Glamour and emptiness, organic culture and Nationalism

Posted by Guessedworker on Saturday, 04 November 2006 10:19.

Stephen LaTulippe has a fine essay at Lewrockwell.com that repays a read.  It draws the battle lines between what he calls a Postmodern and an Organic society.  Here are a few passages:-

He begins with some reflections on the long-running HBO TV series, Sex in the City.

For those who haven’t seen it, Sex and the City tells the story of four thirty-something single women living in New York City. They live a life that, while all too common today, is perhaps unprecedented in human history (especially for women). They are completely deracinated and homogenized, having no discernable family, either nuclear or extended. They have no religious convictions. Their life consists mostly of wandering around Manhattan, eating in chic restaurants, maxing-out their credit cards in fashionable boutiques, and engaging in a bewildering variety of casual sexual relationships.

... In essence, their lives are more akin to that of animals than to anything that could be called genuinely human. They live lives dominated by impulses and sensations rather than by the intellect or the spirit, lives of indulgence rather than of purpose. They reside in the “eternal present,” without regard for the future and without reverence for the past. Even more disturbingly, their lifestyle has a spooky passivity to it, a sense of slavery to their vices. If someone takes them to a swanky Thai restaurant, they’ll eat. If someone hands them a martini, they’ll drink. If a handsome guy appears, they’ll copulate.

That is, in a nutshell, the sum total of their existence. Their post-modernism really isn’t a culture, but an anti-culture. It’s what people do in the absence of authentic culture…it is a downward spiral into the abyss. These women are, admittedly, an extreme example. But the beauty of art lies in its ability to harness archetypes for the purpose of making social and political commentary.

LaTulippe then moves on to explain Organic culture in all its traditional, familial and spiritual connectedness.

Such an individual also looks to the future and adjusts his time preferences to account for the needs of future generations. Respect of one’s ancestors and concern for one’s descendants are thus wrapped together in a religious and culture milieu that is of profound importance in everyday life. These families are linked to other, similar families through the bonds of culture and religion. Together, they see themselves as a unique “tribe” moving through history toward some final destiny.

Well, perhaps LaTulippe is stretching for this a little, and writing what he thinks should be the case.  As he says later on in the essay:-

It is difficult for contemporary generations to even imagine what has been lost. One of the reasons I enjoy cinematic productions of Jane Austen novels is for precisely this reason. It is fascinating to see what Western culture actually looked like before the collapse and to see how the people thought and acted. I’m fascinated by their complex manners, their vibrant sense of right-and-wrong, and their organic connection to their history (in Sense and Sensibility, even the bad guy, a total cad, carries a copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets in his pocket). Western culture has been withering since the early 20th Century. Those of us born during or after the sixties social revolution have no living memory of even a vestigial remnant of Western culture, but rather have experienced only the degenerate post-modernism, drenched in stifling humanism, absurd universalism, and fatuous egalitarianism, that has dominated ever since.

One of the few advantages of having reached the age of rebelliousness just in time for the 60s revolution was that some vestigial sense of the Organic had entered into us, to be either swept away by the “pull” of the social tide or to hold, stubborn as a sharp rock concealed in the swept, golden sands of some fabulous bathing beach.  Those of us who stubbed our toes repeatedly on our rock had no choice but, eventually, to respect its conservative reality.  In some rather obvious ways we envied our frolicking peers.  But in others we despised their excess and superfice.  Our rebelliousness had switched sides.

For myself, by the time I was eighteen I had already met the girl I would marry and disdained education to try to work my way into motor-racing.  When, a couple of years later, I exchanged my taste in rock - the electric guitar kind - for serious music I was clearly a hopeless case, entirely lost to modernity (albeit, of course, by pure accident and through no virtue or understanding of my own).

The organic, English working-class culture that had moulded my family’s background and survived generally into the 1950s is, to me, an unremarkable thing.  I cannot really wax like Laurie Lee about it, illuminating its charmingly odd and recondite corners, its bakelite, Bisto and braces.  Actually, I don’t know that lyricism and charm particularly attach to it.  It just was, that’s all.  Perhaps cultures are only really salient when viewed from distance and with the benefit of unfamiliarity.

In any case, I recoil instinctively from overdoing the Organic thing.  We can’t just re-create it.  It’s gone, become Spenglerian theory:-

Primitive marriage ... was anything but sentimental. A man wants stout sons who will perpetuate his name and his deeds beyond his death into the future and enhance them, just as he has done himself through feeling himself heir to the calling and works of his ancestors.

Too much.  Too much.

And here, I believe, LaTulippe committs the mistake of many social conservatives, especially religious conservatives whose faith-focus unbalances their mentation.  He supposes that ...

1) The old Organic culture can be revivified to order, and

2) that it can be done on any kind of useful timescale.

He writes:-

Since the West has adopted this model, it has only two choices: It can throw off the yoke of post-modernism and reestablish an organic culture that is capable of reproducing itself, or it will be colonized and overrun by other, more prolific cultures. Western elites believe they can avoid a demographic collapse by importing replacement populations and corrupting them with post-modernism before the newcomers are able to impose their own organic culture on the host nations. This may work for America and its largely Hispanic immigrant population, but its prospects with European Islam are, to say the least, highly suspect.

It will not even work for America.  Anyway, LaTulippe’s difficulty here is that social conservatism produces results only on a generational timescale.  We do not have several generations to cook the broth, and a five-minute chicken soup won’t do.

LaTulippe does not mention the word “Nationalism” at any point in his essay.  But that is the only vehicle we have in the short-term, and I say this as a political Conservative.  It is not, of course, a vehicle licenced and ready for the road today.  But it could be made so within a decade, and would be a serviceable stop-gap while the Organic nature of our society slowly grows anew.



Comments:


1

Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 04 Nov 2006 13:09 | #

I should add that the altogether wonderful John Betjeman did colour the cultural landscape of post-war Britain with poetry of an honest, gentle, wistful Englishness.


2

Posted by Steve Edwards on Sat, 04 Nov 2006 18:27 | #

An excellent essay, Mr Guessedworker, and I couldn’t agree more. What the elites have forged runs utterly contrary to human AND animal nature. The edifice will crumble.


3

Posted by Al Ross on Sat, 04 Nov 2006 21:57 | #

Superb piece, GW, with the scarcity value that comes with the mention of the peerless Spengler.

In Israel, no doubt the spiritual home of the ‘Sex and the City’ writing and production team, women have an average of 2.7 children, the highest figure among modern democracies, with upper-middle class women giving birth to an impressive mean 4.3 future enemies of our race.


4

Posted by Bo Sears on Sun, 05 Nov 2006 04:06 | #

Without opposing the overall thrust of this article, the fact is that we should be deeply suspicious of the realities fed to us by the flickering TV screen, and we should be deeply suspicious of political or social arguments based on TV shows.

I don’t begrudge LeTulippe his right to say:

“...Sex and the City tells the story of four thirty-something single women living in New York City. They live a life that, while all too common today, is perhaps unprecedented in human history (especially for women).”

But I do think he has no basis for saying that the Sex/City lifestyle is a life that is “all too common today.” These are lives that live themselves out in the minds of Hollywood’s creative geniuses, not on the streets of New York City. The four chic stylers in Sex/City are just fictional caricatures posed as reality. Gesture as bedrock.

LeTulippe underlines the essentially anti-intellectual and anti-reality basis for his analysis by insisting that “the beauty of art lies in its ability to harness archetypes for the purpose of making social and political commentary.” That is perhaps the most pure definition of post-post-modern rhetoric about art that I have ever heard.

He is actually saying art harnesses archetypes to allow writers to comment on social and political matters, and on top of that balderdash, this ability or capability rendered in behalf of writers is the “beauty of art.” Art is beautiful when it provides archetypes to writers for commentary! So much for the old post-modern position that “art is for art’s sake.”

Let’s face it, one of the women in Sex/City is so downright unattractive that it is impossible that she would capture the attention of the men she seems to attract. She and her TV success are entirely based on nepotism and tribalism, and nothing else.


5

Posted by Frisco on Sun, 05 Nov 2006 08:58 | #

I think that link should be:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/latulippe/latulippe71.html

Hopefully


6

Posted by Guessedworker on Sun, 05 Nov 2006 09:42 | #

Thanks, Frisco.  I will mend the link now.



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