The lies of relativism: buzzwords as enclosed tautology
“Thoughtcrime does not entail death. Thoughtcrime is death.” – 1984, George Orwell
I would guess at this stage that Modernists cringe at the very word ‘European’ for its nasty overtones of distinctiveness.
Of course, we are all now deemed guilty of the crimes of racism and sexism, the ultimate liberal power words. This is despite, as I intend to point out, these words actually being nonsensical and applied as an irrational accusation to literally anything (and have been). Racism and sexism have been the two most effectively used and all-encompassing leftist attack words to shame and discredit any ideas that are not strictly equality-based. Proud or confident traditional architecture can now be labelled racist, as it exhibits ‘inequality’ or revels in imperialism, colonialism, or whatever. It represents a time in which a homogeneous people unabashedly exerted strength and confidence in what used to be called, quite innocently, a nation. This casually applied label of ‘racism’ instantly moots a building’s entire existence – and just about everything is de facto sexist, as men have built pretty much everything.
Firstly, apart from the lunacy of applying these manufactured outrage terms to art, sexism and racism are words for innate instincts that are not logically possible to extinguish in any context. If you belong to a race or a sex, you have no choice but to defend yourself from that corner or vantage, as a matter of basic survival. Therefore, we are all racist and sexist as needed, to varying degrees, and any considerate need to avoid offending other groups without cause has generally been covered by the basic rules of politeness in society. Arguments, wars, disagreements and competition can occur whenever there is difference, or individuals. There have been battles over racism because there are races. But it is the nature of difference, of being anything – that there is always an other. If there is more than one person in the room, there is a contest of power. That is simply life. Different races will always, at times, find themselves at odds or in competition, as do the sexes more commonly. It is a matter of basic reality which cannot be avoided, as we all have personal aspects of our existence we must protect as surely as we have a will to live. The racist/sexist accusation takes advantage of our desire to be kind but the fact that effectively only white people can really be accused of racism, and only men of sexism, tells you all you need to know about these words. Like Artspeak, it is all verbal trickery. Why does nobody ever question the fact that the great minds of history never cross-examined themselves by these standards?
What our ancestors understood, and what we have lost, is the importance of truth and the sacrifice involved in the pursuit of it. Understanding what is good or what is bad, through careful study and self-reflection, is not the primary concern of a Modernist who views the natural order as something to be reshaped in favour of a trite, fairytale philosophy. He fails to understand that nothing good will come of denying nature, and his mawkish fears prevent him from seeing truth.
”False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.”
– Socrates, Phaedo
All this destruction by these accusing buzzwords is doubly tragic for having in their sights Western European art, which is objectively a vast treasure to be cherished by Westerner and non-Westerner alike. There will always be differences and cross-purposes with other major cultures (perpetually, by nature, set in a circumstance of competition) as life is a state of struggle. However, the greater bulk of humanity has benefitted from our art and traditions, in a profound way that cannot be said equally in the reverse. Contrary to this, the liberals are rewriting history to portray Europeans as the perpetual villain. Discrimination, again, is simply an inescapable element of the human condition, required in order to survive and practised every minute of the day. Having good taste itself, or a high art, is a principled act of discrimination. This state of affairs cannot be altered and as an immovable fact of life, discrimination should not be considered an evil to be excised. It is a necessity, as natural as choice, and if you seek accusing meaning in it then everyone and everything is trapped in a potential web of guilt — doubly so (and hypocritically) when members of a specific group are working against their own kind, such as anti-white Europeans who profess a desire for us to die out, or the disingenuous, low-testosterone male feminists who actually think they are impressing girls by acting like women themselves. Generally, their insincerity stands before them and they are a kind of inescapable pariah even to their own supposed allies.
Modern Westerners desperately feel the need to be self-depreciating, as we are intellectually paralyzed by this false guilt. While this implied guilt is not the tool by which art was dismantled initially, it is the process by which a return to art is suppressed. By shaming and distancing ourselves from traditional art, we believe we are paving the way for a fairer future, one without war, borders or aspirations to domination. We are led to believe in a utopia of multicultural fairness that lies just around the next corner, if we can just destroy these artistic tokens of privilege. To achieve equality, everyone must be exactly the same. Yet this sameness that is not only impossible but indistinguishable from a forced mediocrity. Even worse than mediocrity, it is a malevolent nihilism. Who even wants that phantom total equality? What is the point?
The makers of high art, and therefore of culture, must be exiled for being superior.
“Nature is red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson put it.
Equality has never been possible. All attempts to make equality a social reality have led to cultural dissipation followed by mass murder, with those holding the guns becoming the new elites. Equality is a child’s fantasy. The illusion is a permanent fleeing from cruelty, even cruel thoughts, and this flight has been the gelding of the West. All unrest is sold to us as ‘justice’.
The Modernism debacle was defended and spread upon the pretence of equality of ideas in art and philosophy. The Greenbergian concept of art without standards can only spread in the false sentimentalism of a culture seeking equality.
Conversely, the ability to stand fast in the face of cruelty, or to commit necessary cruelty, are necessities of life. There is ultimately no fleeing from certain responsibilities. Modernity and luxury have divorced us from this experience. We have lived for some time now in a world where our food is presented to us sans process, packaged neatly on a shelf like it popped out of the æther delighted to be eaten. All the necessary cruelties regarding the production and slaughter of meat, the labours of the harvest (which kept us more in sync with the seasons), are kept out of sight and thus out of mind. Yet although we hide our eyes from it, cruelty is a part of daily life by the minute, without the occasional application of which we would perish. Ignoring it does not mean it vanishes.
Much of the behaviour we now call ‘bullying’ is likewise unavoidable, natural and necessary to develop a tough skin. Not that it should be encouraged or allowed universally, just that it has been exaggerated into another social weapon in our climate of political correctness. As already stated, when there are more than two people or two ideas in the room there is a competition and nature decrees that one must win out and a hierarchy be established. You cannot do anything or have any opinion without disagreement and conflict with someone, somewhere, somehow. By retreating continually from the realities of inequality, we have also retreated from heroism. Compassion is great in small measure but it is of no use to anyone to castrate themself out of pathetic vulnerability and guilt.
In the words of Ragnar Redbeard’s infamous 1890 consequentialist essay, Might is Right:
“Mankind crieth out for kings and heroes. It demands a nobility — a nobility that cannot be hired with money, like slaves or beasts of burden. The world awaits the coming of mighty men of valour, great destroyers; destroyers of all that is vile, angels of death...We are tired to death of ‘Equality.’ Gods are at a discount, devils are in demand. He who would rule the coming age must be hard, cruel, and deliberately intrepid, for s
oftness assails not successfully the idols of the multitude...In actual operation Nature is cruel and merciless to men, as to all other beings. Let a tribe of human animals live a rational life, Nature will smile upon them and their posterity; but let them attempt to organize an unnatural mode of existence an equality Elysium, and they will be punished even to the point of extermination.”
The Romans built an impressive Empire of functional æsthetics. Roman roads still exist today because they built things to last. They did not shy away from cruelty (when necessary) because they understood reality more pragmatically than we do. They saw effect in the world and understood the agency of cause. It is the edict of nature’s sacred law, which they rightly interpreted as ‘to be a force in nature is to use nature’s ways’. Do you want to have a true legacy, create manifest good and real innovation, and achieve glory? Then you must restrain effete compassion as a primary virtue, and never lose the concept of struggle. To use an artistic allegory: the column segment must be painstakingly carved from the stone, it is not talked into existence.
Modern Westerners have been trained by Marxist word games and compassion-worship to attack themselves, to question, dismantle and distrust anything representing their own interests – to even police and censor their own thoughts. This sad state has been at least partially cultivated by the continued luxury of our convenience lifestyle, as men are not sufficiently testing themselves with cruelty and idleness lends itself to self-criticism. And there have been few epochs historically as idle as this late-stage, oil-rich civilization we see decaying and crumbling all around us. This self-attacking may appear to a cultural outsider to be an act of incredible politeness, in terms of self-depreciation, but it ultimately also paves the way for other, less advanced (but more confident) cultures to dominate us. Our weakness is couched in tolerance and despite its endless touting by politicians as our prime virtue, tolerance was not historically a Western virtue at all. These are the classical prime virtues:
Wisdom (prudentiam), justice, courage, temperance.
Tolerance is ultimately just being too weak to live by your own standards or enforce order. We actually enforce the reverse, a kind of individuality at gunpoint, which in turn actually squashes effectual or traditional individualism (actual unique personality) behind the veneer of an easy morality – which is again compassion. The Modernist asks: “Why can’t I be an artist without learning technique? Why can’t I call whatever I do art?” Freedom and individuality are great but only once you are already within the framework of homogeneous goals.
It must be noted that the schism between the worlds of modernity and tradition were really torn irreparably during the cultural upheaval of the 1960s, a period famous for the ‘freeing’ of social mores without any thought to the consequences. This came upon a tide of carefully manipulated leftward shifting in popular culture. A generation turned to promiscuity and drugs and gutted their own future. They were manipulated by money power. Many years ago, ‘beat poet’ and appalling degenerate Allen Ginsberg threatened: “We’ll get you through your children!” This is what they did and are still doing this to this day.
The 1960s generation did, to their credit, enjoy some æsthetic music, which was really the impetus behind its power. Psychedelic rock leading into heavy metal and progressive rock attempted, for a time, to break back through the fog of simplified and somewhat goofy popular music to a new, more dramatic, even strangely Wagnerian oeuvre. This musical explosion was the only legitimate thing about the revolutionary Sixties and the creative power upon whose coat-tails the revolution piggybacked. As complexity compounded it was akin to an electric, aggressive classicism of sorts. Groups of like-minded Western men, when given license to unite, trend eventually towards originality and brilliance. That is, a patriarchal creativity (at some level a peacockish paean to impress girls) based on complex arrangements with a spirit of exploration that is subconsciously spiritual or Pythagorean.
Sadly, after a few brief decades, mercantile values superseded and their usual exploitation watered popular music down to a more mindless drivel than ever before. The useful tool they took from that era was the idea of music relating to youthful rebellion, which was then harnessed commercially and recycled every generation since in an increasingly soulless and bizarre corporate festival culture, with almost no quality or exploration to the music any longer, and without anything coherent to rebel against.
Without the very basic idea of making something pleasing or rousing, without that collective solar goal, art is merely an annoyance, an afterthought or a club for fey egalitarian drop-outs to express themselves impotently.
Any ill-thought endeavour must suffer its demise. Like an octogenarian punk, it is merely the gaunt frame of a aged, mohawked nihilist too entrenched to pass away. Indeed, even well thought-out endeavours must end. But if we allow traditional Western art values to die, we are also laying to rest civilization on the whole, and killing something it should not have been possible to kill, or could only suffer the illusion of death — a tragedy beyond proportions from any angle. For the moment, these false and juvenile hippy values continue to exist in a climactic limelight. As demonstrated by the ongoing money exchange in our upper art echelons, they can carry their illusions for a little while longer – the illusion being that they are being good for showing a contemptuous disregard for the knowledge of their ancestors, as well as for nature, from which the very worth of value or virtue is bequeathed. It is as if to say that the classical world gave us nothing of any note, that the Byzantine, Greek, Roman, the Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment and Victorian ages were a mistake, an unworthy distraction. And that everything previous to Duchamp and Picasso in the art world was wholly misguided, the lapdog to enslaving empires and servant of the slave masters.
These misguided ancients lacked the relativist, obscurantist ideals of a Postmodern tolerance mind-set, they did not understand that every person, every art, every idea exists in a state of magical equality, and different cultures and approaches to art are also all innately equal. People of the past like Dante and Goethe were such idiots compared with us! They did not even censor their own thoughts, rooting out racism and sexism, and self-flagellate for their privilege!
This relativism is obviously anathema to art — according to their rules, skill in drawing and painting is the last thing an artist should have, as it exhibits competitive shaming over those who are unskilled, an uncomfortable, visceral inequality.
Relativism dictates that all points of view are equally valid, depending on context or point of view. It is the formalization of the equality fairytale. Everything is subjective to a relativist. There are no hard truths and therefore striving for excellence is ultimately futile. Despite pure relativism being untenable and destructive, it has, without notable challenge, been one of the primary arguments used to dismantle art, culture and values. It is the predominating argument behind the peddling of limitless tolerance and universalism. Its folly lies in its naive trust, which fails to see that by dismantling your own natural position in a quest to see things from the other side, you will find your own position weakened.
A Modernist’s relativism argument tends to go something like this:
Modernist: “I think that splatter of paint is art.”’
Me: “That’s ridiculous, Rembrandt is art, that is a splatter.”
Modernist: “This is my opinion and you can’t make me change it, it is high art, very moving and it speaks to me.”
Me: “Look, Rembrandt spent five years on one painting alone, and you can tell by looking at it. This splatter fell onto the canvas when I was cleaning my brushes.”
Modernist: “Well, I partially agree with you.”
Me: “Random splatters of paint are not art.”
Modernist: “Discussing art is pointless — we’re just going in circles.”
So a vulgar, egocentric idea is introduced, championed selfishly and then never goes away because it was not utterly stamped out, mostly because you lose effor
t for arguing and just want them to be quiet. It makes you wonder how we managed to maintain standards at all before the twentieth century — it is as though a bug has entered our cultural computer and warped everything slightly. It is beneficial to understand relativism and opposing views but only so much as it furthers the future of your own people.
The only assurance a relativist world offers is that the basest idea will be celebrated out of a misplaced desire to support the underdog. That is, only the worst in all things will be permitted, to keep the illusion of unity within a diverse society of people with incompatible histories living in a forced, feigned collusion. In such a structure, everyone else can only be as good as the best abilities of the very lowest tier. Westerners feel uncomfortably embarrassed by the breathtaking successes of their ancestors as it is. It does not fit in with the fashionable relativism, so our leftists have decided we must enact a vengeance upon ourselves. But even more cowardly, not even so much on ourselves as on our children and grandchildren.
There is no knitting circle or hobbyist organization imaginable, no matter how seemingly innocuous, that under correct circumstance is not fully capable of becoming a sycophantic Stalinist regime.
“Among those who dislike oppression are many who like to oppress.”
– Napoleon
Relativism in art means actual painting is now labelled realism or illustration to make room for every kind of crass chaos that might want to be called art. The everything is art relativists hold up a false mask of freedom of opinion, while of course carrying on the usual totalitarianism when you are not looking. It is very difficult to say why they see themselves on any kind of intellectual high ground for this reason, as the very vocations of intellectualism they represent are based on classical virtues that they claim no longer exist. They are like a whole societal substrata of intellectually adolescent floozies, only instead of cutting themselves in the bathroom over their narcissist self-esteem issues, they cut away at the foundations of natural order — and they cut with the saws of relativism.
The Decline and Fall of Western Art Page 11