Salon magazine has a piece by Stephen Eric Bronner, in praise of modernism as the great bulwark against bigotry. The piece, presenting modernism, claimed to be the descendent of "the enlightenment," is big on broad brushed generalities and short on specifics. Typical of the generic praise of modernism, Bronner paints with the broadest of brushes, in this essay, taken from a book, he depends on Max Weber, not on primary sources of information. Reading his piece I couldn't help but think that his view of modernism has a lot in common with the kind of color field abstraction in which nothing is represented but you have some kind of emotional response, or are supposed to, or, among the enlightened, modernists, know that you are supposed to have a reaction and - informed by critics of a kind not unlike Max Weber - what that reaction is supposed to be. Much as I like Mark Rothko, talking honesty about his work requires admitting that it makes no reference to real life and carries nothing back to it that increases an understanding of it. You can't figure out what modernism's place in the world really is without going into the details of what the modernists said and did, in full detail.
Here is what I said about his piece at Salon, with some additions. Long time readers will notice it recapitulates things I've written about, things I've researched through primary sources, of what some of the greatest heroes of modernism have, themselves said, instead of the secondary and often ideological sources said they said.
So many of the heroes of modernism have been bigots, many of them publicly, many of them in the very books in which their claim to moderny fame rests, Bronners theory depends on pretending that isn't the case. Having studied the history of eugenics, the establishment of racism and class bigotry as science, on its massive acceptance by the most modern people of the late 19th and 20th century, persisting today and popularized in evolutionary psychology, pushed by the folks among us who consider themselves the most "modern" of people, Bronner's idea is half-baked, at best. You have to go back and read the primary documents, written by those heroes of modernism, themselves, to discover that racism and bigotry was intrinsic to their "modern" scientific bigotry, you won't get that from the secondary crap that was written to cover up that fact.
The enlightenment didn't end slavery, many of its great figures kept slaves.
As much as modern, fashionable atheists hate the fact, slavery was ended largely at the behest of people arguing on the basis of the religious demand for justice. That's also something you can learn from reading what the abolitionists said instead of the secondary and tertiary sources that twist that to serve their ideology.
It's also telling how many of the heroes of modern literature, especially in the first half of the 20th century either flirted with or were enthusiastic for fascism and even Nazism. Gertrude Stein, as moderny as they get, was enthusiastic about Hitler and she actively promoted and produced pro-Vichy propaganda for sale to the American market. Stein, like many of her fellow modernists, was a rather flaming bigot, herself. The list given by Barbara Will in her article on Gertrude Stein's fascism is rather conclusive on that point
Why were so many prominent modernist writers and philosophers attracted to fascist or authoritarian regimes in the first half of the twentieth century? A list of those who were not—Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, and Robert Musil—pales in comparison to a list of those who were—Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Knut Hamsun, Paul de Man, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Filippo Marinetti, Martin Heidegger, Robert Brasillach, and a host of others.
Adding to those, Gabriele D'Annunzio was hailed by no less an authority than Mussolini as the "John the Baptist" of fascism. And I'd mention Gerhart Hauptmann, and could name many others if I weren't pressed for time. In an interview published in Perspectives on New Music, the great pianist and associate of Arnold Schoenberg, Eduard Steuermann, talked about how some guy campaigned with him to get an introduction to Schoenberg because he was so eager to study counterpoint with him while, at the same time, being a dedicated Nazi. He called that kind of thing "Viennese double counterpoint". In so far as the attachment of modernism to notably brutal, oppressive dictatorships*, scientific theories of racism and bigotry, while at the same time expressing full faith in science and "the enlightenment" such stuff is endemic to modernism. Sometimes, as in the faithfulness of Ezra Pound's friends after and even during his disgraceful promotion of fascism, it was based in nothing higher than personal and professional attachment.
I agree with the great radical painter, Jack Levine. "It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it." It also leads to this kind of B.S. published by major university publishing houses. Jack Levine was something of an unfashionable painter because he didn't abandon depiction of people, his art was entirely up to date and provided information about the real world of politics, society, arts, morals and a savage critique on religious as well as all other forms of corruption and hypocrisy. One of his later paintings shows two women sitting in a cafe. To me it is a perfect image of the entire business of social commentary as practiced by social critics and its place in the world.
Science, modern theories (modernism just adores theory, placing its study over that of reality) of everything are engaged in the business of destroying the planet we live on. The resurgence of scientific racism, something that never went away, is presented as being a flower of modernism, its mouthing is one of the more up-to-date and modern things the media does. The entire attitude of the modern is bound up in thinking and acting as superficial as any other identified movement of culture as dreamed up by university based scribblers. It shares in the same human weaknesses as any religion or political theory, racism, sexism, ethnic and race bigotry. It is especially prone to lapsing into those because, lacking any sense of moral absolutes, it has nothing in it to act as a break on those. Its short-lived rejection of that was based in old-fashioned, unmodernistic horror at the products of modernism in the 20th century, the scientific mass murder in Europe and, to a far lesser extent, elsewhere in the world, the horrific wars made possible by the products of the enlightenment, science, social organization, record keeping, the enormous wealth extracted through technology, etc. As the anti-political correctness stand - based in that most moderny of all slogans, "free speech" - proves, any correction of modernism of that sort is easily overturned by fashion and the "more speech" found to be profitable by corporations. Corporations, themselves, are a product of modernism.
No, modernism, unsentimental, cold, calculating, measuring modernism, stripped of its inconvenient history isn't going to save us. I'll put my bets on that most unmoderny thing of all, the Jewish prophetic tradition to do that.
* In light of what I said yesterday, I'll add the modernist enthusiasts for Marxist regimes, who conducted some of the most nearly successful genocides in history.
Update: From the comments at Salon
GeekMommaRants 23 hours ago
At some point bigotry is some special faith one has with their own in-group. This faith works the way religion does.
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Anthony_McCarthy just now
@GeekMommaRants You do understand that your assertion about religion is a bigoted example of special faith in the holding of your in-group. Or don't you? Edit (in 5 minutes)
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LARMARCH5 21 hours ago
Archie Bunker
Family man
Union member
Knew his, and everyone else's, place
Concerned with maintaining hierarchy and tradition
Suspicious of education
Justified in his beliefs
Threatened by anyone different
Fear transposed into anger
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Anthony_McCarthy 3 minutes ago
@LARMARCH5
Archie Bunker
A totally fictitious person invented to assert a stereotype of white blue-collar working class people for the entertainment [and smug self-satisfaction] of other people.
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Not trying to pick out a small point and ignore the larger one, but:
ReplyDelete"Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot,"
I'm an admirer of the works of all three poets, but I have to point out Yeats was from Irish aristocracy, and Eliot and Pound were both Americans.
Joyce was trained by Jesuits; Beckett was Joyce's secretary for a time. Both, oddly enough, were less provincial than Eliot despite growing up in Ireland, maybe because they didn't align themselves with the British (and there's a whole 'nother study, eh?). As Americans, it's no surprise Eliot and Pound were admirers of power, while Joyce and Beckett (whom I know more about than the others cataloged) were quite wary of power's intent, having lived,as I say, in Ireland.
While Eliot did align himself with the British aristocracy, earning the Order of Merit and getting himself a gravestone in Poet's Corner (well deserved; I still love Eliot's poetry), his late writings urge a Christian humility that is profound, but also not as radical as the story of Harry Potter, in the end. Rowling's experience looking down from Scotland may have some bearing there. And then there's this:
"The entire attitude of the modern is bound up in thinking and acting as superficial as any other identified movement of culture as dreamed up by university based scribblers. It shares in the same human weaknesses as any religion or political theory, racism, sexism, ethnic and race bigotry. It is especially prone to lapsing into those because, lacking any sense of moral absolutes, it has nothing in it to act as a break on those."
"University based scribblers" are a weakness of mine, but more and more I think the divorce of religion and morality (ethics is a separate issue from morality, I still assert), a divorce that began with the enlightenment (at least) and became full blown when economics began as a moral philosophy (based almost solely on utilitarianism) is what crumbled the university into near perfect uselessness. Now the university completely washes its hands of any social responsibility for training people to be good leaders (the Ivy Leagues still promote that vision of themselves) or just good citizens.
Because morality is a private matter best left to the churches, which are best left to their one hour on Sunday morning and their circumscribed plot of land they really should pay taxes on anyway....
But that, too, is another story.....
I overlooked this Salon article until now. Considering that bigotry is all about sweeping generalizations with little or no basis in fact, and that this article is an excerpt from a book, perhaps it's not such a bad thing that fewer people are reading:
ReplyDelete"Hatred of the Jews goes back to Egypt and Babylonia. Contempt for what the Greeks considered the “barbarian”—whoever was not of Greece—existed even at the height of the classical period. And Homer already understood the struggles of the outcast and the stranger. What today might be termed ethnic or racial conflicts between empires, religions, tribes, and clans have always shaped the historical landscape."
Working backward from Homer, yes, people have always fought over tribal boundaries (welcome to Anthropology 101), but Homer mostly depicts near-family members and ties that cross bloodlines which should, but don't, overwhelm a sense of duty that leads one to the battlefield.
As for the Greeks, they did consider non-Greeks "barbarians," but if you read just "Medea," you see that contempt for non-Greeks doesn't include apartheid. And the Egyptians and Babylonians hated the "Jews"? First, "Jews" didn't exist as a category until after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. Second, what ahistorical bullshit. Biblical scholars will tell you the story of the Exodus is probably not true (not history, IOW), and Babylon was just doing what other empires did at the time (see, in a much later iteration, Rome): take over weaker neighbors. Babylonians didn't hate "Jews," although the Hebrews didn't record their Exile favorably in their scriptures.
But it wasn't anti-Semitism in the 5th century B.C.E.
That kind of sloppy argument is just as stupid and ignorant as bigotry.