'And so what we have to do is send a collective voice,' he said of the upcoming midterm elections. 'Everything we're doing is God's work: education, healthcare, affordable housing, [protecting against] discrimination, paying people the minimum wage.' Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.)
That's pagan idolatry. Turning politics into religion. It all fits now.
[Added] Yet it's not enough to tear down one man's view without providing a new vision, is it?
I found this wonderful Orwell quote in the comments at Althouse this morning:
Kirk Parker said...
Meade,
I take "it's over" in the same sense that Orwell did here:
"Consequently there was a long period during which nearly every thinking man was in some sense a rebel, and usually a quite irresponsible rebel. Literature was largely the literature of revolt or of disintegration. Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Shelley, Byron, Dickens, Stendhal, Samuel Butler, Ibsen, Zola, Flaubert, Shaw, Joyce — in one way or another they are all of them destroyers, wreckers, saboteurs. For two hundred years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had foreseen, our efforts were rewarded, and down we came. But unfortunately there had been a little mistake. The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all, it was a cesspool full of barbed wire."
From Notes On The Way.
34 comments:
Speaking of church and state: Our news media is a democrat-worshipping joke.
Newsbusters should garner more attention.
That was some quote. I really need to re-read all of Orwell. Though I won't, too little time left for re-living the past.
I believe in the separation of Lem's Levity and TOP!
It's in the Constitution! Just sayn'
Troop: I understand your point. However, I value many of the commenters over there for what they bring to the table which I then drag over here.
What I like about the Orwell quote and the Orwell quote writ larger is the dichotomy of synthesis vs. analysis. In other words, the creative urge channeled either to break down and analyze everything to death or the alternative, to build and to construct new things.
This dichotomy is present in the simplest thermodynamic equation, the Gibbs equation:
ΔG = ΔH - TΔS
The sign of ΔS can make or break societal deals, leading uphill or downhill.
A paraphrase of TS Eliot: Liberalism ends with society crawling up its own backside.
Which reminds me, I was listening to a lecture series on Intro to Philosophy by Daniel Kaufman at Missouri State. He is a commenter at Bloggingheads and has done two Bloggingheads with philosopher Massimo Pigliucci.
In one of the lectures Kaufman talks about the behaviorist BF Skinner, who wrote 'Beyond Freedom and Dignity.' Kaufman quipped, paraphrase, 'one wonders with horror what lies beyond freedom and dignity.' That was from the portion of the series that talked about technocratic intervention to alleviate societal ills.
I didn’t know Orwell’s little article, but reading it entirely reenforces the perception of both Orwell’s brilliance and limitations. His shortcomings mostly had to do with lack of imagination. Orwell was too rooted in his world to conceive of other futures. Aldous Huxley noted this and returned the favor by saying that 1984 was a good projection of the state of the world when it was written, but that he, Huxley, thought the ultimate human motivation was pleasure, not Sovietization.
In the long run, hedonism has proven better at undoing civilization than cruelty. Of course, in our modern world both are true: Servility and depravity are the only things left in play, with justifications on all sides. It doesn’t require, however, a specific belief in God to see the horror. What’s needed is an unclouded mind. But druggy digitized depravity is making that scarce in the Westernized parts of the world. And in other places, you could get beaten by goons, rot in prison, or your head cut off for anything like the civilized high-mindedness that seems to have cropped up repeatedly in history, and which formed the last few splinters of that perch to which we took our chain saw.
Well now, that rascal Brer Fox hated Brer Rabbit on account of he was always cutting capers and bossing everyone around. So Brer Fox decided to capture and kill Brer Rabbit if it was the last thing he ever did! He thought and he thought until he came up with a plan. He would make a tar baby! Brer Fox went and got some tar and he mixed it with some turpentine and he sculpted it into the figure of a cute little baby. Then he stuck a hat on the Tar Baby and sat her in the middle of the road.
Brer Fox hid himself in the bushes near the road and he waited and waited for Brer Rabbit to come along. At long last, he heard someone whistling and chuckling to himself, and he knew that Brer Rabbit was coming up over the hill. As he reached the top, Brer Rabbit spotted the cute little Tar Baby. Brer Rabbit was surprised. He stopped and stared at this strange creature. He had never seen anything like it before!
"Good Morning," said Brer Rabbit, doffing his hat. "Nice weather we're having."
The Tar Baby said nothing. Brer Fox laid low and grinned an evil grin.
Brer Rabbit tried again. "And how are you feeling this fine day?"
The Tar Baby, she said nothing. Brer Fox grinned an evil grin and lay low in the bushes.
Brer Rabbit frowned. This strange creature was not very polite. It was beginning to make him mad.
"Ahem!" said Brer Rabbit loudly, wondering if the Tar Baby were deaf. "I said 'HOW ARE YOU THIS MORNING?"
The Tar Baby said nothing. Brer Fox curled up into a ball to hide his laugher. His plan was working perfectly!
"Are you deaf or just rude?" demanded Brer Rabbit, losing his temper. "I can't stand folks that are stuck up! You take off that hat and say 'Howdy-do' or I'm going to give you such a lickin'!"
The Tar Baby just sat in the middle of the road looking as cute as a button and saying nothing at all. Brer Fox rolled over and over under the bushes, fit to bust because he didn't dare laugh out loud.
"I'll learn ya!" Brer Rabbit yelled. He took a swing at the cute little Tar Baby and his paw got stuck in the tar.
"Lemme go or I'll hit you again," shouted Brer Rabbit. The Tar Baby, she said nothing.
"Fine! Be that way," said Brer Rabbit, swinging at the Tar Baby with his free paw. Now both his paws were stuck in the tar, and Brer Fox danced with glee behind the bushes.
"I'm gonna kick the stuffin' out of you," Brer Rabbit said and pounced on the Tar Baby with both feet. They sank deep into the Tar Baby. Brer Rabbit was so furious he head-butted the cute little creature until he was completely covered with tar and unable to move.
Brer Fox leapt out of the bushes and strolled over to Brer Rabbit. "Well, well, what have we here?" he asked, grinning an evil grin.
Brer Rabbit gulped. He was stuck fast. He did some fast thinking while Brer Fox rolled about on the road, laughing himself sick over Brer Rabbit's dilemma.
"I've got you this time, Brer Rabbit," said Brer Fox, jumping up and shaking off the dust. "You've sassed me for the very last time. Now I wonder what I should do with you?"
Brer Rabbit's eyes got very large. "Oh please Brer Fox, whatever you do, please don't throw me into the briar patch."
"Maybe I should roast you over a fire and eat you," mused Brer Fox. "No, that's too much trouble. Maybe I'll hang you instead."
"Roast me! Hang me! Do whatever you please," said Brer Rabbit. "Only please, Brer Fox, please don't throw me into the briar patch."
"If I'm going to hang you, I'll need some string," said Brer Fox. "And I don't have any string handy. But the stream's not far away, so maybe I'll drown you instead."
"Drown me! Roast me! Hang me! Do whatever you please," said Brer Rabbit. "Only please, Brer Fox, please don't throw me into the briar patch."
"The briar patch, eh?" said Brer Fox. "What a wonderful idea! You'll be torn into little pieces!"
Grabbing up the tar-covered rabbit, Brer Fox swung him around and around and then flung him head over heels into the briar patch. Brer Rabbit let out such a scream as he fell that all of Brer Fox's fur stood straight up. Brer Rabbit fell into the briar bushes with a crash and a mighty thump. Then there was silence.
Brer Fox cocked one ear toward the briar patch, listening for whimpers of pain. But he heard nothing. Brer Fox cocked the other ear toward the briar patch, listening for Brer Rabbit's death rattle. He heard nothing.
Then Brer Fox heard someone calling his name. He turned around and looked up the hill. Brer Rabbit was sitting on a log combing the tar out of his fur with a wood chip and looking smug.
"I was bred and born in the briar patch, Brer Fox," he called. "Born and bred in the briar patch."
And Brer Rabbit skipped away as merry as a cricket while Brer Fox ground his teeth in rage and went home. He went on the Internet and started his own blog to protest all the ills of the world. He posts to this day under the name of The Crack Emcee.
Trooper: I think the movie version of that story wasn't banned; it was self-redacted.
For now.
@TTBurnett: Thank you for that comment. You do have a way with words and metaphor.
But, in any event, I have no fear of being bitten on the ass by a fossil.
What does La Brea have to do with this? ;)
Does Brer Rabbit live in the Peaceable Kingdom? I mean, the Warren?
Thanks, Chickelit. I'm sorry I'm mangling my subsequent comment(s). Grumble.
And, yes, if you want tar, the fossils in La Brea are more what's going on here. I'm happy to wander into the museum and admire them, but I don't think they're coming back to life.
The list of authors Orwell refers to is so varied - what do Dickens, Byron and Ibsen have in common? - that even if they all were underminers of the societies they found themselves in, which is Orwell's contention, my question would be: were they deliberate underminers? In other words was their purpose only subversion? The problem artists in the 19th and pre-WW I twentieth century were up against was worship of progress, worship of the dynamo, worship of material advancement. Nothing wrong with those things but something very wrong with them if they are worshipped, especially from the standpoint of a serious artist, who isn't interested in improvement but in the truth, as he sees it. Presenting that truth may well have been subversive but in many cases the artist's aim was simply to clear some space for reality as he saw it, in the face of smothering positivism.
ricpic, what's wrong with being positive?
What's positivism, anyways?
A further thought: it may well be that Orwell, a writer, overestimates the impact of other writers on their societies. Let's say he is correct in stating that the cumulative impact of the major writers of the 19th and early twentieth centuries was detrimental to Western Civilization. Did they bring on WW I? Did artists precipitate the calamity of WW I, that has demoralized Western Civilization to this day? We know that every great power entered WW I almost gleefully, as though thoroughly fed up with the peace, well ordered society and general improvement in the well being of all orders of society that we look back toward with longing. So what was it in those haute bourgeois societies that rankled their members? Well, whole books have been written on the subject and we still don't know the answer. But to say the whole structure came down because of undermining by those sly sneaky subversive artists....
Positivism: a theory that theology and metaphysics are earlier imperfect modes of knowledge and that positive knowledge is based on natural phenomena and their properties and relations as verified by the empirical sciences.
That's the Merriam-Webster definition.
It puts you and all the other chemists on the top of the heap, chick!
ricpic: One additional author I'd put on that list is Mark Twain. But Orwell was British, and they generally don't have much regard for purely American authors.
The thing those authors had in common was subversion of the standing social order of their day, whether, a critic might add, it needed subversion or not. I think what Orwell was getting at is that the critics of stuffy conventionality ought to have had their reputational comeuppance in the First World War and rest of the first half of the 20th century. Hypocrisy and smugness looked a lot better in retrospect in the aftermath of Paschendaele, Verdun, and later Dachau, Dresden, and Hiroshima, not to mention the Ukrainian famine and the Spanish Civil War. Europe hadn't seen such a cataclysm since the 30 Years' War. Conventionally-minded people thought they had put that antique chaos behind them with 250 years of Progress, rough as a lot of it had been (e.g., the French Revolution).
There is a good argument that the catastrophic 20th century (at least for Europe and parts of Asia) was made psychologically possible by a couple of centuries of a culture of subversion and the puncturing of social blimps. Orwell was standing in the midst of the ongoing wreckage, wondering how the spirit of the times could allow such things, when, only 40 or 50 years earlier, someone on the verge of the 20th century could look forward to a century of science, progress, and societal betterment. Another 30 Years' War? Preposterous.
But the spiritual, metaphysical, and moral basis had been sawn from under the former Christian civilization, partly by the authors mentioned, and when it came down, it landed, as Orwell says, on no bed of roses.
Orwell may have overestimated the importance of authors, but he lived in a literate society, and, in fact, ideas and themes in literature counted for much in the mass psychology of the times.
But it was more than just writers. Operas and music and the fine arts played their part. By the end of the 19th century, it could be argued everything was coming to pieces, the essential message being pagan, with a pre- or even anti-Christian morality. "The Rites of Spring" of 1913 has often been cited as the musical summation of this trend.
And then, stumbling out of the rubble, the artist could say,
Bevor Dada war da, da war Dada da.
Words in which the 21st century seems to find some meaning, as well.
It puts you and all the other chemists on the top of the heap, chick!
Chemistry is bounded by physics and biology and pervades both sciences. It seems to me that both the infinitely small and infinitely large are empirically unknown; we are bracketed by the unknown and it likely pervades us as well.
ricpic is a member of the tribe. Jews are notoriously negative. Just watch any Woody Allen flick or any episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Trooper must have some Hebrew blood in him.
Troop and I agreed that if I don't don a Cardinal's red beanie he won't sport a yarmulka.
Chickelit: I'm reminded of the quote from Sophia Charlotte of Hanover (George the First's sister), who famously said, "Leibnitz talked to me of the infinitely little: mon Dieu, as if I did not know enough of that!" referring to her life at Hanover. A lot of us can relate in many ways without thinking about calculus, atoms or Hanover.
I wear a yarmulka all the time actually. I am going to bat mitzvahs and bar mitzvahs and weddings and funerals every other week. Especially funerals. I have so many buddies who are hebes and it seems that every other week some bodies parent dies.
I actually own a personal yarmulka.
Excellent work, words, and wisdom in this post, TTBurnett.
As to your 4:55, it has always been the media. Mass audiences engender mass madness if the words are persuasive.
@TTBurnett: That reminds me of the night Melinda Gates learned why Bill named his company Microsoft.
That's almost funny, CL.
Thanks, XRay!
Not to drag this out, but I read elsewhere we are an echo chamber, and that everything Orwell wrote has no validity because of this.
So, to sidestep Orwell completely in the Decline of Civilization department, I recommend Modris Eksteins’ book, Rites of Spring : the Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. It’s categorized as intellectual history. As a musician, I especially like it because of its point of departure in Stravinsky and Diaghilev’s ballet. But, making no brief for any point in time, I’ll leave it to you, my fellow ἦχοι-singers, to tell us if the Western world is better off—spiritually, artistically and morally—now, or, say, a decade or two before Orwell was born.
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