Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2007/05/14/last_word.php
Monday, May 14, 2007
The following are by a columnist for Asia Times Online whose nom de plume is ‘Spengler.’
“I think people are sick of [killing],” said President George W Bush of the Israeli-Palestinian war. The contrary may be true. People may want the killing to continue for quite some time, as the Palestinian radical organizations suggest. A recurring theme in the history of war is that most of the killing typically occurs long after rational calculation would call for the surrender of the losing side.
“I don’t know much about art,” you aver, “but I know what I like.” Actually you don’t. You have been browbeaten into feigning pleasure at the sight of so-called art that actually makes your skin crawl, and you are afraid to admit it for fear of seeming dull. This has gone on for so long that you have forgotten your own mind.
If people insist on killing themselves, there is little you can do to stop it. “Alles was entsteht,” as Mephisto told Faust, “ist wert, dass es zugrunde geht.” (Roughly, “All that comes to be shall rightly go to ruin.”) The best you can do is to encourage them to eliminate themselves in a somewhat less antisocial fashion
Bach inscribed each of his works with the motto, “Glory belongs only to God,” and insisted (wrongly) that anyone who worked as hard as he did could have achieved results just as good. He was content to be a diligent craftsman in the service of God, and did not seek to be a genius; he simply was one. That is the starting point of the man of faith. One does not set out to be a genius, but rather to be of service; extraordinary gifts are responsibility to be borne with humility. The search for genius began when the service of God no longer interested the artists and scientists.
Today Americans favor performers with whom they can identify precisely because they have no more technique or culture than the average drunk bellowing into a karaoke machine. Taste descended by degrees. Frank Sinatra sounded more average than Bing Crosby; Elvis Presley more average than Sinatra; The Beatles more average than Elvis; and Bruce Springsteen (or Madonna) about as average as one can get, until American Idol came along to elevate what was certified to average.
Tragedy invariably takes the form of a shadow from the past darkening the present and future. But something like the River Lethe girds the American continent, through which immigrants forget their past and with it their past tragedies. One might say that the American tragedy is the incapacity of Americans to understand the tragedy of other peoples. America can cherry-pick out of the nations those individuals who wish to be Americans, but it cannot force back on the nations its own character.
What accounts for the success of the Harry Potter series, as well as the “Star Wars” films whence they derive? The answer, I think, is their appeal to complacency and narcissism. “Use the Force,” Obi-Wan tells the young Luke Skywalker, while the master wizard Dumbledore instructs Harry to draw from his inner well of familial emotions. No one likes to imagine that he is Frodo Baggins, an ordinary fellow who has quite a rough time of it in Tolkien’s story. But everyone likes to imagine that he possesses inborn powers that make him a master of magic as well as a hero at games.
To begin with, “youth culture” is an oxymoron. Youth does not create culture, it inherits it. Children of all cultures, to be sure, play with each other spontaneously, because their Spieltrieb (instinct to play) is inborn. Adolescents of all cultures fall in love with equal ease, because hormones dictate their behavior. The sort of music which accompanies mating rituals may find instant acceptance from Tallahassee to Timbuktu, but culture itself is a different matter.
America has little culture in the strict sense of the term. Culture—the transmittable experience of one’s antecedents—is the stuff from which we weave the illusion of immortality. In the Old World one could not separate religion and culture. Myths of national origin, poetry and song, cuisine and geography fused into a shared experience of those who went before, with those who come after. Culture means existential continuity. What America offers, by contrast, is redemption through a new beginning, as closely as anyone is likely to get to a realization of the original Christian project.
For today’s Europeans, there is no consolation, neither the old pagan continuity of national culture, nor the Christian continuity into the hereafter. The French know that Victor Hugo, Gauloise cigarettes, Chateau Lafitte and Impressionist painters one day will become a matter of antiquarian curiosity. The Germans know that no one but bored schoolboys will read Goethe two centuries hence, like Pindar. They have no ambition but to die quietly, no concerns except for those amusements which might reduce boredom and anxiety en route to the grave.