This week was Aesthetics Week at Social Matter. So we’ll lead with that…
Ryan Landry, late of minor Theden fame, is up first with The Beauty Of Ballet. In praising the art form, he also discusses the manifold reason’s why, as yet, ballet has proven less proggable than most. Things have essences. Thankfully, some are harder to deconstruct, without completely obliterating the thing, than others. Ballet appears to be one of them.
Henry Dampier makes his contribution to the theme on Tuesday: Cities Need Aesthetic Harmony. They need it and the way they get it is the time honored management technique of ownership (in the non-hyper-rationalist-retard sense). If someone owns, or has stewardship over, the look and feel of the city, he (or theoretically she) can make it look and feel beautiful. How this owner is chosen is far less important than that he exist. Unfortunately, people in the USA are hung up entirely upon the former question.
Professional Man of Mystery, Haven Monahan returns this week to contend: Beauty Is Not In The Eye Of The Beholder. Monahan carves out an appreciation for beauty that lies between mere animal responses and dualistic notions that have plagued Westerners for many centuries. Inspired by women in red: Donovan wonders why we Follow the Dark.
A mysterious newcomer, Vasyl Fedorychko, arrives Friday with a great piece On Beauty and Subversion. He documents various ideology-fueled attacks on traditional conceptions of beauty. It is nothing but a conspiracy for subversion, even if active, conscious conspirators are thin on the ground:
The process of demoralization continues unhindered because of a lack of standards combined with a deathly fear of passing judgment on absolutely anyone or anything, even if the person is acting in the basest manner, and even if the thing is completely lacking in virtue or value. Why? Because we are taught, almost from birth, that everything is the same, and that everyone is equal: to be discriminating is to deny the inherent equality in all things and all people. We are taught to ignore that the pursuit of the beautiful and the avoidance of the ugly is an evolutionary survival mechanism that enables the preservation of the species. We are forced to internalize a lie.
Fedorychko concludes, “Beauty is but another casualty in this war.” Culture war is merely war by other means. With results no less destructive.
Finally, a day late, but never a dollar short, John Glanton has some words to say about Banksy and The Generational Decay of Modern Art. “Banksy” is apparently some British graffiti artist with a fair modicum of talent, a guy who could probably do well in any number of more legitimate endeavors. He’s been an inspiration to a host of less talented “artists” (hacks). One of them is “Mr. Brainwash”, whom Glanton describes as “quite clearly dumb as a box of rocks”, yet whose “works of art” are apparently all the rage among our chattering bobo classes. In this, Glanton sees an object lesson in cultural decay:
For my money, and I’m no art historian, that’s the cycle that got started around the turn of the twentieth century, when a bunch of artsy types in France and Italy started getting more interested in writing manifestos and épater le bourgeois than in producing works of standalone artistic merit. Many of the originators of these avant garde movements, many of their first or second generations, were trained and competent artists in their own right. They had the chops. But if your scene treats a signed toilet as having some profound critical merit, then your scene is (please forgive me for this) going to start getting clogged up with a bunch of shit work. Whatever cultural capital those artistic forefathers had—in the form of education, training, familiarity with the traditions and methods of their given craft—is going to atrophy away. There are examples of this generational decay wherever artists begin to emphasize the propagation of the message over the perfection of the medium.
As with fish and society, art too, rots from the head.
And Sarah Perry makes a significant contribution of her own with How Beauty Fits over at FPR.
Just as there is a tendency to deny the existence of beauty, there is also a tendency to lock it up in art museums, to segregate it from everyday life. If beauty is understood as exclusively a property of old paintings and sculptures and perhaps Shakespeare plays, it cannot intrude into our mundane lives, in the form of doorknobs and socks and the motions of unloading groceries. Indeed, segregating beauty from everyday life seems to excuse the fact that most objects and contexts in our lives are quite ugly and poorly-fitting. Commuting is not beautiful; billboards and offices are ugly; the doorknobs we are obliged to use fit our hands poorly.
As usual, Sarah is hard to summarize, but very very good. RTWT!
Nick Land makes a contribution: Shanghai Style. Pretty impressive. I trust the occupancy rate will match its beauty.
I don’t pay enough attention to The Neoreaction’s Poet Laureate: E. Antony Gray’s A Spy In The House of God. Me being poetically tone deaf and blogspot not sending notification emails are primarily to blame. But in this week of Aesthetics Awarenessness, he deserves a mention for his criminally under-sung work both in poetry and aesthetics generally. This week brings two new poems: Laboring Song and Crocodile Song… or is that Крокодил?
Free Northerner participates with a picture-rich post: Form, Function, and Beauty. He seems to have taken some notes from Sarah:
Objective attractiveness comes from where form and function meet. An object is attractive if its form signals the appearance of the object meeting its function. Beauty is something more than simple attractiveness, it has a a transcendence to it. Beauty is where form and function combine to illustrate truth.
One cannot speak of aesthetics without touching ritual. Ash Milton has that base covered with his (not terribly short) Reflection On Realism and Ritual. Therein, he rejects the Gnostic temptation, in favor of the fundamental unity of reality:
The core premise of realism is the most important part of this case. In our material experiences, we are interacting with a world which embodies universals in an incomprehensible complexity of formal causes. If these forms are real and the material world embodies them, then our sensory experiences are interactions with these forms. Far from separating us from the pure contemplation of the forms, materiality allows us to experience them as they are expressed in the world.
Let see… what else?
I’ve stayed out of the kerfuffle over the Draw-a-Picture-of-Mohammed-Because-Jesus-Loves-Free-Speech issue, but Real Gary VII has up a truly priceless picture. Filed under Following-Episcopalians-so-You-Don’t-Have-To: Real Gary makes an actionable prediction on Episcopalian Politics.
Mr. Laurel explains his slowdown. Even Mitchell has only 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4.0916 seconds in a day, I guess.
Athrelon Harold Lee makes an appearance over at More Right to discuss The Dark Side of the Weak Galt Hypothesis. Not all unequals are created equally.
Skyagusta continues to amaze and enlighten with his fantastic essays on Southern culture. In The Duality of the Southern Thing he diagnoses what may well be a sort of multiple personality disorder. All modern societies have their own versions of this, but Simmons is particularly adept at diagnosing this “double-minded” soul of his own homeland.
Also, very worthwhile Slow History (1918) reading: parts one, two and three of highlights from UB Phillips’ American Negro Slavery. From partie deux:
A planter in explaining his mildness might well have said it was due to his being neither a knave nor a fool. He refrained from the use of fetters not so much because they would have hampered the slaves in their work as because the general use of them never crossed his mind. And since chains and bolts were out of the question, the whole system of control must be moderate; slaves must be impelled as little as possible by fear, and as much as might be by loyalty, pride and the prospect of reward.
If only free laborers in North had had it so good. And this a Book Review: Cracker Culture by Grady McWhiney which outlines the Celtic origins of Southern cultures (plural) in distinction to the more properly Anglo-Saxon influences of the American North.
Speaking of the North, Free Northerner finally finishes up A Troublesome Inheritance, and shares his report.
Butch Leghorn roots a compelling Defense of Marriage in purely non-religious, scientific terms.
High-test neoreactionary bullet points over at Neocolonial‘s site: The trailing edge.
Speaking of high-test theory: Sarah Perry’s latest at Ribbonfarm does not disappoint: Weaponized Sacredness. Let the girl talk:
The important point is that [Gay Marriage Orthodoxy] functions as a new sacredness, something that is so important that we agree not to examine it too closely, and to only speak of it in respectful, ideologically correct terms. But it is disturbing to watch a new sacredness be born, no matter how benign it seems, because like the water locked up for now in a dam, the path it might take in the future is inscrutable and hard to control.
Social forces can have powerful, dangerous, unforeseen effects. The social force that I have been calling sacredness is one of the most powerful. As indicated in the title, it can be weaponized and turned against humans. It can be an engine of cooperation, or a destructive plague, and often displays both natures at once. It travels through many channels, via all forms of speech or human communication, and it operates at many scales. Its language is symbol, entangling map with territory, fusing the word spoken with the thing signified.
This Week in Henry Dampier
On Saturday, The Neoreaction’s most eligible bachelor does a great job of demystifying terror in Counter-Terror. A pretty good job of slam dunking “counter-terror” as well:
The need for domestic counter-terror is a confession of weakness by the state that engages in it.
Next, Henry has a few words About the Griping in the Manosphere. Words like:
The griping can also be seen as an attempt to coordinate during a time when the state (as it ought to in order to protect itself) is working hard to prevent such coordination. Because the state doesn’t want (and shouldn’t want) a competing culture to emerge within its own territory, the people in the alternative men’s media who succeed the most tend to be the ones who encourage men to coordinate to become better parasites on the shuddering carcass of what was good ol’ Western Civ.
They create a bandit culture which praises excellence in banditry. Which would make sense, because we’re in conditions which are conducive to banditry as a strategy.
Parasitism is adaptive, however, until it isn’t. Americans tend to believe that ‘economics is cyclical,’ believing in narratives of ‘stock market recoveries’ which exceed every downturn. But civilizations and economies more often go through profound phase changes which aren’t cyclical at all. The ‘business cycle’ can be more like a one-way ratchet of dysfunction, and the same goes for the other social phenomena.
It’s absolutely fantastic. RTWT!
After 6 1/2 years of ZIRP, Henry puts Stock Market Pretenses under a magnifying glass on Monday. His assessment seems to be we are pretty much on auto-pilot now until the end, however it gets triggered, comes. Stay safe. And stay thirsty.
On Tuesday, Mr. Dampier takes up the knotty problem of black privilege in Cultural ‘Room To Destroy’. A solid piece of post-WWII cultural analysis. For nearly three generations now, we’ve systematically denigrated stereotypically civilized European culture and attitudes; simultaneously promoted un-civilized African behaviors and and values. And yet the system works. Somewhat. But for how long?
Next up a discussion on Divorce and the Pressures on Men and Women, which borrows from this excellent 2013 article from Stephen Baskerville. A fantastic bit of social history and commentary from both of them I think.
Rounding out the week, Henry thinks the current regime goes Out With a Whimper, vis-a-vis a bang.
This Week in 28 Sherman
Social Matter could not contain all that SoBL had to say regarding aesthetics. On Tuesday he makes the solid point, often under-appreciated on the anti-authoritarian right, Government Spending Can Enable Great Art. The problem with the National Endowment for the Arts is not so much its existence or level of funding, but the absolute dreck it sometimes exists to fund. SoBL goes on to document the outstanding art—specifically ballet—that Soviet and Russian government spending has created.
From ballet to buildings, SoBL next considers The Work of Antoni Gaudí, which is seems to me often fantastical and other-worldly in its beauty.
On Thursday, SoBL outlines a whole lotta reasons to not be very sanguine about how Mad Men is wrapping up: To Create and Kill a Show. All in all, he remains pretty Phil Jackson about it. Shows have to end some way, and most of the best ways have probably been taken.
And back to the subject of art and aesthetics (not that he really ever left it), SoBL closes out the week by asking Where’s Our Rodin? He is not, of course, the only one missing. One may ask where is our James Clerk Maxwell? Our Darwin? Our Tesla? Our Thomas Alva Edison? Our Einstein? Even our Freud (fer crissakes)? Our Rodin Lacuna tells the story at least as well as any other:
We don’t really have any Rodins popping up despite all of our progress? All of our leisure time and material wealth, and we cannot produce an artist to take a medium to a new level. Strange. Some of the problem might be a smaller audience seeking engaging art. That might not be so since some of his commissions were public works. It is just that our public works would not select for something where the artist creates, but where the artist creates with proper progressive programming. Even worse, it might be a soulless corporate piece of art exhibiting abstract ideas. “Fluidity, Inclusivity and Diversity!“
This Week… Elsewhere
I’ve been getting to know Ace (Whiskey & Ashes), proprietor of 80 Proof Oinomancy, over the past couple months in Jackal Hours. He is, quite simply, The Real Deal: Charming, honest, and utterly trustworthy. His interview with Beppo Venerdi contained immense wisdom for men. I think it well worth a listen. Also, “Don’t lead an existence of which you would want no part.”
Well, Ace has got a Kindle book out: Whiskey and Ashes: An Inebriate’s Avowals, Maxims and Observations. An accumulation of his wit and wisdom over the years all for $4.99. Go check it out.
Orcbrander B. W. Rabbit has some meta musings in When Dream Worlds Collide – Right Futurists vs. Little House on The Praireactionaries and 9/11 Truthers. I do love the term: “Little House on the Prarieactionaries” and I think Rabbit carves a sane course; but I think his LHOTPRs could do with a bit of steel-manning. Reaction is principally visceral disgust at the way things are going in the modern world. Just because some folks aren’t very good at articulating why they feel that way, doesn’t mean they aren’t perfectly right to be disgusted.
Wasenlite’s got up the third of his Letters To A Young Programmer. The topic: Sex bias, and how if you close your eyes, click your heels together, and imagine really really hard, you just might catch it in the act of occurring in the World of Tech:
You must also be aware, again from the evidence of your own experience, that the reasons proposed for lower promotion rates of women are extremely thin. My own employer has made a fetish of “unconscious bias”, which explains everything and is not falsifiable. (The main purpose of unconscious bias training appears to be to get the attendees to be aware of their unconscious bias. This self-congratulatory recursiveness is a sure sign of the flim-flam artist, of holy rolling.)
Briggs has got full coverage on the the violent and unprovoked triggering of a Columbia student. He also takes some really bad climate science math logic to the woodshed. Filed under: Why-Don’t-We-Just-Club-Smart-Kids-On-the-Head: Kids Raised By Parents Creates Unfair Advantages, Inequality: A Consequence Of Egalitarianism.
Bonald has a few thoughts on guys who pretend to be women. Thoughts on our present gynotopia—all is exceedingly unwell.
Kristor is usually based as you-know-what, but this piece missed the mark I think. For the record: Reactionaries advocate an official state religion as a force for social stability. The only alternative is unofficial state religions which are historically, and likely intrinsically, causative of social destabilization. Which reactionaries, by definition, really hate.
Related (I think) was Mark Citadel’s Faith Militant. I think it misses the mark a little, but I have not space here fully explain why. In brief: I think we suffer in the modern West not so much from the lack of a priestly caste, but rather in being completely overrun entirely by it. Priests Gone Wild, as it were. Also from Mark, a relatively digestible review of a perennial favorite: Julius Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World.
Speaking of arguments with Christians, Atavisionary talks about his Conversation with a Blue Pill Churchian. I hate it when Atheists understand the faith and its proper relation to moral order better than putative Christians. Atavis, ya got a lot more patience than me! You are not far from the Kingdom!!
Al Fin’s got up a very detailed Normal Childhood Development and The Dangerous Child. Normal of 50 years ago is sounding more and more like a recipe for raising future aristocrats of the soul.
Kakistocracy’s got a nice send-up of the new neoliberal orthodoxy, approved by Harvard and NPR that all we need to do with under-perfoming populations is mix them gently into over-performing ones and voilà: sociological gaps will begin to shrink. The program more than pays for itself apparently, so long as you don’t look at the actual costs.
Over at The Mitrailleuse, J. Arthur Bloom promotes Lindsey Graham: The Neoreactionary Candidate. Unfortunately, no self-respecting neoreactionary would ever do anything so degenerate as voting.
Well, that’s all folks… Have a great week. Lemme know what I missed down in the combox. Keep on Reactin’! Til next week… TRP, over and out!!
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Musicians have a trump card to prove that the aesthetics of music are objective and not subjective. Rhythm is either right or wrong, there is no gray area and if we can’t agree on the eighth note we can’t play anything.
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Your criticism is well taken, and I understand it in light of the fact that Modernity has its own religious trappings, which I alluded to in my article. However, I wouldn’t say this represents the presence of what can be accurately deemed a priestly caste. Similarly, we do have an elite gang that hold the levers of power in the Modern world, but I wouldn’t call them an aristocracy in the true sense of the word. In fact I usually call them the faux elite.
On Kristor’s article, I outlined what I think are the three functions of the broad priestly caste.
“1) It procures supernatural justification of the state, and is responsible for keeping the state in good graces with the Divine Realm through reverence and ritual (both exoteric and often esoteric in nature)
2) It acts as a legal body, institutionalized with civic authority to prosecute transgressors.
3) It perpetuates the taboos around destructive and deviant behaviors, essentially keeping the citizenry in a state of good spiritual health.”
NBS: Yes. And our current Brahmin elite does those things. It just does them badly, and in service a particularly ill-conceived “religion”.
The proponents of the new religion of leftism don’t fulfill these functions, or really even purport to fulfill these functions (although they may venture that way at times, e.g – hate crimes legislation).
The thrust of my article was about how the Modern man fears any organized armed opposition from those who profess strong religious convictions in particular because they know that historically, these groups have amassed great power very quickly, as well as followers who are willing to die for what they believe in (something people typically won’t do if their concerns are purely political). I think it is why the left have consistently failed to dominate the Islamic world, because they just can’t disarm and pacify this radical element (I think Jim has discussed Boko Haram along these lines), and they never will, no matter how many tanks and bombs they pour into Syria or Afghanistan.
NBS:
Yes. And that was my take away. And I don’t think you’re wrong. But the trouble is that our elite is purely the Brahmin caste. Full stop. That is the problem. The only way to be elite is to be Brahmin, i.e., priestly. Military service accords no status on its own. Gaining riches via commerce accords to status on its own. The only way to get status is being priestly. It stems from the low-church breakdown of barriers between priest and lay. Everyone (in low church/dissenter thinking) ought to be a priest. It is open question, I think, whether the *content* of the prog religion is purely a function of its organization, but there’s no question at all that having complete hegemony of the priestly caste (irrespective of its dogmas) is destabilizing. And as Moldbug said
“We don’t just live in something vaguely like a Puritan theocracy. We live in an actual, genuine, functioning if hardly healthy, 21st-century Puritan theocracy.”
So it’s not so much that our prog masters are afraid of traditionally religious armed people. Of course they are. But their afraid of according any moral or social status to anyone who’s not a “priest”. And we see this in the military as well. The lower ranks are totally red-state vaisyas, but everyone above about major got their rank by passing prog religious tests.
The left learns from mistakes that have imperiled its ideology before, and has activated a self-defense mechanism to stop those things from potentially occurring again. Of course, it is in our interests that such things do occur, and with increasing rapidity. There was once a time when Christian men traveled across Europe and south armed and ready for combat, at the behest of crusader monarchs. This conception of holy war is something that Evola had a lot of praise for. We seem to have lost this supernatural connection to war, which is now couched in purely secular or political terminology. Rarely do we see wars claimed to really be for ‘what is right’, but rather what is ‘in our interests’ or ‘to keep us safe’.
Thanks for the links!
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One more for Saturday, Nick! Also, thanks for the link.
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Yes. Antony, saw them. That’s the problem with posting on Friday… I guess. The week isn’t actually over.
Mark, your comment is substantive enough that I’ll try to answer inline.
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As per your well-reasoned responses Nick –
Taking status as a presumed authority over others, or perhaps we could say moral superiority, then yes it appears that a pseudo-Brahmin class does hold most of this quality. One can see this in the following comparison…
The CEO of Cargill owns an incredibly lucrative company, but is not somebody I could name off the top of my head.
By contrast, the CEO of Facebook is almost universally known, even though his company earns a fraction of what Cargill brings in in terms of revenue.
The difference is of course that Zuckerberg is a Modernist Brahmin, similar to the late Steve Jobs. He is staunchly and rabidly Progressive. Thus, if we take Progressivism to be a kind of religion then for sure what you say is accurate (though it would be interesting to see how status and actual power correlate).
I guess I draw a pretty harsh distinction between religion grounded in Tradition (no special pleading for Christianity, I would include almost all of the others as well) and this kind of crude caricature which is almost like a kind of mocking Satanic Mass as compared to a Holy Mass. When I do describe the Liberal project as a kind of religion, I’m usually using that to describe its many dogmas and facets that bear a kind of religious overtone, rather than according it the status of say, Hinduism or Christianity. Liberalism has after all no reverence for that which is above (something common to all religions, whether they perceive a God or simply an eternal cosmic order), and instead engages in the worship of that which is below, the worst elements of any given society, the stinking foetor of the underground. The object of the Modern ‘theology’ is man. Man’s equality, liberty, degeneracy.
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In order to get from the Holy Mass down to the Satanic Mass mockery, you have to pass through the fervent (genuinely religious and genuinely wrong) iconoclasm of leveling dissenter sects.
Every nation has an Official National Religion. They’d better make it a good (i.e., a “high church”) one.
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