Let’s take a moment to review our story so far. In mythic terms, it’s a straightforward fairy tale: the gold from the bottom of the Rhine, stolen by the dwarf Alberich and turned into a magic ring, was then stolen from him in turn by the god Wotan, who then had to hand it over to the giants Fasolt and Fafner under threat of imminent doom. Fafner killed Fasolt on the spot, made off with the ring and the rest of the dwarf’s treasure, and turned himself into a dragon, the better to guard the treasure. Wotan, armed with all the grubby tricks available to him as king of the gods and supreme sleazeball of the Wagnerian universe, wants the ring back, but he can’t break the agreements he’s made without losing his power; Alberich wants the ring back, too, but he doesn’t have the guts or the physical strength to face a dragon; and the Rhinemaidens, the spirits of nature who originally had the gold, also want it back but are powerless to get it.
It all seems very cute and harmless until you realize what Richard Wagner was actually saying with all this symbolism, using the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach as a mask. The gold from the Rhine is the wealth of nature—all of it, of every kind, defining “wealth” here as anything that human beings value. The making of the Ring is the process of commodification through which, all of human life got flattened out to fit a one-dimensional scale denominated in money. Alberich here represents the productive classes, those who actually convert labor and raw materials into tangible wealth; Wotan represents the intelligentsia, which craves control over the commodification process as part of the lust for unearned power that pervades Western intellectual life; the giants represent the political and economic ruling classes, which the intelligentsia have to placate in order to keep their ample salaries and their status in society.
That is to say, the world of The Nibelung’s Ring is the world we live in today. Not much has changed in our basic situation, all things considered, since Wagner’s time. The plot of The Valkyrie, the second opera in the cycle, is another matter. Let’s go through the symbolic narrative first, and then talk about what it all means. Here as before, if you haven’t downloaded and read the libretto for The Valkyrie, do that now before going on; you can find it here.
We begin with Siegmund fleeing through the storm. As usual, he’s in danger of his life, and as usual, the reason is a disastrous mismatch between the abstract ideals he believes in and the realities that surround him. The mismatch isn’t accidental; his father, though Siegmund doesn’t know this, is Wotan, and the king of the gods has set the whole situation up as part of his plot to get the ring back. There’s a whole cascade of ironies here; Siegmund thinks he’s a free man trying to do what’s right in a world out of joint, but he’s actually just a tool in a disreputable scheme to extract stolen goods from one thief for the benefit of another.
So he comes stumbling into the hall of Hunding, exhausted and weaponless, and the first person he meets is Hunding’s wife Sieglinde—“wife” here being a euphemism for marital slave, since she was kidnapped and sold to Hunding by raiders. Siegmund and Sieglinde are brother and sister, though they’ve been separated long enough that they don’t realize that until later on. The hall in which they meet just happens to be the one where a mysterious figure showed up at Hunding’s marriage feast and thrust a sword into the giant ash tree that just happens to grow up through the middle of the hall. Once again, we see Wotan’s meddling fingers at work.
The rest of Act I plays out like clockwork. Hunding arrives; it turns out that he was among those hunting for Siegmund, but the old Germanic tribal laws of hospitality forbid him from slaughtering Siegmund there and then. He grants the young man shelter for the night but warns him that they will fight to the death the next morning. He then goes off to bed with Sieglinde. She appears a little later, having put a drug into Hunding’s nightcap that has him out cold, and the inevitable romance occurs. Strengthened by love and renewed hope, Siegmund draws the great sword from the tree, so he’s prepared to fight Hunding; the two of them recognize each other as brother and sister, and off they go to a night of love.
That probably deserves a comment of its own. Brother-sister incest was a pervasive theme in 19th century European literature, more often hinted at than introduced as literally as Wagner did, but much less shocking in his time than it is in ours. The reason is quite simple: the social rules of the 19th century only permitted young men and women to have unsupervised access to each other if they were closely related. That meant that even when actual incest didn’t take place, young people routinely felt their first sexual reactions toward siblings—and the resulting guilt, amplified by endless sermons, played a massive role in the psychology of the age.
What made Freud shocking, in other words, wasn’t that he talked about incest. It’s that he introduced Mom into the picture, and didn’t stash it safely away in a work of art, as something that could be held at a safe distance behind the proscenium of an opera house. He pointed to the role of incest fantasies in the individual psychology of respectable people, as part of his general demolition of Victorian sexual hypocrisy. We still haven’t finished processing that very sudden shift, and the vagaries of our collective attitudes toward sex are driven in large part by the shockwaves—but that’s a discussion for another time.
As Act II begins, we’ll leave Siegmund and Sieglinde as much privacy as an opera allows, and we’re back with Wotan, who’s plotting with his favorite daughter, Brunnhilde the Valkyrie. This is where the audience (if they haven’t read the libretto in advance, that is) find out all about his scheming. It’s a fine bit of dramatic contrast—we’ve just seen the whole thing from Siegmund’s viewpoint as sympathetic hero, and then Wagner shows you the seamy side of the same fabric. Wotan’s in trouble, though, because the audience isn’t the only one who sees through him. So does his wife Fricka, the goddess of social custom and collective consciousness.
This spells instant disaster to Wotan’s plans. The whole point of all the gimmickry he’s set in motion is to give him plausible deniability in his attempt to regain the ring: if it’s clear to everyone that the whole thing is a stage play Wotan set in motion, he loses that, and with it the contracts that give him his power. Faced with Fricka’s furious condemnation, all Wotan can do is crumple and leave his puppet Siegmund to his fate. Since self-sacrifice is the one thing he can’t imagine doing, he has no other choice.
This is where things get complicated, though, because he’s not the only player in the game. Brunnhilde is also involved. Unlike her father, she’s honest and, as we’ll see, wholly capable of self-sacrifice. Wotan orders her to go tell Siegmund that he’s got to suck it up and die heroically. That’s her job, because the Valkyries are the ideals manufactured by the intellectual class in pursuit of its goals, and Brunnhilde is the ideal of liberty. It’s an authentic ideal, but it’s also a tool that intellectuals in the Western world have used ruthlessly in pursuit of power.
It’s when Brunnhilde confronts Siegmund that Wotan’s plan really runs off the rails, because Siegmund isn’t willing to follow blindly the role that Wotan has sketched out for him. Unlike Wotan, he cares for something other than his own ego: he cares for Sieglinde. For her sake, he proposes to ignore Wotan’s interests, kill Hunding, and go off with his sister-bride to whatever future awaits them. What’s more, he succeeds in getting Brunnhilde on his side. Translated from the Feuerbachian, he wrenches the ideal of liberty out of the hands of the intellectual class that promoted it and applies it in his own way, to his own very human interests.
As Wagner realized, but a great many intellectuals still haven’t figured out most of two centuries after his time, that’s the risk you run if you promote a high-sounding ideal but then insist that it can only mean what you want it to mean. It’s always possible that the people you’re trying to motivate through those slogans might apply them in ways you don’t intend. As I write this, our intellectual classes here in the United States are melting down for exactly this reason: having insisted that the ideal of equality can only be applied to races, genders, and sexual orientations, they were blindsided when millions of working class voters applied the same ideal to social classes, and insisted on treating their own interests as equal to those of their supposed betters. So far, at least, the response of the intellectual classes to this Siegmundian disobedience on the part of working class voters seems mostly to consist of blind rage.
Chalk up another one for Wagner, because that’s exactly how he has Wotan respond. The king of the gods explodes in a blind rage that could come straight off today’s corporate media, intervenes directly in the fight between Siegmund and Hunding, and shatters the sword he himself had given Siegmund so that Hunding can kill him. Brunnhilde flees with Sieglinde, who is carrying Siegmund’s child, and helps her get to safety in one of those deep forests that always feature in Germanic legends. (We’ll hear more about that forest as the story proceeds.) Then she confronts her enraged father. He rants and raves, but as his fury cools he starts to show one of the few glimpses of genuine sympathy he shows in the story. It doesn’t keep him from behaving like a jerk, but at least he has the good grace to feel bad about it.
So after the yelling and negotiating are over, he puts Brunnhilde into a magic sleep and, with the help of the fire god Loki, surrounds her with a wall of magic flame that only a fearless hero can pass through. Again, this is cute and harmless until you see through the Feuerbachian mask. What Wotan has done is to take the ideal of liberty and make it as unapproachable as possible. Sure, the intellectual classes say, liberty is a great ideal and a wonderful goal, let’s all praise it to the skies, but don’t any of you underlings dare try to do anything about enacting it in your own lives. At the same time—and this is one of the places where Wagner’s creative genius really shows—they know perfectly well that someday somebody will go straight through that wall of flame and awaken that ideal. They are terrified of that event, and they long for it.
In Wagner’s time, and in ours, they are and they do. Yet there’s something much more specific going on in this opera than the kind of general overview just laid out might suggest. It’s important to remember two crucial points here. The first is that in the grand scheme of Wagner’s opera cycle, The Valkyrie is set in the past—and that’s the past from Wagner’s perspective, not ours. The second is that the past as seen from mid-nineteenth century Europe was dominated to an astonishing degree by one event: the French Revolution.
From the walls of the Bastille
And through the streets of Paris
Runs a sense of the unreal…”
I’m far from sure anyone nowadays can even begin to understand just how vast a shadow the French Revolution cast over the century that followed it. Certainly those of us born and raised in America have less than no clue, unless we saturate ourselves in European history and then make a significant effort of the imagination. The impact of German National Socialism on the modern Western imagination is comparable in some ways—we still have people shrieking about Nazis almost eighty years after the inglorious collapse of the Twelve-Year Reich, after all—but that impact is mostly limited to the political sphere and a few areas of culture. The French Revolution left nothing untouched.
In retrospect, Europe should have seen it coming. England had a revolution of its own in 1641-1645, and finished it up by chopping off the head of King Charles I in 1649, but hushed it up afterwards in a very British sort of way and went around pretending that nothing much had happened. The American Revolution of 1775-1782 was more of a shock, since everyone knew that we’d cheerfully have chopped off the head of George III if he’d given us half a chance, but the aftermath turned out to be a great reassurance to conservatives everywhere: the new federal government left the elite classes of the colonies-turned-states in charge of their own backyards, and simply gave them a new arena for their interminable bickering. (That changed, granted but it took a long time and went through a whole series of intermediate stages, from the Jacksonian era of the 1820s to the Obama era that ended so abruptly last month.)
The French Revolution started out in this same moderate fashion. After decades of spectacular mismanagement, the French monarchy and aristocracy between them had driven the nation into effective bankruptcy through uncontrolled deficit spending. The aristocrats used this to back King Louis XVI into a corner and forced him to call elections for the États-Généraux, the rarely convened national legislature of France, which alone could enact new taxes. Their goal was to get him to restore some of the privileges his grandfather Louis XIV had taken from them in exchange for support on his tax proposals.
What neither they nor he realized was that the French electorate, like ours last month, had its own agenda in mind. The États-Généraux had three houses—the first for the aristocracy, the second for the Catholic clergy, and the third for ordinary French voters—and the latter took the elections as a referendum on the entire French system of government. By big majorities, they packed the third house with advocates of radical change. Once the États-Généraux convened, the third house simply voted to proclaim itself the National Assembly, invited sympathetic members of the aristocracy and clergy to leave the two higher houses and join them, and declared itself the legitimate government of France. The national bureaucracies and the military, sick of the inept and dysfunctional royal government, sided with them, and the transfer of power happened very nearly before anyone quite realized it.
None of that happened by accident. French intellectuals had been laboring to bring it about for most of a century. The philosophes of the Siècle des Lumières (“Age of Lights”), to use the self-glorifying label of theirs adopted by later historians, were motivated by the craving for unearned power that so often corrupts Western intelligentsias. They had devoted all their considerable talents to stripping the French monarchy—one of the oldest continuously functioning political institutions in all of Europe—of the traditional legitimacy it had long held in the eyes of the people it ruled. Their motivation was straightforward: they convinced themselves that if only the monarchy could be overthrown, power would fall into their hands, since they believed as a matter of course that they were the smartest people in the room.
History shows how wrong they were. In times of crisis, power flows to men of action, not to intellectuals who only know how to deal in abstractions, and that’s what happened in France after 1789. Power passed from the National Assembly to ever more extreme and murderous factions, then to a series of fragile juntas, and finally to Napoleon Bonaparte, an ambitious army officer with a genius for tactics who seized power, proclaimed himself emperor, and plunged all of Europe into twenty years of war. By the time he was finally defeated once and for all and packed off to a barren island in the South Atlantic to live out a few dreary years of exile, France and Europe were changed forever, but not in the way that the philosophes had dreamed.
The behavior of the European intelligentsia during all these events bears close study. During the opening days of the French Revolution, the events in Paris were greeted by ecstatic cries in intellectual circles across Europe. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” the English poet William Wordsworth wrote in 1809, looking back on the enthusiasm of his younger days. Once the ruling classes of the rest of Europe realized the scale of the threat, though, that enthusiasm got muzzled in a hurry. The intellectual classes depended, as of course they still depend, on the support of the ruling classes for their wealth and influence. That was a leash that could be, and was, yanked good and hard if they got too far out of line.
Thus the intellectual classes found themselves in the same situation as Wotan, with their own machinations all too visibly on display and their plausible deniability in shreds. By and large—there were of course exceptions—they did the same thing that Wotan did: they turned on a dime, helped prop up the existing order of European society against the revolutionary impulses they had just been praising so exuberantly, and redefined the ideal of liberty into a distant abstraction. It was acceptable to exalt Napoleon himself into the pantheon of heroes, especially once he was safely out of the way, but the intelligentsia had to watch themselves very carefully for a while, as conservative forces across Europe did their level best to turn back the clock and reimpose the monarchical system the events of 1789 had fatally wounded.
Mind you, the intellectuals didn’t leave radical politics for long. By the 1830s they were back at it again, laying the foundations for the failed Europe-wide uprisings of 1848 and 1849; when those failed—well, the easiest way to describe it is to borrow JRR Tolkien’s phrase and note that always, after a defeat and a respite, the shadow of revolution took another shape and rose again. It’s interesting to note, too, that it didn’t matter in the least how many abuses were abolished and how many liberties granted, because the actual condition of the working classes or what have you was never much more than a excuse. Wotan’s craving for unearned power was the real force that set all the Siegmunds of Europe’s radical history on their foredoomed quests.
All these repetitions, though, have no place in The Ring. The nature of opera requires grand narratives to be compressed into a few vivid scenes, and so all those cycles of unrest stirred up by the intelligentsia appear in the opera once, in the form of Siegmund’s brief and tragic career. What interested Wagner was what would come next, now that the ideals launched into motion by the European intelligentsia had slipped decisively out of their grasp. That provided the central theme of the third opera in the sequence, where Siegfried—the child of Siegmund and Sieglinde—rises to his own brief, triumphant, and disastrous destiny.
Excellent post, JMG! I was looking forward to this!
The hardest part of the Valkyrie for me to understand is how Fricka can hold the Hunding-Sieglinde vow as sacred. All her other reasons and motivations are very reasonable, but that obviously coerced set of marital vows is weak grounds for her intervention – especially given that several of her statements are about how transparent and shallow Wotan’s plausible deniability scheme is. Is this just a plot convenience, or is there an additional Wagnerian commentary I’m missing?
Mr. JMG –
Thank you again for another great post! One of the magnificent aspects of this opera is the pacing of each act. In a line-by-line reading of the opera, no character indicates any of these great ideas to another character. Rather, these complex ideas are evoked over the course of each scene. I am impressed with the Wagner’s poetic ability.
One thing that I have been wondering as I have read this opera is whether I am missing out on some aspect of the performance. I understand much of the meaning of the opera can be gleaned from a close reading. I also understand there are visual and musical aspects of the opera. Commentariat, has anyone seen this opera performed live? What was the experience?
Hello JMG and kommentariat. It’s amazing to see Napoleon I entering Valhalla, I didn’t know that picture…By the way, I know you don’t like go to the cinema, but I went last year to see last Napoleon movie, and I didn’t like it much. John, you didn’t loose anything great…
This is very interesting, and certainly makes an interesting and plausible story. Do we have (direct or indirect) evidence that directly supports aspects of the interpretation, such as material from Wagner’s journals, letters, writings, and so on – especially with respect to the idea of Wotan as the intellectual class? I don’t ask this skeptically, I would just be interested to know about such evidence.
Greetings all,
Overall a rather pessimistic view of human nature and its inability to rise to any sort of ideals. The quest is bound to fail…
Sirustalcelion, that’s a measure of just how far Western ideas about marriage have changed since 1848, when the Seneca Falls convention launched feminism on its way. In Wagner’s time it was normal for young women to be coerced into marriage; under English law at the time, a woman was her father’s property until marriage and her husband’s property afterwards — until the abolition of slavery, she had exactly the same rights under the law as a slave — but she could be, and was, savagely punished if she broke the terms of a marriage contract that had been forced on her. That wasn’t true, interestingly, in the Middle Ages — women in feudal times could inherit and own property in their own right, and could rule a barony or a kingdom — but the 16th and 17th centuries saw the collapse of women’s legal rights across most of Europe. It’s an interesting detail of history that some American colonies and states allowed women to vote early on, but that right was eliminated by the 1820s and wasn’t regained for a century.
Mrdobner, of course you’re missing a huge amount by not taking in a performance. If you have the chance to attend a production of the Ring, I enthusiastically encourage you to do it — I’ve been to two cycles so far and I hope to do more.
Chuaquin, you didn’t lose anything by not knowing about Girodet’s painting, either. It’s pretty awful!
Michael, I encourage you to go back and read the earlier posts in the series, where I discuss the sources for this interpretation. Wagner explicitly identifies Wotan with “the intellect of the present day” in one of his letters, which I quote.
Karim, no, not at all! The mere fact that the intelligentsia of one rather peculiar civilization uses the manufacture of ideals as a tool for power-seeking doesn’t mean that all quests for the ideal are doomed — just that this one class, pursuing this one agenda, gets the results Wagner presents us.
JMG, If Trump represents a kind of soft revolution representing the working class and the entrepreneurial class then that of course portends a large recalibration for the intellectual class. If we assume that the intellectual class in the U.S. is primarily resident in academia and the media then that is where we should start seeing rapid change.
I would guess that the media will change most rapidly ( as it now seems to be doing) because the entrepreneurial class has the most direct levers of power over it. I expect the low hanging fruit in the mainstream media to be purchased on the cheap by Elon or others by money’d entrepreneurs and changed overnight. MSNBC say hello to your new bosses Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson.
But I think academia will be a tougher nut to crack as the levers of power there work more slowly. My personal opinion is that we will see a growing schism in academia between the hard sciences, engineering, ag. etc. and the arts favored by the intellectual class. The ” soft side” of the university establishment has had an outside influence on the campus climate. But the hiring and donating requirements of the new entrepreneurial class will require the ” useful” side to change more quickly and throw off the woke mind virus to have any hope of surviving.
This post got me reflecting on my own career.
As I have said before, I was (and am) your basic, “four-eyed”, Aspie, “walking encyclopedia” intellectual, from my childhood up.
I lived with my parents in Washington, D.C. and went to American University College of Public Affairs (which is basically the American equivalent to the French civil service academy). I might easily have become a member of “the Blob” myself, except for two things.
First, President carter froze Federal hiring at the start of his Presidency (just as I was close to graduating). So, I never got in to the Civil Service.
Second, I read Spengler at the age of 19 (followed by Toynbee at 21). Spengler did more than anyone to convince me that intellectuals have no place in positions of power, and cannot handle power safely or responsibly.
So, I “learned to code” (literally!) and spent 33 years in the IT industry, until my retirement.
Now, in the twilight of my life, I am a minor cleric in the Orthodox Church. Would Spengler have approved? Hard to say, but I am sure he would have expected it!
@JMG
Thanks for the answer. My mistake was thinking mostly about 21st century western civilization and the mythical dark age setting rather than 19th century cultural specificities. The immiseration of women as a class in early modern Europe was dreadful – a real theft of rheingold!
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I actually kinda like the idea of Napoleon soldier’s entering valhalla. After all wasn’t he some sort of frankish Wotan, leading his Wild Hunt of French, Poles and others throughout Europe? Though he used us and treated us as a tool we still like him….
“Brother-sister incest was a pervasive theme in 19th century European literature, more often hinted at than introduced as literally as Wagner did, but much less shocking in his time than it is in ours.”
So this is a very old topic in Western art…
Well, I’ve remembered this recent Swiss movie about brother-sister incest:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Brother,_My_Love
It’s curious that there’s nothing new under the sun, but we pretend we create something new every day to open a can of worms and “épater le bourgeois”.
“women in feudal times could inherit and own property in their own right, and could rule a barony or a kingdom — but the 16th and 17th centuries saw the collapse of women’s legal rights across most of Europe.”
John, that centuries (16th and 17th) are “casually” the same times of the cruel witch hunt across Western Europe. Were that inhumanous punishments against wise women a warning by “modern” governments against the “normal” women to be more submissive? Or…Am I seeing things?(where there wouldn’t be nothing related).
>but the 16th and 17th centuries saw the collapse of women’s legal rights across most of Europe
I wonder why they collapsed?
Mrdobner#2: It’s a pity, I haven’t seen this opera live never, only excerpts from youtube.
I wrote my master’s thesis on a lot of the subject matter Wagner runs through here, and I feel its worth noting that one thing about the aristocracy of the time is that when they look at the run of revolutions in their own time, they have something approximating our host’s diagnosis of the problem: the intelligentsia grasping for power and stirring up the public in order to get it. What’s interesting is that they feel that, for the most part, The People just want to be left alone to run their own lives and Metternich thinks that in the absence of pressure from the intellectuals they wouldn’t have done anything in the first place. Of course, Metternich is Metternich and his words on the matter should be taken with a grain of salt, so I think there’s something rather dragonlike about his sentiment. “If the people stay away from my den and just let me keep this ring, there don’t need to be any problems,” sounds good until you remember exactly what goes into creating a landed aristocracy in the first place.
The whole point of all the gimmickry he’s set in motion is to give him plausible deniability in his attempt to regain the ring: if it’s clear to everyone that the whole thing is a stage play Wotan set in motion, he loses that, and with it the contracts that give him his power.
I don’t think you could have planned the timing any better on this series. Our crowd of Dollar Store Wotans are still insisting that it’s not a stage play.
So this looks like the time to repeat the question I asked before you started: what happened to Loge? In Rheingold he’s a major player (and to my taste a very sympathetic character!). Here, Wotan calls on him to put the fire around Brunnhilde and it just appears – Loge doesn’t even put in an appearance. And then he’s gone. Is there any meaning to this?
Learned Sir,
Are there examples from non-Western civilizations where intellectuals also desire unearned power? I don’t know enough about, say, Confucian or Hindu philosophy to judge.
thank you,
Lothar von Hakelheber
Hi John Michael,
Thanks for the clear explanation as to where the characters fit into our current story. Sometimes, they’re all bad apples! 🙂
Ah, I see it’s that free will thing again. Doesn’t it make you want to sit the foolish Siegmund down and set him straight? Sure Arthur made some errors, but these characters and their antics are the entire next level…
They are terrified of that event, and they long for it. Is this a good example of what you contemplate, you imitate? Or do, they know deep down that they’ll have to face their worst fears? The ancient grand master of strategy, Sun Tzu, advised to never back an opponent into a corner. Such acts produce real world consequences, as we’ve (and the elites) perhaps learned today in the news. It’s rarely enough to say that you’re good, you actually have to embody good, whilst also being perceived as good – people can sniff out hypocrisy.
Eventually with all those shenanigans going on, the power of the ring will be diminished – and then where will all those characters be?
Cheers
Chris
Clay, the academic industry is vulnerable from a financial angle. If the incoming administration wants to clean house there in a big way, all it has to do is get the federal government out of the business of guaranteeing student loans, and change the law so that existing student loans can be discharged through ordinary bankruptcy. Once people who want to get student loans have to prove that they will be able to pay back the loan via a career, that’ll be the end of most of the ideological degree programs. It’ll also probably reduce the number of US universities by half, which will also help.
Michael M, I get the impression that a lot of us in the later part of the Boomer generation walked strange roads. I certainly did! It took me a little longer to get to Spengler, though.
Sirustalcelion, it was a very grim time in a lot of ways.
Quin, thanks for this as always.
Katylina, I suppose a case could be made for that!
Chuaquin, of course. As I recall, every sixty years or so somebody reinvents public masturbation as a form of “performance art,” and everyone forgets how many times it’s been rehashed before. As for the collapse of women’s rights and the witch persecutions, there may well be a connection.
Other Owen, it’s one effect of the pervasive “Islam envy” that spread through Europe while the Ottoman Empire was at its zenith. Notice just now much of Protestantism was an attempt to revise Christianity to look more like Islam, for another example.
Deoradhan, thanks for this! Is your thesis available anywhere online? As for the aristocracy, whether they were right or not, that does seem to be Wagner’s idea — and I’d suggest that it has some truth to it, though doubtless it’s not the complete truth.
Cliff, I’ve been watching that with some amusement.
Roldy, Loge is the independent intellect. In Wagner’s time, you saw less and less of that as politics elbowed independent thinking out of the way. If this reminds you of the present, why, I won’t argue.
Lothar, China’s the closest comparison, as the Confucian intellectual class spent more than two millennia convinces that it ought to run the empire because its members were the smartest guys in the room. The great difference is that Confucian philosophy is profoundly conservative in ethos, and so it was a lot easier for the giants to work out a modus vivendi with the gods; China’s Wotans wanted to keep everything stable, not to change everything.
Chris, what we might as well call the Wotan Syndrome — the tangled emotional state in which what a failing elite fears is also the subject of its most intense and secret longings — is a complicated thing. It’s partly a matter of imitating what you contemplate, but there’s much more to it than that. When you’ve wedged yourself into a lifestyle that you’ve been taught to want but you actually loathe, and you know at some level that you’ve cashed in all your ideals and turned your back on everything you once valued, the thought that somebody might bring your whole house of cards crashing down becomes at once your greatest fear and your greatest hope. We’ll see plenty of that as Wotan’s world continues to unravel.
JMG,
In re: ” it’s one effect of the pervasive “Islam envy” that spread through Europe while the Ottoman Empire was at its zenith. Notice just now much of Protestantism was an attempt to revise Christianity to look more like Islam, for another example.”
It wasn’t just Islam. In fact, I will say that it was not even primarily Islam.
Rather, I think it was Rabbinical Judaism. Notice how the Old Testament underwent a big revival in the 16th Century, with names like Abel, Sarah, Zachary, Joel, Joshua, Aaron, Jared, Ruth, Deborah, Isaac, etc. becoming much more popular than they were in the Middle Ages.
Many historians (particularly Sacvan Bercovich) have noted the Goethean “elective affinity” between New England Puritanism and Rabbinical Judaism. It was at about that time, that the role of the Virgin Mary began to be downplayed, with radical Protestants claiming that the veneration of Mary was “idolatry.”
The Protestant Reformation was quite explicitly misogynistic, and I think that such misogyny was an influence off rabbinical Judaism.
Yes, I know, anyone who questions the privileges and pretensions of AWFL’s (Affluent White Liberal Females) gets accused of “misogyny,” but there really is such a thing as hatred for women as such.
Once again I am in awe of your unique ability to present the lessons of history in ways we can relate to from where we are at currently. Very shareable–“You see, this is how human beings collectively react to the physical realities they by necessity confront, and which technology does very little to change. See the pattern repeating once again. Stand back and watch.”
About the loss of women’s rights – 16th and 17th centuries? I’d have thought, 17th and 18th. I know for a fact that after the American Revolution, in the early 1800s, before the Transcendentalists, there was what I’m sure was seen as a “cleanup” of some things that ha been tolerated before. For example, a harder line was drawn between the status of white indentured servants and African -descended slaves. And, yes, the liberties of women were cracked down on, too. As Abigail Adams said, prophetically, “Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.” She had influence and agency; Quincy’s wife Louisa had far less. Now, in Britain, I’m not sure when the sweeping revision of the laws concerning women were passed, but I do remember it was considered to be a “reform.” A “setting things right.”
OT: In the 1940s, the ACLU defended the rights of Neo-Nazis to march through a Jewish suburb, they were that committed to free speech. Today, all I see in their literature is the pure Woke line. Likewise, the League of Women Voters used to be nonpartisan, so much so that they were the moderators for political debates up until the late 1980s. Now, they are so associated with the Woke Left that Republican candidates have refused to give them statements in the last several elections that I’m aware of, clear back at least to Obama. I have dropped my membership in both for that reason, a major reversal for me – I remember an old list of organizations I wanted to keep through the times ahead.; they’ve all been scratched off since -when? Certainly all this century. For what that’s worth.
As for women’s right and status and Wagner’s original source material: In the Nibelungenlied, a courtly German version of the tale, the maiden is essentially in purdah; many wives in in the Norse material were in Sieglinde’s position, but others are as free and active as Icelandic women generally were. (But then, Iceland was a frontier society. It’s no accident that the first state to allow women to vote was Wyoming.) Medieval wives were totally subject to their husbands by law, and daughters – like sons – could be and were married off as their fathers decreed, but a look at the records show that, say, a 15th century widow was a free as a man, and with as many responsibilities.
However, when those in power start thinking things are getting too sloppy, too free and easy, and crack down, women and peasants are the first to be reined in. A sorry fact of history.
JMG, I made the case a last week to someone last week that in 10 years 70% of the small private liberal arts colleges would be gone. In addition, I predicted that half the large state universities would be gone. This means that in most states outside of CA and TX there would only be one large public university left.
This particular person who went to a state university agreed about the private schools, but was totally aghast at the idea of only one public university per state. They were even willing to bet me $100 to be settled 10 years hence. The main reason they thought is it would be bad for traditional football rivalries. My guess is they had not thought much about the future of state budgets in the next decade.
Recently there was an episode of the Mel K show with author Richard Poe where he discussed the role of the British government in fomenting the French and Russian revolutions and then scapegoating the Jews. It might be just another attempt install the illusion of a guiding hand on a chaotic world so that reality doesn’t seem so intimidating, but I found it to be an interesting theory and was wondering if you had any thoughts on that.
Peter Abelard once said that he had a good mind to go and live in Spain because among the infidel he might be able to live a humble Christian life. Intellectuals tend to chafe at social conformism more than any other sorts of people. Bookish women simply can’t understand why they should waste reading time on fashion, cosmetics and hair styling; I have known intellectual, brilliant men who thought bathing a bother and nuisance. Some civilizations have kept such persons in institutions like monasteries and universities where they can be at hand when needed and left alone to pursue their researches at other times. I believe the proper role of such people in any society is to tell the truth as they see it, uninfluenced by fashion or the desire for popularity. No, Madam, you mustn’t build your guesthouse on that lovely bit of green because said green is a swamp which is 10 feet deep. Obviously, truth telling is a useful and necessary vocation, but truth tellers rarely have the judgement necessary for rulership.
Hello, JMG! I’ve been reading this blog for over a year now, and really like this series!
I read Spengler’s The Decline of the West a year ago because your sketch of his ideas seemed intringing. It weakened my faith in scientific materialism (since it isn’t “scientific” and yet its description of the Faustian soul resonates with me) and my political ideology (the passage on what he calls “Ethical Socialism” and how it really is about a lust for power).
About our society’s current Wotons, I read a blog post by a progressive the other day arguing for the cities– and just the cities– of the USA to secede and form their own union because conservatives are too intolerant.
Re incest: I recall reading that children reared in the communal nurseries of Israeli kibbutzim ended up feeling like siblings and therefore were not sexually attracted to one another and would frequently seek mates from neighboring kibbutzim. However, male and female children in a kibbutz were reared in much greater proximity than would have been allowed in 19th century Europe, sleeping in the same rooms and even showering together until 6th grade as the Israeli pioneers were dedicated to changing old roles and working for equality. Siblings in upper and middle-class families in 19th century Europe would have been in the nursery when very young and brothers and sisters close in age probably spent their waking hours together. But older children were educated separately: boys by a male tutor or at an all-male school, girls by a governess. In adolescence and until marriage brothers and sisters would have been able to walk in the garden, ride in a coach, sit in the parlor, play music, read aloud to the family or be read to, eat at the family table, and write to one another. Women of a family were also involved in nursing the ill or injured. Sisters as well as mothers would be sitting by a patient’s bed, administering medicines, wiping fevered brows (literally). I can see that this combination of a certain amount of intimacy with enough distance to allow idealization could lead to incest fantasies.
It looks to me like Biden was just putting on a show of wanting to forgive loans while knowing that the courts would likely reject the programs he proposed as outside his authority. Since he was involved as a senator in the writing of the current bankruptcy laws, he has to have known that a change in that law would have been an unassailable method to free borrowers. Somehow this option never seems to have been brought up. Of course, the entire subsidized loan program has been a huge giveaway to the banks–it doesn’t matter how much I owe; Citibank has been paid. And big bonus to the colleges as well, tuition rises to match loan limits.
Rita
A very interesting take on the Age of Revolutions! I do think the English Revolution, at least, had a considerable popular, even rural, bottom-up component, until the wealthier revolutionaries scurried back to the monarchy. But it was almost memory-holed. The 1830, 1848 and 1870 revolutions in Paris were also carried to an extent by small shop owners and artisans. However, their ramifications in Germany were much more strongly coloured by the educated classes – the German parliament elected in 1848 and convened in Frankfurt was known as “the professors’ parliament”. And that, after all, was where Wagner himself came into contact with revolution.
The loss of women’s rights from the 16th to the early 20th century surely has several reasons, and I would like to see “Islam envy” discussed at more length. Maybe it will still win a 5th Wednesday slot! However, I think urbanization itself also contributed. In Chinese history, nomadic invasions tended to give women more liberty, while the expulsion of the nomads confined them again. In the golden age of Pericles, Sophocles and Socrates, the wives of Athenian citizens were quite restricted in their movements, copying perhaps the cities of the Persian Empire, while rural Sparta gave them more rights. In the early Roman republic, women had personal names like Gaia and Lucia, while in later times, well-born Roman women were known in public only by their family names (think [Mrs.] Claudia). The early modern period was among other things a period of increased urbanization, too
Hi JMG and everyone,
Another great instalment JMG. Thank you!
I came across this recently, its sounds a bit ‘Wotanish” and sneaky to me, especially since the man’s family name isn’t actually this, but hey, It makes a great story!
He mustn’t have read Tolkien or Wagner…
“In my office in Jerusalem, there’s an ancient seal. It’s a signet ring of a Jewish official from the time of the Bible. The seal was found right next to the Western Wall, and it dates back 2,700 years, to the time of King Hezekiah. Now, there’s a name of the Jewish official inscribed on the ring in Hebrew. His name was Netanyahu.”
Regards,
Helen in Oz
ps it’s currently 38.2°C – not pleasant.
“After decades of spectacular mismanagement, the French monarchy and aristocracy between them had driven the nation into effective bankruptcy through uncontrolled deficit spending.”
That sounds oddly familiar. By no means is it limited to the French. I just checked and the US is $36 trillion, 170 billion in the hole.
Speaking of the French they are in an uproar again. No guillotines yet. The budget is blown and the government is broke.
“France’s government collapsed Wednesday following a vote of no confidence in the country’s prime minister, pushing the country’s political future into chaos and exacerbating its budgetary and looming economic crises.”
Michael, there’s been a sustained effort to downplay the immense cultural charisma the Ottoman Empire exercised over Europe while it was at its zenith. Very few people in Europe want to admit that Europe was a cold, grubby backwater at that time, contrasted with the rich, powerful, and cultured Ottoman sphere. Doubtless rabbinic Judaism also played a role, but the refocusing of Christianity from the sacraments to scripture was to my mind another reflection of Islam envy.
Patricia O, thank you, but this time it was really shooting fish in a barrel!
Patricia M, it was later in the US than in Europe — we always were behind the times.
Clay, I’ve occasionally thought about seeing if I could buy the campus of a failed liberal arts college one of these days and use it to establish some kind of Green Wizards’ institute. The way things are going, I’m far from sure that would be out of reach.
KVD, hmm. No, I haven’t seen that theory before and would have to research it before commenting. It seems unlikely, but we’ll see.
Mary, exactly. Intellectuals make good advisers to the powerful but they’re lousy leaders. If you want an archetype, think of Merlin, who was Arthur’s adviser and counselor, not a ruler in his own right.
Patrick, glad to hear you’re willing to open your mind. As for the cities, what a fine idea — I wonder what they’ll think when the rest of the country refuses to keep providing them with food, water, and raw materials…
Rita, yes, exactly on both counts.
Aldarion, every revolution has a large popular component, since intellectuals rarely want to do the fighting themselves! As for Islam envy as a 5th Wednesday theme, by all means bring it up when I next call for votes.
Helen, I’d wonder if the whole thing was cooked up for propaganda purposes.
Siliconguy, familiar indeed. As for the French, they haven’t had a proper revolution in too long. They need to stop being so lazy. 😉
JMG, would the distinction between this odius twisting of an ideal and ideals in general, correspond to the health of the grail quest and the failure of the Camelot project? Come to think of it, JFK is associated w Camelot…hmmm…by the way, other Owen and Michael Martin (too) Jacques ellul has an interesting chapter in The Subversion of Christianity on Islam’s effect on Europe, during the dark ages and medieval period. I’m not sure I agree w Spengler and the host in toto that the reformed period equates to the rise of Islam; the time scales are very different, for one thing. However I am certain there is a lot more there than generally acknowledged even in scholarly settings.
Lightbulb came on. Our elites are losing their shale: the first pseudomorphosis is over and lacking a connection to land, they get to choose between Islam, China or Russia. At least in their minds. Which not coincidentally are the three groups they are most hellbent on antagonizing, besides their own subjects of course, for the hat trick.
Sirustalcelion, JMG: The timing on the collapse of women’s rights in Europe suggests it was part of the same process symbolized by the forging of the Ring: just as Nature was transformed from someone to have a relationship with to a resource to be exploited, so too were women transformed from people into a productive resource to exploit. Does this sound plausible?
This is not meant as a rhetorical question, and not even necessarily a question anyone can answer, so much as we might have a conversation teasing out the implications, and never getting to the bottom of it.
But since the question of “unearned power” has come up, and the type of power in question is the power to rule over others (as opposed to the power to rule oneself, provide for oneself, and etc), it suggests that there IS some legitimate way to EARN the power to rule over others.
Personally, I struggle with this one, as, over a lifetime, I have become very firmly convinced that no one is BETTER at ruling a person than that person themselves. (Even when most people are bad at ruling themselves, almost anyone else would STILL be worse for any given particular person). However, I do see that there are public matters that need to be arranged and managed by more than one person so that all may benefit. I suspect that “earning” the power to so arrange and manage can never be more than a temporary thing before the power so earned is seen, and justified, as the power the earner is entitled to, and then things start to go downhill again, and round and round we go.
Still, I am very interested in your own thoughts, JMG, on how one may properly and legitimately earn the power to rule, and I am also very interested the thoughts of others on this question.
Thank you!
Hi John Michael,
That’s an interesting perspective, which is probably true. Hmm. I only bring this next matter up because of your observation, but I’ve spent a lot of time talking to different people randomly about their experience of the err, health matter over the past few years which seems to have sent a lot of people loopy. One of the most surprising admissions, and I’ve now heard it said often enough, was that people enjoyed the time immensely. And that stated opinion, differed so markedly to my own experience. I’ve been cogitating on what it all means ever since. Am I sensing an element of your observation as to the wanting someone to crash the edifice down, with what I’m hearing in that regard?
And yes, the historic French debt game is perhaps being played on a massive scale nowadays? As you’ve mentioned before, a difference in scale, is not a difference in kind. Now that’s another story I’m scratching my head wondering about. So strange that it would even be tried, given the historic evidence of how it generally works out, every single time.
Cheers
Chris
Very instructive. Very, very instructive.
In a recent comment you mentioned it would be better for intellectuals to feed ideas into society along the sidelines as it were. With regards to this installment, that makes a ton of sense. There really are better alternatives than trying to impose some kind of top down acceptance of a given ideal (all while failing to be an example of that ideal). We can get ideas into circulation without the kind of browbeating the current evangelical woke crowd uses to whip up saliva flecked invectives of aggressive resentful shame.
Stories are probably the best way to get them out there into the wild where they can feed the imagination of those who encounter them. Imagination > Culture > Politics
Do you have any thoughts on the transition between the current intelligentsia and the ones to come? I suppose we may be in a limbo for awhile. I see J.D. Vance and people who write at places like Unherd and County Highway as representatives of a nascent intelligentsia, coming into power with the entrepreneurial elite. The atheist woke will likely convert to Islam or join a convenient church, and some of the so-called intellectuals in that sphere will dissipate. As academia gets vulturized it will be interesting to see who and what sets up shop after its halls are vacated by the current tenured squatters.
The PCs and NPCs in the RPG of reality are changing alignments as the gods throw dice and move pieces across the board.
Remaining Lawful Neutral or True Neutral is difficult but I will continue to attempt a poise of equanimity amidst the Chaotic Good of the Changer swirling around us as the special snowflakes meltdown following the waning of the winter storm.
The assassination of the United Healthcare CEO also has overtones of the French Revolution, shaded with the slant of current crisis.
@JMG: Ah. Dion Fortune said, I think it was in Goat-Foot God, that “In any time, the intelligentsia is a generation ahead of their fellow Londoners,, who are a generation of the provinces, which are a generation ahead of the countryside, which in turn are a generation ahead of the really remote areas.” (i.e. – for Americans – “The backwoods”; for Australians, “the Outback.”) so that in any period you have that spectrum of public opinion. And of course, w.r.t. Europe, the most sophisticated American would have been a real hick from the sticks. Thanks for that elucidation.
Even today, someone born and bred British would have had a totally different definition of “civilized” than the high desert Westerners I spent 50 colorful years among. (Well, all right, in the state which was at the heart of MexAmerica-North-of the-Rio Grande. But the Anglo population was pure Mountain-and-Basin Western.) .
North-Central Florida is very close to being Georgia Cracker Dixie.
With regards to incest the novels of V.C. Andrews, TM, were very popular back in the day and still have a following. I guess that is part of the still unfolding working out of changes. There is a lot of lag time with these things when studying the historical influence of ideas.
I’m going to suggest another factor in the whole “Islam envy” issue and that’s the superior usefulness of an Islamized/Old Testament-focused Christianity to the colonial project. From the beginning, the leadership noticed that morale tended to be low among soldiers stationed in places where there was no town for them to visit for entertainment (such as the North Atlantic coast of North America with its tall trees, an enormously valuable military resource when battleships were made of wood) so getting those places settled had to be a high priority if the colonizing nation hoped to hang onto them. Maximizing the birth rate, genociding foreign peoples in order to take over their lands, a hierarchical authoritarian family structure with a certain amount of normalized domestic violence so that young men came out army-ready, all were part of optimizing the culture for expansion through conquest.
>That sounds oddly familiar. By no means is it limited to the French. I just checked and the US is $36 trillion, 170 billion in the hole.
That’s not what concerns me. What concerns me is the GROWTH of the interest on the debt. It has gone hockeystick. If this was a plane, it would be saying things like “sink rate” and “terrain” and “pull up”. But the people in charge are out to lunch. Nobody is flying the plane!
I guess we all put our heads between our legs and kiss something goodbye?
Re: Ottomans
The cultural pull of the Ottomans was that great?
I find it interesting these things go in cycles. Makes me think 2200 could see a surge in Islam again. Definitely all those little countries in the Levant have a tendency of getting rolled up into one empire or another. I’ve been maintaining the future belongs to those still willing to have kids, which pencils out to the Amish and the Muslims.
Nor exactly a future I get excited about but considering how miserable the present is for a lot of people, you’d be hard-pressed not to call it an improvement.
“As for the French, they haven’t had a proper revolution in too long. They need to stop being so lazy.”
One might perhaps say the ghost of revolution still prowls the Paris streets, down all the restless centuries, wandering incomplete. Nice lyric, but I’ve always wondered if there was much substance behind it. (The ghost of Charlotte Corday probably knows, but the wind took away the words she wanted to say.) What you’ve written is very illuminating.
Another lyric, “Marat, your days are numbered,” is a warning about seeking authority when unsuited for it that I personally take to heart.
Building on the Merlin (and Marat I suppose) examples, there are a couple of original Star Trek episodes that illustrate Science Officer/First Officer Spock making a poor Captain compared to Kirk’s quick-thinking man-of-action approach. One in particular, “The Galileo Seven,” has that as its main point. Of course, with changing times, that distinction was dropped and forgotten in the later movies and sequel series.
I know this post its not about History, so i will refrain from writing too long about the French Revolution, but as a Catalan i can’t resist comenting that you are right on spot about the event afecting the entire 19th Century. Napoleon was unable to conquer Spain, but Liberalism and the Revolutionary ideal were introduced to our country during the short reign of Joseph I, and , together with the epic idiocy of Ferdinand VII, was enough to totally destabilize Spain for the duration of THE WHOLE CENTURY, and i’m not exagerating. Anyone who doubts it will do well to read how many forms of government Spain tried from 1814 to 1931…
And by the way, i would love to know the name of the painting that depicts the taking of the Bastille, and the meeting of the third state.
Well Guillem 48, Napoleon Bonaparte even nowadays is, for most Spaniards,the evilest evil man, a proto-Hitler! Instead entering in Valhalla, spanish painters maybe had painted Bonaparte falling into Hell…However, I think not all in him was bad. He closed the worst excesses of 1789, he was a genious in war and politics, and he expanded classic Liberalism across Europe. Even he abolished the spanish Inquisition…
Hello Mr. Greer, you’ve linked Wagner operas and 1789 French Revolution very brightly! I suppose by the way, you don’t like very much the 1789 revolutionary epic, as good Burkean conservative. Am I fully right? Or maybe I’m wondering too much about your personal ideology. Am I wrong?
Mauve Zone,has a long and vital tradition of harboring working class intellectuals, of which Eric Hoffer might be the best known example. Also, our host in his early years.
Celadon, that’s an intriguing suggestion. The usual interpretation of the failure of the Arthurian dream is that it was driven by the personal inadequacies of those (Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot) most centrally entrusted with its fulfillment, rather than a fatal flaw in the dream itself, which is Wotan’s problem. Still, myths are flexible.
Kfish, I could definitely see a case for that interpretation.
Scotlyn, it’s a good question to wrestle with. The conclusion I reached is that earned power is the power that is freely granted to you by the people who follow you. Gen. George Patton is one good example. The US Third Army would have followed him to Hell and back, because they trusted him and knew he would lead them to victory if anyone could. He’d earned his power. The same is true these days, to turn to a controversial subject, of Donald Trump. Nobody had to support him in this last election campaign, much less pour out the enthusiasm and energy that brought him his victory; his followers feel that he’s earned their respect and support, and that makes his power over them legitimate.
Chris, a lot of people in the managerial class adored the Covid fiasco, since it allowed them to work from home and engage in vast amounts of performative virtue signaling. It was the people in the working classes who had a miserable time of it. As for the debt game, why, look at the history of speculative bubbles sometime. They’re always driven by the same mistakes and end the same way, and the fact that none of this ever stops a new bubble from taking off is to my mind one of the best disproofs of the myth of progress.
Replicant, good! The transition from one intelligentsia to another is always a chaotic time, driven as much by unpredictable vagaries in public taste as anything else. With any luck it’ll be a while before a new intelligentsia succeeds in solidifying, as the longer things stay unsettled in cultural and intellectual planes, the more likely it is that some of the ideas I support might find a foothold somewhere. Still, I’ll stay out here on the fringes dropping ideas into the vortex, and see what happens.
Patricia M, exactly — here in the US we’re all hicks from the sticks, and most of us are proud of it. 😉
Pseudopod, oh, there’s always a market for vaguely kinky Gothic novels. V.C. Andrews managed to tap into that market efficiently.
Joan, that’s an interesting hypothesis, but I’d want to see a little evidence that anything so deliberate was planned and carried out. The claim that culture is manufactured by elites doesn’t actually stand up well to the evidence of history, you know.
Other Owen, it was indeed. In 1500 the Sublime Porte, as the Ottoman government was called in the West, was far and away the richest, most powerful, and most civilized political establishment anybody in Europe had ever encountered. It ruled an empire far larger than all of Europe put together, and made no secret of its plans to conquer Europe — the two sieges of Vienna in the century and a half that followed were both near-run things.
Walt, you could indeed say that, given which album was playing as I was putting the post up! (Jumping songs a bit, I could note that France reached the age of reason, only to find there was no reprieve…)
Guillem, I simply did an image search online for “French revolution” and took the images from there. You might see what you can find.
Chuaquin, like Burke himself, I think the French had very good reason to overturn one of the most effete and incompetent governments in Europe, but I consider it a tragedy that they didn’t simply adopt a constitutional government and settle things that way. Remember that Burke strongly supported the American revolution — as of course do I.
I like Celadon’s observation that our intelligentsia’s old pseudomorphism is pat it’s sell-by date,and that they, titally disconnected from the land, are now going shopping for another one, with a very small menu to choose from. Poor suckers. OF course, it takes more than a few years in any one place t o really develop a connection to the land. I call myself a southwesterner now, after 50 years there, but it took me a long time to do so.
@Chuaquin
I dont know if any Spanish painter depicted Napoleon. Goya did paint about the Independence war and it’s horrors, though.
As for Liberalism, i think that’s the most deadly blow he inflicted to Spain, as it brought a lot of unrest, suffering, and the irreparable loss of many things.
As an example, the confiscation of the goods of the church, that was suposed to be a measure for the good of people created instead a phenomenon wich still exists today in modern Spain, called “Caciquismo”, where some very rich families of the Capital were able to buy enormous pieces of land for ridiculously low prices, including entire villages, that formerly were Church domains.
This created a huge problem, because the new owners were not interested in allowing the peasants to live there. They wanted profit from their new acquired lands, or else to be turned into private hunting grounds.
In addition to that, they “bought” (steal, after evicting the monks) many monasteries that were still working, and procedeed to sack and re-sell their riches, works of art etc.
It was a very bad century for Spain…
JMG, it is interesting that instead of using the intellectual ideal of Liberty the intellectual class in the modern U.S. had to modify it to be ” Democracy” . It seems a poor substitute as an ideal to motivate people in an inauthentic way, but I would guess that Liberty smacked too much of something a Maga dude would have on the flag in the back of his truck.
It was amazing to watch the way the media ( especially the so called high brow media like the NYT) flung around this term as if it was sacrosanct to the democrats. “Trump will destroy our democracy”, was the siren call. While at the same time the democratic elites and intellectuals were busy getting rid of anything resembling democracy anywhere they could find it.
I think the fact that they kept flinging around this tarnished ideal to try and control the masses while it was apparent to all ( except the professors and the editorial board at the Times) that this was the greatest show of hypocrisy modern times contributed to them losing the election.
On the 16th and 17th century decay of women’s social status, but specially in response to @Kfish, #36…
One hypothesis that comes to mind is that women’s work, being more spacely constrained due to the accommodations needed by the pregnant and the nursing, was first on the line to clash with the early industrial revolution, – you know, not the coal powered one, but the earlier one focused on wind and water mills. It is a common trope that Father will keep you fed and Mother will keep you clothed; and the lack of highly mobile engines meant that in those times the labor of lots of strong lads was crucial to keep the supply of the calories needed to keep society running (not to mention, to keep body and soul together). On the other hand, women’s work became increasingly commoditized: surely you could keep spinning and weaving at home… if you were too poor to afford the nice fabrics coming out of the the lord’s mill.
OK John, I understand your view, which isn’t manichean or simplist. Oh, I didn’t remember Burke was friend of American Revolution, thank you for reminding it to me. I’d like to read Burkean books, by the way.
Guillem M. #53:
I share your description of XIXth century in Spain as “bad”, but History never isn’t simple enough to find an only “bad man” as guilty.
I agree it was a pity the sacking of the Catholic Church goods.
However:
Liberalism in Spain was always weaker than its European equivalents; and it was divided in some factions like “Moderate” and “Radicals”. Then, if we want to see the complete picture of spanish disasters in the XIXth century, we must remember as part of that mess, the Borbonic Absolutism and Carlism…Carlist wars were cruel civil wars and they weren’t good and evil game: both sides commited atrocities.
If you didn’t know this news (maybe you knew it, maybe it was unnoticed for you).
In september the city of Dresde received an ambitious funding for a new academy. Its name, of course, is “Richard Wagner Academy”.
https://theviolinchannel.com/city-of-dresden-receives-funding-for-new-richard-wagner-academy/
@Scotlyn #37
“Personally, I struggle with this one, as, over a lifetime, I have become very firmly convinced that no one is BETTER at ruling a person than that person themselves. ”
I’d say that under optimal conditions a person is usually better at ruling themselves than at ruling others, just like under optimal conditions a man is usually larger and stronger than a woman. But conditions are rarely optimal and there are examples of rulers who might not have been good – but their outward performance of ruling others was still far better than their inward performance of ruling themselves and, say, living within a family. (Helmut Kohl comes to my mind, for example).
“how one may properly and legitimately earn the power to rule,”
I concur with what JMG has said. The foundation of “legitimately earned power” is trust. To be justified, this trust has to be earned by deeds and not by words.
Cheers,
Nachtgurke
“I’m far from sure anyone nowadays can even begin to understand just how vast a shadow the French Revolution cast over the century that followed it. Certainly those of us born and raised in America have less than no clue, unless we saturate ourselves in European history and then make a significant effort of the imagination.”
I learnt about this from, of all things, my study of elite historical garb from about the year 1400 onward. The dresses of elite women and formal (court) outfits of elite men were gorgeous things. My interest is on female garb mainly, and the dresses were amazing confections of abundant swathes of truly beautiful fabrics.
Then, the late 1780s and bam! It all goes away. The contrast in style before and after the revolution is hard to overstate. The dresses got downright ugly for a couple decades after, and only slowly ‘recovered’ after around 1820- oddly, right around when you said the intelligentsia started up their tricks again.
You can even see it in the museum collections. There’s a gap there, where lots and lots of lovely gowns got slashed down and resewn into the harsh new style, and nothing new was being made. I almost get a sense of panic from it, like they were desperate to conceal what they had worn before. When you’ve been immersed in centuries of glorious gowns, the suddenness and extremity of the change is startling, and quite stark.
@54
I believe the Dem leadership wanted to lose this election, and adopted a strategy they knew the TDS/”Vote Blue No Matter Who” crowd would embrace but the wider electorate would reject.
I think the timing of the leaked videos of Biden showing symptoms of dementia a few weeks before the Biden-Trump debate followed by the disastrous debate itself was an attempt at politically assassinating Biden.
After delaying their replacement of Biden for a while to increase the damage to his support, they chose a candidate they knew could not possibly salvage the election for Team Blue.
I think they want to have time to rebrand the Dem Party’s stale messaging while leaving most of its policies unchanged (people in the middle were starting to tire of anti-Trumpism & wokeism).
I could be wrong and higher-up Dems could be as out-of-touch as the liberal MSM pundits.
Clay, about demise of small LA colleges, what I wonder is what happens to their libraries? I suppose faculty get first pick, but then what?
JMG might want to buy a campus; I would like a fund to buy up the remains of college libraries and establish a lending library along the lines of the early Netflix.
JMG – Arthur and Merlin, Kirk and Spock, Washington and Franklin… pick your mythic duo! As I filled out some estate planning documents, there was a place to indicate how I wanted to be remembered. I’m too modest to write down “Franklin, not Washington”, too serious to say “Spock, not Kirk” (or “R2D2, not C3PO” in an alternate universe), but maybe “Merlin…”. Quietly competent at the tasks I attempt? That would be fine.
Scotlyn – How does one earn power? I wouldn’t know for sure, since I have very little, but I think that a leader who explained the scope of the possible, then how each faction in society could compromise within their constraints, would qualify. That would include explaining to the greedy that they would rest more easily in their beds if their neighbors did not envy their ill-gotten prosperity. Someone with enough insight into the local ecosystem to help each find work suited to the needs of the community, as well as to themselves, might be given increasing power to make such assignments.
So we’re finally here . All the preliminaries and backgrounds and prosaic prelude opera (Rheingold) have laid the groundwork for one of the pivotal moments in the entire history of art and civilization. The Valkyrie is where Wagner reaches the full measure of his greatness; in the process, as you pointed out, he tore away all the illusions that Europe had had about itself (the effects are not entirely benign; as his disciple-turned-opponent Nietzsche pointed out, we can’t do without illusions. The Birth of Tragedy and all that followed could not have been written without The Valkyrie.)
Among those illusions, as you note, the nature and roots of sexuality. At the very moment where Siegmund is at the depths of despair – the very moment where he has also been fully awakened to his sexual longings by Sieglinde’s beauty and character – he calls on his father. All his childhood trauma resurfaces. It is one of the most thrilling moments that it is possible to experience short of the act of love itself: to sit in a darkened theater and hear a great tenor (you do need a good tenor) with a great orchestra behind him (you also need a good orchestra) illuminate the heart of the human experience with the call on his father to show him the, um sword he’d been promised.. (Wagner would go on in Tristan to explore in yet greater depth the way childhood determines sexuality, but he did it first in the Valkyrie, Freud was really just systematizing Wagner.)
Three great scenes – one per act – demonstrate that for all the plotting, scheming, and endless whirring of machines, that love will have its way. The first I’ve already mentioned. The second – really the pivot of the entire cycle – happens when Brunnhilde arrives to inform Siegmund of his destiny. Not only does he reject said destiny, but as you note, she is so moved that she “joins his side.” Both Siegmund and Brunnhilde are Wotan’s children, but as he discovers, they’re not his puppets – they have wills of their own independent of Wotan’s (he tries to deny it but then in the great scene of the 3rd act, acknowledges the truth), most importantly, they can and do love in a loveless world. Wotan also loves and this is absolutely critical. his explosion of rage in Act 2 acquires its power precisely because he thought he had created a puppet and then discovers he hasn’t and that he has to kill a person he actually loves in order to keep his schemes going. Brunnhilde confronts him with this and he can’t deny it, try though he might. When he gives in an accedes to her pleas (and Wagner’s music makes it quite clear that he loves Brunnhilde more than anything or anyone — that is also something he hadn’t planned for; the he would love his daughter so), knowing he has to give her up for ever, it is almost intolerably moving. I judge the quality of a performance of Valkyrie (I’ve attended nearly a dozen in the course of my life) by how completely I lose it during what is often called “Wotan’s farewell.” You hear with shattering force the truth behind all the great religions: there is no salvation short of giving up the world and acknowledging that it does not revolve around you..
@mrdobner #2. Reading the libretto of an opera is to the actual experience of hearing a great opera (and the Valkyrie is among the 4 or 5 greatest operas ever written) what reading about sex is to the actual experience thereof, or reading a well-written recipe book or restaurant review is to eating a good meal. Do whatever it takes to get to a performance of Valkyrie. It is being performed this summer at the Santa Fe Opera in New Mexico. The opera house in Basel, Switzerland will be staging an entire Ring cycle this coming spring, as will the Metropolitan Opera in New York, during the 2027/8 season.
No kind thoughts for the philosophes in these parts. 🙂
Thanks for this series. It’s really a great read.
It probably didn’t matter to Wagner since it would have been hard to work into opera, but the mismanagement that forced Louis XVI to call the Estates General was oversized military expenditures from the Seven Years War and the American Revolution. In a sense wars started the French Revolution and wars ended it.
Clay, and it’s indicative that it was usually “our” democracy. It was in fact their democracy, and not available to the rest of us. The Greek word δημοκρατία literally means “the brute force of the people,” and tolerably often in ancient times was a term for mob rule; given the prevalence of cancel culture and other forms of organized bullying on the left, “our democracy” was in fact not a bad description of it.
CR, hmm! That’s a fascinating point — you’re quite correct that the first jobs that were mechanized out of existence were women’s jobs, spinning and weaving, and it may be that the collapse of women’s status was driven by the collapse of their economic role in society.
Chuaquin, I hadn’t heard of that. Not somebody I’d name an academy after!
Mother Balance, hmm again! Thank you for this — it’s not a branch of history I’ve studied, but clearly I’ll have to remedy that.
Patrick, that’s an intriguing theory. We’ll see if they can in fact recover from this promptly.
Mary, I’d contribute to that project.
Lathechuck, it’s quite an archetypal pattern.
Tag, thank you for this. Mark Baker did a fine job in the 2001 Seattle Opera production, though Stephen Milling’s Hunding frankly walked away with the opera — he was very early in his career that year, but oh my, what a performance!
Joel, deficit spending due to excessive military adventurism — hmm. I’m sure I’ve heard of that somewhere else. 😉
@Patricia, thanks for that. Yeah that’s definitely been my experience, living in Arkansas I’m just knocked around the state for over 40 years and it seems more like home all the time. But it was definitely a process that could have gone a different way. Yeah it just dawned on me that our elite, so-called, are really pricking against The gods here. They really have to choose land or foreign gods, for that second pseudomorphosis, maybe both. I would vote Russia. What they may get is Atzlan, although it also occurs to me that perhaps the American Indians could come to our aid. Did we already have two pseudomorphosis at once? Or start the second? Lots to ponder on. It’s clear they’re in deep bat guano…the heartland is convinced, and has been, but now more than ever, they’ve lost it in a Gothic manner. And we desperately need statesmen and wise women and village chiefs, so …anybody’s ball game. The native Americans appear to be trumpists, so their vote seems pretty clearly a no confidence in the faux liberaux .
JMG, Wj sidis wrote an interesting book on America and the tribes and when he argued that the American Indians have had a profound effect on American political philosophy. But I wonder if it’s that whole Eastern tribe team of confederacies and alliances to prevent the rise of empire. Could the first pseudomorphosis have slowly started under the nose of the second, faster one?
JMG, re elite manufactured culture – I bring this up seeing as it’s almost Xmas – there’s old Christmas season practice still going around that has not much to do with Christianity or otherwise elite-approved culture.
In various places in Europe plus further afield in Turkey there’s legends about a lady, in some versions old, in some versions young, that goes by various names depending on location. Some appear to be connected to the Jesus story, some don’t, but they all appear to have pre Christian origins.
In some of them the old lady leaves gifts to kids depending on whether they’ve been good or bad. One of the stories has the three wise men approaching an old lady and asking her if she knows where the baby Jesus is. She sez no and then the three ask her if she’d like to go with them to look for Jesus. She sez no, she’s too busy, then changes her mind and takes a basket of baked goods with her and goes out to find the three wise men and the baby Jesus.
She never did catch up to Gaspar, Balthazar and Melchior and after all these centuries she’s still looking for Jesus and stops at houses on Xmas eve where there’s kids and leaves some goodies for them. Which, to skeptical kids looking at sloped roofs and narrows chimneys and wondering how you land a sleigh up there never mind getting some big fat guy down that chimney with a sack of presents, the story about the old lady sounds a lot more reasonable.
Anyway, what goes on in bastions of approved doctrine and what goes on in villages up in them thar hills can be two different things.
The thesis is indeed available online, but I need to fix it up because the robots screwed it up. I used certain microsoft features to expedite the process of incorporating the committee’s feedback, but the citations aren’t what they should be because of that. I can send you a link when I’ve finally gotten around to fixing it up if you’d like? I’m kinda attached to my pseudonymity and unfortunately the thing has my real name on it.
As for Wagner and the aristocracy, I think part of it is that, hm. I left researching my thesis way more sympathetic to the aristocracy than I expected to be coming into it – you get the impression they were traumatized by the French Revolution and a lot of the things they did over the subsequent decades were motivated mostly by an effort to prevent another pan-european war. Metternich writes about waking up from nightmares of the countryside surrounding Vienna on fire as French troops moved to encircle the city, and I think that fear is what motivated him. But, welllll, no one turns themselves into a dragon if they aren’t scared of something.
In regard to the sudden break in fashion about 1780, “There’s a gap there, where lots and lots of lovely gowns got slashed down and resewn into the harsh new style, and nothing new was being made. I almost get a sense of panic from it, like they were desperate to conceal what they had worn before. ”
Given what happened to Marie Antoinette, Madame du Barry, and Charlotte Corday, I would expect nothing less.
Chuaquin
I’m not blaming Napoleon, but Liberalism and the revolutionary ideals that his brother puppet reign introduced into Spain. To some degree, as i already said, Ferdinand te seventh is also to blame, as he did his level best to deslegitimize the monarchy.
However, as you said, Liberalism was always too weak to rule the country in an stable way, because it was a poor fit for Spain. That’s why the Carlins wars happened; Because many people, from several classes, where left totally out of the new order that the Liberals wanted to implement.
The fact that the Liberals were divided is nothing excepcional in itself. They were also divided in France after the revolution( Jacobines, Girondines..) What set the divisions in place in Spain for the time being was precisely the repeated failures, that convinced a part of the Liberals that they could not ignore the Carlins even if they managed to defeat them, because they were still too many.
As for both sides commiting atrocities, i’m not that sure of that. Carlins ranks were composed of rural common folk, and had little reason to ravage their fellows in the country-side. They did not manage to take any major city, so all in all they had little chance to commit atrocities. The Liberals…well, did i need mention the famous Espartero quote? “Barcelona needs to be bombed once every decade”…
JMG, for what it is worth, I agree with Patrick’s assessment – the 2024 election is something of a booby prize considering what is coming down the pipe. Fast forward to 2028, after defeat in Ukraine, the Middle East and probably Taiwan, some serious inflation and who knows what else, the Democrats will have a lot to blame Trump for. And of course, there is the looming issue of the very safe and effective vaccines developed at WARP SPEED (trust me, this is the fastest speed, one of the fastest) by the first Trump administration. If those vaccines ever start getting associated with Republicans or Trump, stick a fork in the Republican party whether lead by JD Vance or Joe Kent or whoever else, they’re done for a cycle or two… and who knows how many cycles are left?
Hey JMG
I came across this recently, thought you may be interested in “The Wagner society in Queensland” as they have written some essays on his work.
https://wagnerqld.com.au/
Hey Jez
I sent you an email, but I assume I wrote it wrong as you have not replied yet.
Re: spinning and weaving – Icelandic womens’ weavings were a major source of income for them, and the root of their power. OTH, in ancient Egypt, weaving was a men’s trade. (“The Satire of Trades,” an Egyptian scribe discouraging his son from adopting any trade, by showing all the downsides of them and none o the upsides.) In Athens, weaving was the main occupation of the women, who were kept in purdah and, if you believe Xenophon, and a deliberately ignorant of everything as possible, so that the husband was given a blank slate to write on. In Medieval (Renaissance? Unsure of the exact date) Florence, a crackdown on women working at paid jobs (to protect those of men) led to a large uptick in panhandling and prostitution. But for Northern Europe, that may have been the case. YMMV. Though jobs at the mill financed young American women’s independence for a while.
OT; it came to me last night, reading more about Biden pardoning Hunter when he said he would not, that this is the first bit of “Politics is about interests, not values,” to wit: Donald to Joe: “If you pardon me for January 6th, I’ll let you pardon Hunter, and we’ll both take the hit in public opinion. What have you got to lose? Your side threw you off the bus anyway.” Biden, thinking it over, “Yeah. They did.” Thinking over the many, many presidents with no-good relatives who caused scandal in the Good Old Days. “And he’s changed; he deserves it.”
For what that’s worth.
A possible sign that the creative springs of our culture are fading. The top ten money making films so far in 2024 are all sequels.
https://www.worldofreel.com/blog/2024/11/22/the-10-highest-grossing-movies-of-2024-are-all-sequels-first-time-in-recorded-history
The reason why intellectuals crave for unearned power is because, thanks to the schooling system, it quickly becomes apparent to us that we should rule. There are three main aspects to this that I like to harp on:
1. Intellectuals often go through the entire schooling process without being challenged. This is especially so due to electives. Once you feel yourself getting uncomfortable, you can simply opt out.
2. Non-intellectual classes that are designed to make well-rounded human beings like art, music, gymnastics, sports, etc. are treated as second-class or even non-citizens to the classes in which intellectuals excel.
3. Students are sorted into groups based on age rather than ability.
I was no. 1 in GPA all the way through the end of high school, and I barely studied and never came close to hitting the wall. I was awful at art, music and sports so I simply didn’t take any of those classes. I was far smarter than my peers, parents, and teachers. This environment is guaranteed to create a narcissistic person who both dreams of ruling and believes he deserves to rule because the only thing you’re taught to value is academic achievement. In D&D terms, our education system rewards characters who max out intelligence at the expense of every other trait (dexterity, strength, wisdom, constitution and charisma). I was insufferable.
I was lucky enough to break out of it by studying Japanese in college and sticking with it even though I was absolutely terrible at it. While I never learned to work hard in college, once I moved to Japan, a friend I met through fate (we met at Union Station while waiting for a train in NYC and then found ourselves living in the same small town in Japan 6 months later) taught me how to study Japanese properly, which was the single hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. Years of relentless grinding. This was an extremely humbling experience, and through it I learned what it means to work hard, what it means to study, and also what’s it’s like to hit a brick wall.
If kids were grouped by ability and not age and forced to keep progressing in their subjects until they slam face first into problems that are difficult for them to solve, I think you would have a much more sober class of intellectuals rather than the Wotanish characters you see populating our university elite (which feeds the corporate elite) class today.
Celadon, thanks for this, but I’m going to suggest that you bring it up again in this month’s open post, on the 25th. I’ll want to think about that.
Smith, I like that. Can you tell me some of her names? She belongs in the same space as Krampus, as an alternative to the Greedmas imagery so luridly present in our culture.
Deoradhan, thank you for this. If you want to maintain your anonymity, no problem — you can mark the comment with the heading “Not For Posting” and I won’t put it through. Alternatively, if you want to put through a “Not for Posting” comment with an email address, I’ll contact you directly and you can send the thesis as an attachment — it’s definitely something I’d like to read.
Justin, your predictions are duly noted. Now we’ll see!
J.L.Mc12, thanks for this.
Patricia M, it’s an interesting detail of the history of language that any family name ending in “-ster” used to be, in medieval English, a term for a woman who practiced a profession; “baxter” (originally, “bakester”) was a female baker, “spinster” a woman who spun, “webster” a female weaver, and so on. Thus there’s quite an irony in the more recent coinages “mobster” and “gangster” — technically, those should only be used for women! (“Mobber” and “ganger” would be the equivalent medieval male terms.)
BeardTree, it’s a sign worth watching.
Dennis, those are excellent points. In my case it was the steady stream of rejection slips my early manuscripts got from publishers that first gave me a clue, and occult training that taught me how to work hard.
>Overall a rather realistic view of human nature and its inability to rise to any sort of ideals.
Fixed that for you. Hope that helps. Have a nice day.
> It was in fact their democracy, and not available to the rest of us
Some wag also did an AI edit and replaced “our democracy” with “our bureaucracy” and it worked pretty well too.
>I have become very firmly convinced that no one is BETTER at ruling a person than that person themselves
I’ll make an oblique comment about if you’re truly free, you have the ability to make yourself do unpleasant things that are necessary.
In a modern day twist ob Wagner’s story, the U.S. empire has become Wotan and the world reserve currency is the gold. The empire ( Wotan) made a deal with the world ( gods) that he could have the possession of nearly unlimited unearned riches by being able to print money at will that the rest of the world would accept at face value. The contract with the gods was that the empire would not print the currency beyond its underlying value or ability to be paid back.
The empire broke this contract with the gods decades ago and now all the tribulations of the Ring are slowly but surely coming down upon the one who strived for unearned riches and power at the expense of all else.
Re the gift giving old woman spirit, I know her as La Befana. The local branch of the Re-Formed Congregation of the Goddess used to hold rituals in her honor on January 6. Sadly, I no longer remember any specifics from those rituals.
Since you mentioned the blind rage of big-city PMC-liberals in response to the election results, I just thought I would comment on how liberal women supposedly adopting the “no-sex-with-men” 4B Movement to spite the male demographic for very largely supporting Trump, reminds me of a small child at the grocery store proclaiming “I’m going to hold my breath!” upon being told that they can’t have the box of Nilla Wafers that they want. Urban liberals already have a lower birth-rate than rural conservatives, so what would happen if liberal women followed through on this “strategy” bears more a little bit of similarity to what would happen if the small child in my analogy actually could follow through on their threat to hold their breath!
I have been thinking about how a different future society could tell the story of the Rheingold as a comedy rather than a tragedy.
It starts out the same with the dwarf stealing the gold from the Rhein maidens, but then the chief god comes to him and explains that if he does not return the gold to the Rhein maidens a horrible doom will fall upon him. The dwarf tells him that he did not want to steal the gold from the Rhein maidens, but they were so fickle and found him to be so unattractive that he suffered greatly.
The chief god nods his head and Says I understand but you have been going about this all the wrong way. You can’t command and order the Rhein maidens around (i can’t either). You have to seduce them, entice them, find out what they like do and help create those situations. let me show you…..
The chief god takes off his beautiful cloak and tells the dwarf that they need to cut up his cloak and make gifts for the maidens. One doesn’t like to get her hands dirty so they make her gloves, another wants a beautiful bag to carry things with, another wants a pretty hat ( the god and the dwarf have a big laugh over this because they don’t understand why she want one, but they do it anyway.)
And for the rest of the story the dwarf makes hilarious mistakes in trying to woo the Rhine Maidens but with the help of the gods he learns from his mistakes. The dwarf transforms himself form a repulsive thief into a ladies man then finally into a good husband for the Rhien Maidens.
Other Owen, that works, too. So does “our kleptocracy.”
Clay, yep. Interestingly, the breaking of Wotan’s spear on which the contracts of his power are carved is a feature of our next episode…
Sister Crow, thanks for this.
Mister N, I may be unduly skeptical, but we’re talking about a demographic that treats unrestricted access to abortion as the most important civil right there is. I really doubt they’re capable of following through on their no-sex strategy for more than a few months at most.
Dobbs, it would make a nice fairy tale for the Grimms to collect — though Alberich would probably have two older brothers who failed, so that he could succeed in the proper fairy tale way.
@Beardtree #78:
“A possible sign that the creative springs of our culture are fading.”
I would say the creative springs have faded. They’re ex-springs. They’ve joined the bleeding choir invisible, and so forth.
But we’re in the start of a cultural winter and it’s only going to get worse. Here’s a company that wants to bang out 8000 AI generated books next year:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/26/writers-condemn-startups-plans-to-publish-8000-books-next-year-using-ai-spines-artificial-intelligence
Here’s an article on how ‘sludge content’ is becoming prevalent on TikTok:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sludge-videos-are-taking-over-tiktok-and-peoples-mind1/
I’d say we’re getting a front row seat for a championship round of culture death.
>4B Movement
I call it the Cluster B Movement
(JMG, please, delete my last comment, this one is the good one)
———————————————————————————–
Guillem Mateo #74:
“To some degree, as i already said, Ferdinand te seventh is also to blame, as he did his level best to deslegitimize the monarchy.”
Yes, he was a wicked and not very smart man, and his supporters also did their best level to self-deslegitimize the Borbonic monarchy. The worst king of the spanish History…
“That’s why the Carlins wars happened; Because many people, from several classes, where left totally out of the new order that the Liberals wanted to implement.”
Well, all started as a dynastic “problem”, but went fastly into a sociopolitical “party”. However, if traditionalism had seized the power in Spain, I doubt the results had been bright and peaceful…
“As for both sides commiting atrocities, i’m not that sure of that.”
Maybe you’re romantizing the Carlins side, consider that until the second half of XIXth century there weren’t any war conventions in Spain against abuses on prisoners, civilians and so on. Liberals “Isabelinos” were cruel (summary executions), but some Carlist were it too. Reprisals and revenges in both sides, I repeat it. A case was the aftermath of this battle in the 1st Carlist War…(In spanish)
https://historiasdelbajoaragon.wordpress.com/2013/02/19/atrocidades-y-canibalismo-durante-la-primera-guerra-carlista-en-beceite-teruel/
This story wasn’t Liberal propaganda, it was real.
Sister Crow #85:
Oh, La Befana! Yes, it’s a popular folkloric/mythological figure in Italia and Italian diaspora in Argentina. She has an interesting relation with the 3 Wise Men, he he he. Competition and kindness…I like the Befana tradition because although sh is depicted as a witch, she appears alwas smiling and happy, because she’s a good person. No doubt, a good election to do ritual on January 6.
https://www.ciaoitalia.com/recipes/the-old-woman-befana-befana-la-vecchia
Brunnhilde’s role in all of this is fascinating. First she learns everything from her father Wotan by telling him that she’s just another part of him, so it’s fine. Then, horrified by what she’s learned, she shows free will by going against what Wotan ordered, in order to try and give Wotan what he really wants. But allowing Brunnhilde to have her way means Wotan loses power. At the end, Wotan gives up on everything else, fights his daughter and betrays his son in order to hang on to power. Brunnhilde tries to serve the cause of love and preserve family ties but gets defeated by Wotan’s need for power.
Fricka’s role in constantly limiting Wotan’s power is also interesting – social custom placing limits on intellect. He gives in to her repeatedly, not for her own sake but to preserve his own power base.
Patrick @ 61, I agree with you except I think the Dem leadership was told to lose. By their billionaire donors, never mind which ones, that discussion would be getting into forbidden territory. I see the Biden pardon as part of the payoff.
Yep. Massive deficits from unaffordable military adventures, an aristocracy whom the government doesn’t have the stomach to tax, and the organizations managing the morality, charity, and education legally immune from taxation– it does have a familiar ring.
Luckily, we Americans today are more sophisticated so I’m sure it will work out fine.
Hi John Michael,
Hmm. You know, it occurs to me that people use the words ‘power’ and ‘energy’ interchangeably, when they are different but related concepts.
The two are linked of course, and one is rarely possible without the other. A message for today and the future, huh? You got me thinking about this matter with your reference to Wotan and his broken spear, which sort of looks like a form of technology. If I may be so cheeky, it’s a bit Harry Potter-ish with magic wands and stuff.
I’ll note that Aragorn was tempted by ring and rejected it, but hey those palantír and epic sword were a pretty handy bit of kit with much lower costs for the user. Possibly Wotan wasn’t equal to his spear?
PS: Your analogy is spot on. Thanks.
Cheers
Chris
Regarding the 4B women’s vow to avoid sex: considering that what we resist persists, won’t these women just wind up jumping into bed with MAGA dudes in about six months? So, if you’re a young dude in the New York or Boston area, in about six months get yourself a red MAGA cap, some cowboy boots, jeans, and walk into bar downtown, it may improve your luck.
WILL1000
JMG and Sister Crow, you probably know this already, but in Germanic realms Befana is known as Holle, Holla, Perchta and some other names, and Babushka in Russia, but I could not find her Anatolian name. And it seems that in Europe there’s some Jewish observance of the tradition, you know, families with little kids leaving food out in anticipation of her visit the same as Gentile parents.
Kfish, good. Yes, it would be possible to write a full post on each of the main characters. Wagner was among other things a superlative dramatist.
Joel, the assassination of a top health insurance official the other day seems to have been met, across the whole spectrum of ordinary Americans, by a general response of “Okay, that’s a good start.” That being the case, I suggest going long on tumbril futures.
Chris, we’ll get to that! Wagner has something very specific in mind with that spear.
Will, I doubt it’ll take six months. MAGA dudes at this point are the ultimate Bad Boys.
Smith, many thanks for this.
Hello Mr. Greer,
I would like to also ask for an article, whether on the 5th Wednesday of the month or otherwise, detailing the argument that Protestantism was an attempt to copy Islam. Everything I have read on the subject argued that metaphysics moved in a language based model of reality that laid the foundations for emphasizing the word as the real sacrament. This eventually led scripture to overtake the sacraments altogether. However, your thesis sounds very plausible, especially as it relates to Calvinism.
On another note, I would love to see you set up a green wizards academy. A small liberal arts college in a rural community could easily combine a great books liberal arts education that preserved the best from classical education, but still had access to local blue color resources. That sort of stripped color education that taught both how to work with your hands and how to think would be invaluable in the years ahead. I am pretty sure the college in my local, small town in fly over America is going to go out of business soon. I would love to see them do something like this. It would be especially useful if you could set up internship programs with local farms/machine shops that let students pay their own way through school. If you could succeed in creating this kind of college the next intellectual class might be the first one in goodness knows how long that actually respected the common man who works with his hands. That strikes me as something we have not had since the Founding Fathers and their love of Scottish common-sense morals.
Re college/university libraries , back in 2023 a friend forwarded the notice pasted below. What actually happened to the collection I don’t know. Something may have been worked out — or the collection may just have been dispersed and discarded. At any rate, from what I can see, the school at the moment doesn’t seem to have any music program. haven’t looked very hard to find any mentions of the “deacquisitioning” of the music collection.
This kind of thing may well become more frequent.
—————————————————————————-
To all musicians in the SF Bay Area: The music portion of the Notre Dame de Namur library, comprising over 10,000 books, is going to be destroyed soon, as they haven’t been able to get another library to take them. So everyone is invited to come take them. They have:
Much music reference books, including the entire Groves Dictionary of Music and Musicians, books on every musical subject.
AVAILABLE RESOURCES
Biographies, books by composers, theory,
musicology, composition, ethnomusicology…
Scores, including many Dover scores, piano reductions of scores
Complete works series of Mozart, Beethoven,
etc
Music (classical, Broadway and pop)
Piano, vocal, chamber music of all kinds,
operas, opera libretti,
Broadway show piano/vocal scores, solo music
for all instruments with piano accompaniment.
Music instruction books
The library is open all day and pretty much
deserted, as it is at night, sadly.
….
Feel free to pass on the word-anything
remaining of the collection will be destroyed.
Sawyer–I was amused by your description of intellectuals avoiding the non-intellectual subjects in school. As a child my family expected straight A grades from me, which was not a problem for reading, arithmetic, etc. . I could not avoid music, physical education and art as they were required of everyone at the elementary level. So, I convinced my grandmother (she was the one whose opinion counted most to me) that B grades in these areas did not count because they weren’t real subjects. In middle school and high school music and art were no longer required and all that was needed to earn a B in P.E. was to show up in uniform, be counted through on the showers, wash the uniform and give everything a reasonable try.
JMG–I was thinking today about the health insurance executives who may be sitting in their offices thinking the opposite of the Sally Fields’ “they really like me” scene. “They hate me, they really, really hate me. I think I am a decent person working hard at a necessary job, but if I am killed by some nutjob thousands of people will applaud. ” That has to do something to a person’s head.
Chuaquin
This discussion is turning into the classical ping-pong match that internet so often produces, in wich any understanding and listening is replaced by diagonal reading, and the franctic look for weak spots in the other guy arguments.
This is unproductive and boring. If you don’t intend to listen me, there’s little point at having a conversation.
Thus i will clarify my position.
I thing that Carlism was the natural reaction of large parts of the population, specially in countryside, but including the minor nobility and the low and mid clergy,against a new order of things that left them out. Because Liberalism brought with them the Industrial World, that always favors the City, and it’s values, to the detreniment of the Peasantry, and it’s needs. They thought that liberals aimed to destroy them with taxes, atheism, laws,expropiations and industry…and they where right.
Today we live in the aftermath of this process. Have you heard about the “España vaciada”? Modern world has destroyed the Spanish country-side, and the process started in the 19th century. In Catalonia is a bit better, because there is still a lot of industry and much tourism.
I’m not interested in speculating what could have happened if the Carlists had won. But i’m willing to bet that it could have been something similar to the restauration regime of Canovas, with the king acting as an arbit, wich is the best period that happened in that age.
There was between 1911 and 1915 a Wagnerian Association in Madrid, Spain, in which there were more than 2,000 members in its best times. Curiously, the 1st World War finished with it: it had a short life…There’s a book about that association, but it’s unfortuntely only in spanish.
https://www.elargonauta.com/libros/richard-wagner-en-espana-la-asociacion-wagneriana-de-madrid-1911-1915/978-84-8138-731-5/
However, Wagner music reached my country very soon, circa 1862., and like in the rest of Europe, it opened a can of worms generating arguments between “Wagnerian” fans and haters.
Dear JMG:
I think that for the modern world, the First and Second World Wars would be comparable to the disruptions, vast changes of many aspects of everything, and the near to total overthrow of the Old order. For whatever reason, Europe seems to have some inkling of this, but the US does not (I don’t know enough about Asia). The wails about “fascism”, “Nazis”, etc. seems to be the most we recognize about the massive changes the World Wars brought.
Did the intelligentsia do the same thing as their forebears before the French Revolution in delegitimizing the old, post-Revolution order of society and European power? One possible spur to at least the clarity of thought of the elites during this period is the First World War showed the elites they could certainly lose their position, status (and their life, if they weren’t lucky). There were a lot of directions society, government, and power could go: i.e. Fascism (Mussolini was widely admired, as opposed to that second-rate guy with the funny moustache), Communism, Capitalism (the Great Depression was a serous hit to its status), and one could go on (Anarchism, anyone?). Which countries would lose power, status, existence? Which would gain power, status, others land and population (Russo-Polish War)?
We are still seeing the fallout today; I just don’t think the elites have the ability or mental power to do much that is sensible about it now. The intelligentsia seem to have been consumed by The Barbarism of Reflection. Throw Peak Oil on all this; populism may be the least of the coming problems …
Cugel
@ JMG – I find it funny how the revolutionary regime of that replaced the monarchy always gets characterized as bloody, but the old regime with its centuries of systemic exploitation and violence gets a pass. Did the people of France just wake up one day in 1789 and collectively say “ you know what, the intellectuals are right. We should start indiscriminate killings!”
I think that characterization gives too much power to the intellectuals, and takes away agency from the people who propelled the revolutionary regime to power.
I wonder if there’s any recent incident that involves someone driven to killing a powerful person responsible for death and impoverishment?
Owen @ 83
if you’re truly free, you have the ability to make yourself do unpleasant things that are necessary.
I consider that ability a sign of adulthood. I would add, make yourself do things you find necessary, as opposed to what someone else wants to foist off on you.
Mister Nobody, most of the liberal women you mentioned did, in fact, work for whatever success they have had. They can, certainly, be faulted for failing to improve on whatever education they might have had through self study as well as for entitled attitudes, but they are not privileged daughters of the rich. I believe and suggest that there is a reality underlying “4b” which is that many women have simply gotten fed up with rude, crude and obnoxious. That is the secondary reason, primary being that I had kids to raise, why I never dated after my husband died. There are behaviors which one must deal with in public, but will not allow in one’s own home.
Wer here
Well recent events are supporting my latest prediction that a giant war is inevitable in the Middle East and Europe.
Turkey with a lot of radicals invaded Syria and is trying to get rid of Iranina friendly and Russian freindly Assad it lokks more like they my succed after so many attempts had failed. In Romania elections had been banned and it seems that in other egions of the Eu they will be too. If we are going to a giant war than we have to had forced unity at all costs. In Georgia they are trying to oust an elected parliment and install a EU friendly one. If they succed they will end up like Ukraine. In the US Trump will have no other option than to cater to the whims of the neocons and support Israel in the upcoming war with Iran which can turn deadly fast. The world is unravelling as we speak and if NATO and Russia go to hot war with each other they might end up even worse for Europe and Asia. I am afraid JMG very afraid perhaps they had decided that starting WW3 is preferable to an another Trump term or they want to force him continue the war they had started there by saying “You cannot back down”
Stephen, bring it up the next time we have five Wednesdays in a month and we’ll vote on it! As for your ideas for a Green Wizardry academy, all this sounds very promising.
LeGrand, it’s appallingly common. That’s why I put a scene of the same kind into my novel The Shoggoth Concerto. It worked very well as one expression of the overall theme of that novel, which poised a fragile individual talent against uncaring institutions and groupthink.
Chuaquin, interesting. I’m not surprised — Wagner was immensely influential, and immensely controversial, all over the Western world.
Cugel, fair enough. Being American, of course, I see things through an American lens, and on this side of the Atlantic the two world wars mostly functioned as a vote of confidence in our culture and institutions; it mattered a great deal that old, arrogant, hyperconfident Britain had to run frantically to us and beg for rescue twice in thirty years.
Ben, you’re stretching what I said well out of context. Of course the French monarchy was oppressive and abusive — most governments are — and also spectacularly incompetent. That was a large part of why the efforts of the intelligentsia to destabilize it fell on fertile ground. It took, as I pointed out in my post, many decades for the French people to decide that the intelligentsia was right and the established system of government had to be replaced; here again — as I also pointed out — it was the decision of the electorate to choose radicals to represent them in the Third Estate that made the revolution happen. As for the indiscriminate killings, those were set in motion by a small circle of politicians in the National Assembly — though of course they were wildly popular.
That recent incident? Here again, unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last twenty years, you must have noticed the strenuous efforts by intellectuals on both ends of the political spectrum to delegitimize the corporate kleptocracy that runs the United States for its own benefit. That, combined with the fact that so many people have suffered so much under the kleptocracy in question, explains why the public response to the assassination of a medical-insurance CEO was, “Okay, that’s a good start.” If you happen to have read my novel Retrotopia, you might remember that the murder of an equally culpable CEO by a mob was one of the core triggering events of the Second Civil War in that novel’s backstory…
Wer, so noted. We’ll just have to see what happens, won’t we?
It always has mystified me how insurance became the primary way to pay for medical services. Insurance wants to take your money and give none of it back or give as little of it back as possible. Some are better (or worse) at it but they all strive to take your money and not give it back. Looks like that ticked off someone who traveled a long way on a bus to shoot an insurance CEO.
There’s several people I’d like to slap or beat down if I had a time machine. One of those would be the people who thought that insurance was the best idea to pay for medical services. And it’s not a stable system either, there’s no equilibrium, it just gets worse and worse as time goes on, no matter who’s doing what to change it.
Whether it’s the insurers or big pharma or the hospitals – how long does any of it stay running before it all collapses? That’s what I ask myself these days.
As far as the French Revolution goes, I think uprisings could certainly have happened without the philosophes. There were plenty of revolts great and small in France without them. Even the taking of the Bastille, I would argue, did not go that far outside the medieval paradigm (what happened there was that a bunch of Parisians, mostly labourers, grew anxious – not unreasonably, but perhaps “misinformedly” – that the King was about to attack the city with foreign troops in response to a political disagreement, and decided to gather in a militia and strike first; that sort of thing happened all the time in Medieval Europe with communal revolts). But erasing the Estates, the Monarchy and (as an independent power, at least) the Church – that was new, and that did require special ideological justification. Though curiously, many of the “novel” measures that followed, from price controls to indiscriminate slaughter of political opponents, were things various French monarchs tried in the remote past.
I do wonder how popular their killings really were, by the way. My reading on the French Revolution is still patchier than I’d like, but I get the distinct impression that contemporary French politicians liked to attribute their decisions (e.g. killing losers in political fights) to their fear of the bloodthirsty mob/support of the people’s righteous wrath when it suited them. When they wanted to do something “the mob” didn’t like, such as banning unions and strikes, they overpowered all resistance without much apparent difficulty. In any case, undoubtedly there’s always some support for killing a member of the elite (those are inherently easy to loathe because of their position and most of them have some real faults as well), but a large-ish crowd cheering in Paris is not necessarily very representative of the French people as a whole.
@Guillem Mateo: About that carlists comited less atrocities than their enemies, I think that you are wrong and I encourage you for t read the “National episodies” of Galdós. But I must add that I knew a carlist Who fought in the spanish civil war of 1936 and who seems me a saint.
Re: Poverty, immiseration, and decline: 10 different segments of the American population an their life expectancies a few years ago and now.
https://bigthink.com/health/ten-americas-for-life-expectancy/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
Re: the killing of the health insurance CEO: That particular firm had a rotten reputation. But none of them have a very clean record. My own anti-cholesterol meds were knocked down to a second tier at one point with the observation that “statins are cheaper,” when the same record noted “allergic to statins.” However, I noticed Id been buying the brand name, and next time asked for the generic., which corrected that situation. But, yeah, the health insurance industry has too much control over our medical decisions – and a lot of gall in calling themselves “health CARE companies.” They’re not. add me to the “Well, that’s a good start” crowd.
Re: Rita,
My school experiences were much the same. Art was required until 7th grade. Music until 9th, but I was in band so that was no problem. PE was required throughout all 12 years, but once the Coach decided you were not Team material he lost interest. Just show up and all was well.
There were shop classes in 9th grade, I still have the wood bench I made, and a tin box made in the metal shop. The magazine rack broke years ago.
As for the CEOs in the health industry, I thought of Cersei on the wall and Tyrion below when he says “You hate them and they hate you.” That’s about it. How else can you explain,
“To be clear, it never was and never will be the policy of Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield to not pay for medically necessary anesthesia services,”. Except that is exactly what they put in writing. “No more anesthesia for you, prole, just scream, I can’t hear you and my superyacht fund is lacking.”
What’s next, “Insert $100 for one additional minute of anesthesia? For today only a special rate of only $900 for 10 minutes.”
@ JMG – maybe it’s a personal take, but when I read ‘bloodthirsty’ I think Vlad the Impaler, rather than Robespierre. I would imagine the motivations of intellectuals attacking the legitimacy or our current kleptocracy run the gamut from naked self-interest to genuine frustration with a corrupt and broken system. Ion a personal note, the book my friend and I are writing about the economics of inequality certainly comes from a desire to give people accurate information about just how broken the current system is, and let them do what they will with it. Neither of us have any desire to end up in charge of anything larger than our families…
I did read Retrotopia. When the news of the CEO shooting broke, and the information about the words on the shell casings appeared to point straight at a systemic motive, that bit about the celebrity CEO flashed through my mind. If the shooter gets apprehended, I could see the trial turning into a bit of a circus, and a potential flashpoint of there’s even a hint that the jury was tampered with or the trial rigged. Even if that doesn’t happen, I could see a guilty verdict turning very quickly into a lit match, tossed at an open barrel of gunpowder!
@ Wer
I would guess that Turkey, The US and its band of Rent-A-Jihadis think that they have succeeded by overrunning a few towns , in the same way Napoleon thought he succeeded when he approached the city limits of Moscow in 1812 and met little resistance.
Hi John Michael,
You keep us hanging on, wanting more!
It’s not really my place to judge the acts of the gods, but Wotan is such an odd character, full of contradictions. If the god is all so powerful, why does he lust after even more power? And if the god has so much power, why not just make everyone admire and obey him, even though at face value, the word ‘twit’ comes to mind as a description. Not really sure what that means though… 😉 And curiously, and perhaps my memory is a bit dodgy, what power does the ring actually confer upon the holder? Has this even been discussed?
Given Sauron originally lost, then never regained that other ring of power, you’d have to suggest that the things are not all that they’re cracked up to be. 🙂
Speaking of power, but in a more down to earth kind of way. Thought you might be interested in this unfolding drama. With more grid tied solar power systems connected up nowadays down here than pretty much anywhere else, the powers that be who have to run the grid, are discovering for themselves what I knew about the technology years ago – install enough solar PV panels, and sooner or later you’ll have to curtail generation. AEMO says emergency powers to switch off solar needed in every state amid ‘system collapse’ fears. Interesting, huh?
Do you know that many years ago I casually mentioned this issue to some dude on this here interweb, may have even been on the old ADR website, and the response surprised me: Your system is so wasteful! It amuses me to observe that the humongous scale of the solar grid tied installations down under, has not altered the underlying realities of the technology. What did everyone expect?
The thing is, it needn’t have been this way, but the grid tied inverters installed over the last decade and more, are probably too dumb to accommodate this reality, and they are unable to throttle up and or down their output. Looks to me like it was a case of doing the job on the cheap – and here we are today with the consequences. The reality with this technology is that if you want to use it properly in all conditions, it’s a completely nuts and over the top expense. But do people listen?
Incidentally, what happened to that CEO was awful, however the alleged goings on of that organisation make the guy into what appears to be a very deeply unsympathetic character. The golden rule of ‘do unto others’ equally applies at the level the guy was working at, nobody gets a hall pass when it comes to that rule. Bubble land provides no insulation.
Cheers
Chris
Owen, oh, it was a straightforward resource grab by the insurance industry. It used to be that you paid for ordinary health care expenses out of pocket, and then had catastrophic-care insurance to handle the expenses of major health crises, if those happened. The insurance industry got big employers to sign onto more expansive plans, and it just went from there. The Obamacare fraud was the final step in the process.
Daniil, both those are valid points.
Patricia M, thanks for this. As for the CEO, there’s a sign or two that the inmates of the corner suites are finally noticing just how much hatred their actions have earned them from the rest of our society. It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out.
Ben, one of the intriguing lessons of history is that abstraction is more deadly than psychopathy. Vlad Tepes killed a lot of people, but Robespierre is the archetype of the modern political mass murderer, so caught up in abstract considerations that it never occurs to him that the corpses he’s heaping up were once real people.
Chris, one of the fascinating things Wagner’s ring and Tolkien’s have in common is that we never get to see the almighty power supposedly contained in either one of them. It’s really quite odd. Solar energy seems to have similar issues…
“If the god is all so powerful, why does he lust after even more power?”
Quote by Henry Kissinger: “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”
If a little is good, more must be better. That gets applied to everything with various bad results.
For Chris, admire the green line. Winter is here. That’s the first twitch in a week. That extremely level line in cobalt is the nuclear plant. That’s why the prattling about nuclear powered AI data centers continues on. It’s unthinkable to turn off a data center. That Star Trek episode where the M5 computer incinerates a redshirt to get more power is looking prescient.
https://transmission.bpa.gov/business/operations/wind/baltwg.aspx
@ Anselmo
Benito Perez Galdós will not do as a neutral point if view, since he was a liberal. I’ve read some of the episodes(,Trafalgar and the Girona siege, to be precise) albeit not those refering to the Carline war. But remember that they are novels, that intend to portray the feeling and the spirit of those events, more than to inform.
However, since you, more or less openly, challenge me on sources, i will provide an interesting take on Carlism by non other than Karl Marx itself! I just found it today, after searching for what Josep Pla tought about the matter. Oh, and guess who translated it from german to spanish? Andreu Nin. Here it goes the google translation from the spanish source, and here goes the link to the source http://www.lletres.net/pla/marx.html
“Carlism is not a pure dynastic and regressive movement, as the well-paid liberal historians insisted on saying and repeating. It is a free and popular movement in defense of traditions that are much more liberal and regionalist than the absorbing official liberalism, nonsense, that copied the French Revolution. The Carlists defended the best Spanish legal traditions, those of the Fueros, and the Legitimate Cortes that trampled the monarchical absolutism and the centralist absolutism of the liberal State… They represented the great homeland, as the sum of the local homelands, with its peculiarities and traditions. own. There is no country in Europe that does not have remains of ancient populations and popular forms that have been trampled by the evolution of History. In France, they were the Bretons and in Spain, in a much more voluminous and national way, the defenders of Don Carlos. Carlist traditionalism had authentically popular and national bases, peasants, small landowners and clergy, while liberalism was embodied in militarism, capitalism (the new classes of merchants and agiotistas), landowning aristocracy and secularized interests.”
Re: the liberal women not having sex & what you resist you imitate….
The amount of sexual thirst floating around on social media in response to the one smiling photo of the CEO assassin is AMAZING.
Re the allure of the Ottomans —
While the “strong horse” always has its charms, Judaism (which was far from being a strong horse, either militarily or culturally) was also very influential, and very attractive to certain writers — philosophers and others, not to mention esotericists. This was true not only during the Renaissance, but well after. Many philosophers were accused of “Judaizing” — that is, being unduly influenced by Judaism, or even being secret converts to Judaism. (See Jean Bodin, for example — whom Eliphas Levi considered a deep student of Kabbalah. )
There was a constant, though often covert, attraction to Judaism, especially through Kabbalah, but also through philosophy (Maimonides et al.), which extended through the Italian renaissance well into the 19th century (as with various national Messianic movements). Part of this was not only the interest of outsiders in Jewish matters, but the openness of Jewish figures (more or less orthodox, or heterodox) to that openness. This was not only at the intellectual level, but also at more popular levels, especially in central and eastern Europe (despite the indurated traditional mutual hostility that also flourished).
It’s worth noting that Sabbatai Zevi’s (ostensible) conversion to Islam, while it unavoidably influenced his followers in Turkey, does not seem to have reverberated back into Christian Europe. There was quite a bit of spillover between unconventional Jewish and Christian movements, but not much in the way of “Islamicizing”. except among the Philosophes, whose admiration for what they imagined to be other, more sophisticated, cultures, was (I think) based less on actual deep familiarity, but on a sort of “anyone but us” mentality.
Actual Islamicizing begins perhaps with people like Lawrence, or Guenon and some other Traditionalists — for whom Judaizing in the earlier mode would have been inconceivable, and probably repugnant.
@ JMG – meh, I’m not really buying that argument. I’ve really enjoyed this series on Wagner, but I just don’t find the idea that intellectuals are uniquely predisposed to becoming bloodthirsty tyrants or holding up ideals then denying anyone else the right to access or implement those ideals.
In the case of Robespierre, sure he was probably a megalomaniac, but was he a megalomaniac specifically because he was an intellectual, and couldn’t or wouldn’t conceptualize the lives of others? I doubt it. Plenty of people found plenty of justifications for bloodthirstiness without also being intellectuals.
As for intellectuals being uniquely disposed to holding up ideals they then deny to others, US history is practically built on that tension. The framers of the constitution held up liberal republicanism as the ideal to strive towards, then the leadership of the country spent centuries saying “freedom doesn’t apply to XYZ group”. But was this tension due to the Constitution being written by intellectuals, or because subsequent generations of American aristocrats simply found it convenient to limit access to political and economic power?
As for Wagner himself, I’ve not read much about him beyond what you’ve written in these essays, but it sounds to me like he took the failures of the 1848 revolutions exceptionally hard, and really wanted to skewer the people held responsible for that failure ie other intellectuals. Which seems odd considering that I’m the cases of the German lands, the Hapsburgs and Prussians had as much to do with the failure of the revolutions as did any amount of misdirected idealism. And to be fair to the revolutionaries, they came close to toppling the Hapsburgs I doubt the Frankfurt Constitution had much of a chance, given that they would have had to defeat the Prussians….
@Ben #115 Respectfully, “genuine frustration with a corrupt and broken system” is compatible with any level of evil, and not all evil is based on naked pursuit of some material personal advantage. I have some early Bolsheviks among my not so distant kin. I have no reason to doubt that they and the majority of their party colleagues were genuinely frustrated with the world and sought to build a better one in accordance with their sincere understanding, how ever flawed. At worst one might say that they were being deeply dishonest with themselves and unconsciously acting out of an emotional self-interest (punishing the wicked and saving humanity feels good, if you can convince yourself that this is what you’re doing).
But seizing power was, for them, purely a means to an end. What made them evil was how they decided to go about their work: by killing or at least ruining everyone who got in their way. But be fair: it would’ve been pretty hard to impose a utopia on an overwhelmingly unwilling populace without extreme violence and coercion. They figured no moral or human price was too high for utopia, and wrote and acted accordingly.
None of that is a comment on the book you mentioned, by the way; it sounds like a worthy endeavour.
@Guillem Mateo, I was intrigued by the quote, especially since it seemed utterly at odds with Marx’s (and even more blatantly Engels’) other views. The founders of Scientific Communism were famously intolerant towards “reactionary peoples”. Also, while I am not an uncritical supporter of the Carlists, I think there is much truth to it. However, it seems this quote has been called into question, if the Google translation of this apparent Carlist page is to be trusted: https://www.tradicionviva.es/2019/05/04/la-falsa-cita-de-karl-marx-sobre-el-carlismo/
Guillem #103:
I agree, we don’t need to argue more. I understand your position in this topic, although I don’t share it fully. We live in the aftermath of past events…
Re: Robespierre and others: check out a book called “Mantel Pieces” by Hilary Mantel; brief essays/book reviews about Robespierre (who seems to have lived totally in his head), Marie Antoinette (“It was she who invented the modern princess….until [her], the queens of France had been of interest only as breeders.”) and more. The archetype of the clueless blonde twit…. and if you think really nasty trash-talking was a modern invention, the stories made up abut her were more vile than anything the tabloids of today could invent, according to Mantel. ‘Ware author bias in some of the essays.
Greetings, JMG!
This morning, I read a fascinating pretend-interview with a fictitious character out of George Orwell’s 1984: https://unbekoming.substack.com/p/interview-with-emmanuel-goldstein?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=355417&post_id=152693880&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=17bhkb&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email#footnote-1-152693880
Excerpt: “Throughout recorded time, I’ve observed that society has maintained three distinct groups – the High, the Middle, and the Low. While their names and relative numbers have varied across ages, the essential structure and relationships between these groups have remained constant, like a gyroscope returning to equilibrium despite perturbations.
The aims of these groups follow an unchanging pattern. The High seek to maintain their position, the Middle aim to trade places with the High, and the Low – when they can think beyond their daily struggles – desire to create a society of equals. This dynamic creates a recurring cycle where the Middle enlist the Low by promising liberty and justice, only to thrust them back into servitude once power is achieved.”
I couldn’t help comparing it to your analysis of The Nibelung’s Ring and noting the parallels, but it brought to mind one of your past posts about another group, the philosophers, who were considered dangerous because they embraced asceticism and thought for themselves without falling into the trap of the usual hierarchy of power (if I recall correctly) and thus could not be used by the powers that be.
I’m curious to know if you see such a character in Nibelung’s Ring, however minor or off to the side. This interests me because I am hoping to carve out the role of the ascetic outsider to the power dynamics in the coming economic and social upheavals.
Thank you as always for sharing your wisdom and knowledge!
-Myriam
@ Guillem Mateo: I see that you know much more about carlism that me. Let me recomend you the article from the materialist philosopher iñigo Ongay , titled “De Vergara a Montejurra” wich you’ll can find in the post “Catoblepas”.
They recovered the insurance assassin’s backpack. It was full of monopoly money. This guy is definitely sending a message, albeit cryptic. My guess is these things mean much more to the insurance company than all of us. This is anger, channeled in a very deliberate and controlled manner. They p*ssed off the wrong guy.
Wer here
JMG please tell if I am banned for my panic attack or something. I would like to apologise please JMG Commentariat don’t ban me. People are going crazy and losing their minds here, the media is fueling the madness I don’t know what is happening here.
>If a little is good, more must be better
If freeing a memory handle once is good, freeing it twice is even better!
>It used to be that you paid for ordinary health care expenses out of pocket, and then had catastrophic-care insurance to handle the expenses of major health crises
That would be a good place for some rules, restricting medical insurance to catastrophes. Not going to happen, I know. I guess instead, the whole edifice crashes and burns and if you’re sick you see some local herbalist under the table and on the down low.
During Rome’s decline there were periods of top down revival and reorganization which tempered the decline. Perhaps the USA is in such a period now. At my age of 71 I remember the creative vigor of the country in the 1950’s into even the 90’s. Vigor found in the varied mainstream culture and also in the underground and alternative parts. We are still living off of those fumes of that creativity and the basic structures and habits built in since colonial times. The past 15 years to me feel like the spasming of a zombie or dying body. Hopefully the paddles that are being applied will jolt some life back in.
Assad is elsewhere, that was a quick collapse.
Interesting quote about the state of France.
“In sum: A selfish boss from hell (who could fire himself but swears he won’t), no functioning government, a tanking economy, and a mood like there’s no tomorrow. How did that happen to the “Grande Nation”? ”
https://swentr.site/news/608887-france-macron-centrism-crisis/
And the Supreme Court of Romania didn’t like the election results and demanded a do-over. Restless natives wherever you look except possibly Norway where they keep buying electric cars so they have more oil to sell.
Svea, good gods. I hadn’t encountered that — another benefit of staying off social media, I suppose.
LeGrand, duly noted. My take on the Protestant Reformation isn’t that it was explicitly Islamicizing — it’s that the cultural charisma of the then-dominant Ottoman world and its Islamic ideology was powerful enough that European Christians revisioned their own faith somewhat in its image, rejecting sacraments and images in favor of scripture and weekly prayer services.
Ben, er, whether you do or don’t accept it is not of any great concern to me. The role of abstract ideology as a central motivating factor in modern mass murder is what it is.
Patricia M, hmm! I’ll see if the local library has a copy.
Myriam, interesting — thanks for this. Asceticism doesn’t have a place in The Ring — but it does have a very specific and nuanced place in Parsifal, which we’ll be discussing in due time.
Other Owen, it’s intriguing that the assassin also seems to have made a very efficient escape. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next — and even more interesting to see if this is a one-off, or the first of a sequence.
Wer, no, you’re not banned, but please don’t make off topic comments. You can bring all this stuff up in this month’s open post if you like, but this week we’re talking about Wagner.
Other Owen, oh, I think the crashing and burning can be a little less extreme. I’m hoping to see nurses permitted to open their own clinics, without having to pay an MD for the privilege; quite a bit of effective health care could be done that way.
BeardTree, if Trump can accomplish his stated goals — getting the US out of the global-policeman racket, clearing away at least a portion of our useless federal bureaucracy, and trimming the health care industry down to size — it’s possible that he’ll preside over such a period of revival and restabilization. We’ll have to wait and see.
@128 Myriam
About the Orwell/”Goldstein” quote: I believe it gets the aims of the High & the Middle correct, but, at least in America, the Low wants a fairer system where hard work eventually allows one to live comfortably or even become wealthy.
“There is God and there is the word of God. What more do you need?” That quote could come from either a Muslim – or a European believer in the Protestant belief in “Sola Scriptura.”
One good question to ask – and Wagner, as a German, might have wondered about it – is why the further North the nation, or in Germany, the region, the harder they latched onto Calvinism in Scotland and Lutheranism in Germany and Scandinavia.
And thanks, Myriam, for bringing up the Stoic – and Cynic – alternative that’s nowhere in the Ring Cycle. NOW I see why JMG called “Parsifal” the sequel to that epic.
Regarding the health care system and health “insurance,” I had a clarifying experience many years ago, when both my wife and our dog needed to be tested for Lyme disease in the same month. The vet charged $60, no doubt making a healthy profit. The medical group billed for hundreds of dollars (less than $1000 but more than $600), our insurance capped the charge at a significantly lower “negotiated” “in-network” amount, then covered a portion of the remainder, leaving us with a balance due of… $60.
It sure looked a lot like all the figures prior to the balance due were arbitrary and fictional. So why the high premium for such “coverage?” Without it we’d have had to pay the initial inflated amount billed. As others have pointed out, it’s not really insurance, but there’s a different term for what it actually is: protection money. Like what your local mob soldier might offer/demand. The day to day value of the “coverage” isn’t in what it actually covers/pays for (and of course, typical “affordable” plans hardly cover anything at all), it’s that when it works, it protects you from being charged the vastly higher arbitrary predatory amounts that health care provider corporations can charge for services you might not be able to refuse.
Now, what happens to that mob lieutenant when he collects the protection money but fails to deliver on the protection? That’s what happened in New York, and it’s why despite the obligatory (though halfhearted) pearl-clutching from the media, few feel any sense of moral outrage at that outcome.
As a side note, the dog’s $60 blood test also included results for five other diseases. From what I know about how most blood lab testing works, my wife’s test probably also produced results for several other diseases, but for them to actually reveal those results would no doubt have increased the billed amount by thousands.
@Other Owen (#130) & JMG (#136):
What I’ve read about the assassination so far suggests to me that the gunman was either a professional hitman or a very thoughtful and intelligent amateur. I don’t expect he’ll ever be taken alive, or if he is taken dead, that he will not have killed himself.
Hey, I’ve found a post about Wagner, the fascism and the Christianism. No doubt, the author has opened a can of worms.
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2024/07/richard-wagner-nazis-christianity-joseph-pearce.html
It’s interesting that’s a conservative and Christian blog, I hope JMG and kommentariat, you like it, or at least you don’t dislike it too much. What do you think about it?
JMG —
I’m open to the possibility of Islamic (or Turkish/Islamic) influence on the Reformation esthetic and general attitude, but I don’t quite see it. Yet.
There are traces of Islamic influence earlier on, e.g. in the position of some Nominalists that “a thing is just because God wills it” (rather than an external standard of justice being able to constrain Divine omnipotence). There is also the claim (advanced in the late 19th and early 20th century) that Dante’s circle was influenced by Sufi models. And there is the Rosicrucian connection — Brother CRC having traveled to and studied in Damcar, and so on.
As against these suggestions, there other factors to be weighed. First, that there was an example ready to hand of aniconic worship, and of non-sacramental religion, in the form of Jewish places of worship. Second, there is plenty of evidence that the Reformers spent serious time brooding over the Old Testament, studied Hebrew (and Aramaic), and so on; not so much (that I know of, but I’m open to correction) that they were aware of Islam or Islamic models. Third, Reformers (e.g., Servetus, Calvin) were often accused of “Judaizing”, not (again, as far as I know) of following Islamic models. Fourth, western Europe, especially the Iberian realms, were in the throes of decolonization, trying to eliminate as much as possible the influence of the colonizing powers, and were quite sensitive about such matters. (Servetus, again, was not criticized for following Islamic models, but for following Hewish models.) And the Rosicrucian stream in Reform, especially Boehme and Behmenists, was associated with Lurianic Kabbalah, and Lurianic circles.
Now the Mormons *were* sometimes accused of being more or less influenced by Islam, but I think largely on account of polygamy — even by that time Islam was often still regarded as a rather louche form of Christian heresy (polygamy! harems! Arianism!).
In other words, i think there could be two (and a half) primary ways in which an influence of Islam on the Reformers could be indicated. First, if contemporaries used Islam (or The Turk) as a stick to beat Reformers. Second, if there were evidence that one or more Reformers, perhaps covertly, actually looked to Islam (or Turkey) as a model. And a half — if there were evidence of specifically Islamic motifs in the words or deeds of Reformers that could not be more readily accounted for by exemplars closer to hand: not, that is, direct quotations, but parallelisms, stylistic or esthetic habits, and so on.
Interesting question.
In which I sort of begin to answer my own question.
It seems that Servetus was indeed described, by Melanchthon no less, as transmitting Mohammedan doctrines. I copy a section of a text, with URL just ahead of it..
——————-
https://www.uua.org/files/documents/internationalresources/servetus_500_anv_book.pdf
——————
But it is nevertheless hard to understand why a man of such intelligence, and well versed in theological matters such as Melanchthon, Luther’s assistant and successor at the helm of the German Reformation, said in 1556 that the “Servetian, i.e., Mohammedan teachings” were being spread in Poland (Baron 1989, p. 435).1 Was it mere ignorance of the work of the Aragonese heretic, or tampering of his teachings? Just three years after his death at the stake in 1553, Servetus’ doctrine was undergoing deformations and biased interpretations of such magnitude that very few people were capable of transmitting it fully, and often at considerable risk to their lives, to other restless thinkers who were dissatisfied with the doctrine taught by the established churches. Furthermore, the author could not rise to reply, few of his books had been saved from the flames, and those who could have spoken loudly did not dare to do so. What was really the relationship between Servetian doctrine and Islam? If we discard Melanchthon’s simplistic response, equating them in their denial of the Trinity, which was the approach taken by the Aragonese heretic, and up to which point was it original and shocking for its time? Which was his concept to Islam, and how could it fit into his theology? To analyse these questions, we will first see how the context of sixteenth century Europe conditioned the visions of Islam that prevailed in the West; then we will see how the Muslim religion is reflected, and particularly their holy book, the Qur’an, in Servetus’ work, and how did he consider it in his work and during the trial in Geneva in which he was sentenced to death. Finally we will draw some conclusions about Servetus’ opinions of Islam.
Chuaquin, I read the article about Wagner. I think the author should have named some names. Whom, exactly, is blaming long dead Wagner for the uses to which his works were put? I am, perhaps, a bit sensitive about blanket denunciations of the kind–all fill in the blank people think such and such, as being invitations to abuse of the innocent. I also was not aware that “all that is good and noble in Norse and German mythology” is “forever cursed”. My reason for not being a Wagner fan has nothing to do with politics or history; I simply think his music sounds like a bad movie soundtrack.
@Danil Adaamov
Many thanks for this. I looked at the page, and the objections seem plausible to me. The origin of the quote difers, however, since Josep Pla obtained it from this book: Andreu Nin. Marx: «La revolución española –1868-1873». Editorial Zenit. Madrid, 1929 Which is supposed to be a direct translation from the german original.
..While in the page you provided, they say that : “…Jesús Evaristo Casariego, who was the one who translated it into Spanish and published it in 1961 in ABC, wrongly attributing its authorship to Marx.”
30 years passed from the first translation to the second one.
So i guess that someone should go check if the quote actually appears at the german original or at the spanish translation.
@Anselmo, i don’t know that much. It’s just that some years ago i read a book by a catalan author, who fought in the last carline war,(Marian Vayreda, Records de la darrera Carlinada) and i got the impression that Carlism is a deep phenomenon, poorly understood today. Many people left their lives behind to fight for it. Why they did it? Because they were backward, fool reactionaries?. It makes no sense, there is more and somebody has lied to us. The author was from a well positioned family. But many volunteers were common folk. Something strong compelled them to oppose the liberal regime. Since then, and at my humble level i try to learn more wherever i can, and oportunity arises.
Hi JMG and everyone,
Not entirely related to the subject, but i thought worth adding, as you’ve talked about the Piscean era ending.
I ‘m listening to The Gaggle with Peter Lavelle and George Szamuely, and Peter just said in regards to Syria:
“This is the end of Christendom in the Levant – after 2000 years…”
Regards,
Helen in OZ
ps other Helen W,
may I ask, where in S.A. your son lives
Hi Siliconguy,
The graph is fascinating, and pretty much matches the sort of demand / supply curves down here. It’s a high wire rope balancing act, and to be honest, it’s amazing the entire system works as well as it does.
The green line was very interesting coming in on a weekend. The acronym VER was not readily explained. What does it represent?
With the over supply of roof top solar issue down here, one suggestion for dealing with it, is to simply let the circuit over voltage which will trip the sub station, and cut the excess supply. The issue is like trying to pressurise a big water pipe, but from both ends. The dumb grid tied inverters have to supply a higher voltage than the mains if they want to push those electrons away from a house – so with too much of that going on, up goes the voltage in a circuit in an uncontrolled manner, unless your neighour switches on heavy loads like heaters, or car chargers etc. Which nobody has control of. When they talk about inertia in the system being supplied by really huge spinning generators, they’re talking about the ability to stop the fluctuation of voltage, frequency and current supply because that supply is bigger.
If you’ve ever had the chance to watch the voltage bouncing around up and down, on the grid, the words stability don’t quite describe what you see. 🙂 All the same though, as I said before, it’s amazing the grid works as well as it does.
Off grid, the voltage supplied is rock solid and constant because the inverter gets it’s supply from batteries (which presumably have enough charge in them). Easier on electrical equipment, if I may add!
Cheers
Chris
Hi John Michael,
It is quite odd isn’t it? When I first read the Tolkien books, it never even occurred to me to ask that question. The reader just presumes that the ring is a powerful thing, because everyone said so. But is it really? The author never cared to elaborate further, despite the large number of supporting books going back over the pre-history of that fictional world. It certainly wasn’t powerful enough for Sauron to not lose his finger and a major war.
Maybe the elves weren’t all that powerful either? Tom Bombadil appeared to be the most powerful character of all, and yet despite rescuing the party from harms way, neither did he alleviate their burden.
Tolkien’s conclusion was right from my perspective. The ring was just pure bad news, and best destroyed to put an end to the entire mischief it created. Still, even that outcome makes me wonder if the author had a larger meaning in mind, and the conclusion was an allegory, metaphor or even a comment upon civilisation. What do you reckon about that?
Cheers
Chris
Patricia M, exactly. I’m not sure why the northern European countries were so much more receptive to Protestantism, unless it’s an effect of harsh environments. As for Parsifal, just you wait — the symbolic and philosophical resonances are just getting started.
Walt, thanks for this. Yeah, “protection money” is about right.
Robert M, that seems like a reasonable analysis. The guy was certainly competent.
Chuaquin, I’ll put it on the “get to” pile; it may be a while.
LeGrand, the process that anthropologists call “stimulus diffusion” — which is what I’m talking about here — is notoriously difficult to track in so straightforward a manner. Consider Sequoyah’s invention of the Cherokee syllabary. It’s accepted by just about everyone that he was inspired by seeing written English, but it’s a syllabary rather than an alphabet, and while some of the characters look like English letters there’s essentially no similarity in sound values:
This is “Tsalagi,” the Cherokee word for themselves. Thank you for the quote from Melanchthon — that others in the same period recognized the Wittgensteinian family resemblance is, I think, helpful.
Helen, it’s really unfortunate, but probably unavoidable. The Muslim world typically goes through spasms of religious intolerance when it’s throwing off foreign influence politically. I hope the Syrian and Lebanese Christians can find somewhere to go.
Chris, well, Tolkien himself made a point of rejecting straightforward allegory, so I don’t think it’s quite that simple. If I ever write my para-Tolkienian fantasy, though, I may have some fun with the Magic McGuffin whose supposedly limitless power doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.
JMG – Suppose the Power of the Ring is the universal belief that the one who wears it can command the actions of all others. Because each one believes it, each is afraid that everyone else will be compelled to punish them for a lack of loyalty or enthusiasm for whatever scheme the Ringbearer proposes. Each thinks “I’m the only one free to disobey, but I will be harshly punished by those who are not so free, so I will obey… this time.” It seems plausibly like criminal gang dynamics to me. Run with it!
@144 Mary Bennet
The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra doesn’t perform Wagner, and a minority of people associate a love of Wagner with Neo-Nazi beliefs (I remember a cop show episode, maybe Law & Order where a guy was briefly suspected of being a wanted Neo-Nazi because he purchased a record of Wagner’s Tragic Overture, until it was pointed out that the overture was actually by Brahms.
I actually like the strawman of Wagner being a Nazi, because it is easy to debunk and distracts the Left from realizing that there are popular composers and conductors with real ties to the Nazis.
I don’t want online retailers to stop selling CDs of Karajan, Orff’s *Carmina Burana*, Richard Strauss, or Furtwangler.
@Helen in Oz,
My son is in Adelaide, attending university. (What can I say, it’s his choice. I tried pointing out that ‘higher education’ these days is just a wealth-extracting business and the debt from the fees take years to pay back.) Are you also in Adelaide?
Hi Helen,
Yes, I live in a suburb northeast of Adelaide, Valley View, is he living in the city, or in the suburbs?
Well, I hope his studies end up being worthwhile!
Regards,
Helen in Oz
Patrick, OK. Like I said above, I tend to be rather sensitive about these kinds of “if the shoe fits, wear it” open ended denunciations. As if, maybe, the writer of the article linked above by Chuaquin didn’t want to directly name the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. This seems like a rhetorical trick to me, denounce the behavior, but well, we can’t name the actual perpetrator because some important person might get mad, so we will just make it sound like someone else is our target.
I am afraid I don’t know much about mid-20thC composers, or their political associations. The one composer from that period of whose work I am a fan is Messaen. IDK what his political views might have been. Rather traditional, I would imagine, as he was a Catholic church organist.
@Wer,
I’ll add you to my prayers, if you would like. It’s not crazy here in Japan. Yet. I observed on the TV last week a whole lot of guys decked out for war in Seoul. That was sudden, and that’s typically how it happens out in the Far East. They’re placid one day, but it’s a thin veneer of normalcy, and the next day off they go. I’m rural, but Heavens knows, that might not be enough.
Thank you all who have commented about the troublesome topic: relationship between Wagner and Nazism. This topic usually degenerates into the well known fallacy “Reductio ad Hitlerum”:
If Hitler liked Wagner music, everybody who likes Wagner is a Nazi.
If Hitler was vegetarian, every vegetarian is a Fascist.
If HItler believed in God…
If Hitler wore a moustache…
If Hitler liked dogs…
And so on (ironic mode).
http://www.quickmeme.com/Reductio-ad-Hitlerum
Mary Bennet #144: ” My reason for not being a Wagner fan has nothing to do with politics or history; I simply think his music sounds like a bad movie soundtrack.”
OK, that’s your subjective reason for not to like Wagner music, and I respect it (although I’m a big Wagnerian fan myself); at least you don’t find faux reasons disguised as “objectives” like people who blame Wagner for being supposedly the favourite Nazi composer…So you’re in your right to dislike him.
@154 Mary Bennet
I don’t know a lot either, but I picked up some. I learned Karajan was a conductor for the Nazi regime from jokes on forums about him being forced to conduct Mahler symphonies after they became too popular for him to ignore. By then, I already had a lot of Karajan recordings because they’re widely available and he’s a “trusted name” for me.
Messiaen was famously a German prisoner of war when he composed the Quartet for the End of Time.
Chuaquin, I don’t need faux reasons to express what are nothing more than personal tastes and preferences, and I truly do not understand why anyone thinks they do need pretend reasons. Simple statements like such and such is a nice person/piece/or whatever; I happen to be partial to thus and so, are usually sufficient politely to express differences of taste. I will say I have no respect, as in none whatsoever with you make poor little me feel bad because you didn’t agree with me attitudes and behavior.
I also completely and totally reject the notion that you can evaluate a person’s character on the sole basis of ephemeral tastes. Mental laziness is what I call that habit. For example, if a lady slavishly dresses according to the latest fashion, she might be a shallow clothes horse, or, she might have a job which requires that form of dress. A girl I knew once rejected a job offer in a clothes shop because all employees were required to wear the company clothing line, for a (discounted) price. She said, I am working to save money, not spend it.
About Islam and Protestantism: There’s a difference between what they were doing, what they thought they were doing, and what their contemporaries thought they were doing. Here’s my take:
They thought they were fighting the Papacy and all its works. That’s on records, as is the corruption of the popes of the period. To do so, they stripped the faith of everything seen to be “Papist.” That left very bare bones.
Because of the heavy emphasis on the Old Testament, they were *seen* by contemporaries to have been “Judaising.”
I get a sort of ambivalence on their part to the Jews: they didn’t like them, but God had seen fit to leave them in place, sooo….
Islam? Not consciously. I think the Western European view of Islam at this point was two-fold: The Ottoman Empire as The Enemy; and the older view that looked to The Holy Land and to North Africa – Moors and Saracens.
Shakespeare dealt with Europe’s view that culture in Othello, whose lethal jealous rage makes a lot more sense when you recall that, however long he’d spent in Europe, he was a born and bred North African underneath, with all their cultural assumptions. ( Iago hit a sore spot with “She did defy her father….,”) with their built-in tradition of Honor Killings. One which poor, hapless Desdemona had no inkling of.
That their bare-bones theology looked a lot like Islam’s was more along the lines of both Sumer and Mexico bot having pyramids.
Does that make any sense?
@Patrick #151
In re: “I don’t want online retailers to stop selling CDs of Karajan, Orff’s *Carmina Burana*, Richard Strauss, or Furtwangler.”
I can’t speak for the others you mentioned, but I have read three separate biographies of Strauss, and I can assure everyone that Strauss was not a Nazi (even opportunistically).
Rather, he was a political naif who did not take Hitler seriously until it was much too late.
In retrospect, it is hard for us to imagine the dismissive, contemptuous attitude that the upper classes in Germany (including Strauss) had for Hitler at first. They saw him as a screeching, gesticulating buffoon, and may of them predicted that he would not last in office for more than a year or two.
Indeed Strauss was incautious enough to write a letter to that effect to his librettist, Stefan Zweig. That letter was intercepted by the Gestapo, and Goebbels summoned Strauss to Berlin and read him the riot act for hours on end. The Gestapo subsequently harassed Strauss’ son and wife (who was Jewish) until the end of the war.
As with so much else about World War II, the real history is much more complicated than what we get taught in school.
Hi John Michael,
Ah, well I defer to your opinion about the author and allegories, although I love a good allegory. Truly, I’d not even realised he’d become a bit grumpy over the years. It can happen.
Hehe! John Michael, you’d probably confuse your readers with such a story, but then maybe it’s a book you could write for your own enjoyment, and we have to make of it what we will. The Magic McGuffin worth not very much has a lot of promise. How would you introduce the surprise in a way that differs from the author Frank Baum’s unveiling at the end of Oz? Or the infamous, Bored of the Rings book?
I’m currently reading your reading, and the words: it typically drives sudden, decisive change, sure sounds alarming. It’s an odd experience to observe events progressing at such a fast clip.
Cheers
Chris
“Necrophyllic”thought: I think Wagner cause of death was heart attack (please, correct me if I’m wrong). It’s a death very suitable for a man who was so appasionate and violent in his music style…What do you think about it?
Re: Protestantism and Islam
As a non-Christian, what JMG said just makes sense to me. An outside observer can point to a clear historical parallel — iconoclasm in the late Roman (“Byzantine”) Empire. I’m sure the intellectuals could find any number of reasons why destroying icons was based on Christian doctrine, but an external observer would just say “these guys are getting the arses kicked by these desert folk, and some of them think some of the desert folk’s ways might be useful “
@161 Michael Martin
Thank you.
The brief biography I had on Strauss in a book of composers mentioned only that he got in trouble for having a Jewish librettist (Zweig) and quoted him saying, “Germany had 56 opera houses; the United States had two. [Leaving Germany] would have reduced my income.”
I also know from a David Hurwitz YouTube video that he composed a piece celebrating the alliance with Japan– he was complaining that only one recording exists in bad sound.
Furtwangler wasn’t ideologically a Nazi either.
I don’t know about the views of Karajan & Orff.
However, the p9litical worldview of wokeists is so unnuanced (Trump is equivalent to Hitler and his supporters are fascists) that Strauss, Furtwangler, Karajan, and Orff could be targets of a future cancelling campaign on the ostensible basis that they were Nazis (but really to erase those parts of the past that do not support their historical narrative).
@Patricia Mathews #160 Although I broadly agree with this, it does leave the question: how did they decide what was Papist? If they were only opposed to everything associated with the Popes, I understand that there was plenty of (often borderline-pagan) folk Christianity for them to tap into that was at best tolerated by the Popes. But that was very much not the direction in which they went. It seems like they wanted to get rid of everything other than the Bible, which inevitably, if probably unwittingly, pushed them closer to the Jews. And to a lesser degree the Muslims – because it meant drawing closer to a shared Abrahamic heritage.
I was rereading the post and realized you were less than a week early.
“The national bureaucracies and the military, sick of the inept and dysfunctional [Assad] government, sided with [the advocates of radical change], and the transfer of power happened very nearly before anyone quite realized it.”
What happens next is the question. The conspiracy theorists are having a great time with it.
There is a book called Trolling the Fisher King: Reimagining the Wound, by the late poet and Jungian and jazz festival promoter Paul Pines that I think might shed some light on the question about the relationship between the West/WASPs and Islam. While much of the book is focused on Parzival / Percival, it does touch on the longer lasting influence of the Holy Wars and how we keep re-opening this wound. It’s not your typical book, but a mixture of mythography, memoir, dreams, criticism, analysis. One of a kind work. Cheers.
Lathechuck, I’ll consider that. Here again, though, I have some notions of my own…
Chuaquin, and then there’s this:
Patricia M, it’s an interesting argument. I’ll be exploring the matter in more detail later on.
Chris, Bored of the Rings has been a fave of mine since I first read it, and I can still recite from memory chunks of the poetry that graces (so to speak) its pages. The powers of the Ring in that epic of absurdity might be wortth contemplating. As for the ingress chart, the thing I find interesting is that it shouldn’t take effect for another two weeks!
Chuaquin, heart disease is the world’s most common cause of death, so I don’t think it counts for much.
Alvin, that’s certainly true of iconoclasm, and it takes on an even more forceful dimension when you remember that in 1500 the Ottoman Empire wasn’t “these desert folk.” It was a vast, civilized, prosperous empire, much richer and more civilized than the squabbling little kingdoms of Europe. The most powerful monarch in Europe couldn’t even dream of having the power and wealth that the Grand Turk had at his beck and call. Thus the temptation to imitate success was a powerful one.
Siliconguy, it’s a tolerably common way that revolution happens. Nor is it impossible that we’ll see similar scenes here in the United States in the not too distant future.
Eagle Fang, hmm! I’ll see if I can find a copy.
The book started out as four essays online, and they are is still up:
1.
https://numerocinqmagazine.com/2015/08/07/trolling-for-the-fisher-king-starting-in-gloucester-paul-pines/
“Two details must be noted: after recognizing his role, Parzival rejoins his wife in true union, a Holy Marriage (heiros gamos); and, finally, he encounters his dark brother, Fierfize, (piebald), the son their father, Gahmuret, sired with the black Moorish Queen Belcane, in the North African Kingdom of Zazamanc, on his way home from the Crusades. Concealed by their armor, they face off without knowing the identity of the other. Just before delivering the death blow Parzival sees his brother’s face free of the helmet, recognizes him, and the once embattled knights embrace.It begins as a reprise of the battle in which Amfortas was wounded, and ends with a resolution. Parzival welcomes his dark Muslim brother as a part of himself. He can heal the wounded Fisher King by asking the question which he now embodies. Amfortas, free from pain, dies in peace. may be a cipher and a prescription for our own time..”
Part 2: https://numerocinqmagazine.com/2015/10/03/trolling-with-the-fisher-king-the-archaeology-of-dreams-paul-pines/
Part 3: https://numerocinqmagazine.com/2016/02/02/trolling-with-the-fisher-king-chapter-three-constellating-the-net-a-quantum-fairytale-paul-pines/
Part 4: https://numerocinqmagazine.com/2016/06/11/dinner-with-the-fisher-king-paul-pines/
Maybe not so much about Islam in these after all, when I look through them again, except that bit above, but certainly a lot about Parzival!
JMG,
I thought all the turmoil that happened after Gollum fell with the ring in the pit in Mount Doom might have been an example of the power of the ring, i.e. it was holding Mordor together with Middle Earth’s version of duct tape and bailing wire but that could have been due to Sauron going poof at that point. I know you didn’t read the later HP books, but the ring seemed to be a fine example of what Ms. Rowling called a Horcrux, an object that encapsulates a fragment of a soul that keeps the rest of soul on earth if the body died as long as the object is intact. I wouldn’t be surprised that there plenty of other sources for this concept, but I wonder if Ms. Rowling got the inspiration from LOTR.
The ring(s) greatest power might just be that it (they) makes people want it (them). That would explain why Gollum just holed up in a cave and ate people, while Sauron was able to do more impressive things.
Mary Bennet #159:
“De gustibus non est disputandum”.
You wrote,
“Patricia M, exactly. I’m not sure why the northern European countries were so much more receptive to Protestantism, unless it’s an effect of harsh environments.”
I believe there is a very straightforward answer to this. At some point compare a map of the Roman Empire that divides the land into the sections that were truly Romanized with Latin based culture, and the sections that just joined Rome by treaty. What you will find is that if you compare that to the Protestant vs Catholic map of Europe, you are basically looking at the same map. Areas of Europe that embraced Roman culture, art, language, music, and so on stayed Roman Catholic. Areas where a barbarian was offered some tribute and a cute Roman princess to self-identify as Roman for a little while centuries later went Protestant. I cannot remember the page number but Rodney Stark’s book, “For the Glory of God” mentions this thesis. Spengler and the whole pseudomorphis idea seems particularly relevant here.
JMG #168:
You’re right about it. Heart attacks happens…but I think some personalities have more probabilities to have heart diseases, and their life styles too. Wagner had a stormy and controversial life…
Heart attacks are also a risk for those of a choleric temperament, for what that’s worth.
Eagle Fang, thank you! Duly bookmarked.
John, the detachable soul is a very old concept in folklore and shows up all over older fantasy fiction — if you ever read Barry Hughart’s sinophile fantasy Bridge of Birds, for example, you’ll recall the detached soul that was Hughart’s Magic McGuffin. The powerlessness of the Almighty Ring, to my mind, is one of the great flaws in Tolkien’s opus — Bilbo put it on quite often, and Frodo did so on a couple of occasions, but all it ever did was make them invisible. If the Ring gave them power according to their stature, hobbits are even shorter than I thought. 😉
Stephen, that’s certainly plausible.
Chuaquin, so did a lot of people who died from other causes!
@170 John
That was because Sauron put so much of himself into the Ring that he was reliant on the Ring’s existence to maintain a physical form and control over Mordor and his forces. It’s not a “buff” from the Ring; it’s a sacrifice Sauron made to forge the Ring.
@JMG
In the Second Age, the king of Numenor declared war on Sauron when the latter figure gave himself the title “King of Kings.” Despite Sauron always wearing the One Ring, his forces were defeated and he was taken prisoner.
@Stephen D #172 – thanks. That makes a lot of sense. Though Ireland was never Romanized, either.
JMG – When Bilbo and/or Frodo put on The Ring, they didn’t know that it offered them extraordinary power. (You have to admit, though, that invisibility (including the clothes one is wearing at the time) is a nifty trick.) Not knowing that it gave them command of orc armies, and there being no one nearby who expected to be commanded, I think I can excuse Tolkien for the way it’s written. The situation raises an important point: if you HAD extraordinary power, what would you do with it? (It’s related to Superman’s Dilemma: so many muggings in Gotham, which one does he disrupt?) Or, related to the remote-viewing museum exhibit: if you could see something very far away, what would be worth the effort? If it’s something that you can get a photo of, just get the photo! If you can’t get a photo, how can you know whether the view is accurate or just imagination?
“I think the French had very good reason to overturn one of the most effete and incompetent governments in Europe, but I consider it a tragedy that they didn’t simply adopt a constitutional government and settle things that way.” JMG.
That may have been because constitutions weren’t at that inflection point where they were popular enough to catch people’s attention but not so old they fall out of favor. ‘Liberte, egalite, fraternite,’ did not include, ‘constitutionality.’ It also didn’t include, ‘democratic.’ Democracy was too old and constitutions were too new.
‘Democracy’ became a sacrosanct thing later during the nineteenth century, at least in the US. This while our actual form of government is anything but democratic. I remember when my daughter came home from school horrified at learning that our government is not a democracy. “Yes, that’s true,” I said. “How does the Pledge of Allegiance go? ‘I pledge allegiance to the flag… and to the republic for which it stands…’?” She hadn’t thought things through.
I notice today that ‘democracy’ has turned into a Harry Potter magic charm, as in, ‘Expecto democrito!” and, Poof! Your problems are fixed. But the constitution, which is the ground document of a republic, is being increasingly marginalized. The constitution is archaic. Old and therefore obsolete. Candidates occasionally win without getting the ‘popular vote,’ as was the case with Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016. That got a lot of heartburn from the woke left!
The electoral college is antiquated, but it was created for a specific purpose in a time when the states in the United States were to be sovereign states who only agreed to form a union, called a republic, but basically ruled themselves quasi-independently. Today’s Woke Revolution defines democracy to mean, ‘Diversity, equity, inclusion,’ without having a real definition of those nebulous terms. That’s why we created constitutions be begin with. To painfully define everything.
I’m wondering if this is an unconscious desire-dare I say conspiracy-to get rid of the ‘Constitutional Republic’ and replace it with a ‘Democracy’ which the average voter is to interpret as ‘fixing’ (overturning) the US constitution? Pendulums swing. Old things that were abandoned because they didn’t work anymore slither around and become the Next New Thing!
“The powerlessness of the Almighty Ring, to my mind, is one of the great flaws in Tolkien’s opus — Bilbo put it on quite often, and Frodo did so on a couple of occasions, but all it ever did was make them invisible.”
I don’t remember it from my reading decades ago either, but it appears Frodo pretty unambiguously did a bit more with the Ring:
https://www.reddit.com/r/lotr/comments/2w7ar8/how_frodo_killed_gollum_with_the_one_ring_and/ .
Lathechuck (#179) asked: “if you HAD extraordinary power, what would you do with it?”
I would try my hardest never to use that extraordinary power, and to get rid of it as quickly as I could. As Lord Acton wrote back in the late 1800s: Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men. I know for certain that I am not so “special” that I would be immune to such corruption.
I think that “democracy” became a fetish in the USA much later than the 19th century. I remember my classes in the 8th grade on Civics, where we were taught that the men who wrote the Constitution — chiefly James Madison — were prudent enough to avoid giving our new nation any “pure” form of government, whether monarchy, oligarchy or democracy. Instead, they gave us a mixed form with three branches: a quasi monarchical President, a quasi-oligarchic Senate, and a quasi-democratic House of Representatives. (The Supreme Court, we were specifically told, was not one of the three branches of our government, but stood outside of all the branches, to judge their actions for posterity.) All this was according to the state-mandated curriculum for the 8th grade, according to a slim green-covered pamphlet we all had to read: Outline for the Study of Civics, by Grace Chandler Stanley, written in 1924, and published by the California State Board of Education.
This was during the school year 1955/6 in Berkeley, California. The fetishization of democracy came later, in my experience: I first became aware of it during the rebellious 1970s.
The power of the Ring. If you read all his lore (and Tolkien loved to create mountains of lore), the One Ring wasn’t the only Ring out there, there was a whole Ring technology that the Elves became dependent on, although Tolkien never does go into exactly what those Rings did for the Elves or why they became dependent on them. (If you wanted to write a story, JMG, that would be my suggestion – how the Elves became dependent on this Ring technology and what it did for them. I think you can see the obvious allegory there :P) I think he mentions in passing that the Rings made for the dwarves by the Elves could “breed gold”, but that was all he imagined. The Rings given to Men just turned them into invisible ***holes, as far as I can tell. Tolkien kept saying the era of the Elves was over and they were all slowly leaving Middle Earth, due to their mistakes with the Rings, that it was now the Age of Man.
Sauron basically learned all the secrets of the Ring tech of the Elves and then he made one master Ring that could control all the other Rings. But to do so, he had to transfer most of his godly power (he was one of the lesser gods in Tolkien’s mythology) into the One Ring. Tolkien seemed to be fond of “devil’s bargains” where one hand giveth and the other hand taketh away.
I don’t know if I write this too late for today: According Wikipedia, Richard Wagner was very influenced in his thought by Schopenahuer. I didn’t know this fact. What were the real scope of this “friendship” with Schopenhauer books, in your opinion, on Wagners music and life?
@184 The Other Owen
Gandalf secretly was the bearer of the Ring of Fire which “rekindles the embers of hope in a world grown chill” and probably is the reason Gandalf was known for fire magic.
The dwarven and human rings were all made for the elves, but dwarves and men have different desires. Dwarves are resistant to corruption while men are suspectable to it.
Disclaimer: I know some of this from the Silmarillion, more from YouTube analysis videos.