AS I have gotten older and looked more critically at the assumptions of my youth, many of which, by the way, are not attributable to my parents or the Church but to the far more seductive popular and academic cultures I experienced, those last two in perhaps rapidly diminishing order of influence, I've found a lot of it to be total bullshit and often stuff I was too vapidly passive in accepting to understand it being embedded in ideological influences grown subtle through their infiltration of the general culture.
A couple of years or so ago I wrote a post about the mathematical demonstration that just about anyone with Western European biological heritage (including many, many of us who are counted as People of Color) almost certainly have Charlemagne the eighth century emperor as one of our ancestors, in direct line of biological inheritance. That demonstration is based in the rapidly increasing humber of great, great, great, grandparents we all have, which that many generations ago would be larger than the total population of Europe, so the chances are that that many marrying, many concubine keeping gangster king was among them.
My conclusion about that wasn't the common stupidity of being proud to have had royalty in my ancestry (I don't see that as being any more to be proud of than having those we admit are organized criminals in my lineage - who, by the way, we must also have) but to realize that, there being many more Jews in Europe at the time than eighth century "Emperors of the Romans" that it is an even greater mathematical certainty that every Nazi, every antisemite would have Jewish blood coursing through their hateful veins, every Jew would almost certainly have Crusader pogromists in their ancestry. Or the love of Mike, even every Irish person is likely to have English ancestry.
And that same line of mathematical reasoning certainly brings us all the way back to Africa where every single white supremacist must trace their lineage and their direct biological inheritance for almost every significant aspect of their genetic and other biological heritage.
Of course everything in this line of mathematically derived fact about notions of human heritage even as it must increase our consciousness of the unity of the human species must also be destructive of notions of ethnicity, of biological and cultural separateness and appurtenance to anything like a "pure" heritage. It renders any such notion of "purity" or separateness a mathematical absurdity. It is one of the remarkable things about the dishonestly named "enlightenment" that it didn't decrease such notions of separateness but it seems to have taken up earlier notions of such bullshit and give it a gloss coat of sciency approval and promotion. The late 18th century through to today is rife with such stuff, even today when its destructive side is threatening, certainly, assertions of human equality and the legitimate conception of democracy which can only be a product of the assertion of and practice of equality.
Another of the things in my experience that have led me into thinking about this was the increasingly disturbing recognition of some commonalities between the popular culture of my youth and adulthood and Nazism, something which I had thrown in my face continually during my long researches into the commonalitiy of Nazi ideology and Darwinism. The Nazi notion of Volk and its many uses in Nazi propaganda derived from 19th century romantic linguistics and anthropology (so pseudo-science) both of which were generally tied up in the most intimate ways with racism and beliefs of people in their own racial superiority over either generally understood or designated "others" who were inferior and always presented as a least a rival and, mostly, dangers to the "pure" Volk. That kind of thinking was certainly not peculiar to those who spoke German and mistakenly believed themselves to have no Jewish or Slavic or Romani ancestors, the English language folk had their own version of it as did, in fact others. Especially in what developed into Nazism, all of that tied into ridiculous, ahistorical beliefs and distorted historical beliefs about the "Holy Roman Empire" of which Charlemagne was the first crime family boss. As noted there are similar neo-Nazi, neo-fascist lines of comic book historical belief in relation to Byzantium, the real "Roman Empire" surviving into the medieval, feudal period.
History told wrong is a dangerous thing, but, then, all lies are. People don't generally tell lies for the purpose of doing good, though our "enlightened" Founders were too stupid to make that distinction when talking of "freedom of the press" and "free speech." Those told in the pseudo-sciences and its invasion to even within the real scientific study of evolution are as if not more deadly.
You could write a library of books dealing with both the absurdity of such notions of The Folks, "folk culture" many of the various neologisms created with that four letter word. What I've become interested in is the common origins and consequences of notions of "folk culture" between the right and the secular alleged left which, of course, became more associated with commies in the United States.
I think in my early research and thinking about this the separation of the two is largely illusory, certainly at the beginning stages. The motives of the early collectors of folk lore, folk music, folk stories, folk culture, especially their ideological motives is certainly interesting because in a lot of cases it came from the same notions of post-"enlightenment" 19th century romanticism and the desire to raise some form of biological heritage into a guide star to find some unspecific and ill defined truth or force of nature, to find something to replace the "God shaped hole" in the soul of modernism. I think that the hostility to religion, and if not religion then the egalitarian nature of The Law, The Prophets and, most of all, The Gospel, is the rather crumbly foundation stonework of all of it. The notion that there is some material substrate that finds its expression in the absurdly believed in atavistic nature of "the folk" "folk culture" that must yield some more general truth is intimately tied up with a rejection of revealed religion. A good part of the expression of that took the form of the desire to reestablish a totally ahistorical 19th century notion of the original "Germanic" paganism, "Druidism", various notions of "the old religion" and in places such as Italy, that took the form of an absurd, romantic version of the real Roman empire (the whole notion of neo-classicism is, oddly, part of the same thing, I suspect) and in France some bizarre mix of that with feudal Christianity, tied in with romantic notions of the French monarchy. Where they could lay claim to the central power of the classical period they used that, where that was lacking, they made something up out of local materials trying to come up with some pure "natural" replacement for God. When you're looking to make yourself feel superior to other people you use whatever chance happened to give you.
As you can see, I'm still at the early stages of research and thinking about this, how far I'll get with it, I don't know, Darwinism which I've been working on for going on twenty years, is hardly exhausted as something to look at and its foundational literature is far smaller and in fewer languages.
One thing that I've found is I can't listen to Pete Seeger and The Weavers and Almanac Singers anymore with anything like enjoyment. I've become deeply suspicious of such stuff and pop culture in general. I suspect that the academic promotion of and elevation of pop culture is for more monetary motives and that it's easier to write about something with such a thin substrate to it. I've read enough real research to know bullshit when I see it.
No comments:
Post a Comment