As the orchestra warms up for the final opera of the Ring cycle, the great conflict in Richard Wagner’s mind has been settled at last. Gone is the giddy utopian fantasy Wagner took from Ludwig Feuerbach, which led him to the brink of disaster in 1849, and forced him to flee for his life to exile and poverty in Switzerland. In its place is the more profound and tragic vision of Arthur Schopenhauer. All those dreams of a perfect society that motivated Wagner in his youth have given way; the opera that was once titled Siegfried’s Death, which would have ended with a ringing cry of “Wotan’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world,” has become The Twilight of the Gods and will end with the fall of Wotan and everything he represents.
There’s a mordant irony in the fact that this is also the point at which George Bernard Shaw, whose bestselling book The Perfect Wagnerite made many of the same points I’m discussing more than a century ago, insisted that Wagner lost the plot. He claimed that Wagner, having seen his dreams of a shining socialist future disproved in the fiasco of 1848-1849, had given up on the Feuerbachian scheme that provided structure to the first three operas in the cycle, and written the music for the remainder as grand opera pure and simple, intended only to entertain its audiences. Thus his commentary on The Twilight of the Gods is dismissive and, in places, rather nasty. There are reasons for the nastiness, and we’ll get to those.
I’ve already encouraged any of my readers who doubt the importance of radical political and economic ideas in Wagner’s operas to read Shaw’s book, and I’ll reiterate this encouragement here. Shaw provides a good clear survey of Wagner’s ideas; his crisp prose is much less work to read than wading through volume after volume of Wagner’s own letters, though this is of course the final option for the unconvinced. The point that needs making here, however, is that Shaw gave those ideas their due in the first three operas but insisted that the fourth couldn’t possibly have any more to say on the same theme.
His argument is of course subtler than that. He believed that the failed revolutions of the middle and late nineteenth century had disproved once and for all the theories of revolutionary socialism upon which Wagner had based the plot of his operas. The supposedly glorious Siegfrieds of 1848 and 1849 had failed miserably, and their equivalents in later attempts at revolution had done an even worse job of fulfilling the revolutionary vision. Shaw argued, however, that all was not hopeless. A devout believer in the religion of progress, he held that the natural unfolding of human social evolution would lead inevitably to the coming of socialism by less violent means, simply because (in his view) it was so much more efficient than unchecked capitalism that even capitalists would come to agree with him. In The Perfect Wagnerite, he sketches out the course of events as he foresaw them in terms of Wagner’s own allegory:
“In real life, Fafnir is not a miser: he seeks dividends, a comfortable life, and admission to the circles of Wotan and Loki. His only means of procuring these is to restore the gold to Alberic in exchange for scrip in Alberic’s enterprises. Thus fortified with capital, Alberic exploits his fellow dwarfs as before, and also exploits Fafnir’s fellow giants who have no capital. What is more, the toil, forethought and self-control which the exploitation involves, and the self-respect and social esteem which its success wins, effect an improvement in Alberic’s own character which neither Marx nor Wagner appear to have foreseen. He discovers that to be a dull, greedy, narrow-minded money-grubber is not the way to make money on a large scale; for though greed may suffice to turn tens into hundreds and even hundreds into thousands, to turn thousands into hundreds of thousands requires magnanimity and a will to power rather than to pelf. And to turn thousands into millions, Alberic must make himself an earthly providence for masses of workmen: he must create towns and govern markets.”
All of this may seem unduly generous to the Alberichs of our day, but there’s a point to it. If you know your way around the gyrations of socialist thought, in fact, it is easy enough to recognize where all this is pointing. It points to Fabian socialism, and in fact Shaw was an early and influential member of the Fabian Society, the organization that gave its name to the branch of socialist thought we’re discussing. For the sake of readers less well versed in the ideological vagaries of the leftward end of Western intellectual history, on the other hand, a few words of explanation may be useful.
The Fabian Society is the world’s most historically influential organization that you’ve probably never heard of. It was founded in London in 1884 by a group of left-wing intellectuals who had become convinced, as Shaw was convinced, that socialism could only be brought about gradually, with the permision and cooperation of the ruling classes themselves. The name of the society came from the Roman general Fabius Maximus Cunctator, who defeated the Carthaginian general Hannibal by avoiding pitched battles and using indirect tactics. Its coat of arms in its early days—I swear I’m not making this up—was a wolf in sheep’s clothing; this compares interestingly with its official claim, also on record since its earliest days, that it proposes no policies and that the opinions of its members are solely their own. Its role in creating the ideology of the modern political and cultural left was immense, and its efforts to spread welfare state policies and social democracy worldwide had an equally immense impact on the history of the twentieth century.
The policies it promotes—or, to go along with its preferred camouflage, the policies its members promote—can be summed up neatly as top-down socialism. Instead of overthrowing the existing order of society, Fabian socialists want to reform it by convincing the very rich that it really is in their best interests to curb their ruthlessness, provide welfare benefits for the poor, and grant various amenities to society as a whole, while retaining and increasing their own power and wealth and continuing to exploit society. This is obviously a very popular form of socialism among privileged intellectuals, since it allows them to tell themselves that they’re working for a better world while still being careful to do nothing to upset the arrangements that backstop their privilege and the income associated with it.
Less obviously, perhaps, it’s very popular form of socialism among a certain fraction of the very rich. Then as now, some wealthy and powerful people like to imagine themselves as humanity’s vanguard, a steely-eyed band of supremely capable visionaries, naturally superior to everyone else, boldly piloting our species toward some allegedly glorious future or other. (Think of the antics of the absurdly wealthy at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos and you’ll recognize the type at once.) To a good many of these people, the rhetoric of Fabian socialism is a giddy intoxicant, and Fabian socialists figured out early on how to amplify that effect with sufficiently lavish flattery. Shaw was among those charged with spreading the flattery with a trowel, as his glorification of Alberich in the passage quoted above might suggest.
All this may seem worlds away from The Twilight of the Gods. It is not. As the final opera of The Ring begins, Shaw and his fellow Fabians are much more a part of the story than he or they were ever willing to admit, or even to contemplate. For the moment, though, let’s step back into Wagner’s great metaphor and talk about what’s happening on stage.
The Twilight of the Gods begins with what, as far as I know, is the longest prelude in opera—long enough that for all practical purposes it is divided into two scenes. As the curtain rises on the first of these, we are plunged deep into the world of Norse mythology. The three Norns, the goddesses of fate, are busy spinning the cord of destiny in the darkness. Once they spun it in the shade of the World-Ash-Tree, but now that is gone and they labor on the rock where Brunnhilde was left in magic sleep, stretching the cord from a pine tree to a ragged rock and back again. They sing as they work, and their song sketches out the entire mythic history of Wagner’s universe, framing the action so far. It’s not a cheerful story they sing, either. In the best Norse fashion, it leads straight to the downfall of the gods.
Here for the first time we hear of the origins of Wotan’s magic spear and the consequences of its making. It was cut from a branch of the World-Ash-Tree, and that wound caused the tree itself to die and the magic well of wisdom to run dry. While the spear remained intact, the laws and contracts written on its shaft held the world more or less in order, but now that the spear has been shattered on Siegfried’s sword all bets are off. In some of the most harrowing lines in opera, one Norn tells the others that Wotan has ordered his warriors to cut down the dead trunk of the World-Ash-Tree and pile the pieces around Valhalla, and holds Loge the fire-god captive. When the time is right, sings the Norn, Wotan will drive the broken spear through Loge’s body, and the flames thus released will burn Valhalla and annihilate the gods themselves.
But the vision of the Norns is fading as they sing, and the cord of destiny itself is fraying. Then it snaps. The Norns cry out in horror, gather up the broken pieces, and descend to the earth goddess Erda, taking their wisdom with them. All the laws that once held the world together—the laws of nature, represented by the World-Ash-Tree; the laws of contract and custom, represented by Wotan’s magic spear; and the laws of destiny itself—have ruptured. Bereft of these, the world hurtles toward primal chaos.
But the sun is rising over the rock, and as it rises Brunnhilde and Siegfried come out of the cave where they’ve just spent the night together. They’re giddy in love, and pledge eternal faithfulness to each other, even as Brunnhilde encourages Siegfried to go riding off to do more heroic deeds—he’s a hero, after all, and that’s what heroes do. She gives him her magic horse Grane, which she rode as a Valkyrie; he gives her the Nibelung’s ring, the ring he won by slaying Fafner, and by this act, all unknowing, seals her doom. Then off he goes to face the world, leaving her to be guarded by the flames, since—by Wotan’s curse—she is now an ordinary woman, without the powers she had as a Valkyrie. By this act, all unknowing, he seals his own doom as well.
Down below is the Rhine, and beside it is the palace of the Gibichungs. Yes, this is where we find our way at last back to what’s left of the historical events that set the whole thing in motion, the seed out of which sprouted the luxuriant tree of the medieval Nibelung legend, bearing Wagner’s operas as its most opulent bough. Gundahar, King of the Burgundians is there, having morphed into his legendary form of Gunther; his sister Gutrune is with him, and so is his dark half-brother Hagen. The board is set and the pieces are ready for the final tragedy.
The first move is Hagen’s, and he makes it with characteristic skill. Hagen is a fascinating character. He’s the one character in the entire Ring cycle who knows exactly what’s going on and is under no illusions whatsoever about any of it. He knows what he wants—the Ring—and he manipulates the other characters ruthlessly to get it. He fails, as we’ll see, but it’s a near-run thing. How did he get this unique combination of exact knowledge and cold mastery? It’s quite simple: like Gunther, his mother was Queen Grimhild of the Gibichungs, but his father was Alberich the Nibelung, and he learned the whole backstory at daddy’s knee.
His plan is typically subtle. Gunther and Gutrune are both unmarried. He proposes that the best bride for Gunther is Brunnhilde, and the best husband for Gutrune is Siegfried. Gunther isn’t fearless enough to pass through the fire and win Brunnhilde for himself, but Hagen has a magic potion which will make Siegfried fall in love with Gutrune. If Gunther agrees to the match, Hagen suggests, he can ask Siegfried to get Brunnhilde for him as a bride, and all’s well, right? Now of course Hagen knows perfectly well that all will not be right, but this scheme will get both Siegfried and Brunnhilde within his reach, alienate them from each other, and make it easy for him to destroy them both and obtain the Ring.
Does Siegfried fall for it? Of course he falls for it. He’s a teenage boy motivated purely by passion, after all, utterly fearless and, as previously noted, nearly brainless as well. The stage machinery of the magic potion is hardly necessary to the plot; he sees Gutrune, he wants her, and he’s perfectly willing to do whatever Gunther asks in order to get her. In fact, he adds a detail to Hagen’s frankly sleazy arrangement; he will use the magic cap he got from Fafner to make himself look like Gunther, so Brunnhilde will never know that it wasn’t Gunther who went through the flames and fetched her out as a bride.
Let’s step outside the narrative here, because this is one of the places where Wagner’s insights into the radical politics of his time and ours become uncomfortably edged. Leaving aside the mythic elements, and returning to the underlying themes of politics, economics, and society, what has just happened? Siegfried, the revolutionary vanguard onto which the young Wagner once heaped so many hopes, has just sold out to the establishment. Brunnhilde, as we’ve seen, is the ideal of liberty; Gutrune can be identified easily enough as privilege—and all of Siegfried’s heartfelt pledges of loyalty to the one went whistling down the wind as soon as he had his first serious chance at the other.
This, in turn, is why George Bernard Shaw insisted so heatedly that Wagner had lost the plot and couldn’t possibly have meant The Twilight of the Gods as the final stage of the process of social transformation traced out in the first three operas. Shaw, in the final analysis, was just one more sell-out, no different from Siegfried; he’d given up his revolutionary ambitions and settled for flattering his capitalist masters, having convinced himself that he could change the system from within. His was an unusually bleak example of selling out; by the time he wrote The Perfect Wagnerite he had convinced himself that ordinary people couldn’t possibly govern themselves, that democracy was therefore a sham, and that humanity ought to be governed by a superior class produced by eugenic policies. It’s frankly not that easy to distinguish Shaw’s ideas in later life from those of German National Socialism.
I suspect, for what it’s worth, that Wagner also recognized his own compromises with the ruling classes of his time for what they were. As noted earlier, there are kinds of art you can do successfully out on the fringes as an exile from polite society, but writing grand operas isn’t one of them—not if you want those operas to be produced, and especially not if you write them on the grandiose scale Wagner had in mind, with huge orchestras and unusually elaborate sets. In order to fulfill his creative vision, he had to compromise with a system he despised. Some of the tremendous harshness of the music that frames Siegfried’s betrayal is thus likely to come out of Wagner’s own reflections on his life and his choices.
But of course Shaw and Wagner aren’t unique in any way. Show me a radical movement among young idealists and I’ll show you, after the lapse of a very few years, a crop of former radicals who have sold out to the system they claimed they were going to oppose forever. Those of my readers who were around in the last decades of the twentieth century will recall how quickly the environmental activist groups of the 1970s turned into the slick corporate enablers of the 1980s. More recently, those who were paying attention watched core leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement use millions of dollars in donations to that movement to buy themselves big houses and lavish lifestyles, while BLM collapsed behind them. It’s an old, old story.
The rhetoric used to justify it is just as old. The George Bernard Shaws among us like to insist, when they cuddle up to the first available Gutrune, that they’ve decided that their best option was to change the system from within. A great many former hippies at the end of the 1960s, as they threw away their headbands and love beads and bought business attire, said the same thing. Even at the time, it was widely recognized as a cop-out, but in such times cop-outs are in vogue.
The Shaws among us also like to insist that time, or social evolution, or the dialectical process of history, or some other abstraction of the same kind will eventually bring about the goals they’ve stopped fighting for. That’s one of the things that Wagner meant to counter with that harrowing opening scene, where the Norns can no longer foresee the future and the cord of destiny snaps in their hands. In his mature view, drawing on Schopenhauer’s insights, the sense of historical entitlement that leads radicals to insist that history on their side is a delusion. The historical process set in motion symbolically by Alberich’s theft of the Rhinegold, and historically by the rise of abstract commodification as the central principle of society, does have a natural endpoint, but that endpoint isn’t the Utopia he once hoped for. In his view, as we’ll see, the arc of history bends inexorably toward fire, flood, and nightfall.
You touched lightly on Schopenhauer at the very beginning and again at the very end of this post. I’m hoping you’ll flesh out the middle ground.
(JMG, please delete my previous comment. I had neglected to update that version of the list with the requests from Magic Monday.)
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.
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This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests.
May Frank R. Hartman, who lost his house in the Altadena fire, and all who have been affected by the larger conflagration be blessed and healed.
May MethylEthyl, who recently fractured a rib coughing, heal without complications, and have sufficient help for the move that she and hers are making at the end of the month.
May Sub’s Wife’s upcoming major surgery on Wednesday 1/15 go smoothly and successfully, and may she recover with ease back to full health.
May David/Trubrujah’s 5 year old nephew Jayce, who is back home after chemotherapy for his leukemia, be healed quickly and fully, and may he, and mother Amanda, and their family find be aided with physical, mental, and emotional strength while they deal with this new life altering situation. (good news update!)
May Mindwind’s dad Clem, who in the midst of a struggle back to normal after a head injury has been told he shows signs of congestive heart failure, be blessed, healed, and encouraged.
May Corey Benton, who is currently in hospital and whose throat tumor has grown around an artery and won’t be treated surgically, be healed of throat cancer. He is not doing well, and consents to any kind of distance healing offered. [Note: Healing Hands should be fine, but if offering energy work which could potentially conflict with another, please first leave a note in comments or write to randomactsofkarmasc to double check that it’s safe] (1/7)
May Christian’s cervical spine surgery on 1/14 be successful, and may he heal completely and with speed; and may the bad feelings and headaches plaguing him be lifted.
May Viktoria have a safe and healthy pregnancy, and may the baby be born safe, healthy and blessed. May Marko have the strength, wisdom and balance to face the challenges set before him. (picture)
May Open Space’s friend’s mother
Judith be blessed and healed for a complete recovery from cancer.
May Linda from the Quest Bookshop of the Theosophical Society, who has developed a turbo cancer, be blessed with a successful surgery under a steady hand when she goes into the operating room in mid January, and with well-being and a speedy recovery.
May Bill Rice (Will1000) in southern California, who suffered a painful back injury, be blessed and healed, and may he quickly recover full health and movement.
May Peter Van Erp’s friend Kate Bowden’s husband Russ Hobson and his family be enveloped with love as he follows his path forward with the glioblastoma (brain cancer) which has afflicted him.
May Daedalus/ARS receive guidance and finish his kundalini awakening, and overcome the neurological and qi and blood circulation problems that have kept him largely immobilised for several years; may the path toward achieving his life’s work be cleared of obstacles.
May baby Gigi, continue to gain weight and strength, and continue to heal from a possible medication overdose which her mother Elena received during pregnancy, and may Elena be blessed and healed from the continuing random tremors which ensued; may Gigi’s big brother Francis continue to be in excellent health and be blessed.
May Jennifer, whose pregnancy has entered its third trimester, have a safe and healthy pregnancy, may the delivery go smoothly, and may her baby be born healthy and blessed.
May Scotlyn’s friend Fiona, who has been in hospital since early October with what is a diagnosis of ovarian cancer, be blessed and healed, and encouraged in ways that help her to maintain a positive mental and spiritual outlook.
May Peter Evans in California, who has been diagnosed with colon cancer, be completely healed with ease, and make a rapid and total recovery.
May Jennifer and Josiah, their daughter Joanna, and their unborn daughter be protected from all harmful and malicious influences, and may any connection to malign entities or hostile thought forms or projections be broken and their influence banished.
May Giulia (Julia) in the Eastern suburbs of Cleveland Ohio be healed of recurring seizures and paralysis of her left side and other neurological problems associated with a cyst on the right side of her brain and with surgery to treat it.
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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.
Thank you for this insightful writing. So many who hope for a better world believe it is inevitable. Sadly, that is most likely not true at all. The darkness ahead is real and brutal. Seems only by conflagration is the world renewed again.
Thank you once more for this fascinating series. I am drawn to the parallels between this great work of Wagner and a contemporary, Victor Hugo. Though there doesn’t seem to be any evidence they met or corresponded, it seems impossible Wagner would have been unaware of Les Miserables. Thanks to you, every time I hear ‘Do you hear the people sing?’ I find it impossible not to notice that all the would-be revolutionaries are of course privileged young men, and the final reward for the ultimate nepo-baby Marius is to be rescued from his own mistakes and allowed to live happily ever after thanks to the money made by Valjean’s hard work.
One thing about radicals selling out is that, when I was working on my master’s, it had me thinking a lot about Bismarck. I’m not sure where he would fit in in Wagner’s schema exactly, but what he did was present himself as all things to all people. What I was saying about him was that his goal was to become the metaphorical “house” – someone who everyone else had to go through in order to get any of the things they wanted. I guess that would make him Hagen? The key thing is, part of how he did this is that he made it as easy to sell out as possible. Yes, I’ll unify Germany. Yes, it can be “liberal” and “democratic” – it’ll have a constitution and elections and everything. Just don’t pay too much attention to the fine print. At one point, he started a war that was illegal under the constitution he had just promulgated, won it, and then dared the radical intellectuals in parliament to punish him. Predictably, they didn’t.
The thing is, as strange as it is, I’m not sure I can really credit him with any personal ambition. It honestly seems to me like he did it for the love of the game, not because he was in it for the money or personal aggrandizement. Maybe he just wanted power for its own sake.
As for the thesis itself, I’d been hoping to get it fixed up over the holidays and wound up busy with work and too exhausted to do much of anything productive. It’s still on the to-do list, but I don’t know when I’ll next be able to find the time.
Very fine. But — a small detail — I would like to question your caption to the firing-squad photo.
I believe it depicts the execution of the Archbishop of Paris and other clergy together with a distinguished jurist on May 24, 1871. These men were not Communards shot by the authorities; they were hostages who were shot by the Communards when the authorities were starting to gain the upper hand. It is therefore as you intended a good illustration of the practice, in contrast to the theory, of the Commune; only the caption is off.
See the discussion here, with the same photo:
https://genealogiepro.canalblog.com/archives/2021/05/24/38984285.html
I looked at the fabian society heraldry, and what I saw before you described it was a wolf with a dead sheep tied to its back.
Greetings all
In his view, as we’ll see, the arc of history bends inexorably toward fire, flood, and nightfall.
The collapse of civilisation and the return of barbarism?
It does not look good…
No happy ending…
Socrates said if my memory serves me ‘true wisdom is in knowing that you know nothing’. This is just a good approach when we are learning about something new. Just like when you are walking through the dark forest you close your eyes and let your retinas widen. This is very heady with a parallel to the spirit of our time(zeitgeist) John, enjoying the series.
Que up pictures and videos of Los Angeles suburbs (and possibly more) in January 2025…
This was, of course, a time of bitter division between reformers and revolutionaries, and Marxists and non-Marxists, over the question of whether a decent society could actually be constructed out of the capitalist brutality of the age, or whether violence was the only solution in the face of the expected violent resistance by Capital. In this sense, the Commune, to which you refer briefly, was a test to destruction of the idea that common people could actually govern themselves if allowed to do so. But it was also a very class based struggle, between the middle-class reformers at Versailles, who had made a humiliating peace with the the Prussians for fear of social revolution, and the largely working-class and lower middle class Communards. In the end, Thiers and his colleagues turned the same Army which had performed so poorly against the Prussians against the French people, and toasted the ensuing slaughter, when some 20,000 Parisians died, mostly unarmed civilians, as “the end of Socialism.” Next time you go to Paris, go to the Père Lachaise cemetery in the East of the city and you will find the Mur des Fédérés, the wall against which the last 174 Communards to surrender were executed. Even today, there is a ceremony there on 1 May, and fresh flowers all the year.
There were two ways of looking at that, both predicated on the idea that the ruling class would, in the last analysis, prefer its interests to those of the nation and the people, and use whatever brutality was needed to preserve its status. One route, of course, was to create revolutionary movements which would be much more organised and ruthless than the Commune had ever been. But the other, typified by the Fabians in Britain, but also by people like Jaurès in France, was gradualism, capturing institutions from the inside and slowly changing mentalities.
And what’s often not realised is that up until the mid-1970s, it really did seem as though the reformists were winning. In, say, 1970, there was full employment, old age pensions, free healthcare, free education , laws about working hours and workplace safety, everybody had the vote, rates of personal taxation were high and society was much more equal. Most Socialists of the nineteenth century would have settled for that in a heartbeat. But of course it turned out to be much more fragile than anyone expected, and was undone with frightening speed from the 1980s onwards. Perhaps the revolutionaries were right after all.
Really excellent work. The series has been long but worth it.
Wow!! Great insights John. I suppose that Gotterdamerung is logical end of pursuing Utopia
This analysis is getting better and better.
I was wondering why Hollywood had never contemplate to make an epic adventure movie with the operas music as background music and compete with the other ring cycle.
I am starting to see that indeed the plot is a little bit more politically incorrect than modern audiences could handle… or is it?
Could it be time for this movie to be made and embraced fully by the masses of modern Nibelungen, Jötun and Æsir alike?
JMG, It seems that the Fabian Socialism of our age has taken on a slightly different form than originally intended by its ” members” back in the 1880’s. Instead of focusing on ushering in socialism by providing welfare for the poor, its most modern adherents have instead focused on promoting “Billionaire Safe” socialism by providing welfare for certain portions of upper middle class society.
I think we can view Academia as a kind of upper middle class version of the “projects”. enabled by a gusher of federal loan money, and the implementation of large swaths of cushy jobs for sociology graduates. I think the same can be said other swaths of society like Teachers Unions.
That is why more and more organizations , from FEMA to schools, seem to be dysfunctional. They no longer exist to accomplish a mission, but exist to provide an armature of cushy jobs that can best capture the funds flowing down from the Billionaire class.
Karalan, well, I did give him his own post, you know…
https://www.ecosophia.net/the-nibelungs-ring-the-later-philosophy/
Quin, thanks for this as always.
Cindy, I wish they were right and I was wrong, but that’s not what history says, and it’s also pretty clearly not where we’re heading. Rather, you and the old Stoics are right — it’s only through fire and flood that the world can be renewed.
Zachariah, heck of a good question. Certainly, though, they were both intelligent, well-informed, and brilliantly creative people living at the same time and experiencing the same paradoxes in action.
Deo, I’ve occasionally wondered if Wagner deliberately drew some elements of his portrayal of Hagen on Bismarck. That is to say, you’re not wrong.
Gray Hat, so noted! I did an image search for “paris commune firing squad” and took the best image that came up. I’ve amended the caption accordingly.
Pygmycory, ha! In a certain sense, that’s an even better image of socialism.
Karim, exactly. Now you know one (though only one) of the sources of my vision of history.
Hawk, every time I encounter The Ring I notice something else that Wagner got to ahead of me. A Socratic approach to these operas is essential!
John, if they get some heavy winter rains next, it’ll have everything but the music.
Aurelien, good. Yes, the Fabian/Jaurèsiste approach worked quite well in a handful of western European countries until the limits to growth started to bite down hard. The problem, of course, is that the revolutionary option was also tested, by the Soviet Union and its satellites, the results were nothing like so good, and they also tipped over into decline around the same time. The whole socialist phenomenon was a temporary product of the fantastic economic boom that unfolded from the breakneck extraction of fossil fuels (and all the other resources for which fossil fuels were the gateway resource) — but of course that’s not something anybody in the Western world was able to grasp, and precious few can grasp it even yet.
Albrt, thank you.
Raymond, excellent! Could you take that last sentence of yours, put it on the business end of a branding iron, and apply it red hot to the backsides of all our extremist radicals of left and right alike? It might just spare us a lot of misery.
Rashakor, it couldn’t be done as a single movie; it would take at least five (The Twilight of the Gods is so huge it would need to be done as two), and I can’t imagine any Hollywood funding source coughing up the cash for something on that scale. Other art forms might be better suited to such a project. I’ve long considered turning it into a sequence of novels and retelling the whole thing in the language of science fiction; it might just be time to try that someday soon.
Clay, of course. That’s always what happens when a radical movement lets itself become a captive project of the elites. I like the idea of universities as middle-class ghetto projects — and that same analysis, it seems to me, can be extended to the whole fantastic metastasis of white collar jobs in our societies — corporate, government, nonprofit, you name it, it’s all just an equivalent of the royal courts of the eighteenth century, which hired vast numbers of servants in livery and useless officials to proclaim the greater glory of the King and buy the temporary loyalty of the masses and the aristocrats alike.
I was looking at the fabian society heraldry too and I at first saw one dog sucking at another dogs teat. Then I realized it was one dog humping another. Maybe.
@JMG,
As usual your latest essay was a pleasure to read. Until today I did not know about the first Fabian coat-of-arms – the past is indeed stranger than we can imagine! It’s ironic that a full 140 years ago socialism had already reached its reducto ad absurdum – it’s no longer about political equality (the masses being too dumb for democracy) or even about pulling down the wealthy (akshually the very rich are going to LEAD us to Utopia!)… it is socialist because it says that society ought to be centrally governed by socialists. (Obviouslly all socialists get there, sooner or later, but people like Xi Jinping are johnny-come-latelies next to George Bernard Shaw.)
To be honest, I found the plot of Gotterdamerung to be somewhat of a letdown. It’s just hard to take Siegfried seriously as a tragic hero when he spends nearly the entire opera under the influence of a potion that makes him forget his past. Tragedies are more satisfying when the protagonist is more clearly culpable in his own downfall… I am thinking stories like Othello (adapted fairly faithfully into opera by Verdi) where even though Iago is the Hagen-like “prime mover” who manipulates Othello into his doom, we also know that if it weren’t for Othello’s (freely chosen) rashness and vindictivenesd, Iago wouldn’t have had his way with him. (IIRC in one of the sources for the Brunhilde story, Siegfried never loves Brunhilde or drinks any potions; he helps Gunther make her his wife against her will solely to get Kriemhild, and this alone makes Brunhild angry enough to set off a huge blood feud.)
Do you think that Hagen’s drug has some political meaning? Is Wagner trying to make us feel pity for a brave but clueless youth who is being manipulated by forces that he dosn’t understand, and who never had a chance of coming to a happy ending no matter how innocent his motives may have been?
Dear JMG, hello, I read your article as soon as I saw it and I want to share my thoughts with you: This Fabian Socialism and its subtle form and its thinkers position themselves as such, and we know how they think – as you described -; then and now, some rich and powerful people like to imagine themselves as the vanguard of humanity, a group of steel-eyed, extremely talented visionaries, naturally superior to everyone else, boldly guiding our species towards a claimed glorious future. Apart from that, as you said in your article titled Science as Magic, we can see that science in Western Culture has run its course in terms of the space it occupies – and this worldview issue is also a choice to be chosen from nothing; Similar to what happened in Sunday Church School, SCIENCE®, which is characterized by heretics, lay novices and enthusiasts working in warehouses, told in science classes in middle and high school, is portrayed as a rebellion against authority, it is given a legendary role, so to speak, but there is a problem with this narrative, it has replaced the traditions and authorities it denigrates and now it is about to be trampled underfoot and the stories it tells for its own justification are not enough, at least not for me, apart from this, the abstract utopian thinking style of Progressive Religion is also about to be shattered and instead of the Church and Traditions it denigrates, attic inventors, warehouse researchers and laymen, instead of cows in aprons, they have become the authority they denigrate and as a result of not conforming to what they say, I can say the following; Why would a person prefer the fake (belief in Progress) when the Original (Christianity) (as the foundation of Western Culture – I am not insulting other beliefs, it is better than being the only spiritual source that created the Wasteland, after all, scientific materialism is the enemy of us all) exists? The sentence I will use here will be similar to “For centuries, Satan has been the greatest ally of the Church” attributed to Anton Szandor LaVey. “Modern Progressivism has been the greatest ally of the Church, even though it does not realize it, because it has gained its own legitimacy by denigrating it”. But here the imitation starts to fall apart and I personally experience the happiness and peace of returning to the Original and I say; I DO NOT WANT TO KNOW, I WANT TO BELIEVE. Thank you for your beautiful article.
I used to wonder what it would be like for Woody Allen to turn the Ring Cycle into a movie series about four generations of a Jewish family from Brooklyn. Each movie would cover a 30 year span. 1920 – 1950, 1950 -1980, 1980 – 2010, 2010 – 2040. If Twilight of the Gods is lang enough to make two movies you could just push it back another 30 years and start in 1890 – 1920.
Interestingly enough there is a table top roleplaying game called Space 1889. I would love to see what you would come up with as a Science Fiction series version of the Ring Cycle with each generation sowing the seeds for the next generation to rebel against and the grandchildren to emulate.
JMG,
I’ve known nothing about Fabian socialism but its name. As soon as you started describing it, I thought, “Oh dear God(s). So, this is where all this bull-shale comes from.” And in the next paragraph you have a picture of our “beloved leaders” at their favorite annual party hangout.
I’ve seen three of the four operas live – at the NYC Met itself. There were no yellow bunny costumes, though there was the “Machine” in at least two of them. I never expected that what I perceived as a slightly and strangely disjointed series of operas held these rather veiled meanings and was an extended essay on industrialism, social activism and our future.
Over the years I really wanted to get a fuller view of your ideas about Socialism. One of the problems I’ve had is knowing what questions to ask, since the whole concept of this movement is so steeped in cant and fantasy. I have expected that you would clarify, at least, certain things over time. Thank you, you have.
@Karim Jaufeerally (#8) & JMG (#16) in reply:
Robert E. Howard made exactly the same point in one of his stories about Conan the Cimmerian (“Beyond the Black River), which ends:
““Barbarism is the natural state of mankind,” the borderer said, still staring somberly at the Cimmerian. “Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must ultimately always triumph.”
That seems to me to be the natural course of history over the long millenia. Martin Luther King Jr’s famous quote about the arc of history bending toward justice, albeit slowly, seems to me deeply mistaken, a mere product of his wishful thinking.
Thanks, Zachariah #4. I was about to cite Les Miserables myself…..
@JMG re: the Los Angeles fires & possible heavy rains: I was there when the same thing happened in North-Central New Mexico, and wiped out an iconic and thriving apple farm,among other things. First, a forest fire that left the hillsides barren; then a heavy rainfall. Nasty mess, that. It’s the kid of thing that, like the Lockdown of 2020, acts as a hard reset, after which nothing is really the same.
@Raymond: Amen!
Re: Doing the entire Wagnerian epic as a movie: They did that with LOTR. And with Dune. And with Game of Thrones (on TV). Or did. To the tune of “Great Ponderous Medieval Epics Sell Big!” Or was that an artifact of the tail end of the 1990s Age of Excess?
“The George Bernard Shaws among us like to insist, when they cuddle up to the first available Gutrune, that they’ve decided that their best option was to change the system from within. A great many former hippies at the end of the 1960s, as they threw away their headbands and love beads and bought business attire, said the same thing.”
I was a bit too young to be a 60’s hippie (born in 1960), but close enough to the era to somewhat partake, and certainly have many friends (and later colleagues) from the era. They (We? Although I was hopeful about their chances at first, I am a natural cynic… so I flip-flopped a lot over my life) may not have changed the system but they definitely changed its character. In the office, at least at first, the changes seemed positive, loosening things up and making it a bit more fun to perform that kind of repetitive, mostly tedious work. But over time, like every other “hope and change” theory/philosophy/ -ism I have ever encountered, the sociopaths get a hold of it and fold-spindle-mutilate it to suit whatever narrative they need in order to get what they want. And of course, many non-sociopaths get taken in, until finally those best intentions are installed by System Pavers on the path to you-know-where.
Yup, cynics R us.
Raymond #13: agreed. There will be more attempts to make society better and believe that the ensuing chaos will be worth it, because the resultant utopia will allow us all to reveal our better natures. As Captain Sisko said in Deep Space Nine: “it’s easy to be a saint in Paradise.”
Which leads me to a quote from another of my favorite fictional characters:
“ Sure as I know anything I know this, they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, 10, they’ll swing back to the belief that they can make people better.”
JMG, I’ve no words to describe how much I have enjoyed this series about the Ring!
Hi John Michael,
Thank goodness you explained the sheep in wolfs clothing bit, I thought it were two animals in an act of copulation! 😉 That’s what it looks like to me, but then maybe here I can blame a misbegotten youth reading Mad Magazine and of course, National Lampoon. And let’s not start discussing the very bawdy English comedy of my youth.
Hmm, the entire story sounds all very tawdry. Truly, only the hermits, ascetics and fringe folks are under less sway. Idealists these days passionately hunger for nuclear power and other trappings, despite the long term costs. Always was it thus.
Why do I feel the influence and long shadow of those Fabian folks on big events during the past few years? How many times do they have to fail, before giving up the dream?
Cheers
Chris
“I’ve long considered turning it into a sequence of novels and retelling the whole thing in the language of science fiction; it might just be time to try that someday soon.”
Stephen Donaldson did a sci-fi series loosely based on the Ring, the Gap cycle, which I may have to reread after reading your articles to see how he treats the themes – I remember there was no direct equivalent of the Ring, and more importantly I don’t think he attempted to work in any extensive scheme of symbolism (but maybe he did and it all went over my head…) I remember enjoying it, though mostly the later books, as the early ones were a bit too full of horrible people doing horrible things.
(Donaldson’s first published series – the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant – *did* involve a magic ring, although rather different from both Tolkein’s and Wagner’s.)
“It’s frankly not that easy to distinguish Shaw’s ideas in later life from those of German National Socialism”
I tried googling for his opinions on Hitler and found this, from the New York Times in 1933:
“LONDON, Nov. 23 — Still calling himself a good Socialist and a democrat, George Bernard Shaw sang praises of Chancellor Hitler and dictators generally in the annual Fabian lecture tonight.”
The rest of the article is paywalled, alas. Shaw did think Hitler was too harsh on the Jews, though Shaw’s idea on how to resolve the issue was to forbid Jews from marrying each other so they’d be absorbed into the German population and the problem would be over.
@pymycory #7: That is exactly what I saw, too!
MOLF, maybe so. I suppose it could be seen as a Rohrschach inkblot onto which one can project one’s opinions of socialism…
Sandwiches, oh, it’s a tragedy all right, but Siegfried isn’t the tragic character. Brunnhilde is, Her fatal flaw is that she thinks, as the Beatles sang later, that “love is all you need.” Remember that she’s the one, in her misery and rage, who tells Hagen about the vulnerable spot on Siegfried’s back, and thus dooms him and herself. As for your interpretation of the potion, that’s quite possible, yes.
Yiğit, well, that’s certainly one choice. There are more than just those two, however, and I choose one of the other options.
Moonwolf8, that would have been an amazing cycle of movies! As for the game, I know it and have played it. As a steampunk SF RPG, it’s hard to beat.
John, most American opera companies are hopelessly out of their league when they try to do the Ring, even without marshmallow bunny costumes; it requires a richer grasp of culture and history than most people have on this side of the Atlantic. (This is one of the reasons I don’t expect the Ring to survive the dark age ahead.) As for Socialism, I consider it to be the final product of liberal Protestant Christianity — a religion without God, a church without sacraments, messianism without a messiah and the most crassly material version of Heaven on record. Faustian culture reached its pinnacle and its reductio ad absurdum simultaneously when socialism was born.
Patricia M, that’s good to hear. A really drastic reset might actually help, since LA (and California generally) have to brace themselves for traumatic change now that the age of American overseas empire is over.
Laughingsong, what the optimist calls cynicism, the pessimist calls realism. I’m glad you’re enjoying this series!
Chris, they’ll never give up the dream. That’s just it — disastrously self-defeating as it is, Fabian socialism appeals too powerfully to the vanity of intellectuals and plutocrats alike to be set aside, until the civilization that gave rise to it crumbles away beneath it.
Gottschalk, was that what Donaldson was up to in the Gap cycle? I was unimpressed enough by the second Thomas Covenant series that I never read it. Thanks for the Shaw reference — no surprises there.
I have to agree with Sandwiches that the potion business doesn’t quite work. Complete contrast to Tristan where the “potion” could have been anything (as Tristan later acknowledges). Both he and Isolde thought they were drinking poison and were prepared to die — that is what released them from the prison of their conscious “values” and forced both of them to understand their actual feelings. But in Gotterdammerung? It’s a letdown — after that staggering prelude — the opening scene with the Norns is some of the greatest music ever composed and the love duet in the second scene is wholly and triumphantly convincing in contrast to the preceding love duet at the end of Siegfried which feels forced. I suppose Wagner was faced with a dramatic problem — how do you show Siegfried’s loss of idealism and capitulation to the humdrum world of illusion and get-on to go-on (as well as the distraction that any hot-blooded teenage boy is going to feel in the presence of a beautiful woman hitting on him even if he had just pledged eternal fidelity to another one). Well… the potion is a “solution” of a sort, although it feels like a gimmick. In his defense, Wagner would probably have needed another whole opera to show in convincing detail Siegfried’s transformation from young idealist to McKinsey consultant but his “solution” does lead to, well, some fidgeting/boredom on the part of at least this listener. After that incredible prelude to sit through all these sleazy machinations is a trial. Of course it doesn’t last too long so I suppose it’s a reasonable price to pay, particularly given the following scene when Waltraute visits Brunnihilde up on the rock and begs her to give up the Ring. — now THAT is opera at its greatest — followed of course by what amounts to the rape scene that brings the curtain down on Act 1. You were so right to identify Brunnhilde as the great tragic figure of the whole cycle — the disillusionment and rage that follows when you realize that no, love is not all you need. Yet how could we live without that illusion? Fantastic essay, JMG — the dissection of Shaw is just so delicious. (Shaw did have a point when he noted how the plot of Gotterdammerung showed more than traces of the plot of Norma — Wagner had high regard for Bellini and learned a good deal from him, particularly the technique of spinning out seemingly endless melodies.)
I‘ve read your weekly posts for 15 years now.
This series on Wagner’s Ring Cycle is among my favorites of all your writings.
I’ve always been impressed by your birds-eye view of the history of ideas, of civilizations and of culture.
This Ring series shines with you being at your best, showing your skills at being a master weaver and meaning-maker.
I do hope you consider compiling the full series together in a single printed volume for sale.
I’d promise I’d buy at least a dozen to give away.
Perhaps to use as the first Seminar book to help birth a new living university, changing “higher education” by starting off both by offering such clarity about what not to do with the gift of our lives, and also by demonstrating what intellect is actually good for. Combine that type of book-learning with teaching real physical work, and who knows, maybe more can make it through this approaching dark age than we usually imagine.
If done without any expectations of success, I don’t see any reason not to try.
Thanks again for your efforts and contributions.
Take care
With respect to, “Show me a radical movement among young idealists and I’ll show you, after the lapse of a very few years, a crop of former radicals who have sold out to the system they claimed they were going to oppose forever.”
There is Eric Hoffer’s observation, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
Sometimes, especially nowadays, “eventually” is just a few years.
I just want to say thank you. I’ve been reading you online, and in and increasing hardcopy collection, for about 5 years now. I look forward to your writing, and this series in particular. Really enjoy your appearances on Hermitix too. You take care in 2025, and a peaceful, prosperous New Year to you.
Where can I find a high quality video performance of the entire Ring series, ideally with some sort of English translation to accompany it, so I can follow the plot?
This question may well have been answered before, maybe even repeatedly. I never had any interest in watching this opera, or any opera, really — beyond maybe Phantom. But you’ve imparted me with a desire to try to appreciate it properly, if I can just find a video version of good quality. Thanks!
In this connection, I think of Randall Collins’ concept of “sinecure”, as developed & deployed in his “The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification “.
It has to do with the development of credentialism (and licensing of various sorts), and the at best loose connection between credential and capacity. The book is well worth a look because it predates (at least in its first edition, and even in its second) a lot of the current issue of “professional managerialism”.
Briefly, credentials establish authority, restrict access to authority, establish entitlement to payment or patronage, and establish levels of hierarchy and credibility within any type of authority. They also create a way to absorb “surplus labor”, and a way to distribute “surplus production”. It applies these concepts not only to the US of its time, but also to other governmental and social forms., although not in as much detail.
I can’t begin to do it justice here., but it’s well worth a look.
@JMG, Tag Murphy,
I suppose you are right about Brunnhilde being the main tragic character… she certainly is more aware of what’s going on than he is and makes more of the decisions that drive the plot. Also I agree with Tag Murphy about that scene where Waltraute visits Brunnhilde’s rock being one of the greatest in all opera!
One point of quibbling – I don’t think it’s fair to chalk up Siegfried’s quickness to forget about Brunnhilde and chase some other woman to his being “a teenage boy.” The fact is, I was a teenager once and I have known plenty of chaste teenage boys – youngsters who are more concerned about preparing for a faithful marriage with one woman than with chasing anyone who catches their eye. (And yes, this applies to energetic and athletic boys too, not just to the shy ones.) Granted, it is an attitude more commonly found in some cultures than others (and it matters a lot what kind of relationship the boy’s parents modeled for him) but I think that the folks who ascribe wild lust to teenagers and young people in general are just projecting their own weaknesses onto humanity at large.
Since it came up, Shaw’s views on the Nazis and many other political subjects are expressed with wonderful clarity in the prefaces to certain of his plays, namely On the Rocks: https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300561h.html and Geneva: https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300551h.html In brief, he thought they were obviously on to something with their policies and obviously superior to Britain’s gormless parliamentary system, though also wrong about many particulars. (They were, after all, not as smart as him…)
It may be worth noting that his opinions did differ from that of many other Fabians; the Webbs, while enthusiastic if sometimes moderately critical supporters of Stalin and initially somewhat sympathetic to Mussolini, drew the line at Hitler and were fairly scandalised by Shaw’s position, which he probably took as encouragement. He comes off as something of a contrarian troll politically, but if a man trolls consistently in one direction, that does suggest something about his actual views.
Not surprised that his response to Wagner’s tragic turn was to go “nothing to see here”, though. I think he was smart enough to realise that things might not go as he hoped, but struggled desperately to believe in the human “evolutionary” destiny of utopia and immortality. Engaging properly with Wagner’s pessimism would likely not have helped him in that struggle.
So what is Hagen, from the political perspective? Or will we get to that later?
Wow… quite simply, for all our facades, we are animals and will bend the knee for primal needs. Often we justify and/or confuse them with something more just. That was the seed planted when we were born, and the seed planted when civlizations appear. It’s a depressing thought, but seeds mutate often, do they not?
@JMG, others:
Once more I have some interesting links that I think some of the readers here might light. First off, our host’s digression into Fabian Socialism and the silliness of an ideology that looks to the very rich to lead society into a “socialist” future that can’t be achieved through egalitarian means made me think of this fine essay called “Defining Leftism” that Tree Of Woe posted a year and a half ago.
https://treeofwoe.substack.com/p/defining-leftism
He argues that when ordinary people define the political Left as the egalitarian faction (while the Right is pro-hierarchy) they’re wrong, since actual leftist societies (like the USSR, or whatever Bernard Shaw was trying to build) are intensely hierarchical. Rather, as he says, “Leftism does not seek to diminish the impact of all social hierarchies. It certainly seeks to abolish most social hierarchies, but only because it wants to erect a new one. Here is how I define Leftism: ‘Leftism’ is a political ideology which holds that there is one moral and legitimate social hierarchy, the social hierarchy of individuals ordered by their degrees of demonstrated commitment to Leftism. A socio-economic hierarchy is permitted only to the extent that it is necessarily in alignment with commitment to Leftism. All other social hierarchies based on all other qualities must be dismantled….”
It’s worth reading the whole thing. Also, there is an article on the Twilight Patriot Substack called “Our Medieval Scientific Heritage” that reviews a pair of books about science and technology in what most people call the “Middle Ages.” The author argues that the idea of an intellectually or technologically stagnant Middle Ages is nonsense, and that the people who lived back then were actually way more thoughtful and innovative than the post-Enlightenment myths give them credit for.
https://twilightpatriot.substack.com/p/our-medieval-scientific-heritage
Granted, the guy who wrote it doesn’t fully agree with the Ecosophian worldview – he still appears to use the word “progress” as a shorthand for “things that are praiseworthy,” and he obviously believes that the minority of medieval thinkers who rejected astrology were ahead of the curve. Still I think it is worth reading if you’re curious about how much of the ideas that we modern people take for granted are actually owed to the unique intellectual and commercial life of medieval Europe.
Ah yes, the Fabians. Read any history of New Zealand politics and the Fabian Society stands out as a big influence – especially the Webbs – in developing the idea of a ‘Better Britain’. That quote @eGrand Cinq-Mars gave of Hoffer’s pretty much sums up the trajectory.
@Rashakor #14 – There have been at least two notable works of screen art in the 20th century using music from the ring cycle:
‘Apocalypse Now’, where the Ride of the Valkyries is famously used as a backdrop to a US helicopter raid of a Vietnamese village. Looking back on this scene with a JMG lens it is a perfect illustration of end-of-empire excess and cruelty.
And of course, ‘What’s Opera, Doc?’ where the great philosopher of our age, Bugs Bunny, shows adults and children alike the folly of the pursuit of power, and gives us the most succinct summary of the cycle possible: “Well, what did you expect in an opera? A happy ending?”
Reading this essay reminded me of Shaw’s best known play, Pygmalion. I never watched the play, only the musical movie starring Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn.
In Shaw’s own afterword, he attacks the ending the musical gave to the play, where Eliza (representative of the lower class lifted up) returns to Henry Higgins (upper class intellectual). He says Eliza marries Freddy (stupid downwardly mobile aristocrat) and they both live with Higgins and are dependent on him and the Colonel for a long time while they try to set up a flower shop and learn the associated skills with running a business. After a long time of despairing at adult commercial school lessons, the business found a market selling vegetables in addition to flowers and became self-sufficient, besides holidays taken on the Colonel and Higgins’ dime. Eliza nags Higgins viciously but still lives in the same roof.
I guess that’s Shaw’s own ideal of how class relations would work. The intellectual “betters” supporting the deserving poor and the downwardly mobile to a middle class existence by their scolding, arrogant largess.
Another thought I had was that Effective Altruism, Extropianism etc are the latest descendants of this idea. Underneath it all, there is this idea that the ends justify the means, and that the intellectual elite know the ends better than mere mortals. I think the FTX collapse struck a blow at EA, but it remains there, simmering in the minds of much of the elite.
Following Moonwolf8’s comment, such movie has probably been made. Sunshine (1999) by Istvan Szabó described how multiple generations of a typical intellectual Jewish family struggled with their quests for integration, prestige and power. The glorious ups and then tragic downfalls, quite wagnerian in my opinion.
Regards,
Thanks John, another great article.
“I’ve long considered turning it into a sequence of novels and retelling the whole thing in the language of science fiction; it might just be time to try that someday soon.”
Fantastic idea, consider that a sale already.
Regards Averagejoe
I didn’t comment on the Wagner series, because I didn’t have much to add to this excellent discussion. But the mention of social democracy as the materialist form of an ideal political economy for Western civilization, which needs an industrial civilization on its economic pinnacle to work, ledas to the question which kind of political economy would work well in an industrial civilization in decline, especially regarding the current crisis period in which Western civilization finds itself, partly due to neoliberal policies?
As for the Wagner operas, I find it intriguing that the Wagner operas in Bayreuth (Germany) have become something in which upper class people and members of the bourgeois class indulge, in light of the meanings and symbolism of the Ring cycle, as laid out in these blog posts.
>he had convinced himself that ordinary people couldn’t possibly govern themselves, that democracy was therefore a sham, and that humanity ought to be governed by a superior class produced by eugenic policies. It’s frankly not that easy to distinguish Shaw’s ideas in later life from those of German National Socialism.
Hello Mr. Greer,
Is that not the nature of most systems us Humans make? They speciate us by assigning lots to people depending on the degree of their aptitudes within a system that organizes this – to some supposed telos, or eventual instrumentality. Since most people lack an Intellect – since it irritates their biological circuitry – they have allowed Caste Systems, Catholic Ecuemes, Industrial-Bureaucratic structures, or AI/AGI to either repress, suppress the indivdual wills to some total-end as per where an elite want to take it. I think America avoided this initially due to it’s frontier like nature and “warring” ways as Tocqueville pointed out, but as systems close up hierarchies form like we are seeing.
Planasthai
@JMG, you’ll notice that none of the examples of life getting better that I cited involved spending much money, or using shiny new technology. It’s a common mistake to assume that we improve life through technology, but this isn’t always the case. Full employment and the ending of widespread poverty were achieved after 1945 in societies which were “poorer” than ours is, and “lower-technology” than ours is, and there’s no reason, except for politics and the concentration of economic power in certain hands, why they couldn’t be implemented now. In practice, most people don’t want technological advances for their own sake: they are more concerned with the quality of their daily lives, and previous generations of politicians realised this. (There is, of course, an important strain of techno-scepticism in the Socialist tradition, from the Luddites to William Morris to George Orwell.) In fact, a major problem today is actually technological decline: we no longer have the capacity to maintain and replace the infrastructure built 100-150 years ago in many western societies.
It’s also important to remember the fear of progress itself, because of its subversive potential. Political elites in the nineteenth century worried that universal education (which most people would see a progress, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this and you wouldn’t be reading it) would be the first step to creating an educated general population which would make demands that would lead in turn to bloodshed and revolution. Better to keep our ancestors ignorant. And as late as the 1970s, figures on the political Right tried to insist that improving workplace safety or introducing compulsory maternity leave was the first step towards introducing Soviet-style Gulags. Mind you, the Left suffers from a parallel delusion: that any attempt to improve the living conditions of ordinary people will result in a military coup, so it’s not worth trying.
‘Karalan, well, I did give him his own post, you know…’
Thanks, I’d forgotten that post. Worth a re-read.
Tag, thanks for this. Of course Wagner borrowed from Bellini — if I knew opera better I’d probably be able to point to a dozen other operas he drew on here and there for inspiration, and no doubt Shaw would have been able to do the same if he hadn’t been frantically trying not to think about how exactly he was playing the role of Siegfried.
Chris, I’m already assembling the manuscript. The challenge won’t be turning it into a book, it’ll be finding somebody willing to publish something at once so recherché and so politically incorrect.
LeGrand, of course you’re quite right — and so was Hoffer. (As usual.)
Oisín, thank you and may your wishes be visited on you as well.
Gnat, somebody else will have to answer that one.
LeGrand, hmm! Many thanks for this — that book will fill a significant gap in my theory of historical cycles.
Sandwiches, so noted, but I also remember my own teenage years, and how quickly and uncritically I and most of the young men I knew responded to any expression of interest from a woman!
Daniil, thanks for this. I wasn’t aware of that, but it doesn’t surprise me at all.
Prizm, indeed they do, and now and then one of the mutations takes root.
Sandwiches, thanks for both of these. Tree of Woe is of course quite correct here. I think it was Robert Anton Wilson who defined socialism as the attempt to eliminate coercion by handing all economic power to the state, and also giving the state a monopoly on the power of coercion: that is to say, whitewashing a wall by painting it black.
KAN, again, no surprises there.
Alvin, of course! Shaw was an utter snob. The movie’s ending is much better. As for “Effective Altruism,” I’ve rarely laughed so hard as when I first read about that, as it’s hard to think of any movement that is either less effective or less altruistic.
Averagejoe, there are a couple of core issues I need to work out before I can do it, notably how to make the Ring work in any meaningful way in the kind of deindustrializing setting that I want to use. Still, it’s on my mind.
Booklover, no form of political economy works well in a society in decline. Neither does anything else — that’s why the decline continues, and ends in collapse.
Planasthai, plenty of societies avoid that trap, usually by working out social customs that prevent the accumulation of wealth — the potlatch system of the old Northwest Coast native peoples is one example that many have heard of. The flipside is that such societies don’t become civilizations, because you need massive accumulations of wealth in few hands to build one of those. Joseph Tainter points out in The Collapse of Complex Societies that every measure of social complexity is also a measure of inequality. Since civilizations are also self-terminating, there’s a cycle: societies move into the kind of system you’ve described, and that system then runs through its changes and self-destructs, leaving the survivors back in a simpler and much less rigidly hierarchical world.
Aurelien, I think you’ve misunderstood me. The changes I have in mind aren’t shiny new technology — they’re things like mechanized agriculture and mechanized mass production. Between 1820 and 1970, those factors, driven by the breakneck extraction and exploitation of fossil fuels, sent the price of most necessities plunging to unprecedentedly low levels. I like to point out that during the English Regency, clothing theft was a major crime problem in London and other English cities — maidservants on errands literally had to worry about being robbed of their clothes. Why? Because even in the early days of mechanized fabric production, ordinary clothing was so expensive that few working class people had more than two sets. In the century and a half that followed the Regency, food, clothing, soap, heating fuel, and most other necessities became so cheap that it was easy for elite classes to placate the poor by making these things readily available. Once fossil fuel supplies could no longer keep up with rising demand, in turn, that began to break down — and yes, the rising tide of infrastructure failure is another sign of that same process.
Karalan, you’re welcome.
@Plantasthai (#46) wrote: “Most people lack an intellect.”
In my experience this is very very far from true, unless by “having an intellect” one means “being an academic intellectual.” Very many working people are extremely thoughtful and wise. I have always found such people to be much better company than most academics. There’s something about having to work with your hands to earn a living that frees up the mind of many people for developing a deep understanding of life. During all my decades of teaching at an Ivy League university, some of the least thoughtful people I met were, alas! faculty colleagues, and also many upper-crust students. On the other hand, some of the most thoughtful people I met did physical labor in the university’s Buildings-and-Grounds department.
An elderly Portuguese-American janitor in my building, whose English was functional but quite limited, turned out to be a deep reader of Medieval mystics (whom he read in their original Spanish, or in Portuguese translations). He was in his 80s when I knew him, but he still needed an income, so he had told the University he was only in his high 50s. One could not doubt that he had a functioning intellect.
Another man, who also worked in B&G, was a former Police detective (retired, but not ready to stop working), a very kind and deeply thoughtful person. We asked him and his wife to be godparents to our younger son.
I could multiply examples, but I think two are enough to make the point.
I agree that Siegfried being drugged into falling in love with Gutrune doesn’t work very well. When I read that I thought, “Date rape drug!” Siegfried is no longer a free agent and can’t be held accountable for his actions.
Brunnhilde later accusing him of betrayal is disingenuous. If at least he could have felt lust for Gutrune before being given the love potion, that would have shown that he was tempted while still in his right mind and therefore was at least willing to abandon the ideal of Brunnhilde as harsh justice for Gutrune as cheap pleasure. The significance would have been better, as well. Siegfried would have felt irresistibly attracted to the alure of a rich and decadent society, so he willingly drank the Kool-Aid to remove any guilt.
Jerry Rubin, who abandoned radical activism in the 60’s to become a businessman in the 70’s and who convinced himself that he was, ‘more effective… working on Wall Street… than dancing outside the walls of power,’ showed that he took a good slug of potion from the drinking horn, himself.
Biden provided a fine demonstration of the cycle of decline in his last address to the nation last night. After decades of service to the oligarchy, he (and Jill) gave forth to his rage at being turned out of their reward for faithful service last July, by warning us about the perils of that oligarchy! Brunhilde could do no better.
Seems looking for Utopia in all the wrong places is a never-ending distracting quest for humans at various stages of development and time. I found this post particularly of interest as am reading THE NIRVANA EXPRESS – HOW THE SEARCH FOR ENLIGHTENMENT WENT WEST… never knew Annie Besant was member of Fabian Society. Funny that Rajneesh/ Osho also felt Socialism would evolve from unbridled Capitalism. Guess he also felt he was helping move things along with his personal material gluttony😉
Thank you for great post.
Jill C yogaandthetarot
@JMG said “Sandwiches, so noted, but I also remember my own teenage years, and how quickly and uncritically I and most of the young men I knew responded to any expression of interest from a woman!”
Yes, this is obviously true. Most youngsters are not going to put off being interested in girls until their parents and/or society at large say they are ready to marry, and certainly not Siegfried, the very archetype of a rootless rebel! But you’ve also got to remember that Siegfried is not starved for affection – after all he did just sing those wonderful love duets with Brunhilde, a literal daughter of the Gods, while exchanging magical tokens of fidelity and apparently also consummating the relationship at some point. Hence my belief that Hagen’s potion is still necessary for the plot to work.
Also, you can count me among your readers who would gladly buy a volume (or two or three or four!) of deindustrial fiction inspired by Wagner’s Ring cycle. And I look forward to seeing how you close the plot holes – how, for instance, does the feral child Siegfried suddenly know how to make a sword (or whatever you use in place of Notung)? Why is the reforged blade stronger than Wotan’s spear when the old one wasn’t? Whatever motive do you find for Siegfried’s betrayal in place of that dissatisfying forgetfulness potion?
Also, if you ever finish that epistolary novel you once mentioned on here – the Tolkienesque fantasy that subtly mocks the concept of a “Dark Lord” – I would happily read that one too.
Interesting to note David Lynch passed away. The worlds last great auteur gone as Hollywood burns. I still like his version of Dune… but Hollywood burned him there, and he always demanded final cut afterwords.
It’s hard to imagine how film will survive, if at all. It’s so resource and time intensive, we’ll be going back to theater on the stage at some point.
Also Agent Dale Cooper certainly counts as an at least quasi occult detective. You don’t go into the astral black lodge without that being the case.
Since no one better qualified has offered gnat a recommendation for a video of the Ring, I’ll mention that I did a little research on this when JMG started the series. The production that appeared in almost every critic’s “top 3” list was the one by Daniel Barenboim and Harry Kupfer, recorded at Bayreuth in 1991-92. The 11-disc DVD set, which offers subtitles in more than one language, is published by Warner Classics / Kultur. The usual cautions about NTSC vs PAL apply.
The singing and acting are — in my opinion — quite good, but be warned that the staging is modernistic and minimalist, which may not be to your taste.
@ Clay Dennis #15 and JMG
I had a similar idea years ago when a friend of mine, who is a retired professor, invited me to a conference held in the prestigious Collège de France in Paris, an institution which exists since the Middle Ages. Basically we heard a number of respectable academics read solemn texts about ancient Roman priests and other subjects which have been studied again and again for centuries.
One of the academics was one of my friend’s former students. She’s a very bright lady who can speak 9 languages and has written at least several dozen books, at least one of which is 800 pages thick. She made a half hour speech about the first verse of the Bible. We concealed our amusement the best we could, because what she said was full of pedantic expressions such as “l’hypostase de la corrélation ternaire”. In English: The hypostasis of the ternary correlation. The expression is as opaque in French as it is in English. We had lunch with her after the conference, and I’m glad to say that she’s a quite pleasant person, and quite un-pedantic in private.
My impression was that academia, in France, is a prestige institution. In this respect it is similar to the castle of Versailles and other vestiges of a glorious past. In my opinion, this is what justifies all the taxpayer money spent on it. Besides, it provides cushy jobs, as you said, to well-connected people in need of employment, just like Georgetown University in the USA, where disgraced former FBI agent Peter Strzok is now a professor.
American universities attract students from all over the world, who pay full tuition. Xi Jin-Ping’s daughter was a student at Harvard, and three of Turkish president Erdogan’s four children attended American universities. Money spent on American universities is therefore not only an investment in prestige but also in soft power.
One of the things about socialism that has fascinated me is how obsessed with aesthetics it is. To the point that aesthetics seem to matter far more than political or economic policy. Those are but an afterthought. China for example still flies red flags and has hammers and sickles on buildings and has state ownership of large segments of industry but the actual stated goal of improving commoners lives and giving them the chance to make command decisions is totally absent. Socialism is the red flags and garish posters nothing else. A series of stage sets for middle class intellectuals to play act at building the future. In the west of course the Bolshevik influenced aesthetics would never fly, so we get the cheap metal, glass and concrete of the Davos and silicon valley sets instead but the end goal is the same. A series of stage sets. Both of the western and eastern flavors got into space exploration as an expression of the progressive drama too, and Zemyatin in We satirized that all the way back in the 1920’s. Never mind if it makes sense, it appeals to middle class intellectuals.
This focus on set building I would guess began with Fourier and his Phalanstery concept, but I wonder why it’s such a big deal for them. Things that are far more effective at bringing about a world they claim to want (say, a tax regime that favors Co-ops to give workers a stake in their firms) are always ignored in favor of this monomyth of a managed and planned society based on “reason”. Even their nominal enemies in Libertarianism fantasize about the same thing. With the nominal difference that joint-stock conglomerates will be doing the planning instead of the state or a public-private partnership. The actual effectiveness of these centralizing policies are, to the believer immaterial, they have to be followed on purely aesthetic grounds.
Is the severe focus on aesthetics a legacy of the 19th century?
Cheers,
JZ
As a sellout, this hits really hard.
Ah, Fabian socialism: the system where the rich and influential get to ‘have’ their cake and ‘eat’ it, too! I guess I’m innumerate because in ‘my dictionary’ it’s a four-letter word! 😊
Thanks, JMG, for mentioning this horrid latter-day form of socialism that, to my eye, infected so much of the West (and some other countries) during the last third of the 20th century up to today. India’s first prime minister (Nehru) was a Fabian Socialist: he sat devotedly at the feet of Mahatma Gandhi playing the part of the good chela and as soon as he was declared PM, he threw all of Gandhi’s theories of ‘freedom’ and ‘self-sufficiency’ in the dustbin and replaced them with Soviet-style five-year plans and social experimentation that were like DEI on steroids. In my eyes, Canada has been a captive of this sinister, insidious form of socialism from the day that Pearson became PM in 1963. It had a good ‘run’, too – running the middle class right into the ground and turning Canada’s once enviable gini coefficient into the predictable master-and-slave binary of today, with the same old Laurentian Elite keeping its rigor-mortis stricken hands on the reins power as if it is the embodiment of the tarot card ‘Death’.
I love your definition of socialism as “a religion without God, a church without sacraments, messianism without a messiah and the most crassly material version of Heaven on record”. I’ve been wrestling with the right comparison of it with Protestant Christianity and you hit the nail right on the head!
On the subject of publishing this series of posts, at the present moment it may seem to be politically unpopular. Maybe so at present, but the Overton window (at least in North America) is shifting at light speed these days so perhaps in a few years a sizeable segment of the intellectual population may be ready to read your words!
First of all, I should admit that this time, I haven’t yet read the libretto, in part because this is the part of the story I know in other versions. The prelude sounds like I want to listen to it, though!
The discussion of socialism in the essay and in the comments becomes somewhat dichotomous, inspired by Siegfried’s choice between Brunhild and Gudrun, perhaps. For someone outraged with the injustice of the existing society, I think in real history there was, and there still is, more choice than just fighting for a violent revolution, on the one hand, and selling out by promoting top-down “socialism”, on the other. You have yourself lamented in past posts the poverty of modern political imagination and pointed out alternatives like distributism and syndicalism. It seems the word “left” or “socialist” is unduly restricted by excluding these options.
I must admit I find it hard to translate such decentralization of power and wealth into the language of the myth!
Btw, the old posts about your Cimmerian Hypothesis you linked to at the end last week were very interesting, and it was refreshing to read discussion almost free of any allusions to the politics of the day.
Eric Hoffer, the “Longshoreman Philosopher” almost perfectly embodied the mid-20th Century USA, the working class fellow from San Francisco (back when it was a city of longshoreman not tech oligarchs) who disappointed the radical intelligencia’s hopes in the 1930s of the working class overthrowing the ruling class and replacing them with, well, people like themselves.
Hoffer’s writings became visibly more cynical and shrill over the 1960s and 1970s. He believed the era of “common men” like himself was over forever thanks to automation and it wouldn’t matter what politicians were elected in the future. He had an open wariness about the growth of “radicalism” at universities, which he saw as the return of a feudal impulse disguised as an emancipatory one.
“The explosive component in the contemporary scene is not the clamor of the masses but the self-righteous claims of a multitude of graduates from schools and universities. This army of scribes is clamoring for a society in which planning, regulation, and supervision are paramount and the prerogative of the educated. They hanker for the scribe’s golden age, for a return to something like the scribe-dominated societies of ancient Egypt, China, and Europe of the Middle Ages. There is little doubt that the present trend in the new and renovated countries toward social regimentation stems partly from the need to create adequate employment for a large number of scribes. And since the tempo of the production of the literate is continually increasing, the prospect is of ever-swelling bureaucracies.”
Ch. 13: “Scribe, Writer, and Rebel (1963)
https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eric_Hoffer#:~:text=%2C%20too%2C%20corrupts.-,Power%20corrupts%20the%20few%2C%20while%20weakness%20corrupts%20the%20many.,hate%20not%20wickedness%20but%20weakness.
He had this to say about one particularly prominent California professor.
https://lovelycountryblog.wordpress.com/2017/02/28/eric-hoffer-on-intellectuals-1970/
Naturally, he wasn’t a fan of the former actor Californians had elected to handle stuff like campus “radicals” either. In a 1967 interview with Eric Severeid, he described Reagan as a B-movie actor trying to run the state on a B-picture budget.
Hoffer was also against American involvement in Southeast Asia as he viewed the revolutionaries’ aspirations as being fundamentally driven by a sense of Asian independence from the white man not necessarily Communism. Therefore, Western powers could not defeat them. He was also however anxious about the Americans unambiguously losing their first war as Hoffer feared it would result in a mindset similar to Weimar Germany where a Hitler-like figure could rise to power using a similar “stab-in-the-back” meme.
In a documentary towards the very end of Hoffer’s life (1983), (https://tubitv.com/movies/650586/eric-hoffer-the-crowded-life) Hoffer seemed even more tragic and cynical. By that time, San Francisco property prices were already growing well out of reach for longshoremen like himself. At the same time, he wished that capitalism would succeed because “socialism is not compatible with freedom; communism is not compatible with freedom”.
I can find some more great quotes and links and prophetic insights if you are interested.
“The stage machinery of the magic potion is hardly necessary to the plot”
Agreed. Like some of the other commenters, I initially felt that the potion seems feels like weak sauce to explain Siegfried’s change of heart. The truth is he didn’t need a magic potion to betray and violate Brunhilde, he was always the sort to impetuously grasp at whatever grabbed his fancy in the last five minutes. That Siegfried could do what he did even to some unknown woman demonstrates his utter inhumanity, even as he remains the Romantic ideal person.
However I’d like to add a defense of the potion. We see magic potions used throughout Siegfried’s life – one was behind his conception – but in the prior opera, Mime just tried to kill Siegfried with a magic potion – so Siegfried ought to be wary of proffered drinks. It is only his relentless naiveté and pride that keeps him from more careful behavior.
JMG,
I noticed that in the Hagen-potion scene, Siegfried makes several solemn but ill-considered vows, and the language of promises was wrapped around it. Since we already have a symbol for laws (spears), would these oaths identify the potions more with manifestos? Or is there some further allegory that I’m missing with it?
“…to turn thousands into millions, Alberic must make himself an earthly providence for masses of workmen.” I wish I could introduce Mr Shaw to Jeff Bezos and the Silicon Valley set to see how his theory turned out! Although if he could write that line after seeing the “dark Satanic mills” of the English Industrial Revolution, he must have been completely deluded.
Hi JMG and everyone,
Another great post, and I would say this has been my favourite series as well.
I too, would welcome a book series by you – add it to your pile!
Will you be turning the Levi series into a book? I stopped early on that one due to a number of reasons, but I think a book would be great.
As far as some of the weak plot points, eg the reforged sword and the potion, well there are Gods flying around on horses and magic hats, so I look at it more as a kind of fairy tale, where anything is possible no matter how implausible.
Although, regarding the magic headpiece, I’m not quite sure how it was able to be taken from Alberich when he changed, but Fafner had to be killed before it appeared? Hmm.. Anyway!
The man did compose all that magnificent music to go with it, so I think we can give him some slack.
The important thing for me is that you, JMG are able to interpret the message and we get a university level (I’d image, never attended one), set of lessons and discussions.
I’ve recently finished the second Ariel mystery and so liked the description of where she lived, I googled it, not realising it was a place of legend!
After that I finally decided it was time to read TheFires of Shalsha which I’ve had for years. I really enjoyed it. Not fast paced but it leads you somewhere as you take in the lives of the people living there. I liked that there wasn’t too much technical whizzbangery, just enough gadgetry that could possibly be plausible, living on a far off colony planet.
I’ve got Stars Reach, Journey Star and The Halls of the Homeless Gods, but I’ve gone with Dune next, which I tried reading many years ago but only got a few pages in for some reason.
This time round, I’m right into it and I think Fires has something to do with that.
Have you, or anyone else read a short essay, THE FATE OF EMPIRES and SEARCH FOR SURVIVAL by Sir John Glubb? I downloaded the pdf some time ago and must get around to reading, it’s only 24 pages.
Anyway, the garden beckons!
Kind regards,
Helen in Oz
@JMG & Aurelian
I agree that necessities being cheap was one important factor in the temporary success of non-revolutionary socialism in certain places. However I think there’s another important factor which is rarely discussed, which is homogeneity of culture. If you have a group where most people have similar values and wants, then it is much more feasible to create a managed society that supports people in pursuit of those goals. For instance, if most people have similar views on what sort of medical care is desirable, then they’ll be more likely to support a socialized medical system than if they fall into radically different camps regarding the sort of medical care they want. In the same vein, a society which has similar values on education, the value of it in general and the methods that ought to be used, is going to be more likely to be able to work out a socialized system of higher education than a society that doesn’t have that level of homogeneity.
To my mind, this is a key factor in why social democratic systems have had more success in small European countries with less cultural diversity than in the United States which has always been more diverse. It’s also no coincidence that the closest the US did come to a social democratic system was in the post World War II period in which the dominant culture was quite conformist. The religion of progress has played a large role in providing a common cultural narrative from which social democratic policies have been able to take root, but that belief system is now in the process of fracturing and will eventually break down. The frantic efforts by the left to root out “misinformation” show that they’re aware of this at some level, but trying to force people to believe in an increasingly delusional narrative is backfiring. The left’s support of mass immigration is really a case of them shooting themselves in the foot, as mass immigration sabotages the cultural foundations of social democracy, but the religion of progress blinds them to this.
All in all, I expect western social democratic systems to continue to break down in the years ahead as both the material and cultural foundations for them break down. I could see similar systems arising at times in the future in which the material and cultural conditions are met again. I don’t think a society needs to be nearly as rich as the west at its peak for the material conditions to be met, especially if it’s a society that’s on the rise rather than decline and it hasn’t gotten to the point of decadence yet.
That leads me to another limitation on social democratic systems, that even given cultural homogeneity and a more sustainable material resource base, the lifespan of such systems may be limited by natural selection. The hard truth is that populations only maintain fitness when natural selection weeds out the less fit, and over time a social democratic society with a strong safety net may end up less fit than surrounding societies. That realization likely played an important part in the popularity of eugenics in the early 20th century, the idea being that society needed to take control of its own evolutionary selection and avoid that dilemma. However, the results of that were far worse than just letting nature take its course, These days, few even think about this dilemma, most on the left will just look very uncomfortable if it’s brought up. Some might say to trust in technological progress to deliver us from being subject to natural selection in the first place, but that’s only going to convince the faithful. Possibly some society in the future will figure out a way around this dilemma, but unless that happens I think that social democratic societies will always be relatively short lived.
Aurelien says:
#47 January 16, 2025 at 8:57 am
” Political elites in the nineteenth century worried that universal education (which most people would see a progress, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this and you wouldn’t be reading it) would be the first step to creating an educated general population which would make demands that would lead in turn to bloodshed and revolution. Better to keep our ancestors ignorant. ”
I am generally in awe of your writing and broad knowledge and analytical prowess, and regularly read your Substack writings and am happy to be informed by them. I have, however, gathered that you are of some European nation and have worked intensively there. Therefore, a small quibble: you may not be aware that in America, before public education became a general phenomenon, estimates are that general literacy was quite high (because people wanted it and sought it out, overcoming numerous obstacles to achieve it). Indeed, literacy was only a few percentage points under 100%, and at a much higher level than is to be found among today’s post-graduate studies “educated” person. So I understand, having researched it quite a while ago. I’m unable to provide my sources, as they were lost several house moves ago, but there’s lots of readily available evidence for this. I’m not sure, but I believe our host may know a thing or two about this. Indeed, American current literacy rates are scandalously low, and numerous creditialist obstacles are placed before those who, out of the goodness of their hearts, would like to teach those who cannot read. Which my aunt (born 1902) who had a high-school education, did every week of her adult life without a single credential. So, as for our being able to read this, I’m not sure the development of general public education is the apposite example, at least for Americans.
JonL, if I ever do rewrite the Ring in the language of science fiction, there’ll be no magic potion, and the Siegfried character will sell out in some more convincing way. Admittedly that’s easier to do in prose fiction than in opera, where all the action has to be compressed into a very few scenes.
Great Khan, I wonder who wrote his speech. I find it implausible that he did.
Jill, yeah, the British Theosophists and the Fabians had a lot of overlap back in the day. Yeats’s rejection of that scene — which he participated in as a young man, when he was a Theosophist and a good friend of William Morris — is an ongoing though never quite explicit theme in the book we’ll be studying next in the book club posts.
Sandwiches, it’s much easier to handle the plot holes in fiction, where you don’t have to pack everything into a few emotionally intense scenes! Since my proposed rewrite is in the language of science fiction, it won’t be a sword that Siegfried repairs, and I’ll have the necessary events line up to give him the scraps of information he needs. As for King of the Crimson Land, my epistolary epic fantasy, I’ve made a couple of tries at that but it’s not quite ready to gel; all in due time…
MOLF, it’ll be interesting to see if cinema can reinvent itself in a more minimalist form. I’m open to the possibility, certainly.
Horzabky, exactly. The academic industry is one of the pillars of today’s decadent aristocracy. I admit to wondering if the Trump administration will turn off the money spigot that keeps them afloat.
John, good heavens — you’re the first person in years I’ve encountered who’d even heard of Yevgeny Zamyatin! The public library in Seattle, of all places, had a copy of the English version of The Yawning Heights; I still remembered enough profanity from my high school Russian classes (we had some grandkids of emigrés who taught the rest of us) to giggle uncontrollably about the name of the town of Ibansk. As for the sources of the fixation on aesthetics, that’s a fascinating question, rendered even more so by the fact that fascist regimes had the identical fixation. When Spengler met Hitler and muttered thereafter, “What Germany needs is a hero (ein Held), not a Heldentenor!” he put his finger on one of the core themes of the Third Reich — it was all about the image, which I suppose is not surprising for a regime headed by a painter who adored opera…
Dennis, understood. Since I’ve made my own compromises with the existing order of things, I can relate.
Ron, well, we’ll see. If I can find a publisher willing to take it, I’ll certainly give it a try.
Aldarion, granted, but that’s the dichotomy that Wagner and Shaw were working with. I’d offer a broader range of options myself, but I didn’t write the oeras!
David, that is to say, he outlived his fifteen minutes of fame. A lot of fringe intellectuals do that; I’m quite aware that I may do so one of these days, for example.
SirusTalCelion, the role of the oaths is not entirely clear to me. To some extent it may simply be part of the plot mechanism — but you’re right that romantic revolutionaries love to make sweeping promises before they get power and drop them like hot rocks once they take charge of things.
Kfish, yeah, even in Shaw’s time that was a contemptible lie. I don’t think he was deluded, I think he was lying to himself. It’s not quite the same thing.
Helen, the Lévi sequence is being turned into a manuscript as it’s being written, and will go to the publisher early this year. As for the fairy tale element, granted! I’m delighted that you’re enjoying my novels, and by all means take a break and read Dune — it’s one helluva story.
Kashtan, you’re quite right about social homogeneity; the brief heyday of social democracy doubtless had many causes. I simply note that cheap abundant energy was a necessary if not a sufficient factor.
@Helen 65
Logi tricked Alberich into turning into a toad, and seized him. He and Wotan coerced Alberich into giving up his hoard, the tarnhelm, and finally the Ring itself. I also think that as a toad, he was physically separated from the Ring.
If Alberich had not fallen for Logi’s trickery and remained a dragon, he would have been almost impossible to overpower.
@66 Kashtun
It’s a good thing that evolution in humans operates on a much longer timescale than the lifespans of societies.
Clarke AKA Gydion–One strong factor in American respect for and desire for literacy was religion. Protestants in particular were expected to read the Bible and in many homes that would have been the only book.
Rita
Interestingly, a blogger named Joshua Stylman posted an article highlighting the Fabian Society’s original coat of arms on the very same day that you put this article up. Apparently some tracks in space are getting established or followed or something.
Stylman’s writing and word choice read like he could be a fan of your writing, though he does get a tad hyperventilatingly doomerish in his arguments. He references Wells’ World Brain concept repeatedly without once trying to counterbalance with Forster’s The Machine Stops or L’Engle’s vulnerable IT brain. Anyway, it’s a very interesting wade through the greatest hits of Fabian wetdreams from the past century:
https://stylman.substack.com/p/the-technocratic-blueprint
JMG, I would imagine you might be particularly drawn to Norma since the heroine (by that name) is a Druid priestess (!) and the plot revolves around an anti-Roman revolt in Gaul led by Druids (Norma is secretly seeing the Roman proconsul which leads to, um, complications). Wagner knew the opera well and had high praise for it– he had conducted it and even went so far as to add his own aria for bass solo and men’s chorus (someone needs to dig that out one of these days and record/perform it — probably not going to displace what we hear for similar forces in Act 2 of Gotterdammerung when Hagen rouses the Gibechungs, but as a distant precursor (written some 35 years earlier) would surely command some interest from ardent Wagnerians.
Of course Wagner soaked up influences like a sponge. But I think one can make the case that his greatest musical influences were Beethoven (motivic development over long stretches), Bach (control of counterpoint) Mozart (the most erudite employment of chromaticism for musical/.dramatic ends while almost always leaving the listener sure of where the tonal center is — well, not always; e.g., Prelude to Act 3 of Parsifal where the sense of key is deliberately blurred), Berlioz (orchestration and the way in which the orchestra can “tell a story” as it were — Wagner was bowled over when he heard Romeo et Juliette) , Bellini as noted for the technique of spinning out seemingly endless melody (listen to the famous Casta diva — Maria Callas’s signature aria, as it were), Weber for the whole Romantic German opera business — and one has to say it, Meyerbeer, much as Wagner would be loathe to admit it. Rienzi has been called Meyerbeer’s greatest opera.
Comparing Das Rheingold with Siegfried: in the first one, the Rhinegold can only be taken by one who has renounced love. In Siegfried, Nothung the sword can only be repaired by one without fear. In both cases, Alberich and Siegfried achieve the impossible because they lack a vital part of humanity, and both of them end miserably. Is this another aspect of the metaphor – industrialism achieving great things but becoming undone through its own imbalances?
JMG, I should have remembered the consequences of deline on the functioning of political and economic systems! Nevertheless, there are probaly things that work better or worse in an age of decline, especially when one remembers that the decline of a civilization isn’t linear, but rather works in a star-step-like fashin.
As for the university systems in current Western countries, the situation in Germany is that universities, in my experience with their inmates, seem to be a system of credentializing on which many professions rely on; not only managerial professions as such, but more ordinary professions such as bookseller, accountant and the like. The students aren’t an elite in respect to their number; instead, most of those who have absolved the equivalent of a high-school diploma (Abitur) go to university or to similar institutions afterwards. So these institutions have become quite bloated in scope.
As for scribes, wchich one commenter mentioned, the nonindustrial societies of the past simply didn’t have the energy per capita to employ as many managers, secretaries and accountants as modern society. Someone, I don’t know anymore if it was JMG or someone else, remarked that, in comparison to Western civilization, the Byzantine empire was a model example of lean management.
Perhaps “Twilight of the Gods” should read “Twilight of the Goths”. I can just imagine Annalena Baerbock, Angela Merkel, and Ursula von der Leyen shrieking and cursing in their castle on the Rhine as the cord of destiny frays and snaps in their hands. And who can blame them? Germany producing fewer vehicles than South Korea. Leopard tanks littering the plains of the Ukraine. Twenty+ million refugees. Insufficient energy to fuel a first world economy. Its shades of 1945 all over again, except this time they can’t blame the Kaiser, the Communists, the Nazis, the Americans, the Russians, the Brits, or even the French. Despite this disastrous outcome, in Germany, seventy percent still support the CDU/SPD/Greens, with similar polling for established parties in all the Northern European countries. Perhaps us Goths will be more content returning to our Zulu warrior ways, living in wattle huts or long houses built on stilts over the water, our chief concern getting picked off by some passing large carnivore.
“The hard truth is that populations only maintain fitness when natural selection weeds out the less fit, and over time a social democratic society with a strong safety net may end up less fit than surrounding societies.”
That movie was called Idiocracy.
The Russian lady with the arctic fox breeding experiment found out how many generations it took to get a friendly fox, and also how many it took to get an insanely aggressive fox. Don’t take this number without checking but I think it was nine. So breeding a better human would likely take 250 years of consistent effort.
It has occurred to me that the general culture may well be self selecting for literacy in written languages since the invention of the printing press.
So, several operas back you said Loge represents the independent intellectual. So Wagner’s vision of the independent intellectual is that he’ll be destroyed by the consensus intellectuals, but will take them down with him?
Christophe, hmm! I’m glad to hear this, though less pleased by his heavy-duty blackpilling. It intrigues me that so many people fail to look at history and notice how reliably arrogant elites who think they’re smarter than everyone else trip over their own, er, cerebrums or something. 😉
Tag, oh, I’m familiar with Norma as a symptom of 19th-century Druidomania — Druids do cycle in and out of fashion, usually in a more or less embarrassing way, though I grant that Bellini’s version is less absurd than, say, Terry Brooks’s…
Kfish, oof! That’s a very cogent insight and one I missed completely. Yes, I think you’re quite right.
Booklover, granted — while nothing works well, there are things that are less bad. Generally speaking, in an age of decline, the less intermediation you have, the fewer steps and gimmickries between producer and consumer, the better. Local production and distribution of goods and services becomes essential, and the more you can do for yourself, the better.
Claus, funny. In a certain sense, the EU is Germany’s third attempt at a pan-European empire, and each one seems to be ending in roughly the same way; it’s even more ironic that NATO should have tried a Drang nach Osten after what happened to the last of those. Wasn’t it Marx who said that every historical event occurs twice, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce?
Roldy, good. We’ll be getting to that in three weeks, but the short form is that Wagner foresaw the Western intellect becoming its own negation and held that the twilight of intellect would bring about the final collapse. I’m far from sure that he was wrong.
There seems to be a question underlying this whole series: What is the discerning individual to do in these conditions? The cycle must play out. Revolting against the system either fails or produces horrific consequences, while capitulating to the system gives you comfort now at the cost of a bad cosmic pay-off later.
Here’s what I’ve come up with as an answer, for now:
1. The cycle must play out. That’s simply the nature of human existence.
2. We’re mortal. There are some pretty severe limitations upon our abilities.
3. Renounce the Ring, to the extent you are able to, and re-enthrone Love as the sustaining principle of life.
3a. Recognize that you will only ever be able to do so imperfectly.
Stepping once more out of the mythological language of the opera (I wouldn’t know how to mythologize this), I think social democracy broke with Fabian socialism in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, when income tax rates soared to over 90% in the USA and other countries. British gentry had to sell their estates. The bourgeois had to let go their cooks and maids (gamekeepers, gardeners and butlers for the rich), cook and change diapers themselves. At that point, I think the rich and the comfortable didn’t have to be convinced to let go of their privileges, they had no choice.
Hi John Michael,
It’s a bleak assessment, but also sounds about right. Long ago you wrote something along the lines of ‘dead cold grasping hands’ and that seems to be the way things are headed.
I’m curious though, given Wotan’s status, there’s a mystery as to why the god would have gambled all on a single play and for a single item – then lost with dire consequences.
Oh well, once the dust from the final downfall settles, the costs from all that mischievous lot will be cheaper for the common folks, if they can avoid becoming collateral damage. That’s something to be grateful for.
Cheers
Chris
I read the article Christophe @72 posted. It struck me for the reason a lot of those sorts of techno pseudo doomerist positions do; I think it reflects a secret longing.
One of my favorite subgenres of science fiction is the so-called ‘dying-earth core’ named after Jack Vance’s ‘Dying Earth’ series. It traces it’s origins from Hodgson’s ‘The Night Land’, through Clark Ashton Smith’s ‘Zothique’ cycle (though the whole Lovecraft circle had echoes of this idea in their stories to varying degrees) and on to Jack Vance and Gene Wolf with his ‘Book of the New Sun’ series. There are some others too. This genre is often set in a distant future where the high tech world of today (or an even more high tech world than the one we have today) is a distant memory with the world as we think we know at best a hazy myth in the distant past. It’s not a future of space ships and interstellar voyages, AI gods or any of that, but rather a much smaller and leaner society living in the wind blown remains of that ancient world. No atomic apocalypse, or population explosion or computer transcendence, just a long decline to tomorrow.
A lot of allegedly dystopian media, like the above linked article takes a stance of horrified inevitability. That all the Amazing Stories techno-fantasies will come true, but be used for evil. “They’re inevitable don’t you see?” goes the thinking, “And we have to resign ourselves living in a world inevitably shaped by them and those who make them”. It’s a hope for the world of ‘Ralph24C 41+’ even if it’s ruled by Elon Musk and the WEF. To the people who enjoy this story, that vision of the future is a lot more comforting than the one offered up by Hodgson et. al. They’re too afraid to ask the question the assertion made by the mainstream. What if all the promised future changes are actually impossible? What if AI is just an over-hyped autocorrect used to justify stock market shell games? What if mind link computers are at best a parlor trick that haven’t advanced much at all since the 1970’s? What if CRISPR is just another ho-hum biochemistry technique of interest to research specialists?
These questions and others like them are too terrifying to face and so people comfort themselves with the idea that “At least we’ll get ‘Brave New World'” when in reality the future looks more like Beowulf.
Highly recommend the books I mentioned if anyone in the audience hasn’t read them.
JZ
“I’ve long considered turning it into a sequence of novels and retelling the whole thing in the language of science fiction; it might just be time to try that someday soon.”
Please, do!
bk.
Cliff, good. The crucial insight, to my mind, is the one from that movie all those years ago: “The only way to win is not to play.” If you distance yourself from the Ring — don’t touch it, don’t even let yourself desire it — you don’t fall under its curse. As for the rest, why, we’ll get Wagner’s considered opinion about that in Parsifal.
Aldarion, I see that as the point when the Fabian socialist wolf dropped its sheep’s clothing and plunged into social engineering on the large scale. Notice how many other steps were taken to drag people into the workforce — most of second wave feminism falls into that category — as part of a general proletarianization of society. The very rich, at least in the US, kept their servants and their influence; it was the upper middle classes who were shoved downward.
Chris, I suspect that Wotan’s one-shot gamble was a function of the limits of opera, which requires all the action to be compressed into a very few emotionally intense scenes. I imagine Wotan, unable to accept the failure of his great gamble, spinning scheme after scheme to regain the Ring and take control of the situation, with each scheme more unrealistic than the last: all things considered, rather like Hitler in the Führerbunker, and ending much the same way.
John, thank you for this! A novel that drew heavily from that tradition, M. John Harrison’s The Pastel City, played a robust role in shaping my imagination of the future. I recommend it highly if you haven’t read it — and yes, I also recommend the books you’ve listed.
BK, I’m definitely considering it. I have some other fiction projects to get out of the way first, though.
England once produced men like Sir Richard Francis Burton. England now produces men like Sir Keir Rodney Starmer. British parliamentary democracy has effectively perished, because it requires gentlemanly behaviour, and all our present leaders are bounders and cads. Fortunately, in the words of William Morris, ‘there will always be places in the world where a man may be free’.
Proletarianization is a (no doubt consciously) polemical expression, since proletarians are those that only have their proles, and the 1950s were marked by an unprecedented expansion of material belongings! I would accept uniformization or massification. But I see what you mean: a population of wage-earning adults dependent on the organizations that employ them.
I suppose I should now read the libretto to stop dragging the discussion away from Wagner!
Dear JMG and commentariat:
It strikes me that in a “Twilight of the Gods” manner, the fact that AI is a massive user of electric power just means it will increase energy demand in an increasingly energy short future. So for it not to be just another energy and resource sink (in my opinion the most likely outcome), it had better “hit one out of the park” to borrow a popular expression!
I have a vision of AI suddenly telling governments, big corporations, and think tanks: “sorry, this green energy thing isn’t going to work. Diesel is the key, and it doesn’t just form out of nothing!”
Cugel
Hi John Michael,
Talk about smoking wrecks, and I agree with your analysis. It’s just all so unnecessary and stupid. Anywhoo, back to smoking wrecks, mate if I were employed by your federal goobermunt, I’d bail now into another job on the basis that it is generally easier to get another job, when you already have a job. The interesting thing though, as someone who’s employed people, it’s my belief and experience that such folks are very um, how to put it politely, but as a general observation: sluggish. Of course there are always exceptions.
In Australia, immigrants who misbehave and end up with a conviction, usually serve time and are then promptly deported. It’s a very simple system, with consequences. Our best friends across the Tasman Sea in New Zealand have the highest incident of this occurring, and it causes social havoc over there. They’d like the policy stopped, for obvious reasons. At a street level, the policy is quite popular. Doing some reading today, and I suspect that will be the model you guys will adopt. It is simple, and works despite some familial hardships being created – and you already have the people in detention.
Just my twenty cents.
Cheers
Chris
Regarding: “In Australia, immigrants who misbehave and end up with a conviction, usually serve time and are then promptly deported. It’s a very simple system, with consequences. Our best friends across the Tasman Sea in New Zealand have the highest incident of this occurring, and it causes social havoc over there.”
This incidence is skewed by the fact that New Zealander’s have automatic right to work in Australia but very restricted access to Oz citizenship, so most of those being deported were the children of NZers or migrated as babies and had grown up in Oz – explaining their criminal behaviour. NZ, as a ‘Better Britain’, has a long history of sending its less desirable elements across the ditch. As our former Prime Minister Rob Muldoon once said, NZers immigrating to Oz isn’t a brain drain because it lifts the IQ of both countries. 😉
Kashtan, if anything, Europe is much much more diverse than present-day United States (leaving the Native community aside). We have infinitely more languages; before the nation state was basically imposed upon the people, what you would think of as “national languages” were not spoken or even understood by vast minorities or even the majority of people in a country. I use language as an example, and also because it’s a good proxy for diversity.
This is also, by the way, why you have a United States of America, but not a United States of Europe, in spite of all efforts to create one. We’re just not homogeneous enough.
So what happened was that education was a way to reduce this diversity, and part of it was shaming people who didn’t speak what was to be the dominant language, or struggled with formal education. Many cultures and lifestyles were destroyed in this process. Education was a homogenising force, not a result of homogeneity.
As for medicine, well, medicine worked, so people accepted it. It was also, unlike education, voluntary and optional. You don’t have to go to the hospital if you don’t want to, but most people did. Ironically, people are becoming less accepting of it now, as societies become more educated and homogeneous, and this education in turn makes people think they know more than they do, including the doctors themselves.
“Brunnhilde encourages Siegfried to go riding off to do more heroic deeds—he’s a hero, after all, and that’s what heroes do”
Interestingly this is what English translations I’ve checked say, but the German original is more ambivalent and it’s not clear who initiated the separation (“how could I love you if I did not let you go?” “wie liebt ich dich,ließ ich dich nicht?”)
Well look at this tag, “today’s radicals become tomorrow’s shills”. Aren’t we being cheekily facetious today.
Seriously, when you began this series I got into my head it’d be a 3-parts item (I don’t know why) and that it was shaping up to be as legendary as the Kek God Wars epic.
Pfft, was I ever way off. It is much more, actually. Very fundamental. Now we can see the conclusion nearing and your timing is eerily synchronous with accelerating world events.
Macro meets Micro. All pretenses of values and ideologies cast aside for ‘rapports de force’ if not ouright brute force.
On the bright side, many lies aren’t long for this world!
kashtan –
IMHO, the problem with taking conscious control over natural selection is that we actually have no idea, or no single idea, of what “fitness for survival” actually is. It’s certainly not just physical fitness: the eagle, mosquito, comb jelly, and great white shark are all still present, and therefore proven “fit” for their environments. We can only look backward at those species and memes that have gone extinct and say “well, I guess they weren’t fit”.
A social scheme in which struggle and strife determine leadership within the group may turn out to be less fit in competition with another group, within which generosity and cooperation are the norm.
“Survival of the fittest” is a tautology, because the only criterion for fitness is survival.
A couple of thoughts about certain items that have been talked about:
1) What does the ring offer? ABSOLUTE power. After all, it allowed Alberich to wring gold from both the earth and the labors of his once-fellow dwarves. Its furthest extensions can be represented by Army Sargents (absolute power within a limited sphere), the 20th century dictatorships (Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and Xi Jinping come to mind) and Jimmy Savile in the nineteen eighties.
2) The drinking of the potion – how else to better show the seductiveness of “Selling Out” than by giving Siegfried a TASTE? Drinking the Kool-Aide comes to mind – an obvious faked form of juice which became popular because it was a cheap way to satisfy prematurely decadent tastes. Also, for all we know Gertrude could be ugly and misshapen enough to repulse Siegfried, and past middle age to boot – at least that’s how I’ve always imagined her, for some reason.
3) Who’s to say that there wasn’t a few years between Brunhilde waking up to Siegfried’s kiss and Brunhilde sending Her Man off to adventure? That would explain Brunhilde’s confidence in Siegfried – they’ve been together a while and he hadn’t strayed yet. That would also allow time for Valhalla to be subdued by Wotan and a fatalism to settle in – with Waltraute being Wotan’s last attempt to get The Ring.
JMG,
In regard to how Seifried was able to break his grandfather’s spear with the reforged sword, while in Siegmund hands Wotan had the sword shatter, one thought came to me while eating dinner. Seifried had the ring while he was fighting the old guy. Perhaps the ring does have some power besides just getting people to lust over it.
@Lathechuck #94:
Leslie Fish – Better Than Who lyrics
Better Than Who?
Leslie Fish
Chorus:
Better than who? (Better than who?)
The scores aren’t in. (The scores aren’t in.)
Let the gods of evolution say who’ll win.
Better at what? (Better at what?)
In what way? (In what way?)
Let the gods of evolution have their say.
I’m better than you at shooting,
You’re better than me with a knife.
Who’s to say which tool works better when the thugs come for your life?
You’re better than me at karate,
I’m better than you with a stick.
Do you really want to walk through the slums tonight, let the old gods take their pick?
I’m better at breathing pollution,
You’re better at avoiding colds.
Which of us will last the longer in the threats the future holds?
You’re better at surviving bug bites,
I’m better at eating junk.
If civilization sinks tomorrow, which of us would be sunk?
I’m better at training horses,
You’re better at fixing cars.
Which will be in more demand at the next turn of the stars?
You’re better at hunting rabbits,
I’m better at making fire.
Which of those sk**s can better fulfill what tomorrow might require?
I’m better at growing gardens,
You’re better at counting cash.
Which will serve us best tomorrow, the money or the stash?
You’re better at working computers,
I’m better at making a song.
Which will put more food on the table if the world goes right or wrong?
(musical interlude)
You’re better at playing dominance,
I’m better at making friends.
What works better, whether or not civilization ends?
Nobody knows the future,
Or what sk** betters the odds.
So it’s best to say we’re all born equal and leave the rest to the gods.
i think empire or unsustainable extraction of natures resource capital, is inevitable and “natural”. Spengler compares empires to flowers, and jmg compared the cycle to mice in a field introduced to a fallen over grain cart. I dont think that fire and flood are “cleaning” the system but rather resetting it. And while we judge unsustainable growth, since it is so ugly, it is a part of nature as evolution drives chemicals (organic life included) to be the fastest agent of entropy it can be. Jmg’s books have taught me to find peace in a collapsing empire, and i think that peace should be extended to the whole cycle. Growth is not “good” since it leads to decline, and decline is not “good” because it leads to growth. In ecotechnic future there was a great point that going straight to a agricultural society before the industrial age or scrapping stage complete will be difficult as it will be outcompeted. Human culture needs to adapt to the resource base just like different plants. I think this is why this opera is so hard to write for this author, not only was there no utopia at the end, there was not even necessarily a lesson to be taught, rather this opera is a grim observation of how humans are just as “ugly” as the savage nature we separate ourselves from, and what we find beautiful in nature is simply an unexploited landscape.
@94 Lathechuck
The issue is that if everyone is able to survive and reproduce due to a strong social safety net and good healthcare, natural selection would be greatly weakened.
In H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, the Eloi had roughly the physical and mental capacities of kindergarteners because of Man Conquering Nature into an overgrown garden world and their reliance on the Morlocks for their every need.
I believe it was the socialist Rosa Luxemburg who coined the phrase “Socialism or Barbarism.” Well, she was partially right. The trajectory of this civilization is straight into barbarism. There is no escape.
I just realized something. To defeat Wotan, Siegfried didn’t have to slay Fafner. He met Wotan, and shattered his spear with Nothung. If Siegfried then decided he didn’t want to kill the dragon and wandered off, Wotan’s influence over society would still have collapsed.
In our society, Wotan and his sky castle are in the process of falling now. The ruling giants and the Nibelungs will have to adjust to Faustian visions being discredited (or one of multiple options), but could keep their relative positions in society for some time.
So Wagner believed in the false dilemma between Progress Towards Utopia and Apocalypse.
Possibly OT: Kaiser on where the Democratic intellectuals went off the road; and a reasoned view of our incoming President. ”
You asked for it? You got it! A new deal.” {Personal comment in song.]
http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com/2025/01/facing-future.html
So, while most of the talk re:the privileged ones in this piece/comment thread holds the Fabian-type as the elites to whom the sell-out sells, there is another type of ‘elite’-centered relationship present that is striking to me, having just cast I Ching 41 Decrease https://www.iching-online.com/hexagrams/iching-hexagram-100011.html marked lines 2 and 6 transforms to 24 Return and indicates “If the foundations of a building are decreased in strength and the upper walls are strengthened, the whole structure loses its stability. Likewise, a decrease in the prosperity of the people in favor of the government is out-and-out decrease. And the entire theme of the hexagram is directed to showing how this shift of wealth can take place without causing the sources of wealth in the nation and its lower classes to fail….The top line marked means:
If one is increased without depriving others,
there is no blame.
Perseverance brings good fortune.
It furthers one to undertake something.
One obtains servants
But no longer has a separate home.
same-day being guided to pick from my bought but haven’t read shelf Lasch’s The Revolt of the Elite. Your somewhat regular pointing to the ability of Chinese society to expand/complexify and then ‘decrease’ and simplify cyclically rather than collapsing. Your words in this piece ‘we hear of the origins of Wotan’s magic spear and the consequences of its making. It was cut from a branch of the World-Ash-Tree, and that wound caused the tree itself to die and the magic well of wisdom to run dry. While the spear remained intact, the laws and contracts written on its shaft held the world more or less in order, but now that the spear has been shattered on Siegfried’s sword all bets are off. ‘
All these data points for me today reference a place-based elite with access to wisdom and upholding social contract through law and custom.
The stylman Christophe references writes ‘zbignew Brzezinski’s “Between Two Ages” expanded this framework, describing a coming “technetronic era” marked by surveillance of citizens, control through technology, manipulation of behavior, and global information networks. He was remarkably explicit about this blueprint: “The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values… ”
Lasch is documenting the transformation of the old, place-bound inherited-type elites to the ‘meritocracy’ pointing out that 1)opportunity to rise is no substitute for the general diffusion of the means of civilization 2) social mobility reinforces elite influence by supporting the illusion their influence rests solely on merit 3) meritocracy strengthens likelihood elites exercise power irresponsibly precisely because they recognize so few obligations to their predecessors or whoever they claim to lead and 4) in any case they are less interested in leadership than in escaping the common lot (definition of meritocratic success).
So maybe revolution or selling out is too clear cut and there’s a place for the contracts once written on Wotan’s shattered spear but the PayPal mafia, say, isn’t particularly interested in restoring them?
Patricia (#97) Thanks for the song. I love it.
>It has occurred to me that the general culture may well be self selecting for literacy in written languages since the invention of the printing press.
If the printing press selects for something, what does TikTok and Twitter select for?
Asking the questions that kept me out of the really good schools…
>Notice how many other steps were taken to drag people into the workforce
Which all seem to be coming undone. It’s like society is spinning down because nothing is powering it anymore. Nobody’s getting married, nobody’s having kids, nobody’s working a straight job – the Great Unraveling.
@Alex #98: “…I think that peace should be extended to the whole cycle.”—absolutely!
A walk through the pine-barrens forests near my home is enough to clearly illustrate what successional stages look like from the point of view of individuals. First we’ll visit a beautiful sunny green clearing, an open space in the canopy where two mature pines toppled in a storm a couple of years ago and a thousand lovely foot-tall Northern White Pine seedlings are now growing in their place. Five minutes away, there’s another opening of similar size, but from about five years earlier, also quite beautiful and peaceful, where there are a hundred fine saplings. A few steps down a side trail, and suddenly we’re in a brown gloomy pine thicket. At first glance the two score standing young pine trees look as dead as the many slender fallen trunks crisscrossing the ground, but that’s only because the live trees’ green fronds are well above eye level and concealed by the many dead lower branches. This is what the survivors-so-far of the thousand seedlings look like a couple decades later. The competition for light requires them to either grow as tall as possible regardless of strength, leaving them vulnerable to wind, ice, drought, and insects, or to get lucky when one or more of those forces take their taller neighbors out (but can also easily take out the whole stand, and start the sequence over). The few eventual survivors will have lived their entire lives in what appears to be privation and peril.
This isn’t some marginal or transitional species we’re looking at. It’s the dominant species of this biome. The final stage on exhibit in the tour is the whole forest; the process never actually ends but it eventually reaches limits where the structural physics of tree growth intersects with the statistics of wildfires and extreme weather events. (That takes centuries, which is why the tallest white pines, the kind disputed over by the colonies and Crown for their value as ships’ timbers, aren’t present now, and may or may not return before the sea retakes the whole area.)
If some philosophically minded seedling were to feel distress over this state of affairs, it would quickly realize there’s no possibility of permanently escaping it. If they could migrate to available open space elsewhere, and even assuming there were no tool-using apes acting to keep such open spaces open, it would only help for a few generations before all the open spaces were in the same crowded condition as the original clearing. If all the seedlings in the clearing could agree to somehow override their own natures and all remain small, it would only be a matter of time before some other species, or a less cooperative variant of their own species, overshadowed them all. Something similar would happen if the parent trees of all the seedlings collaborated to scatter fewer seeds in the first place. There is no pinetopia. This “tragedy of growth” is why, after all, there’s a forest here in the first place instead of some sort of algal slime layer coating the ground peacefully harvesting the same amount of incident sunlight. The beauty and the tragedy of the forest are the same thing.
Analogous factors limit the stability of, say, small scattered tribes of humans living in balance with their environments. As long as disease, drought, and other small and large-scale hazards keep the population low, stability at the small-scattered-tribes level remains feasible. Especially in marginal environments. When infrastructure, medicine, and technology start mitigating those hazards, the most successful strategy is probably to foster a culture that sends young males out in small bands to raid neighboring tribes, because sacrificing only your own population to keep resources in balance would be disastrous in the long run. This seems to be almost instinctive behavior in our species anyhow. But it will falter once raiding starts threatening one another’s infrastructure, encouraging the formation of defensive alliances and retaliatory armies instead of Sharks and Jets. That’s the next step toward civilizations and empires. And so it goes.
That’s why I ventured the comment in a previous installment that Alberich’s story, or the Ring Cycle in general, isn’t a cautionary tale. The Rhinegold never stays put. It’s another cycle of nature. It has its own beauty.
(See JMG’s Mystic Teachings from the Living Earth, if I’ve done a poor job at making this point make sense.)
To the Other Owen,
All of our civilization is built to chase the ring. At the very bottom of society are the people who exist to be exploited by the powerful lest they starve to death. That’s why civilization tries to eliminate every option to live off-grid. At the top are people who have the ring, and for them, life is a constant struggle as they all targets on their back and most people enter their circle to try to steal their part of the ring from them, either through grifting, blackmail, butt kissing, or lawfare, etc.
Meanwhile, in the middle, most of us have dreams of reaching the top but are oblivious to the realities that those at the top face, just as we are oblivious to the day-to-day struggle to survive of the poor. And, as JMG pointed out, the civilization finds more and more and more ways to cajole more and more people into work, ultimately using either the carrot (the ring) or the stick (poverty).
Imagine how happy you’ll be once you can support yourself and do not need to rely on a man. Work hard and you’ll have a good life. The American Dream.
The machine is running out of tricks, however, as more and more people realize the false promises of the civilization for what they are, and retreat into a cheap pseudo-life online. In Japan, it’s gotten so bad that the most popular genre of anime is isekai (another world), in which the main character gets hit by a truck in the first few minutes of episode 1 only to find themselves reincarnated in what is usually a Dungeons & Dragons esque fantasy world.
Walt wrote, “See JMG’s Mystic Teachings from the Living Earth, if I’ve done a poor job at making this point make sense.”
While that is indeed a delightful and highly recommended book, you don’t need to worry for one moment that you did a poor job of illustrating your point brilliantly. Your description of all the different coexisting stages within a perfectly stable, yet ever-changing ecosystem is vivid. Your hypothetical anthropomorphizing of plants enduring philosophical distress, attempting to override their own nature, or seeking a transcendent Utopian solution to the dilemma of succession is delightful. The parallels you draw between us oh-so-special, self-regarding humans and lowly plants, highlighting that even our most complex stabilizing and civilizing behaviors look to be merely glorified instinctual drives, not all that different from how plants behave, really does put a cherry on top.
Uniquely granted dominion over all the earth? Or would that just be hairless monkeys, perpetually hooting about the specialness our own inbred habits of succession?
Very late to the game here, but as Anna Russell so pithily observed, Gutrune is the first woman Siegfried has met who hasn’t been his aunt. So from a conventional morality point of view (Hi Fricka!), replacing Siegfried’s incestuous relationship with Brunnhilde with a conventional marriage to Gutrune would be the “right” thing to do.
I just love reading your essays. There’s always so much fun esoteric history and philosophy. It tickles my fancy when the punchline is “and here’s the same thing happening today”. It’s comforting because it gives a bigger picture perspective and I appreciate all the heavy mental lifting you do. My husband has a few of your books which are good. Are you writing any new ones now?
Thanks!