The Little Red Blog

Wednesday with Pascal: Progress, Maybe?

{In evaluating historical narratives, Pascal the existential Russian blue cat believes that the best strategy is to allow one’s sources to argue amongst themselves, while assuming for oneself a stance of studied neutrality.}

“No idea is as absurd as the idea of progress.” (Julius Evola)

Robert Nisbet, in The History of the Idea of Progress, opened with a brash claim:

“No single idea has been more important in Western civilization for nearly three thousand years than the idea of progress. Simply stated, the idea of progress holds that mankind has advanced in the past—from some aboriginal condition of primitivism, barbarism, or even nullity—is now advancing, and will continue to advance through the foreseeable future.”

Nisbet admitted that the idea of progress was never held unanimously; it was frequently contested by skeptics, cynics, and pessimists, as well as by historians, philosophers, and theologians. Rather than attempt to debunk the critics (among whom he counted Hannah Arendt, W.R. Inge, Walter Bagehot, and J.B. Bury) Nisbet simply consigned them to the margins of his discussion, asserting from the outset that they constituted a rump faction of nonbelievers stubbornly resistant to “faith in the dogma of progress”.  

Nor did Nisbet attempt to prove that progress was real or, if real, an unmixed blessing. He was not endorsing progress so much as he was endorsing the idea of it, the belief in it, because belief was what mattered; “The springs of action, will, and ambition lie for the most part in our beliefs about the universe, the world, society, and man which defy rational calculations.” Dogmas do not have to be true to be valuable; their value lies in their ability to motivate action, to inspire sacrifice, and to command loyalty and obedience. It may be the case that, as W.R. Inge wrote, “The alleged law of progress has no scientific basis whatever,” but Nisbet was not proposing either a science or a law; he was preaching a religion.

Nisbet’s faith in the persistence of the idea of progress enabled him to claim, for example, that “early Christian philosophers, starting with Eusebius and Tertullian and reaching masterful and lasting expression in Augustine, endowed the idea of progress with new attributes which gave it a spiritual force unknown to their pagan predecessors.” Among those attributes, Nisbet said, was “the emphasis upon the gradual, cumulative, spiritual perfection of mankind, an immanent process that would in time culminate in a golden age of happiness on earth, a millennium with the returned Christ as ruler.” You have to admire anyone who can identify Tertullian and Augustine with attempts to immanentize the eschaton.

Nisbet made his case in just over three hundred pages, whereas the British clergyman William R. Inge, in 1920, needed only about one hundred and fifty words to suggest that human progress as commonly understood had been a global disaster:

We have devastated the loveliness of the world; we have exterminated several species more beautiful and less vicious than ourselves; we have enslaved the rest of the animal creation and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form. If it is progress to turn the fields and woods of Essex into East and West Ham, we may be thankful that progress is a sporadic and transient phenomenon in history. It is a pity that scientists, instead of singing paeans to Progress, have not preached us sermons on the sin of racial self-idolatry.

Again, and to be fair, Nisbet was not arguing for progress itself, only for the historical dominance of the idea, despite the assertion of historian Walter Bagehot that “The ancients had no conception of progress; they did not so much reject the idea, rather, they did not even entertain it.” A much more thorough refutation of Nisbet's premise came from Richard Foster Jones. In his book Ancients and Moderns, Jones provided copious evidence for the absence of the idea of progress in medieval Europe when scholars “were committed to a reverenced antiquity. The opinion of the learned world was based solidly upon classical philosophy; the universities and the professions drew their prestige from it. Isolated and important revolts were in evidence, but little progress could be hoped for until these scattered forces could be marshalled into solid ranks, until the face of the learned world could be turned from the past to the future.”

The preference for antiquity included the belief that the world itself, and even the cosmos, was slowly deteriorating, along with mankind’s cognitive and creative capacities. Even on the brink of modern times, popular and scholarly opinion largely agreed:  

“The world waxes old, and every part thereof feels some debility and weakness. For there is less virtue in plants and herbs than ever before, and more feeble strength in every living creature then ever was before, and less age in men than ever was before. It remains therefore (of necessity) that shortly there shall be an end and consummation of the World, because it is (as it were) subject to old age, and therefore feeble in every part.” (Francis Shakelton, 1580)

“This paragraph,” wrote Richard Jones, “contains the germ of much that was said in the attempt to prove the world’s inevitable decay. Men seemed to be blind to any possible virtues in their own times. Convinced as they were that nature had about run its course and was tottering on senile legs to a final dissolution, their eyes were all the keener to discern evidence of decay, and to read in such signs confirmation of their belief.”

In 1616, Godfrey Goodman wrote, echoing Shakelton, "Whatsoever I see, whatsoever I hear, all things seem to signal corruption." He found evidence, according to Jones, pretty much everywhere: “In the evils of his times, in the sickness, suffering, vices, passions, and unhappiness of man, in the warring of the elements, in flies, worms, and monsters, in the decay of beauty and withering of fruit. Nature gives man infinite desires, as if she had an infinite treasure, but in truth she is barren and defective. Man himself is vicious and corrupted in every state and course of life, a corruption which finally appears in his death. As man through his fall brought death upon himself, so he imposed death upon all nature. In general, Goodman's idea was that the course of man and nature had been one of continual decline from a perfect state to the decay of old age."

That, pace Robert Nisbet, is no one’s idea of progress.

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Robert Nisbet - Wikipedia

William Ralph Inge - Wikipedia

Richard Foster Jones - Wikipedia

"Time will tell just who has fell and who's been left behind                                                        When you go your way and I go mine." (Bob Dylan)

Wednesday with Pascal: Our Intellectual Regression

{Recently, Pascal the existential Russian blue cat delved into the Traditionalist movement to explore its possible link to nihilism; he concluded that to believe Reality is an illusion is at least to believe that Reality is something rather than nothing. That said, Pascal continues to explore the territory of Traditionalism, populated as it is by an extraordinary crew of misfits, eccentrics, and outright cranks whom Pascal, for one, finds entertaining.}

“The Traditionalist movement takes ‘tradition’ as belief and practice transmitted from time immemorial—or rather as belief and practice that should have been transmitted but was lost to the West during the last half of the second millennium CE. According to the Traditionalists, the modern West is in crisis as a result of this loss.” (Mark Sidgwick, Against the Modern World)

The “Traditionalist movement” to which Mark Sidgwick refers has nothing to do with William Morris or John Ruskin, nothing to do with the “arts and crafts” of the late 19^th century, and no known connection to the Luddites. Rather, Traditionalism is about the rediscovery and the cultivation of what Aldous Huxley, among others, called “the Perennial Philosophy”. Like the ancient Gnostics, Traditionalists believe that a “saving wisdom” exists, a spiritual enlightenment reflected and preserved by various cultures in rituals and texts from centuries and even millennia gone by. “Traditionalists” in this latter sense have ranged from Yeats to Eliot to Kathleen Raines, and from Rene Guenon to Julius Evola to Alexander Dugin (the last two representing the overt politicization of Traditionalism, exactly what Eric Voegelin had in mind when he said that modern Gnostics want to “immanentize the eschaton”).

As Mark Sidgwick explains, Traditionalists believe that “The sacred center, the divine and the spiritual, seems to have vanished from the West. In its absence, all is falling apart, and anarchy threatens—not mere political anarchy, but a more serious, deeper reaching anarchy. Traditionalism is the exhilarating attempt to reinstate a divine order, the response of sensitive and intelligent individuals to an alien world in which they are dissidents.”

Mark Sidgwick elaborates on Traditionalism’s “exhilarating” belief system:

Belief in the existence of the ‘Perennial Philosophy’ (from Marsilio Ficino in the 15^th century) is one of the central elements in the Traditionalism developed by Rene Guenon. All religions, in this view, share a common origin in a single perennial (or primeval or primordial) religion that has subsequently taken a variety of forms, including the Zoroastrian, Pharaonic, Platonic, and Christian.

Traditionalists see clearly what the rest of us see through a glass, darkly. “While all that really matters is in fact in decline, people foolishly suppose that they see progress.” In modernity, illusion has trumped Reality; material affluence disguises spiritual poverty, personality is confused with character, individual authenticity is prized over disciplined restraint, ugliness is lauded as beauty, quantity replaces quality, relativism denies absolute truth, conflict and chaos thrive in the absence of harmony and order. The physical realm has detached itself from the metaphysical realm which it was meant to imitate; on its own, the material world is a mere golem. ¹

Predicting our descent into a new Dark Age (the Kali Yuga), Julius Evola ² found it prophesied in an ancient Hindu text, the Visnu Parana:

Men will fix their desires upon riches, even though dishonestly acquired. Men of all degrees will conceit themselves to be equal with Brahmans [the prevarication and presumption of the intellectuals and modem culture]. The people will be almost always in dread of dearth and apprehensive of scarcity; and will hence ever be watching the appearances of the sky [the meaning of the religious and superstitious residues typical of modern masses]. The women will pay no attention to the commands of their husbands or parents. They will be selfish, abject, and slatternly; they will be scolds and liars; they will be indecent and immoral in their conduct and will ever attach themselves to dissolute men. Men having deviated into heresy, iniquity will flourish, and the duration of life will therefore decrease. ³ 

According to Rene Guenon: “Modern Western civilization appears in history as a veritable anomaly, the only civilization that was developed in a purely material direction. This monstrous development, the beginning of which coincides with what is commonly called the Renaissance, has been accompanied by a corresponding intellectual regression, which has reached the point where contemporary Occidentals no longer know what pure intellectuality might be.” ⁴

If you honestly believe that the last six hundred years of Western civilization has been a fundamental mistake, that the founding premises of modern life are in error, and that “contemporary Occidentals” do not know their fundament from the firmament: I am not sure where you go from there or how you act on those beliefs. Of course, Traditionalists reject the primacy of “acting” as part and parcel of modern heresy; they prefer spiritual knowledge to instrumental reason and contemplation to activity. This means that Traditionalists, except for the overtly politicized minority among them, have neither obligation nor motivation to do anything about Modernity except to complain, at which activity they are exceptionally skilled.

As I see it, mankind has always been going to hell in a handcart, as any reasonable assessment of history will confirm. The only thing different about modernity is that the handcart is more comfortable, contains a lot more gadgets and entertainment options, ⁵ and will get us to hell much faster than the older models. ⁶

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¹ Golem - Wikipedia

² According to E.E. Rehmus, “Julius Evola’s negative assessment of empirical reality and his intense dislike of ordinary, everyday life, explains why his political view are so unpopular and controversial.”  That seems like a reasonable conclusion.

³ The bracketed remarks are Evola’s own editorial explanations.

⁴ Mark Sidgwick: “By ‘pure intellectuality,’ Guenon means something like metaphysics, spirituality, or religion, which has been replaced by a superstitious cult of reason which values that which is not really valuable.”

⁵ I cannot be the first to describe the products of consumer capitalism as “weapons of mass distraction,” but if I am, I want full credit.

⁶ Insert “Jetsons” vs. “Flintstones” reference here.

The Kali Yuga: There must be some kind of way out of here, said the shaman to the priest.

Saturday Lecture: The Zeitgeist It Is A-Changin'

{I don’t know much about Ross Barkan, but he apparently hasn’t read (or doesn’t remember) Pascal. “For thousands of years,” Barkan informs us, as he blithely explains today’s Zeitgeist, “mature human beings knew how to be alone in their own thoughts and tolerate boredom.” Compare this smug observation with Pascal (17th century): “All humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” It also seems that Barkan, who was born in 1989, is unaware that New Age spirituality is not new: e.g., New Age - Wikipedia or, for an even longer historical view, Jason Josephson-Storm’s The Myth of Disenchantment. Those caveats aside, Barkan’s recent essay is indicative of—well, of something.}

Ross Barkan (from “The Zeitgeist Is Changing” ¹):

Church attendance, long the barometer of the US’s devotion to the unseen, has continued to plummet, but taking its place isn’t any of the pugnacious New Atheism that tugged at the discourse for a stretch of the 2000s. Instead, it’s what can be loosely termed “spirituality” – a devotion to astrology, witchcraft, magic and manifestation – that has emerged, particularly among the young. Online life, paradoxically enough, has only catalyzed this spirituality more, with teenage TikTok occultists and “manifesting” influencers racking up ever more followers.

Not all of the old romantics were opposed to Judeo-Christian religion, but they were drawn, like the youth of today, to spiritual realms that operated far beyond any biblical teachings or rationalist precepts. They were deeply wary of technology’s encroachment on the human spirit. They feared, ultimately, an inhuman future – and hence their rebellion. Today’s romantics, still nascent, sense something similar. Why else, in such an algorithmic and data-clogged age – with so much of existence quantifiable and knowable – would magic suddenly hold such sway?

What explains the dominance of digital charlatans who promise all of life’s riches are at hand if only you visualize hard enough or utter the correct incantations. ² Embracing the paranormal or believing, wholeheartedly, that star positions can determine personalities can be harmless fun – until the delusions become life-consuming and despair takes hold when they inevitably do not deliver on their promise.

Irrationality, on its own, is no virtue, and some of the romantics of the 19th and 21st centuries succumb to the same ancient dross, magic alone as the supposed channel to transcendence. That spiritualism has spread with tech is an irony fitting of the age.

Against the hype of progress, the new romantics wonder: what good has any of this done for us? Were hyper-sophisticated GPS devices, cameras, and video recorders worth it? It is too soon to predict a revival of the Luddites, but there has been at least one press report of a teen group ditching smartphones altogether because “social media and phones are not real life”. Science brought about these revolutions; science compressed once unimaginable computing power into a single handheld device. Science now promises a great leap forward with artificial intelligence, which seems intent on replacing the arts themselves – machines will now make mediocre art, music, literature, and even fact-challenged journalism.

For now, rapacious tech still has a mass buy-in. Smartphones are ubiquitous. Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google are hegemonic. Mark Zuckerberg sculpts his pharaonic Hawaii compound. He and his ilk own the present. Whether they own the future, forevermore, is no longer clear. Generational change is hard on the incumbents. And romanticism won’t hold still; it promises, at the minimum, a wild and unsteady flame. What it burns is still anyone’s guess. ³

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The zeitgeist is changing. A strange, romantic backlash to the tech era looms | Ross Barkan | The Guardian

Ross Barkan - Wikipedia

¹ Experts say that, for best results, your zeitgeist should be changed every generation or so, perhaps at the same time you refresh the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots and tyrants. ("The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural manure."  Thomas Jefferson) I would also recommend that you take your zeitgeist in for a tune-up every five years or every 80,000 miles, whichever comes first.

² Belief in incantations and ritual formulae is shocking to Christians? That seems odd.

³ As is, for that matter, whatever Ross Barkan is going on about.  

You may not be interested in the zeitgeist, but the zeitgeist is interested in you.

Saturday Lecture: The Worlds We Make

Charles Lemert (from Postmodernism Is Not What You Think):

Those who hate [postmodernism] may be on occasion overwrought, but they are not wrong to worry. The modern world is undergoing some kind of change. Even those who wish it were not concede this point. The cultural order that was founded in the colonizing sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that achieved its grand political moment in the eighteenth, that revolutionized science and industry in the nineteenth, that perfected so many technologies in the twentieth is not what it once was. Whether the modern world can ever be a semblance of what it was cannot be said. What can and must be said is that the investigation of the facts is a foremost and righteous responsibility of all with a stake in the nature of what, through the years, we have so blithely called, as though its reality were never in doubt, ‘the world’.

The worlds in which we live are what we make of them. Whether one approves of the idea or not, worlds are thus ‘made-things’. The world we live in was definitely made in the form we live in it today more or less about the time Darwin discovered, then proved to a majority’s satisfaction, that the world of human beings is certifiably not different from the world of natural things pure and simple. The theory of natural selection which in its sociological afterlife came to be used as a justification for the excellent prospects of human progress was, in its original form, a dark scientific theory that required the people of mid-nineteenth century England, Europe, and America to rethink, thus to remake, their worlds.

Darwin got the circumstances of the modern world just right. Underneath its benefits to the few, the modern world promised to the rest much that would never be without struggle. This is the terrible darkness of the modern world. Hence, Darwin—like Marx, like Weber and Durkheim, not to mention Spencer—was concerned, as many are today, with the fall of the human back into the dark, murky slime of things. During just about the same years Darwin was puzzling through to his theory of natural selection, Marx was perfecting his theory of capitalism which had begun in his rethinking of Hegel’s concern with the reification, the thingification, of the human. Weber’s iron cage was in its own way a poetic refiguring of this concern; Durkheim, in much the same manner, feared that human society was man’s only protection from falling back into the animal passions.

Human life springs from the dark things, from the beasts—but spring it does. Durkheim and many others were the more Malthusian pessimists. Their pessimism was soon forgotten, generally speaking, until the first murmurings of what today we fear to be postmodern beasts. In Darwin’s day, at the very time science was coming into its mature modern form, there was much in the world to encourage faith in the progressive ideal. But that encouragement was, in Weber’s word, bought at the price of the disenchantment of the natural world. Modern society required that the mysterious monsters and murky things be killed, leaving the world open to competitive progress, if bereft of native imagination.

Forgotten in all the postmodern anxiety is the fact that postmodernism is merely the currently fashionable name for a complicated series of cultural and theoretical inventions, each of which were adjustments to the reality of the world in the second half of the twentieth century. Modernism, the cultural theory, seemed to draw factual support from the historical witness of the modern age. From the vantage of the most modern of men, it seemed that each progressive move across the seas, into the jungles and mountains, and across the plains made the world as we know it, and, in the process, confirmed the most moral fact of all: that the reality is that things can and will get better.

It is the truth of this fact than now worries us. It is not that prior generations were free of such worry, but that our worry now is oddly associated with the suspicion that the pre-modern monsters and freaks are still out there, close to home, haunting the night air. Postmodernisms and related theories are but a few of the murky things that disturb our sleep.

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Charles Lemert - Wikipedia

Honey, We Blew Up Modernity

Wednesday with Pascal: The Rise and Fall of Reason

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat believes you can tell a lot about a person based on whether they are Promethean or Antimethean. As for Pascal, he is on the fence on this issue, content to be just one more voice in the bewildering, and increasingly bewildered, modern chorus.}

“Reason has risen against itself.” (David Ohana, Intellectual Origins of Modernity)

According to David Ohana, “The paths of modernity were tortuous, and its roots are not to be found in a desire for enlightenment or progress but in the Promethean longing of Western humankind to be their own masters, to impose their own rationality, and consequently to mold the world in a form different from that in which they received it.”

Is it true that Promethean ambition has nothing to do with “a desire for enlightenment or progress”? As unlikely as that seems, it is what Ohana claims. In his narrative, modern man, wanting to supplant God, has replaced God with, well, nothing:  

Modern humanity is faced with the consciousness of nihilism. They are homeless, and the question is where can they turn now? Nihilistic criticism paved the way to the will to power, the desire for independence. This is the modern situation: a world created in one’s own image without reference to God. The Nietzschean revolution is the reflective self-awareness of the modern human who constructs the world out of personal creativity. The axis of the revolution is not reason but aesthetics; not Judeo-Christian morality but the principle of the will to power; not knowledge but creation; not essence but existence. The death of God is the announcement of the possibility of the birth of modern humankind.

A century ago, Walter Lippmann claimed that “the acids of modernity” had caused “the dissolution of the ancient order.” In David Ohana's telling, the chief acids have been “critical reason” and the associated “products of rational activity”:

The idea of modernity could be described as the triumph of critical reason over the hallowed principles of the old world, whose foundations were religious salvation, metaphysical redemption, and the Lord of history. The new principle of modern society was that everything may be judged and criticized: the social order, the political system, economic activities.  Modernity is made up of all the products of rational activity: scientific, technological, or administrative. If the hallowed old order was based on a total concept, the modern order was divided into separate critical categories that consequently were essentially secular. The social differentiation of politics, economics, and family affairs led at the same time to different critical categories. Religion was no longer the sole principle according to which life was organized and the motive force behind everything. In its place, one had divisive and subversive Reason.¹ Max Weber described modernity as a process of intellectualization, meaning that modernity is a break with the finality of the religious spirit.

Christianity offered an eschatology, whereas secular history is (and can only be) just one damned thing after another ("the end of History," my eye!):

The religious vision hopes for a final accomplishment of God’s plan and thus expects an end of history. Historicism, on the other hand, finds meaning in historical events but not beyond them. Modernity is the contrary of the idea of an end to history and can be described as an end of prehistory, that is, of the totality of the events and personalities of traditional society, the feudal system, the royal dynasty, aristocratic privileges, of traditions, beliefs, and prejudices.

Enlightenment thinkers, destructive as their methods (in the wrong hands) would prove to be, at least replaced the eschaton with the idea of Progress. If History wasn't coming to some predetermined end, at least it was going somewhere:

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the modern consciousness, utilizing reason, differentiation, and criticism, believed it was promoting universal objectives. The Enlightenment was characterized by three elements: reason, nature, and progress. The main contribution of the Enlightenment to human thought was the universalization of reason. Reason related to all human beings in the same way. What distinguished the Enlightenment from all previous philosophies was its intention of extending to everyone what had previously been the property of a few: a life based on reason.

The more modern we have become, the less tenable our faith in Progress or even in Reason, the latter being, as we have said, remarkably pliant and ever subject to the passions. David Ohana laments “the triumph of instrumental reason over fundamental reason,” meaning he still retains belief in the latter. He cites the Frankfurt School’s Max Horkheimer; Horkheimer, he says, “declared that the meaning of reason had long been the exercise of understanding and the internalization of eternal values that were said to be the proper objectives of mankind. Today, Horkheimer thought, we witness an opposite process. The means have replaced the ends, and people have become dependent on the political, economic, technological, and communicative powers that they themselves unleashed and that they were supposed to control. What can modern humans do to find themselves again? Are they capable of acting without any guiding, accompanying, directing, and restraining forces? Are they able to control their own powers that have exceeded their limits?”

Leaving those questions unanswered for the moment, David Ohana sadly remarks that “Modern humankind does not act as expected according to the universal rules of the Enlightenment.” What a surprise! Of course, in pre-modern Europe, humankind failed to act according to the supposedly universal rules of Christianity. We humans are perpetually disappointing ourselves and each other. Meanwhile, for all the good it has accomplished, the light of Reason has also served to illuminate the darkest and most unreasonable corners of our souls.  

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¹ Reason may be characterized as the two-edged sword by which modernity both lives and dies. Joseph de Maistre denounced it in no uncertain terms: “Human reason reduced to its own resources is perfectly worthless, not only for creating but also for preserving any political or religious association, because it only produces disputes, and, to conduct himself well, man needs not problems but beliefs.”   

Saturday Lecture: The Perils of Quantitative Collosalism

“Our period could almost be defined as being essentially and primarily the ‘reign of quantity’.” (Rene Guenon)

Pitirim Sorokin, from The Crisis of Our Age (1941):

In the late Hellenic and Roman eras, sublime quality deteriorated. Its place was taken by ever-bigger quantity, and the greater the colossalism of the quantity, the better its regard. Temples, palaces, theaters, public buildings, monuments, sculptures, all became gigantic. The Colossus of Rhodes was 105 feet high; the Halicarnassus Mausoleum was 140 feet high. The size of sculptures and monuments like the Pergamene Frieze, the Farnese Heracles, the Arch of Titus, and the Triumphal Columns of Trajan, Marcus Aurelius, and Constantine were, comparatively, enormous. The Hellenic cities with their huge buildings and wide and long avenues were much larger than the Greek cities of the previous period. The fortunes of millionaires grew enormous. Gigantic choruses and orchestras developed, with numerous and much more complicated instruments. Theatrical plays involved hundreds of actors, animals, and accessories. Schools, colleges, learned and artistic societies, unions, and associations developed, each one larger than the last. Sciences and arts were now cultivated on a large scale. Mass education in arts and sciences, philosophy, and technology became established. A more widely spread school system was introduced. Mass preoccupation with politics became the rule. Mass growth — of unions, of men’s and women’s clubs with mass aesthetic connoisseurism; of mass amateurish philosophy; of mass theater and dramas; of mass religious revivals; of mass production of all kinds of cultural values — spread on a large scale. The size of the empire grew to pathological proportions. Quantity and show became the criteria of quality. The disease of external hugeness and of quantitative colossalism permeated the Hellenic and post-Hellenic Roman cultures.”

Quantitative colossalism was but a substitute for inability to create the great qualitative values. It was the line of least resistance accessible to any mediocrity. “Not being able to make them beautiful, they made them rich”— we can repeat what Pliny says about the huge theaters of his time. The more the creative quality deteriorated, the huger became the values produced. The less inner substance they had, the more showy they were. The more vulgar they were, the more popular they became. The bigger the temples became, the more hollow was the religion. The more generally mass education spread, the less genius appeared. The larger the empires grew, the more disorganized they turned out to be and the harder the lot of the citizens became. The larger the crowd of philosophers, the fewer great philosophers emerged. Erudition replaced creative genius; technique, inspiration; mechanical skill, creative originality.

Our sensate culture of today appears to be exactly in the same position. External glitter and quantitative colossalism already reign supreme in it. “The bigger the better” is its motto: hence our enormous skyscrapers, monuments, temples, school and college buildings, railroad stations, up to the monsters of Radio City and World’s Fairs. Quantitative colossalism tends to become the criterion of any great value. The best business firms are those which are hugest. The society leaders are those who are richest. The greatest empires are those which are most monstrous. The largest theaters become the best. The best show is that which attracts most people. So also the best preachers, teachers, orators, professors, ministers, and what not. The greatest scholar is he who is paid the highest salary or has the largest audience. The greatest university is the largest. The masterpieces of literature or art, philosophy or science, religion or politics are the best sellers bought by millions. “The biggest firm,” “the largest circulation,” “the biggest market of second-hand tires in the world”.

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Pitirim Sorokin - Wikipedia   

For more on Quantitative Collosalism: Kirkpatrick Sale’s “Human Scale” and E.F. Schumacher’s “Small Is Beautiful”.

For more on the notions of Quantity and Quality: Rene Guenon's "The Reign of Quantity" and Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance".

Small is beautiful? Try telling that to the Colossus of Rhodes.

Saturday Lecture: Ciphers of History

Stanley Diamond (from In Search of the Primitive):

“In the modern era, the mission of civilization is simply civilization itself.” (Stanley Diamond)

The question of ‘progress’ is critical. With the rise of industrialism and the related ideology of science, the total conscious transformation of society and nature was, for the first time in human history, considered both possible and desirable. The West does not doubt the superiority of its techniques or its vision; its mission can be ‘objectively’ evaluated. But the fulfillment of the mission requires a universal polity; cultural imperialism is conceived as a leveling—and, at the same time, as a progressive—force. The cultures of societies everywhere are reduced to the common denominators of their respective ‘occupying’ powers; world hegemony becomes the paradigm for world government.

The basic apology for any kind of imperialism remains the idea of progress. The brutality of the means of conquest, the erosion of other cultural possibilities, the necessity of political tutelage, even economic exploitation, are all rationalized in that context. Their unintended consequences are conceived as positive; enlightened self-interest, it is fancied, ultimately resolves itself in the universal good. The manifest and ‘scientifically demonstrable’ superiority of the West seems to be the logical denouement of the history of the species; the ideal of Western civilization is projected as no less than the goal of humanity—a goal which all rational men are obliged to share. If Europe is faithful to its own heritage, the rationalization runs, and fully realizes its potential, then it is bound to become the civilization of the world—everyman’s fate.

Faith in progress as the outcome of their techniques and ideas justifies Western civilized men to themselves. That faith is the dominant idea of Western civilization. In its name, Western man rationalizes not only his self-interest, but also his failures; he does not perceive his failures as the result of his goals, nor of his motives, but rather of the means at his disposal, or of his human limitations. He cannot surrender the notion of progress without destroying the rationale for his entire civilization. No matter how critical he may be of the realities of his society, he clings to his progressivism as he would to his sanity. It is the notion of progress that mediates his alienation and makes it possible for him to construct a reality which he does not actually experience.

But his commitment to progress is less of a faith than a compulsion. No matter what aspects of Western culture he assumes to be superior to the cultures of other times and places, the case for such superiority is always weaker than the intensity of his argument. This argument is, therefore, grotesque, a deformation of consciousness, for the idea of progress is not based on a rational analysis of our civilization. It springs instead from the disequilibrium of the system in which Western man finds himself.

The social structure of the United States, for example, limits the uses of technology. Corporate capitalism is misrepresented as ‘free enterprise,’ or as the realization of the revolutionary spirit of the eighteenth century; Thomas Jefferson is linked to General Motors. Modern technology, society, and ideology are always out of joint with each other; and this sensed disjunction generates the idea of progress. Caught in the contradictions of society, Westerners see themselves as ciphers of history; incomplete and always waiting to be completed. Disintegrated by the extreme division of labor, by competition for goods and services and status, they obsessively anticipate integration.

The idea of progress is, above all, the precipitant of unresolved social and personal conflicts in modern civilization, conflicts that feed on themselves. It is the awareness of these conflicts, along with the effort at resolving them, that creates the sense of unresolved movement toward specific goals which are defined as ‘progressive’.

In primitive societies, progress is a reality of personal growth, a progress through society, not of society. The structure of primitive societies is perceived as permanent, while the individual moves from experience to experience on what the Winnebago call ‘the road of life and death’. ‘Progress,’ in such societies, if this Western conception can be applied to them at all, would be a metaphor for spiritual transformation. The contradictions of growth through the various phases of the life cycle are socially recognized, ritually expressed, and dialectically resolved. The person evolves through hierarchies of being, that is, the ‘becoming’ of personal growth is balanced by the ‘being’ of personal realization on all significant levels of existence—our [Western] perception of history is irrelevant.

In our civilization, the person is reduced to a status, a reflex of society; it is society which is supposed to progress. Compelled by their conflicts, Westerners are always trying to find concrete evidence for their superiority; they feel that they represent the West, the logical inheritance of the past, civilization itself. Our culturally compulsive need to believe in progress is one thing, but the rational evidence is quite another; in fact, the evidence is weak.

‘Progress’ means advancement to a better condition, not simply evolution or development. The belief in progress through advanced science or technology is a uniquely Western fallacy. First, science and technology are not necessarily related; man was a technician long before he was a scientist. More pertinently, science and technology, reified and divorced from the human context and from social application, are no more than mechanical fetishes. Western man fantasizes, understandably enough, that he will one day be replaced by the robot or the computer; but this replacement has already begun. Therefore, it is only from the standpoint of the machine, representing the disengaged category of ‘science and technology,’ that progress remains possible. To maintain the fiction of progress, Westerners entertain the notion of negating humanity itself.

This, in turn, is related to the irrational production of commodities over which ordinary people have no control but which they are conditioned to consume. In the joint perspective of the worker and the consumer, commodities take on a life of their own; after all, they have not invented them, and they have no voice in their use or replication. The imperious ring of the telephone, for example, interrupts all other activities. Its trivial, dissociated, and obsessive use reflects both the alienating character of the society that prizes it so highly and the transnational corporations that profit from it. The telephone as ordinarily used becomes a sign, not of communication, but of the lack of communication and of the consequent compelling desire to relate to others, but to relate at a distance.

Anthropologists cite [as evidence of progress] the extension of ‘in-group ethical commands,’ but that, of course, has not occurred. The fact that the great majority of murders in the United States occur within families, or among close friends and acquaintances, denies the logic of this claim. Moreover, the intensity and duration of modern war, enabled by science and technology, is unknown among primitives, for whom murder, rape, and theft are also rare occurrences. Still another criterion [of progress], the increase in the health, safety, and comfort of the individual, is not only impossible to measure ‘objectively,’ but if measurable in the terms stated, would require a bourgeois yardstick.

The anthropologist does not mention transcendence, spiritual growth, or maturation. He overlooks the increase in certain diseases—cancer, schizophrenia, arteriosclerosis. The pollution of the environment, the increased rate of industrial accidents, and the unhealthy character of daily life, all militate against the notion that the species has been improving itself. Progress must be correlated with the possibility of human fulfillment and the understanding of the human condition.

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Stanley Diamond - Wikipedia

Wednesday with Pascal: Progress Toward What?

{As should be clear by now, Pascal the existential Russian blue cat enjoys reading (and responding to) critiques of our contemporary way of life, even when those critiques are based upon ideas with which he does not agree or on values which he does not hold. The important thing, Pascal believes, is to be against the Conventional Wisdom, whatever it is, and for whatever reason.}

"Progress ain't what it used to be." (Anonymous, or at least unattributed)

“Progress” used to mean “advancement toward a goal or destination”; that is, the idea of Progress was teleological in nature. The destination may have been the kingdom of God, or it may have been the kingdom of Man, but in either case, it was something to be aimed at and something to work toward. Granted, it was always difficult to estimate how close we were getting to the kingdom, especially to God’s; but that uncertainty was what faith and prayer were for.

According to Bob Goudzwaard, however, the rise of Positivism in the mid-19^th century, while in no way dampening faith in Progress, fundamentally changed what Progress meant:

Technological innovation and economic expansion are no longer looked upon in the first place as means to be used or guides to be followed because in the future they might lead humankind to paradise. Rather, they have become objects of appreciation in themselves because of their concretely observable and measurable daily manifestations. The actual enjoyment of present progress takes precedence over possible future progress. The present reality of technological and economic growth has become central precisely because it is so real, tangible, and measurable. ¹ The orientation of progress toward measurable expression in the present has remained characteristic of Western faith in progress since the mid-19^th century. For instance, when we are asked how well off we are as a nation, our first reaction usually is a reference to the GNP—the Gross National Product.

When we think of progress, we no longer think of the future but of what is happening today. Economic progress is often defined entirely apart from qualitative criteria; it is reduced to what is directly and quantitatively measurable. Well-being in the West today is not only expressed in figures; it is virtually equated with figures such as the annual GNP. This type of response to the question of well-being and progress reveals less about the issue than it does about ourselves. It is the expression of persons for whom the future has shrunk to a day-to-day advance of the present, and for whom truth is equated with the observable and ‘essence’ with the measurable. Whoever is interested in discovering to what level of cultural and spiritual poverty the West has sunk need only ask after its well-being!

As Adolph Strasser, a former leader of the American Federation of Labor, put it: “We have no ultimate ends. We are going on from day to day.” Going where? How was Adolph Strasser to know, and why would he even care? Progress to him and to his AFL colleagues was an increase in the hourly wage and a more expansive benefits package; neither he nor they were visionaries, just workingmen looking for a bigger share of the pie they helped create. In postwar America, "progress" came to be defined as each generation having more money to spend, bigger houses in which to live, and shinier, fancier household appliances. ² 

Along with Positivism, in Goudzwaard’s view, the theory of evolution, as articulated by Darwin and interpreted (or misinterpreted) by the likes of Herbert Spencer, further altered our perspective on Progress. “In the concept of evolution, we encounter a process that has already begun apart from human intervention. Man does not propel progress forward; he is being propelled toward progress over time.” Progress is, on the one hand, entirely natural; on the other hand, it is no longer a process humans initiate or control but an ongoing reality to which we must adapt, something that happens to us. “It is beyond dispute,” Goudzwaard writes, “that in this [evolutionary] approach the glory of humanity has been greatly diminished. Human reason, once acclaimed as the ultimate source of meaning in the world and the essence of human dignity, becomes in Darwin’s theory ‘merely an organ that has been developed in man’s effort to adapt himself to his environment.’ Man becomes the product and the plaything of a ‘Nature red in tooth and claw,’ and civilization is no more than ‘a part of nature, a development of man’s latent capabilities under the pressures of favorable circumstances.’”

If Progress is detached from teleology, then it is reduced to, as the saying goes, just one damned thing after another. The question “Are we there yet?” makes sense only if we know where we are trying to go. No longer captains of but only passengers on the ship of Progress, we are fated to drift upon the currents of time, blown by the winds of chance. We have no destination in mind and no control over the vessel; we may as well just settle in and make ourselves comfortable—which is what we in the West have been doing for the past two hundred years.

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¹ Our emphasis on whatever is quantifiable and measurable was one of the worst developments of modernity, along with our reliance on fossil fuels, the invention of the 8-track tape, and the legalization of right turns on red.

² And automobiles--lord, do not get me started on the plague that is automobiles. 

Progress!

Saturday Lecture: Our Most Important Product

{In the 1950s, it was none other than the sainted Ronald Reagan who uttered the memorable tagline for his employer, General Electric: “Progress,” the once and future Gipper assured America, “is our most important product.” Reagan was without doubt a persuasive and telegenic spokesperson, but it was the unknown author of that ad copy who brilliantly captured, in one short sentence, the essence of three mutually reinforcing myths: the myth of Progress, the myth of America, and the myth of Capitalism.}

Charles Beard (from his Introduction to J.B. Bury’s THE IDEA OF PROGRESS):

Whatever its philosophic soundness, the idea of progress, even when vaguely understood, has exerted a powerful influence on the development of civilization in the United States. Here, a number of circumstances early conspired to make it the leading principle of society. In its economic note there was a special appeal. Although many of the original settlers fled to this continent in search of religious liberty, the motive with the overwhelming majority was the improvement of their economic status.

In such a motive they saw nothing to be ashamed of. Nor was there any reason why they should conceal or deny it. The kings and queens, lords and ladies, merchants and priests of the Old World had never been unmindful of increasing their patrimonies or raising their standards of living. Catholic Spain and Protestant England operated consistently on the principle that commerce and colonies were to be exploited for the advantage of the beneficiaries in the metropolis. Only a few ascetics in Europe were really willing to be hungry when they might be fed, cold when they could be warm, sick when health was at hand, and poor when the means of well-being could be had at the price of labor and ingenuity. On the rational and rationalist assumption that the material resources of the earth should be exploited in the interest of a comfortable life, immigrants came from the Old World to the New, founded the English colonies, and developed the United States. If many carried the idea to extremes and sought wealth for its own sake, piling up riches and luxuries in avarice, that did not invalidate the fundamental correctness of the general judgment.

The abundance of land and resources in a primitive state appealed to men and women of action — peasants, merchants, and artisans primarily concerned with making a realistic use of their opportunities for industrial enterprise. In this the British colonists differed fundamentally from the Europeans who occupied Latin America. The latter were mainly soldiers who conquered and settled down upon a subject population, encouraging priests to apply religious and social discipline. The major portion of the British colonists, on the other hand, were continuously engaged in practical economic affairs. They cut down forests, sailed the seas, hunted the whale under the frozen skies of two arctic regions, pioneered, plowed, planted, and reaped, eagerly making use of every instrument that invention could furnish to enlarge their powers and increase their wealth.

Even the planting aristocracy of the South, while it spoke of merchants with contempt, was as zealous as any other class in augmenting its holdings and revenues. Outside New England, the clergy was nowhere supreme, and even there theocratic despotism was soon disintegrated by rational criticism, eventuating in Unitarianism and the thin transcendentalism of Emerson. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that the philosophers of progress in France, especially Saint-Simon, who fought under Washington in the American Revolution, looked upon the United States as the best possible theater in which to carry the new idea to full fruition.

“[Americans were spared] the rigors of [European] classical education and preoccupation with scientific affairs. As J.B. Bury notes: ‘So long as men believed that the Greeks and Romans had attained, in the best days of their civilization, to an intellectual plane which posterity could never hope to reach, so long as the authority of their thinkers was set up as unimpeachable, a theory of degeneration held the field, which excluded a theory of progress.’

At no time in the history of education in America did this classical concept have a complete monopoly over intellectual life. Classical education there was, of course, in the early colleges, but those institutions were [rare] in colonial times and the range of their influence over social life was extremely limited. The mass of the people and their leaders were not subdued to the classical discipline, nor were they dominated by an intellectual caste which paid excessive tribute to that type of education. When the great development of higher learning appeared, especially in the new state universities, the secular, realistic, and practical spirit became dominant, with the classics at best as a sideline. Hence one form of intellectual tyranny was escaped, not without some loss to offset immense gains.

Founded on a realistic view of life, business enterprise, accompanied by its armies of inventors and explorers, made steady headway and at last established its supremacy. It could only attain its primary end —the accumulation of profits—by developing natural resources, stimulating popular demands, augmenting wealth, and encouraging applied science. Under the auspices of the state and federal governments, colleges and institutions for the advancement of technology were multiplied, and applications to every branch of economy were encouraged. Public grants were supplemented later by huge endowments from private purses as technical schools and universities widened the range of their interests. If no Saint-Pierres, Comtes, and Spencers appeared in the United States to give theoretical formulation to what was taking place, there was no doubt about the course of events. Immense energies, physical, intellectual, and moral, were being applied to the conquest of the earth, with a view to raising the standard of life, decreasing the death rate, overcoming illiteracy, eliminating physical suffering, and providing the comforts of a rational living.

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Charles A. Beard - Wikipedia

 J.B. Bury - Wikipedia

Wednesday with Pascal: Was America a Mistake?

{I have given up trying to describe, much less to understand, Pascal the existential Russian blue cat’s intellectual interests—calling them “eclectic” would be an understatement. In today's post, Pascal samples a 1968 book (Was America a Mistake?) by Henry Steele Commager; 1968 was, it must be admitted, as good a year as any to consider Commager’s titular question.}

“America is a mistake, a gigantic mistake it is true, but a mistake nonetheless.” (Sigmund Freud, circa 1910) ¹

"Counting the cars on the New Jersey turnpike / they've all come to look for America." (Paul Simon)

According to the noted historian Henry Steele Commager, Freud came late to the sport of America-bashing. Even before America had achieved independence from Britain, the best minds of Europe were pondering the question: was America a mistake? ² As Commager explained:

It is a typical eighteenth-century question, this. For the Enlightenment addressed itself only to the great questions and contemplated these incessantly. What is the nature of the universe and of the celestial mechanics which God, or Nature, has imposed upon it? How does man fit into the cosmic system? Is primitive man happier than civilized man? Were the Greeks or the Romans superior to modern man? Is civilization itself a mistake? What is the origin of government? What is the purpose of government? Are wars ever justified? Are colonies worth their cost? What are the Rights of Man? What is virtue, what is happiness?

The “cosmic philosophers,” as Commager called them, cogitated, argued, and wrote (“pens scratching across an infinity of pages”) until they all but ran out of ink. “They studied the past, they surveyed the present, they speculated about the future. Nothing trivial commanded their concern, nothing parochial; always the great universal questions.” And, even as they “sought the good and true and considered the sublime and the beautiful,” they returned again and again to a question more “importunate [and] fascinating” than any other: “Was America a mistake?” That is, “Was it a mistake to have discovered this strange new world? A mistake to have conquered it, if she was indeed conquered; a mistake to have planted colonies on those alien shores?” Perhaps they should have asked those questions of the indigenous inhabitants of the “strange new world.” But the Enlightenment savants were Europeans—worse, they were French—and it likely never occurred to them to solicit the opinions of the native “savages.”

Instead, the philosophes (French for “deep thinkers”) formed their own opinions and arrived at their own conclusions. As Commager told the story, it was Abbe Guillaume Raynal, in his encyclopedic 1770 work, “A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of Europeans in the Two Indies,” who first delivered a scathing critique of America (still under British colonial rule). Raynal’s book was, Commager marveled, “a magnificent potpourri of history, economics, politics, anthropology, and morality, written every which way and by half a dozen contributors, though Raynal saw to it that he got all the credit.” Moreover, “It was the first history to deal with the expansion of Europe as a single grand theme, the first to do justice to the colored races, the first to fit together politics and economics and religion and society in a single pattern.”  

And what did Abbe Raynal and his confreres, from their enlightened eighteenth-century perch, think about America? They thought that “The discovery of America was worse than a sin; it was a mistake. How much better for mankind had America remained hidden in that oblivion to which a kind Nature had consigned her. For the American continents were primitive, degenerate, and irremediable.” Not that the Europeans who had intruded on America were beyond blame. Commager explained Raynal’s view of the encounter between civilized Europe and the rest of the world:

Wherever Europeans had gone, in the East or in the West, they had carried death, disease, and destruction. They had created empires—but at the price of ceaseless wars and of the lives of millions of innocent natives. Not since the Deluge had there been such a holocaust. They had added undreamed-of luxuries to life—and had enervated those who had indulged in them: how much happier the natives, without luxury or vice! Europeans had spread commerce but had inflamed speculation; they had substituted the love of gold for the love of honor. They had spread Christianity and, with it, superstition and fanaticism. Worst of all, they had fastened slavery on one half of the globe.

In essence, European explorers, ‘discoverers,’ and conquerors, having stumbled upon a wretched, God-forsaken corner of creation, had managed to make it worse. In Raynal’s words:

“Everything in the New World exhibits the vestiges of a malady of which the human race still feels the effects. The ruin of that world is still imprinted on its inhabitants, a species of men degraded and degenerated in their natural constitution, in their stature, in their way of life, and in their understanding, which is but little advanced in the arts of civilization. A damper air and a more marshy ground must necessarily have infected the very roots and seeds both of the subsistence and the multiplication of mankind. The [native] men have less strength and less courage, no beard and no hair; they have less appearances of manhood and are but little susceptible of the lively and powerful sentiment of love. Men who have little more hair than eunuchs cannot abound in generating principles. The blood of these people is watery and cold. The men sometimes have milk in their breasts, hence arises their tardy inclination to sex and hence has proceeded that want of population which has always been observed in them.”

The inferiority and degeneracy of the native Americans was, alas, contagious. Commager relayed Raynal’s view: “The Creoles of Louisiana were degenerated in mind as in body. Spain was in decline, in the New World and the Old alike. Even the English, wrote Raynal, ‘had visibly degenerated.’ Had Nature punished them for colonizing in this unwelcoming world? ‘Are they a people degenerated by transplanting,’ asked Raynal, ‘by mixture?’”

The conclusion was inescapable. Commager summarized: “The discovery of America had been a mistake. Far better that Columbus never lifted the veil that had for so long hidden this world from the greedy eyes of Europe; far better had the Conquistadores failed in their campaigns against the Aztecs and the Incas; far better had Cabot and Verrazzano and Henry Hudson and all the other intrepid navigators found a watery grave in those oceans that had so long guarded the Western world…”

Commager went on to review the lively debate to which Raynal contributed, a debate that is not necessarily over even today, and which may not have been about America in the first place. The question 'Was America a mistake?', wrote Commager, “was not a wholly honest question, for there was more here than met the eye, more than an inquiry about America. There was no evidence that Raynal himself cared a fig about America, and as for those who answered his question, what they cared about was quite clearly not the New World, and barely the Old World, but quite simply their own world. America was merely a kind of stalking-horse for their own domestic problems.” Both in 1770, when Raynal wrote his history, and again in 1968, when Commager wrote his, one’s attitude towards America was a litmus test of sorts, and the real question that was being asked was “Which side are you on?”

I will let Bob Dylan have the last word. In a 1965 song, “Bob Dylan’s 115^th Dream,” the Bard of the Boomers narrated a surrealistic tale involving himself as a sailor aboard the Mayflower, captained by a Captain Arab. As they approach the as yet unknown continent, the narrator declares, “I think I’ll call it America,” I said as we hit land / I took a deep breath, I fell down, I could not stand / Captain Arab he started writing up some deeds / He said, “Let’s set up a fort and start buying the place with beads.” Misadventures ensue; “Well, I rapped upon a house with the U.S. flag upon display / I said, “Could you help me out? I got some friends down the way.” / The man says, “Get out of here, I’ll tear you limb from limb.” / I said, “You know they refused Jesus, too,” he said, “You’re not Him.” The narrator eventually escapes and returns to the ship and to the sea, getting as far away from America as fast as he can. His parting observation is: “The funniest thing was when I was leavin’ the bay / I saw three ships a-sailin’, they were all heading my way. / I asked the captain what his name was and how come he didn’t drive a truck. / He said his name was Columbus; I just said, “Good luck.” ³ 

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Henry Steele Commager - Wikipedia

¹ According to an article in Psychology Today, “On his way to see Niagara Falls [in 1909], Freud was invited to a barbecue in upstate New York. He later complained angrily that his steak had been cooked over an open fire by ‘savages.’” Sigmund Freud Hated America: 5 Reasons Why | Psychology Today

Having attended such barbecues in upstate New York, I cannot disagree with Freud.

² The question was later elaborated (by Abbe Guillaume Raynal) as this: “Was the discovery of America a blessing or a curse to mankind? If it was a blessing, by what means are we to conserve and enhance its benefits? If it was a curse, by what means are we to repair the damage?” Rather than risk an answer, we might attempt the famous 'Jordan Peterson dodge': "Was America a mistake? Well, it all depends on what you mean by 'was,' and what you mean by 'America,' and what you mean by 'mistake'. You have a lot of terminological unpacking to do before you can even begin to understand the bloody question, and even then, I'm not sure you can make it coherent."  

³ Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream | The Official Bob Dylan Site

Listen to it here: (11) Bob Dylan - Bob Dylan's 115th Dream (Official Audio) - YouTube