Sigmund Freud – John Malcolm

The Best of Fred Hutchison: Postmodern Barbarians

April 19, 2012 by John Malcolm 3 Comments

By Fred Hutchison | April 19, 2012 | RenewAmerica

Originally published June 17, 2004

In this essay, I discuss some psychological similarities between Postmodernism and barbarism. Both seem to inflict some of the same kinds of torments upon the mind. I shall contrast these miseries with the joys of a high culture.

Modernism and primitivism

By an irony of history, men of the French Enlightenment began the cult of “progress” at the same time they began to idealize the “noble savage.” This curious paradox occurred in the middle of the eighteenth century. Interestingly, the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau provided a stimulus for both seemingly contradictory things.

The fascination with primitivism has continued through the modern and postmodern eras. Modernism was disconnected from the great ideals of the classical civilization of Europe — which I like to call Baroque Civilization. In spite of this detachment from the old ideals, Modernism profited greatly from the western cultural heritage. It constantly drew from this heritage in spite of its irrational ideological insistence that the past was “darkened,” the present day is “enlightened,” and the future will be glorious.

There was a Romantic reaction against Modernism in which Classical and Medieval revivals in the arts and architecture occurred. Some critics have pronounced these Victorian styles to be “decadent.” (This kind of decadence is not to be confused with the fin-de-siecle decadent art which was pornographic.) Pitirim Sorokin said that Victorian classicism was “overripe.”

Some sensitive artists and scholars revolted against this overripe decadence and reached towards primitivism. Gauguin, a French post-impressionist painter, traveled to Tahiti to celebrate primitivism in his art and in his experience. Picasso’s transition from Neoclassicism to abstract expressionism began as he obsessively stared at an African mask. Margaret Mead traveled to Samoa seeking a rationale for a liberation from the Victorian “sexual repression” which Freud warned about. She sought an example of sexual liberation in primitive Samoa. Her game of pseudo-science has long since been exposed and discredited. But the myths she created are still in circulation among postmodern liberals. The myths are going strong in the cult of Multiculturalism and in the delusions of the sexual revolution.

In our popular culture, the longing for primitivism and barbarism can still be heard in the primitive beat of much of hard rock music, in cartoonish movies such as 1982’s Conan the Barbarian, and in the clownish exhibitionism of public wrestling.

The fallacies of barbarian fantasies

Kenneth Clark made short work of the Romantic nostalgia for barbarism. “People tell me that they prefer barbarism to civilization. I doubt if they have given it a long enough trial….they are bored with civilization; but all the evidence suggests that the boredom of barbarism is infinitely greater. Quite apart from discomforts and privations, there was no escape from it. Very restricted company, no books, no light after dark, no hope. On one side the sea battering away, on the other infinite expanses of bog and forest. A most melancholy existence!” (Civilization, by Kenneth Clarke)

Clarke pointed out that the Anglo-Saxon poets had no illusions about barbarism.

“A wise man may grasp how ghastly it shall be/ When all this world’s wealth stands waste/ Even as now, in many places over the earth,/ Walls stand wind beaten,/ heavy with hoar frost; ruined-habitations…/The maker of men has so marred this dwelling/ That human laughter is not heard about it/ and idle stand these old giant works.”

“These fragments have I shorn up against my ruin.” (T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land) Eliot’s gloom sounds a little like barbarian melancholy. He was an intelligent modern looking over the brink at Postmodernism. The existential despair which was shortly to follow Eliot’s time would be even more forlorn in its message. The liberal Postmodernism of our day is one further stage of retreat from hope.

Postmodern counter-culture

Postmodernism is not decadent. It is counter-cultural. Decadence (from the root word decay) is a debasement of aging cultural forms. A counter-cultural revolt is a rejection, not an inferior imitation of the forms’ cultural heritage. Postmodernism involves an utter renunciation of the Western cultural heritage. As a result, Postmoderns not only cherish cultural primitivism, as did their decadent Modernist forbears; they suffer from some of the pathologies which the barbarians used to suffer — boredom, fragmentation, hopelessness, and melancholy.

I would also add claustrophobia. Postmoderns do not suffer the claustrophobia of living at close quarters in a mud hut. I think they suffer from a mental claustrophobia of thinking within the closed system of cultural determinism. It is as though their minds are trapped in an endlessly repeating loop of a computer program. As their thinking has become compressed, they have become prone to narrow ideologies, ideological myths, the terrors of ideological bogeymen, and cartoonish interpretations of the world. The Postmodern renunciation of reason has turned their minds into a shadowy underground cavern in which all the exits are blocked. Such may be the fate of those who turn away from reason and from high culture.

Barbarism is filled with myths and taboos. The politically-correct speech codes of Postmodernism are also full of taboos. A barbarian will kill you if you violate a taboo. A Postmodernist will demonize you if you violate a taboo, will try to block you from speaking, and will prevent you from getting tenure if he can.

Read the full article here.

Modernism vs. Postmodernism (africanamericanlitcsu.wordpress.com)
After Postmodernism? “True, but still…” (theotherjournal.com)
Postmodernity and Professional Life (edprof.net)
New Romanticism (abigaillaurel.com)
What makes a postmodern library? (zaddymanlib.wordpress.com)
Postmodernism: Style & Subversion at the V&A (rattlingoastick.wordpress.com)
The Enlightenment Was the Catastrophe: (brothersjuddblog.com)

Filed Under: Cultural Marxism, Progressivism Tagged With: Civilization, Classical Civilization, Classical Education, Claustrophobia, College Speech Codes, Counter Culture, Cult of Progress, Cultural Determinism, Cultural Heritage, Decadence, Demonize, Europe, Exhibitionism, Fred Hutchison, French Enlightenment, Future, God, Hard Rock Music, High Culture, Ideologues, Ideology, Irrationality, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Kenneth Clark, Kenneth Clarke, Liberalism, Liberals, Margaret Mead, Medieval, Modernism, Morality, Multiculturalism, Myths, Noble Savage, Pablo Picasso, Pathology, Paul Gauguin, Pitirim Sorokin, Political Correctness, Politics of Rage, Popular Culture, Pornography, Postmodernism, Primitivism, Psychology, Reason, Revolution, Samoa, Sexual Repression, Sexual Revolution, Shut Up, Sigmund Freud, Subversion, T.S. Eliot, Taboos, Tenure, Traditional Values, Utopianism, Vendettas, Victorian, Vindictiveness, Western Civilization, Wrestling

Why There is a Culture War: Gramsci and Tocqueville in America

April 2, 2012 by John Malcolm 2 Comments

By John Fonte | December 1, 2000 | Orthodoxy Today

John Fonte examines the philosophical antecedents of the culture war to show why the culture war takes the shape that is has. He reveals why a constant vigilance towards the permanent things that breathe life into the culture is necessary. The essay runs about fifteen printed pages but the time spent reading it will prove worthwhile.

As intellectual historians have often had occasion to observe, there are times in a nation’s history when certain ideas are just “in the air.” Admittedly, this point seems to fizzle when applied to our particular historical moment. On the surface of American politics, as many have had cause to mention, it appears that the main trends predicted over a decade ago in Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?” have come to pass — that ideological (if not partisan) strife has been muted; that there is a general consensus about the most important questions of the day (capitalism, not socialism; democracy, not authoritarianism); and that the contemporary controversies that do exist, while occasionally momentous, are essentially mundane, concerned with practical problem-solving (whether it is better to count ballots by hand or by machine) rather than with great principles.

And yet, I would argue, all that is true only on the surface. For simultaneously in the United States of the past few decades, recurring philosophical concepts have not only remained “in the air,” but have proved influential, at times decisive, in cultural and legal and moral arguments about the most important questions facing the nation. Indeed: Prosaic appearances to the contrary, beneath the surface of American politics an intense ideological struggle is being waged between two competing worldviews. I will call these “Gramscian” and “Tocquevillian” after the intellectuals who authored the warring ideas — the twentieth-century Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci, and, of course, the nineteenth-century French intellectual Alexis de Tocqueville. The stakes in the battle between the intellectual heirs of these two men are no less than what kind of country the United States will be in decades to come.

Refining class warfare

We’ll begin with an overview of the thought of Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), a Marxist intellectual and politician. Despite his enormous influence on today’s politics, he remains far less well-known to most Americans than does Tocqueville.

Gramsci’s main legacy arises through his departures from orthodox Marxism. Like Marx, he argued that all societies in human history have been divided into two basic groups: the privileged and the marginalized, the oppressor and the oppressed, the dominant and the subordinate. Gramsci expanded Marx’s ranks of the “oppressed” into categories that still endure. As he wrote in his famous Prison Notebooks, “The marginalized groups of history include not only the economically oppressed, but also women, racial minorities and many ‘criminals.'” What Marx and his orthodox followers described as “the people,” Gramsci describes as an “ensemble” of subordinate groups and classes in every society that has ever existed until now. This collection of oppressed and marginalized groups — “the people” — lack unity and, often, even consciousness of their own oppression. To reverse the correlation of power from the privileged to the “marginalized,” then, was Gramsci’s declared goal.

Power, in Gramsci’s observation, is exercised by privileged groups or classes in two ways: through domination, force, or coercion; and through something called “hegemony,” which means the ideological supremacy of a system of values that supports the class or group interests of the predominant classes or groups. Subordinate groups, he argued, are influenced to internalize the value systems and world views of the privileged groups and, thus, to consent to their own marginalization.

Far from being content with a mere uprising, therefore, Gramsci believed that it was necessary first to delegitimize the dominant belief systems of the predominant groups and to create a “counter-hegemony” (i.e., a new system of values for the subordinate groups) before the marginalized could be empowered. Moreover, because hegemonic values permeate all spheres of civil society — schools, churches, the media, voluntary associations — civil society itself, he argued, is the great battleground in the struggle for hegemony, the “war of position.” From this point, too, followed a corollary for which Gramsci should be known (and which is echoed in the feminist slogan) — that all life is “political.” Thus, private life, the work place, religion, philosophy, art, and literature, and civil society, in general, are contested battlegrounds in the struggle to achieve societal transformation.

It is perhaps here that one sees Gramsci’s most important reexamination of Marx’s thought. Classical Marxists implied that a revolutionary consciousness would simply develop from the objective (and oppressive) material conditions of working class life. Gramsci disagreed, noting that “there have always been exploiters and exploited” — but very few revolutions per se. In his analysis, this was because subordinate groups usually lack the “clear theoretical consciousness” necessary to convert the “structure of repression into one of rebellion and social reconstruction.” Revolutionary “consciousness” is crucial. Unfortunately, the subordinate groups possess “false consciousness,” that is to say, they accept the conventional assumptions and values of the dominant groups, as “legitimate.” But real change, he continued to believe, can only come about through the transformation of consciousness.

Just as Gramsci’s analysis of consciousness is more nuanced than Marx’s, so too is his understanding of the role of intellectuals in that process. Marx had argued that for revolutionary social transformation to be successful, the world views of the predominant groups must first be unmasked as instruments of domination. In classical Marxism, this crucial task of demystifying and delegitimizing the ideological hegemony of the dominant groups is performed by intellectuals. Gramsci, more subtly, distinguishes between two types of intellectuals: “traditional” and “organic.” What subordinate groups need, Gramsci maintains, are their own “organic intellectuals.” However, the defection of “traditional” intellectuals from the dominant groups to the subordinate groups, he held, is also important, because traditional intellectuals who have “changed sides” are well positioned within established institutions.

The metaphysics, or lack thereof, behind this Gramscian worldview are familiar enough. Gramsci describes his position as “absolute historicism,” meaning that morals, values, truths, standards and human nature itself are products of different historical epochs. There are no absolute moral standards that are universally true for all human beings outside of a particular historical context; rather, morality is “socially constructed.”

Historically, Antonio Gramsci’s thought shares features with other writers who are classified as “Hegelian Marxists” — the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs, the German thinker Karl Korsch, and members of the “Frankfurt School” (e.g., Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse), a group of theorists associated with the Institute for Social Research founded in Frankfurt, Germany in the 1920s, some of whom attempted to synthesize the thinking of Marx and Freud. All emphasized that the decisive struggle to overthrow the bourgeois regime (that is, middle-class liberal democracy) would be fought out at the level of consciousness. That is, the old order had to be rejected by its citizens intellectually and morally before any real transfer of power to the subordinate groups could be achieved.

Read the full article here.