37
The modern city is a monstrosity, but it doesn’t yet approach the anonymous squalor of Oriental civilization, of default civilization. It’s a contradictory place but you see a counter-drive even in the attempt to preserve parks. This exists in Tokyo, in many European and European-derived cities like Buenos Aires—its makers must have been obsessed with preserving some piece of nature inside the city, and hired the French to beautify it—and in non-Western cities that have copied this way. In the arrangement of public spaces as well, of the streets, and even of the social life, the modern city is not entirely a reversion to the pre-modern squalor of pure civilization, but an attempt to preserve or at least simulate a natural space for man to move, to expand, to practice and perfect some excellences, as limited or stunted as these may be. In the modern world the return of pure civilization is the slum and the shantytown. It is slowly but certainly encroaching on the modern city as it still exists, which is in all ways a left-over from European domination of the world, and is by no means the form toward which life is progressing. The future of Blade Runner is much too optimistic, and even that in Elysium doesn’t approach the true wickedness of our fate if nothing is done. Mohammed Atta, one of the leaders of the 9/11 plot, was an architecture student. He was deeply moved by what had happened to Aleppo, and the corruption of Muslim life that finds itself disoriented in the modern city, not just in its different moral life, but in the arrangement of space and buildings that upsets the life of the faithful. He was reacting to the modern city as such, not necessarily to the slum, although the expansion of modern life in the third world is very ambiguous here; there’s always some slumification. The cities of the Near East, of North Africa, of most of the Muslim world and even much of the Orient, were in any case always differently arranged from the West, having neighborhoods closed off physically from each other, walled compounds with inner courtyards, and in general a turning away from public, political space, into the space of the family and the clan. This was a result not only of the corruption of authorities, but of an entirely different feeling of what the city existed for in the first place. There is a confusion about what different peoples object to in the modern world: they don’t necessarily hate in the modern the same thing you hate in it. I would rather ally with the leftist hipster than with China! The Chinese will actually “appropriate” everything and pretend they invented it.
38
Aristotle says Greeks are different from north Europeans and the Orientals. The Asian is civilized but slavish; the European barbarian is uncivilized, unlearned, but free. In this formula is assumed Aristotle believed in a “balance” between these two extremes, and that Greeks were better because they were the “median” between these two deficient extremes. Actually neither Aristotle’s view nor the view of the Greeks of his time, and even later, took things quite this way. There was no equivalence drawn between the free northern barbarian and the slavish Asian, but the Greeks valued and respected the free barbarian far more than the Asian. You can see this is so from many things: as late as the Crusades, when Anna Comnena wrote the Alexiad, she refers with some horror but also much respect to the Western barbarians. She is in awe at their handsomeness, their bravery and often their intelligence and cunning. Similar praise never exists for the civilized or slavish peoples of the Near East. The same attitude existed also in the age of the classical Greeks. Herodotus among others expresses much admiration for the Scythians and sees them as the innovators of a new and magnificent way of life, the nomadic, through which they confounded and defeated Darius and the Persians. Very often you can read of classical Greeks who, perched on the shores of the Black Sea, “went native” at least for part of the year and joined the nation of the Scythians, in admiration of their free life. The same thing happened much less often, and usually not at all, in the Near East: there were mercenaries, artisans, architects that worked for the Persian king and others, but they didn’t go native in this way (the charge, “to Medize,” referred to a political alignment taken out of necessity, not to a cultural preference or affinity for a way of life). The Athenians used Scythians as police in their city, but, aside from a few very old families with claims to Phoenician heritage, there was no equivalent use of Orientals and Asians, except as slaves. The beauty of northern European children is praised in antiquity very late: children of Angles for sale are referred to as “not Angles, but angels.” Many of the Greek heroes and gods had fair hair and blue or grey eyes, among which, Aphrodite, Athena, Apollo, Achilles, Menelaus, and many others; many ancient poets refer to the Dorians as a blond race. It’s hard to believe that such idealization would have been made for the qualities of neighboring nations that were despised. No, from all this and more it’s clear the Greeks admired the power and freedom of the barbarian far more than the “civilized” way of the slave, and his false intelligence. And the “balance” often attributed to Aristotle between these two ways is no such thing, but a reference to what I speak of here, that Western civilization, the European city, is unusual because it is the attempt to preserve free and barbaric life within the confines of the city. It’s an attempt to exalt and develop certain tendencies of that free life that could presumably benefit from the arts, the science, and the leisure that can only be promoted inside a city. It’s an exception in history. And by settled city and settled life, I mean settled with SLAVES! And let’s not forget that the Greeks never abandoned that mobile and nomadic life, but transposed it to the sea, as to a large extent the Germanic peoples also always have—they’ve always been a seafaring people. Entire Greek cities, like those of the Phocaeans, rather than submit to Persian rule preferred to embark their ships and move to colonies as far away as France and Spain—Marseille was founded by them, but there were outposts farther west as well. The Athenians were ready to do the same to escape subjection, and like the Scythians, take to the open sea in their sea-wagons, which in fact they did for a while. The call of the open steppe, the freedom of the new steppe of the seas, this never left them. It’s clear from this and even more how much contempt they had for the civilized and slavish life of the Asian, and how much respect and longing they had for the life of the free barbarian. This extended in some way even to their respect for the blaq Ethiopian, about who Herodotus says such nice things, especially when he compares them to the neighboring Egyptians. But in this case, there was very little familiarity with the African, his nature too foreign to the Greek, and there was the suspicion, supported by Aristotle and many others, that the African and also the Arab were too stupid to represent an admirable alternative. Nevertheless in spirit I would say even now the European has much more in common with the African than with the “Asian,” meaning the inhabitant of the broad swathe of land stretching from Han China to the Near East, that includes the long-settled farming serf regions of the planet. I know many dorks who fetishize IQ above all else will disagree with this. The Orient and Asia has always been the enemy…Africa is mostly irrelevant. The “African” may even be an ally and only became a problem under conditions of modern mass democracy, when he has been manipulated and stirred up by others.
39
Some of the modern right wing is “environmentalist,” and even beyond this, but mostly has contempt for the left Greens and other half-and-half because they misunderstand the problem of civilization and of technology. The problem of modern left is they seek not to defend nature, but to blame the West for the modern condition. And this is because the problem is said to be technological or “civilizational” progress as such. These people don’t understand that the rapacious life, the buglife, is the default condition of mankind and that the West along with a couple of others has attempted, since its beginnings, to try mitigate the evils of “pure civilization” and to bring the benefits of free life within civilization, as far as this was possible. The left environmentalist is not a reliable defender of nature: he’s “anti-racist” first and cares for nature second. Actually the two things are incompatible. China and India are by far the
sources of the most serious obvious pollution, which is the destruction of the world’s oceans with plastics and garbage. The contempt for animal life is rare in India—Schopenhauer says it’s for this reason that they easily rejected Christianity, because they heard of the gross mistreatment of animals in Europe of the time—but animal cruelty and abuse is exceedingly common and the rule in China and most of the rest of the non-European world. It is only Indian and, today, European man that is moved by compassion for animals, who are our brothers and sisters. The practice of industrial agriculture is a great evil that must be stopped, but who besides European man really cares for this? Others seem to take a great joy in the humiliation and torture of even cats and dogs. Furthermore it is, as is well known, the zombi hordes of the third world that care nothing for public and national parks and that are the ones who litter and exploit them, often by flinging feces as they’ve long learned, being sons of the honey badger that eats its own shit. As is well known, the Sierra Club and other environmentalist organizations used to oppose mass immigration, in part quietly for this reason, but also because population increase will on its own place unacceptable strains on nature. The populations of Europe and Japan, under the strain of life in high population density in the late 20th Century, chose to limit their fertility, and there’s nothing wrong with this: it is the governments, corrupt and under the lash of financiers dependent on population increase, that forbad a natural retrenchment of population. Therefore the modern left, “anti-racist,” pro-migrant, can never really be environmentalist. But, even more, in the promotion of the third world “primitive” (he is no such thing) and the false belief that life there is easier on the environment, they promote the slum, the shantytown, “civilization,” the locust default existence of mankind. It’s true that the non-Western man lives “closer to nature” in terms of his material needs, but this doesn’t translate into a more natural life or less stress on resources: he uses any excess to breed indiscriminately and make more like himself. Any aid to Africa or much of the rest of the third world doesn’t translate into improved quality of life, even into improved nutrition, but is immediately converted into more children who continue to live at the same level of misery. The true environmentalism is racism and has a racial foundation, and in fact the two things, environmentalism and racism, are indistinguishable. This is why there’s endless discussion of “global climate change,” because it takes attention away from concrete problems that are within our grasp to solve—the destruction of national parks, of public spaces, of the mistreatment of animals, and most especially of the oceans. All of these problems are problems of race, not of the modern city as such, modern progress, or the progress of technology. In fact, the attempt to limit this progress and to screw back humanity or freeze it in some supposedly pre-modern form, the attempt for example to bring back “small communities” in the modern world, is the greatest danger and a possible source of the most thorough-going and totalitarian subjection.
40
The true understanding of peasants you aren’t going to get from those modern windbags who extol their life or that of “noble savage”; but more likely to get from Chekhov’s story of that name. They are a wretched bunch, and locusts on the earth. You can get a good image of them also from Kurosawa movie like Seven Samurai. The peasant and serf, the default state of mankind has, like animal, his nose directed toward the earth and the ground, because it is there that the objects of interest are found, the needs of bare life. He is far from contemplation even of the stars, that Homer says gladden the heart of the shepherd alone on mountain. The dwellers of the valleys and tillers of the soil are the prototype for all the modern “bugmen,” don’t be fooled otherwise. This is the “frame” or worldview that turns all matter and all things into mere utilities. It doesn’t need technology to do so, and never has. In primitive farming societies they will immediately execute any of the intelligent as a witch: this is still done in Africa and there is the famous Chinese saying about how the intelligent must be killed. This is always the case in much so-called “primitive” life, life under the thumb of the empowered old matriarchs and the conceptual dildoes they use to clobber the heads of young men. What is worst about the modern world is the reimposition of this life, which is taking place for political and biological reasons. The problem of our time has never been with technology as such. There is no inner working of technology that inevitably leads to human subjection. The tendency exists merely because, by allowing an overwhelming increase in the numbers of the superfluous, it gives them and those who cater to them power when it is mixed with democracy. The left environmentalist, among many others, is misguided because he wants more power given to such people. He attacks precisely those elements of the modern West, of modern technology, even of modern culture, that can mitigate somewhat the rule of the superfluous and their destruction of nature, including human nature. I can imagine few fates worse than if we decided to “live closer to our means,” to retrench and stop technological progress and innovation, to scale back to “small, integral communities,” to bring back “traditional forms” in our circumstance. I understand the desires of those on the right who long for the great parts of the past, but understand this: any such attempt in the modern world, I mean to promote the small village, the rustic life, the modest life, will lead not to the reestablishment of the glories of past ages, but to the freezing of modern corruption, to its stabilization and permanence. You will get small communities run by the gynocracy, to suppress true manhood and youth, but this time with the benefit of whatever modern technology is already around. They will do so in the name of “traditional virtue.” They will be Christian, maybe, but their Christianity will be a cover for Marxism in one way or another. It doesn’t matter what ideology or religion or “ideals” you give them, they will still behave the way they’re born to. The problem of the modern world, as also of the degradation of the environment, isn’t technology or a way of life or an ideology, but the ubiquity and rule of a certain kind of human…. and until this problem is solved………
Bronze Age Mindset Page 7