The World As It Is

The basic world situation at the end of this first decade of the third millenium is still largely what it was 10 years ago. The conflict in the world, the dividing line, is still between the East and the West. This is as it has been since Achilles slew Hector and the Persian hordes smashed into the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae in an attempt to extinguish the Freedom of the Greeks.

The East today is led by Russia and China and their alliance based on mutual antipathy and fear of the United States. The United States is still the leader of the West out of necessity if not desire.

All of the distractions that some claim are the great threats of the age, namely terrorism and "climate change", are the hobgoblin of minds trained to think presently and not historically. Terrorism is not a war, it is the prelude to a war between nations including the cyberwar already raging between the US and China. "Climate change" is the earth-centered, man-centered theory that holds that Man is the center of the Earth and the Earth is the center of the Universe. It ignores the fact that climate is change. Climate change has been occuring on the Earth since the beginning. Climates have changed, are changing, and will change. A climate without change would not be a climate but stasis, an impossiblity in climatology. "Climate change" is earth-centered because it ignores the corresponding climate changes occuring presently throughout the solar system related to solar changes.

The theory of anthropomorphic climate change or global warming is a pathetic, desperate attempt to blame human activity for earth changes that have been occuring for eons and are occuring presently in a commensurate fashion on other planetary bodies within our solar system. It is an effort to fulfill a political agenda backed by politicized science to advance and justify the regulation of human activity on a global scale. This attempt will fail.

So we return to the basic conflict in the world today of East versus West. This conflict is rooted in the basic differences in our conception of Man's relationship to his fellow Man (and woman). The Western conception of Man's relationship to Man is based on the mutually shared conception of the primacy of Reason in everyday relationships. This is clarified in the legal concept of the "reasonable person" as stipulated in Western jurisprudence.

In the East Reason is viewed as largely antithetical to freedom. As Dostoyevsky writes in "Notes From the Underground", should a man not have a right to conceive that 2+2=5?? In the East free will includes the will to evade reason, to move beyond or below reason, depending on your view. In the West, we generally see no conflict between Reason and free will. Free Will is in fact related to Reason in two ways. The first is that Man has the freedom to pursue knowledge through Reason, and second that Reason exists within each person allowing us to exercise freedom. Through shared Reason we are linked to the cosmos and each other and yet are still individuals by the path we choose to pursue Reason, to pursue our eudynomic bliss, to pursue our happiness.

This view of the harmony of Unity and individual existence that permeates Western culture is viewed as fantastic fantasy in the East. It is convenient individualistic tripe, from the perspective of the East. The East's view is that a choice must be made between Unity and the individual, between Unity and Freedom. This often leads to a choice between a subsuming Statism and a nihilisitic, destructive, atomistc individualism.

Look for the conflict between East and West to intensify in 2010 as many of the distractions fade into irrelevancy.

More Marx

Marx's belief that Capitalism would bifurcate into a two-tiered hierarchy of owners and workers proved to have not been the case. Marx tried to prove the scientific certainty of this proposition in his great work "Das Kapital" in 1867. But certainly by the 1920s Max Weber's brilliant works on the Capitalist economy made it clear that Capitalist competition had actually divided the economy into a myriad of classes and classificatrions that were far more complex than a simple owner/worker paradigm.

Goethe

One of Goethe's ideas was that art is not only a reflection of the artist, it is also a reflection of the circumstances of the world that the artist inhabits. True art seeks to interpret and describe the world surrounding the human being from the perspective of and filtered through that being. Therefore, a piece of art blends the individual and the collective. It is a view of the soul of the creator as altered by the collective. The state of that soul is a statement, as well, of the state of the health of the collective.

Modernism expands

The attempt to synthesize art into a single form we saw in Wagner. However we saw this more stridently in philosophy and psychology. Marx tried to create a synthesized history blending economics, sociology, politics and Hegelian dialectics. He turned these dialectics on their head however. Hegel believed that ideas shaped the world. Marx believed the world shaped ideas.

Freud tried to create a scientific psychology in which history and the past affect the mind of the individual in the present.

Modern Art

A general trend in modern art has been the retreat from the tangible world. One might suppose this was influenced by Freud's "discovery" of the subconscious. Ironically, modern art has also been characterized by the attempt to amalgamate all art into one formal expression, which might be seen as a way to make it coincide more with real, tangible life.

The trend away from tangibility we see in music in the divergence from harmony that was seen in the music of Arthur Schoenburg and Igor Stravinsky. We see this same revolt against tangibility in the abandonment of the ballet form of dance and the rise of free form dance in the 1910s and 1920s led by the incomparable Isadora Duncan.

We most especially see the modern trend in painting with the rise of the impressionist school in France. This was led by Manet and Monet inthe late 19th century.

Verdi and Wagner

The world of opera of the 19th century was dominated by Richard Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi. Verdi was an Italian born in 1813 and dying in 1901. Wagner, also born in 1813, lived until 1882. Verdi's operas were much more practical and worldly than were Wagner's. They dealt with events in history or literature. They represented a peculialrly Italian practicality where beauty and brilliance are sought, but there is a recognition that they will never be attained and that there is a certain absurdity in the attempt.

That absurdity was Wagner's universalistic attempt to transcend art and create Art in the general sense. He attempted to synthesize all the fine arts of music, architecture, voice, and dance into a whole artistic expression. At the risk of generalizing, this was a quintessentially Germanic quixotic grandiosity bordering on pompousity. The genius of Wagner is that he very nearly succeeded in the attempt. Verdi always was disgusted by Wagnerian arrogance, as he saw it.

The Journey

The idea of the jorney or pilgrimmage has been an ongoing theme in Western literature. It appears in Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" depicting pilgrims travelling to visit the shrine of Thomas a Beckett. The journey appears again in Boccaccio's "Decameron", ten stories about pilgrims escaping plague ridden cities. It is linked with the idea of growth and progress. Dante's Divine Comedia is another example of such literature. For a modern film version of the journey see the incredibly brilliant 2008 movie "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" directed by Tommy Lee Jones.

Brunelleschi II

The architecture of Brunelleschi was really the type of Roman architecture inherited from Italy by the colonial American states. It was Roman suffused with later Italian styles. It shows how art can literally leap across hundreds of years of history having been seemingly lost until rediscovered by creative minds of later generations. Monticello is an example of Brunelleschi's type of architecture.

Brunelleschi

Architecture was also revived during the Renaissance. The initiator of the revival of the great principles of the Roman architect Vitruvius was Fillippo Brunelleschi. He lived from 1377 to 1446, a native of Florence, as with so many of the Renaissance greats. Brunelleschi's great masterpiece was the completion of the cathedral dome in Florence. This was a rival in greatness to Hadrian's Pantheon in Rome 1400 years before. The cathedral in Florence revived the art of dome building that had been lost after the fall of Rome in the West.

Da Vinci and Michelangelo

The 15th century was the great age of achievement in the Renaissance of Italian art. The most notable geniuses of this period were Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci. Leonardo lived from 1452 to 1519 and Michelangelo from 1475 to 1564. Da Vinci's art was characterized more for quality than quantity. He was a sporadic genius whose great work was the "Mona Lisa."

Michelangelo was a prolific eclectic artist producing enormous quantities of sculptures and painting characterized by supreme creativity and genius. His most famous work was the painting of the ceiling of the Sistene Chapel.

Da Vinci and Michelangelo were the vanguard of a movement of artistic genius the proved that the individual, given the means and the freedom, could achieve a level of vision and beauty thought previously reserved only for the ancients. Before the Renaissance the idea was prevalent that civilization was still declining from the time of the Roman Empire. The great achievements of the Renaissance were visual proof that Man, while not perfectable, was truly a noble being.

Greece

Greece invented the prose style of writing. Before that it was common to write poetry. However, writing to convey a message, to represent a reality either physically or mentally, had not been invented before the ancient Greeks. Herodotus, the first historian of about 450 BC, was also one of the first prose writers.

This invention of prose, coupled with a related increase in literacy, must have had a liberating effect on the common man. To be able to read and write well is to be able to think well. One can then use discernment and judgement. This use of discernment and judgement by the common citizen is essential for the proliferation and maintanence of participatory government. These two qualities added to courage makes up the Free Citizen.

Ancient Egypt

It is interesting that in ancient Egypt images and words were often conjoined with one another. Hierglyphs were picture-words usually used to represent certain sounds. The proportional grid used to form Egyptian art to ensure uniformity of design derived from those proportions used to write hierglyphs. Therefore, for the ancients, there was no sharp dividing line between the image and the word.

There is no division or difference in textual learning and visual learning. A deficiency in one leads to a lack in the other, even if one is more developed. A picture might say a thousand words, but a word can conjure up a thousand pictures.

Monotheism

One of the most important creations, revelations or discoveries was that of monotheism. It began with the most historical of peoples, the Jews. One cannot, however, resist the temptation to imagine that the Jews originally came to monotheism from the monotheistic ideas of Pharaoh Akhenaton, "the heretic Pharaoh, who introduced the world's first monotheistic religion around 1350 BC. The experiment was short lived but extremely impactful at the time.

Journal entry June 30,2009

The genius of the American political system of government was that it never tried to settle the great debate among citizens. To be an American one simply had to agree that everyone had the right to debate and that the government was the guarantor of Liberty under law. The government was there to assure the continuence of the flow of the great river of debate, not to enforce its will to gain a result. A great tragedy of the last 100 years of so is that the federal government , especially in economics, has attempted to settle the great debate about economics around what may be called "corporatism." This is the idea that all levels of society must be smoothed over and amalgamated so as to make greater and greater centralization possible. It favors the strong over the vulnerable and the big over the nimble.

The wedding of vast corporate wealth to largely unchecked federal power solidifies into time and space a governing system which is highly undemocratic, largely unrepresentative, and always and completely unjust. The dispensing of enormous federal contracts to corporations and the construction of vast beauracratic systems called entitlements have ceded our government to someone else. The legislature has become a meek, miniscule emasculated little speck between the corporate lobbyists who trek to Washington to write the bills and the nameless, faceless, employees of the leviathan of boards and agencies that infest the body politic and practically become unelected legislators through their interpretation of laws and writing of regulations for bills the size of phone books full of details that will effect thew lives of thousands or millions. Is this not undemocratic, unrepresentative??

Many large corporations become dependent on federal or state contracts to the point that they become arms of the government that hires them and conduits by which that government can exert power and influence. The "private" firms become not "public" firms, designed for the general welfare, but public/private sources of largess, patronage and corruption for the governing class in Washington.

Vast entitlement programs funnel revenues to particular groups of people without having to endure the legislative process of appropriating money. Money is in effect appropriated one time by congress for all the time the program exists. Theoretically the program can be ended by legislative democratic means. However, practically, on the level that politics operates, the programs become so large over time that their abolition would mean the collapse of an entire system, be it of health care, retirement insurance or the like. So the systems are undemocratic in their nature in that to oppose them sets one up as the advocate of collapse and chaos.

Therefore the vastness of these programs perpetuates them. In a democratic society nothing should ever be perpetual except Liberty, Justice and the enduring spirit of the People in their political capacity. The increasing centralization and corporatism of our government runs counter to this trinity of democratic virtues.

Journal entry April 29,2009

One of the chief fallacies of our age is that we live in an age of science. Science today is used by both the Left and the Right to promulgate half-truths and falsehoods that advance their political agendas. The Right finds the few scientists who greatly question Darwinian evolution and use that to promote their ideas. The Left ignores the many scientists who question man-made global warming in order to advance a political agenda of centraliztion cloaked as enviromentalism.

Science is too often willing to prostitute itself to political patrons to gain public funding.