Tech Week Thoughts…

…or are they aphorisms?

Image by Grok, using the following prompt: “Draw an image inspired by the concept of an aphorism, but in an abstract expressionist style.”

I’m a drama teacher, as you may know, and it is, again, tech week — that biennial Triduum of the thespians. I’m strapped for time, but I didn’t want to maintain radio silence for too long, or you might think I’m dead and unsubscribe. So, here are some more pensées — with a few quasi-aphorisms. I’m not a natural at the style: too often, I want to explain. But the aphorist doesn’t explain.

He declaims.

1

Why do I enjoy metal? On the surface, there's so little conventionally beautiful about it: the Cookie Monster vocals, the often dissonant or at least angrily melancholic riffs, and so on. Is it nothing but a vent for raw power? I don't think so. Certainly, it appeals to something deep and dark within us, but it’s not the same as the raw animal appeal of openly salacious blues rock, like Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones. It's too controlled, too self-conscious and sophisticated, to be lumped in with Jimmy Page's jammy, bluesy noodling, impressive as that is in itself. That strange combination — elemental force alongside hyperrational, almost cold compositional techniques — may be just as responsible as the pagan symbolism and the death growls for the intuitive association between metal and demons. And certainly, there seems to be real overlap: I was dismayed to discover (when I looked at their lyrics) that one especially phenomenal Sicilian metal band was basically a Satanic praise and worship ensemble. But there are also a lot of curmudgeons and contrarians who thrive on transgressive rhetoric and personae. (Think the frontmen of Tool, Avatar, and Porcupine Tree.) Adjusting for their shit-disturbing ways, I think there's still plenty of metal to enjoy in good conscience.

But what's to enjoy? I think metal captures something of the sublime side of the cosmos, a kind of Lovecraftian marriage of power and mystery which we tend to forget was as much an ingredient in our vaunted Greco-Roman heritage as it is in neopaganism. In that sense, metal has a role to play in reenchanting the world - if only to caution us against equating enchantment with Narnia or Middle Earth. Out in the deep places, where darkness thrives like a fungus, there be monsters. Do we eschew it for that reason? Again, no. Bach, too, lands in the same ballpark in some of his majestic organ pieces or in his austerest fugues. It's no surprise that metal riffs transpose well to pipe organs — and vice versa.

2

I bristle when leftist cultural critics burden the West with more than its fair share of guilt for historical injustice, but it's hard not to regard the West's (comparatively recent) technological edge as a unique case for moral assessment. The technological asymmetry invites more exacting scrutiny. It's true that peoples up and down history have conquered and colonized each other, but the fact that Europeans fought sticks and stones with gunpowder is grossly unfair — and the ensuing economic exploitation is more despicable. With great power comes great responsibility, after all.

Of course, this argument assumes that the West actually was and is meaningfully more advanced than the civilizations it conquered and exploited. It’s only uniquely depraved if it’s uniquely developed — there has to be a real asymmetry. So it turns out that the only justifiable reason for concurring with any of Noam Chomsky’s conclusions is if you concur with the bulk of Ronald Reagan’s principles.

Truth’s a pisser.

3

There’s Chestertonian a notion that “bumpkin” is a term of endearment, that the Hobbitish habits of closed minds and full tankards are somehow closer to the good life. Bull. In the real world, bumpkins aren’t Hobbits: they’re Muggles.

4

Revisiting Plato, I find that he is just as much a “master of suspicion” as Freud, Marx, and Nietszche. But you wouldn’t guess it reading his Christian fanboys. Plato and “the Greeks” are contrasted with the operators of the postmodern “nonsense machine,” to use Sir Roger Scruton’s term. But Plato is every bit as sneaky, layered, and interested as, say, Foucault. (And if Parmenides isn’t a nonsense machine beta, what is?)

But Plato-adjacent Christians insist on interpreting the Platonic corpus like it has a kind of Scriptural polyvalence — especially when it comes to the repressive and eugenic project in The Republic. But, those who adopt this attitude forget that, although certain tensions between the literal and spiritual senses of Scripture are admissible, outright contradiction between them isn’t. Either, therefore, we must be at peace extending greater latitude to Plato than to the Holy Spirit, or we must accept that he might have meant that we should euthanize and sterilize the unfit to produce a master race of thumotic philosophers rapturously enjoying the Good while living on the backs of halfwits.

5

I’m continually frustrated with the idea that education is a panacea: fix the schools and the culture will follow. Not that simple. I was sobered to see so many fellow graduates from a college that inculcates “critical thinking” succumb to groupthink in 2020. Their habits — formed in an academic context — didn’t survive the transition to nonacademic life. (It’s a bad thing when you start sounding verbatim like yesteryear’s satire.) And what about those never educated, who can no longer go to school? As Haymitch Abernathy says, “Who helps them?” Do you want to rebuild culture? Don’t just keep founding schools. Conversation, not the classroom, is the proper context for intellectual life. Start a reading group, a movie club, a writing group. These — not “movements” and certainly not the “I alone can fix it” messiahs of mass politics — are the way of the future.

6

Christopher Dawson criticizes the idea of art as a conscious solace from the difficulties of life. He says that’s a modern exaggeration, that craftsmanship was an organic part of any flourishing, healthy society, and saw itself in organic, social terms, not as the expression of a fulfilled individual psychological need. In some ways, his position is reinforced by J.L. Carr’s Month in the Country. But then again, what is the narrator uncovering in Carr’s novella? What did the craftsmen depict most often? Not just religious themes, eschatological themes: last judgments and apocalypses. Seeing justice served in art that isn’t served in life… sounds like consolation to me. The self-understanding of artists may be overdeveloped, but it seems to me that the natural condition of human life is perennially painful, and that art has been a perennial palliative. Why else does culture flourish in times of mass political upheaval? 1960s, 1920s and 30s, late 19th century in Russia, early 19th century in France, Germany, and England; Boccacio’s plagues and Dante’s political fragmentation, etc, etc, etc.? Art from America’s mythical isolationist, post-Civil War past is among its most bland and forgettable — with the possible exception of Walt Whitman.

7

It strikes me: today’s mainstream conservatives insist on such a normative interdependence between sex and gender that they consider any deviation from the norm a sign of inner depravity, or at least of mental illness, while fringe “conservatives” extends similar reasoning to race. They disclaim misogyny or racism, of course; the more intelligent emphasize that these are corollaries to the principle that humans are embodied spirits. The principle I admit, though not always its extension by mainstream, and certainly not its exploitation by fringe, conservatives. But I can’t help noticing how often people in these same groups dismiss any and all inclusion and representation efforts as “woke,” never seeming to pause over the actual content of those different traditions. They think sexual and ethnic distinctions are real and relevant, but only value the art and erudition of one human category. Doesn’t it follow that they think the other categories are less valuable — which is to say, notwithstanding their best approximation of respectability, aren’t they still just… bigots?