Wandering around in this morass of meaninglessness–can I stipulate that when someone wants to “contextualize” something they are admitting being lost?–it occurred to me what a RELIEF anger is in such an environment. It was welling up in me. I was getting images of being a KKK Night Rider, as a vastly preferable alternative to living in that horrible world.
We need to recall that the artistic climate leading up to Bolshevism was Futurism, which extolled meaninglessness.
We need to recall that the artistic climate of Berlin in the period leading up to National Socialism was one of Dada and horror. “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1920 )might be viewed as one of the first–perhaps the first–Horror film. Or M, perhaps the first film about a serial killer.
Or Bauhaus, which was a de facto rejection of historical culture, where “culture” within my terms is “that which facilitates meaning.” It rejected historical means of generating meaning, while offering nothing new other than a purported “rationality”.
The artistic world was out of creative ideas for benevolent, desirable social and personal growth and transformation. It rejected the old, without having understood what functions it performed, without grasping what actually matters in a social order. I have argued that art should be INTEGRATIVE. I have offered specifical moral values it should foster: the rejection of self pity, perseverance, and enhanced capacity to see, in all the possible sense of that word.
I am willing to countenance any and all events in art, if they lead to growth of these virtues. “The Cabinet” might–I have not seen it–but I see no credible reason to suppose most modern horror does. How do you want away more generous, more open, more loving? You don’t. You want away traumatized, but addicted to that feeling.
Berlin saw constant street battles between Moscow-supporting Communists, and National Socialists, who believed no in the primacy of the worker, but of the GERMAN. This was their only difference: Fascists are in general more honest. Hitler did in fact advance the cause of most ordinary Germans, whereas Lenin and Stalin helped virtually no one outside a power elite.
But the point I want to make is that nihilism, a sense of helplessness in the fact of the task of meaning formation, leads to violence.
The KKK thought it was defending a way of life, and the virtue of its women. They were no more wrong in this than are Communists in claiming they defend the rights of the worker in the face of oppressors. Communists tyrannize, with very few exception, EVERYONE in a society, including Party members who forget their special standing, and need to conform publicly in all cases to even the most idiotic Party lines.
I would actually go so far as to say that the violence of the KKK was more RATIONAL than the violence of the Communists. The KKK killed perhaps 4,000 people over a span of a century. There were WEEKSs when Communists killed that many people. The KKK was trying to resurrect a social order that had been destroyed in war. The Communists had nothing to point to, no creative activity. No net positive for virtually anyone, but rather countless trails of tears, including the countless millions displaced by their policies, in an analogous fashion to our displacement of Indians, but multipled by a 100.
The KKK terrorized a small part of society–and to be clear, what they did was clearly evil; I am in no respect defending them, other than to say their terrorism was much more defensible than that of the Communists–but Communists terrorized EVERYONE. There was no reliable “us”. There was no reliable group, no family, no place where trust was warranted.
As I say from time to time, my view of Communism is that it is as close to a purely evil creed as can be imagined. One could say that literal Satanism would be worse, but if it were called by that name, it would still be more honest, and could scarcely be more sanguinary.
And this evil–this justification of a violence made psychologically necessary by artistic and intellectual failures–is facilitated by meaninglessness of the sort on display in hundreds of museums the world over.