wagner: His Wit, Puns, Pranks, and Dare-Devil Stunts.” Looks really interesting.
“Richard Wagner differed surprisingly from the picture usually painted of him. Joachim Köhler presents an unfamiliar side of the Genius of Bayreuth: the comedic tragedian, who loved laughter, above all at himself and his own works. Not merely the creator of some of the greatest operatic works in Western music, he was also an amateur acrobat, and an inveterate prankster in the footsteps of Till Eulenspiegel. Wagner emerges in this book as a warmer, more engaging, even delightful character than the dour, self-aggrandizing, often spiteful figure commonly associated with his name.”
…and looking this up led me to Till Eulenspigel who I had known nothing about. I’m always happy to learn about a new folk-hero, saint or the like.
The trickster / fool / clown archetype seems to be activating…
On another topic, this book I’ve been looking at about Gerrard Winstanley “Radicalism and Reverence” is interesting. The author is framing his arguments about Winstanley’s conception of man and his contemporary Thomas Hobbes version, showing each of their reactions to the Puritanism of the time. It’s rather dense as many academic tomes are, but worthwhile so far. Thanks again for the chapbooks you linked to from the Christian Anarchist tradition…
Again, still struck by how closely the things the Diggers, Levellers, et al. were rallying against rhymes so closely with our time:
Thinking here of “laws that are enforced against the rich, and the end of the aristocratic monopoly on real estate so that every family can own its own home and farm.”
@Rita Elizabeth Rippetoe #56,
@Patricia Mathews #30,
The barricades in Les Miserables are those of 1832, not 1848.
The French have many revolutions to choose from.
@gnat,
People say that Wokeism is Marxist because it’s an outgrowth of Critical Theory. Critical Theory basically applies Marxist ideas, analytical techniques and proposed solutions to all perceived oppressive hierachies in society (the so-called Patriarchy, Race Relations, 90 million flavours of Sexual Oppression, Ableism etc). Wokeism ripped off all the best Critical Theory talking points and dialled the crazy up to 11 with ideas like maths is racist. Also, with so many ‘flavours’ of oppression it all ends up very contradictory and confusing.
However, the important thing, in my view, is that no matter what they choose to call it the theory is serving the same purpose Marxist theory always has: to provide cover for rich people with evil intentions to whip up hatred and division so that they can sneak in and wrest political control.
I will point out here that (some) Christians have been looking forward to an age when the wolf and the lamb shall graze together, and the lion eat straw like an ox, for the best part of 2000 years…
I’m not sure Jewish people, whose pre-Christian scriptures that vision comes from, would interpret these passages in the same utopian fashion, but that is mainly because I have less familiarity with Jewish exegesis.
So, yes, there is nothing new under the sun.
However, on the matter of human nature, I find that people tend to fall out over the question of whether human nature IS greedy, selfish and etc. Which to me is a bit like arguing over the Buddhist proposition that existence IS suffering. Well, existence contains suffering, for sure, but it contains many other things… Just as human nature contains greed, selfishness and so on, for sure, but also contains many other things.
We can neither change the nature of existence, nor can we change the nature of ourselves…
…but to adopt a sailing metaphor…
…navigating through winds and waves whose nature we, likewise, cannot change (not even by flavouring them with lemony sweetness – lol!), still allows of more or less effective methods for operating THIS boat in a way that COMBINES the deep nature of winds and waves WITH following the course that we chart to take us to the destination we wish to reach.
Whether we reach it, is another matter, for none of us is ever vouchshafed an OUTCOME. Yet each of us possesses small, but real powers, and has the capacity to make small, but real adjustments as we chart our course, and navigate our craft, through each of the days we are given.
And as we do this, we always, at every moment, have EVERY part of our own human nature at our disposal to draw on as we wish – the greed, the sloth, the courage, the adventuresomeness, and on, and on, and on…
Aurelien #24
“…few would deny that ordinary people respond to behavioural incentives…”
My husband, an Irish farmer who has grown up in this particular rural area from a boy, to pension age, will tell the following story about how ordinary people AND the land they tend, respond to changes in behavioural incentives.
He remembers growing up in hills that bloomed purple every summer with heather, with a long established local economy centred on sheep. His account of what stopped the heather blooming purple, sometime in the 70’s, was that it followed a change in the way farm subsidies were reckoned. It seems the subsidies themselves have been around for longer, but the way they are framed does make a difference.
The change? When he was young, an inspector would come to each farm sometime in the summer and “punch the lambs”. And the number of “lambs at foot” would form the basis for calculating that farm family’s subsidy. It made sense to keep your ewes healthy, and in balance with the capacity of the land, because only healthy ewes will birth and rear a lamb at foot.
Sometime in the 70’s, the system was changed (perhaps to save on inspectors?). Now farm subsidies would be reckoned on the number of ewes – with or without a lamb at foot. Immediately, the more careful husbandry involved in trying to make sure every ewe would keep her lamb went out the window, and the hills were soon covered in the scrawniest, poorest of stock. Whatever its state of health, however diminished its reproductive powers, any ewe you could keep living at all, was reckonable. And so the hills were grazed bare, with no let up, and soon the heather disappeared.
That said, there have been other changes, in recent years, introducing incentives which appear to be driving people off the land altogether. The heather has begun to bloom purple again… but the people are not doing so well.
Tom River @ 31 Egyptians didn’t exactly reach cultural heights?
Do you think technology is part of culture? Archeologists and the engineers they consult are still trying to figure out how the Egyptians raised their obelisks and built their pyramids. Their elaborate building projects were public works, by the way. Employment for the folks whose fields were flooded for about 4-5 months of the year. Such objects of daily life as have been found impress me as being both simple and beautiful.
Another interesting fact about Egyptian civilization is that that there was no money used. No coins until, I think, the Persian conquest. Maybe that is what underlies the hostility with which Ancient Egypt is regarded in recent scholarship.
林龜儒, granted. I’ve talked about Europe’s Magian pseudomorphosis, but not recently or in that much detail. (I could really throw the cat among the pigeons sometime by pointing out the extent to which Protestantism is a Magianized form of Christianity, made over in the image of Islam during the years when the Ottoman Empire was huge, rich, and powerful, and Europe was none of these things.) As for science fiction, one of the weirdest features of the whole genre is that science fiction so rarely features in it — by and large — there are some exceptions — nobody in SF talks about those spaceship stories back in the 20th century, the way that people now talk about literature from earlier in history. That’s one of the reasons why I inserted a surviving copy of Dune into my novel Star’s Reach, and why H. Beam Piper’s novel The Cosmic Computer plays a significant role in my forthcoming novel The Hall of Homeless Gods.
Emmanuel, of course they’re troubling. They’re troubling precisely because they work.
Daniil, that’s reasonable.
Disc_writes, (1) that’s fair; I was thinking of their status in Wagner’s lifetime, not their earlier condition. (2) I never meant to imply that it had ceased to exist, solely that it was romanticized by the Romantics. (3) In that case, a lot of what I have to say will make no sense to you. I’d point out, though, that while it’s true that it’s hard to draw a rigid line between “hot” and “cold,” most people can tell the difference when they step into the shower.
Justin, I’m going to have to find that book!
Scotlyn, that’s a valid point. I’d say it’s just as inaccurate to say that human nature is only greedy and selfish as it would be to say that human nature has no greed and selfishness in it at all. It’s precisely the human condition that we embody such a wide range of potentials.
Read something by Hitler? I read Mein Kampf about 60 years ago. I mention that to people and they gasp (“How could you?”) If you don’t know how the other side thinks, how can you deal with them effectively? I look for books from other cultures, religions, etc. that give me an understanding of different ideas and ways of life, I found a very old book, published in 1900 that has excerpts of Eastern religions: Hindu, Buddhism, and Islam. There are only about 5 books of the Koran but they give a good beginning to the understanding of Islam. Mohammed instructs his followers to follow the teachings of Jesus. I wonder if those so-called Christians who burn the Koran understand what it is they are burning.
Books I want to throw against the wall? Hegel’s Logic would be #1
@gnat #46 – after getting into Ayn Rand for a while decades ago, I decided it was an excellent system for solitary felines.
@Jessica #61 – no, I wasn’t aware of that. Though it was obviously not the French Revolution.
>There was definitely something in the air about mid century.
And then about 10 years later there was an argument in Murica over things in general. With about 600000 people dead at the end of it.
Things run in cycles, that’s for sure.
J.L.Mc12 #59 re Thomas More’s “Utopia”: I think that book was intended to be satire. The title itself is a clue: “utopia” is Greek for “no place.”
>that even being one of the people with the supposedly correct views wouldn’t necessarily save one from the gulag
You should examine the history of the Nazi Party. Many of the early people got purged and killed along its ascent to power. The best response to those kinds of entities is to stay away and don’t dance with them.
>it’s that the people they rule just will not behave the way Marxist theory expects them to behave, no matter what
You know, if a model is making goofy predictions, a scientist would discard the model or look at the model to figure out what’s wrong, not blame his test rabbits for the failure.
I guess these “romantic” dreams are more powerful than reality. So powerful, people will kill for them.
>I’ve been following Matt Taibbi’s examination of the Democratic Party’s embrace of censorship–labeling unpopular or anti-government views as “misinformation”
I’ve come to the conclusion that anyone loudly shouting that word, is most likely a totalitarian statist. It’s the 21st c way of telling someone “SHUT UP OR ELSE”.
@ JMG “…it’s just as inaccurate to say that human nature is only greedy and selfish…”
Well, yes.
To wit, the failure of the “Rational Economic Man” concept, beloved of “praxeologists” everywhere, to account for all those times when human beings surprise, perplex and annoy such theorists by choosing the NON-rational, non-greedy, non-selfish option… 😉
In Late Stage financialized America there is a new kind of Utopia. Instead of a land of socialism with rock candy mountains these places have a new twist. We are talking about the work-from-home resort town.
In places like Ashland, Bend, Carmel, and Aspen there are no dirty factories, noisy ports, messy warehouse districts or dusty farms. Just come with your low-effort PMC work-from-home job, bitcoin racket, or other labor free cash flow. These utopias are imagined as places without grubby working class folks with their check cashing stores, pawnshops and thrift stores. Of course the need for this work still exists but the entitled residents pretend that it doesn’t and let the poor saps commute from trailer parks 40 miles away in rusty jalopies.
But living here makes you a good person. Your are doing your part because the golf course is watered with grey water, the Whole Foods has solar panels and their is nary a smokestack in sight. As a reward for such clean living you can have a mega-SUV ( as long as it is whiz bang electro hybrid) and fly on jet vacations to other utopian resort towns around the world.
These places do in fact have a slightly longer shelf live than some of the other utopias. But they will definitely hit the skids when the easy printed money runs out, and it costs too much to get the truck up the windy mountain roads to deliver Amazon packages and Chablis.
Rita Elizabeth Rippetoe #56
“I’ve been following Matt Taibbi’s examination of the Democratic Party’s embrace of censorship–labeling unpopular or anti-government views as misinformation…”
I have tried to find URLs referring to your mention of Taibbi, and can find nothing obvious. On this issue, would you give a keyword or two, or a URL or two, so I can find more of what you are talking about?
More broadly, what URL(s) is a good place to read what Taibbi has written the last year or so? Ten years ago, I read him regularly, but the Internet has changed and I can’t find where he publishes his articles anymore. I read something about Demoncrats now disliking him because he won’t write their party-line🫡. Kindly clue me in on URLs where he posts his articles. I abhor doing any social-schmedia, so don’t get links via that route. Search engines are givin’ me hardly anythin’.
Thanks.
Best wishes,
💨Northwind Grandma💨🫤📝
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Hi John Michael,
But of course, and I agree plenty of things need to change. The addiction with which the elite top end of town spends other peoples money, just for one example. That will be brought to heel sooner or later. It is worthwhile noting that the big corporate world appears to be mirroring the same debt strategy as the goobermint folks. There’s a school of thought which suggests that large pay packets for those at the top are only possible when lashings of debt are slathered onto the pie.
The core problem with the ‘growth for ever and ever’ spell, is that there just isn’t the surplus for it to work, and then practitioners fall for their own spell – and nasty things eventuate. What did they expect? That belief and spell has always baffled me.
Cheers
Chris
JMG,
Its crazy that people in Western culture still think the average person wants an ideology that requires them to live the life of a Saint, martyr, or monk.
Some how the 19th didn’t happen…..
林龜儒, I think the beginning of the change from Magian to Faustian can be rather precisely dated to about 1140 AD. That is when Abbot Suger commissioned the rebuilding of church of St. Denis in a new, deliberately non-Islamic style. I am convinced that the great church architecture mis-called Gothic was. among other things, a deliberate differentiation from Islam. You don’t allow graven images, we will have thousands, literally, on the insides and outsides of our churches. You make your places of worship resemble caves, we will let in as much as possible of God’s light.
“I could really throw the cat among the pigeons sometime by pointing out the extent to which Protestantism is a Magianized form of Christianity, made over in the image of Islam during the years when the Ottoman Empire was huge, rich, and powerful” Now, that is interesting. JMG, I would like to read that essay.
Northwind Grandma #88
Matt Taibbi is on Substack these days. Substack is a newsletter site that allows freedom of speech (mostly), and so is described by “respectable” outlets such as The Atlantic as “a ticking time-bomb”. It would not surprise me if Google quietly downranks Substack search results making Substack writers hard to find– indeed it would shock me if they didn’t.
Anyway, Taibbi’s newsletter is here: https://substack.com/@taibbi
“helping (among other things) to cause the disaster unfolding as I write this on the eastern plains of Ukraine.”
But JMG, why did you have to go to the eastern plains of Ukraine to write your piece? I expressly forbid it in future. You could have been shot and killed, don’t you know? Please stick to theoretical Wagnerianism in future. I’m keen to read plenty more of your posts yet.
A little off-topic but I couldn’t help but be stunned by the teaser news feed I get in my email from the New Yorker. The title of the article is something like ” life Among the Low-Information voters that may decide the election.”
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-south/among-americas-low-information-voters
The article is dripping with sarcasm and analogies about what country bumpkins believe about politics. These fools believe such things as the vaccine is bad, the Biden family are criminals, the 2020 elections was rigged, and main stream media is biased. They did manage to leave out the foolish belief these low information types had that Joe Biden is senile.
How do these people sleep at night!
@Northwind Grandma #88 your requested link https://www.racket.news
I spent my teenage years in Belleville just across the border of Dane County in Green County, Wisconsin is a beautiful state and under appreciated.
JMG,
Cockaigne wouldn’t be a play on the word cocaine would it? Awful close.
Also, your name was the first three words of B’s very interesting essay this week at the honestsorcerer.medium.com.
Scotlyn @173
I have heard the story, perhaps apochryphal, that the EU inspectors visiting Irish farms would count the sheep, then be invited in for a cup of tea, while the sheep were driven to the next farm to be counted again.
Stephen
Northwind Grandma: Matt Taibbi seems to be posting his work all at his substack. https://www.racket.news/
Hi John Michael,
You may have missed this because it being a visual media form and stuff, but the film ‘Galaxy Quest’ was a comedic sci fi where actors from a 1980’s axed fictional sci-fi based loosely on Star Trek, were catapulted into an actual space conflict. Aliens (with no idea of the concept of fiction) had re-created the fictional ship for the actors to pilot through space in the hope they’d defeat another alien race. A fun film if I may say so, and it wrapped sci-fi fiction into a sci-fi fiction – did that last sentence make any sense? Maybe. 😉 Whatever, it’s a fun premise.
Cheers
Chris
Hey JMG
On the subject of “Classic Vs Romantic”, I suddenly recall the way David Brin would rather contemptuously refer to anyone or anything that looked to the past with anything approaching admiration as “Romantic”, claiming that such thoughts were delusional and (I think, since I rarely visit his blog anymore) believes that such thoughts arise from certain hardwired animal instincts. It is apparent that your exploration of “Classical Vs Romantic” in this Essay series you have started sheds an interesting light on Brin’s rants.
JMG,
Meant to say “Some how the 19th century didn’t happen…..”
@Northwind Grandma
Matt Taibbi mostly posts his stuff on his substack: racket.news. It comes up if you search on that.
Annete, good; I read Hitler’s book about forty years ago, for what it’s worth. As for books worth flinging, Hegel’s always good for that — The Phenomenology of Spirit always leaves me thinking that Schopenhauer was right to claim that it was pure word salad manufactured for the purpose of looking profound by being incomprehensible.
Other Owen, not even scientists behave that way unless they’re forced to. Check out the latest news in the replication crisis sometime.
Scotlyn, I want to meet one of these Rational Economic Men someday. They must be in cages in zoos or something.
Clay, yep. Naomi Wolf’s latest substack offers an interesting perspective on those.
Chris, I don’t get it either. It seems so obvious that doing that means you end up dangling from a lamppost.
GlassHammer, a certain number of people want the lifestyle of a saint, martyr, or monk; they generally manage it quite well. A much larger number of people think they ought to want that lifestyle, but don’t want it — so they spin fantasies about other people taking it up en masse. It’s common enough.
Mary, I’ll keep that in mind.
Batstrel, English is such a fun language, isn’t it?
Clay, that’s hilarious. The shrill and snarky tone doesn’t suggest any particular confidence on their part.
Stephen, no, the country was named centuries before Europeans ever heard of coca leaves. Thanks for the link — B.’s a fine essayist.
Chris, yes, I missed that. Funny.
J.L.Mc12, yeah, Brin’s a standard Classicist, complete with the serene conviction that he and the people who agree with him are by definition the smartest guys in the room. It interests me that that particular kind of intellectual arrogance so reliably goes along with blind faith in silly but emotionally appealing notions — say, the bizarre conviction that humanity is destined to trample the stars beneath its seven-parsec boots.
Stephen Pearson, this kind of story existed about the Soviet Union, too. It was recounted in “Archipel Gulag”, that in Stalin’s Soviet Union, a multi-story house was inspected by Party secretaries. There was only one bathroom where things had been installed, and the workers hurriedly carried the bathtub to the next-higher floor, before the Party secretaries came to inspect the progress on that particular floor. So, the secretaries were content that everything had been installed.
I’ve been reading Emerson. I had forgotten that the Transcendentalists were influenced by the European Romantic movement. It makes a lot more sense now. When I first learned about the Transcendentalists they were always called the original hippies.
I read Naomi’s Wolf’s Substack. I admit I may be deceiving myself with wishful thinking hoping for the better, but I think the Archangel Michael may be about to swing into action and deal with those bad forces she spoke of. That has been my prayer. Yet in this quite imperfect world it would be a temporary respite of mercy. And thank you, JMG for this peculiar space.
For what it’s worth: headline from VOX: ” Politics /2024 Elections: The major political transformation flying under the radar at the DNC. ” “The third night of the DNC confirmed just how dramatically the party has swung on immigration — to the right.”
Gothic as a reaction to Islam – “what you forbid, we rejoice in” and “Protestantisim as making Christianity more like Islam by stripping it down” those concept are worth a blog post in themselves.
Naomi Wolf’s essay was the most powerful one I’ve read in a ling time – yes, the gods o death are on the prowl, as are the Four Horsemen – as they were during the Civil War, the Thirty Years War, the Wars of the Roses, the pre-Augustus Roman civil wars….and the one she discussed, WWII. And her answer was exactly the one Dion Fortune brought to her besieged Britain. That is strong meat there, as opposed to the watery Kool-aid of the politicians. And as for the New Yorker – you can trust anything our of New York City to be snide about the rest of the country, believe me.
>Clay, yep. Naomi Wolf’s latest substack offers an interesting perspective on those.
Like was said in the movie Prometheus – “Before one can create, sometimes one must first destroy”
Everything runs in cycles. This too, shall pass. Eventually. May take a while.
>In places like Ashland, Bend, Carmel, and Aspen there are no dirty factories, noisy ports, messy warehouse districts or dusty farms.
To paraphrase Mark Blyth though, at least Aspen is defensible terrain, unlike the Hamptons. But it will be somewhat amusing when the people who actually do all the work commuting into those places finally decide “Nah, I think I’ll go do what I do somewhere else today”. And that day is coming.
I suspect there are residents who have practical skills but they are a distinct minority. I wonder how many residents of Aspen could make it through the typical Colorado mountain winter without heat. They’re going to find out.
JMG,
It reminds me of mission work,heavily promoted by the church but rarely chosen and only briefly lived.
The other problem is that although people can rally behind those self sacrificing individuals, the group tends to fall into chaos the moment that individual is not around. This is because the group didn’t live the lifestyle of that saintly individual, they only lived that lifestyle vicarioualy through that individual.
Boy’s Mom @ 62 I think for self change the ancient Greeks had their mysteries and, to a lesser extent, the oracles. Of which there were many besides the famous ones.
Jessica @ 63 About discrediting Marx, one could start with the fact that he managed to get the housemaid pregnant.
Taibi’s substack is mostly behind paywalls. Taibi has a certain amusing talent for snark, but I don’t find him worth paying for, even if I had the means.
If voters really are “low information”, the reason for that is that the mass media, beginning with newspapers like the NYT, has failed in their duty to inform the rest of us. Part and parcel, as I see it, of the post WWII neglect of their duties by American intellectuals, all too many of whom took the cash and the social position and forgot that their job was to be truthtellers.
JMG, didn’t classicists and romantics conjoined during the French revolution? I mean, the Jacobin Republic borrowed heavily from Greco-Roman stuff, but it was also filled to the brim with utopic ideas…
@gnat
On the Marxism-Wokeness continuity, I’m not sure where I heard it but I’m quite fond of the saying, “Marxism is just Christianity without all the god stuff, and Wokeness is just Marxism without all the class stuff”.
@Tom River, I would differ slightly on those points you made. Yes Egypt had very good resources and geography, but we can see countries have resources and still fail. its commonly known as “the resource curse” Basically what happens is the extra money causes infighting instead of stability through bribing the populous with jobs and safety. For example in Ethiopia they are oil rich yet fight all the time because there is not an large power parity between those who could have the oil (north and south), yet in Saudi Arabia the leaders have bribed the majority of the populous and so have relative peace.
Also i think building pyramids is a great waste of excess energy! remember if that energy goes into growth either in extraction or war, you get a boom and bust cycle. If the excess energy is “burned off” it allows a stagnant and smooth status quo.
Jon, “original” only in American terms. They were typical Romantics, right down to the involvement in Fourierist communes. (Sometime look into the history of Brook Farm, the failed Fourierist phalanstery where Louisa May Alcott spent part of her childhood.)
BeardTree, I’d very strongly encourage you, and anyone else so minded, to pray for that. It’s so easy to get caught up in the crisis of our time, and get dragged down to the level of the two contending forces, the sort of thing Matthew Arnold wrote about:
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Any heartfelt invocation of the powers of light and wisdom is a step in the necessary direction.
Patricia M, Vox is desperately trying to pretend that the Harris-Walz ticket is much closer to the center than it is. It’ll be entertaining to see how this all plays out.
Other Owen, “eventually” has already been quite a long time.
GlassHammer, oh, granted. The saintly individuals generally figure this out, too, which is why so many of them become hermits.
Bruno, of course! It was always a spectrum; furthermore, and especially around the time of the French Revolution, you saw Romantics appropriating Classical imagery wholesale. These things are never simplistic or straightforward.
For what it’s worth, it seems the familiar version of “Big Rock Candy Mountain” is heavily bowlderized, or at least that one earlier version included final lyrics that made the song a warning against the temptations of idyllic fantasy rather than celebration of it. Specifically, they cast tales of the Big Rock Candy Mountain as a lure that hobos would use to persuade children to run away from home so as to exploit them both financially and sexually. Dark stuff.
Hello JMG and kommentariat…
I think it’s very ironic that Wagner music(a leftist anarchists friend) was the favorite of certain mediocre Austrian painter…
By the way, speaking about anarchism, what do you think about Kropotkin?
Seems like Fourier’s theories, and the political ideologies which drew from them, share a common root with the concept of apocalypse, in that they’re a form of provisional living. Once a given event happens, the world will become whatever you happen to want. There seems to be a heaping helping of cognitive dissonance involved in both cases, of course — for Marxism, the divide between what is supposed to happen according to the theory and what actually happens; and for believers in the end times, the divide between the world they claim they want and the world their own actions are creating.
Stephen P #96…
Well, now… that’d be telling… 😉
Seriously, though, when you set up an “incentive” you ARE going to affect people’s behaviour, and one of the ways you will affect it is by getting people working overtime figuring out how to “game” the incentive so as to get it to cough up more.
On the other hand, I wonder that no one ever gets around to questioning the idea of “incentivising” itself. Because, to me, an “incentive” is a pretty upfront manipulation – a coercive move. Just like blessing, prayer or magic, I do believe matters like behaviour modification should not be attempted without explicit consent… raspberry jam, doncha know… 🙂
At least one episode of an idealistic attempt to achieve a time of plenty for all like those you describe occurred in Japan as well. The Fuji Faith was heavily influenced by a variety of philosophies and faiths, and since Christians were also present in the country during its formative years, it should not be surprising if a certain amount of Christian culture also shaped it, and was hastily concealed when the Bakufu prohibited Christianity on the pain of death as a threat to the regime’s legitimacy. Two of the early leaders were hauled in and questioned on suspicion of Christianity, which they denied and were released. I suspect hidden Christians would have felt at least somewhat at home in the faith. There is a tiny white cross right at the center of their crest–a deniable one, as part of the wisteria branch depicted.
Anyway, they petitioned the Bakufu at least once, and I think several times to declare the foretold (from Buddhist concept of Maitreya) “Miroku Era,” or “the Millennium” as the LDS would call it, a time of peace and prosperity for all.
A large part of the prosperity in that era of sustainable living, due largely of course to lasting peace after centuries of wars, was attributable to their efforts to create the Miroku Era on their own, cooperating with the Bakufu, as the Confucian elements of the religion recommended.
@JMG. Another fascinating essay — points to the importance of intellectual history, if one had to choose between a real grasp of it as opposed to dynasties, battles, revolutions, and the rise and fall of kings any sensible educator would opt for the former, yet it’s the latter that is emphasized. “The ideas of economists and political philosophers are more powerful than is commonly supposed; indeed, the world is ruled by little else” wrote the greatest and most influential public intellectual of the last century.
Interesting that at the same time that Wagner was, as you point out, the quintessential product of the Romantic Revolution, his greatest musical influences lay elsewhere: Mozart (from whom he learned how to control the most extreme chromaticism within a tonal framework) , Beethoven (who taught him what to do with instantly memorable musical motives), and Bach (who gave him crucial command of counterpoint) — well, yes, Berlioz who fits to a tee the definition of a Romantic artist and whose work opened his eyes – or ears — to what could be done dramatically with orchestral color. . But the great German Romantic composers — Schubert, and Schumann — seem to have had little influence on him and he was known to be dismissive of them ( I suppose one could argue that the Wesendonck Lieder — and thus Tristan — could not have been composed without their example — was the anxiety of influence at work?)
@Thomas Schmidt I think every great artist is allowed one work to announce what he is about and how he gets his results — the whole of Meistersinger is a mediation on the origins of great art — what it takes to make it possible and that includes not simply individual inspiration but the social and political milieu. JMG is of course right that Parsifal is Wagner’s greatest opera (and arguably the greatest opera of all time — its only real rival is the Magic Flute and, perhaps, Otello) but Parsifal could not have been written if Wagner had not first composed Meistersinger (and of course the Ring but that’s already been acknowledged in these threads). The Ring works at the level of myth and the depths of the human psyche; Meistersinger probes the social/political environment necessary for great art; Parsifal brings them together.
Fascinating story you are weaving here from quite motley collection of threads. Can you recommend some books about cultural and social history of Europe during 19th century? Many cultural ideas you are describing here I am hearing first time.
JMG,
This essay reinforced an idea I’ve been chewing on lately. That the 19th century was the “accelerando” or period of insanely rapid technological and social change that science fiction authors have been waiting for since the early 20th century. Mainstream science fiction is still busy convincing itself in a thousand and one different ways that a very specific future is coming, one of immense social change driven by technological development via scientific materialism. But that future is 150-200 years in the past. Is science fiction a romantic reaction to the end of the age of steam that deluded itself into thinking it was talking about things to come? That there would still be a world of Great Easterns replacing tall ships and Telegraphs supplanting pony riders and endless Africas or western frontiers to explore and conquer forever?
JZ
I had never heard of the Amalricians, and am now reading a free online treatise on this group which seems to be written by a scholar, but is quite accessible. It contains some very intricate figures designed by Joachim de Fiore and much more.
林龜儒,
I have mulled over your comment, but find it hard to understand. The legends of King Arthur are thoroughly tied up with the legends of the Grail, which are profoundly mystical – the search of the soul for the Divine. Do you think these are easy to understand for the modern mind?
While the crusades were brutal, I don’t think they were more brutal than the Thirty Years war. You seem to imply that Europeans of the early modern period did not appreciate the crusades because ideological warfare was alien to them, but the 16th and 17th centuries are full of vicious religious warfare, especially in France and Germany.
In general, I do think there was a strong and not universally recognized influence of Islamic civilization (what you call Magian, following Spengler) on Europe, but it did not start in the 11th century, and it did not end in the 15th. Rather, there were waves of Islamic influence (e.g. troubadours, knightly ideals, Avicennism, later maybe the abolition of images and celibacy, as JMG suggested above) and waves of European counter-reaction against the Islamic influence (e.g. Gothic architecture as suggested by Mary above, the increased importance of the Eucharist from the 13th century onwards, the blossoming of human portraits etc.).
Myself, I find Toynbee’s model in his later books to be more helpful: out of the “Hellenic-Aramaean cultural compost” that incubated from the time of Alexander the Great until the Abbasids, several daughter cultures sprouted: the Byzantine one (rising from the ashes after ~800 AD), the Arabic and Persian ones after Islam became the faith of the majority in the 9th to 11th centuries AD, the Western European one, starting in the 10th century AD, and possibly others that didn’t become as widespread.
JMG
“ Tolkien really was a romantic, wasn’t he?”
I agree, though I need to get a better grasp on the concept of romanticism.
I like his stories, but they imagine a society that never could be.
James, interesting. I can’t imagine Burl Ives singing the original, then!
Chuaquin, an interesting author of political fantasy. It’s fun to read, but as a plan for action you might as well try The Wizard of Oz.
Ethan, that’s an excellent point!
Patricia O, that’s not surprising at all. The Utopian thing was pretty much universal during the Piscean age.
Tag, keep in mind that in the “Romantikerkrieg,” the great squabble among German Romantic composers, Wagner was on one side and Schumann (or, more precisely, his wife Clara) was very much on the other. Schubert didn’t live long enough to get involved, but my understanding, at least, is that his music was on the conservative end of things — certainly when compared to Wagner, Liszt, and the other radicals. So it’s not surprising that neither of them had a lot of influence on Wagner.
Juhana, I wish I could! I’ve picked up these motley threads from an equally motley array of sources — it’s what happened when a Wagner fan with a taste for the history of ideas goes roving out in search of context. 😉
John, excellent! Yes, exactly. The Age of Progress reached its all-time peak during the reign of Queen Victoria, and by all relevant measures progress has been slowing down steadily since then. Thus science fiction, that relentlessly Classical genre, is longing for a future that never happened, the future of linear acceleration from the Victorian era on. (And this casts, of course, an entirely new light on the Steampunk movement…)
Aldarion, interesting. Thanks for this.
Piper, that’s true of all Romantics: “Only the things the heart believes are true.”
@John #123 I agree with your point. By the 1950’s a common American home had electricity, a phone, central heating, a radio, an automobile, access to modern dentistry and medicine, hot and cold running water, a toilet, a camera, record player, TV, movies, good roads, access to planes, trains, ships; electric appliances, refrigerator, catalog mail orders, vacuum cleaner. Change since then has been minor and incremental in comparison to what happened in the previous 70 years.
My great grandmother who remember when I was a very small child was born in 1867 and died in 1964 at the beginning of humans in space. She saw the big change.
I always found it strange that anyone could expect human nature to change by a change in institutions.
That’s why Marxism (and its spinoffs) never had any spell over me. It always seemed preposterous on the face of it. To this day I still don’t understand the appeal.
This is where I think the fairytales mentioned a few weeks back come in handy. They clearly establish in a child’s imagination that people are greedy, selfish, and lazy by nature.
Anybody who watched a few Disney movies as a kid ought to know that greed and selfishness do not originate with capitalism!
This is so, so, so basic. Only people who grew up privileged or spoiled, and had very little contact with reality growing up, could take the idea of changing human nature seriously.
In fact, my hypothesis (which perhaps one day could at least partially be tested) is that the most fervent Marxists in history grew up pampered and/or were never exposed to fairytales as children.
(Or perhaps they were all only children. For Heaven’s sake, anyone with a brother or sister knows that greed and selfishness are innate human characteristics!)
Hi JMG,
“Protestantism is a Magianized form of Christianity, made over in the image of Islam”
I’m seconding Mary Bennett’s request for that essay!
“Magianized?” ehh, maybe, if you are talking about the worst kind of cookbook ouija-board magian practices. I’d agree that there is some thaumaturgy going on there, but would also argue that most of it is being done by people who have no understanding that it IS thaumaturgy, or the dangers of blowback of one type or another.
“Image of Islam?” I can see that, to some extent, if you omit the Sufists and that part of the culture which includes Geomancy and investigations of the occult. Maybe, if you are talking about Iranian-style Islam. There is definitely a hierarchy of Protestant Imams that subscribe to the sit-down-and-shut-up school of teaching, with a heaping helping of guilt sauce to goose the donations. Talking about Spiritual Maturity, but doing everything in their power to maintain infancy and dependency in their congregants. They are at once infallible, yet also jockeying for position at the top of the heap. Brought low by scandal only to climb the hill again on the bodies of both fans and enemies…
Yep, the more I think about it, Mary Bennett is right. Please fit that essay into your writing schedule somehow!
The spiritual background of the Calvinist Presbyterian churches where I spent some years included the concept of a Bible that contained all you need to have a spiritual life, with nothing of value to be found outside of it. It was a bit like the stuffy atmosphere of ‘Star Trek, Next Generation’ with Wesley Crusher spending all of his spare time reading technical journals under fluorescent lights to better understand the minor technical details of Starship Enterprise! And this was no accident, since Protestant Christianity was really Christianity remade in the image of the sterile, mechanical Enlightenment.
Ahh, the frigid beauty of the logical structures of Calvin’s Institutes! What Mother Theresa was ever produced after reading THAT tome for 40+ hours? None comes to my mind. And don’t dare bring up ‘You shall know them by their fruits’…
Sunday-School teachers and Pastors contorted like acrobats to extract ponderous meanings from ever-smaller bits of the implied meanings of Koinae Greek texts of the New Testament, and all to confirm that, ‘Yes, Calvin was right about that.’ It didn’t occur to us at the time that we had become the Pharisees–No, make that Sadducees–that we reviled.
The real cognitive dissonance– That the home-based potluck dinners, visiting the sick and dying, the living community helping each other and the community at large, had nothing to do with Calvinist Doctrine. We did these things in spite of it. Life wins out eventually.
I am thankful to have escaped all that. “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” How ironic that the Truth has set me free from Protestant Evangelicalism!”
A slight hiccup on the Age of Progress, now official.
“Two Nasa astronauts who have been stuck in space for over two months will return to Earth in a SpaceX capsule.
The American space agency said Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore – who are on the International Space Station (ISS) – would not return to Earth until February 2025.
It said the Boeing Starliner spacecraft they went into space on would return to Earth un-crewed.
The pair took off on what was planned to be an eight-day mission on 5 June but will now spend around eight months in orbit.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwy47w9yndpo
Gilligans Space Station?
BeardTree, exactly. My grandparents were born in 1906 and 1908 respectively. They grew up on farms that were worked by horsedrawn plows, and he worked for a while as a boy in a shipyard that produced wooden ships powered by sails. (There were a lot of schooners going up and down the west coast in those days.) They remembered, and would talk about, the day the first automobile in the county came rattling past, the day when electricity finally got to their town, and how everyone reacted when the first airplane, that impossible miracle, came buzzing through the sky. They lived to see nuclear weapons, desktop computers, and human bootprints on the Moon. They died within a few weeks of each other in 1988. What has happened since their time that even begins to measure up to the pace of change they witnessed?
Blue Sun, that’s an interesting hypothesis. For the sake of the future, I’d like to urge all my readers who have small children to read the fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm to their offspring. You can save them, and everyone else, from cluelessness!
Emmanuel, Spengler referred to the civilization of the post-Babylonian Middle East as Magian. I’ll keep the post in mind, and discuss then what he meant by that — it’s not that they practiced lots of thaumaturgy. As for Calvin’s Institutes, the fact that Presbyterian churches did in fact engage in a lot of charity — and may still do so, for all I know — is to me proof that human nature ultimately triumphs over the most rigid and repellent ideology.
Siliconguy, about that.
“Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale,
A tale of a fateful trip,
That started from Cape Kennedy,
Aboard this Boeing ship!”
The vaunted smart phone/internet/computer stuff was a relatively minor add on to an already well functioning technological society. The typical day to day life of Americans has made no substantial improvements since the 1960’s. According to a long running happiness poll American happiness peaked in 1958. As I often say “I have reached the age where I have seen the future and I am not impressed”.
Mary Bennet (#110)
The notion that Marx got his maid pregnant (not Engels) seems to be held in some circles but not others. I never saw it in the biographies of him I read.
That brings up another interesting point: if folks want to cancel someone, especially someone long dead and of a different age, they could always make up things.
@Emmanuel Goldstein (#130):
Calvin began life as a lawyer, before he became a theologian. That explains so mucn about his system of theoloigy.
It is very telling that we are having big problems docking two vehicles in. low earth orbit, then detaching them and returning to earth with the astronauts intact. This is a feat we first achieved in 1966 during the Gemini 8 mission piloted by Neil Armstrong.
I think it is unfair to compare the skipper and his normally reliable ship ” the ss Minnow” to Boeing’s failed rocket. The crew and passengers would have had an uneventful journey if not for a surprise tropical storm. Boeing ( and Nasa) just failed under normal circumstances due to incompetence, corruption and lack of attention to detail.
To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, ” The train of progress ran off the tracks because we were just too cheap and lazy.”
@Siliconguy 131: I wonder if they’re getting paid time-and-a-half for overtime.
One thing I must remind everyone seeing Islam’s heart in the forms of Christianity embraced by the Germans, Scandinavians, English and Scotts: Don’t confuse reaction with influence, especially when the influence has to come across multiple borders.
You want to festoon your churches with statues over everything? We’ll go with simple symbols that anyone can make.
You want to lean on 1500 (now 2000) years of tradition and interpretation? We’ll just take from the Good Book.
You want to focus on “good works?” Fine, we’ll embrace Faith (and yes, we’ll admit that some people are just doomed to Hell).
Yes, I’m aware that Martin Luther stated that he’d rather be under Muslim rule than Catholic rule. Still, the Protestants weren’t reacting to Islam, they were reacting to Catholicism and its abuses.
JMG #132: I could hear the singers from the series singing your lyrics! I guess we won’t know the rest of the new lyrics till we find out what happens to the Starliner spacecraft when they attempt to bring it back to earth. But given what happened to the ship of the TV series …
My family belonged to and attended a Presbyterian church in the 1960s, when I was a child. At age 13 I attended the church’s classes for 13 year olds considering becoming members. It was here that I first heard about the concept of the Elect, the idea that only some people would be saved and God already knew who they were. There was *nothing* the minister had said in his sermons to indicate that this was church doctrine, and by then I’d been in church with the adults, listening to the sermons, for close to four years.
Hi John Michael,
Admittedly, the film was a rare departure from the usual sci-fi narrative. 🙂 It was a pretty funny film though.
Man, I really wish I didn’t understand the economic news either. The latest instalment in the kick this baby down the road a bit longer and hopefully nothing gets too crushed by the economic bus wheels arrived a few days ago: Why some banks are cutting interest rates for term deposits and home loans when the Reserve Bank isn’t. Yup, self interest is rarely a good look, but who really knows, maybe all these arrangements is the best they’ve got?
In a nutshell, in order for the banksters to attract new loan business, they appear to be offering discounted rates on new loans. That is harder for the banksters to afford to do than you’d imagine, most options involve them taking a hit to their profits and/or salaries. Anyhoo, the fixed rate mortgage down under is usually only limited to three to five year terms, then a person has reapply for their loan, and it usually then becomes the higher variable rate – and a surprising number of people are often shoved into the shadow banking sector. This time around though, in order to fund the deposit rates and not lose customers, they’re funding the discount, by reducing deposit rates. Sends a strong message…
Man, this is a world class mess of a situation, but I’m absolutely stumped to know when the proverbial faeces will hit the fan.
Cheers
Chris
@JMG:
If you do get around to a “Protestantism and Islam” post, you may be interested to know that the Lutherans tried to establish intercommunion with the Greek Orthodox in the 16th Century. Unfortunately (but perhaps predictably), the talks collapsed:
http://orthodoxinfo.com/inquirers/tca_luther.aspx
https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/orthodoxyandheterodoxy/2017/10/03/lutherans-greek-church/
I find no record of Calvin being interested in the Orthodox at all. Calvinism had more in common with Rabbinical Judaism and Islam than Lutheranism did. The latter have always held the sacraments in higher regard than have the Reformed.
JMG, From what I am seeing in this conversation, I get that you believe that significant changes in human nature are unlikely. I am also trying to relate this to your definition of magic, “magic is the art and science of causing changes in consciousness in accordance with will.”
While I understand that the average person, and even those who only dabble in practices like magic or alchemy, may not experience profound changes in their fundamental nature, I’m curious about your thoughts on the possibility of more substantive transformations. Are such changes genuinely impossible, or are they symbolic exaggerations that describe incremental, internal shifts rather than fundamental alterations in human nature?
Hi everyone,
I think a comment from an Opera singer, I heard about a week ago is apt.
To sum up, for about 2 years, most of her parts were of characters who died.
She always puts her heart and soul into each part and she found that her mental health began to suffer.
Her psychologist (I’m going from memory if this was the form of practitioner), explained that in a way she was ‘heartbroken’ and needed to involve herself in more ‘mental’ pursuits, to balance things out.
It made me think of this discussion and that going too far, for too long on either side of Classical or Romantic is ultimately unhealthy and perhaps self defeating?
That ‘middle pillar’.
Hmmmm 🤔
On a book(s) note, I have just recently finished reading Dorothy Dunnett’s6 volume Lymond Saga.
Has anyone else read them?
The main protagonist is fascinating. A real mix of ‘good’ and ‘bad’.
You can’t help but like him!
Regards,
Helen in Oz
BeardTree, true enough. Look around your home and see how many things in it were already there in 1965. Except for computers, the answer will be “nearly all of them.” Progress is over.
Clay, oh, it’s more than just cheapness or laziness. The train of progress could only pick up the kind of speed it had there for a while because, first, there was a lot of low hanging fruit in science and technology, and second, the Western nations had access to the plundered wealth of the rest of the planet. Neither of those conditions are true any more, and so the train has lurched and shuddered its way to a halt.
Donald, I think it’s more complex than that, and that the cultural charisma of Islam in the Ottoman Empire’s heyday had much more to do with it than is fashionable to admit these days.
SLClaire, fascinating. I wonder what they believe these days, if anything.
Chris, exactly when the fewmets shall smite the windmill is a good question, but the blades are turning and the mess is already airborne.
Michael, and of course that’s a good point — the Reformation was a complex phenomenon and bred many competing visions.
Clark, it’s quite possible for individuals to experience dramatic, life-changing transformations in consciousness. That only happens to those willing to work at it, though, and the fraction of our species willing to do that is very small. It’s a common experience among those of us who teach occultism, for example, that of every 100 people who sign up for a study program meant for beginners, 10 will finish the first lesson and submit the necessary work to pass to the next, and 1 will complete the course. And of course those 100 must be weighed against the tens of thousands of others who would never think of signing up for a course like that in the first place!
Helen, doubtless that’s true! I haven’t read Dunnett yet, though she’s on the list; I’m currently in the first volume of Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy, and finding it enormously enjoyable and thought-provoking.
@Michael Martin:
The Anglican Church also had talks with The Orthodox Churches about a union in the early 20th Century as well. And it would have happened BUT the Orthodox wanted the Anglicans to disown their “Low Church” brethren and the Anglicans refused.
I think that there is a lot of territory between the failure of all utopias attempted so far on the one hand and claiming that all attempts to improve human nature must, and deserve to, fail miserably. Given all the tyranny that has been imposed in the name of such attempts, to strongly reject any such is understandable. Yet, I am not convinced that some improvement of human nature is inherently impossible.
If one is going to try, the following seem necessary:
1) Such attempts must be participatory, not imposed not from above. Any forces making such attempts need to be part of the change, not standing aloof. (Somewhere I read that this is the difference between magic and technology. Magic involves the mage in a way that technology need not.) This strongly implies the need for some form of inner work. Trying to shift human nature as a way to avoid inner work is an invitation to shadow and suffering.
2) Small steps. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Or a century for that matter.
3) Such efforts must be empirical rather than dogmatic. You must respond to what actually happens when you make the attempt, not double down in the dogmatic belief that if X didn’t work, XX is sure to.
In current large societies, these three criteria cannot possibly be met on a society-wide scale. (I wonder if perhaps we are within a multi-millennium phase of species development in which societal PTSD makes moral advance far more difficult.)
Nonetheless, I think that it is useful to learn lessons from past failures to improve human nature, if only to give future civilizations a bit of a chance to not fall into the same traps.
I know that your understanding is that this realm will always be more or less as it is and that development happens by moving up to higher realms. I have long had the theory that full sentience looks something like Buddhist enlightenment* and that the process of a species reaching such full sentience is a process requiring tens or hundreds of thousands of years. I am not sure if I still think this. It is like the difference between a surface that is totally flat and one that is curved by one inch per parsec. On a human scale, that difference could hardly be detected.
Between the end of Rome in the West and the 1500s, technological advance was not visible within a person’s lifetime, yet crop yields in Spain in the 1500s were double those during Roman times, so agriculture was improving. Just too slow to be visible.
By the way, even if what I am saying is true, I am not saying that any of it is inevitable. Just that it would be one of many possibilities.
*More precisely, what is known as Buddhist Enlightenment is what something much larger, species-wide, looks like when it first starts popping over the horizon in the form of something confined to an individual surrounded by societies and individuals living less consciously.
Hi JMG,
Thoroughly enjoyed the essay, and I am enjoying the conversations unfolding in the comments. Concerning your comment “They lived to see nuclear weapons, desktop computers, and human bootprints on the Moon. They died within a few weeks of each other in 1988. What has happened since their time that even begins to measure up to the pace of change they witnessed?”
Yes, my grandparents as well. I remember sitting in their living room as a nine year old on my summer vacation with them in Boise, Idaho, watching the moon landing. They were quite interested; I just did not much care. Another day, another miracle. Could we run through the sprinkler in the back yard instead, please? I sometimes wonder if “Progress” went poof for me while I was a kid.
OtterGirl
There is a meme out there about one’s life purpose being to serve as a bad example. I appear to have fulfilled this in my comments on revolution and Le Miz–1832, not 1848. I stand corrected having inadvertantly proven my own point about American historical ignorance.
re Woke vs. Marxist — I would recommend the analysis of the turn of Western Marxism from class analysis to identity politics, _Here be Monsters_ by Rhyd Wildermuth, a gay Pagan Marxist originally from the Appalachians who has been living in Luxembourg for several years. He also has some online essays with interesting comments on the Ukrainian situation.
Rita
Just to chime in on the progress/ lack thereof story: my father was born in 1890, my maternal grandmother in 1867, and my maternal grandfather, who died before I was born, early enough that he remembered seeing the escaped slaves in the attic, their house being the last stop on the underground railway before they got the boat to Canada. I don’t know when my paternal grandparents were born.All of them grew up when the main method of going anywhere was by foot or by horse, and sometimes train. My father lived till 1958, my grandmother till the early 50s. they both got to see cars, planes, electricity, phones,nuclear, etc. I was born in1940, and perhaps the only comparable change I have seen was space flight. We are getting a pretty vivid view at the moment of the status of that. The only household thing now that we didn’t have in my childhood are computers.. It seems most people now are holding on to the dreams and expectations of those earlier times whilst living in the wreckage of their reality.
On the Magian/Protestantism thing: I was under the impression that Spengler saw Protestantism as the Faustian West finally throwing off the Apollonian Pseudomorphisis that had hung over it via the influence of Catholicism. It’s just that Spengler saw the rise of Islam as the moment when the Magian Civilisation threw off its own Apollonian influence.
Hi John Michael,
🙂 That’s good! Thanks for the chuckle, and yes that is also very much thinking at the moment. Anywhoo, man, my education was so poor, truly awful. Exhibit A: my introduction to the richness of the Arthurian lore was: ‘The Mists of Avalon’. I know what you’re thinking there, and you’ll get no argument from me. Nowadays I know better, and um, of course the characters are flawed and that’s part of the greater narrative, but MZB’s depiction of the males produced weak and dysfunctional protagonists who would have been the first to fall come the zombie apocalypse.
That book single handedly put me off Arthurian tales for years. I got duped, just like people wanting cheap money.
Cheers
Chris
There’s an episode of The Andy Griffith Show where a hobo played by Buddy Epsom tries to seduce Opie to run off and live the hobo’s life of ease. And Griffith puts a stop to it with a monologue of how people are seduced by shiny trinkets.
But soon after Buddy Epsom strikes oil and moves to Beverly Hills…..
The sinking this last week of tech billionaire Mike Lynch’s super yacht should be a warning to other Tech moguls who plan to retreat to their Luxury Bunkers protected by their loyal guards and servants.
Lynch, his daughter and some other high end guests perished when the 56 meter yacht capsized in a yet to be determined mini tornado or waterspout. The entire crew escaped by piling in to the lifeboats with little or no effort ( according to the news) to rescue those trapped in the luxury suites below deck.
Looks like money might not buy the loyalty that Zuckerberg and friends think it does.
10 Reasons Why Technological Progress Is Now Reversing
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/10-reasons-why-technological-progress
Item 5, “what is a mountain” has a nice thought provoking chart. Are people following the trend? That’s where The Matrix and Soylent Green ended up as well.
Re #140 and #144
The ordure is airborne,
The fan blade it turns;
The path the projectile
Will take is confirmed.
So clench your posterior
And grip tight your hat,
For soon there shall be
An almighty splat!
Before we proceed, I just had a couple of angry trolls try to comment here, pushing the officially approved mainstream media party line along with the usual flurry of personal insults. Maybe it’s RFK Jr.’s endorsement of Trump’s campaign, maybe it’s something else, but that sort of behavior usually happens here when true believers in the output of the government/corporate propaganda machine are feeling more than usually insecure. If it keeps up, I’ll take that as a useful indicator.
With that said…
Jessica, I think it’s quite possible for individuals to change their own nature, and for groups of individuals to work together on the same project with good results. That latter’s the whole point of monasteries, ashrams, magical lodges, and Twelve-Step groups, after all! So by all means get out there and work with others on the betterment of humanity; at worst, you’ll benefit yourselves and each other, and some of the people with whom you interact may catch a spark from the flame as well. For that matter, you might just prove me wrong…
OtterGirl, I was seven when that happened, and I was fascinated, but then I was geeky as the day is long about the space program in those days. I’m sure it was less of a rush for me than for the older people watching, though.
Rita, nah, don’t worry about it. I had no idea Le Miz had a revolution in it at all, for whatever that’s worth. I agree that Rhyd’s essays are well worth reading — it amuses me to note that we started out sniping at each other on our respective blogs and ended up agreeing on a lot of things.
Stephen, thanks for this. Yeah, it’s a rough process letting go of collective dreams, and especially when the dreams in question are as grand and vivid as ours.
Strda221, that was his view, yes. I think he was mistaken — but then I don’t think he ever grasped that every civilization has two pseudomorphoses, the second of which gives it something to rebel against.
Chris, oog. I used to enjoy Bradley’s Darkover science-fantasy novels back in the day, but Mists was more than I could choke down. Still, there’s a reason for that. I took a writing workshop from her many years ago; it was a very useful experience, and one of the more interesting things about it was that she talked very openly about market research as the key to bestseller status. To decide how she was going to portray the Arthurian legends, she said, she went to every Pagan festival in Northern California and asked everyone she met what they thought about King Arthur et al., and took detailed notes. That is to say, she gave the US Neopagan scene exactly the Arthurian legend they wanted, and so they gobbled it up like somebody eating mashed potatoes with both hands.
Dashui, funny.
Clay, I really wonder what actually happened there. To be quite frank, I suspect the guy was killed; the only question is whodunit. That said, your point stands.
Siliconguy, Gioa’s always worth reading but he’s not always attentive to the deeper issues. I wonder if it’s occurred to him that resource depletion is one of the main factors driving the trends he lists…
Martin, ha! Thank you — a fine bardic satire for our time.
strda221,
This was the sense I got as well in the discussion I had about Faustian Islam on the last open post. A key part of modern Protestantism is the need for personal study of the Bible, leading to the fracturing of Protestantism into many different sects from people’s different interpretations of the Bible. JMG said that if Islam takes on Faustian characteristics that he would expect that Islam would turn away from the sunnah, the consensus of the faithful, and towards the personal study of the Koran, leading to the fracturing of Islam into many different sects from people’s different interpretations of the Koran.
But maybe that wasn’t the case for some of the first Protestant denominations in the 1500s – maybe the Calvinists and Lutherans still had their own version of the consensus of the faithful and the only thing that changed was that it differed from the consensus of the faithful offered by the Catholics.
JMG #144: “I’m currently in the first volume of Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy, and finding it enormously enjoyable and thought-provoking.”
You might also enjoy a collection of his essays entitled “One Half of Robertson Davies.” One is entitled “What will the Age of Aquarius Bring?” In that essay, Robertson skewers the pop-culture understanding of that concept with his characteristic wit, and discusses a much older and more profound understanding of that age.
A sample: He describes the pop-culture conception of the Age of Aquarius as seeming to have “originated in the mind of a very young person who had been partaking unwisely of a feast of whipped cream complicated by several sharp snorts of cocaine. The Age of Aquarius was to be easy and woozy, with a great deal of soft-boiled sex in it. That wasn’t the way our old astrologer-alchemists saw it.”
@ Ferndale Chris # 140
That is realy strange about house mortgages in Australia, and I think Uk as well that they are only limited term fixed rate ! I guess our ( USA) housing mortgage fiasco on the early 2000’s lesson has not been heeded abroad ?
Most home loans here are fixed rate, either 30 year( or sometimes 15 year). So, if you see published data on our average loan rate vs. yours, take that into account, ours (overall) do not change over the life of paying off the loan. So longer term fixed rates are higher than very short term ones.
Even the convertible ones that I remember, so the usual standard ones from 1990s and early 2000’s, would have a starting fixed rate for x number of years, and then would convert to an adjustable rate that was locked in in that it was based on some like prime interest rate plus x%. It was not renegotiated. People did not need to requalify or shop around for someone to give them a loan.
What you are describing is what used to be marketed to sub-prime borrowers, desperate people, etc. and usually ended in disaster.
I dont even understand why anyone would bother thinking they have “bought” a home on such terms, you can pay out alot of money for that short term and then basically be repossessed because you cannot afford a refinance !
If that is the norm for your entire country, that speaks to how broken that market is and how vulnerable the citizens realy are.
@siliconguy
#7 “The space program was pursued almost entirely for disinterested motives—not much different than climbing the mountain in the chart above”
Um, no. The primary reason they poached Werner von Braun was for missiles. The space program was just window dressing over that. Most rockets are dual use. Or, what you learn building and designing one rocket can be easily transferred to another.
—
I’d say (and some games are starting to model this) that the more tech you “discover”, there’s a certain maintenance cost you have to pay to keep it going. So if you don’t want to forget a tech, there’s a certain amount of “lightbulb power” that has to go into maintaining it. You need to identify people who are able to understand the tech, you need to incentivize them to be interested in it, etc. None of that is free, especially when it crosses generational boundaries.
At some point you reach diminishing returns, where you have all these legacy costs and there’s little surplus lightbulb power to go get something new. I suppose lightbulb power isn’t completely fixed but STEM does compete with other jobs in the market. For instance, let’s take the movie Margin Call, where one of the protagonists was an engineering PhD from MIT. And they asked him why he was in finance and he said “It’s all numbers and the money is much better here”. That decision made collectively over time reduces lightbulb power. You give a relatively smart person the incentive to make a particular number get big, and he will find a way to do it. But it may not be the way you imagined. Or wanted.
At some point you get into maybe not a coffin corner situation, but definitely you have to start making choices about the future, where you can’t have it all, if you want something, it comes at the cost of something else. I think we’re there now.
Just keep in mind, saying “I want to have it all” is the same as saying “I want to have nothing”
Chris and JMG, about the Matter of Britain, the original Celtic legends are both powerful and moving, and remain so as retold by Mallory. Whose life and works are proof that bad men can write good books.
Unfortunately, the legends were so sentimentalized by Tennyson and then trivialized in early 20thC Hollywood filmmaking and finally given a raucous funeral in mid 20thC popular fiction, of which the Bradley opus was only one example, that they have, alas, become all but unreadable. Tennyson was a great lyric poet and IMHO ought not to have attempted epic themes. Maybe, as Poet Laureat, he thought it his patriotic duty to take up the Matter. TH White made a valiant attempt to salvage Mallory’s original story, only to see his really quite good book given the Disney treatment.
Re: Gioia — it’s like he is willing to admit many of the downsides of technology without yet being able to say that we have actually hit a dead end and, yes, supplies are running out.
Otherwise I think it is good he is getting his readers to pay attention to this stuff -and the shoe might drop for some of them.
Hi JMG
The communism was the default utopia of the Catholic Church from the first christians at least up to the end of the Middle Age, because was the way of life of the first christians as it is described in the Acts of Apostles (Gospel of Luke) Act 2:44-45:
“Now all the believers were together and held all things in common. They sold their possessions and property and distributed the proceeds to all, as anyone had a need,”
Or in Act 4:32-35:
“Now the large group of those who believed were of one heart and mind, and no one said that any of his possessions was his own, but instead they held everything in common. And the apostles were giving testimony with great power to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was on all of them. For there was not a needy person among them, because all those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the proceeds of the things that were sold, and laid them at the apostles’ feet. This was then distributed for each person’s basic needs.”
This all sound similar to the marxist “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”, because, in fact, the origin of the idea remains in the same source: the Gospels; removed of any metaphysical significance by the materialism of the time, but with full of the same utopia.
The monasteries in their “Imitatio Christi” are the example of a “communistic” community where nobody own anything with the commandments of “Ora et Labora” and all the fruits of the work are shared for all without distinctions of the capacity or efficiency of anyone.
In fact the vow of celibacy, instituted by Gregory VII (very strong pope), was made to avoid the risks associated to the tendency to give wealth to the children, so it is an incentive to the people to conceive the richness of the Church as private property. So the clergy must be only the custodians of the sacred wealth of the Church but never “owner” of anything.
The theological controversy around private property last all the Middle Age. One of the more influential theologian of this time was Gratian and in his “Decretum” (XII century) he said:
“Communis enim usus omnium quae sunt in hoc mundo, omnibus hominibus ese debuit” = “for the common use of all men of this world should be all the things of this world”.
That fell short of the “Omnia sunt Communia” of Thomas Müntzer.
There are thousands of text and quotes around the injustice of private property (or property rights), for example San Ambrosius in the IV century said:
“The Lord God in a particular way desired that the earth be common possession of all, and produce fruit for all; but greed produced property rights”
In fact this hostility of the church to the private property, sustained by the Franciscans (led for example by Duns Scoto and William of Occam), but was opposed by the scholastics, with Thomas Aquinas using the argument developed by Aristotle in the “Politics”: “What is common to a very large number of people gets minimal care. For all are especially concerned with their own things, and less with the common ones, or only to the extent that they concern one”.
It seems to me that Mr. Garrett Hardin attributed to himself the “Tragedy of the Commons”, but it is the same argument (and probably copied) of the one exposed by Thomas Aquinas which in turn was copied from Aristotle (in this case with attribution, of course, which is an old fashioned habit now).
Quite communistic was the way the middle age peasants lived, because they have open fields and “open” tools in common, even the lords cannot sell their properties, because their rights was only stewardship in a web of obligations with their peasants and their lords.
All the deep medieval theological diatribes around the “Imitatio Christi”, the “right to private property”, the condemnation of usury, the compatibility between richness and salvation (“it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God”), The “Just Price” in commerce, etc…All was blown-up by the Reformation which allowed the unleashing of the pent-up forces of capitalism in full strength liberated of any ideological restraint.
Cheers
David
Yes, I hope “they are feeling more than usually insecure” and that the Archangel Michael with angelic assistants is busy kicking Ephesians 6:12 posteriors behind the scenes with positive consequences to come out in the open including revelation of previously secreted doings.
Thanks for sending out the PSA 😉
Speaking of the creation of myths legends and politics. A new video game was just released that seems to be making a ham-handed attempt at building a supporting legend for the whole woke/DEI movement. It is a story/narrative driven video game that follows the cast of Multi-gender heroes as they cross the Authoritarian US which is now controlled by the “Puritans”. Along the way they use ” the power of words” to defeat their enemies.
This video game, Dustborn, was released yesterday and as of last reporting it had a devoted following of 65 players. I have included the URL for the website for the game as just reading the description is more ridiculous than any news story could be.
https://www.wearedustborn.com.
Hello Mr Greer,
Thank you for another interesting and eye-opening entry in this series – the articles more than deliver on the initial promise and I am very much looking forward to the next instalment. You have explained that neither Classicism nor Romanticism had much to do with the Greco-Roman or Middle Age civilisations they purportedly took as their respective models. I was wondering – were Christian ideas the unacknowledged common ingredient that makes these two cultures far closer than they appear to be at first sight? As far as I understand ancient Greeks and Romans, they saw history as cyclical rather than progressive, and would not have much time for speculations on how to improve human nature. Also, the idea that each human is valuable, worthy of consideration and has certain inalienable rights is, I think, Christian in origin, and would appear very strange to anyone from a culture not deeply influenced by Christianity – that, at least is the impression I get based on recent works such as Tom Holland’s Dominion. Could the Classicist and the Romantic movements be seen as two antagonistic Christian sects?
Somewhat off-topic – in regards to Joachim of Fiore’s somewhat unsuccessful predictions – why are so many individuals, whose spiritual goods intentions and practices I have no reason to doubt, so often convinced that they have supernatural insights into future? And why do they so often turn out to be completely off the mark? You have recently written a fascinating article where you encouraged people to take advantage of possibilities for glimpsing into future in order to navigate their lives more successfully – how to avoid getting catrastrophically misled?
Many greetings!
About the Victorian Accelerando and the our early 20th century arrival of modernity – Dion Fortune wrote (U forget which book) that the big city intelligentsia [in her time] were a generation ahead of the rest of the city folks, and the city folks, ahead of the provinces, and IIRC, provincial cities ahead of what we Americans would call the backwoods.
Re: The Honest Broker’s essay on why progress is going in reverse, Point 8: “So much wealth is concentrated in the hands of the winners in these processes, that they literally become more powerful than nation states. Over time, this approach to monetizing tech turned the leading technocrats into the wealthiest individuals in the history of the world. In many instances, these elites are more powerful than nation states.” That’s exactly what happened in the last days of the Roman Republic. Augustus became emperor by inheriting Julius’ fortune; he literally bought the Roman state. But, yes, the author missed the resource depletion factor.
JMG-
Just to be contrarian, maybe we’ve seen more change in the last 20 years than people of your age and mine are ready to admit. We say “it’s just the computers, Internet, smart-phones”, as if that’s somehow less than the revolution in transportation posed by the internal combustion engine. But look at us here! We’re exploring realms of intellect and history that I doubt I would even be expose to without an Internet to gather this sparse little community into a virtual salon, 24/7. The closest analogy I can think of is “adult Sunday-school”, which would be pretty much constrained to one faith tradition and a few shelves of mutually-reinforcing books. That’s the good side of it. Then, there’s the bad side…
I heard a very sad advertisement on the radio (which, for the young ones, is “streaming without control of the stream”). A man says that his daughter is having a big birthday party, and will his home wireless Internet access provide the required bandwidth for all of the children, and their parents, who will (implicitly) be streaming independent entertainment content to their portable devices. THAT is a modern-day birthday party?!? THAT is an environment in which socialization never happens, and what will happen to society as a result is anyone’s guess.
Some writers attribute the continued fall of family formation and childbearing to the widespread availability of pornography. Sure, there were always magazines to support the informal study of gynecology, but I’m afraid that there’s something qualitatively different going on now.
Donald @145
“The Anglican Church also had talks with The Orthodox Churches about a union in the early 20th Century as well.”
Yes, I know. St. Nicholas Velimirovich of the Serbian Church was quite active in those discussions, and was initially quite hopeful.
The Lambeth conference was what put paid to those talks. I consider that to be a real tragedy. Despite their recent apostasies, there are still a lot of pre-Schism traditions in the Anglican tradition that would be very compatible with Orthodoxy.
To this day, people who convert from the Church of England to Orthodoxy have the easiest time of it, and suffer far less culture shock than converts from any other confession (including Rome).
“Clay, I really wonder what actually happened there. To be quite frank, I suspect the guy was killed; the only question is whodunit. That said, your point stands.”
Regarding this, John, I think you are way out on a limb (or a yardarm?). I owned four sailboats, but no yachts. I think the Bayesian crew was negligent, both in seamanship and regarding their duty to the passengers. I see it as a “Lord Jim” sort of situation. The Bayesian’s designed-in risk factors appear to be the extra-tall mast and the retracting keel, which was retracted when the yacht was “knocked down” while at anchor. Murder would have been challenging under the circumstances, even if there had been a motive. But we’ve drifted pretty far from Wagner. Perhaps the anchor has dragged.
Yavanna, thanks for this. I’m enjoying Fifth Business enough that I expect to read most if not all of Davies’ other work — and it’s good to have my suspicion confirmed that Davies knew a great deal indeed about occultism.
Mary, oh dear gods, yes. There are good presentations of the Arthurian legend dating from after 1800, but they’re swamped in the torrent of glurge to which Tennyson contributed much and Disney inflicted the worst. Myself, I’m very fond of Rosemary Sutcliff’s Sword at Sunset, a very intelligent attempt to talk about the historical realities behind the legends, but she and a modest number of others are isolated islands in a sea of schlock.
Justin, oh, I think Gioa’s doing useful work. I just wonder if it’s ever going to occur to him that you can’t make resources appear magically by waving money around.
DFC, those are good points. I’ll defend Hardin, though, because he wasn’t simply presenting a rehashed Aquinian argument — he was making a specific point about economics, showing that the fabled “invisible hand” of the market can produce bad consequences. That’s why orthodox economists hate him so much.
BeardTree, here’s hoping.
Blue Sun, you’re most welcome.
Clay, the first thing I heard about it was people calling it “Dustbin,” so I think your view is fairly widely held…
Soko, of course. Faustian culture is Christian through and through, with all the good and bad that involves. Even its atheists aren’t actually atheist, they’re a-Christians — as a Druid, I’ve had fascinating conversations with atheists in which they insisted heatedly, and sometimes explicitly, that my polytheism couldn’t be real because if there was a god, it would have to be the Christian one! As for your question about prophecy, it’s another legacy of Christianity — since the Biblical prophets foretold what was going to happen in advance, anyone who aspires to some equivalent status in a Christian or not-really-post-Christian society is likely to be sucked into believing they can foretell the future. I encourage people to try it privately, and see how their predictions work out, before going public…
Patricia M, two good points.
Lathechuck, er, I see you haven’t looked into the periodical presses a hundred years ago. In 1924 we’d be having these conversations in a magazine or a specialty newspaper, via articles, essays, and lengthy letters to the editor — there were entire journals, of which Notes & Queries was the most famous, consisting of nothing but letters to the editor. As late as the 1960s there were also coffee shops and other venues in most large American cities where intellectuals, or those with pretensions to that class, would hang out and have conversations like these. Many more people were involved in such conversations in those days, btw — some astoundingly niche subjects had their own thriving magazines or monthly papers. The internet is simply a refuge for the last scraps of that once-thriving intellectual culture.
Phutatorius, maybe so. It interests me, though, that Michael Lynch’s business partner and co-defendant Stephen Chamberlain was run down and killed in a freak hit-and-run accident two days before Lynch’s boat sank — and of course the two men had recently been acquitted in a trial over a $11 billion fraud. There’s something just a little Wagnerian in that…
#169 I see what you’re saying but 20 years ago is 2004. If you think back another 20 years, it seems more like there was more change in those years than the 20 years to the present in the day to day technologies people interact with.
I would argue that not much really has changed since the turn of the millennium, by which time home internet access was already a reality for many. There is an additional effect of smartphones, in that users are able to be continually online almost anywhere they are, but the fundamental of the technology is its a computer that you carry around with you, which already existed in 2000 in the form of a laptop computer of which the smartphone is an evolutionary not a revolutionary development of.
JMG, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), to which my childhood church belongs, has a long statement concerning predestination on its website: https://www.presbyterianmission.org/what-we-believe/predestination/. Here are the two most salient paragraphs.
“There has been pressure to revise the Westminster Confession, for example, to remove statements that teach God’s eternal condemnation of some people. The United Presbyterian Church edition of the Westminster Confession of Faith specifically repudiates this teaching.
All through the history of the church this has been a doctrine that has been warmly embraced by some but has caused problems for others.”
This may be the origin of the minister’s avoidance of the doctrine in my childhood church.
@Phutorius (#171) and JMG (#172):
That coincidence struck me, too, as odd enough to give rise to the same speculation. Alas, we are likely never to know for certain. Striking coincidences do occur by chance alone.
Richard,
If I were to hazard a guess, the Faustian Protestants in the Protestant Reformation were the Radical Reformers like the Anabaptists who rejected the concept of the institutional Church. The Calvinists and Lutherans and Anglicans were part of the Magisterial Reformation which was more Magian in nature.
Lathechuck, There is another twist to your insights on how technology has changed society and people in it. I was looking over some articles about the astronauts stuck on the space station and noticed something that I had never heard anyone comment about. Both Astronauts are approximately 60 years old ( one a little older, one a little younger).
The oldest astronaut in the Apollo program was Alan Shepard at 47. I am about the age of the current cast-aways and I doubt it would be a good idea to send me in to space to spend a year in zero gravity with liquid food. When us crusty oldsters get together we often opine that our generation ( grown up before cell phones and the internet) is the last one that can really problem solve on the fly, adapt well and apply technical and managerial skills together. Perhaps that is true, the only folks that Nasa has with the flight, and technical skills along with the mental toughness for this duty grew up in the 70’s
Just another reason the industrial machine may soon be grinding to a halt.
I love your highlighting of the role Joachim of Fiore played as an inaugural voice, caterwauling on about how this must now be the dawning of the Age of the Holy Spirit. It’s also interesting how Joachim’s particular brand of “harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding” morphed across the centuries from being some mysterious natural shift in human nature at the dawning of a new age, rendering restrictive hierarchies redundant, to becoming a prerequisite dismantling of extant hierarchies and institutions in order to then unleash human nature’s resulting change for the better. Why am I saddled with so many doubts as to whether that morphing was some innocent misreading by Fourier, rather than an utterly cynical ploy to justify a revolutionary transfer of power over to the ambitious functionary class to which Fourier belonged?
Ever since you decoded the lazy habit of reversing the polarity on disliked ideologies in order to create equally abhorrent ones, as in “Evil be thou my good”, I now notice the sad results of that nihilistic proclivity all around me. Living in this age of wars for peace, crippling nanny states, and Woke liberation by force feels like trying to keep track of a fast-paced polarity-flipping ping-pong match — you could easily develop whiplash just trying to keep track of all the hypocrisy and self-deluding behavior! This week’s post’s dissolving and recoagulating of Joachim’s, Fourier’s, and Marx’s bizarre presumption that human nature is not anything like what it has always has been has helped me to tease out yet another lazily indulgent polarity reversal.
Libertarianism, as currently practiced and brayed about in the US, is Marxism flipped on its head. For Marx, the sin of private property was the cause of the debasement of human nature’s distorted purity. Libertarians have turned Marx’s evil into their good by revering private property rights as the ideal to be upheld above all others and from which all goodness disseminates. “Unfettered Capitalism, deliver us from evil!” Talk about a secular religion.
Should Libertarians ever get the chance to enact their kooky theories, they seem convinced that human nature would suddenly revert to its natural self-serving perfection, which only regulating institutions and big government have warped beyond recognition. Should they ever get the chance to be thoroughly disappointed by their theory’s real-world incoherence, I would expect the mass killings to begin promptly. So long as that -ism stays safely in the realm of theory, it is delightfully comical to picture the most devout of Libertarians slavishly following their great prophet Marx to the letter… only backwards. I wonder what the polar opposite of lemonade oceans and anti-lions would be?
John, help! I’m looking for a word you once used in a post in The Archdruid Report. You said that it was a German word that means something like “something you can say in the living room,” meaning that it was socially acceptable and not at all scandalous. “Salon”-something, I think. It was a word you used to describe people’s feelings toward antisemitism in the 1930s. Do you remember what this word was?
@SLClaire
Free will exists but massive amounts of karma can make certain choices look almost inevitable.
SLClaire, interesting. Thanks for this.
Robert M, oh, granted. As with so many things, we’ll never know.
Christophe, ha! Yes, exactly — Objectivism was the original Marxism-in-reverse, but as Marxism changed, so did its antireligion. Libertarianism is its current incarnation. I’m not sure what an anti-anti-lion would be, but the opposite of a lemonade ocean is presumably an alkaline one, courtesy of brainless geoengineering schemes.
Wayne, the word you’re looking for is salonfähig, literally “fit for a middle class living room.” Yes, I did in fact use it talking about antisemitism in Europe before 1945; it could be used in plenty of other contexts today.
@christophe #178, yes, exactly, extreme libertarianism has become a religion. Thank you for recognizing it as the mirror image of communism. Some years ago, a bright medical student (with a sideline of investing in stocks) told me that in a perfectly unregulated market economy there was no risk of monopolies arising. When I pointed out to him counter-examples like Standard Oil, he replied “Austrian economics is logical and can be deduced from first principles, it needs no empirical basis”.
Isn’t any appeal to human nature a kind of No True Scotsman fallacy? It’s one thing to accept the existence of greed and ego as parts of the human experience; it’s another to make them the center of your civilization and call any objection “socialism.” I mean, syndicalism isn’t an exception to the rule, it’s an entirely separate socialist ideology that you’ve actually endorsed. It seems like what you actually object to is extremism — which would be fair enough, if you had anything to say about right-wing extremism, which any honest observer of US politics would have to agree is a much greater threat. Now, I suspect this series will eventually address this, but is there a relationship between atavism and the myth of progress? You seem to be suggesting that both are present in romanticism; how do those opposites converge?
JMG #127: thank you for your sharp and convincing answer about Mr. Kropotkin, whose libertarian-communist utopia has been aging really bad since it was formulated….(ahem ahem).
I have another question for you and maybe the kommentariat, although maybe I would know the answer, more or less.
What do you think about Rousseau idea that human beings are born in a state of “goodness” before society rots them? (Excuse me I’m about to laugh).
JMG – excellent & thought provoking essay/series. It seems as though that somehow the mythical past will bring about an equally mythical future, once we get through the messy present…
This brings to mind a question (for everyone): There is a book on my to-read list, but I keep hesitating because I have gotten the impression, true or not, that it describes an everything-was-just-wonderful past with the utopian societies that existed in Pre-Columbian Americas (1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus; by Charles C. Mann; 2005). Anyone have anything to say about this book – good or bad? I’ll probably read it anyway, at least as a counterbalance to other histories, but just wanted to know what I was getting into.
Hi John Michael and Mary,
Hmm, that makes a lot of sense, and I’m uncertain I could go back to Marion’s books.
On the other hand I’m quite partial to Jack Whyte’s Camulod series for it’s sheer grittiness and awesome attempt at historical realism. Being in that world was a special treat. 🙂
Looks like there will be no snow here again this year. That would make it the third winter in a row. Oh well. Hey, I noticed this little winter temperature record achieved way up in the far NW of the continent (where the hottest of hot summer weather I experience usually derives): Australia’s highest winter temperature on record. That’s 107’F, in winter. An impressive achievement, well done all of us. I reckon it deserves an ‘Oof’ or two, and maybe even three!
Cheers
Chris
Hi Atmospheric,
It was mentioned in ‘The Big Short’ book that an interest only loan on a house was akin to a ‘rental with debt’. Hmm.
Yeah, that’s how things roll down under. They call it the mortgage cliff. Not good, and people are rolling off that right now. Incidentally mortgages down here are recourse, so they stick to the borrower.
Interestingly in your country (the US presumably?) there have been many mortgages which had a small recourse portion, which was sold off on the cheap, and like all good zombies, are once again rising from the dead. The folks owning those rights may have a nasty plan, best hope you’re not involved.
Cheers
Chris
Jiminy, it fascinates me that so many advocates for socialism seem to have such serious reading disabilities. I’d encourage you to read my essay again, and see if you can find where it is that you think I said that greed and ego are the center of this or any other civilization, much less where I used the term “socialism” to refer to any alternative at all. Au contraire, greed and ego are among the many factors in human society — they just happen to be ineradicable, at least by all the evidence — and socialism is a specific tradition with recognizable roots in the history of ideas. You really should pay more attention. As to whether it’s left-wing or right-wing extremism that’s the great danger in today’s America, er, remind me which side of the political spectrum is suppressing free speech, whipping up trumped-up legal charges to keep its opponent off the ballot, and running an elite-chosen candidate for whom not one voter voted in the primary…
Chuaquin, this is actually a good answer to Jiminy’s comments just above. Rousseau was wrong, embarrassingly so, because he thought he could characterize human nature in a simplistic way. He was reacting against certain currents in Christian thought that characterized it in just as simplistic a way, as essentially evil due to original sin, and in the usual fashion, he tried to break out of dualistic thinking by standing it on its head. The result was drivel. Human nature embraces a wide range of possibilities; no political or economic system yet tried has succeeded in narrowing that range to exclude those possibilities any given culture labels “bad”, and I seriously doubt any ever will.
Patricia T, thank you. I haven’t read it, so will be interested in others’ reactions.
Chris, I haven’t read Whyte’s work yet; I’ll consider it.
The binary black and white thinking commonly found in the the progress/apocalypase duality in Western society is also found in many Christian views of the afterlife. After you die you are given two options, you ascend into heaven (i.e. progress) or you are sent to eternal hell (i.e. apocalypse).
To Patricia #185, I have read 1491. The main point is that there was a diverse range of civilizations in America, author doesn’t idealize them. He also speaks against the pristine nature myth of pre Columbus America, especially in North American plains and eastern forests and the Amazon basin, that the native Americans managed and modified the landscape for their own purposes on a rather large scale with the difference it was sustainable over time and didn’t degrade things. Worth reading IMO. The same type of management happened in California as detailed in the book Tending the Wild. Ecologically they were keystone species that had a life giving effect. But beside this cool stuffI am sure these groups culturally had that same admixture of not so nice stuff commonly found in human cultures. I have met native Americans who laugh at the over idealization of their past cultures. I believe other civilizations like the Maya didn’t pull off the positive keystone species thing with their environment.
@ Chris in ferndale
I live in the USA in California, I had to look up recourse loan. They are illegal here (California), so that must be why I havent heard of them. The interwebs claim illegal in 12 states. But, I think that with mortgages you can walk away in other states too. I remember when JMG commented about his home in that little town he and Sara used to live in, that state is not on the list of 12 states I just read, but he said the house was underwater, they left and mailed the lender the keys. In our big mortgage crash, people just walked away, noone paid the difference between market value at the time and loan balance, …..But, here is what is crazy, the federal tax man in some cases considered the loss of equity the lender had as income to the borrower !
But, why are home loans like that, short term with no security in terms of having a loan In Australia ? All that work and money spent on previous payments and then they can take the home from you if you cant requalify, even if you are making payments ? ANother thing you guys should be revolting over !
When I got divorced and was a single mom, I decided to buy out my ex and keep the house. We did not give up the original loan, as I could have never qualified for a loan on my own. I made the payments as a priority until it was paid off. This happens alot, not just divorce, but loss of income, but the families scrimp and keep up payments. SOunds like in Australia, these single moms or families with a job loss would just not “requalify” and would be forced to sell or default, and with your laws, they could be forced to default and still owe money. This certainly makes it to everyones short term advantage to not have prices fall, because if they fall, and you cant requalify for a loan, then you also would not be able to sell to cover the home loan balance and you would still get wages garnished to make up the difference. Kind of Kafka-esh
@ Patricia, #185
I also have read 1491 and thought it was a good book, it was part of the reading list for my youngest in her homeschool American History reading list, I think 8th grade. This history course was thru Son Light, you can look them up online to see what else they ahd as recomended reading. The course was much more well rounded and way less politically correct garbage than a California State history textbook based course
Aldarion,
Yes, there are indeed some religious elements in the legend of King Arthur, but this, just like the Christian elements in The Lord of the Rings, does not prevent it from being popularized into secular entertainment.
Of course, there is something special about the fact that the legend of King Arthur can be passed down and not be forgotten after the end of the Middle Ages like the popular dramas/novels of the time.
Just like the numerous literary creations produced by modernity since the 19th century, only a very small number will survive into the future. Most of them will be forgotten in the torrent of time. For example, East Asian novelists are considered to have been born in the Warring States Period(in fact, they are considered to be part of hundreds of schools of thought). Although they created many works, most of them have disappeared, and only about 15 works have survived. Because their traces disappear so quickly, Western Chinese studies rarely mention their existence.
https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E5%B0%8F%E8%AA%AA%E5%AE%B6_(%E8%AB%B8%E5%AD%90%E7%99% BE%E5%AE%B6)
As for the biggest ideological difference between the medieval Crusaders and the Thirty Years’ War, the demands of the Crusaders were actually highly related to the land (Holy Land). Since the “Holy Land” itself is a material existence, this led to the Crusaders’ conflict with modern nationalism. (So-called Indivisible and Abandoned Land) creates a degree of similarity and an ideological war over control of the land.
This was almost unimaginable to the Puritans during the Reformation. During the period from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, Europe’s ideological wars did not seek land ownership. For the people at that time, if they lost Control of an area usually migrates directly to other places, abandoning its place of origin.
For medieval Islamic Arabs and Latin Catholics, it was easy for them to die in order to keep a specific territory under their control. In fact, ideological differences were not important at all in the belief in the land.
The difference between how two crusaders thought about Catholicism could be as vast as the difference between a secular nationalist and a religious nationalist about how their country should be run. But as long as they are fighting for a specific territory, all differences can be temporarily ignored. These were almost intolerable to various types of Protestants and even some Catholics during the Reformation.
As for the highly bloody nature of the Thirty Years’ War, I believe this is more of a characteristic of the Faustian culture than a general rule of cultures that are generally in the summer period. The religious reform of the Faustian culture was accompanied by powerful bloody wars, unlike other cultures that are more Mild diversion, this may be the result when your culture demands that all humans must obey in principle.
“That’s also the source of the back-to-the-land dream that played such an important role in the twilight of the 1960s counterculture.”
One fun little part origin of the back to the land thinking also came indirectly from german poet/artists/back to the land advocate Gustav “Gusto” Arthur Gräser. Gusto was considered a part of the Libensreform movement I mentioned about a month back. Folks that walked their own path in life. While many have not heard of his tragic life, Hermann Hesse spent 3 months living in the wild with him and found the experience to be a far bit less romantic than anticipated. But it did leave a mark on him.
Part of this became inspiration for Hesse’s novel ‘Siddharta’ that ended up being the inspiration being practically a bible for many of in the 1960’s counter culture movement.
It is just neat to trace these things back, to see how new ideas aren’t really new.
https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E5%B0%8F%E8%AA%AA%E5%AE%B6_(%E8%AB%B8%E5%AD%90%E7%99% BE%E5%AE%B6)
Sorry, the link above does not lead well to the wiki page I gave you. It is a Taiwanese page that introduces the school of novelists during the Warring States Period.So I still put the link with the original han Character?
https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/小說家_(諸子百家)
Those who are interested can use machine or AI translation. Yes, the English translation of the word 小說家 is novelists, because their nature is considered to be similar to modern novelists.
@JMG “Marxism is founded on total contempt for the working class.”
Exactly, whenever a system of power is defined, the same kinds of people will flock to it to gain power. Like politics, it is filled with almost all the wrong people because they are the ones that crave power over others.
Those who have power shouldn’t, those that should don’t want it. In Taoism they say that if someone is put into a position of power reluctantly, it is worth considering their ideas a little more honestly as they are there not by ambition but circumstance.
“I think it’s an excellent idea to read Marx. I also recommend reading Hitler.”
Both Hitler and Marx were artists before they took up the pen. The lesson here is, the right artists wronged can lead to millions of people dead. The multi-ordered effects in action.
@ Chris at Fernglade RE : Galaxy Quest.
If there was one TV show I would recommend folks here to watch it would be the first few seasons of Futurama. The shots it takes at absurdity of our current world and the sheer stupidity of the futures promised still hits so well. As the creator said “If you love Sci-fi, you will love Futurama. If you hate Sci-fi, you will love Futurama.”
As JMG said “Thus science fiction, that relentlessly Classical genre, is longing for a future that never happened”. Which is why we have the Cybertruck, as Tesla said “The future should look like the future” completely unaware that the future design they are talking about is form the 1950’s.
@DFC As a slight aside, the issues with Garret Hardin’s work has nothing to do with what he actually wrote. The problem is that his works can be summarized into a simplistic version that files off all the necessary details and nuance to make them work.
You could take any chapter of his book ‘Filters Against Folly’ and summarize them in a fashion that confirms almost anyone’s bias. But the details define the ideas wonderfully. Hardin had the spirit of a true ecologist, something that is missing so dearly in almost everyone with the microphone calling themselves that nowadays.
@Atmospheric River: The situation in NZ and Australia is that you apply for a loan on a term of say 30 years, but the rate is either ‘floating’, or fixed for a period up to 5 years. If you fix it for 5 years, at the end of those 5 years you get a choice of refixing for another period of up to 5 years, or switching to a floating rate, or paying back the loan. The bank cannot end your loan until the end of its term (the 30 years you took it out for) unless you stop making payments. The floating rate usually follows closely the central bank interbank rates with a premium. It is more common to take the floating rate in Australia, whereas fixed rates are more common in NZ. In part this reflects the sophistication of the funding for the banks (the floating rate in NZ has a higher premium on it). The reason the US can offer such long fixed rates relates partly to the depth of the capital markets for the banks and partly to the lack of relative volatility (NZ has one of the most volatile exchange rates in the world, so obtaining funding from overseas markets comes with a premium that increases with the term).
Re Kropotkin:
I’m currently reading “Mutual Aid” and I find many of his arguments convincing. One thing in particular that struck me, and maybe someone would like to comment on, is his assertion that development from a primitive state doesn’t go Family > Group > Tribe > Nation, but rather Group > Family > Tribe > Nation.
So scattered bands would initially come together in a group for mutual defense, and once there is a certain amount of security family life becomes possible. Along with family comes family ownership of people possessions and property, striving to put your kids ahead of other people’s kids, etc, i.e. looking for personal benefit instead of group benefit.
He gives many examples from nature and from human societies to bolster his argument,and I must say that here in Africa I see echoes of a group consciousness rather than a typical Western family consciousness, so I think there’s something to it, although how one would translate this into a modern political system I do not know.
#191 It sounds like the mortgages in Australia work in the same way as the UK, I hadn’t heard the term “recourse loan” probably because its just the way mortgages always work over here.
I don’t know whether you would have to requalify or just be moved from a fixed rate deal to the standard variable rate.
If you couldn’t afford the payments and had to sell but were in negative equity, then surely you would just go bankrupt?
Hi John Michael,
If I may cheekily suggest so, the author fits one of your reading criteria – now being in the realms of the beyond. Oh man, I know you’re busy. The series may shine some light and warmth into your heart and mind, especially as the nights arrive earlier now in your part of the world. A warm hearth, a good book, a dark ale, and a decent reading light are the stuff which are more worthy than the finest trappings of Emperors of yore. The author died in relative obscurity, but I must say, he took upon himself a monumental task. If you do dip your toes into the reading waters, I’d be curious to hear your opinion.
Cheers
Chris
Hi Atmospheric,
Respect! I grew up in a single parent household and comprehend the trials and tribulations of that arrangement, but from the underside as a child – feel free to ask me my of perspective, if you dare. And that maybe so about the arrangements, but a person has to understand the system in order to play it and/or escape from at least the worst excesses of it. And even then you can come unstuck.
The whole recourse arrangement is put in place I’m guessing to ensure overall stability. There has been some talk of err, mortgage prisoners. The thing is, down here, the rental vacancy rate is so low, plus demand and supply appear to be artificially meddled with, that a person gets tied down. That’s what I’d describe possibly as a feature of the system. Walking away is not an option, or at least not an easy one.
In your country, my understanding is that the loans were arranged in something like a 90% non recourse + a 10% recourse component of the loan, but with interest, it can add up. And the 10% component was sold on the cheap to possibly what could be described as speculators. It all comes down to the written details of the contract, and who bought the right to collect.
Alas, down here a household may not qualify for the same expired fixed term interest only loan, but that may well force them into the shadow banking sector.
Cheers
Chris
JMG #188: I agree. Human behaviour is very wide, we can’t deny the “positive” or the “negative” tendences because of our favorite ideology/religion. Rousseau and the naïve Left were wrong, indeed.
Hey, 1848 was widely and wildly successful. It formed modern Switzerland. And then shortly after, these pesky conservative Swiss went all in and introduced initiatives, referenda, motions and petitions and 70 years later they voted to let women vote. (lol)
Mark, granted. It really does pervade the whole tradition.
Michael, I should do a post on the Lebensreform movement, which bridged the gap between 1848 and 1968. It was an interesting phenomenon.
林龜儒, duly noted! For what it’s worth, though I don’t read Chinese, I’ve read and enjoyed The Journey to the West in translation — I know it’s later than the novelists you’re referring to, but a grand novel and a lot of fun to read.
Michael, a good point. I imagine a world in which Marx and Hitler both became successful painters; it would quite probably have been a better place. Though, curiously enough, I can’t seem to find any paintings by Marx online. Hitler’s art is much easier to find, and a bit unnerving:
Martin, it’s a fine book. It’s just that attempting to put any of his conclusions into practice, without the kind of protections against exploitation that Garret Hardin and Elinor Ostrom wrote about, has reliably bad results.
Chris, I’ll certainly keep his current status in mind. 😉
Chuaquin, exactly.
L. Undertal, are you by any chance Swiss? I’ve heard it said by various people, including some from Switzerland, that the Swiss are notoriously parochial: “Hey, it worked in our little country even though it flopped everywhere else!” seems to confirm that…
“in a perfectly unregulated market economy there was no risk of monopolies arising. ”
The drug cartels refute that nicely, or not so nicely in practice. Economies of scale are one thing, and natural monopolies are another. A uniform sense of cultural ethics (I won’t do X because X just isn’t fair) can tamp down the worst tendencies, but that’s still regulation by other means (if I do X no one will talk to me and they’ll throw stones at my kids).
JMG,
In Mein Kampf, Hitler said that he didn’t care about half the subjects taught in his middle school, did poorly in those subjects, and never graduated. He applied for art school and they told him that his drawings was better suited for architecture than for painting, and he would have gotten accepted into the art school for architecture if he had done well in middle school and graduated. If he went to art school and became an architect, he would have never gone into Vienna, seen all the poor Jewish immigrants from Russia (many of whom were refugees from the pogroms going on in Russia at the time) and became anti-Semitic.
About Crusades and land and so on: one of the weaknesses of European feudalism was what do you do with younger sons? In theory, they might be the spare who takes over if the heir dies, while others dutifully become bishops and abbots. In reality, they tend to want their own appanages. And, being well trained in the arts of war, and having their own warlike households, they have a habit of revolting against the eldest or setting out to conquer lands for themselves. See, for examples, the Reconquista in Spain and the history of the Teutonic Knights of Prussia. Some do join religious military orders, of which the Templars and the Knights Hospitallers were but two of many, but even those couldn’t absorb the available supply, nor were all younger scions of noble houses willing to give up having their own families.
A minor quibble, the term ‘Catholic’, while used in the liturgy, was, I think, not a meaningful concept for the laity; folks thought rather of Christendom, the lands of Christ.
@Michael Gray: I wonder if Gustav “Gusto” Arthur Gräser was another figure who fed into the Joculator Baliensis character in the Glass Bead Game (Joseph Matthias Hauer being one who quite plausibly did on the I Ching end of that.)
Cybertrucks look awful. It’s like mobile brutalist architecture. I saw one on the road earlier this summer, I didn’t like it at all.
JMG – I’d welcome a post on the Lebensreform (and Wandervogel for that matter). … when is the next Fifth Wed? : )
I wonder if the woke agenda is pushed so hard by the elite because they are so tied to the idea of progress. It does seem like the notions of societal progress started to ramp up just as our technological progress started to splutter. If we’re not getting the technological future that we imagined, then, by gum, we’re going to insist on getting societal progress.
The conditions that bring about a thunderstorm are still there, if one towering cumulus cloud isn’t doing it, some other towering cumulus cloud, will.
If Hitler got shot/went to art school/got abducted by aliens, I’d bet something like WW2 would’ve happened anyway. The names and details would’ve changed, but the broad outlines – would have not.
I remember a historical account of those times went something like “And the people of Germany were baying like dogs for a leader, any leader at all” after the collapse of the Weimar Republic. It sounded like there was nobody who was willing or able to deal with the consequences of all the bad decisions made earlier. Sound familiar?
The Other Owen,
What might have happened though without Hitler is that the replacement leader would have just been regarded as a normal leader like all the rest of the world leaders around WWII and wouldn’t have become the symbol of absolute evil that Hitler is regarded as in today’s society.
@The Other Owen: “And the people of Germany were baying like dogs for a leader, any leader at all”
But they were not baying for Hitler, as the historical vote tallies show. It was more of a case of “And the elites of Germany were baying for a leader (they thought) they could manipulate, any leader at all”
Karl Marx is a rather common combination of names. I see there are several painters who bore it, but they lived in the 20th century. I have never heard of the author of Das Kapital touching a brush.
Jon G @ 209, we will in time learn that the so-called woke agenda is a psy-op. Our host has previously alluded to this. Note that, as he pointed out, the woke agenda surfaced right after the Occupy movement was crushed.
Thank you BeardTree (#190) & Atmospheric River (#192) for your helpful feedback re ‘1491’.
My education (elementary through college) was pretty much the standard-age appropriate-approved-sanitized version of history taught in (most) public schools in that era (late 50s-early 70s). Not politically correct by more recent definitions, not overtly offensive, just a lot was left out (like all the interesting stuff with very few exceptions). My children got pretty much the same version of history – updated & with politically correctness beginning to kick in – and even lower in quality. It was through a fluke that I finally started reading history during my adult years – big difference! I felt like I was finally learning something.
“one of the weaknesses of European feudalism was what do you do with younger sons? In theory, they might be the spare who takes over if the heir dies, while others dutifully become bishops and abbots.”
It was quite the plot point in Jane Austen as well. The eldest son inherits, the others get to choose between the military, the law, or the Church. Edmund Bertram, Edward Ferrars, and Henry Tilney all come to mind. Colonel Fitzwilliam and Captain Wentworth had enough money to purchase their commissions (or their families did) but Wentworth at least was not wealthy when he started out.
I’ll bring up this video again by WHAT IS POLITICS? because it talks at length about equity vs. equality 9.2 – A Rainbow of Inequality: When Social Control Masquerades as Social Justice
The most recent Sean Carroll podcast interviewed Jean-Paul Faguet about Colombia, specifically about how Colombian communities are still affected by 16th-century encomienda, and Bolivia, and he made the point that it was mainly younger sons of minor nobility that went off to join the conquistadores, because it was very dangerous, so the major noble families just stayed at home. https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/08/26/287-jean-paul-faguet-on-institutions-and-the-legacy-of-history/
>But they were not baying for Hitler, as the historical vote tallies show
Correct. Their elected representatives sold them out, strictly speaking. However, Hitler did have quite a bit of fanatical support that the other factions did not have. If they hadn’t, Germany might have gone into civil war or gone to the Soviet Union. Nobody remembers the communists (because they lost and nobody likes a loser) but they were even more fanatical and wanted to be BFFs with Russia, and drag along every other German into the Soviet Union, whether they wanted to or not. So fanatical in fact, they made Hitler look downright reasonable. All he had to do was look less crazy.
Sometimes there are no good decisions to be made, they’ve all been taken off the table long ago. I don’t know if I would’ve done much better handling the collapse of the Weimar Republic. Would you?
I dunno, what’s unnerving about a sketch of a doggy? I think the general consensus is that he was good at drawing things but not spectacular. I think the current lingo would be something like “artistic midwit”? Reading between the lines, I think part of why he got rejected from art school was they knew he flunked out of secondary school. Credentials are everything to Germans (and near-Germans, yes they’re Austrian I know) and that would’ve biased them against him. Combine that with so-so talent and their decision wasn’t surprising. You want to dazzle the Germans, you need to have pieces of paper with the right symbols on it.
Maybe there’s an alternate timeline where he left Europe to go find an art school that would take him and his choice not to says a lot about him, IMHO. Then again, it’s hard to go live in a place where the language and the culture are different.
My take on the doggy is the head doesn’t look quite right, there’s something off about it. Better job than I could’ve done though.
The synchronicity on this one is on the weirder side. I had just finished listening to “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” a version spun by the late U. Utah Phillips on his old radio show, the weirdest version I’ve ever heard, just as Utah promised when he introduced it. It sounded like it was sung by a didgeridoo accompanied by Willy Wonka’s chocolate-making machinery. The performer in question was one “Baby Gramps.” When I looked him up my first thought was, “That beard looks like one from behind which I’ve heard archdruidical musings.” Which led me here for your latest.
Well, then, here it is: Baby Gramps’ version of the hobo classic. (Audio only.) A song which, by the way, is a regular lullaby for my two-year-old, and hasn’t so far caused him any harm. That I can tell.