My pedantic, perfectionist side compels me to point this out. IT’S NOT MY FAULT!!!
Well, not completely, in any event. Goddammit.
This was typed on a computer. I have a couple posts for tomorrow I did not feel like inflicting on my poor booger finger.
One can readily infer from this the great social comfort Americans derive from “getting ahead”, since this form of rationalism retains some hold on this, and comfortably avoids the issue of who we ARE, by defining us by what we DO. But there can be no rest in this system.
And equally logically, the authoritarians–like the kid in the anecdote he relates who asked if we “should go back to sublimation”–infer that if non-conformity is punished, there must be an order, that the way back to Eden is to stomp out and destroy all outliers.
One sees many people desperately trying to break rules to affirm the presence of an order. At the present moment I see this in transgenderism, with perhaps bestiality, pedophiles, and necrophilia waiting as final possibilities. They want to hated, in some respects, since that hate implies an order they can juxtapose themselves with, and in so doing find a community of sorts.
This reminds me of gays I have read publicly lamenting their success. When they were outside they had something. Now that they are inside they suffer the same Last Man Syndrome the rest of us do.
To my mind, nothing could be more insipid or uninspiring than to define oneself by ones sexuality. We all feel sexual urges, but that urge, as a simple physiological tension, is easily dispelled through masturbation, and I think much contemporary sex is scarcely above that. I read kids are having less arc now, and I think it is because they too have realized this, that sex does not imply emotional intimacy, and that the feeling of being felt, as Dan Siegel puts it, is vastly more important, and vastly harder to satisfy.
I see kids experimenting with fluid gender red not out of innate psychological need, but as a means of forming SOME identity in a world denuded of way-markers; where, because everyone belongs, no one belongs.
This effort, it also seems to be, is a vulgar misinterpretation of the already bad ideas of Sigmund Freud.
And if the Democrats don’t want to let this Russian thing simply fade away as the puff of smoke it is, why not start taking seriously the investigation of and prosecution of Obama and Hillary, both of whom have committed ACTUAL crimes, not the made up ones?
The history of this whole thing, as I understand it, is that one of the Baltic States cooked up some flimsy and evidence free bullshit against Trump. The British ran with it. Obama got wind of it, and used it as a pretexts to eavesdrop on an unknown number of people around Trump and including Trump, during the Presidential campaign, and afterwards.
The news media, since, being utterly unable to process the degree of irrelevance their continual lying has relegated them to, continues to insist with no evidence that “The Russians” somehow cost their Dear Leader the election. The whole things is ludicrous.
But, again, if they want to play fucking games while living in a glass house, I say Game On.
But it may have been grief from being misunderstood. I read he was generally regarded as a “conservative” among most intellectuals, but this is a misperception. That this is a misperception is obvious within the book itself. From my own perspective, one need only note the seriousness with which he regarded Rousseau, and the esteem he held him in, to see this.
Bloom’s book might well have been titled “The Etiology of an Error: how modernist stupidity ruined my fun.”
All he is really doing is pointing to the manifest and sundry contradictions within modern intellectual history, which like Ouroboros use rationalism to destroy rationalism, and, not surprisingly, then have nothing useful or practical to say. In the symbol, the image is intended to connote both destruction and creation. In the modern Academy, the snake succeeds, somehow, in digesting itself, leaving nothing, as Bloom says, but disingenuous but absolutely clear nihilism.
Another title might be: “How the modern University became civilization and democracies greatest enemy.”
Bloom is sympathetic when Rousseau talks about the General Will, and people being forced to “be free”. He sees in Rousseau a foreshadowing of the later distinction de Tonnies drew between “Gesellschaft” and “Gemeinschaft.”
In his portrayal of the problem of the Last Man, Bloom is absolutely useful, though. Who is this person in the strip mall, and what is their purpose in life? What could, and what should be their purpose, and who are we to comment, criticize, or commend?
And where do we go from here? Unlike Bloom, I retain what gets called a “normative” disposition. I think the Big Questions can be settled in flexible but relatively fixed ways. I might say it this way: I believe the beginning of a path can be described which will always lead somewhere interesting and useful if followed with diligence and courage.
He thought that some questions were inherently sufficient in themselves, and that the process of answering was the process of diminishing and eventually the process of destroying through innervation and starvation the culturally creative energies of the human race. This, in any event, is what I understood him to have said.
I am in the 3rd part now, and should finish in the next week or so. I understand his fascination with universities and the life of the mind. I have felt it myself. I felt it at the University of Chicago, in fact. I used to find bookstores enchanting places, because there were so many places to go.
That feeling has diminished to a great extent. Where I saw endlessly magical places in the past, now I see a long series of dead ends, generalized admission of failure, and the marketing of niceness, novelty, and career success.
When I want the answers I seek, my most useful resource is a meditation mat in my room, looking at candles, and inhaling incense and listening to very pleasant music.
Why seek the counsel of neurotics if the goal is seeking an end to neuroticism? All fools have solutions to the problem of foolishness, but . . .
Take any given Is-Ness, say “the rich”. There are many interconnecting fields, which I think would most usefully be visualized as clouds in motion. The “rich” sometimes become poor. Many are on the bubble. Poor become rich. Some rich, like some poor, are heartless. Some rich, like some poor, are very open hearted and philanthropic. Some are political and some are not. Some are reactionaries, some genuine Liberals, and some, like George Soros, are open opponents of democracy and political freedom.
I would submit that binary distinctions by means of which we confuse reality with our map of reality are artifacts of times when sime distinctions helped survival, and that exist not just in our brains, but our gut brains as well. Above the neck: one of us/one of them. Below the neck: safe to eat/not safe to eat.
But we have, now, the capacity for nuance, and I would suggest that capacity depends for full expression on the capacity for relaxation, which is to say the relative demobilization in a conscious way of our lambic system, and a following heightening of remaining perceptual capabilities.
And I will continue to insis on the PHILOSOPHICAL importance of Kum Nye as a fantastic answer to the question “how do we return to feeling?”
The 2017 version of course would read “and would willingly submit to social censure and teeducation”.
Do you not see Macron and Metkel in this? Does this make Le Pen and Trump supporters “Penultimate Men”?
I love this metaphor, which we might also call the Problem of the bourgeoisie, and will have more to say. I am listening to the book, but need to get a hard copy to quote at length where he anticipated the non-debates on gay marriage and transgenderism.
The headline might well have read: “Harvard Graduate School plans separate but equal graduation for blacks.”
The KKK itself could ask for no more.
The path forward is not considering black people to be an alien race we only speak about in certain ways–from whom, to be clear, we can distill the feeling of personal virtue without interacting with them or helping them in any way–but actual human beings capable both of emotional pain and resilience, who we want to integrate in an authentic and honest way into the waters of the larger society.
Virtually everything done by the Left is intended to separate and isolate them. This is because their manias make them anti-Humanistic, blind, and profoundly savage. They think that directing their hateful energies against whites–rather than in support of blacks–is somehow different than the emotional underpinning of any other authoritarian regime. It isn’t.
What if this is translated as “modern cultural conditions destroyed my mother”? This, of course, would be an odd phrase upon which to project, but my intuitive sense is that, if I might continue, I am on solid ground here.
All of us contain within us what I tend to call “moments”. If there were a wax museum of our lives, there are scenes which never completed, which we never processed, which conjured overwhelming emotion which was simply passed through and never fully seen, never imbibed. Which persist over time, until we find the doors and open them and walk through with open eyes.
It is interesting, to me at least, to note that it is quite impossible to know the inner conditions of earliest childhood for nearly anyone. One can assume that a mother who is cold later was cold earlier, but this is not necessarily the case.
I was reading an article yesterday that Ted Bundy’s house, which was recently renovated, is reportedly haunted. Odd things happen. But to the point, he himself said his parents were great, and all the neighbors said they were a “nice family”.
What I would submit is that he was the victim of a double bind, a dual communication at least from his mother which he was unable to ever consciously process. One can receive “niceness” on one level, and literally unspeakable rage and violence on another. Sometimes the communication happens not directly, but tacitly, in terms of what is NOT said, and NOT done.
I am getting into and healing the deepest places within myself, and these are interesting caves. I am trying to record some of my explorations, and what I am finding written not just on my walls, but those of humanity. We are all, after all, connected, as the cliche would have it. I do believe in a collective unconscious, and something beyond it. If I go deep enough, I will find a path back to you.