Dear Occupant: Machiavelli contributed to the development of soft totalitarianism

(2014)

The oligarchs of the Western Lands long ago discovered that convincing people that they are free is a more efficient way to reduce them to helotry than crushing them with tanks, since even the most propaganda-enriched of helots can tell that something is off once the tanks move in. 

As Machiavelli says in his famous treatise on managing a primate nation, The Prince, it is well to have a parliament in-between The Prince and The People, since the existence of a representative body automatically widens the gap between rulers and ruled. I am so proud for him, the idea is simply eery. 

That is, incidentally, the most important idea in the bloody book. The rest of the book simply isn’t Machiavellian enough. Ramifying application of this idea is the ideological history of the world since the late 18th Century without all of the linguistic masks that it ordinarily wears, such as "Congress", "Parliament",  and "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" etc. 

The Princes of our time know full well that any attempt to actually enact the ideals of 1789, variously interpreted by the “Democrats” and the “Communists” etc of the post-Century of Lights era, would simply result in a Reign-of-Terror-like or plasmic instability which would lead to either the entrenchment or the replacement of the oligarchie du jour. 

I will close with a little nod to a certain East Asian nation which is finally, finally! grokking that there are gains in efficiency to be made from the deliberate exercise of soft totalitarianism, at least during times of relative prosperity. Xiexie! on behalf of its venerable people, who know not of what ideological principle they are the happy beneficiaries. And thank you, Machiavelli, for providing soft totalitarianism with one of its most important tools. 

Category error: reframing the 'Modernist epic'

"Category Error: Reframing the 'Modernist Epic'"

I was looking at a letter exchange between Hart Crane and Yvor Winters and I thought: what children these men were, like Alexander Pope at his worst, and how awful it would have been to discuss anything with either one. Look at them, just look at them squabbling over the term 'epic' and its applicability or not to Hart Crane's The Bridge. Winters appears to have been basically a sour, choleric man, although he has insight to share in-between the fits. Crane was an emotionally-turbulent, undisciplined ricochet of an alcoholic who was, in this instance, clearly attaching private, fetishistic emphasis on the syllables "e" and "pic". One could be forgiven for wishing Yvor Winters had been a junky, and Hart Crane an espresso fiend. Things could hardly have gone any worse, and their personal relationship could hardly have been more acrimonious and explosive. Imagine publicly denouncing a brilliant masterpiece over a disagreement so trivial, thereby trashing a man's reputation who, faults aside, was always the better and the brighter of the two (if not the stable one likely to live to a ripe old age)!

Now, as to what they were discussing, both men's positions are bollocks. It is quite clear that the Classical epic obeys certain rules and adopts certain trappings which were particular to the Classical civilisation. The Western long poem, on the other hand, is a genre which has flourished in the last two centuries in our civilisation. Examples of the Western long poem include T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, William Wordsworth's The Prelude, James Merill's The Changing Light at Sandover, Hart Crane's The Bridge, and David Jones' The Anathemata, a charred copy of which is in front of me. It was one of the books Professor Wizard managed to save back when his home was fire-bombed.

The Western long poem, to conclude, is a genre all its own; but it has always had something of an identity crisis. You would not believe the tortured extent to which authors of such works go to convince others that they are writing epics rather than glorying in the authentic, particular merit of what they are about. The Bridge, to conclude, is a fine poem, and it needs no other descriptive; or if it does need one, then let that descriptive recognize its essentially Western rather than Classical origins. Granted, future generations of sour art critics and alcoholic long poem authors will find some other triviality to savage each other about, but at least this particular knife is now stored on a high shelf.

As above, so below: the juncture between utopian beliefs and everyday life

(2014)

The juncture between utopian beliefs and everyday life is any act of fairness. The placement of an abstract point somewhere in the distance of the shining future, while unrealizable, is the realization of a certain actual movement towards that futuristic chimera which could not have occurred without its assistance. 

Utopians are humanised by their Utopias, but certainly one should consider the other side of the coin. Just as one variety of Utopianism humanises the Utopian’s everyday behaviour, so does another dehumanise in proportion. Utopianism is dangerous, as it involves basic drives, but inevitable and ubiquitous. There is scarcely a group but has its own sense of the shining future which is magically going to make life more equal or less entropic.

The point at which overarching ideology and beating individual intersect is complex, fascinating, and lost in a sea of ideologues. But pure ideological drives can be extracted from that sea, divorced from particulars, distilled to essentials. Comparative ideology is at least a tonic for an age of ideologues the prevailing custom of whom is to talk all at once. The resemblance to Black Sea polyphonic folk music is unmistakeable.

On the probable outcome of even merely calling for Russia's ejection from SWIFT

(written in 2014)

Calls to remove Russia from SWIFT could turn it from an institution into just another option, which is long overdue anyway. Either the Shanghai Cooperation Organization nations, the BRICS generally, or some combination of the two are likely to set up their own analogue to SWIFT out of necessity and as a logical outcome of their increasing financial interpenetration. 

If one isolates someone or something in order ostensibly to weaken them, and in point of fact this isolation strengthens them, then either one's assessment of the situation was wrong or one's stated reasons differed from one's actual policy. Given the West, I would say that there is a little bit of both factors at work. 

The SCO and the BRICS understand now, more than ever, that supposedly open and global institutions tend actually to be Western and closed.

The SCO's deliberate response to Western encirclement (NATO expansion, "Pivot to Asia" etc.) is actually very moderate and gradualist for two reasons which might surprise people raised on a classical-conditioning diet of demonization. One, they have so far refused to rise to the bait represented by encirclement. Two, they would seem to prefer, in general, not to set up SCO analogues to Western institutions until they are actually forced to do so by the press of circumstances.

Make no mistake, however. Serious discussion about what to do in precisely this scenario has been on the minds of Chinese and Russian leaders for years; and a policy of waiting for the West to make the first move in this or that area is not the same thing as the absence of a detailed rollout plan in the event of particular outcomes.

Flower the tom kitten confirms animal sentence construction

(written in 2014, retrospective in 2016: I no longer believe in the 'continuity hypothesis' due to rejecting the theory of evolution as it relates to human beings, but everything else I wrote about animals and the construction of sentences still rings true to me today. By the way, they know not to even bother speaking thus to most human beings, who rarely even communicate with each other. How I love animals, and how I wish I loved humans half as much.)

Flower, the tom kitten who visits on his rounds, went directly to the shower stall, a place where he does not habitually go, and began meowing. It happened that there was no water dish for visitors, since I had knocked it over and never gone about replacing it. So I did, and he drank about a cup of water. He had A) remembered that the shower, though dry, is associated with water and B) recognised that another animal ("Trent") would understand the combination of meowing and that association. One infers that the absence of water in the shower stall was adjudged to be structurally and syntactically similar to the absence of water in the spot where he ordinarily finds it. This is the same tom kitten who hissed at me once when he was meowing and agitated, which was when I actually noticed the scratch on his nose, remembered the cat fight I had heard earlier, and put two and two together. It was the most efficient way he could arrive at explaining his being upset on account of a fight in particular. It is clear that he prefers to use binary compounds to get his points across. In glossing terms, the two sentences would be "UPSET ABSENCE-OF-WATER" (meows + pantomime) and "UPSET FIGHT-EARLIER" (meows + unprecedented hiss).  Implicit in his choice of binary compounds is a recognition that single words or signs communicate less than clusters. The sentence as we know it arises from this recognition, and with it human spatial and temporal syntax.

An explanation for homosexuality which is neither a Rube Goldberg device nor a kwashiorkor-swollen Somalian nor a kicked puppy

(written in 2013)

The origins of homosexuality, I suggest, are to be found in the ingrained instincts of heterosexuals. Homosexuality is rather an exaggeration of heterosexuality than some kind of antithesis to it. For the tendency of those with similar fitness levels and looks to flock together to attract flocks of opposite polarity of like comeliness is obvious from everyday experience.

The exaggeration of this tendency is the natural byproduct of a mechanism which rather drives male and female together than ‘destroys traditional marriage’, and accounts for the occurrence of homosexuality among many species. One might represent it visually as the ritualistic separation of men and women at old-style dinner parties; the women would leave the men to their cigars, robber baronage and whisky, retiring somewhere soft, biscuit-replete and smelling faintly of lavender and mulberry. 

Some men, and some women, happen to take their respective domains as all-encompassing; this is natural because the ideal form which is, for instance, an adaptive trait such as the ability to reproduce at all refracts through actual circumstances so as to produce a range of expressions among which there will exist outliers, that being just the price of the trait’s existing at all in a range of individuals of the same species.