Technics and De-Civilization

a rant

Not many people have encountered Hendrik Van Loon, the two works I acquired, over 25 years ago thanks to Friends of the Library, Van Loon’s Lives and his book entitled The Arts are well worth finding and reading. In our time of barbarism arts too have bowed before the Muse of Popularity. Everything high must be made low and the low elevated to the highest acclaim by clapping hands and cheers and in this wise we educate our young.

THE PARADOX OF THE LIE--1939-http://www.berdyaev.com/berdiaev/berd_lib/1939_xxx.html

The lie plays a tremendous role in human life. The world is swallowed up in lies. And to the problem of the lie philosophers have paid too little attention. Not only do people that are by nature liars lie, but also uprightly truthful people. They lie not only consciously, but also without awareness. People live in fear, and the lie is a weapon of defense. The structure of consciousness is deformed by the function of lie, begotten by fear. There exist several types of lies, but the most interesting is that type of lie, which is conceived of not as a sin or a vice, but as a duty. Elementary in type is the greedy lie, as the means for the attainment of egoistical aims. But there is a type of lie, non-greedy, almost artistic, when man does not make a distinction between reality and his own fictitious inventions. This type likewise does not here interest me. There is moreover a type of lie out of sympathy, which can be to the saving of the life of another man. Uprightness does not signify formalism and pedanticism. The moral act of man is always creatively-individual and is worked for the concrete instances of life, singular and irrepeatable. But most significant is the social lie, affirmed of as a duty. The life of states and societies is full of it, it serves as a support for civilisation, this gives it pride, as being the vanguard against chaos and anarchy.

Deeply rooted in the mass consciousness, myths are manifest by the expression of this lie. Through the organising of these myths, lie runs the world, a watch-guard over human society. Ancient myths arose out of a collective subconscious creativity, and at their foundation was always some sort of reality. Contemporary myths are characteristically and consciously an organised lie. In them is no naivete. This may sound pessimistic, but it mustneeds be recognised, that lie is mortared into the foundation of the organisation of society. The pure and nakedly unshielded truth can lead to the end of all things, to the ruin of societies and states, -- say the defenders of the pragmaticism of the lie. Politics is to a remarkable degree an art of directing the human masses, i.e. to spout demagoguery, i.e. to spout the lie. This artifice is utilised by myths, which are no chance product of fantasy, and which bear a consciously organising character.

In a book written by the French novelist, diplomat and travel writer, Arthur Comte de Gobineau – namely his Religions and Philosophies of Central Asia. -Ketman is a protective attitude of silence and opaqueness adopted by men living in Muslim-dominated lands who are not themselves Muslims, a way of keeping your most personal beliefs to yourself. There are several pages of direct quotation from Gobineau and explications of Ketman, before Miłosz (The Captive Mind) goes on to apply this idea to people living under Soviet rule who conform but don’t believe. Because under a communist regime, everyone is an actor. Everyone acts all the time till it becomes second nature. Everyone lies, deceives,.....

For Berdyaev, having separated itself from God and spiritual values, modern humanity pridefully turns exclusively to the construction and organization of its material world to find meaning, happiness, and security. Technics is precisely the means by which modern humanity, apart from God, and by its own devices, seeks to achieve desired beneficial ends for itself. In modernity, several autonomous spheres of existence seek to dominate exclusively the whole of life, and technics is one of them. Once modern humanity discarded the Medieval worldview, with its religiously integral view of reality, it has sought integrality of being in one of several spheres of life. Technics is a part of these spheres. Specifically, technics must reckon with the spheres of statism and economics. Berdyaev perceives a pernicious development in modernity in which collective forces (the "masses") look to the state, economics, and technics to provide them with total happiness and wellbeing. Like Dostoevsky, from whom he gleamed many insights, Berdyaev thinks that humankind's appeal to technics, statism, and economics for total well-being only leads to human self-enslavement.

Berdyaev's work contains many valuable ideas about the nature of revolution and the character of its leaders. "Revolutions," he says, are preceded by a process of disintegration, a decline of faith, the loss by people of a unifying spiritual center of life. As a result of it the people lose their spiritual liberty, become possessed by the devil;" the leading part among them is played by the extreme elements, Jacobins, Bolsheviks, men who imagine themselves to be free creators of a new future, but in truth are passive "mediums of formless elements; they are really turned not to the future but to the past, for they are slaves of the past, chained to it by malice, envy and revenge" (PHILOSOPHY OF INEQUALITY). Hence, revolutions can do nothing but destroy; they are never creative.

This stub from Wiki —Van Loon's Lives is a book by the Dutch-American writer Hendrik Willem van Loon published in 1942. Its full title, deliberately written in a manner already archaic at the time of writing, is Van Loon's Lives: Being a true and faithful account of a number of highly interesting meetings with certain historical personages, from Confucius and Plato to Voltaire and Thomas Jefferson, about whom we had always felt a great deal of curiosity and who came to us as dinner guests in a bygone year.^[1]

Loosely based on the classical Plutarch's Lives, it recounts the biographies of various famous historical characters, and like Plutarch often pairing together characters from different times and places whose life, careers or personalities seemed to Van Loon to bear a similarity to each other (e.g. William the Silent and George Washington who led the Wars of Independence of their respective countries; the philosophers Descartes and Emerson; Empress Theodora of Byzantium and Queen Elizabeth I of England; Torquemada and Robespierre, of both of whom Van Loon had less than a flattering view...).

In the book the author imagines he is living in his summer home in the town of Veere on the island of Walcheren in the Dutch province of Zealand. He has the ability to summon the famous (and sometimes infamous) great men and women of history to come to dinner. The summoning is done in the prosaic way of leaving under a specific stone a note with the names of the persons they wish to meet that weekend, who duly make their appearance. This magical aspect places the book within the category of contemporary fantasy, though the term did not yet exist at the time it was published.

Chapters in the book typically start with Van Loon describing the lives of the people invited that week, with many digressions and idiosyncratic comments, opinions and comparisons with actual 20th century events - particularly with the doings of Hitler and Nazi Germany in general and the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in particular, which was clearly very much on Van Loon's mind. This is followed by these people appearing in the 1930s provincial Netherlands and their interaction with modern people, in some cases consisting of polite and intellectually stimulating conversations, in other cases leading to humorous or hilarious results. (For example, the Archbishop of Bithynia and Archbishop of Cyrenaica, who were staunch theological foes during the 4th century Council of Nicea, wildly assault each other as soon as they are resurrected in the 20th century and run out into the streets of Veere, shouting abuse. A local policeman locks them up in separate cells, but by the next morning they had mysteriously disappeared...)

His book on the Arts —Art and artist from the Prehistoric Man to Johannes Brahms, the amiable philosopher who thought in terms of music and Clause Debussy, The impressionistic style moves from the painter's studio into the study of the composer. 63 chapters that deal with many kinds of art: paintings, music, architecture, throughout the centuries and the world. There are also many illustrations in both in black and white and color. Regrettably due entirely to his knowledge being European centered his treatment of arts has the stamp of the era so to an audience over 80 years later it feels off in regards to Asia.

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