La tyrannie de la pénitence

Princeton University Press (2010)

Described by Douglas Murray as one of the landmark books of our time, Pascal Bruckner's The Tyranny of Guilt develops a line of argument that he first advanced two decades earlier in The Tears of the White Man. Namely, that the Western world has spent the last sixty years so consumed by remorse for its own history that it is now on the verge of apologizing itself out of existence.    

Our self-hatred and self-contempt is matched only by our sentimental insistence on the innocence and innate moral goodness of those peoples upon whom we once imposed our imperial values and the evils of slavery, racism, and genocide; evils which, mistakenly, the West now believes it invented and have a monopoly on.

Nietzsche describes this pathology of guilt, shame, and self-division as bad conscience and whilst Bruckner doesn't refer directly to the second essay of the Genealogy, he acknowledges that Nietzsche understood better than most how the internalization of cruelty, practiced so remorselessly within Judeo-Christian culture, was continuing within secular liberal society; intensifying the pain and creating a duty of repentance.       

Bruckner seeks to understand this phenomenon and how it unfolds in the world today. And, importantly, he attempts to counter it by offering us some theoretical tools of opposition. Of course, to his enemies - and he has many - this attempt at a revaluation of values within the West is seen as reactionary and ethnocentric. He is accused in France of neo-conservatism and Islamophobia due to his opposition to multiculturalism, his staunch defence of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and his admiration for the United States. 

But accusations such as this are as tiresome and as trite as they are predictable. Bruckner may not get everything right, but he deserves to be read and taken seriously. The Tyranny of Guilt is a brave, lucid, and provocative text that challenges readers not only to think - but to care and be concerned about the world in which they live. 

 
Note: Pascal Bruckner studied under Roland Barthes and belongs to that generation of French intellectuals who emerged during the 1970s known as les nouveaux philosophes. He is the award-winning author of many works of fiction and non-fiction, including the novel Lunes de fiel (1981), which was made into a little remembered film, Bitter Moon (1992), directed by Roman Polanski, starring Hugh Grant and Kristin Scott Thomas.

The Culture Cult

Westview Press (2001) 

The fact that this is a badly written and bad tempered book with a strangely dated frame of reference, lacking both philosophical rigour and insight, certainly detracts from but doesn't entirely negate the fact that it's an interesting study on what has once more become a vital question - namely, that of culture and civilization. Or, rather, culture contra civilization.

Roger Sandall - a former lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney - is not a man who likes to leave anyone in any doubt where he stands. In The Culture Cult he offers an unambiguous critique of romantic primitivism and an unapologetic defence of modernity and Western civilization. He also analyses how designer tribalism is used to undermine the values and achievements of the latter by people who, for one reason or another, choose to reject civil society, science, and secularism.

For those who often violently oppose corrupt (i.e. complex) modernity in favour of pre-modern ways of life - such as radical Islamists, for example - human rights, healthcare, and education are besides the point. They insist on the moral superiority of their traditions and beliefs and offer a fictionalized account of the past to justify this insistence. Depressingly - and disastrously - as members of religious and/or ethnic minorities who have migrated to the West, they are encouraged (often by those who mean well) to effectively lead separate lives based on practices and views that are at irreconcilably at odds with the world around them and which thus keep them trapped in poverty, superstition, and ignorance. This often leads to resentment, criminal behaviour and, ultimately, opens a pathway to extremism. 

Sandall regards everything associated with noble savagery and the culture cult as bad news. And he is at pains to remind us that most traditional cultures "feature domestic oppression, economic backwardness, endemic disease, religious fanaticism, and severe artistic constraints", concluding that if you want to live a free and full life then it might be worth your while defending civilization - not stone age stupidity or a sentimental ideal of Otherness.

Remember: the life of the Maasai warrior who drinks fresh blood from the neck of a cow, is no more noble, authentic, or spiritually enriched, than the life of an American tourist sipping a can of Coke.  

These Are a Few of My Favourite Things: Films

I have spoken elsewhere on the political and philosophical importance of lists, but we should not overlook the pleasure aspect: quite simply, lists make happy; they are fun to write and fun to read.

So, here's a list of my favourite films - assembled not in order of preference nor following a critical assessment of cinematic value, but alphabetically by title. For compiling lists should not be simply another excuse to exercise judgement and construct hierarchies. I love all of these films, not equally, but in any order that one might care to view them and the only logic that links them is the fact that they have continually given amorous pleasure. 

Two final points to note: Firstly, I've selected only a single film by any one director. Obviously I could list several by those directors of whom I am especially fond, but I didn't want to do that. Secondly, I have only selected English language films made in the US or UK, even though there are obviously foreign language movies that I love; perhaps I'll make a separate list of these at another time.

Annie Hall, (dir. Woody Allen, 1977)

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, (dir. George Roy Hill, 1969)

Carry on Screaming (dir. Gerald Thomas, 1966)

Fight Club (dir. David Fincher, 1999)

Goodfellas (dir. Martin Scorsese, 1990)

Housesitter (dir. Frank Oz, 1992)

My Cousin Vinnie (dir. Jonathan Lynn, 1992)

Paper Moon (dir. Peter Bogdanovich, 1973)

Please Sir! (dir. Mark Stuart, 1971) 

Pulp Fiction (dir. Quentin Tarantino, 1994)

Sons of the Desert (dir. William A. Seiter, 1933)

The Apartment (dir. Billy Wilder, 1960)

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (dir. Sergio Leone, 1966) 

The Prime of Miss Jean Brody (dir. Ronald Neame, 1969)

The Thirty-Nine Steps, (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1935) 

Twins (dir. Ivan Reitman, 1988)  

Reconsidering the New Philosophers

BHL: king of the nouveaux philosophes 

 Photo: Corbis / Richard Melloul

Les nouveaux philosophes are members of a generation rather than a school or group of French thinkers who came to prominence in the 1970s and include Bernard Henri Lévy, André Glucksmann, and Pascal Bruckner. 

If they decisively rejected Marx on the one hand, they had little time for Nietzsche on the other - or, indeed, for any writers whose work all-too-conveniently lends itself to non-democratic systems of power and authority. Politically, they can thus be described as neo-liberals who unashamedly subscribe to the ideals of the Enlightenment.  

Perhaps not surprisingly, Deleuze hated them. Indeed, in a famous text dated 5 June 1977 and given away free in bookstores in an attempt to counter the growing popularity of the New Philosophers, he claimed their thought was entirely devoid of real ideas, even if full of puffed-up concepts and large egos: 

"This wholesale return to the author, to an empty and vain subject, as well as to gross conceptual stereotypes, represents a troubling reactionary development." [139-40]

The reason for their success, Deleuze explained, was because the New Philosophers were media-savvy and  understood how to market themselves and their works in a brilliant fashion. They effectively turned themselves into a brand and theory into a form of journalism or a series of soundbites perfect for TV. And this, says Deleuze, is conformist to the highest degree and marks a humiliating submission of thought.       

For Deleuze, the New Philosophers pissed on the events of May 68 and declared revolution - which is only another word for vital creativity - impossible; where once a little breeze was blowing, now there was a closed window:

"This is the total negation of politics and experiment ... the New Philosophers incarnate the disease that is trying to stifle all that. There is nothing alive in their work, but they will have fulfilled their function if they can occupy centre stage long enough to give whatever is creative the kiss of death." [147]

Deleuze has one more problem with the New Philosophers apart from the fact that they are TV-buffoons and their work is, in his view, shit. And that is that their humanism is overtly moral in tone and feeds off the suffering of others:

"What I find really disgusting is that the New Philosophers are writing a martyrology: the Gulag and the victims of history. They live off corpses. They have discovered the witness-function ... But there would never have been any victims if the victims had thought or spoken like our New Philosophers. The victims had to live and think in a totally different way to provide the material that so moves the New Philosophers, who weep in their name, think in their name, and give us moral lessons in their name. Those who risk their life most often think in terms of life, not death, not bitterness, and not morbid vanity." [144-45]

Now, to be fair, I think Deleuze makes some valid points here and raises important concerns. Whenever one sees BHL, for example, interviewed on TV looking like a playboy intellectual and pleading the case for humanitarian intervention whilst promoting his latest book, one does feel a little creeped out.

Having said that, however, I can't help feeling that the New Philosophers do have import and that André Glucksmann's book Les maitres penseurs (1977) posed a crucial question: How had he, like many others of his generation, been so prone to murderous political fantasies and what role did texts by some of the great thinkers of philosophy play in this? As James Miller points out:

"Whatever its other merits, Glucksmann's book was a trenchant piece of self-criticism. The totalitarian impulse, as he stressed, was not something external, to be smugly denounced as it appeared in others; rather, this impulse affected everyone. Each of us was 'dual', caught in the snares of power, and prey to the temptation to abuse it. And 'if one takes account of this internal division', he concluded, 'it becomes impossible to imagine a single, ultimate revolution ...'"

Obviously such thinking infuriated Deleuze, but Foucault, however, was far more sympathetic and in a review of Glucksmann's book he praised the younger thinker and conceded that the revolutionary ideal itself needed to be questioned - be it in its Marxist or Dionysian form. Without explicitly saying so, Foucault was ratifying Glucksmann's move away from Maoism towards liberalism and, by so doing, furthering a philosophical and political rift between himself and Deleuze.

This took intellectual courage and integrity on Foucault's part I think. And, also, looking back from where we find ourselves today, it was the right thing to have done and not just a brave and honest move. In the final years of his life, Foucault helped inspire a new style of political conduct and commitment (acute, but cautious). André Glucksmann rightly praised him after his death in 1984 for breaking with the terrorist radicalism of the theoretical avant-garde.

This is something we have all had to learn to do ...           


Notes

The interview with Gilles Deleuze from which I quote - 'On the New Philosophers (Plus a More General Problem)' - can be found in Two Regimes of Madness, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina, (Semiotext(e), 2006). 

The passage from James Miller is taken from The Passion of Michel Foucault, (Flamingo, 1994), p. 296.

Designer Tribalism and the Racism of Low Expectations

Romantic primitivism in all forms is absurd and deserves to be ridiculed. But when it emerges out of multiculturalism as a designer tribalism that incorporates superstition, violence, corruption, and misogyny - when it effectively keeps people locked into poverty and failure by perpetuating the soft racism of low expectations - then it demands serious critical examination.

White liberals with their touchy-feely morality and political correctness are always overly keen to show how sensitive they are to racial and religious difference. They believe it's crucial that immigrants arriving in Europe from Asia and Africa are allowed to keep their own beliefs, traditions, and practices in order to maintain their identities and self-esteem. It follows from this that they should therefore be allowed to have their own schools, places of worship, community centres, shops, newspapers, radio stations, and, perhaps, even their own legal systems.    

Ayaan Hirsi Ali ruthlessly tears this well-intentioned but profoundly misguided and ultimately disastrous way of thinking to shreds. She writes: "The idea that immigrants need to maintain group cohesion promotes the perception of them as victim groups requiring ... an industry of special facilities and assistance" and results in the creation of ghettos.  

In other words, the ideal of cultural diversity is one that ends in social failure. Rather than producing "a rich mosaic of colourful and proud peoples interacting peacefully ... it translates into closed pockets of oppression, ignorance, and abuse."

Immigrants might preserve their arts and crafts, be able to eat the foods they like and wear traditional styles of dress, but this comes at a tremendous cost. For they are effectively complicit in a system which preserves them in the same manner it preserves endangered wild life; they are patronised and encouraged to remain loyal to a way of life which is untenable, inappropriate, and often in direct conflict with the society around them.

If this means their children do badly at school, can't find employment, and drift into crime, well, that's just too bad. Members of the liberal establishment overlook this just as they turn a blind-eye to the those unfortunate cultural practices such as honour killing and female genital mutilation. Their determined celebration of exotic otherness allows them to demonstrate just how tolerant and understanding they can be - and that's what they care about; atoning for the sins of their imperialist forefathers and exorcising their own guilt.

One is grateful to Hirsi Ali for speaking up and speaking out on this topic with her customary intelligence and integrity. 


Note: lines quoted from Ayaan Hirsi Ali can be found in Nomad, (Simon and Schuster UK Ltd., 2011), pp. 212 and 213.  

Peep Show Proves We're a Long Way from Wuthering Heights

"We're a long way from Wuthering Heights ..."

With this devastating line, Houellebecq refers to the progressive effacement of human relationships and a kind of vital exhaustion - particularly in the bedroom - which characterizes the early 21st century.

Ours is an age in which people continue to fuck and to feign an interest in romance, but their fascination for eroticism is completely artificial and they are, in fact, bored beyond stiffness by the endless orgy in which they find themselves; thus the growing need for pornography, sex toys, and Viagra.

We simply don't feel or even truly understand what fictional lovers such as Cathy and Heathcliff are said to have felt; their passion has become embarrassing and slightly repulsive. We don't want intense emotional commitment; rather, we prefer to fake our own feelings and simply replay old scenarios whilst lacking in any conviction. For us, sex is all about a nostalgic staging of desire and its dispersal. 

Ultimately, all we'll be left with are the signs and simulations of sex circulating via the media creating a world characterized by what Baudrillard refers to as virtual indifference. This will doubtless have many consequences, including the fact that novels, such as Emily Brontë's classic, will become impossible to read, or even talk about in and on our own terms; as evidenced, for example, in Peep Show series 7, episode 3.

Chairman Mao and the Swindle of Traditional Chinese Medicine

Image of Chairman Mao:
uncyclopedia.wikia.com

Traditional Chinese Medicine is, of course, an entirely bogus modern phenomenon; a pseudoscience promoted by Chairman Mao that possesses no valid mechanism of action or evidence for its treatments. It's no more effective than the equally dubious remedies offered within European witchcraft.  

Not that this stops millions of believers around the world using obscure herbal remedies, ingesting ground up animal parts - such as tiger bone and rhino horn - or having pins stuck in them in order to release a flow of vital energy along the body's meridians. Attempts to locate these mysterious pathways, or to identify this potency known as qi, have so far proved fruitless. Primarily, this is because they don't exist.

   

Practitioners of alternative medicine, however, don't allow such minor details or anatomical facts to stop them peddling their services and products. If modern knowledge of human physiology and pathology proves problematic to their teachings, they simply start talking about cosmic notions of yin and yang, patterns of harmony and disharmony, or the five phases. Such traditional Chinese wisdom is also, of course, entirely false - if pleasing to metaphysicians everywhere.

Happily, at least some Chinese philosophers are prepared to admit as much. In 2006, for example, Zhang Gongyao published an article entitled 'Farewell to Traditional Chinese Medicine', arguing that TCM in both theory and practice was absurd and should be exposed as such. The Chinese government, however, keenly aware of global export revenues, insisted that it had an important role to play in healthcare and deserved future development. 

And this brings us back to Chairman Mao, who, almost single-handedly invented TCM as we know it today. Let me elaborate by summarizing a recent article by Alan Levinovitz, who is an assistant professor of Chinese Philosophy and Religion at James Madison University ...

Initially, following their victory in the Civil War, the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party ridiculed TCM as irrational and backward; something contrary to the Party's programme of modernization and scientific progress. However, when it became clear that they would never be able to afford to establish a national healthcare programme reliant upon highly skilled doctors, expensive drugs, and advanced surgical techniques, Mao revised this position. Now TCM was proudly held up as a great national resource to be developed in opposition to the bourgeois medicine of capitalist imperialism. 

Further, Mao realised that if only the traditional methods could be marketed in the right manner, they could be sold to gullible foreigners. And so the Chinese Communist party set about standardizing TCM into a single theoretical and practical system that could be taught as an alternative (holistic) science concerned with preventative and complimentary healthcare. 

Next, they set about providing Westerners with sensational - but faked - evidence of what TCM could do. Eager to subscribe to the myth of the ancient wisdom of the east, this was, outrageously, accepted at face value by large numbers of the public, as well as many professionals who really should have known better. Before long a craze for TCM - particularly acupuncture - boomed and today you can get all kinds of quack treatments on the NHS! 

Levinovitz nicely puts this into a cultural and historical context:

"The reason so many people take Chinese medicine seriously, at least in part, is that it  was reinvented by one of the most powerful propaganda machines of all time and then consciously marketed to a West disillusioned by its own spiritual traditions. The timing couldn't have been better. Postmodernism was sweeping the academy, its valuable insights quickly degrading into naïve relativism. Thomas Kuhn had just published his theory of paradigm shifts and scientific revolutions ... Alan Watts was introducing hippies to mind-blowing Eastern philosophy; Joseph Campbell was preaching the power of myth. Sick of Christianity and guilty about past imperialist sins, the West was ready to be healed by Mao's sanitized version of Chinese medicine."  

He concludes:

"Ultimately, however, the existence of qi, acupuncture meridians, and the Triple Energizer is no more inherently plausible than that of demons, the four humours, or the healing power of God. It's just that Mao swindled us ..."

Notes: 

Alan Levinovitz's article in the online magazine Slate entitled 'Chairman Mao Invented Traditional Chinese Medicine', can be found by clicking here.

My thanks to Zena McKeown for inspiring this post following a recent conversation on the topic.  

Foucault's Islamic Folly

Photo from the front cover of the Turkish translation of 

Foucault and the Iranian Revolution

Michel Foucault wanted more than anything to be generous to the Iranian revolutionaries when he arrived in Tehran in September 1978 in order to report on events for an Italian newspaper. 

Despite their aggressive xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and fetishization of martyrdom, Foucault was keen to counter the idea that these bearded opponents of the Shah were simply political extremists or religious fanatics. On the contrary, he argued, their demand for the impossible was perfectly reasonable and their goal of establishing a new Islamic order held out the hope of a genuine revaluation of all values; the first great insurrection against global hegemony inspired by a creed of combat and sacrifice.      

Just a few short months after writing this, Ayatollah Khomeini and his mullahs assumed power and established a murderous theocracy which has endured to this day. For a while, Foucault continued to defend the regime - or, rather, he continued to promote his quasi-mystical belief in ecstatic violence and revolution as a crucial form of limit-experience (however tragic the outcome). But, eventually, Foucault was obliged to break with what André Glucksmann described as the terrorist radicalism of the theoretical avant-garde. 

Indeed, before his death in 1984 Foucault even found it possible (and important) to rethink questions central to the Enlightenment and to liberalism. He conceded that whilst the concept of human rights is a political fiction, it's nevertheless a useful fiction which needs vigorously defending; as does secular society when threatened by militant religious fascism.

And this is something I wish more of our intellectuals, media commentators, and public officials would have the courage and the tactical intelligence to acknowledge today.   

Note: those interested in reading more on this topic should see Janet Afary and Keven B. Anderson; Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, (University of Chicago Press, 2005).

Qué Barbaridad

Flag of the Islamic State 
(formerly known as ISIS or ISIL)

One of Nietzsche's concerns in his later writings is with the question of how a stronger species of man might arise from out of modernity, which he regards as a form of corruption. A people possessing the ability and the desire to impose themselves upon others can, he says, grow up only out of terrible and violent beginnings. And so he awaits those he terms the new barbarians ...

But just as the Nazis were not those whom he anticipated and called forth, neither are the militants of the Islamic State - presently fueling chaos and committing a series of grotesque atrocities across Syria and Iraq. For whilst these jihadis may display some of the traits that Nietzsche admired, they nevertheless remain barbarians of the depths, rather than those who come from the heights and who, like Prometheus, bring something genuinely new into the world.

Unfortunately, their asceticism remains tied to a spirit of revenge and is born of sickness and inferiority, rather than a union of spiritual superiority, well-being, and an excess of strength. For all their sincerity and violent enthusiasm, they're essentially decadents full of all the same modern vices - such as an addiction to modern technology and social media - as the rest of us. This is why when, not praying or fighting, they seem to spend most of their time tweeting, or posting vile images on YouTube and Facebook.

 

Ultimately, if holy war can be the source of stimulation in a mankind grown soft via the resurrection of the most savage energies "in the shape of the long-buried dreadfulness and excesses of the most distant ages", it can do no more than this. Significant change requires something else. Not something bigger or more catastrophic, but, on the contrary, something much more modest; something requiring not just cruelty, but the exercise of great caution.

Ultimately, we will reflect on the attempt by these Islamofascists to trigger a revaluation of values as Nietzsche looked back on the French Revolution; i.e. as nothing more than "a pathetic and bloody piece of quackery". They might inspire believers with their neo-archaic fantasy of a global caliphate, but, the attempt to reterritorialize upon the ruins of a despotic state machine and fragments of a seventh century Arabic text is, thankfully, doomed to failure.     

Notes:

For Nietzsche's thinking on the question of barbarism and the new barbarians, see, for example, notes 868, 899 and 900 in The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, (Vintage Books, 1968), pp. 464-65, 478-79. 

The line quoted from Nietzsche in paragraph four is from Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), I. 8. 463, p. 169.

The line quoted from Nietzsche in paragraph five is from Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), V. 534, pp. 211-12. 

For a more extensive discussion of this topic see my study of Nietzschean and post-Nietzschean politics, Outside the Gate, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010), particularly part three.

On the Etymology of the Word Hamas

People often ask: What's in a name?

Well, quite a lot when that name happens to be Hamas: an acronym of Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah, which rather conveniently spells out the Arabic term for enthusiasm.

As we know, this Islamic resistance movement - designated a terrorist organization by, amongst others, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union - has governed the Gaza strip since winning a majority of seats in the 2006 Palestinian elections. Since then, it has certainly demonstrated an enthusiasm for indiscriminately firing rockets into Israel and building an extensive network of tunnels in which to conceal weapons and through which it might send suicide bombers. 

Obviously, as one who values irony, indifference, and insouciance, I have little time for those who enthuse in this manner; i.e. with such militant sincerity. In fact, as an anti-theist, I hate the very term enthusiasm, which is derived of course from an ancient Greek root, ἐνθεός [entheos], meaning to be possessed (or inspired) by a god.   

Such is the intense level of enthusiasm displayed by the members and supporters of Hamas, however, that I think we might more accurately translate their name as zeal and understand them not merely as enthusiasts, but true zealots; i.e. fanatical and uncompromising, in both their religious faith and their political ideology.

Interestingly, the English word zealous can also be traced back to an ancient Greek origin; indeed, if Maria remembers her mythology correctly, then Zelus [Ζῆλος] was the son of the Titan, Pallas, and the river goddess, Styx, and he personified dedication to a cause.
 

However, it is important to note that he also personified other traits, including envy (the modern word jealousy is also derived from his name), resentment, bigotry, and insecurity (thus his need for complete consensus and his desire for the total annihilation of his enemies).

What's in the name Hamas? More than they might care to acknowledge ...

On the Joy of Flirting and the Experience of Beauty

 Ayaan Hirsi Ali

 

Flirting is one of the great joys of life, which, regardless of intent, is always an innocent form of sexual play at the level of language and gesture; by this, I mean it lacks the consciously cruel and manipulative aspects of teasing.  

People who do not know how to flirt are like those who do not know how to laugh; they lack that insouciance which is so lovely in wild animals and flowering plants and in men and women who intuitively understand the mystery of beauty.

 

For beauty, ultimately, is the key thing: when we flirt, we communicate the happiness that arises out of an experience of beauty. We find others sexy and appealing when we find them beautiful. But, as Lawrence rightly argues, living beauty is not a fixed pattern or a conventional look which comes ready-made or photoshopped. This is why even the most skilled cosmetic surgeons fail to produce a truly beautiful face, despite an almost perfect arrangement of features. And this is why there's nothing flirtatious about a sex doll.

Because beauty is something felt and something which can be shared with others, even the plainest person can be beautiful and flirt successfully. On the other hand, even the most attractive person in the room can seem ugly and undesirable when they lack the warm glow of beauty and don't know how to communicate joy. Only when the sex-glow is missing, writes Lawrence, do people move in ugly coldness like "one of those ghastly living corpses which are unfortunately becoming more numerous in the world ... and whom everybody wants to avoid".

Today, it takes a rare woman to genuinely rouse a sense of loveliness; and a rare man to have the courage to respond to her loveliness and to flirt in a spirit that is neither lewd nor crude, but generous and playfully tender, with perhaps just a touch of irony. Luckily, however, there is an example of such to be found on YouTube and involves a very touching and amusing public encounter between Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Christopher Hitchens; he full of old school charm and she smiling and giggling in an almost coquettish manner.

Perhaps, as well as everything else, flirting is an important sign of freedom ...

Notes: 

Readers interested in viewing the encounter between Hitch and the very beautiful Ayaan Hirsi Ali at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC, on Feb 13 2007, should click here.

The line quoted from D. H. Lawrence can be found in the article 'Sex Appeal', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 146. 

The Picture of Douglas Murray

Douglas Murray: Photo by Martin Pope

The writer and commentator Douglas Murray may not be made out of ivory and rose-leaves, but he certainly embodies several of the virtues that make beautiful and make manly, including courage, for example; courage in the face of often violent opposition and the courage to speak his mind with an openness lacking in most other public figures and politicians.

I might not always agree with what he says, but I can't help admiring him and, after first seeing Douglas on YouTube, I was conscious of the curious effect that he exerted: I knew that I was watching someone whose personality is so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would threaten to absorb my whole nature and whose neoconservative ideas are so dangerously seductive that, if not careful, they might infect my own thinking on the issues that face us today.

I do not know if we are destined to meet and to know each other. But I suspect, sadly, that we could never be friends. Indeed, I would find it difficult to even stay in the same room as this wonderfully handsome young man, with his finely-curved scarlet lips and frank blue-eyes full of candour and passionate purity; for how could one not feel inferior in the presence of someone so palpably better-read, better-travelled, and better-looking?

My one hope is that Douglas finds time to write more works of literary biography - like his brilliant study of Bosie, written when he was still an undergraduate - and that he doesn't squander all his time and talent listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless, or fighting against the ignorant, the base, and the fanatic.

Just Say No

Viktor and Rolf: A/W 2008

 

'You're always so negative and critical', she said - rather ironically by way of criticism. Like many of the things that came out of her mouth, it wasn't entirely true. But, even if it were, so what?

For just as in saying yes to something in particular we automatically say no to everything else in general, in saying no to things - particularly things, ideas, or people which we once loved uncritically in the past - we say yes to the future and a strange new unfolding of the self. 

Nietzsche writes:

"When we criticize something, this is no arbitrary and impersonal event; it is very often evidence of vital energies in us that are growing and shedding a skin. We negate and must negate because something in us wants to live and affirm - something that we perhaps do not conceive as yet."

- The Gay Science, Book IV, 307.

To want to have done with judgement and make an affirmation of life as it is, does not mean depriving oneself of any means of distinguishing between modes of existence; nor does it mean renouncing one's critical faculty as born and developed not within the ideal realm of higher values, but within a beating heart that knows of love and hate.

 

Richard Dawkins on Rape: Good Logic, Bad Thinking

In an attempt to illustrate what philosophers know as a syllogism (i.e. a statement of comparison between two terms that does not necessarily endorse either), Richard Dawkins tweets: "Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at knifepoint is worse."

As a piece of logic, it's fine. But as an example, it's extremely unfortunate and one does wish he had simply stuck with the algebriac formula of x and y. For whilst clearly not sanctioning date rape, Dawkins nevertheless perpetuates the myth that it's a less serious crime because carried out by someone known to the victim in what are deemed to be less aggravating circumstances.

Such circumstances, however, remain external to what essentially constitutes the crime itself; i.e. fucking someone against their will. If consent is not fully and freely given to sexual penetration (or, in the case of minors, cannot legally be given) and you stick your dick where it isn't wanted and shouldn't be, then that's rape professor!

Indeed, the law is pretty clear on this. So critical opposition voiced on Twitter by those who were troubled by his choice of syllogism is not necessarily proof of their moral absolutism, or inability to think logically; rather, it might simply demonstrate their superior legal knowledge, their more sophisticated understanding of rape, and their rather more sympathetic sexual politics.

Ultimately, rape is rape, just as murder is murder. The story of someone killed with kindness - perhaps a lethal dose of diamorphine discreetly administered before bedtime thereby allowing the victim to slip away peacefully in their sleep - lacks the sensational horror (and thus newsworthiness) of someone hacked to death with a chainsaw, but either way a vile crime has been committed and there's a body lying dead at the end of it.

Now, whilst speaking about degrees of violence and mitigating circumstances doesn't make much difference to a corpse, for a prominent public figure to imply that if a woman happens to know her rapist (and chances are she will) - and that if he comes carrying flowers rather than a weapon - this somehow makes the crime less serious (i.e. hardly even worth reporting), well, that makes a lot of difference - both to women who have to deal with the reality (and existential threat) of rape and, indeed, to the men who refuse to accept their shameful behaviour for what it is.      

In the end, as my friend Zena rightly argues, it's not up to men - even very clever men like Professor Dawkins - to try and define women's experiences of sexual violence.

Sadly, even good logic can result in bad thinking ... 

A Short Lesson on Lawrentian Zoology

And the baboon, almost a man, or almost a high beast, arrested himself and became obscene; 

a grey, hoary rind closed upon an activity of strong corruption. - D. H. Lawrence

One of the well-known things about D. H. Lawrence is that he was fascinated by non-human life and the wonders of the natural world. 

A wide variety of animals move freely throughout the pages of his books, although, sometimes, they have logs thrown at them, or are chased round the room with a hanky. Or - if they happen to be porcupines - they are shot and beaten to death with a stick. And it's important to remember this: for whilst Lawrence might respond with an extraordinary degree of sensitivity to the sheer otherness of animals, he didn't sentimentalize them and he certainly didn't love them all with equal affection.

In fact, there are some creatures which Lawrence seems to hate and to fear with an almost insane level of intensity. He might like fish, to whom so little matters, and delight in porpoises playing by the side of his boat; he might value mountain lions and admire the indomitable character of a baby tortoise, but Lawrence doesn't care for any of the following: vultures, hyenas, baboons, and beetles.

These animals are accused by Lawrence of arrested development; i.e. of preserving their own hard static forms about a centre of seething corruption. They are, he says, forms of shit-eating anti-life; asserting themselves static and foul, triumphant in inertia and will. And they fill him with unthinkable horror. 

Indeed, for Lawrence, even the snake in comparison is beautiful with vital reality; for although the snake is a creature of the underworld and the oozing marsh, it shares in the same life as mankind: "He struggles as we struggle, he enjoys the sun, he comes to the water to drink, he curls up ... to sleep". 

We can and must make peace with the serpent and let him take his place among us; it will, writes Lawrence, be a sign of bliss when we are reconciled in this fashion. Unfortunately, however, more and more men and women seem drawn in the direction of carrion and insects and baboons; desperate to remain ideally intact and feeding on putrescence. 

See: D. H. Lawrence, 'The Crown', in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988). The line quoted in the text is on p. 297. Line quoted beneath the photo of a baboon is on p. 295.

Nietzsche and the Question of Corruption

Corruption, writes Nietzsche, is merely a nasty word for the autumn of a people. 

That is to say, corruption is a term which, whilst often loaded with negative moral connotations, simply describes those periods in which the fruits of a society - sovereign individuals - ripen and fall from the tree. 

It is these extremely rare types who carry the seeds of the future and become founders of new states and communities, as well as new ways of thinking and feeling. Often, such singular men and women care only for the moment and for themselves; and yet, for Nietzsche, they justify all the stupidity and cruelty of the past and redeem the suffering of the many. They are what nature has been aiming at all along.

Nietzsche provides us with four signs to look out for, should we wish to determine the degree of corruption within a social body: 

(i) Superstition: understood by Nietzsche to be a symptom of enlightenment and spiritual progress. He writes: "Whoever is superstitious is always, compared with the religious human being, much more of a person; and a superstitious society is one in which there are many individuals and much delight in individuality."

(ii)  Exhaustion: although a society in which corruption is ripe is often accused of being exhausted, Nietzsche points out that actually all the energy previously expended in war by the state, is simply now sublimated into countless private passions. Indeed, there is probably a greater than ever exercise of power; the individual squandering resources in a manner which would have previously been unimaginable: thus is it precisely in times of corruption that "great love and great hatred are born, and that the flame of knowledge flares up in the sky".

(iii) Refinement: it is also mistakenly believed that times of corruption are more humane (i.e. softer, kinder, perhaps more feminine); that cruelty declines drastically, or is sharply curtailed. But again, Nietzsche says this is not so: "All I concede is that cruelty now becomes more refined and that its older forms henceforth offend the new taste; but the art of wounding and torturing others with words and looks reaches its supreme development ... it is only now that malice and the delight in malice are born."

(iv) Tyranny: corruption allows for the emergence of tyrants; "they are the precursors ... of individuals". It is invariably in the age of a Caesar that the individual will also ripen and culture achieve its highest and most fruitful stage; not on account of the tyrant himself, but because he provides the necessary external conditions - the peace and stability - that is needed. Whilst he makes life safer and secure, they set about making it more beautiful and profound.

So you see, we need our decadents and quasi-feminine types; our corrupt egoists. But not in the way or for the reason that the followers of Ayn Rand imagine. We value them not as wealth creators, but as culture creators and the founders of discursivity; they are free spirits - not merely free marketeers!     

   

Note: All quotes from Nietzsche are from The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1974), I. 23, pp. 96-8. 

Wenn Ich Kultur Höre ... The Rise and Fall of Hanns Johst

 Hanns Johst (1890 - 1978)

When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver!

This oft-quoted line - commonly, but mistakenly, attributed to Hermann Goering or one of the other Nazi leaders - continues to resonate with us today and to mutate into new and often amusing forms. 

But it has perhaps still not quite been understood that whilst the original speaker - a character called Friedrich Thiemann, in a play entitled Schlageter - is indeed expressing his preference for paramilitary violence over all intellectual or artistic pursuits, the author, Hanns Johst, had a rather more developed racial understanding of the culture question.

    

For Johst, like many other writers and thinkers at this time, there was traditional German culture on the one hand, which he loved and wished to defend; and then there was modern Jewish culture, which he despised and wished to combat, fearing that it would otherwise infect and corrupt the purity of the former. This is why he joined the nationalistic and anti-Semitic Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur (Militant League for German Culture) in 1928 and why, four years later, he became a committed member of the Nazi Party.

Schlageter, which tells the story of a proto-Nazi martyr, was in fact written solely to express his support for National Socialist ideology, including its arts policy which declared that only works which conformed with classical standards and expressed the Aryan ideal would be allowed; those which failed to do so were notoriously branded as degenerate. 

In 1935, Johst became the President of both the Writers' Union in Germany and of the Akademie für Dichtung. By 1944, now an officer in the Waffen-SS, he was named as one of the Third Reich's most important artists. 

After the war, Johst was interned by the Allies and eventually received a three-and-a-half year prison sentence. Unable to successfully re-establish his writing career following his release, he was reduced to placing poems written under a pseudonym in Die kluge Hausfrau - a magazine published by that great bastion of all things German, Edeka, a large supermarket chain.

 

When I hear the word kultur, I reach for my price gun ... 

Informal Economics: The Triumph of System D

People, cattle and vultures all enjoying the benefits 

of an informal economy

I recently attended an interesting talk given by Dr Marianna Koli, Senior Lecturer in Economics at NCH, on crime, development, and democratization in Latin America, using Mexico, Columbia, and Brazil as her case studies. Central to her paper was a concept which, apparently, has become increasingly popular amongst economists and sociologists, namely, that of informality.

Informality is a term that is used to refer to the unofficial, unregulated, and frequently illicit activity carried on by people either marginalized by the state, or self-excluded and self-employed from preference (often because they resent paying tax, or having to comply with restrictive laws and regulations).

We used to refer to this informal sector as the black market, or shadow economy, and many of those who objected to its existence might point to its flirtatious relationship with the criminal underground. But now, it seems, we are invited to view it in a rather more positive light; i.e. not as a sign of social division and corruption, but as a flourishing of entrepreneurial know-how and urban ingenuity involving skilled professionals and creative individuals and not just the poor and dispossessed desperate to earn a few dollars, or provide basic services and amenities for themselves and their families living in 'non-stable communities' (i.e. what we used to call slums or shanty towns).

Indeed, it is claimed by admirers and advocates that informal activity is not simply a feature of advanced capitalism, but the very engine of such, driving production and innovation forward. Libertarians - keen to do away with the State entirely - are particularly quick to argue that governments should give up their futile attempts to control or combat informal activity and celebrate, expand, and learn from it instead.

For such political optimists, ur-capitalism (or agorism) provides a working model for the future; we can all be free to earn less and do without public services and provisions (such as health care); we can all live hand-to-mouth like those happy-go-lucky Latin Americans, or other peoples who opt for a more traditional lifestyle free from government and state regulation, but not from poverty, exploitation, violence and insecurity.

Who needs civilized society with its boring formalities, material benefits, and universal rights when we can have culture - developed organically from within the conditions of actual lived existence - allowing every individual to shape their own future and stand on their own two feet atop the garbage heaps of the world ...?


Afterword

Dr Marianna Koli has kindly commented on this post below and made her own position clear. I would hope it's understood that the views expressed in this post are mine alone - as are the errors and distortions made. 

Obviously, the post is a piece of polemic written by someone lacking in expert knowledge or experience in this area. Nevertheless, I stand by the central argument that informal economics is simply another way of saying laissez faire capitalism and, as such, something likely to attract the attention of libertarians and those of an Ayn Rand persuasion (i.e. those I regard as political opponents).  

In Memory of James Garner

James Garner (1928 - 2014) 

as Jim Rockford in The Rockford Files

The Rockford Files is one of those '70s American TV shows that everyone who remembers it, remembers it fondly. Just as I'm sure the lead actor, James Garner, who, sadly, died yesterday, will also be remembered fondly by family, friends, and fans alike. 

The thing with Garner was that he was both very good-looking and a very good actor, capable of playing both comedic roles and more serious parts with the same grace and charm, whether on the small screen or the silver screen (he was one of the first Hollywood stars to move between the two). 

Among his many movie roles, that of Flt. Lt. Robert Hendley, known as the Scrounger, in The Great Escape (1963), is a personal favourite. But, it's primarily as the LA-based private investigator Jim Rockford that Garner most impressed himself upon my young imagination: I liked the way he dressed in sports jackets and open-necked shirts; I liked the equally casual manner in which he approached his work and handled the cops; I liked the fact he lived in a trailer on the beach; and I liked his lawyer and on/off girlfriend Beth Davenport (played by Gretchen Corbett).

Thanks to syndication, DVD, and YouTube, it's easy to still enjoy episodes and to delight in the show's fantastic theme tune (composed by Mike Post and Pete Carpenter), as well as Garner's great performance. The man had style - and that's the highest you can say of anyone. 

 

Geoff Dyer

Photo by Matt Stuart (2011)

geoffdyer.com

Someone - not quite a friend, but not, I think, someone motivated by any real enmity either - writes to tell me what is wrong with this blog and why it fails to find an audience of any size: It's too random, he says, too much made up of bits and pieces that lack any coherent theme or continuity.  

This, of course, is not untrue, but it somewhat misses the point; i.e. that I'm very deliberately subscribing to a fragmented method of writing which encompasses as wide a range of concerns and interests as possible, all of which are assembled in a single space, but without being coordinated or synthesized into any kind of unity or whole. Obviously, such a non-systematic (and anti-systematic) approach is indebted to several of the writers I love the most, including Nietzsche, Baudrillard, and Roland Barthes. 

Geoff Dyer understands: for he shares in this love of the fragmented and whimsical and has built a successful non-career by following wherever his imagination and his desire has taken him, producing a variety of original works, without any regard for a target audience, that speak of his admirable (and enviable) freedom as a writer. 

By learning how to loiter, as Dyer says, on the margins of everything, "unhindered by specialisms ... and the rigours of imposed method", one becomes not merely a man of letters, but a homotextual - i.e., one whose life is virtually synonymous with their writing.

I might not particularly care for all of his books, or share all of his passions or opinions; I might even find him something of a fraud. But, in Dyer, I recognise a degree of kinship and so can't help feeling a little friendly and fraternal towards him - whilst not entirely sure this would be reciprocated ...

Note: Geoff Dyer is the author of four novels, two collections of essays, and several genre-defying books. The line quoted is from his Introduction to Anglo-English Attitudes: Essays, Reviews, Misadventures 1984-99, (Abacus, 2004), p. 4. 

Post 333: Invocation of Choronzon

Club Choronzon 333, by deadguy333

www.deviantart.com

According to Pythagoras, three is the first genuine number - as well as the first natural number and first male number. It is also the noblest of all figures, as it uniquely equals the sum of all the numbers before it. 

Even if we might challenge its authenticity and its engendered high status, it nevertheless remains an important number within mathematics, philosophy, and many of the world's religions; think of the Christian Trinity, for example, composed of the consubstantial expressions Father, Son, and Holy Ghost (i.e. three distinct entities, but sharing one divine essence). 

Or, for that matter, think of what our friends in the neo-pagan community refer to as the Triple Goddess - i.e. three female figures portrayed as Maiden, Mother, and Crone symbolizing different stages in the female life cycle or phases of the moon, who are nevertheless aspects of a greater single deity. For like many other hypostatic idealists, including Christians and Platonists, neo-pagans share a profound belief in the fundamental unity of being. 

In other words, whilst the number three has a certain magic and mysticism to it (three's a charm, as they say), it's the number one and an instinctive hatred for plurality which ultimately determines the thinking and theology of the religiously-minded - including Jung and Robert Graves, who are responsible for much of what passes for goddess worship in the modern world.               

For those of us who loathe monotheism and metaphysical notions of synthesis, stability, and identity, however, the will to oneness is - to paraphrase Nietzsche - the one great folly, the one great lie, the one great intrinsic depravity which betrays a lust for revenge upon life; the latter understood as a demon of chaos and innumerable becomings and called by Crowley Choronzon, the Dweller in the Abyss, whose number is 333.

From Chimpan-A to Chimpan-Z

Still from The Simpsons episode 19, season 7

© 20th Century Fox Film Corp.

It's amazing to observe how, after forty-odd years, the Planet of the Apes franchise continues to capture the imagination of a global movie-going audience. People, it seems, just can't get enough of those crazy sci-fi simians and militant monkeys. 

The latest cinematic installment, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, dir. Matt Reeves and starring Andy Serkis as Caesar, opened in the US a few days ago, immediately topping the box office and taking $73 million in it's first weekend. The film also received extremely positive reviews; not just for the stunning special effects, but also as a piece of well-crafted, intelligent story-telling. British audiences will be able to decide for themselves how successful or otherwise this sequel to the series reboot, Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), is when it finally opens here tomorrow (July 17th). 

Sadly, however, I won't be going.

And the reason I won't be going is because, for me, as for many others, it's simply become impossible to view any of the great ape films without remembering the classic Simpsons episode which featured Troy McClure appearing in a musical adaptation of the original 1968 movie, mockingly entitled Stop the Planet of the Apes - I Want to Get Off!

Flashbacks of apes break-dancing to a brilliantly rewritten version of Falco's 1985 classic track, 'Let Me Rock You Amadeus', still result in tears of joy - and tears of joy streaming down one's face don't allow you to watch a clichéd, over-earnest and super-serious action thriller, which ultimately attempts to make monkeys of its audience as well as its lead actors. 
   

Notes: 

The Simpsons episode to which I refer - 'A Fish Called Selma' - was directed by Mark Kirkland, written by Jack Barth (before being revised by the usual in-house team), and guest starred Phil Hartman as Troy McClure. It originally aired on 24 March, 1996. 

The song 'Dr. Zaius' - one of the funniest musical numbers ever included in the show - was primarily written by George Meyer. The now classic line "from chimpan-A to chimpan-Z" in the final song of the musical was written by David Cohen.  

Thanks to Joe22c for uploading this clip on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/47069867   

That Queer Riviera Touch

Film poster by renowned Italian artist Arnaldo Putzu (1927 - 2012)

One of the films that made happy as a child was shown yesterday on Film4 - That Riviera Touch (1966), dir. Hugh Stewart, and starring Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise playing versions of themselves.

There is a plot, involving a jewel thief and a large sum of money won at a casino, but it's basically just the two English comics fooling around on the French Riviera and competing to win the affection of the beautiful Claudette, played by Canadian-born actress Suzanne Lloyd.

I have to confess, it didn't quite amuse as much as it did when first watched on TV in the 1970s, but it did still interest - particularly the ending, which is somewhat queer to say the least and openly hints towards the establishment of a ménage-à-trois of some kind. 

In other words, the two inseparable friends each get to get the girl; Claudette happily marries both men, thereby voluntarily committing an act of bigamy. In the final shot, Eric turns to the camera and says with a knowing smile: "We'll cross that hurdle when we get to it", seemingly referring to the question of who will first fuck the bride.

However, one couldn't help suspect - knowing the intimacy of the relationship between Eric and Ern - that they might be inclined not simply to share their new matrimonial duties in a cordial and civilized manner (one taking Mon-Weds, the other Thurs-Sat, leaving Sunday as a day of rest), but agree to pleasure Claudette simultaneously.  

Indeed, it's tempting to imagine that whilst all three are naked in the honeymoon suite, there might even be explicit sexual contact between the boys. This is not to suggest that all men are secretly tempted by the prospect of penetrating one another or aroused by the thought of hairy male legs, but it's amazing how often the presence of a woman - serving as an alibi of sorts - facilitates experimentation of a bi-curious character in such circumstances.       

And why not? For as Eric would say: They can't touch you for it. 

If You're Human and You Know It Clap Your Hands

According to some religious lunatic featured on a recent Dispatches report made for Channel 4, whilst the achievements of a good Muslim should be recognised, they should not receive a round of applause; for clapping, by diverting attention to the individual, robs God of the glory and praise which he alone deserves. It is thus a sound which pleases only the ears of Satan.

I have to admit, I've never thought of it like that before, but I've never much liked clapping either; both giving and receiving a show of appreciation in this manner always makes me a little ashamed. For whether one claps oneself like a trained seal hoping for a fish, or is the recipient of a doubtless generous and often warm hand, there's just something humiliating in such a socially sanctioned display of approval.

One wonders if people couldn't be encouraged to do something else: John Lennon once rather amusingly asked those in the expensive seats of a Royal Variety Performance at the Prince of Wales Theatre not to clap but simply rattle their jewellery instead. Unfortunately, this only provoked laughter (with which I also have problems) and, ironically, additional applause.

Like it or not, applause is simply too ancient and too universal a habit - too human, all too human, as Nietzsche would say - for either my opposition or that of the Taliban to really make much difference. As long as people have hands, they'll doubtless continue to scratch, fidget, and clap. Indeed, were they not taught to put their hands together in prayer, or given holy books to hold, merely in order to limit such activities ...?

Aspasia

Aspasia on the Pnyx, by Henry Holiday (1888) 

Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre

According to Nietzsche, great philosophers - like great artists - are sensual individuals full of excess vitality; lovers not just of the wisdom that resides in language, but of the truth located in bodies. Thus it's no surprise to discover that even old Socrates couldn't help being crazy with desire for Aspasia; the beautiful and accomplished courtesan who captured the heart of Pericles.

As a member of that class of women known as hetaerae, Aspasia enjoyed a level of independence and influence far above that of most other women in Greek society at this time. Renowned for her artistic and intellectual abilities, as well as her skills in the bedroom, she actively took part in symposia alongside male members of the social and political elite and her opinion was both highly respected and frequently sought out. Indeed, despite her somewhat illicit reputation, Plutarch informs us that many of these men even encouraged their wives to listen to her converse. 

Of course, she was not loved by all and Aspasia faced many personal and legal attacks from those envious of her fashion sense and her powerful position. She was accused, for example, of corrupting the young women of Athens due to her distinctive style and put on trial for impiety. Aristophanes even attempted to hold Aspasia responsible for the Peloponnesian War - labeling her the new Helen.

After Pericles died in 429 BC, Aspasia took up with Lysicles, an Athenian general. Unfortunately, little is known of her after this date. She is believed to have died shortly before the execution of her admirer Socrates in 399 BC.

Her name and her fame, however, have significantly lived on and not only does she appear in numerous works of modern art and literature, but, like Sappho, she is an important source of inspiration for many feminists, poets, and philosophers (both male and female).

An untimely figure, Aspasia both embodied and abolished all history in her person. She lived beyond judgement; accepting the abuse of those who spoke against her with stoicism and a wry smile. We can only ask: what's not to love about this astonishing woman?