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Billmon: 04/07
Desolation Row
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UPDATE:
Yeah, let’s dance! From Russia With Cash Russian Dressing
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Schiavo memo, Heilrocket, Powerline, Power Lie
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Culture of Death
Healing the sick, sheltering the homeless, caring for the poor, comforting the dying, consoling the grief-stricken, providing emergency relief to the disaster-stricken, educating the children (in places where they otherwise woudn’t be) — these are hardly small things, and the church does them all over the world every day. They don’t usually make the papers or become discussion topics in the political blogosphere, but they make an enormous difference in the reduction of human misery on the planet.
But that’s precisely why, on further reflection, John Paul II’s failings seem so grievous to me, and why I should have confronted them more directly in my earlier post. By endangering the church’s going-concern value, he may have done great harm to the world, creating costs which future shareholders will be paying for generations to come.
@Billmon that is handsome of you — graciously done, and reads well. More bloggers — and writers in general — should write followups, revisions, self-critique, retrospective, etc., showing how their/our thoughts change and evolve across time (whether a week or two, a cool-down period, or a few years or decades). We place imho far too much emphasis on presenting a Seamless Position, an internally-consistent, defensible edifice of prosody and ideas — and too little on sharing the process by which ideas and thoughts morph, mutate, accrete, splinter, etc.
Anyway, my somewhat baffled thought for the day is Why — why is it that so many institutions are, at this particular historical moment, suffering from such a strong restorationist/revanchist, nostalgic/authoritarian backlash? I offer as fodder for this inquiry the “Bande Materam” style Hindu nationalist rightwing revanchist/revisionist movement in India; the Shari’a/fundamentalist Islamist movements worldwide; the good ol’ time Capo/Bossman style of Berlusconi and Putin; the resurgence of the BNP in the UK; the primacy of Opus Dei and other rightwing/restorationist forces in the Catholic church; the “red state” Bible-thumper phenomenon in the US with its zeal to replay the Scopes trial and possibly the Salem trials as well; the ultra-revanchist Settler movement in Israel; the wingnut extremism in the US, reminiscent of the McCarthy years in the nostalgic return to comic-book villains and comic-book methods of dealing with them (biff! bang! pow!). Sometimes one feels that the whole species has taken leave of its senses in a kind of Saturnalia of anti-empiricism, anti-rationality, a worldwide tantrum against the Enlightenment and all its values.
It seems at times as if, all over the world, people have lurched a little too far towards modernity [flash: the ape-people standing around TMA-1, daring each other to touch it, flinching and snatching their hands away?] and are now flinching back from it as if burnt. Or perhaps it is that the inhumanity and penchant for crisis-creation that characterise industrial capitalism have attacked the fabric of daily life so deeply that millions of people are in some kind of emotional revolt against it, or trying to be (but guided by the plutes into safely ineffectual “culture wars”)? Or is it perhaps that on some subliminal level we, as a species, understand how far we have overdrawn our biotic bank account, in what a delicate and perilous state our civilisations stand, and our instinct is to duck-n-cover, crouch back into a defensive stance, return to the fantasy of a safer, more idyllic past?
Is it that several institutions — the Church, capitalism, the American Republic, Islam, the oil-based economies, nationalism, patriotism, faith in general — have reached the cusp of decay all at the same time, and that desperate efforts are underway to shore them up because we are incapable of imagining anything that will replace them? Are we teetering on the edge of some new social organisation that is (of course) being fought tooth and nail by those who feel safer with the “tried and true”?
Why the heck is it that all this revanchism, authoritarianism, repression, and backlash is going on in so many venues and sects simultaneously? Is this just a phase we’re going through, or truly the beginning of some kind of bizarre Retrograde Era when the absolute values of patriarchy, warrior-cults, bullying sky-gods, feudalism, and the like will dominate the globe?
Posted by: DeAnander | Apr 7 2005 18:42 utc | 16
There is no monolothic World Elite, there are a series of small powers (and one big power..), and a whole bunch of people who want more power than they have. The Zeitgeist, specifying, for example, that cracking down on terrorists, or of paying workers less or finding cheaper ones, or of obfuscating things in the media, of playing on emotion, etc. please them no end. Throw a few pages of the rule book away, and they will all come out and play. Some of them don’t even have any specific evil intentions, they are just playing the game as presented, fitting in, buying the mantra, wanting to be part of things, be someone – because they are also afraid of loosing, of being left behind.
The Elite (that is, media types / owners, Western pols, corporation heads, some rich royals, those who have made their mark – Kissinger comes to mind – and various hangers on who have some cards in their pockets, etc.) are just like any other social group. They have their watering holes – The Bilderberger meetings, or Davos – where they mingle and discuss and take up what the most scintillating actors said, or reverently refer to the latest views of those who have clout, and even sit still and listen quietly to boring propaganda (Before the reception!) So will reputations be made, and so does (part of) history march forward. Jerome said similar…
Those who have influence and power are always calculating the present situation in terms of the future, their position in 5 years time, growing assets, secondary goals, etc. The past interests them not at all, and they would never even contemplate seriously referring to it as positive in any way (‘Cepting those marvellous furniture makers..). Their -isms are not hankering after organic turnips, smelly horse-drawn cart, communal prayer, and a friendly neighborhood, right? That is all I meant to say…Pulls to the past, or drive to the future depend on what social group one belongs to.
The elites’ aim is to conserve their power and to grow richer, and for that you have to pro-active.
Some manipulators will be more effective than others, as in any group; some may be acting on very long-term agendas, for sure. Some may be more influential than most of us like to admit, and actually running the show, in the direction of jdp’s posts, I think. Yes. But how to correctly scope that out, I don’t know.
Posted by: Blackie | Apr 8 2005 21:30 utc | 73
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