Politely Declining All Solidarity

Excerpted from the introduction to Vol. VIII of his Études sur la Littérature Contemporaine (1885):

Age teaches doubt, and experience to distrust. Distrust of the word in particular, since words are like the tongue, the best of all things and the worst of all things. A word is the sign of an idea, and it has all the privileges of a thinking being; but how dearly have we to pay for this privilege! It is the tool of science, but it is also the occasion of errors, the source from which prejudices spring; and, to employ a Baconian phrase, it is the artisan of idols. Words make history; words lead the world; there are words that have shaken States to their very foundations, and that have consummated revolutions. There are words for which, even to this day, men divide themselves into parties or to which they sacrifice themselves. There are privileged words, orthodox words, sacred words, before which prudent men bow themselves. Let the fancy seize you some day to ask what is progress? or to insinuate that humanity after all might be only an abstraction, and you will soon perceive that you are thought to be an idiot or a knave.

Let us be graceless, and let us dare to say that progress is one of the sophisms to which over-hasty generalisation leads, and that it is only the disguise of an abstract term. The idea of indefinite improvement is borrowed from the exact sciences and from the industrial arts, where each conquest becomes the starting-point for a new acquisition, so that it is impossible to foresee that the human species will ever be arrested in this line of successive enrichments. Furthermore, the general prosperity being dependent upon the state of trade, the improvement of the one will have for its consequence the improvement of the other. Here is therefore, without contradiction, social progress—from a materialistic point of view. From day to day suffering, pain is alleviated, and more numerous enjoyments are put within the reach of our fellow-beings; and this is (it costs me nothing to recognise it) something very considerable. I even confess that this is all that is essential. The error is born when it is thought that what is true in the material and positive order of things, is also true in the moral order; when it is supposed that society increases in rectitude, in equity, in moderation, in purity, in delicacy of sentiment by a necessary evolution and an automatic development. This error springs from another error. Well-being is confounded with happiness, when in reality it is only one of its conditions. Happiness is contentment, which, if it does certainly imply the satisfaction of needs, is nevertheless not the consequence of that satisfaction. Happiness is above all a state of soul, an affair of disposition, the philosophy of life; so much so, that it is possible to be very happy with very few enjoyments, and miserable with the possibility of satisfying any desire. Brought back to its true significance, social progress cannot assure the happiness of a single person, much less of humankind. It is even possible that progress will militate against happiness, contentment being a product of wisdom, and wisdom being the product of an intellectual culture more refined than will be perhaps obtained under democratic levelling. We must therefore make up our minds to this: that men lose on the one hand what they gain on the other, and that history is condemned to remain to the end of the chapter a mass of confusion.

Humanity is another of those general terms that is exchanged like current coin, without any one having ever dreamt of verifying the amount of alloy it contains. It is one of those abstractions that defray our incurable mystical necessities. We have a family, a surrounding, a city, a fatherland, and with these, with our relatives, our friends, our fellow-citizens, we have affinities of race and community of interests. But this is not enough for us. We extend in thought the limits of this relationship—already so wanting in reality—and we take in our thoughts the whole genus homo! then we idealize these data of natural history, we personify it, we establish it as a supernatural power, we pronounce its name with deep feeling, we chant hymns in its praise, we shed ink upon its altars, ink and sometimes blood; the most fervent sacrifice their lives to it on barricades or on the scaffold. In the great shipwreck of creeds, we have transferred to this conception all our needs of faith, hope and love. What do I say? It is Comte himself, it is Positivism, which has charged itself with the task of establishing humanity into an object of worship. The world has got rid of theology and of metaphysics, but it has remained the dupe of a word.

Humanity a great family! Men all brothers! Is not this going very far? Do you feel very distinctly the tie of brotherhood when you meet in a book of travels the picture of a Papuan or even of a Chinaman? Between us, and whispered softly: Does not the godless humanity often resemble a female monkey? [...] Humanity tells me nothing. Where is this humanity seen, where is it found? Amongst the men and women I meet with here how many are there with whom I do not desire to have any closer acquaintance? I cannot sufficiently admire the power of abstraction of those persons who in the exuberance of their sympathies overlook the ugly, the sottish, the vulgar, and pay no heed to what is vicious, vile and atrocious. You would not shake that man’s hand: true—but he is a brother. You send him to the galleys, to the gallows: but he is always a brother! Humanity amuses me, it interests me, but, as a whole, it inspires me neither with respect nor with affection. I decline all solidarity.

– Edmond Henri Adolphe Schérer

Taken Their Place

"I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place."

– Winston Churchill to the Peel Commission (1937) on a Jewish homeland in Palestine

The Charity of the Poor

When the rich give charity to the poor, it's well publicized. But the charity of the poor to the rich is anonymous. The rich give the poor a little food, drink, shelter, clothes. The poor have given the rich palaces and yachts, almost infinite freedom to indulge their doubtful taste for display.

– Gilbert Seldes "Against Revolution"

Lord Keynes of the Market

Man was not made for the market, but rather, the market was made for man.

Progressive, Liberal, Reformer

“If I tell you that there are powerful people who are oppressing you to defend their own interests, you’ll call me a progressive, a liberal, and a reformer. If I tell you who those people are, you’ll call me a Nazi.”

– Gregory Hood

Starved People Cannot Be Taught

(To be edited and expanded on)

Keys on the Minnesota Starvation Study (a study worth studying):

"Starved people cannot be taught democracy."

Starved people cannot be taught anything. To me this applies to the obese who are actually nutrient and energy starved as well (it's a true paradox but an explainable one). It applies to the "skinny fat" as well, who have no noticeable muscle mass and what is man without strength? In short, it applies to the American people. We are starved for muscle mass and healthy fats. We are being starved intentionally in this area and in the educational one to keep us there. It is no coincidence that Plato, that shining star of the West, was a wrestler and was also presented in ideal physical form. Bodily fitness and intelligence are connected with thinking. We have lost our well deserved Greek inheritance.

"To talk about the will of the people when you aren't feeding them is perfect hogwash."

Reverently Orientated

"But by far the most important channel of transmission of culture remains the family: and when family life fails to play its part, we must expect our culture to deteriorate. Now the family is an institution of which nearly everybody speaks well: but it is advisable to remember that this is a term that may vary in extension. In the present age it means little more than the living members. Even of living members, it is a rare exception when an advertisement depicts a large family or three generations: the usual family on the hoardings consists of two parents and one or two young children. What is held up for admiration is not devotion to a family, but personal affection between the members of it: and the smaller the family, the more easily can this personal affection be sentimentalised. But when I speak of family, I have in mind a bond which embraces a longer period of time than this: a piety towards the dead, however obscure, and a solicitude for the unborn, however remote. Unless this reverence for past and future is cultivated in the home, it can never be more than a verbal convention in the community. Such an interest in the past is different from the vanities and pretensions of genealogy; such a responsibility for the future is different from that of the builder of social programmes."

–T.S. Eliot "Notes towards the Definition of Culture"

Hypothetical Hysteria

"The goal of a liberal / classical education is to produce a person with a fully general capacity to entertain hypotheses without being a hysterical bitch."

– D. Antinora (mashing up some other quotes I found on Twitter)

Institutionalized Biases of Literate Man

PLAYBOY: But aren’t there corresponding gains in insight, understanding and cultural diversity to compensate detribalized man for the loss of his communal values?

McLUHAN: Your question reflects all the institutionalized biases of literate man. Literacy, contrary to the popular view of the “civilizing” process you’ve just echoed, creates people who are much less complex and diverse than those who develop in the intricate web of oral-tribal societies. Tribal man, unlike homogenized Western man, was not differentiated by his specialist talents or his visible characteristics, but by his unique emotional blends. The internal world of the tribal man was a creative mix of complex emotions and feelings that literate men of the Western world have allowed to wither or have suppressed in the name of efficiency and practicality. The alphabet served to neutralize all these rich divergencies of tribal cultures by translating their complexities into simple visual forms; and the visual sense, remember, is the only one that allows us to detach; all other senses involve us, but the detachment bred by literacy disinvolves and detribalizes man. He separates from the tribe as a predominantly visual man who shares standardized attitudes, habits and rights with other civilized men. But he is also given a tremendous advantage over the nonliterate tribal man who, today as in ancient times, is hamstrung by cultural pluralism, uniqueness and discontinuity — values that make the African as easy prey for the European colonialist as the barbarian was for the Greeks and Romans. Only alphabetic cultures have ever succeeded in mastering connected linear sequences as a means of social and psychic organization; the separation of all kinds of experiences into uniform and continuous units in order to generate accelerated action and alteration of form — in other words, applied knowledge — has been the secret of Western man’s ascendancy over other men as well as over his environment.

Source: https://www.nextnature.net/2009/12/the-playboy-interview-marshall-mcluhan/

Fixed & Finite

What was the positive principle behind all the other principles of ’89? I am talking here of the revolution in as far as it was an idea; I leave out material causes—they only produce the forces. The barriers which could easily have resisted or guided these forces had been previously rotted away by ideas. This always seems to be the case in successful changes; the privileged class is beaten only when it has lost faith in itself, when it has itself been penetrated with the ideas which are working against it.

It was not the rights of man—that was a good solid practical war-cry. The thing which created enthusiasm, which made the revolution practically a new religion, was something more positive than that. People of all classes, people who stood to lose by it, were in a positive ferment about the idea of liberty. There must have been some idea which enabled them to think that something positive could come out of so essentially negative a thing. There was, and here I get my definition of romanticism. They had been taught by Rousseau that man was by nature good, that it was only bad laws and customs that had suppressed him. Remove all these and the infinite possibilities of man would have a chance. This is what made them think that something positive could come out of disorder, this is what created the religious enthusiasm. Here is the root of all romanticism: that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir of possibilities; and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order then these possibilities will have a chance and you will get Progress.

One can define the classical quite clearly as the exact opposite to this. Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent can be got out of him.

This view was a little shaken at the time of Darwin. You remember his particular hypothesis, that new species came into existence by the cumulative effect of small variations—this seems to admit the possibility of future progress. But at the present day the contrary hypothesis makes headway in the shape of De Vries’s mutation theory, that each new species comes into existence, not gradually by the accumulation of small steps, but suddenly in a jump, a kind of sport, and that once in existence it remains absolutely fixed. This enables me to keep the classical view with an appearance of scientific backing.

Put shortly, these are the two views, then. One, that man is intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstance; and the other that he is intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent. To the one party man’s nature is like a well, to the other like a bucket. The view which regards man as a well, a reservoir full of possibilities, I call the romantic; the one which regards him as a very finite and fixed creature, I call the classical.

One may note here that the Church has always taken the classical view since the defeat of the Pelagian heresy and the adoption of the sane classical dogma of original sin.

It would be a mistake to identify the classical view with that of materialism. On the contrary it is absolutely identical with the normal religious attitude. I should put it in this way: That part of the fixed nature of man is the belief in the Deity. This should be as fixed and true for every man as belief in the existence of matter and in the objective world. It is parallel to appetite, the instinct of sex, and all the other fixed qualities. Now at certain times, by the use of either force or rhetoric, these instincts have been suppressed—in Florence under Savonarola, in Geneva under Calvin, and here under the Roundheads. The inevitable result of such a process is that the repressed instinct bursts out in some abnormal direction. So with religion. By the perverted rhetoric of Rationalism, your natural instincts are suppressed and you are converted into an agnostic. Just as in the case of the other instincts, Nature has her revenge. The instincts that find their right and proper outlet in religion must come out in some other way. You don’t believe in a God, so you begin to believe that man is a god. You don’t believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a heaven on earth. In other words, you get romanticism. The concepts that are right and proper in their own sphere are spread over, and so mess up, falsify and blur the clear outlines of human experience. It is like pouring a pot of treacle over the dinner table. Romanticism then, and this is the best definition I can give of it, is spilt religion.

– T. E. Hulme

Conscious Conscience Formation

Adams did believe in progress, in amelioration of the human condition, but he warned that “wild snatches at perfection” à la Condorcet or Rousseau would ruin real advancement. Adams also ruled out the common quick fix forwarded by such radicals: education. Once a schoolmaster himself, he sneered at the idea that man is perfect in “nature” and only corrupted by exposure to knowledge and civilization. He knew formal education would only make man more clever, not better. Kirk continues for Adams, writing:

We cannot expect formal education radically to alter the common impulses of the heart; only the much more difficult inculcation of morality, which comes from the snail-slow influence of historical example and just constitutions rather than from deliberate legislation, can effect [sic] that moral improvement which is the real progress of humanity.

As Kirk notes, there is much of life not to be gotten out of schools. A conscience cannot be formed through a library. The struggles and pains of life common to all will not be eliminated by philosophers or legislators, though they may be made worse in the attempt. According to Adams, the drive to perfect man will end in his abolition.

Source: https://www.alabamapolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/API-Research-Kirk-The-Conservative-Mind.pdf

The Asymmetrical Advantage of Bullshit

The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it. – Alberto Brandolini

On the "asymmetrical advantage of bullshit":

Come to think of it, there’s a certain class of rhetoric I’m going to call the “one way hash” argument. Most modern cryptographic systems in wide use are based on a certain mathematical asymmetry: You can multiply a couple of large prime numbers much (much, much, much, much) more quickly than you can factor the product back into primes. A one-way hash is a kind of “fingerprint” for messages based on the same mathematical idea: It’s really easy to run the algorithm in one direction, but much harder and more time consuming to undo. Certain bad arguments work the same way–skim online debates between biologists and earnest ID aficionados armed with talking points if you want a few examples: The talking point on one side is just complex enough that it’s both intelligible–even somewhat intuitive–to the layman and sounds as though it might qualify as some kind of insight. (If it seems too obvious, perhaps paradoxically, we’ll tend to assume everyone on the other side thought of it themselves and had some good reason to reject it.) The rebuttal, by contrast, may require explaining a whole series of preliminary concepts before it’s really possible to explain why the talking point is wrong. So the setup is “snappy, intuitively appealing argument without obvious problems” vs. “rebuttal I probably don’t have time to read, let alone analyze closely.” 

If we don’t sometimes defer to the expert consensus, we’ll systematically tend to go wrong in the face of one-way-hash arguments, at least our own necessarily limited domains of knowledge. Indeed, in such cases, trying to evaluate the arguments on their merits will tend to lead to an erroneous conclusion more often than simply trying to gauge the credibility of the various disputants. The problem, of course, is gauging your own competence level well enough to know when to assess arguments and when to assess arguers.

Source: http://scienceblogs.com/mikethemadbiologist/2009/04/20/the-asymmetry-of-bullsh-t-and/

Universal Basic Income

"One might therefore expect business leaders and their experts to be more in favour of subsidising mass consumption (by means of family allowances, subsidies to keep down the prices of necessities, etc.) than of public investment; for by subsidizing consumption the government would not be embarking on any sort of enterprise. In practice, however, this is not the case. Indeed, subsidizing mass consumption is much more violently opposed by these experts than public investment. For here a moral principle of the highest importance is at stake. The fundamentals of capitalist ethics require that 'you shall earn your bread in sweat' -- unless you happen to have private means." 

– Michal Kalecki "Political Aspects of Full Employment"

Everything Becomes Nothing

“The vanity of existence is revealed in the whole form existence assumes: in the infiniteness of time and space contrasted with the finiteness of the individual in both; in the fleeting present as the sole form in which actuality exists; in the contingency and relativity of all things; in continual becoming without being; in continual desire without satisfaction; in the continual frustration of striving of which life consists. Time and that perishability of all things existing in time that time itself brings about is simply the form under which the will to live, which as thing-in-itself is imperishable, reveals to itself the vanity of its striving. Time is that by virtue of which everything becomes nothingness in our hands and loses all real value.”

– Arthur Schopenhauer

The Soul of the World

To my way of thinking a true street is like a garden–not a means but an end.

The architect does not build for the private client, but for the city. All of us are compelled to live with the result, which must therefore be offensive to no one. The case is no different from clothing, which ought to be original only if it first conforms.

These unarticulated verticals and blank screens of wall, these flattened deserts that once were streets, with the empty lots still grieving for their vanished houses–all speak of a flight from the city to some distant barricaded place, where neighborliness expires and people live for themselves alone.

When we see the world exclusively as an assemblage of objects, then nothing is rescued from barter and exchange.

And now, destroying the home, we are making a new kind of fallen world.

Even the most elaborate corner can be seen, therefore, to be the logical outcome of intelligible rules, so as to look less like an intrusion than a culmination.

Traditional buildings have orientation: they face the world, not always in one direction only, but in such a way as to address the space before them. They are not edges to the public space but visitors that congregate along it.

A public space is not an unowned space, but one in which the many spheres of ownership come to a negotiated boundary.

We deface the world when we scribble "me" all over it, and invite others to do the same. Beauty is the face of the community, and ugliness the attack on that face by the solipsist and the scavenger.

– Roger Scruton "The Soul of the World"

The Failure of Freedom

[A]bolish negro slavery, and how much of slavery still remains. Soldiers and sailors in Europe enlist for life; here, for five years. Are they not slaves who have not only sold their liberties, but their lives also? And they are worse treated than domestic slaves. No domestic affection and self-interest extend their aegis over them. No kind mistress, like a guardian angel, provides for them in health, tends them in sickness, and soothes their dying pillow. Wellington at Waterloo was a slave. He was bound to obey, or would, like admiral Bying, have been shot for gross misconduct, and might not, like a common laborer, quit his work at any moment. He had sold his liberty, and might not resign without the consent of his master, the king. The common laborer may quit his work at any moment, whatever his contract; declare that liberty is an inalienable right, and leave his employer to redress by a useless suit for damages. The highest and most honorable position on earth was that of the slave Wellington; the lowest, that of the free man who cleaned his boots and fed his hounds. The African cannibal, caught, christianized and enslaved, is as much elevated by slavery as was Wellington. The kind of slavery is adapted to the men enslaved. Wives and apprentices are slaves; not in theory only, but often in fact. Children are slaves to their parents, guardians and teachers. Imprisoned culprits are slaves. Lunatics and idiots are slaves also. Three-fourths of free society are slaves, no better treated, when their wants and capacities are estimated, than negro slaves. The masters in free society, or slave society, if they perform properly their duties, have more cares and less liberty than the slaves themselves. "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou earn thy bread!" made all men slaves, and such all good men continue to be.... We have a further question to ask. If it be right and incumbent to subject children to the authority of parents and guardians, and idiots and lunatics to committees, would it not be equally right and incumbent to give the free negro's masters, until at least they arrive at years of discretion, which very few ever did or will attain? What is the difference between the authority of a parent and of a master? Neither pay wages, and each is entitled to the services of those subject to him. The father may not sell his child forever, but may hire him out till he is twenty-one. The free negro's master may also be restrained from selling. Let him stand in loco parentis, and call him papa instead of master. Look closely into slavery, and you will see nothing so hideous in it; or if you do, you will find plenty of it at home in its most hideous form.... It is a common remark, that the grand and lasting architectural structures of antiquity were the results of slavery. The mighty and continued association of labor requisite to their construction, when mechanic art was so little advanced, and labor-saving processes unknown, could only have been brought about by a despotic authority, like that of the master over his slaves. It is, however, very remarkable, that whilst in taste and artistic skill the world seems to have been retrograding ever since the decay and abolition of feudalism, in mechanical invention and in great utilitarian operations requiring the wielding of immense capital and much labor, its progress has been unexampled. Is it because capital is more despotic in its authority over free laborers than Roman masters and feudal lords were over their slaves and vassals? Free society has continued long enough to justify the attempt to generalize its phenomena, and calculate its moral and intellectual influences. It is obvious that, in whatever is purely utilitarian and material, it incites invention and stimulates industry. Benjamin Franklin, as a man and a philosopher, is the best exponent of the working of the system. His sentiments and his philosophy are low, selfish, atheistic and material. They tend directly to make man a mere "featherless biped," well-fed, well-clothed and comfortable, but regardless of his soul as "the beasts that perish.[''] Since the Reformation the world has as regularly been retrograding in whatever belongs to the departments of genius, taste and art, as it has been progressing in physical science and its application to mechanical construction. Media~val Italy rivalled if it did not surpass ancient Rome, in poetry, in sculpture, in painting, and many of the fine arts. Gothic architecture reared its monuments of skill and genius throughout Europe, till the 15th century; but Gothic architecture died with the Reformation. The age of Elizabeth was the Augustan age of England. The men who lived then acquired their sentiments in a world not yet deadened and vulgarized by puritanical cant and levelling demagoguism. Since then men have arisen who have been the fashion and the go for a season, but none have appeared whose names will descend to posterity. Liberty and equality made slower advances in France. The age of Louis XIV. was the culminating point of French genius and art. It then shed but a flickering and lurid light. Frenchmen are servile copyists of Roman art, and Rome had no art of her own. She borrowed from Greece; distorted and deteriorated what she borrowed; and France imitates and falls below Roman distortions. The genius of Spain disappeared with Cervantes; and now the world seems to regard nothing as desirable except what will make money and what costs money. There is not a poet, an orator, a sculptor, or painter in the world. The tedious elaboration necessary to all the productions of high art would be ridiculed in this money-making, utilitarian charlatan age. Nothing now but what is gaudy and costly excites admiration. The public taste is debased. But far the worst feature of modern civilization, which is the civilization of free society, remains to be exposed. Whilst labor-saving processes have probably lessened by one half, in the last century, the amount of work needed for comfortable support, the free laborer is compelled by capital and competition to work more than he ever did before, and is less comfortable. The organization of society cheats him of his earnings, and those earnings go to swell the vulgar pomp and pageantry of the ignorant millionaires, who are the only great of the present day. These reflections might seem, at first view, to have little connexion with negro slavery; but it is well for us of the South not to be deceived by the tinsel glare and glitter of free society, and to employ ourselves in doing our duty at home, and studying the past, rather than in insidious rivalry of the expensive pleasures and pursuits of men whose sentiments and whose aims are low, sensual and grovelling. Human progress, consisting in moral and intellectual improvement, and there being no agreed and conventional standard weights or measures of moral and intellectual qualities and quantities, the question of progress can never be accurately decided. We maintain that man has not improved, because in all save the mechanic arts he reverts to the distant past for models to imitate, and he never imitates what he can excel.

–  George Fitzhugh "Negro Slavery, Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society"

Arsonist & Fire Chief

"The liberal is an arsonist, the conservative is a fireman, and the reactionary is a builder and planter. A fireman isn't much good after the forest has been burned down."

– Martin Svetislav


I'd contend that liberal modernity is both the arsonist and the fire chief...

The Carnage of the Universe

"Alas! The slaughter accomplished by man is so small a thing of itself in the carnage of the universe! The animals devour each other. The peaceful plants, the silent trees, are ferocious beasts to one another. The serenity of the forests is only a commonplace of easy rhetoric for the literary men who only know Nature through their books! ... In the forest hard by, a few yards away from the house, there were frightful struggles always toward. The murderous beeches flung themselves upon the pines with their lovely pinkish stems, hemmed in their slenderness with antique columns, and stifled them. They rushed down upon the oaks and smashed them, and made themselves crutches of them. The beeches were like Briareus with his hundred arms, ten trees in one tree! They dealt death all about them. And when, failing foes, they came together, they became entangled, piercing, cleaving, twining round each other like antediluvian monsters. Lower down, in the forest, the acacias had left the outskirts and plunged into the thick of it and, attacked the pinewoods, strangling and tearing up the roots of their foes, poisoning them with their secretions. It was a struggle to the death in which the victors at once took possession of the room and the spoils of the vanquished. Then the smaller monsters would finish the work of the great. Fungi, growing between the roots, would suck at the sick tree, and gradually empty it of its vitality. Black ants would grind exceeding small the rotting wood. Millions of invisible insects were gnawing, boring, reducing to dust what had once been life.... And the silence of the struggle! ... Oh! the peace of Nature, the tragic mask that covers the sorrowful and cruel face of Life!" 

– Romain Rolland "Jean-Christophe: Journey's End: The New Dawn" (1912)

Mankind the Nonexistent

 “In my life, I’ve seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.; as for Man, I must confess I’ve never met him."

– Joseph de Maistre

Homo Fascism

Articles condemning homosexuality as “unproletarian” had been appearing in the KPD press beginning in the late 20s, and in 1934 it was more or less officially labeled a “fascistic perversion.” From then on, the linkage of homosexuality and fascism became the stock in trade of Stalinist propaganda worldwide. Wilhelm Reich, though not a Stalinist (he had been expelled from the KPD in 1933), attributed the Nazis’ appeal to the suppression of healthy heterosexuality by German bourgeois prudishness, and associated homosexuality with fascist sadism, masochism and misogyny. The Frankfurt School’s Erich Fromm also claimed to find a relationship between homosexuality and sadomasochistic character disorders typical of fascists. In the Soviet Union, the writer Maxim Gorky proclaimed: “Exterminate all homosexuals and fascism will vanish.” Gorky even alleged, obscenely: “In the fascist countries homosexuality, which ruins the youth, flourishes without punishment.”

Source: http://newpol.org/content/socialism-and-homosexuality

Renan – Democracy

"Reason and science are the products of mankind, but it is chimerical to seek reason directly for the people and through the people. It is not essential to the existence of reason that all should be familiar with it; and even if all had to be initiated, this could not be achieved through democracy which seems fated to lead to the extinction of all arduous forms of culture and all highest forms of learning. The maxim that society exists only for the well-being and freedom of the individuals composing it does not seem to be in conformity with nature’s plans, which care only for the species and seem ready to sacrifice the individual. It is much to be feared that the last word of democracy thus understood (and let me hasten to add that it is susceptible of a different interpretation) would be a form of society in which a degenerate mass would have no thought beyond that of enjoying the ignoble pleasures of the vulgar."

– Ernest Renan

24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

But if and when such devices [ed: new types of communication technologies with different displays and interfaces] are introduced (and no doubt labeled as revolutionary), they will simply be facilitating the perpetuation of the same banal exercise of non-stop consumption, social isolation, and political powerlessness, rather than representing some historically significant turning point. And they too will occupy only a brief interval of currency before their inevitable replacement and transit to the global waste piles of techno-trash. The only consistent factor connecting the otherwise desultory succession of consumer products and services is the intensifying integration of one’s time and activity into the parameters of electronic exchange. Billions of dollars are spent every year researching how to reduce decision-making time, how to eliminate the useless time of reflection and contemplation. This is the [ed: final] form of contemporary progress—the relentless capture and control of time and experience.

As many have noted, the form that innovation takes within the capitalism is the continual stimulation of the new, while existing relations of power and control remain effectively the same. For much of the twentieth century, novelty production, in spite of its repetitiveness and nullity, was often marketed to coincide with a social imagination of a future more advanced than, or at least unlike, the present. Within the framework of a mid-twentieth century futurism, the products one purchased and fit into one’s life seemed vaguely linked with popular evocations of eventual global prosperity, automation benignly displacing human labor, space exploration, the elimination of crime and disease, and so on. There was at least the misplaced belief in technological solutions to intractable social problems. Now the accelerated tempo of apparent change deletes any sense of an extended time frame that is shared collectively, which might sustain even a nebulous anticipation of a future distinct from contemporary reality. 24/7 is shaped around individual goals of competitiveness, advancement, acquisitiveness, personal security, and comfort at the expense of others. The future is so close at hand that it is imaginable only by its continuity with the striving for individual gain or survival in the shallowest of presents.

My argument may seem to contain two inconsistent threads. On the one hand I am affirming, along with some other writers, that the shape of contemporary technological culture still corresponds to the logic of modernization as it unfolded in the later nineteenth century—that is to say, that some key features of early-twenty-first-century capitalism can still be linked with aspects of the industrial projects associated with Werner Siemens, Thomas Edison, and George Eastman. Their names can stand emblematically for the development of vertically integrated corporate empires that reshaped crucial aspects of social behavior. Their prescient ambitions were realized through (1) an understanding of human needs as always mutable and expandable, (2) an embryonic conception of the commodity as potentially convertible into abstract flows, whether of images, sounds, or energy, (3) effective measures to decrease circulation time, and (4) in the case of Eastman and Edison, an early but clear vision of the economic reciprocities between “hardware” an “software”. The consequences of these nineteenth-century models, especially the facilitation and maximization of content distribution, would impose themselves onto human life much more comprehensively throughout the twentieth century.

On the other hand, sometime in the late twentieth century it is possible to identify a constellation of forces and entities distinct from those of the nineteenth century and its sequential phases of modernization. By the 1990’s, a thoroughgoing transformation of vertical integration had taken place, exemplified most famously by the innovations of Microsoft, Google, and others, even though some remnants of older hierarchical structures persisted alongside newer, more flexible and capillary models of implementation and control. Within this emerging context, technological consumption coincides with and becomes indistinguishable from strategies and effects of power. Certainly, for much of the twentieth century, the organization of consumer societies was never unconnected with forms of social regulation and subjection, but now the management of economic behavior is synonymous with the formation and perpetuation of malleable and assenting individuals. An older logic of planned obsolescence continues to operate, propelling the demand for replacement or enhancement. However, even if the dynamic behind product innovation is still linked to the rate of profit or to corporate competition for sector dominance, the heightened tempo of “improved” or reconfigured systems, models, and platforms is s a crucial part of the remaking of a subject and of the intensification of control. Docility and separation are not indirect by-products of a financialized global economy, but are among its primary aims. There is an ever closer linking of individual needs with the functional and ideological programs in which each new product is embedded. “Products” are hardly just devices or physical apparatuses, but various services and interconnections that quickly become the dominant or exclusive ontological templates of one’s social reality.

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This unrelenting rhythm of technological consumption, as it has developed over the past two or three decades, prevents any significant period of time elapsing in which the use of a given product, or assemblage of them, could become familiar enough to constitute merely the background elements of one’s life. Operational and performative capabilities assume a priority that overrides the significance of anything that once might have been thought of as “content.” Rather than being a means to a larger set of ends, the apparatus is the end itself. Its purpose is directing its user to an ever more efficient fulfillment of its own routine tasks and function. It is systematically impossible that there might be a clearing or pause in which a longer-term time frame of trans-individual concerns and projects might come into view. The very brief lifespan of a given apparatus or arrangement encompasses the pleasure and prestige associated with its ownership, but simultaneously includes an awareness that the object at hand is tainted with impermanence and decay from the outset. Older cycles of replacement were at least long enough for the consensual illusion of semi-permanence to hold sway for a while. Now the brevity of the interlude before a high-tech product literally becomes garbage requires two contradictory attitudes to coexist: on one hand, the initial need and/or desire for the product, but, on the other, an affirmative identification with the process of inexorable cancellation and replacement. The acceleration of novelty production is a disabling of collective memory, and it means that the evaporation of historical knowledge no longer has to be implemented from the top down. The conditions of communication and information access on an everyday level ensure the systematic erasure of the past as part of the fantastic construction of the present.

Inevitably, such short cycles will, for some, produce anxieties about outmodedness and frustrations of various kinds. However, it is important to acknowledge the attractive incitements to align oneself with a continually evolving sequence based on promises of enhanced functionality, even if any substantive benefits are always deferred. At present, the desire to accumulate objects is less important than the confirmation that one’s life is coinciding with whatever applications, devices, or networks are, at any given moment, available and heavily promoted. From the vantage point, accelerated patterns of acquiring and discarding are never something regrettable, but rather a tangible sign of one’s access to the flows and capabilities most in demand. Following Boltanski and Chiapello, social phenomena that are characterized by the appearance of stasis or slow rates of change are marginalized and drained of value or desirability. Committing to activities where time spent cannot be leveraged through an interface and its links is now something to be avoided or done sparingly.

Submission to these arrangements is near irresistible because of the portent of social and economic failure–the fear of falling behind, of being deemed outdated. The rhythms of technological consumption are inseparable from the requirement of continual self-administration. Every new product or service presents itself as essential for the bureaucratic organization of one’s life, and there is an ever-growing number of routines and needs that constitute this life that no one has actually chosen. The privatization and compartmentalization of one’s activities in this sphere are able to sustain the illusion one can “outwit the system” and devise a unique or superior relation to these tasks that is either more enterprising or seemingly less compromised. The myth of the lone hacker perpetuates the fantasy that the asymmetrical relation of individual to network can be creatively played to the former’s advantage. In actuality there is an imposed and inescapable uniformity to our compulsory labor of self-management. The illusion of choice and autonomy is one of the foundations of this global system of auto-regulation. In many places one still encounters the assertion that contemporary technological arrangements are essentially a neutral set of tools that can be used in many different ways, including in the service of an emancipatory politics. The philosopher Giorgio Agamben has refuted such claims, countering that “today there is not even a single instant in which the life of individuals is not modeled, contaminated, or controlled by some apparatus.” He contends convincingly that “it is impossible for the subject of an apparatus to use it ‘in the right way.’ Those who continue to promote similar arguments are, for their part, the product of the media apparatus in which they are captured.”

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Because of the permeability, even indistinction, between the times of work and leisure, the skills and gestures that one would have been restricted to the workplace are now a universal part of the 24/7 texture of one’s electronic life. The ubiquity of technological interfaces inevitably leads users to strive for increasing fluency and adeptness. But the proficiency one acquires with each particular application or tool is effectively a greater harmonization with the intrinsic functional requirement continually to reduce the time of any exchange or operation. Apparatuses solicit a seemingly frictionless handling, dexterity, and know-how that is self-satisfying, and that can also impress others as a superior ability to make efficient or rewarding use of technological resources. The sense of individual ingenuity provides the temporary conviction that one is on the winning side of the system, somehow coming out ahead; but in the end there is a generalize leveling of all users into interchangeable objects of the same mass dispossession of time and praxis.

Individual habituation to these tempos has had devastating social and environmental consequences, and has produced a collective normalization of this ceaseless displacement and discarding. Because loss is continually created, and atrophied memory ceases to recognize it as such. The primary self-narration of one’s life shifts in its fundamental composition. Instead of a formulaic sequence of places and events associated with family, work, and relationships, the main thread of one’s life story now is the electronic commodities and media services through which all experience has been filtered, recorded, or constructed. As the possibility of a single lifetime job vanishes, the enduring lifework available for most is the elaboration of one’s relation to apparatuses. Everything once loosely considered to be “personal” is now reconfigured so as to facilitate the fabricating of oneself into a jumble of identities that exist only as effects of temporary technological arrangements.

The frameworks through which the world can be understood continue to be depleted of complexity, drained of whatever is unplanned or unforeseen. So many longstanding and multivalent forms of social exchange have been remade into habitual sequences of solicitation and response. At the same time, the range of what constitutes response becomes formulaic and, in most instances, is reduced to a small inventory of possible gestures or choices. Because one’s bank account and one’s friendships can now be managed through identical machinic operations and gestures, there is a growing homogenization of what used to be entirely unrelated areas of experience. At the same time, whatever remaining pockets of everyday life are not directed toward quantitative or acquisitive ends, or cannot be adapted to telematics participation, tend to deteriorate in esteem and desirability. Real-life activities that do not have an online correlate begin to atrophy, or cease to be relevant. There is an insurmountable asymmetry that degrades any local event or exchange. Because of the infinity of content accessible 24/7, there will always be something online more informative, surprising, funny, diverting, or impressive than anything in one’s immediate actual circumstances. It is now given that a limitless availability of information or images can trump or override any human-scale communication or exploration of ideas.

– Jonathan Crary “24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep" (pg 40–43, 44–47, & 58-60)

A "Who" As Though It Were A "What"

She's right. He can and does:

To avoid misunderstanding: the human condition is not the same as human nature, and the sum total of human activities and capabilities which correspond to the human condition does not constitute anything like human nature. For neither those we discuss here nor those we leave out, like thought and reason, and not even the most meticulous enumeration of them all, constitute essential characteristics of human existence in the sense that without them this existence would no longer be human. The most radical change in the human condition we can imagine would be an emigration of men from the earth to some other planet. Such an event, no longer totally impossible, would imply that man would have to live under man-made conditions, radically different from those the earth offers him. Neither labor nor work nor action nor, indeed, thought as we know it would then make sense any longer. Yet even these hypothetical wanderers from the earth would still be human; but the only statement we could make regarding their "nature" is that they still are conditioned beings, even though their condition is now self-made to a considerable extent.

The problem of human nature, the Augustinian quaestio mihi factus sum ("a question have I become for myself'), seems unanswerable in both its individual psychological sense and its general philosophical sense. It is highly unlikely that we, who can know, determine, and define the natural essences of all things sur­rounding us, which we are not, should ever be able to do the same for ourselves-this would be like jumping over our own shadows. Moreover, nothing entitles us to assume that man has a nature or essence in the same sense as other things.

In other words, if we have a nature or essence, then surely only a god could know and define it, and the first prerequisite would be that he be able to speak about a "who" as though it were a "what."

The perplexity is that the modes of human cognition applicable to things with "natural" qualities, including ourselves to the limited extent that we are specimens of the most highly developed species of organic life, fail us when we raise the question: And who are we? This is why attempts to define human nature almost invariably end with some construction of a deity, that is, with the god of the philosophers, who, since Plato, has revealed himself upon closer inspection to be a kind of Platonic idea of man. Of course, to demask such philosophic concepts of the divine as conceptualizations of human capabilities and qualities is not a demonstration of, 'not even an argument for, the non-existence of God; but the fact that attempts to define the nature of man lead so easily into an idea which definitely strikes us as "superhuman" and therefore is identified with the divine may cast suspicion upon the very concept of "human nature."

On the other hand, the conditions of human existence-life itself, natality and mortality, worldliness, plurality, and the earth can never "explain" what we are or answer the question of who we are for the simple reason that they never condition us absolutely. This has always been the opinion of philosophy, in distinction from the sciences-anthropology, psychology, biology, etc. which also concern themselves with man. But today we may almost say that we have demonstrated even scientifically that, though we live now, and probably always will, under the earth's conditions, we are not mere earth-bound creatures. Modern natural science owes its great triumphs to having looked upon and treated earth-bound nature from a truly universal viewpoint, that is, from an Archimedean standpoint taken, willfully and explicitly, outside the earth.

– Hannah Arendt "The Human Condition"