Tags
Anti-Nature, Civilisation, Cultural Marxism, Defend the modern world, Irony, Life, Meta-Irony, New Sincerity, Philosophy, Postmodernism, Sportfreunde Stiller, Tyranny
The other day (having nothing else to do) I watched an interesting video on the Glenn Beck YouTube channel. In a ten-minute presentation, the flame-haired libertarian mourned the tendency of popular culture to emphasise and celebrate the negative. Where, he asked, is the art celebrating existence as opposed to devaluing it? I really share Beck’s exasperation on this issue and would identify one artistic trend above all as having led to the contemporary state.
Few attitudes have been more corrosive to British (and Western) potential as that we call ‘irony’. Married to the postmodern, irony (a mirage of depth) has deeply wounded, if not retarded Britain for over three decades. The famed British sense of humour now deals in little else. Nothing is said seriously. Sincerity and positivity are frowned upon, deemed to be infantile or unevolved. Those who celebrate openly positive concepts are dismissed as not being in on the joke of the age.
According to this position, life is a burden, a death-sentence. One may as well smoke or inject heroin as go out and exercise. The end result will always be the same; the endless grave. Hope for an afterlife or for a final, lasting justice is suited to childhood. People should be dark, philosophical and counter to all natural principles. Nature is ugly. Humanity overrated.
This poisonous attitude; the taking of life and nature as a joke we have worked out and transcended, must surely be the greatest burden of our history.
I am not wholly immune to its charm. For many years, I idolised the Kurt Cobain approach to living. The introverted poet, prone to self-harm, addicted to cheap pleasure, destined for self-destruction. I thought the painted smiles of White America were corporate illusions, and that when the camera faced another way, the smiles would surely drop. Never did I consider that those Americans were actually living more in tune with the rhythm of the universe than I or Cobain.
What is so wrong with health? What is so wrong with hope for the future, sincerity in emotion, politeness, hatred of death, celebration of life and vitality?
In England, we often associate smiles with stupidity and frowns with depth. Our musicians – even those with great talent like Radiohead – lean towards the dark margins around life, avoiding moments of integrity like spores of anthrax. We mock the happy and exalt the ironic. We are too intelligent to be happy.
Isn’t it time someone launched a cultural movement to counter this?
To be sure, there are some who claim to be making a start, but this is usually not in the way we ought to welcome. The ‘New Sincerity Movement’ in music for example, seeks to degrade the power of irony with the creation of unapologetically sentimental artworks. But sentimentalism is or can be just as corrosive as irony.
What we need is a positivity movement; a trend across the creative disciplines (but especially in literature and music) which resurrects natural principles. The rock band Sportfreunde Stiller are a good example of the way ahead. Stiller, a German three-piece, are known for their simple and positive song-writing as well their celebration of sport (sport and athleticism being far removed from the traditional lyrical themes of rock).
More broadly, culture must be revaluated from top to bottom, and the barometer of worth must be positivity. If self-help books, religious belief, vitamin tablets, Christian rock or therapy increase your feeling of life, pursue them.
Positivity is what the world exists for, lest we ever forget. The anti-natural are foreign to it. They are unnatural. In any other system of life, the rotten parts drop away, rejected by the elements that still have the will to flourish. Perhaps this is how it should be. To be alive at all is a state of indescribable luxury. To waste life is a crime against being.
D, LDN.
Defend the Modern World 
This is what I like, your writings strike a chord in me.
Overall they are positive, even as I chew and think thru everything.
It is tremendous writings that you put together with your deep thought and succinct style on many topics, and still inter relate, and motivate.
Thank you
Simpleton
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Very nice of you to say. Thank you.
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I think the Jews of Israel, most of them, have a LOT to teach the world on this subject.
Think of it: they emerged from either A/ the smoking furnaces of the Shoah or B/ the seven hells of dhimmitude, and they have spent the past seventy-odd years (Muslim aggression and terror raids started *before* the restoration of the state of Israel – look up “Hebron 1929” for just one example) fighting for their very lives against neverending genocidal Jihad, waged both from within and from without, and yet: instead of becoming a grim “Sparta” they are much more like an “Athens”, busily planting, building, creating, inventing, making music, and LIVING. Even the most secular Israelis – the arty sophisticated denizens of Tel Aviv – tend to have 3 or 4 children.
John Roy Carlson’s great book “Cairo to Damascus” (1951) concludes with an account of a typical voyage of the ship Ha Tikvah from Cyprus to Israel in 1948 or 1949, with Shoah survivors on board.
Many couples, either reunited after being separated during the horror, or newly-formed in the Displaced Person camps before embarking for Israel. And…they had musical instruments. Carlson writes – “Among the bedraggled children a half-dozen carried violin cases”. More – “I thought it significant that these harassed Jews thought of music as well as survival; at no time during my stay among the [Muslim] Arabs (this when he was “under cover” getting the lowdown on the jihad – Carlson had nerves of steel! – dda) had I seen anybody with a violin, or with any musical instrument of any kind. Nor had I ever seen so many wash-tubs as on the Hatikvah. All that a family owned was dumped into the tubs, **which also served as cribs, for invariably on top of every well-packed tub was an infant.** [my emphasis – dda] It was usually tended by its father; the mothers, exhausted, were asleep on the double-decked cots jamming every inch of space on the decks. These infants were the gifts that the wanderers who had been through the torture-chambers of Europe were bringing to Israel.”
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