Sam Altman's Lamp Lighter

Fentanyl is a synthetic (man-made) opioid that works like morphine. It may be used to treat severe pain after surgeries and for pain at the end of life in patients with cancer. Carfentanil is another synthetic opioid. It is used as a tranquilizer for very large animals like elephants.

Excerpts from video above:

...the problem is simple, it is the confusion of two words, prosperity and luxury. Our ancestors who like read the Bible and stuff, did not have this brain damage. They would see that while we are rattled with luxury, we have very little Prosperity. Electric cars are a luxury, porn is a luxury, fentanyl is a luxury. What is the difference between luxury and prosperity? At the lowest levels of Maslow's pyramid of needs they are the same. Both luxury and prosperity start with air, proceed to water, then food, then safety. Forty percent of Americans are afraid to walk alone outside at night where they live, and more might be if they weren't more worried about long-term changes in the temperature of the planet. Here, luxury and prosperity diverge. Prosperity is what is good for you. Luxury is what feels good to you.  Luxury serves your present self. Prosperity serves your future self. The greater the productivity you can command, the further apart these targets are.

--- 

...This analysis neatly distinguishes between luxury and prosperity. Luxury does not make a human being valuable, rather the opposite alas, whereas Prosperity does in fact. Whatever we mean by the value of a human being, it is corroded by idleness and luxury, and enhanced by practice, training, and discipline as the Victorians knew well. But we persist in forgetting a Lamplighter is a more valuable human being than a welfare recipient. Lamp lighting may not be useful in and of itself, but the lamp lighter can be reassigned to many tasks involving diligence and care. He is better for the world and he is better for himself, but he has less free time to inject elephant tranquilizer.

Will we be able to transition humanity to a "prosperity economy" before the coming Technological Singularity event hits?   Don't count on it...

From the TS Wiki link above:

The concept and the term "singularity" were popularized by Vernor Vinge – first in 1983 (in an article that claimed that once humans create intelligences greater than their own, there will be a technological and social transition similar in some sense to "the knotted space-time at the center of a black hole",[8]) and later in his 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity,[4][7] (in which he wrote that it would signal the end of the human era, as the new superintelligence would continue to upgrade itself and would advance technologically at an incomprehensible rate). He wrote that he would be surprised if it occurred before 2005 or after 2030.[4] Another significant contributor to wider circulation of the notion was Ray Kurzweil's 2005 book The Singularity Is Near, predicting singularity by 2045.[7]

Some scientists, including Stephen Hawking, have expressed concern that artificial superintelligence (ASI) could result in human extinction.[9][10] The consequences of a technological singularity and its potential benefit or harm to the human race have been intensely debated.

Imagine a Von Neumann Machine with AGI... 

Weinstein on Soros' Reflexivity

...on Soros' version

On Bioelectric Intelligence

The Banality of Evil

Blowing Woke Smoke to Deflect Accountability and Insulate Bureaucracies from Criticism

Counterfeit Lives

 

A Counterfeit -- a Plated Person --

I would not be -- Whatever strata of Iniquity 

My Nature underlie -- 

Truth is good Health -- and Safety, and the Sky.
How meagre, what an Exile -- is a Lie,

And Vocal -- when we die --

- Emily Dickinson 

On Fredric Jameson

 Slavoj Žižek, "Larger than Life: A note on the death of Fredric Jameson" (Sept 2024)

Fredric Jameson was not just an intellectual giant, the last true genius in contemporary thought. He was the ultimate Western Marxist, fearlessly reaching across the opposites which define our ideological space – a “Eurocentrist” whose work found a great echo in Japan and China, a Communist who loved Hollywood, especially Hitchcock, and detective novels, especially Chandler, a music lover immersed in Wagner, Bruckner and pop music… There is absolutely no trace of Cancel Culture with its stiff fake moralism in his work and life – one can argue that he was the last Renaissance figure.

What Jameson fought throughout his long life is the lack of what he called “cognitive mapping,” the inability to locate our experience within a meaningful whole. The instincts that directed him in this fight were always right - for example, in a nice stab against the fashionable cultural-studies rejection of “binary logic,” Jameson calls for “a generalized celebration of the binary opposition” – for him, the rejection of sexual binary goes hand in hand with the rejection of class binary… Still in a deep shock, I can only offer here some passing observations which provide a clear taste of his orientation.

Today, Marxists as a rule reject any form of immediacy as a fetish which obfuscates its social mediation. However, in his masterpiece on Adorno, Jameson deploys how a dialectical analysis includes its own point of suspension: in the midst of a complex analysis of mediations, Adorno all of a sudden makes a vulgar gesture of “reductionism,” interrupting a flow of dialectical finesse with a simple point like “ultimately it is about class struggle.” This is how class struggle functions within a social totality: it is not its “deeper ground,” its profound structuring principle which mediates all its moments, but something much more superficial, the point of failure of the endless complex analysis, a gesture of jumping-ahead to a conclusion when, in an act of despair, we raise our hands and say: “But after all, this is all about class struggle!” What one should bear in mind here is that this failure of analysis is immanent to reality itself: it is how society itself totalizes itself through its constitutive antagonism. In other words, class struggle IS a fast pseudo-totalization when totalization proper fails, it is a desperate attempt to use the antagonism itself as the principle of totalization.

It is also fashionable for today’s Leftists to reject conspiracy theories as a fake simplified solutions. However, years ago Jameson perspicuously noted that in today’s global capitalism, things happen which cannot be explained by a reference to some anonymous “logic of the capital” – for example, now we know that the financial meltdown of 2008 was the result of a well-planned “conspiracy” of some financial circles. The true task of social analysis is to explain how contemporary capitalism opened up the space for such “conspiratorial” interventions.

Another Jameson’s insight which runs against today’s predominant post-colonial trend concerns his rejection of the notion of “alternate modernities,” i.e., the claim that our Western liberal-capitalist modernity is just one of the paths to modernization, and that other paths are possible which could avoid the deadlocks and antagonism of our modernity: once we realize that “modernity” is ultimately a code name for capitalism, it is easy to see that such historicist relativization of our modernity is sustained by the ideological dream of a capitalism which would avoid its constitutive antagonisms:

”How then can the ideologues of “modernity” in its current sense manage to distinguish their product—the information revolution, and globalized, free-market modernity—from the detestable older kind, without getting themselves involved in asking the kinds of serious political and economic, systemic questions that the concept of a postmodernity makes unavoidable? The answer is simple: you talk about “alternate” or “alternative” modernities. Everyone knows the formula by now: this means that there can be a modernity for everybody which is different from the standard or hegemonic Anglo-Saxon model. Whatever you dislike about the latter, including the subaltern position it leaves you in, can be effaced by the reassuring and “cultural” notion that you can fashion your own modernity differently, so that there can be a Latin-American kind, or an Indian kind or an African kind, and so on. . . . But this is to overlook the other fundamental meaning of modernity which is that of a worldwide capitalism itself.”

The significance of this critique reaches far beyond the case of modernity—it concerns the fundamental limitation of the nominalist historicizing. The recourse to multitude (“there is not one modernity with a fixed essence, there are multiple modernities, each of them irreducible to others”) is false not because it does not recognize a unique fixed “essence” of modernity, but because multiplication functions as the disavowal of the antagonism that inheres in the notion of modernity as such: the falsity of multiplication resides in the fact that it frees the universal notion of modernity of its antagonism, of the way it is embedded in the capitalist system, by relegating this aspect to just one of its historical subspecies. One should not forget that the first half of the twentieth century already was marked by two big projects which perfectly fit this notion of “alternate modernity”: Fascism and Communism. Was not the basic idea of Fascism that of a modernity which provides an alternative to the standard Anglo-Saxon liberal-capitalist one, of saving the core of capitalist modernity by casting away its “contingent” Jewish-individualist-profiteering distortion? And was not the rapid industrialization of the USSR in the late 1920s and 1930s also not an attempt at modernization different from the Western-capitalist one?

What Jameson avoided like a vampire avoids garlic was any notion of the enforced deeper unity of different forms of protest. Back in the early 1980s, he provided a subtle description of the deadlock of the dialogue between the Western New Left and the Eastern European dissidents, of the absence of any common language between them: "To put it briefly, the East wishes to talk in terms of power and oppression; the West in terms of culture and commodification. There are really no common denominators in this initial struggle for discursive rules, and what we end up with is the inevitable comedy of each side muttering irrelevant replies in its own favorite language."

In a similar way, the Swedish detective writer Henning Mankell is a unique artist of the parallax view. That is to say, the two perspectives – that of the affluent Ystad in Sweden and that of Maputo in Mozambique – are irretrievably »out of sync,« so that there is no neutral language enabling us to translate one into the other, even less to posit one as the »truth« of the other. All one can ultimately do in today's conditions is to remain faithful to this split as such, to record it. Every exclusive focus on the First World topics of late capitalist alienation and commodification, of ecological crisis, of the new racisms and intolerances, etc., cannot but appear cynical in the face of the Third World raw poverty, hunger and violence; on the other hand, the attempts to dismiss the First World problems as trivial in comparison with the »real« Third World permanent catastrophies are no less a fake – focusing on the Third World »real problems« is the ultimate form of escapism, of avoiding to confront the antagonisms of one's own society. The gap that separates the two perspectives IS the truth of the situation.

As all good Marxists, Jameson was in his analysis of art a strict formalist – he once wrote about Hemingway that his terse style (short sentences, almost no adverbs, etc.) is not here to represents a certain type of (narrative) subjectivity (the lone hard-boiled cynical individual); on the contrary, Hemingway's narrative content (stories about bitter hard individuals) was invented so that Hemingway was able to write a certain type of sentences (which was his primary goal). Along the same lines, In his seminal essay »On Raymond Chandler,« Jameson describes a typical Chandler's procedure: the writer uses the formula of the detective story (detective's investigation which brings him into the contact with all strata of life) as a frame which allows him to fill in the concrete texture with social and psychological apercus, plastic character-portraits and insights into life tragedies. The properly dialectical paradox not to be missed here is that it would be wrong to say: »So why did the writer not drop this very form and give us pure art?« This complaint falls victim to a kind of perspective illusion: it overlooks that, if we were to drop the formulaic frame, we would lose the very »artistic« content that this frame apparently distorts.

Another Jameson’s unique achievement is his reading of Marx through Lacan: social antagonisms appear to him as the Real of a society. I still recall a shock when, at a conference on Lenin that I organized in Essen in 2001, Jameson surprised us all by bringing in Lacan as a reader of Trotsky’s dream. On the night of June 25 1935, Trotsky in exile dreamt about the dead Lenin who was questioning him anxiously about his illness: “I answered that I already had many consultations and began to tell him about my trip to Berlin; but looking at Lenin I recalled that he was dead. I immediately tried to drive away this thought, so as to finish the conversation. When I had finished telling him about my therapeutic trip to Berlin in 1926, I wanted to add, ‘This was after your death’; but I checked myself and said, ‘After you fell ill…’”

In his interpretation of this dream, Lacan focuses on the obvious link with Freud’s dream in which his father appears to him, a father who doesn’t know that he is dead. So what does it mean that Lenin doesn’t know he is dead? According to Jameson, there are two radically opposed ways to read Trotsky’s dream. According to the first reading, the terrifyingly-ridiculous figure of the undead Lenin “doesn’t know that the immense social experiment he single-handedly brought into being (and which we call soviet communism) has come to an end. He remains full of energy, although dead, and the vituperation expended on him by the living – that he was the originator of the Stalinist terror, that he was an aggressive personality full of hatred, an authoritarian in love with power and totalitarianism, even (worst of all) the rediscoverer of the market in his NEP – none of those insults manage to confer a death, or even a second death, upon him. How is it, how can it be, that he still thinks he is alive? And what is our own position here – which would be that of Trotsky in the dream, no doubt – what is our own non-knowledge, what is the death from which Lenin shields us?” But there is another sense in which Lenin is still alive: he is alive insofar as he embodies what Badiou calls the „eternal Idea“ of universal emancipation, the immortal striving for justice that no insults and catastrophes manage to kill.

Like me, Jameson was a resolute Communist – however, he simultaneously agreed with Lacan who claimed that justice and equality are founded on envy: the envy of the other who has what we do not have, and who enjoys it. Following Lacan, Jameson totally rejected the predominant optimist view according to which in Communism envy will be left behind as a remainder of capitalist competition, to be replaced by solidary collaboration and pleasure in other’s pleasures; dismissing this myth, he emphasizes that in Communism, precisely insofar as it will be a more just society, envy and resentment will explode. Jameson’s solution is here radical to the point of madness: the only way for Communism to survive would be some form of universalized psychoanalytic social services enabling individuals to avoid the self-destructive trap of envy.

Another indication of how Jameson understood Communism was that he read Kafka’s story on Josephine the singing mouse as a socio-political utopia, as Kafka’s vision of a radically-egalitarian Communist society – with the singular exception that Kafka, for whom humans are forever marked by superego guilt, was able to imagine a utopian society only among animals. One should resist the temptation to project any kind of tragedy into Josephine’s final disappearance and death: the text makes it clear that, after her death, Josephine “will happily lose herself in the numberless throng of the heroes of our people”(my emphasis added).

In his late long essay “American Utopia,” Jameson shocked even most of his followers when he proposed as the model of a future post-capitalist society the army – not a revolutionary army but army in its inert bureaucratic functioning in the times of peace. Jameson takes as his starting point a joke from the Dwight D Eisenhower period that any American citizen who wants socialized medicine needs only to join the army to get it. Jameson’s point is that army could play this role precisely because it is organized in a non-democratic non-transparent way (top generals are not elected, etc.).

With theology it’s the same as with Communism. Although Jameson was a staunch materialist, he often used theological notions to throw a new light onto some Marxist notions – for example, he proclaimed predestination the most interesting theological concept for Marxism: predestination indicates the retroactive causality which characterizes a properly dialectical historical process. Another unexpected link with theology provides Jameson's remark that, in a revolutionary process, violence plays a role homologous to that of wealth in the Protestant legitimization of capitalism: although it has no intrinsic value (and, consequently, should not be fetishized and celebrated for itself, as in the Fascist fascination with it), it serve as a sign of the authenticity of our revolutionary endeavor. When the enemy resists and engages us in a violent conflict, this means that we effectively touched its raw nerve...

Jameson’s perhaps most perspicuous interpretation of theology occurs in his little-known text “Saint Augustine as a Social Democrat” where he argues how St Augustine’s most celebrated achievement, his invention of the psychological depth of personality of the believer, with all the complexity of its inner doubts and despairs, is strictly correlative to (or the other side of) his legitimization of Christianity as state religion, as fully compatible with the obliteration of the last remnants of radical politics from the Christian edifice. The same holds, among others, for the anti-Communist renegades from the Cold War era: as a rule, their turn against Communism went hand in hand with the turn towards a certain Freudianism, the discovery of psychological complexity of individual lives.

Another category introduced by Jameson is the “vanishing mediator” between the old and the new. “Vanishing mediator” designates a specific feature in the process of a passage from the old order to a new order: when the old order is disintegrating, unexpected things happen, not just horrors mentioned by Gramsci but also bright utopian projects and practices. Once the new order is established, a new narrative arises and, within this new ideological space, mediators disappear from view. Suffice it to take a look at the passage from Socialism to Capitalism in Eastern Europe. When in the l980s, people protested against the Communist regimes, what the large majority had in mind was not capitalism. They wanted social security, solidarity, a rough kind of justice; they wanted the freedom to live their lives outside of state control, to come together and talk as they pleased; they wanted a life of simple honesty and sincerity, liberated from primitive ideological indoctrination and the prevailing cynical hypocrisy . . . in short, the vague ideals that led the protesters were, to a large extent, taken from Socialist ideology itself. And, as we learned from Freud, what is repressed returns in a distorted form. In Europe, the socialism repressed in the dissident imaginary returned in the guise of Right populism.

Many of Jameson’s formulations became memes, like his characterization of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism. Another such meme is his old quip (sometimes wrongly attributed to me) which holds today more than ever: it is easier for us to imagine a total catastrophe on the earth which will terminate all life on it than a real change in capitalist relations – as if, even after a global cataclysm, capitalism will somehow continue… So what if we apply the same logic to Jameson himself? It is easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the death of Jameson.

Sudan

Slavoj Zizek, "Global Capitalism and Perpetual War"

Sudan today has become the exemplary case of how the developed West contributes to the conditions for violent conflict and mass migration in resource-rich parts of the world. Beneath the façade of “primitive” ethnic passions exploding in the African “heart of darkness,” one can discern the unmistakable contours of global capitalism.

LJUBLJANA – When one looks for a figure who best represents the worst tendencies of our brutal age, the first names that come to mind include Yahya Sinwar (Hamas’s leader in Gaza), Binyamin Netanyahu, Kim Jong-un, or Vladimir Putin. But that is primarily because we are bombarded with news about these leaders. If we widen the lens to account for horrors that Western mainstream media largely ignore, those waging Sudan’s civil war stand out even more. The country’s new warlords are displaying shocking cruelty and indifference toward their own people (or those living in the regions they control), including by systematically hampering the flow of humanitarian aid and taking an exorbitant amount of it for themselves.

The situation in Sudan exposes a global economic logic that has remained obfuscated in other cases. Back in 2019, widespread demonstrations toppled the country’s longtime dictator, Omar al-Bashir, whose reign at least had maintained a semblance of peace and stability following the secession of South Sudan (a predominantly Christian country that is now mired in its own civil war). Then, following a brief moment of transitional government and renewed hopes for democratization, a brutal war erupted between two Muslim warlords: General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the leader of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) who is still nominally head of state, and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (or Hemedti, meaning “little Mohamed”), the commander of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and one of the country’s wealthiest men.

The RSF is behind some of the worst atrocities of the current conflict, including the Khartoum massacre on June 3, 2019, when more than 120 protestors were killed, hundreds more wounded, thousands of women raped, and many homes pillaged. More recently, Dagalo’s forces triggered a new cycle of violence on April 15, 2023, when they launched a broad assault on SAF bases across the country, including in the capital, Khartoum.

Although both sides express a vague commitment to democracy, no one takes such claims seriously. What they really mean is, “First we have to win the war; then we’ll see.” This is an understandable position to take. To all those involved, a mostly benevolent dictatorship like Paul Kagame’s regime in Rwanda may be the best that one can realistically hope for.

Further complicating matters is the role of external forces. For example, Russia’s Wagner Group, the Libyan National Army (under the command of Khalifa Haftar), and the United Arab Emirates have reportedly furnished the RSF with military supplies, helicopters, and weapons on a scale that has left it better armed than the SAF. Meanwhile, the SAF has been looking for its own backers, not least China.

But the RSF has another major advantage: Dagalo controls a region with abundant gold reserves that allow him to purchase all the weapons he needs. We are thus reminded of a sad truth facing many developing countries: natural resources are as likely to be a source of violence and poverty as they are to underpin peace and prosperity.

The quintessential example is the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has long been cursed by its reserves of critical minerals, diamonds, and gold. If it had no such resources, it would still be poor, but it might be a happier, more peaceful place to live. The DRC is also an exemplary case of how the developed West contributes to the circumstances for mass migration. Behind the façade of “primitive” ethnic passions exploding yet again in the African “heart of darkness,” one can discern the unmistakable contours of global capitalism.

After the fall of Mobutu Sese Soko in 1997, the DRC ceased to exist as a functioning state. Its eastern region now comprises a multiplicity of territories ruled by local warlords whose armies press-gang and drug children and maintain business ties with the foreign corporations that are exploiting the region’s mineral reserves. This arrangement serves both partners: the corporations get mining rights without having to pay state taxes, and the warlords get money with which to buy arms. Many of these minerals then end up in our laptops, mobile phones, and other high-tech products. The problem is not the “savage” customs of the local population; it is the foreign companies and the wealthy consumers who buy their products. Remove them from the equation and the entire edifice of ethnic warfare crumbles.

The DRC is no exception, as demonstrated by the de facto dismemberment – or, rather, “Congo-ization” – of Libya following NATO’s intervention and the fall of Muammar al-Gaddafi in 2011. Since then, much of Libya’s territory has been ruled by local armed gangs who sell oil directly to foreign customers, reminding us of capitalism’s tenacity in securing a steady supply of cheap raw materials. This is why so many states damned with the resource curse remain condemned to their plight.

The tragic upshot is that no party in ongoing conflicts is innocent or righteous. In Sudan, the problem is not just the RSF; both sides are playing the same brutal game. The situation cannot be reduced to a “backward” people who are not ready for democracy, because it is really about the continuing economic colonization of Africa – not just by the West but also by China, Russia, and rich Arab countries. We should not be surprised that Central Africa is increasingly dominated by Russian mercenaries and Muslim fundamentalists.

Yanis Varoufakis has written eloquently about the passage of capitalism to “technofeudalism,” as evidenced by the Big Tech companies’ de facto monopolies over their respective markets. In countries like Sudan and the DRC, however, we have something closer to the feudalism of medieval times. In fact, both descriptions are true: we are increasingly living under a combination of high-tech and analog feudalism. This is why Hemedti – even more than Elon Musk – is the true avatar of our era.

Adjusting My Spectacles...

...with Guy Debord.

A Jukebox Jive

Mark K. Spencer, "A Piano, a Jukebox, and a Life of Contemplation"

t the end of his recent book, Non-Things: Upheaval in the Life-World, Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han tells the story of buying a vintage jukebox after he crashed his bicycle in front of the Berlin shop where it was being sold. He took it home to “a flat that contained only an old grand piano and a metal desk from a doctor’s surgery.” “I needed to be in an empty flat,” he explains, and “neither the grand piano nor the desk detracted from the emptiness; they intensified it.” By “emptiness,” Han “does not mean that there is a space with nothing in it. It is an intensity, an intense presence. It is the spatial appearance of stillness, which is an intense form of attentiveness.”

Like his desk and piano, the jukebox also intensifies Han’s attentiveness. Han is fascinated by the sounds and movements the machine makes, and by how it makes listening to music a tactile, bodily experience: putting coins into it, watching its lights and interior movements as it warms up and prepares a record for playing, listening to its ancient valves and speakers. Listening to music in this way, unlike listening to a streaming service, requires lingering in the presence of a physical thing. This story sums up many key themes that make Han one of the most interesting and unusual cultural critics of our time. (Readers of Law & Liberty have already been introduced to Han’s distinctive work in an article and a review by Scott Beauchamp and a review by Emina Melonic.)

Han’s choice of furniture alone clearly shows him to be something of an eccentric, which is also borne out by his criticisms of modernity. Indeed, his assessment of contemporary life is at times so negative, that one might be tempted to dismiss him as a reactionary Luddite. One of my students, reading Han for the first time, said he gave off vibes of an angry old man shouting at people to get off his lawn. My student wasn’t entirely wrong: Han’s writing is suffused with resentment of modernity, and that gives rise to some sloppy argumentation and gross over-generalizations about recent history. But even so, his work has extraordinary value. His pessimism may be overwrought at times, and his reasoning loose, but Han has been, for me, a writer who holds up a mirror to my life, such that, page after page, I say, “Yes, that is how things are.” For me and many other people, he has captured the mood of our times with impeccable accuracy.

As a philosopher, Han is interested in figuring out what conditions are needed for human persons to reach fulfillment. His philosophical approach is shaped by many influences: a range of thinkers from Plato to Walter Benjamin, medieval Christian mystics, Zen Buddhists, but above all, Martin Heidegger (though he is also highly critical of many of Heidegger’s ideas). Heidegger and Han are deeply interested in how human persons exist. By this, they mean the basic ways that we fit into our surroundings, ways that color all of our thoughts, feelings, and actions. For example, if my basic stance toward the world, my way of existing, is fundamentally shaped by technology, then I will tend to approach everything—material things, other persons, myself, God—as objects controllable by human beings. Our basic, subconscious stances towards the world are shaped by the sort of political and economic society we live in and the sorts of artifacts we use. As a cultural critic, Han applies these ideas to our current technology. He wants to show how using Snapchat, Tinder, and ChatGPT (for example)—and smartphones and the internet more generally—yields a way of existing that is detrimental to human flourishing.

Han is famous for writing short, almost aphoristic texts. Few of his books are more than 100 pages. My interest here is in four of his most recent books: Infocracy, Non-Things, The crisis of narration, and Vita contemplativa. While these are published as separate books, they are one continuous meditation on the deficient ways in which we exist in the information age, and a proposal of a solution of sorts centered around contemplation. These are themes that have marked Han’s work since he rose to prominence with The Burnout Society (2015) and even before, but these four books give what is probably his most focused treatment of these themes. They are marked by a much more positive assessment of the Western, Christian tradition than some of his earlier work. While deeply influenced by the Buddhist tradition, Han is himself a Catholic. His understanding of religious ritual and the contemplative life as expressed in these books is a fascinating mix of the two traditions. This mix will be of interest to practitioners of both religions, I think, even if, as with many aspects of Han’s thought, they would rather observe than imitate his idiosyncratic blend of two traditions.

The story about the jukebox sums up a central theme for Han: the contrast between the analog and the digital. Digital technologies treat things as composed of manipulable, rearrangeable bits of information. In the world as mediated to us through the smartphone’s touchscreen, things are treated as so much information, effortlessly available at a single touch of a finger.

This situation leads, as Han sees it, to the possibility of a particularly insidious form of control over human persons by political and economic powers. In earlier stages of human history, those powers had to use means external to their subjects in order to control behavior. In totalitarian regimes, for example, the government has to use external surveillance means (like cameras and spies), prison systems, centrally produced propaganda, and workplace discipline to control citizens’ behavior. By contrast, our society, centered on information technology, does not explicitly forbid much and does not use totalitarian, disciplinary controls. Rather, a wide range of products and experiences are made available to us, and a very wide range of actions are permitted. Technology encourages us to see ourselves as producing ourselves autonomously by our actions, leading lives that can be summed up in the data that is collected about us. This leaves us prey to a deeper form of control than was available to the totalitarians: using big data, governments and corporations can effectively nudge people’s desires, while allowing us to believe that we are acting entirely autonomously. This situation leads, in turn, to the anxieties and sense of burnout that plague our contemporary world, including the exhaustion of always having to produce our own identity.

Analog things, represented by the jukebox, appear as wholes that are not entirely subject to our effortless manipulation. Analog things exist more stably in the material world, and so can provide some stabilization for our lives: Han delights in the fact that his jukebox will likely last longer than he does, whereas digital information is, in many ways, ephemeral. In an analog world, we understand ourselves not in terms of big data, but through narratives. Just like physical things, narratives—like religious stories about our relation to the divine, or early modern stories about hope in progress—give stability and meaning to our lives. This meaning is not reducible to bits of information; rather, stories give meaning to data, by incorporating data into a wider whole. That wider whole is best grasped through rituals, in which narratives are conveyed in ways that involve us as wholes, body and mind.

Han recommends activities like religious festivals and rituals, listening to and telling stories, and spending time looking at and listening to beautiful things, as an antidote to the compulsion to producing one’s own identity that plagues us today. 

Han observes that the world of data and information aims to be entirely transparent: in another image repeated across all these books, Han sees our world as fundamentally pornographic. Like in a pornographic film, many people feel a compulsion to show too much about themselves online, because they think that it is through this showing that they construct themselves. Digital technology is oriented to constantly make us feel good effortlessly. Han sees the digital economy as too smooth; our contemporary world has lost a necessary sense of effort, of melancholy, of being wounded by others. In an analog world, we often suffer when we run up against other material things or persons. This suffering gives us a sense of their otherness, their difference from us; grappling with what is other than me—what cannot be reduced to information that I can manipulate—is good for me especially because it forces me to take my attention off of my egotistical self.

Han’s solution to these perceived problems is to engage in contemplation. This is his focus especially in his recent Vita contemplativa. Han’s critique of modernity primarily consists of helping the reader feel how we exist in the information age, and also feel what is missing in that world from a flourishing human life. Han’s proposals for solving these problems also are aimed at helping us feel the desire for contemplation—that is, focused attention on what is other than us. Some of what Han says about contemplation is redolent of the famous work of Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture. Like Han, Pieper understands a major part of the problem with the contemporary world to be a focus on productivity, on justifying actions entirely through their utility. Leisure activities are done entirely for their own sake; they bring us to flourishing by themselves, without needing to attend to their results. Like Pieper, Han recommends activities like religious festivals and rituals, listening to and telling stories, and spending time looking at and listening to beautiful things, as an antidote to the compulsion to produce one’s own identity that plagues us today.

But as the story about the jukebox indicates, Han’s emphasis is not so much on Pieper-style leisurely activities, as much as it is on inactivity. If we’re going to compare Han to a twentieth-century Catholic philosopher, he is more like Elizabeth Anscombe, who, when asked to state her recreation activities for Who’s Who, wrote “sitting around.” For Han too, the world would be a far better place if we all just spent time sitting around. A haiku that he quotes sums up his vision:

Sitting peacefully doing nothing
Springtime is coming
and the grass grows all by itself.

The economy of the information age is good at absorbing all of our activities into itself. It can make anything—other people, ourselves, the stories we tell, political acts, ideologies—into a commodity, and into a source of data that can be further used to nudge our desires, while making us temporarily feel freer and happier. Han wants to find a way of existing that stands outside this system of potential control, leaving us truly free to flourish as human persons. He finds this way of existing in silence, stillness, emptiness, and waiting—in a stance of receiving whatever happens as a gift.

Religious festivals and contemplating beauty are valuable to him when they are pursued not for the sake of personal fulfillment, but for the sake of forgetting ourselves and attending to other things. When one does nothing, and just intensely pays attention to other things, everything “converges in friendliness.” This contemplative state requires effort, and it is the happiest of ways of existing—paradoxically, we are happiest when we do not pursue our own happiness, but respond to what is important in itself for its own sake. Han does not promote inactivity for therapeutic reasons: he does not recommend being inactive and attentive because it will make you a more productive person, more rested, or more aware of your own fulfillment. Rather, this contemplative state will remove you from egotistic attention to yourself altogether; it will lead you to stop caring about self-production, usefulness, and pornographic transparency.

I admit that I find this vision of human life deeply attractive. I also readily grant that it will be repellent to a lot of people; all the more, when it is coupled to Han’s sweeping indictments of contemporary life and his preference for aphoristic assertion over careful argumentation. It will be off-putting to many who might otherwise be his allies. What value does this apparently romanticized, mystical, hippie, or Buddhist vision have for us today, especially for Christian conservatives? Most of us value action and hard work, and many conservatives would like to retain many aspects of our current technological, economic, and political systems, seeing a lot of practical benefit in them, of a sort that may facilitate human flourishing. While most conservatives eschew the visions of self-production that underlie a lot of sexual politics today, self-production as such is key to many conservative visions of work and action. To such views, Han’s criticisms will seem deeply misplaced, and his preferred mode of inactivity may look like nothing but laziness or self-absorption, an unwillingness to practically engage in improving society.

I’d suggest that Han’s work is valuable to conservatives first because it helps us make sense of current crises in conservatism, in religion, and in society more broadly. Every conservative should constantly ask him or herself: what am I trying to conserve? If conservatism is worthwhile, what we are trying to conserve must surely be something having to do with what is genuinely human; it must have to do with preserving a human way of life that is valuable in itself and does not see everything that we do as a mere expression or pursuit of power or results. Many conservative thinkers have advocated a life in which we do not impose our rationalistic plans on human life, but instead are attentive to what is given to us. Han’s contemplative life, while perhaps not the best life for everyone, is a powerful witness to that vision. He is also a master at helping us attend to features of human life that even those of us who care about culture, religion, art, and so on, generally overlook. He is a master at helping us see how, even when we feel freest, we might be enslaved, and even when we don’t seem to be doing anything worthwhile—like when we are just staring at a jukebox, waiting for it to play some music—we might be engaged in what is most human of all. Even if we end up disagreeing with some of his critiques and some of his solutions, Han’s work is worthwhile for the sheer education in attention it yields.

It’s also important to keep in mind that Han offers no policy prescriptions. He has outlined no systematic program of inactivity. You can’t market inactivity; you can’t have a course of training in the attention he recommends. If we read Han as offering practical, society-level prescriptions, he could only be read as naïve and deeply uninformed. The prospects he seems to hold out for societal improvement are rather bleak: pretty much all current political and economic activities (including the very marketing of his books and the writing of this review) fail to be fully human in his view, because they have all succumbed to the vagaries of the information regime. But, at the level of personal life, Han offers a lot of hope—and that focus on the personal, as opposed to the societal, is itself a deeply conservative theme. We can all become more inactive, perceive more attentively, linger more, contemplate stories, and engage in festive rituals with others. We can all submit to digital technology a little less, even if we don’t go as far as Han, and that will likely make us all a bit happier. So long as we don’t do these things for the sake of societal improvement, but do them for their own sake, we’ll be on the path Han recommends. I can’t see how doing all of those things a little more would be bad for any of us.

Proton Shells and Magic Numbers - Nuclear Chemistry Cheats

The Collapse of the post-WWII Global "Democratic" System... according to Weinstein

Benzian contrast?

00:00 Will Trump be Allowed to Become President? 12:02 MSNBC’s Editing of Joe Rogan to Support Kamala 16:48 The Media’s Gaslighting of Modern Politics 31:07 Is Google Influencing the Election? 43:03 How Physics Became Boring & Safe 52:40 Is String Theory Just a Shiny Distraction? 1:03:44 Why String Theory Still Gets Funded 1:07:41 Science’s Big Problems 1:13:45 The Danger of Criticism Capture 1:26:19 Eric’s Antidote for Cancelling People 1:36:15 Why Having Public Opinions is so Exhausting 1:53:21 What Chris Gets Criticised for Most 2:06:10 The Dynamics of Interviewing & Conversation 2:16:18 Trying to Become a High Agency Person 2:25:53 Eric’s Advice for People Who Don’t Fit in 2:33:38 Overcoming Impossible Situations 2:38:17 4D Complex Shapes, Geometry & Dimensions 2:49:09 The Internet is Destroying the Sacred 3:02:44 Reacting to “What Can Be, Unburdened By What Has Been” 3:19:06 Eric’s Thoughts on JD Vance

Deleuze mocks the formula: "Be yourselves - it being understood that this self must be that of others". - Culture is not a movement of normalization or conformity. - "Culture(...) is an involuntary adventure, the movement of learning which links a Sensibility, a Memory and then a Thought, with all the cruelties and violence necessary, as Nietzsche said, precisely in order to "Train a Nation of Thinkers" or to "Provide a Training for the Mind."

The Power of Physics

...driving Standard Physics into a ditch globally, and then searching for a new Einsteinian founder for the Kuhnian "Revolutionary Physics" paradigm.

The Blob's CIC

00:00 - Introduction 13:11 - The Blob 19:07 - 2014 Censorship & the Ukraine connection 29:00 - Influencing international censorship policy 32:35 - The power of ‘The Blob’ 48:06 - Elon/X free speech proxy war 55:43 - DHS censorship threats 1:30:17 - Headway in Congress 1:42:20 - How do we gain powerr over tech companies? 1:51:24 - Tim Walz China connection 1:56:38 - Burisma & why we’re in Ukraine 2:29:14 - Free speech on the internet 2:37:21 - World War 3

Art for Art's Sake?

Megan Gatford, "The Totalitarian Artist: Politics vs Beauty"

After Duchamp, the art world came to view the pursuit of beauty as naïve and gravitated toward political art in their search for meaning. But this is a Faustian bargain: you can have meaning, but you do not get to make it for yourself.

Hitler became the butt of a joke: a failed artist with a funny moustache. But we rarely ask ourselves whether there is an equivalent example of a leftist whose totalitarian personality emerged, in part, because the world shrugged at his bid for creative genius.

This was no idle question for Eric Hoffer, a philosopher of totalitarianism who helped shape the worldview of American presidents like Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, and Ronald Reagan, who awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He saw the totalitarian impulse as a temptation for failed artists of every political persuasion. In his 1951 book The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, he writes:

The man who wants to write a great book, paint a great picture, create an architectural masterpiece, become a great scientist, and knows that never in all eternity will he be able to realize this, his innermost desire, can find no peace in a stable social order—old or new. He sees his life as irrevocably spoiled and the world as perpetually out of joint.

Such a man often becomes, writes Hoffer, a “true believer,” a fanatic who is likely to embrace a revolutionary movement, since his personal frustration leads him to yearn for radical societal change. “All mass movements,” Hoffer argues, “draw their adherents from the same types of humanity and appeal to the same types of mind”:

A Saul turning into Paul is neither a rarity nor a miracle. In our day, each proselytizing mass movement seems to regard the zealous adherents of its antagonist as its own potential converts. Hitler looked on the German Communists as potential National Socialists: “The petit bourgeois Social-Democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communist always will.” Captain Röhm boasted that he could turn the reddest Communist into a glowing nationalist in four weeks. On the other hand, Karl Radek looked on the Nazi Brown Shirts (S.A.) as a reserve for future Communist recruits.

That the true believer can readily swap out Hitler for Stalin, or vice versa, explains historical curiosities like early twentieth-century Futurism—an art movement that celebrated the speed and dynamism of technology, industrialisation, and war—whose adherents were passionate fascists in Italy but communists in Russia. This is why artists of every political persuasion should heed the cautionary tale of Hitler’s frustrated artistic dreams.

Hoffer was particularly wary of “those with an unfulfilled craving for creative work” because they are “the most incurably frustrated”:

Both those who try to write, paint, compose, etcetera, and fail decisively, and those who after tasting the elation of creativeness feel a drying up of the creative flow within and know that never again will they produce aught worth-while, are alike in the grip of a desperate passion. Neither fame nor power nor riches nor even monumental achievements in other fields can still their hunger. Even the wholehearted dedication to a holy cause does not always cure them. Their unappeased hunger persists, and they are likely to become the most violent extremists in the service of their holy cause.

What should artists make of Hoffer’s special attention? The True Believer is a classic in the literature on totalitarianism, written by a celebrated thinker whom some have called a genius. Artists cannot simply ignore his charge that our failures are uniquely volatile threats to the social order.

To be sure, few failed artists have the chops to seize dictatorial power. But scores of progressive ideologues have been struggling to “make it” in the arts and have increasingly treated the creative realm as merely a way to further their holy cause. Over the years, Quillette has published a number of essays that document the ways in which ideology has compromised art. Taken together, these essays form a picture of the totalitarian artist.

“How is art meant to happen when everyone is supposed to be thinking the same thoughts?” wonders novelist Seth Greenland in “The Balkanization of Art.” He bemoans our dogmatic cultural milieu in which the arts are “meant to serve a specific moral or didactic purpose.” In particular, Greenland laments the fact that the artist’s identity constrains the work he or she is allowed to produce:

In an unwritten cultural fiat, writers are granted “standing,” as in an author does, or does not have the “standing” (or, is allowed) to tell a particular story… Chinese-American author Amelie Wen Zhao postponed publication of her novel Blood Heir when she was accused of racism for writing insensitively about slavery (in a fantasy novel!). Award-winning author Kristine Kathryn Rusch decided to self-publish her novels about a black detective because of the degree to which she, as a white woman, was discouraged by traditional publishers from writing about a black character.

This precept applies across art disciplines:

The same problem roiled the art world at the Whitney Biennial of 2017, at which the artist Dana Schutz had the temerity to exhibit a painting of Emmitt Till. Till was a black teenager lynched in Mississippi after he was falsely accused of whistling at a white woman. His death was a tragedy for the entire nation. Schutz’s powerful canvas depicts the slain boy in his coffin. The painting was unveiled; an uproar followed. The Internet predictably vituperated. Protesters linked arms in front of the work to impede the view of museum-goers. Schutz’s crime? Creating this undeniably potent work of art while being a member of the wrong race.

Dana Schutz, “Open Casket,” 2016. Oil on canvas. Source: Wikipedia.

This deference to identity politics is an example of Hoffer’s observation that the true believer “subordinates creative work to the advancement of the movement”:

The true-believing artist does not create to express himself, or to save his soul, or to discover the true and the beautiful. His task, as he sees it, is to warn, to advise, to urge, to glorify and to denounce.

The idea that politics must have a mandate over art seems self-evident to many contemporary art students—including many young hopefuls destined to shrivel into Hoffer’s “incurably frustrated.” When they begin to learn art history, students are typically given Janson’s History of Art. About fifteen years ago, I was assigned the seventh edition, which culminates in a chapter on postmodernism that largely focuses on politics. My classmates and I dutifully tried to pick up where history left off by making political art of our own. I had long since come to my senses by the time I returned to the classroom as a university lecturer—but I was still asked to teach students how to make “socially-engaged art.”

Students often perceive the history of art as a progression towards the evolution of ever more political art. And it’s no wonder. In Janson’s final chapter—his parting note about the cutting edge of art—the textbook concludes:

At the heart of European Postmodernism is the premise that all literature and art is an elaborate construction of signs, and that the meaning of these signs is determined by their context. … Context can change as viewers bring their personal experiences to the work. Postmodernists claimed there can be no fixed meaning, and thus no fixed truth. By the late 1970s, artists and critics had digested this theory and applied it to art. Postmodern theory now became the driving force behind much art making and criticism. …

Now a large number of artists and critics asked more overtly and persistently: How do signs acquire meaning? What is the message? Who originates it? What—and whose—purpose does it serve? Who is the audience and what does this tell us about the message? Who controls the media—and for whom? … Now scholars approached art from countless angles, using issues of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, race, economics, and politics to demonstrate the many layers of meaning and ideas embedded in a work of art.

But these “countless angles” all happen to point in the same direction—towards progressive politics. The philosophical idea that there is “no fixed meaning, and thus no fixed truths” is instrumental to an identity politics that posits subjective experience as the paramount authority. Despite all the postmodern talk about “no fixed truth,” for critics and teachers who follow this line of thinking, there are certainly right and wrong answers to the questions they ask—and students are often afraid to give the wrong ones.

Velvet Favretto describes what it is like to be such a student in her 2018 essay, “Postmodernism and the Decline of the Liberal Arts.” She takes issue with those who “embraced a postmodern viewpoint” yet “tend to harshly ostracise any conflicting perspective, thereby eroding the intellectual freedom upon which the liberal arts had hitherto relied.” And she shares an anecdote about her experience at university that will resonate with any art student not on the political Left:

liberal arts students are taught that all interpretations are valid, and that disapproval of any idea is evidence of their own narrow-mindedness. This presents a paradox: on the one hand, we are instructed to be inclusive and indulge every student’s subjective experience, regardless of whether it is right or wrong because objective judgments about what is right and wrong don’t exist. On the other hand, this suggests that anyone who does believe in the existence of an objective right and wrong are, themselves, objectively wrong. Inconsistencies like this are often evident in everyday classroom interactions. One of my humanities lecturers, for example, in attempting to explain the complexity of identity, condemned the idea that people should dictate what other people think, and “make anyone who departs from that way of thinking feel fearful and different.” She seemed unaware that the course she teaches is saturated with cultural and political biases that exclude any student who holds differing views. Such is the devious nature of postmodernism in the modern classroom—the ‘tolerance’ only extends to those who conform.

Our propagandistic moralisers have reinvented the spirit of 1930s Social Realism, which also valorised identity by glorifying the working man. Then, as now, the art world demonstrated its fealty to progressive politics. By Tom Wolfe’s account, political art was even more dominant during the 1930s than today:

For more than ten years, from about 1930 to 1941, the artists themselves, in Europe and America, suspended the Modern movement … for the duration, as it were … They called it off! They suddenly returned to “literary” realism of the most obvious sort, a genre known as Social Realism.

Left politics did that for them. Left politicians said, in effect: You artists claim to be dedicated to an anti-bourgeois life. Well, the hour has now come to stop merely posing and to take action, to turn your art into a weapon. Translation: propaganda paintings. The influence of Left politics was so strong within the art world during the 1930s that Social Realism became not a style of the period but the style of the period. Even the most dedicated Modernists were intimidated. Years later Barnett Newman wrote that the “shouting dogmatists, Marxists, Leninists, Stalinists, and Trotskyites” created “an intellectual prison that locked one in tight.” I detect considerable amnesia today on this point. All best forgotten! Artists whose names exist as little more than footnotes today—William Gropper, Ben Shahn, Jack Levine—were giants as long as the martial music of the mimeograph machines rolled on in a thousand Protest Committee rooms. For any prominent critic of the time to have written off Ben Shahn as a commercial illustrator, as Barbara Rose did recently, would have touched off a brawl. Today no one cares, for Social Realism evaporated with the political atmosphere that generated it.

Ben Shahn mural detail, ca. 1934. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Albert Camus also disapproved. In a review of his rereleased 1957 speech “Create Dangerously: The Power and Responsibility of the Artist,” Clint Margrave discusses Camus’ opinion of Social Realism:

He sees it as an art with an agenda that destroys the freedom of the artist, and contributes little to art in the false way it depicts reality. Because its focus is idealistic, not realistic, it inevitably ends up as propaganda with “good and evil people,” sacrificing art for what the artist believes is the superior goal of social justice:

“In sum, it temporarily suppresses art so it may first support justice. When justice exists, in a future that is still unknown, art will be reborn…”

Today, pressure may be put on artists to toe the line ideologically in their art at the risk of social and career suicide. This type of pressure can intimidate artists to no longer work in the pursuit of truth, but rather for the “good” of society (which in fact, does not accomplish what it intends). It can discourage artists from exploring taboo subjects and become one of the biggest threats to their freedom. For Camus, art seeks to understand, not to judge, and the best works end up, “baffling all judges.” The role of the artist is not as a “preacher of virtue”:

“What writer would from now on in good conscience dare set himself up as a preacher of virtue? For myself, I must state once more that I am not of this kind. I have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom in which I grew up. But although this nostalgia explains many of my errors and my faults, it has doubtless helped me toward a better understanding of my craft.”

Camus was not a true believer. He cherished freedom too much—and, as Hoffer writes, “Freedom aggravates at least as much as it alleviates frustration. Freedom of choice places the whole blame of failure on the shoulders of the individual.” The true believer flinches from freedom because “Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual?” Art with an agenda is the antithesis of artistic freedom but it is an attractive prospect for some—because making propaganda provides an easy lift for the failed artist.

For over a century now, leftist politics has been ascendant in the art world, though its stridency waxes and wanes. But art has always been pressed into service by ideologies, usually religious. Historically, artists inspired by religious doctrines have produced marvels, as when the Renaissance blossomed in Catholic cities like Florence and Rome, and the Pope commissioned Michelangelo to strain against the limits of human achievement. Clearly, if ideology is to threaten art, then it is not enough for that ideology to hold power—it must also be fanatical.

Michelangelo, “Moses” (1513–15). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Compare Michelangelo to his contemporary Sandro Botticelli, who fell under the spell of Girolamo Savonarola and his fringe interpretation of Catholicism. The Dominican friar was notorious for his “bonfires of the vanities,” at which fanatics would burn secular art and luxury goods in the squares of Renaissance Florence. When Botticelli became a true believer in Savonarola’s movement, he is thought to have felt compelled to torch some of his own insufficiently Christian paintings—an incalculable loss to humanity.

Sandro Botticelli, Self-Portrait (1475). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Giorgio Vasari (1511–74) is often considered “the first art historian.” He was born the year after Botticelli’s death. In his chapter on Botticelli in The Lives of the Artists, Vasari writes:

He was apparently a follower of Savonarola’s faction, which led him to abandon painting; unable to make enough to live on, he fell into the direst of straits. Nevertheless, he obstinately remained a member of this faction and became a piagnone (as they were called in those days), which kept him away from his work. Thus he eventually found himself both old and poor, and if Lorenzo de'Medici (for whom Sandro, among many other projects, had done a great deal of work at the Villa dello Spedaletto in Volterra), along with his friends and other prominent men who were admirers of his talent, had not assisted him financially during the rest of his life, he would almost have starved to death.

The piagnoni—“the weepers”—cried because the world is full of sin. They burned any possessions that they loved more than God. How Botticelli must have loved his paintings!

Sandro Botticelli, “The Birth of Venus” (1485). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

In fifteenth-century Italy, men of God commanded artists. But the Pope presided over the status quo that governed Botticelli’s life in Florence, whereas Savonarola was an apocalyptic cult leader who agitated against it. By that point in time and space, standard-issue Catholicism was no longer fanatical. The difference between the Pope and the friar was that the latter desired change. As Hoffer notes, “A revolutionary movement is a conspicuous instrument of change,” and failure causes some to crave this:

It is understandable that those who fail should incline to blame the world for their failure. The remarkable thing is that the successful, too, however much they pride themselves on their foresight, fortitude, thrift, and other “sterling qualities,” are at bottom convinced that their success is the result of a fortuitous combination of circumstances. The self-confidence of even the consistently successful is never absolute. They are never sure that they know all the ingredients which go into the making of their success. The outside world seems to them a precariously balanced mechanism, and so long as it ticks in their favor they are afraid to tinker with it. Thus the resistance to change and the ardent desire for it spring from the same conviction, and the one can be as vehement as the other.

Savonarola preaching, detail (Florence, 1496). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Hoffer singles out creative failure for its potency in driving people to seek revolutionary change:

Nothing so bolsters our self-confidence and reconciles us with ourselves as the continuous ability to create; to see things grow and develop under our hand, day in, day out…. It is impressive to observe how with a fading of the individual’s creative powers there appears a pronounced inclination toward joining a mass movement. Here the connection between the escape from an ineffectual self and a responsiveness to mass movements is very clear. The slipping author, artist, scientist—slipping because of a drying-up of the creative flow within—drifts sooner or later into the camps of ardent patriots, race mongers, uplift promoters and champions of holy causes.

Did Botticelli feel “a drying-up of the creative flow within”? Vasari only tells us that he “wasted” his time illustrating Dante’s Inferno—a project that he never completed. Did the early stages of artistic failure drive him into Savonarola’s fold, or was his creative flow dammed up by the friar’s withering sermons?

Hoffer summarises the history of the way in which mass movements have stifled creativity:

Trotsky knew that “Periods of high tension in social passions leave little room for contemplation and reflection. All the muses—even the plebeian muse of journalism in spite of her sturdy hips—have hard sledding in times of revolution.” On the other hand, Napoleon and Hitler were mortified by the anemic quality of the literature and art produced in their heroic age and clamored for masterpieces which would be worthy of the mighty deeds of the times. They had not an inkling that the atmosphere of an active movement cripples or stifles the creative spirit. Milton, who in 1640 was a poet of great promise, with a draft of Paradise Lost in his pocket, spent twenty sterile years of pamphlet writing while he was up to his neck in the “sea of noises and hoarse disputes” which was the Puritan Revolution. With the Revolution dead and himself in disgrace, he produced Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes.

“Satan Watching the Caresses of Adam and Eve,” William Blake, illustration for Paradise Lost (1808). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Totalitarian ideas suppress an artist’s capacity to create beauty. This tendency crystalised in the early twentieth century when Marcel Duchamp, the father of contemporary art, presented a urinal as an artwork. In doing so, he fixed an idea in the art world like a cuckoo laying its egg in another bird’s clutch. And just as the baby cuckoo, once hatched, pushes its adopted siblings out of their nest, his idea pushed out concepts like truth and beauty like so many doomed baby birds. Duchamp himself implicitly acknowledged this when he called his project “anti-art.”

Marcel Duchamp, “Fountain” (1917). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Duchamp made “anti-art” to disabuse artists of their ancient raison d’être—beauty, and the skill necessary to bring it forth into the world. Dismissing nearly all art as “retinal,” that is, as superficial because it was intended only to please the eye, he instead wanted “to put art back in the service of the mind.” Declaring that “Anything is art if an artist says it is,” Duchamp used his Fountain to insist on this point—to prove that he meant it when he claimed that literally anything can be art. Many artists emerging from the meat grinder of World War I were receptive to Duchamp’s aesthetic nihilism. But theirs was hardly a virtuous response to evil, as Jason Newman insists in “Why Postmodern Art is Vacant”:

A nonsense has dominated modern art theory (insomuch as there is a theory) that, after the horrors of two World Wars, a return to conveying the beautiful, the sublime, and the transcendent would be fruitless, unfeeling, and in some way would serve to whitewash history. As Theodore Adorno, one of the most prominent cultural critics of the Frankfurt school, declared, “Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”

This is piffle. It is true that nothing could match the scale of the Holocaust for organised brutality or the Somme for mindless loss of life. However, the Renaissance saw large scale wars across Italy and Europe between warring kingdoms and city states, disease was widespread, and poverty was grinding. Yet in the midst of all this horror and death Italy and Europe underwent a cultural flourishing that yielded some of the greatest artistic masterpieces man has ever created. Late gothic art produced glorious carvings, panel paintings, frescos, sculptures and manuscripts in the years after the black death swept through Europe killing between 75–200 million people in a mere seven years. To somehow suggest that Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” is any less captivating or magnificent post-1945 or post-1918 than it was pre-1939 or pre-1914 is fatuous.

Adorno and likeminded artists lacked the moral fortitude of Holocaust victims like Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl, who recalls in his 1946 memoir Man’s Search for Meaning how prisoners would rush out of their huts to glimpse a sunset reflected in the puddles on the muddy ground and whisper to each other of their awe at the world’s capacity for beauty. Frankl relates how:

As the inner life of the prisoner tended to become more intense, he also experienced the beauty of art and nature as never before. Under their influence he sometimes even forgot his own frightful circumstances. If someone had seen our faces on the journey from Auschwitz to a Bavarian camp as we beheld the mountains of Salzburg with their summits glowing in the sunset, through the little barred windows of the prison carriage, he would never have believed that those faces were the faces of men who had given up all hope of life and liberty. Despite that factor—or maybe because of it—we were carried away by nature’s beauty, which we had missed for so long.

While Duchamp and Adorno believed in casting beauty aside, in compounding the horror of war and genocide by bringing more ugliness into the world, Frankl believed in “loving dedication to the beautiful”:

Should I perhaps try to explain for you with some hackneyed phrase how and why experiencing beauty can make life meaningful? I prefer to confine myself to the following thought experiment: imagine that you are sitting in a concert hall and listening to your favorite symphony, and your favorite bars of the symphony resound in your ears, and you are so moved by the music that it sends shivers down your spine; and now imagine that it would be possible (something that is psychologically so impossible) for someone to ask you in this moment whether your life has meaning. I believe you would agree with me if I declared that in this case you would only be able to give one answer, and it would go something like: “It would have been worth it to have lived for this moment alone!”

No one standing before Duchamp’s urinal feels overwhelmed with emotion because that moment alone has imbued their life with meaning. But of course, Duchamp never meant it to—he said that he made anti-art “based on a reaction of visual indifference, with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste… in fact a complete anaesthesia.” Because even a talentless hack can easily select a random object that is visually indifferent, Duchamp thereby eliminated the need for artists. He was “stripping each human entity of its distinctness and autonomy and turning it into an anonymous particle with no will and no judgment of its own,” as Hoffer puts it. If Frankl had shared Duchamp’s indifference to beauty, then he would have probably died in the camps.

After Duchamp, the art world came to view the pursuit of meaning through beauty as naïve. So, another reason that artists gravitate toward political art is as a replacement for their search for meaning. A sincere and earnest young artist, who does not have it in her to put on airs of ironic detachment, still yearns to make meaningful work. Political art offers that option without any snickering. It is a Faustian bargain: you can have meaning, but you do not get to make it for yourself.

Newman picks apart the idea that “post-war ennui” was the driving motivation behind Duchamp’s Dadaist movement:

It is foolish to say that this breakdown in realism and art in general can be put down to the traumatic events of the first half of the 20th century. Something much more nuanced appears to have been at work. The Dadaists and those who thought like them went through and came out of the wars convinced that the old techniques and traditions were now redundant and to be thrown on the bonfire. They rejected the old ideas convinced that the world was forever in flux and that it was time to start anew in an era where this flux was to be embraced. Objectivity was no more. Everything and anything could now be considered art, and everything was as good as anything else.

Intriguingly, there is another movement that broadly mirrors the development of Dadaism: that of the Postmodernists, more specifically the ‘Frankfurt School.’ Like the Dadaists, their genesis was in the interwar years but also like the Dadaists their influence really only started to be felt in the post-War years. They too came out of the first half of the 20th century traumatised. They were appalled by the rise of fascism, but also crestfallen at the failure of Marxist-Leninism to deliver utopia. Having conducted a postmortem on Marxism, they formed their own new ideology, still heavily influenced by Marx but with a new emphasis on the cultural rather than the economic. Like the Dadaists, they also felt the old traditions should be thrown on the rubbish heap of history— faith, family, and the nation had to be destroyed. And, like the Dadaists, they were convinced the subjective was king and objective truth was dead.

This is the central problem: Too many artists are in thrall to the belief that objectivity is overrated. The rejection of objectivity upended our tradition of depicting the real world in a beautiful way. When painters sketch their subjects from observation, they are trying to see the real world so well that they can replicate its image. Drawing and painting are ways of understanding objective reality by looking hard at it. If you nix objectivity, then how can you justify keeping realism, and by what standard do you measure beauty?

But objectivity and standards of aesthetic beauty are the enemies of the failed artist. A lack of talent, practice, or imagination can be masked if the art world no longer prioritises such things and that may bring the failed artist some relief. But that relief may prove illusory if the artist makes a political misstep, fails to conform ideologically, or cannot skilfully manoeuvre her way through the inevitable popularity contests that emerge when artistic greatness is not determined by artistic skill.

Progressives are not the villains in this story. The true believer can vacillate between Hitler and Stalin, as the precise flavour of the favoured ideology matters less than the psychology that marks out the true believer. The art world does not have a totalitarian character because it is left wing—it has a totalitarian character because Duchamp made it a refuge for the failed artist.

In his article, Newman rounds up examples of the most transgressive art to uphold Duchamp’s legacy. Provocations like Chris Ofili’s mixed-media painting The Holy Virgin Mary, which features elephant dung and pornography, and Piero Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit—which is literally just that in a can—continue Duchamp’s irreverent theme. But even postmodern artists sometimes produced emotionally powerful work, such as “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers) by Félix González-Torres.

Chris Ofili, “The Holy Virgin Mary” (1996). Source: Wikipedia.

Piero Manzoni, “Merde d’Artist” (Artist’s Shit), 1961. Source: Wikipedia.

This conceptual piece debuted in New York City in 1987, the year in which González-Torres’s partner was diagnosed with AIDS. It is simply two commercial clocks installed on a wall side-by-side, touching. They were initially set to the same time but fell out of sync over the course of the exhibit. The artist ached to be with his lover forever even as one of their heartbeats began to falter, just as one of his clocks lost time before the other. The piece evokes the injustice of mortality, and specifically the plight of gay men suffering from both a frightening new disease and the opprobrium of people who blamed them for dying from it.

“Untitled” (Perfect Lovers) is quintessentially postmodern. Mass-produced rather than made by the artist’s hand, its meaning is meant to come only from González-Torres’s subjective experiences and ideas, or the interpretations that others place upon them after encountering his installation. Many fans of González-Torres cherish his work in the spirit of “the personal is political,” and much of his following consists of gay men who see themselves in his story. For those who appreciate his art, the fact that he lacks a sculptor’s skill is irrelevant. The concept behind “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers) can stir your heart if you let it, but it is not necessary to see the actual artwork to get the point. In fact, seeing the physical object itself is almost beside the point.

I have never seen En el Aire by Teresa Margolles, but it may be my favourite conceptual art piece. In 2003, Margolles filled a museum with bubbles. Here is how someone who did see the artwork described it:

In the museum’s soaring hall children play under bubbles that come from Teresa Margolles’ piece En el Aire (In the Air, 2003). Running, laughing, catching, they are fascinated by the glistening, delicate forms that float down from the ceiling and break up on their skin. A common motif in art history, the bubble has long been used as a memento mori, a reminder of the transitory nature of life. The children’s parents, meanwhile, studiously read the captions. Suddenly, with a look of disgust, they come and steer their offspring away. The moment of naive pleasure turns into one of knowing repulsion: they have learned that the water comes from the Mexico City morgue, used to wash corpses before an autopsy. It’s unimportant that the water is disinfected; the stigma of death turns the beautiful into the horrific.

Artists have long used literal corpses to make something beautiful. They dissect them to study their anatomy, and they sketch them to observe the pallor and texture of dead skin. Théodore Géricault never could have painted the dead and dying shipwreck victims in The Raft of the Medusa without spending time at the morgue.

Jean-Louis Théodore Géricault, “La Balsa de la Medusa” (The Raft of the Medusa), 1818–19. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

But despite the grotesque nature of their materials, Margolles and Géricault are not irreverent like Duchamp, Ofili, and Manzoni. On the contrary, Margolles gathers wash water only from victims of the drug trade that has ravaged her home in Culiacan, Mexico, and she is adamant that her intention is to make people share in her sorrow. Margolles and González-Torres get away with creating emotive art because their personal identities add so much to the meaning of their art works—but even if you can’t stand identity politics, “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers) and En el Aire are sincere expressions of the human condition and so you may still find meaning in their concepts.

So, not all postmodern artists “contribute to the ugliness and desecration” that Newman laments. Sometimes artists sneak meaning back in. But even these touching examples disregard artistic skill. As Newman demands to know, “Where is the skill and ability in all this?”:

No skill is required to place a rotting cow’s head in a glass cube with an insect-o-cutor (A Thousand Years by Damien Hirst). No ability is needed to set up a room with a light that switches on and off (Work No. 227: The Lights Going On and Off by Martin Creed, a work that won him the Turner Prize). It is most probably the case that the electrician who installed said lights and the abattoir worker who severed the cow’s head possess more skill and expertise than either Mr Hirst or Mr Creed.

In a 2015 interview with the BBC about his forthcoming exhibition involving marble carvings, Hirst was confronted by the interviewer with the charge that he does not make many of his pieces. Hirst replied that: “to carve one of these structures takes two years, and it’s like, I haven’t got time to learn to carve. But I know exactly what I want, and I want it to look perfect and I can make it perfect using these guys” (referring to a team of sculptors he had employed). He finished by stating, “It’s never been a problem for me in art and I don’t think it’s a problem… I mean it’s amazing that we’re having this conversation really.”

Michelangelo’s Pieta, carved by his own hands, took two years to create and was the result of thousands of hours of anatomical study. Mr Hirst’s remark that he, “hasn’t got time to learn to carve” is symptomatic of what is wrong with modern art. His incredulity at having been asked such a question by a philistinic BBC interviewer is palpable. It is almost beneath him. Why should he—Damien Hirst, multi-millionaire darling of the art world!—waste his time doing something so trivial, so menial as actually crafting his creations?

Martin Creed, Work no. 227, The Lights Going on and Off (2000), Tate Britain, November 2013. Source: Wikipedia.

Michelangelo’s skill can be judged by an objective standard: how well his sculptures and paintings resemble reality. Without objectivity, artists are no longer expected to achieve technical mastery. Many still do—but expertise has been so devalued that it is no longer a necessary qualification. And once expertise lost its lustre, the arts became fertile ground for true believers. The failed artists that Hoffer warned against have perfect camouflage in an art world that opposes standards of beauty.

Michelangelo, Pietà (1498–99). Source: Wikipedia

But Hoffer’s views of art history in The True Believer are not all doom and gloom. Hoffer differentiates between the active phase of mass movements—that is, their rise to power, which Hoffer defines as “the phase molded and dominated by the true believer,” whose culture “is sterile,” and what happens next, once the active phase has ended. This is more encouraging for artists:

Whenever we find a period of genuine creativeness associated with a mass movement, it is almost always a period which either precedes or, more often, follows the active phase. Provided the active phase of the movement is not too long and does not involve excessive bloodletting and destruction, its termination, particularly when it is abrupt, often releases a burst of creativeness. This seems to be true both when the movement ends in triumph (as in the case of the Dutch Rebellion) or when it ends in defeat (as in the case of the Puritan Revolution). It is not the idealism and the fervor of the movement which are the cause of any cultural renascence which may follow it, but rather the abrupt relaxation of collective discipline and the liberation of the individual from the stifling atmosphere of blind faith and the disdain of his self and the present. Sometimes the craving to fill the void left by the lost or deserted holy cause becomes a creative impulse.

We are overdue for a renascence. About thirty years ago, the provocative art critic Dave Hickey declared beauty the “Issue of the Nineties,” protested that “nothing redeems but beauty,” and wondered “how, in the final two-thirds of the twentieth century, we have come to do without it.” The philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto discusses Hickey’s declaration in his 2003 book The Abuse of Beauty:

In 1993 when Hickey’s essay was published, art had gone through a period of intense politicization, the high point of which was the 1993 Whitney Biennial, in which nearly every work was a shrill effort to change American society. Hickey’s prediction did not precisely pan out. What happened was less the pursuit of beauty as such by artists than the pursuit of the idea of beauty, through a number of exhibitions and conferences, by critics and curators who, perhaps inspired by Hickey, thought it time to have another look at beauty.

In his introduction to The Abuse of Beauty, Danto admits that he initially “felt somewhat sheepish about writing on beauty” which “had almost entirely disappeared from artistic reality in the twentieth century, as if attractiveness was somehow a stigma, with its crass commercial implications.” But Danto came to understand the importance of beauty:

The spontaneous appearance of those moving improvised shrines everywhere in New York after the terrorist attack of September 11th, 2001, was evidence for me that the need for beauty in the extreme moments of life is deeply ingrained in the human framework. In any case I came to the view that in writing about beauty as a philosopher, I was addressing the deepest kind of issue there is…. But beauty is the only one of the aesthetic qualities that is also a value, like truth and goodness. It is not simply among the values we live by, but one of the values that defines what a fully human life means.

It took the single most brazen terrorist attack in history for a twenty-first-century philosopher of aesthetics to realise that beauty matters—and dare to say so in earnest, out loud. Danto was struck by what Frankl learned in the concentration camps. For Frankl shows us what Duchamp tried to take away from artists: the gift of generating meaning by summoning beauty into an often ugly world.

In Frankl’s thought experiment, he describes someone who believes that listening to a symphony makes life worth living—even with all the suffering that living demands of us. Now reflect on this story from the composer’s point of view: Imagine you can summon enough beauty to make someone want life, even a deeply tragic life, because “It would have been worth it to have lived for this moment alone!” Absorb the magnitude of Frankl’s exclamation: the torture and humiliation in Auschwitz was worth it just to hear your music. If we follow Duchamp and the postmodernist artists and reject beauty and meaning in art, then we rob the Holocaust survivor of a reason to live, and the artist of the honour of creating something worth living for.

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Does the Division of Labour also stifle creativity and lead to failed artists?

Hirst replied that: “to carve one of these structures takes two years, and it’s like, I haven’t got time to learn to carve. But I know exactly what I want, and I want it to look perfect and I can make it perfect using these guys” (referring to a team of sculptors he had employed). He finished by stating, “It’s never been a problem for me in art and I don’t think it’s a problem… I mean it’s amazing that we’re having this conversation really.”

What is the production of a work of art when compared with the commissioning of one?

 Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Ode to Beauty"

Who gave thee, O Beauty,

The keys of this breast,—

Too credulous lover

Of blest and unblest?

Say, when in lapsed ages

Thee knew I of old;

Or what was the service

For which I was sold?

When first my eyes saw thee,

I found me thy thrall,

By magical drawings,

Sweet tyrant of all!

I drank at thy fountain

False waters of thirst;

Thou intimate stranger,

Thou latest and first!

Thy dangerous glances

Make women of men;

New-born, we are melting

Into nature again.

Lavish, lavish promiser,

Nigh persuading gods to err!

Guest of million painted forms,

Which in turn thy glory warms!

The frailest leaf, the mossy bark,

The acorn’s cup, the raindrop’s arc,

The swinging spider’s silver line,

The ruby of the drop of wine,

The shining pebble of the pond,

Thou inscribest with a bond

In thy momentary play,

Would bankrupt nature to repay.

Ah, what avails it

To hide or to shun

Whom the Infinite One

Hath granted his throne?

The heaven high over

Is the deep’s lover;

The sun and sea,

Informed by thee,

Before me run

And draw me on,

Yet fly me still,

As Fate refuses

To me the heart Fate for me chooses.

Is it that my opulent soul

Was mingled from the generous whole;

Sea-valleys and the deep of skies

Furnished several supplies;

And the sands whereof I’m made

Draw me to them, self-betrayed?

I turn the proud portfolio

Which holds the grand designs

Of Salvator, of Guercino,

And Piranesi’s lines.

I hear the lofty paeans

Of the masters of the shell,

Who heard the starry music

And recount the numbers well;

Olympian bards who sung

Divine Ideas below,

Which always find us young

And always keep us so.

Oft in streets or humblest places,

I detect far-wandered graces,

Which, from Eden wide astray,

In lowly homes have lost their way.

Thee gliding through the sea of form,

Like the lightning through the storm,

Somewhat not to be possessed,

Somewhat not to be caressed,

No feet so fleet could ever find,

No perfect form could ever bind.

Thou eternal fugitive,

Hovering over all that live,

Quick and skilful to inspire

Sweet, extravagant desire

Starry space and lily-bell

Filling with thy roseate smell,

Wilt not give the lips to taste

Of the nectar which thou hast.

All that’s good and great with thee

Works in close conspiracy;

Thou hast bribed the dark and lonely

To report thy features only,

And the cold and purple morning

Itself with thoughts of thee adorning;

The leafy dell, the city mart,

Equal trophies of thine art;

E’en the flowing azure air

Thou hast touched for my despair;

And, if I languish into dreams,

Again I meet the ardent beams.

Queen of things! I dare not die

In Being’s deeps past ear and eye;

Lest there I find the same deceiver.

And be the sport of Fate forever.

Dread Power, but dear! if God thou be,

Unmake me quite, or give thyself to me!