What’s Wrong with Positivity and Health?

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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.

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Prelude to a Second American Civil War?

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American Civil War, Counter-Jihad, Defend the modern world, Glenn Beck, Gun Control, National Rifle Association, Rihanna Muslim, Tyranny, United States, Western world

Anyone who saw Glenn Beck’s performance at the NRA convention last week will struggle to describe it in words. On the one hand, the former Fox-contributor was ridiculous, over-emotive, faux-Shakespearean and tended to ramble on from one point to the next rather than focus on the issue he was invited to speak about. On the other hand, he was eminently convincing in his case that firearms and the right of the common man to own them was something above the merely political. It involved, he suggested, one of the naked, pre-political liberties of mankind – the right to defend one’s family, and given that this right precedes politics, he argued, nobody should dare threaten it but that they rightly be called a tyrant.

And with this, I wholeheartedly agree. Beck, however, is a difficult man to agree with. He can embarrass an argument as well as he can express one. And at the NRA convention, Beck provided a lot of unnecessary amateur dramatics. His voice occasionally trembled for decorum and then, just as easily (and artificially) rose with a preacher’s emphasis for applause and confirmation. It’s difficult to keep Beck on track at a live event, but look at his speech in transcript form, and you’ll find much more to engage with.

Beck didn’t mention it explicitly, but the language of ‘civil war’ ran implicitly through his entire speech. His rhetoric about being ready to ‘stand and fight’ hardly needs elaborating upon. Nor does his use of the iconography of soldiers and historic battles. The audience knew what he meant. They whooped and cheered on cue and off, intimating that they understood him, tone and undertone.

It is the undertones which concern me most.

A political tendency is developing in America which, unless some concerted effort is made to arrest it, will bring the prospect of a very damaging civil conflict into view. This tendency is based on a growing doubt that the elected Obama administration is the rightful government of the United States. There are Americans, many of them decent and rational to their bone-marrow, who do not believe that ‘America’ elected Barack Obama, either in 2008 or 2012. They believe that an alien coalition of Mexicans, Africans and Cubans elected him, after he bribed them with their money.

The fact that they’re not entirely wrong doesn’t help us here. Of course the Democrats have engineered immigration policy with the electoral college in mind. Nobody disputes this. But if this belief is followed through to its logical end, we may end up with a catastrophe.

America is not an ordinary country. It is the greatest nation in the Western World. American innovation created and secured the mechanics of democratic capitalism, which itself defeated both Communism and Fascism to ensure that mankind remained free, and that the democratic idea became a global standard. A modern history without America would have seen politics reduced to a question of allegiance between Berlin or Moscow. A choice (if it is one) from hell.

Given this indispensability, everyone the world over has a right to be concerned about America’s internal affairs. With Islamism lapping at European shores and autocratic Russian and Chinese states rising to ever greater economic might, the need for a stable, united, and confident America is increasing.

And yet it is at this point in history that America risks falling to pieces. One cannot now bet safely against a major civil implosion in certain American states. The most likely catalyst for the beginning of a Second American Civil War would (let’s not say ‘will’ just yet), probably be the next election. If the republicans fail to win in 2016, then that really is it for the party of Reagan. After this, people may start looking for primordial, pre-political solutions.

And in case you don’t know what that entails, I refer you back to Mr Beck’s speech.

D, LDN.