Only The Yogurt Has Culture

What remains of Western Civilization hardly seems worth defending.  I studied and ultimately made a living off of the Arts because I saw the inherent nobility and elevation of the human condition in creating art.  However, there is precious little left to call art in the West, and the virus of depravity is spreading worldwide.

Once upon a time, Mozart's Die Zauberflöte was considered to crass for the Vienna National Theater because it was in German and dealt with common gods and faeries.  Now, most people can't even tell me what an "aria" is, much less have ever seen an opera.  At least in my generation, The Who and Frank Zappa wrote "rock" operas and more or less achieved something memorable.

What passes for culture in the West now is little more than "schlock and ooh".  "Performers" prance around in tiny "costumes", "singing" repetitive "lyrics" to entrancing bass beats that only just meet the criteria for having rhythm.  Furthermore, I can hardly distinguish one "song" from the next.  They are all virtually identical, and in the case of DJs, they aren't even original - just digital samples of utter crap.

When Georges Seurat created the art movement of pointilism, he was exploring the qualities of light and vision using the newly discovered properties and physiology of his era.  Roy Lichtenstein, though, simply magnified the printing process, which used the pixels pioneered by Seurat, to explode comic book illustrations to enormous proportions.  Don't get me wrong, I like Lichtenstein and would happily display his work in my den next to the black velvet dogs playing poker and Elvis portraits, but as art, it hardly qualities as anything other than a quaint addition to kitsch collections.

Don't get me started on Andy Warhol.

I did my art history thesis on Claes Oldenburg's Giant Soft Fan and Henri Matisse's Four Backs.  While Oldenburg's piece is an interesting attempt to explode a common item to massive proportions to enhance its design aspects, it is more of a playful exercise than art.  Matisse, on the other hand, deconstructs a feminine back across four panels from its organic presentation to its geometric components.  This is an interesting study in the mathematics of Life and forces one to examine Nature in a new light.

Today, someone can accidentally drop a pair of glasses on the floor of a "museum" and attract a crowd of awed spectators trying to figure out what state of mind the "artist" was in when "creating" such a piece.  Don't believe me?  Read the article.

Compare also the grand cathedrals of Europe, or even the highly functional castles, to the glass blocks of today's modern city.  The cathedrals defied the massive stone blocks from which they were constructed, soaring far above the viewer's head, and the walls were constructed almost entirely of colored glass windows - art in themselves - that created a floating, other-worldly effect.  Combined with an east-west orientation - using the natural surroundings - they even created special effects at certain times of the year, when light streamed through the rose window and struck the nave, causing it to glow eerily in the murky darkness on the interior.  Magic and masterpiece!

Few even stop now to consider the magnificent technological achievement of placing a dome on a box using an ingenious device called a pendentive.  Nor do they stop to admire the incredible artistry and engineering involved in a cathedral's flying buttresses that keep the walls from flying outward under the strain of their loads.

Can anyone name a work as elevating as the Sistine Chapel or Beethoven's 9th Symphony created in the last 50 years?  How about a script as linguistically entrancing as William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliette?  In fact, has any form of art moved you to tears, or left you breathless, or induced a feeling of elation that was created in the past 30 years?

Nowadays, architecture refers to game engines, the visual arts have been reduced to graphics, music has been debased to little more than a repetitive bass cleft with foul words spewed over it, and performance has devolved to computer generated movement and explosions.

Honestly, when the conversation occasionally turns to discussing the defense of Western culture, I can hardly think of anything in the past two generations worth preserving.  Fortunately, the West's greatest achievements are largely available online for everyone to access, but in terms of modern society, I find nothing of value - just a bunch of whiny, unevolved children with no sense of history, art or appreciation for anything outside the lint in their navels.

Oh sure, Donald Trump wants to revitalize America, saving American jobs and American business, but to what end?  So we can be abused into consuming more senseless crud from the country's "artists"?

It used to be that business created wealthy people, who in turn used their wealth to endow artists and talented technicians, who then created monumental works for all posterity to enjoy.  Instead, we get Bill Gates forcing the world to slime their bodies with vaccines, Elon Musk building fun toys and Puckerberg walling himself into his Hawaiian retreat.

So much for culture.

It's long past time for the West to ask itself what it is fighting for?  Without a decent answer, then what's the point?

“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”

Readin', Ritin' n Cypherin'

You've been with the professors
And they've all liked your looks
With great lawyers you have
Discussed lepers and crooks
You've been through all of
F. Scott Fitzgerald's books
You're very well read
It's well known.

But something is happening here
And you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones ?
-Bob Dylan, Ballad of a Thin Man

What is education?

Looks like the current, near-global paradigm is stuffing kids into a room and filling full of the exact same information, sprinkled liberally with propaganda. At some point, they are encouraged to 'specialize' into so field or another and then spend the remained of their matriculation focusing on one thing.

Seems to me this is completely bass-ackwards.

Once upon a time, there were different schools of thought. There were platonics, aristotelians, nihilists, religionists, and scientists. There were weltanschauungs and competing viewpoints. That model produced legendary thinkers who drew upon multiple disciplines to gain insight and inspiration.

Somewhere along the line, we got derailed into this conformist model, where everyone must learn the same mountain of 'facts' and the same interpretation of those facts, and then, to the exclusion of all other information, begin a career building walls to protect just certain 'facts,' to the exclusion of all other 'facts.'

From where I sit, this seems to have produced legendary morons.

During my college days, the most memorable moments were when I tied some historical event to a scientific break-through or social change. One really good writer to this kind of thinking is Daniel Boorstein, who could effortlessly connect the invention of sewing machines to the development of credit cards, or so it seemed.

Things like transcepts and flying buttresses led to explosions in architecture and grand works such as the Hajia Sofia and Chartres cathedral.

The concept of the photon led to pointilism and ultimately to digital photography. Photography freed paitners to explore impressionism, cubism and geometrics.

Knowing little things can be fun also, like knowing that 'terrific' comes from 'terror,' which comes from the Latin, which equals the Greek 'deimos,' which is the root of 'demon' and a moon of Mars. The moons of Mars are called Phobos and Deimos, which can be translated as 'fear' and 'loathing,' which was a popular title for Hunter S. Thompson stories. Not to mention that the names were suggested by Johnathan Swift in 'Gulliver's Travels,' 200 years before the discovery of the moons.

Swift also wrote a famous essay called "A Modest Proposal," in which he advocates eating the children of Ireland as a means of alleviating poverty and unemployment in 17th century Ireland, which oddly sounds like the EU's current proposal to fix Ireland's current economic crisis. Thus, the 'war on terror' is a 'war of the worlds,' and a war on the children of Ireland, and everyone seems to think that just terrific. Reductio ad absurdum ipso facto annuit coeptis.

See how much fun it is?

One can successfully argue that thinkers such as Einstein, who was mired in his focus on calculations, has done more damage to physics than the Newtonian/Keplerian schools ever did. But what's worse is that schools teach Einsteinian space/time as gospel, when in fact nearly every observation of the Universe dispels the theory. Yet, competing schools of thought, such as Eletric Universe are roundly dismissed because the people who conceived of it weren't physicists.

Modern banking and economics, the core and root of the global money mess, are the product of a man called Keynes, whose mental masturbations have become dogma, thus trapping economists into thought boxes from which they can not escape. The Austrian school, on the other hand, is derided and ignored, though its paradigm makes far more sense and is historically sound.

And so the Box Paradigm is perpetuated across time. Schools pound one viewpoint into a child's head, and then for life they are trapped in an artificial construct of someone else's making. If they dare think outside the box, they are failed and relegated to ditch-digging for the rest of their lives.

Finally, not only do we force children to constrain their thoughts within narrow boxes of perception, but we do so by stuffing them in boxes 8 hours a day. No wonder we can't seem to produce great thinkers any more. The most exciting thought exercises in a modern school occur when globalist change agents come and pretend to have think-tank like sessions, but where conclusions are masterfully steered towards pre-ordained 'facts.' Case in point: Al Gore.

With the judicious application of multi-media and internet, combined with platonic dialogues and true investigative thinking, we could be producing Leonardo da Vincis by the hundreds. We could realize a tremendous New Age of Wisdom by teaching children to really think, to investigate multiple lines of inquiry, to open themselves to new connections and conclusions.

Instead, we close their minds, lock them in Schroedenger's Box and throw away the key. We continue to bus them into boxes and stuff them full of 'that's the way we've always done it' and hope for a better future. No wonder we are mired in one pile of stupidity after another.

Given the modern tools available, and simple discussions that cost nothing, children could be taught to really think. They would be encouraged to make connections where none existed before. They would stretch their minds to apply a 'fact' from one discipline to solving a 'puzzle' in another. The most prized degree would become a PhD in Everything, rather than some increasingly narrow line of thinking that leads ultimately to a cul-de-sac. Children would join dots rather than separate them, thus causing an explosion in true understanding of the Universe!

But, alas, perhaps that's the point: we can't have people thinking now can we? They might devise some way to extract energy from the ether for eternal free power. They might devise modes of transportation that are cheap, private and don't require vast infrastructures to operate.

They might become free individuals, sovereign and whole, answerable to their own God and unhindered in their exploration of our vast and wonderous Universe.

We can't have that, now can we?