There is thus no difficulty in seeing how far removed true craft is from modern industry, so much so that the two are as it were opposites, and how far it is unhappily true that in the reign of quantity the craft is, as the partisans of 'progress' so readily declare, a ‘thing of the past'.
The workman in industry cannot put into his work anything of himself, and a lot of trouble would even be taken to prevent him if he had the least inclination to try to do so; but he cannot even try, because all his activity consists solely in making a machine go, and because in addition he is rendered quite incapable of initiative by the professional 'formation' - or rather deformation - he has received, which is practically the antithesis of the ancient apprenticeship, and has for its sole object to teach him to execute certain movements ‘mechanically’ and always in the same way, without having at all to understand the reason for them or to trouble himself about the result, for it is not he, but the machine, that will really fabricate the object.
The end of all this is what is called in present-day jargon ‘mass-production’, the purpose of which is only to produce the greatest possible quantity of objects, and of objects as exactly alike as possible, intended for the use of men who are supposed to be no less alike; that is indeed the triumph of quantity, as was pointed out earlier, and it is by the same token the triumph of uniformity.
The conclusion that emerges clearly from all this is that uniformity, in order that it may be possible, presupposes beings deprived of all qualities and reduced to nothing more than simple numerical ‘units'; also that no such uniformity is ever in fact realizable, while the result of all the efforts made to realize it, notably in the human domain, can only be to rob beings more or less completely of their proper qualities, thus turning them into something as nearly as possible like mere machines; and machines, the typical product of the modern world, are the very things that represent, in the highest degree attained up till now, the predominance of quantity over quality.
From a social viewpoint, ‘democratic' and 'egalitarian' conceptions tend toward exactly the same end, for according to them all individuals are equivalent one to another.
This idea carries with it the absurd supposition that everyone is equally well fitted for anything whatsoever, though nature provides no example of any such 'equality’, for the reasons already given, since it would imply nothing but a complete similitude between individuals; but it is obvious that, in the name of this assumed 'equality’, which is one of the topsy-turvy 'ideals' most dear to the modern world, individuals are in fact directed toward becoming as nearly alike one to another as nature allows - and this in the first place by the attempt to impose a uniform education on everyone.
It is no less obvious that differences of aptitude cannot in spite of everything be entirely suppressed, so that a uniform education will not give exactly the same results for all; but it is all too true that, although it cannot confer on anyone qualities that he does not possess, it is on the contrary very well to suppress in everyone all possibilities above the common level; this ‘levelling’ always works downward: indeed, it could not work in any other way, being itself only an expression of the tendency toward the lowest, that is, toward pure quantity […]
[René Guénon]
The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, p. 51-2
But alongside this convergence there has become visible the conditioning power of one and the same “system,” manifesting as the tendency to destroy all the higher values of life and personality.
The prevalent and determining trends are, and will be increasingly in future, the passive destructive processes from which can only arise
a squalid uniformity, a reduction to types that lack the dimension of depth and any metaphysical quality, defining themselves at an existential level even lower than the already problematic one of the individual and the person.
Among other things, the machine itself may appear as a symbol, and everything that has taken form in certain sectors of the modern world in terms of pure functionality, especially in architecture.
The machine symbolizes a form born from an exact, objective adjustment of the means to the end, with the exclusion of everything superfluous arbitrary, irrelevant, or subjective. It is a form that precisely realizes an idea: the idea, in this case, of the purpose for which it is made. On its own plane, it reflects in a way the same value as the classical world knew through geometrical form, number as entity, and the whole Doric principle of “nothing in excess.”
[…] one can define a realism that signifies coolness, clarity, seriousness, and purity; detachment from the world of sentimentalism, of ego problems, of melodramatic tragedy, of the whole legacy of twilight romanticism, idealism, and expressionism: a realism that entails the sense of the vanity of the I and of believing oneself important as an individual.
Matzke wrote: “We are objective, because for us the reality of things is great, infinite, and everything human is too small, limited, and polluted with ‘soul’.”
The essential traits of the new attitude were well described as distance, otherness, loftiness, monumentality, a laconic quality, and the revulsion against all that is warm proximity, humanity, effusiveness, expressionism; the line of objectivity in figures, of coolness and grandeur in forms.
[Julius Evola]
Ride the Tiger, p. 31, 114-16
Roughly put, taking place in all areas of human life from religion and law to music and architecture, rationalization means a historical drive towards a world in which “one can, in principle, master all things by calculation” [Weber 1919/1946, 139].
For instance, modern capitalism is a rational mode of economic life because it depends on a calculable process of production. This search for exact calculability underpins such institutional innovations as monetary accounting (especially double-entry bookkeeping), centralization of production control, separation of workers from the means of production, supply of formally free labour, disciplined control on the factory floor, and other features that make modern capitalism qualitatively different from all other modes of organizing economic life.
The enhanced calculability of the production process is also buttressed by that in non-economic spheres such as law and administration. Legal formalism and bureaucratic management reinforce the elements of predictability in the sociopolitical environment that encumbers industrial capitalism by means of introducing formal equality of citizenship, a rule-bound legislation of legal norms, an autonomous judiciary, and a depoliticized professional bureaucracy.
Further, all this calculability and predictability in political, social, and economic spheres was not possible without changes of values in ethics, religion, psychology, and culture. Institutional rationalization was, in other words, predicated upon the rise of a peculiarly rational type of personality, or a “person of vocation” (Berufsmensch) as outlined in the Protestant Ethic.
The outcome of this complex interplay of ideas and interests was modern rational Western civilization with its enormous material and cultural capacity for relentless world-mastery.
'Max Weber: 3.2 Calculability, Predictability, and World-Mastery',
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
[…] under liberalism, “culture" becomes a word that parasitizes the original, displacing actual cultures with a liberal simulacrum eagerly embraced by a populace that is unaware of the switch.
Invocations of "culture” tend to be singular, not plural, whereas actual cultures are multiple, local, and particular. We tend to speak of such phenomena as “popular culture," a market-tested and standardized product devised by commercial enterprises and meant for mass consumption.
Whereas culture is an accumulation of local and historical experience and memory, liberal “culture" is the vacuum that remains when local experience has been eviscerated, memory is lost, and every place becomes every other place.
A panoply of actual cultures is replaced by celebration of "multiculturalism,” the reduction of actual cultural variety to liberal homogeneity loosely dressed in easily discarded native garb. The “-ism" of "multiculturalism” signals liberalism's victorious rout of actual cultural variety.
Even as cultures are replaced by a pervasive anticulture, the language of culture is advanced as a means of rendering liberal humanity's detachment from specific cultures. The homogenous celebration of every culture effectively means no culture at all. The more insistent the invocation of “pluralism” or “diversity” or, in the retail world, “choice," the more assuredly the destruction of actual cultures is advancing.
[Patrick Deneen]
Why Liberalism Failed, p.89
Not everything improves with time.
There are a number of things that people did better in the past, both because of lost wisdom but also simply because in the past things weren’t mass-produced. Beautiful older dresses, hand-stitched rugs, even kitchen appliances used to be sturdier and last longer. You can go purchase a mass-produced cheap samurai sword online, but you’d be a fool to use it in a fight against a blade of 20-times folded steel, even if the latter were ancient.
Stradivari violins, hand-crafted by members of the Italian Stradivari family, are legendarily considered to have a superior and unique sound compared to violins made with even the most modern techniques.
[Erik Hoel]
'Why we stopped making Einsteins',
The Intrinsic Perspective
Two issues in Britain are running side by side at the moment. Extremely high excess death among natives (for whatever reason) and the highest levels of immigration in history. The logic of Globalism means that those dying can simply be replaced by foreigners because humans are interchangeable.
We can see here the way that Globalism devalues a population, to the point of making it worthless. If mass immigration was banned a government would have an incentive to value the population which it ruled over.
As it stands the endless flow of human capital allows that government to view the native stock with complete indifference, if not contempt.
Nationalism on the other hand has (or should have) the inherent value of the native stock at its core. Our people are not widgets that can be exchanged or replaced, and they're not inconvenient statistics when they die.
[Morgoth]
Telegram
The religion of Christianity is to a large extent narrative. Festivals such as Easter, Whitsun and Christmas are key narrative moments within an overall narrative which provides meaning and orientation. Every day is given a narrative tension, is made meaningful, by the overall narrative. Time itself becomes narrative, that is, meaningful.
Capitalism lacks narrativity. It does not narrate anything [erzählt nichts]; it merely counts [zählt]. It deprives time of all meaningfulness. Time is profaned, reduced to labour time. Thus, all days resemble each other.
Capitalism […] erases the distinction between the sacred and the profane by totalizing the profane. It makes everything comparable to everything else and thus equal to everything else. Capitalism brings forth a hell of the same.
[Byung-Chul Han]
The Disappearance of Rituals, p.44
Caesar’s Roman world-view is a desiccated or devivified Apollonianism: hierarchical order and dignity, intellectual categorization, the sharp-edged unitary ego, separation from sexuality and the sensory. Caesar’s patron is, to use Nietzche’s phrase, “Apollo, the founder of states.”
Cleopatra’s world-view is promiscuously Dionysian: abolition of limits and boundaries, multiple personae, eating and drinking, sex, anarchic energy, natural fecundity.
Caesar and his retinue call Antony effeminate, yet Antony is more masculine than Caesar in the usual sense.
Caesar, a bland managerial type, is sexually neuter. He is an Apollonian androgyne. The dominant sexual persona of Spenser’s
Faerie Queene has completely lost its glamour in Shakespeare’s Dionysian genre. In
Antony and Cleopatra, Apollonianism is merely officiousness, the spite and banality of small minds.
[Camille Paglia]
Sexual Personae, p.215
[...] in all human traditions there has been a very great antagonism against all this counting business.
I don't know how many of you still know your Bible, but you can find it in two places, in Chronicles and Kings. The first chap who arranged the census was King David, and when he arranged the census the Lord was utterly furious. He gave him a choice between three penance punishments. And David, said, Yes, yes, I know I have sinned. He didn't argue back. You know, those old Jews used to argue back very freely.
He immediately understood there was something wrong in having a census which treats people as if they were units, whereas they are not. Each is a universe.
[E.F. Schumacher]
Good Work, p. 145
The United States is engaged in a revolutionary make-over of the world economy. Its policies on trade and competition condemn to extinction every other economic civilisation.
If Japanese corner stores, or European guaranteed markets for bananas, are judged to be restraints on competition as that is understood in the terms of the American free market, they must be prohibited, whatever their benefits in social cohesion.
The demands made on Japan by the Washington consensus go further than dismantling its small shops. They include lowering savings rates, abandoning its full employment culture and embracing individualism.
Together they amount to the demand that Japan cease to be Japanese.
[…] the solution to Japan’s economic problem is its wholesale Americanisation […] Japan will resolve its economic difficulties only on condition that it cease to be Japanese. At times this is stated bluntly. As a writer in an American neo-conservative journal has noted approvingly: ‘America has the IMF to do Commodore Perry’s job.’
The result of such a policy of enforced westernisation would not only be to extinguish a unique and irreplaceable culture. It would be to destroy the social cohesion that has gone with extraordinary economic achievement in Japan over the past half-century - without resolving the deflationary crisis that Japan presently confronts.
[John Gray]
False Dawn, p.173, 204, 227
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