Trump
I can't remember now what I expected, but I am surprised how the bull shit is snowballing even week to week. You'd think they would want to pace themselves.
That said, I do think I've made some sense out of Kellyanne Conway's "alternative facts" assertion. Really I don't know what she meant, but I think it may be true that there are sociologically valid facts that are not "true" but that a substantial percentage of people believe anyway. Rather like religion. Actually a lot like religion.
If large numbers of people are determined to believe a given conspiracy theory or that their favorite invisible sky-faeries have a particular characteristic, then these statements are "true" for them even when they are not true in any objective sense. The question then becomes, Why do they believe these particular statements? And to answer this "why" question you don't need journalists but psychologists and sociologists. And, as with Franco's Spain, scientists and journalists are only seen as being beneficial to society when they support the distorted view.
Avoiding needless synthesis
Today I was helping an online friend reduce the word count in a piece of fiction she's working on. This got me thinking about the "don't mention things that are not crucial to your story" rule and how William Faulkner breaks this rule -- and how glad we are that he does. Just thinking about Faulkner took me back to Methodism and it occurred to me that Methodism played a similar role in America in the 19th century to the role Puritanism played in England in the 17th century. (And Calvinism in Europe in the 16th century?)
So I'm seeing a natural (human?) cycle here but I'm not seeing synthesis in the Hegelian sense. If the secular trend in European history is the thesis, and the frantically religious response to that is the antithesis, where is the synthesis? As with the political fluctuation in the final century of the Roman Republic, I see a social machine getting more and more out of balance and on the verge of flying apart, not a culture on the verge of achieving some compromise viewpoint.
The Classics
Recently YouTube has decided I'm interested in seeing clips from the movie Gladiator -- and my then clicking on them hasn't discouraged this. But seeing these clips has got me thinking about Rome, and then Greece.
When you read Thucydides and Xenophon, or Livy and Polybius, you inevitably come to identify with the Athenians and Romans. The Athenians are just so modern. And after learning the art of war and the art of politics by reading the history of generation after generation after generation of Romans, you feel like you are a Roman. So it's easy to overlook the reality that by their glory times both states were pretty despicable. Perhaps they are despicable in ways that are easier for us to comprehend than was the case with many of their contemporaries, but that doesn't change the fact that they were a nasty lot that you wouldn't want anything to do with if you weren't a member of their gang.
It's hard to not wish there was some way Alcibiades could have been brought back into the Athenian state to lead their defense against the Persians, but then again, it's hard to argue that they didn't get exactly what they deserved.
It's hard to not wish there were better defenders of the Republic at the end than the insufferable Cicero and the vapid Cato. But even if we accept Cicero's account that he wasn't the usual rapacious provincial proconsul, he was supporting a system that was rapacious to the core. Again, it's hard to argue that the Republic deserved to continue in the form it had taken at that time.
And all this is equally true with America. Even if you give us a pass for our first hundred years on account of the times, even if you forgive the unparalleled terror tactics of WW2, as poetic justice for what the Germans and Japanese started, I don't see how you can justify the sins of the post war years. And even if you do decide the Cold War is an adequate excuse for what we did to the Congo and Chile and Somalia and all the rest, that still leaves everything since 9/11.
So, when it comes down to it, Trump is just an instance of reaping what you sow and of just desserts. I still hope American Democracy will prove strong enough to shake off this disaster, but if not, it's not like we didn't have this coming.
Social Contract
I keep coming back in my mind to America's Social Contract. Regardless of where John Locke and the guys may have wanted to start, the American Social Contract started with protecting the right of Europeans to view Native Americans and Africans as being less than human. As not having legal standing except as chattel.
The next American "revolution" was when abolitionists attacked this notion with regard to Africans which lead to the Civil War and the end of "slavery" as an institution. But when it comes down to it, it seems like Americans are not that interested in other "people's" interests when their own economic interest is involved. Many of the "Sagebrush Rebellion" issues have to do with continued exploitation of Native lands.
The problem, in a world of robot manufacturing and the land being stressed by human population growth, is how are non-tech savvy Americans to be made whole? And this is far more than just an American problem. Because someone will find something for these people to do, just as Mussolini and Hitler did.
Perhaps, just as we need a multitude of gods and religions to suit our individual or group needs, there is no one political system that suits all people. It sounds like you're joking when you point out that the weakness of Italian Fascism was the need to pit Italian nationalism against some external force, but this does seem to be an essential requirement for all forms of extreme nationalism, and I'm sure America First-ism will tend in the same direction. I'm not even in a position to say that this isn't a necessary feature. This comes down to cultural anthropology and sociology. It may well be that the EU has pushed peace in Europe, for example, about as far as it can go. Perhaps radical pruning isn't an accident, but a necessity for European success. It certainly looks like something periodically pushes Europeans toward war.
Continued...
I've been holding onto this for days because I'm still dwelling in The House of Phlegm... (now with minimal hearing in my left ear due to congestion. Dr. Time seems to finally be getting the better of this vile plague. Maybe.)
But now I need to make this already too long post even longer as I just ran into not one, but two intriguing pieces from Medium. I will include the links below.
I guess I'm going to start with this piece on "The Alt-right Is a Doomsday Cult." It's almost like the author has been reading my blogs. There are references to Nietzsche and to Mussolini -- and I now I have to do some research on Julius Evola. There's even a new (to me) use of "kali" to describe the period of time when Kali dances. (How have I missed Evola? His connection with Hermetic philosophy links straight back to the original Faust writings.)
Here's a striking quote from Wiki:
"The Jews were stigmatized, not as representatives of a biological race, but as the carriers of a world view, a way of being and thinking—simply put, a spirit—that corresponded to the ‘worst’ and ‘most decadent’ features of modernity: democracy, egalitarianism and materialism."[20]
And:
Paul Furlong wrote that "The complete Evola held views that it is fair, if somewhat summary, to categorise as elitist, racist, anti-semitic, misogynist, anti-democratic, authoritarian, and deeply anti-liberal."[7]
And finally, the real shocker:
Evola died unmarried, without children, on 11 June 1974 in Rome.
I did a quick search and found this link where the internet, in it's occult wisdom, reveals that 63% of respondents think Evola was gay. That's what I was thinking as well. And not just because he was a Barone.
Now to our second piece on the suppression of science in Franco's Spain. Now here we see exactly what I thought we should see in fascism in general, if its enemy was truly the bourgeoisie (Evola is quite clear on this in his theory of "castes.") Some quotes,
The new council ["the central agency responsible for advancing Spanish science research and exchanges with foreign scientists"] was meant to bring back a view of science that would make it compatible with conservative Catholic values, mandating it to “restore the classical and Christian unity of the sciences that was destroyed in the 18th Century.” In other words, he wanted to turn back the clock to pre-Enlightenment times...
“The Franco regime defended the literalism of the Bible, which was considered an infallible account, inspired by the word of God,” said Manuel Castillo Martos, a professor at the University of Seville and co-author of Education, Science and Ideology in Spain (1890–1950). “Scientific ideas that contradicted it, such as Darwinist evolution, were considered unacceptable.”
Now we have Naphta's doctrine made law. Given that The Magic Mountain was published in 1926 and Franco came to power 1936-1939, and that we know (from Primo Levi) that "everyone" was reading the book after it was published, one has to wonder just how influential it really was.
The Nazis were not in a position, during the late 1930s and 1940s, to be purists when it came to bourgeois science, since they had a war to lose. But was there a long term plan to adapt something similar to (though less Catholic than) the Spanish approach to science? How would I.G. Farben have felt about that? Again, I'm not quite interested enough in this to actually read National Socialist texts. There should be a way to leave idea seeds on Medium in hopes that someone else will do your work for you.
No power to the slaves
I included a Franco quote above and then removed it because it didn't relate to what I was addressing just then, but I want to come back to it now.
“We do not believe in government through the voting booth,” he said. “The Spanish national will was never freely expressed through the ballot box. Spain has no foolish dreams.”
And this goes nicely with Evola's thoughts on caste,
In Revolt Against the Modern World, Evola developed a "general objective law: the law of the regression of the castes", claiming that "[t]he meaning of history from the most ancient times is this: the gradual decline of power and type of civilization from one to another of the four castes - sacred leaders, warrior nobility, bourgeoisie (economy, "merchants") and slaves - which in the traditional civilizations corresponded to the qualitative differentiation in the principal human possibilities."[13]
I don't think Fyodor Dostoevsky would have much of a problem with this. And neither would Naphta, of course. Though I imagine there would be some debate about who decides what between the "sacred leaders" and the "warrior nobility." And isn't it interesting that he chose the word "slaves" for the lowest caste (I'm assuming this is a decent translation.) I imagine Ford Madox Ford was familiar with Evola, I do wonder what he thought of these, Tory-er than thou views.
I do notice a couple problems for the Alt-right in installing these ideas in the New World. As Dostoevsky was aware, the U.S.A. is a pure bourgeois state. Getting rich regardless of the cost has always been the true American Dream and when Trump speaks of Making America Great Again, I'm sure that's what his followers are hearing. How do you introduce finer thoughts regarding the sacred and the noble in a land of the bourgeoisie?
And then there's religion. For Spain and Italy going to their sacred place was simply adhering to the Catholic Church -- just as it was Orthodox Christianity for Dostoevsky. But what is the sacred standard for the U.S.A? Evangelical Christianity? Who's brand? And whichever one you pick the Catholics and Mormons and Goat knows how many other sects will scream. America hasn't yet seen a good religious war, wouldn't it be amusing if the fight against Radical Islam resulted in a new 30 Years War among Christian sects?
