Character Excavation (redux)

Didn’t expect to come back to this one so soon, but an alternative meaning behind my title just appeared. Whereas the first post was about cancel culture, this redux is about finding people willing and able to act as mouthpieces for whatever narrative the powers that be wish to foist on the public, as in “Where do they dig up these characters people?”

Wide-ranging opinion is not difficult to obtain in large populations, so although plenty of folks are willing to be paid handsomely to mouth whatever words are provided to them (e.g., public relations hacks, social media managers, promoters, spokespersons, actors, and straight-up shills in advertisements of all sorts), a better approach is simply to find people who honestly believe the chosen narrative so that they can do others’ bidding guilelessly, which is to say, without any need of selling their souls. This idea first came to my attention in an interview (can’t remember the source) given by Noam Chomsky where is chided the interviewer, who had protested that no one was telling him what to say, by observing that if he didn’t already share the desired opinion, he wouldn’t have the job. The interviewer was hired and retained precisely because he was already onboard. Those who depart from the prescribed organizational perspective are simply not hired, or if their opinions evolve away from the party line, they are fired. No need to name names, but many have discovered that journalistic objectivity (or at least a pose of objectivity) and independent thought are not high values in the modern media landscape.

Here’s a good example: 19-year-old climate change denier/skeptic Naomi Seibt is being billed as the anti-Greta Thunberg. No doubt Seibt believes the opinions she will be presenting at the Heartland Institute later this week. All the more authenticity if she does. But it’s a little suspicious, brazen and clumsy even, that another European teenage girl is being raised up to dispel Time Magazine‘s 2019 Person of the Year, Greta Thunberg. Maybe it’s even true, as conspiracists suggest, that Thunberg herself is being used to drive someone else’s agenda. The MSM is certainly using her to drive ratings. These questions are all ways to distract from the main point, which is that we’re driving ourselves to extinction (alongside most of the rest of the living world) by virtue of the way we inhabit the planet and consume its finite resources.

Here’s a second example: a “debate” on the subject of socialism between economists Paul Krugman and Richard Wolff on PBS‘s show Democracy Now!

 

Let me disclose my biases up front. I’ve never liked economists as analysts of culture, sociology, or electoral politics. Krugman in particular has always read like more of an apologist for economic policies that support the dysfunctional status quo, so I pay him little attention. On the other hand, Wolff has engaged his public as a respectable teacher/explainer of the renewed socialist movement of which he is a part, and I give him my attention regularly. In truth, neither of these fellow needed to be “dug up” from obscurity. Both are heavily covered in the media, and they did a good job not attacking each other while making their cases in the debate.

The weird thing was how Krugman is so clearly triggered by the word socialism, even though he acknowledges that the U.S. has many robust examples of socialism already. He was clearly the one designated to object to socialism as an ideology and describes socialism as an electoral kiss of death. Maybe he has too many childhood memories of ducking, covering, and cowering during those Atomic Era air raid drills and so socialism and communism were imprinted on him as evils never to be entertained. At least three generations after him lack those memories, however, and are not traumatized by the prospect of socialism. In fact, that’s what the Democratic primaries are demonstrating: no fear but rather enthusiastic support for the avowed Democratic Socialist on the ballots. Who are the fearful ones? Capitalists. They would be wise to learn sooner than later that the public, as Wolff says plainly, is ready for change. Change is coming for them.

Life Out of Balance, pt. 2

Color me surprised to learn that 45 is considering a new executive order mandating that the “classical architectural style shall be the preferred and default style” for new and upgraded federal buildings, revising the Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture issued in 1962. Assuredly, 45 is hardly expected to weigh in on respectable aesthetic choices considering his taste runs toward gawdy, glitzy, ostentatious surface display (more Baroque) than restraint, dignity, poise, and balance (more Classical or Neoclassical).

Since I pay little attention to mainstream news propaganda organs, I learned of this from James Howard Kunstler’s blog Clusterfuck Nation (see blogroll) as though the order had already issued, but it’s apparently still in drafting. Twas nice to read Kunstler returning to his roots in architectural criticism. He’s never left it behind entirely; his website has a regular feature called Eyesore of the Month, which I rather enjoy reading. He provides a brief primer how architectural styles in the 20th century (all lumped together as Modernism) embody the Zeitgeist, namely, techno-narcissism. (I’m unconvinced that Modernism is a direct rebuke of 20th-century fascists who favored Classicism.) Frankly, with considerably more space at his disposal, Iain McGilchrist explores Modernist architecture better and with far greater erudition in The Master and his Emissary (2010), which I blogged through some while ago. Nonetheless, this statement by Kunstler deserves attention:

The main feature of this particular moment is that techno-industrial society has entered an epochal contraction presaging collapse due to over-investments in hyper-complexity. That hyper-complexity has come to be perfectly expressed in architecture lately in the torqued and tortured surfaces of gigantic buildings designed by computers, with very poor prospects for being maintained, or even being useful, as we reel into a new age of material scarcity and diminished expectations …

This is the life-out-of-balance statement in a nutshell. We are over-extended and wedded to an aesthetic of power that requires preposterous feats of engineering to build and continuous resource inputs to operate and maintain. (Kunstler himself avers elsewhere that an abundance of cheap, easily harvested energy enabled the Modern Era, so chalking up imminent collapse due primarily to over-investment in hyper-complexity seems like substitution of a secondary or follow-on effect for the main one.) My blogging preoccupation with skyscrapers demonstrates my judgment that the vertical dimension of the human-built world in particular is totally out of whack, an instantiation of now-commonplace stunt architecture. Should power ever fail for any sustained duration, reaching floors above, say, the 10th and delivering basic services to them, such as water for sinks and toilets, quickly becomes daunting.

However, that’s a technical hurdle, not an aesthetic consideration. The Modernist government buildings in question tend to be Brutalist designs, which often look like high-walled concrete fortresses or squat, impenetrable bunkers. (Do your own image search.) They project bureaucratic officiousness and disconcern if not open hostility toward the people they purport to serve. Basically, enter at your own risk. They share with the International Style a formal adherence to chunky geometric forms, often presented impassively (as pure abstraction) or in an exploded view (analogous to a cubist painting showing multiple perspectives simultaneously). Curiously, commentary at the links above is mostly aligned with perpetuating the Modernist project and aesthetic as described by Kunstler and McGilchrist. No interruptions, difficulties, or vulnerabilities are contemplated. Commentators must not be reading the same analyses I am, or they’re blithely supportive of progress in some vague sense, itself a myth we tell ourselves.

Life Out of Balance, pt. 1

I was introduced to the phrase life out of balance decades ago when I saw the film Koyaanisqatsi. The film is the first of a trilogy (sequels are Powaqqatsi and Nagoyqatsi) by Godfrey Reggio, though the film is arguably more famous because of its soundtrack composed by Philip Glass. Consisting entirely of wordless montage and music, the film contrasts the majesty of nature (in slo-mo, among other camera effects) with the frenetic pace of human activity (often sped up) and the folly of the human-built world. Koyaanisqatsi is a Hopi Indian word, meaning life out of balance. One might pause to consider, “out of balance with what?” The film supplies the answer, none too subtly: out of balance with nature. The two sequels are celebrations of humans at work and technology, respectively, and never gained the iconic stature of the initial film.

If history (delivering us into the 21st century) has demonstrated anything, it’s that we humans are careening out of control toward disaster, not unlike the spacecraft in the final sequence of Koyaanisqatsi that tumbles out of the atmosphere for an agonizingly long time (in slo-mo), burning all the way down. We are all witness to the event (more accurately, the process) but can do little anymore to alter the eventual tragic result. Though some counsel taking steps toward amelioration (of suffering, if nothing else), our default response is rather to deny our collective fate, and worse, to accelerate toward it. That’s how unbalanced we are as a global civilization.

The observation that we are badly out of balance is made at the species and civilizational levels but is recapitulated at all levels of social organization, from distinct societies or nationalities to regional and municipal organizations and associations on down to families and individuals. The forces, dynamics, and power laws that push us off balance are many, but none is as egregious as the corrupting influence of interrelated wealth and power. Wisdom of the ancients (especially the non-Western ones) gave us the same verdict, though we have refused intransigently (or more charitably: failed) to learn the lesson for hundreds of generations.

What I propose to do in this multipart series is explore or survey some of the manifestations of life out of balance. There is no particular organization, chronology, or schedule for subsequent entries. As an armchair social critic, I reserve the luxury of exercising my own judgment and answering to no one. Stay tuned.

Offered Without Comment 04

From the end of Paul Street’s They Rule: The 1% vs. Democracy (2014):

Those on the radical left who worry that pursuing a Green New Deal and leading with the environmental issue means giving up on the struggle against the 1% for a democratically transformed “world turned upside down” can rest easy. The green transformation required for human survival will be bright rouge. With its inherent privileging of private profit and exchange value over the common good and social use value, its intrinsic insistence on private management; its inbuilt privileging of the short-term bottom line over the long-term fate of the earth and its many species, with its deep-sunk cost investment in endless quantitative growth and the carbon-addicted way of life and death, and with its attachment to the division of the world into competing nations and empires that are incapable of common action for the global good, capitalism is simply inconsistent with the deep environmental changes required for human survival. “Green capitalism” is an oxymoron. It is naïve to think that the green transformation required for civilization’s survival can take place without an epic confrontation with — and defeat of — the concentrated wealth and power enjoyed by the capitalist elite and its profits system. [p. 197]