Undercurrents

August 1, 2020 Hunter Wallace Aesthetics, History 16

Assuming this is true, what should be done?

What can be done while we are within the current historical cycle?

It is worth looking back at the 1920s and 1930s which were the formative years of our current historical cycle when the ideas which are now completely dominant – antiracism, cosmopolitanism and modernism – were once a submerged undercurrent within the liberal mainstream.

Quillette:

“Many adherents to the aesthetics of the avant-garde in tenured positions at American art schools and universities are still enthusiastic supporters of the ideas and strategies that won them the culture wars of the late twentieth century. They steadfastly cleave to the doctrinal ideas that brought them into their positions of power and authority and have entrenched themselves in defense of an exclusively Euro-centric cult of avant-garde art. But as Western culture has changed around them, they have been outflanked by sentiment and technology.

The foundations of the avant-garde were built upon the opposition of true and fake art. The avant-garde provided true, ethical art, while its opposite pole was fake, sentimental kitsch. The Frankfurt School writer Norbert Elias was first to identify sentiment as the enemy, followed by Herman Broch, who provided doctrinal writings describing kitsch as evil, and tying true art to the exposure of social reality. The young Marxist Clement Greenberg came to the game late, famously bringing their ideas to an American audience with avant-garde doctrines that despised kitsch and favored an elitist intellectualism. Regardless of the importance of emotion in human relationships, a fundamentalist rejection of sentiment in art coupled with an embrace of ethical confrontation became doctrinal to the avant-garde throughout the twentieth century.

Representational artists—painters and sculptors who make images of people who look like people and things that look like things—were their favorite targets, partly because this was the dominant art of the West’s Soviet enemies. The Soviets used representational Socialist Realism to propagandize their ideology, and made use of sentiment as a manipulative tool. American Communism had fallen into disarray after the Stalin / Hitler pact in 1939, and after the war revelations about Stalin’s gulags turned many communists anti-Soviet. The US government courted their allegiance, enthusiastic to present America as the open-armed home of free thought – even if that thought was opposed to the government – in contrast to the straight-jacket of totalitarian doctrine. This created the paradox of American Marxist avant-gardists being set against Soviet Socialist Realism. Offering avant-gardism as a liberating alternative to the constrictions of Communism was essential to America’s strategy for winning the cultural Cold War. If the enemy restricted and controlled art in the East, in the West artists were encouraged to provide political commentary and to transgress. The avant-garde was fresh, seductive, and appealing. If sentiment and representation were the tools of our lying enemies, we must offer the opposite—concept and abstraction.

The establishment of the avant-garde depended upon an intellectual and financial dominance of American arts that was still possible when cultural gate-keepers like Greenberg, Alfred Barr, Nelson Rockefeller, Larry Gagosian, or Charles Saatchi maintained authority over the limited number of literary, museum, and academic outlets that controlled the discourse and development of American culture. Until the late twentieth century, critics could still speak of the “art world,” as a Western hegemony, a monolithic defensive line in which all artists must participate as avant-gardists or be sidelined. …”

Adolf Hitler hated these people.

They were crushed by the Third Reich in Germany. In hindsight though, Adolf Hitler was a romantic nationalist. He was a man of the 19th century in his ideas and tastes. Fascism was the natural end point of romantic nationalism which was the great idea of the 19th century.

In the early 20th century, Franz Boas, Sigmund Freud, the Frankfurt School, the New York Intellectuals, the Austrian School of Economics and the avant-garde – many of them who came to the US or UK as exiles from European fascism – were pioneering all the shit that became hegemonic in the postwar era. World War II was the crisis that catapulted these ideas into the mainstream. It was driven by the practical need to fight the Nazis and Soviets. In much the same way that fascism was the natural end point of the Romantic cycle, Wokeism is the natural end point of antiracism or a spirit of self loathing, cynicism, transgression and disenchantment which was the great idea of the 20th century.

At the end of the 18th century, Jacobinism in the French Revolution was the natural end point of civic nationalism (union of free men against tyrants), which was the great idea of the 18th century. John Locke, Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were all driven into exile. Romanticism developed in reaction to the Enlightenment cycle in the Napoleonic Wars. The earliest stirrings of the Enlightenment began with Descartes and Hobbes at the end of the Reformation cycle who were themselves reacting to the Wars of Religion. Both Descartes and Hobbes were exiles in their lives. Hobbes was the “Monster of Malmsbury.” He published Leviathan in 1651 during the English Civil War. It was one of the earliest articulations of the social contract theory which is at the core of liberalism.

The Reformation brought about the end of the Renaissance Cycle. In that case, another small spark at the end of a dry period of dissolution – an academic disputation over indulgences in a backwater of what is now Germany which was prompted by Pope Leo X’s (himself a scion of the Medici family) rebuilding of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome – a monumental Renaissance extravaganza that later employed Michelangelo – created a stir among European humanists who later became the Protestant reformers. It caught fire in Germany where resentments had been mounting about German money flying over the Alps to Rome. The young John Calvin was a humanist scholar when he was swept up in the tumult of the Reformation in France in the late 1520s and early 1530s. Calvin famously went into exile in Geneva where he published the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion.

Seen in this light, Woke people are the conservatives of our time. They are the tail end of a long train of ideas which gestated in the early 20th century. They are the force which will eventually plunge Western civilization into a new violent crisis which will bring about their dissolution. There will be a reaction against them which will dissolve the elite consensus and combust the current order at which point an undercurrent of thought will gain traction and come to dominate the next historical cycle.

The upshot of all this is that we need to persevere and work.

About Hunter Wallace 12380 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

15 Comments

  1. I think it would be interesting for you to contemplate and write about what you foresee emerging from this crisis.

    It’s interesting to analyze this in terms of cyclical and predictable formulas…but the “reboot” after a crisis isn’t always something better. The WW2 crisis gave us antiracism after all. Will this crisis lead to POC hegemony? Will a vacuum be created for China or Russia?

    • Memebro,

      I’ve thought of this myself and I believe the reaction to the current era can be found within the Xenniel age range down to the Millennials. It will be a rejection of the idea of bootstrapping, a renewed focus on meaning and authenticity, and using technology to increase leisure time. An Artistic Age if you will, where the majority of labor is done by machines and humans are left to ponder the meaning of our role within society.

      The Jewish subversion has caused many people to doubt everything, from institutions to even themselves. Young people of every political stripe hate Capitalism and loathe poverty even more. All work feels meaningless and the people around you are rude and self-entitled. Everything from drug addiction, to internet addiction, are all about escaping the awful reality and trying to find a new sense of meaning and purpose.

      If every anti-masker and BLM protestor dropped dead tomorrow, you’d probably find young Whites generally happy with the world that came after. Right now there is an attitude of “can’t we just get along?” but when the chips are down, I don’t think either of the anti-social attitudes these groups exhibit will be tolerated. Karens are absolutely despised by men and women alike as well. I think when all the smoke clears, we’ll see a day where people will be less tolerant of individualism, more collectivist, more authoritarian but also more polite, more realistic and more focused on enjoying life.

      Globally they will be isolationist and will be open to trade with other nations while remaining separate. The Crisis they will likely go through will be an age where that isolationism is threatened (likely by a non-White group) and the age of empires will begin again in the 22nd century where they will look upon this age as one of decadence and naivete.

    • You can look at these cycles as alternating the liberal/individualist paradigm (centered on the individual) with the conservative/collective-identity paradigm (submerging the individual to the group, and to a greater and unifying concept).
      The Renaissance was a liberalization which shifted the attention form God and brought the individual into focus. It was followed by the Reformation which reasserted a strong religious identity.
      The Enlightenment preached the autonomous individual reason as being the ultimate fact and it was universalist in mindset. The romantic-nationalism followed as a reaction, and it was one which reasserted the idea of collective identity by making supreme the ethnic-national identity. It then used this identity to recreate the social&political order around the idea of the ‘national-state’.

      The liberal-individualist paradigm leads to weak states, polities and civilizations, and it collapses into social disorder. The conservative/ strong collective-identity paradigm leads to self-destructive wars with other polities (states&civilizations) and finally collapses as well (as in the wars of Reformation, or as Hitler ended).

      We are at the end of the post-WW2 cycle, one dominated by the liberal-individualist paradigm, and we witness how the growing the social disorder and state dysfunction is leading to the next transformative crisis.
      What will be the reaction ? We (the dissident right, alt-right, white nationalists, etc.) are part of this reaction but we don’t have yet a clear and coherent vision. Rather we are preparing and helping what is to to come and take over when the things will get so bad that they would become unbearable and the mass of people will become open to a major change. But what will be that which is to come we don’t know yet. We may not even like it that much when we will first see it. It will somehow resonate with our ideas, it will echo them, but likely we will also find it abhorrently plebeian and crude in many aspects.

      • What should we do? HW doesn’t condone violence… though God does. Ps. 139:21-22

        “The purpose of bread and circuses is, as Neil Postman said in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, to distract, to divert emotional energy towards the absurd and the trivial and the spectacle while you are ruthlessly stripped of power.”
        Chris Hedges

        St. Philaret of Moscow stated: “Love your personal enemies, hate the enemies of Christ, destroy the enemies of the fatherland.”

        • Thank you for that Fr. It bugs me that apostates misinterpret what Jesus was saying about loving your enemies. God’s enemies should never be loved and there isn’t anywhere in Scripture that would support such a ridiculous and blasphemous teaching that they should.

          But for those folks, Satan is their real god, despite their insistence on referring to themselves as Christian.

  2. I really think that, though the extremity of The Left, at this time, is vexing to behold and live through, I continue to think that this is the end of a liberal century and the beginning of a Nationalist-Populist century in it’s wake.

    The election of Trump, Brexit, the jauntiness of The Visegrad alliance within The EU, the likelihood of a coming Italexit, the new constitutions of Poland and Hungary, and the rearisal or The Russian Orthodox Church, within Russia, the growing strength and visibility of The traditionalists within The Roman Catholic Church, or the now more common buycotts and counter-doxxings on The Right in this country, are some of the more salient evidences of this since 2010.

    Of course, for many of us, these processes are happening way too slowly, yet they are happening, nonetheless, and these processes also have something to do with a Left that is now standing on the highest rung of it’s ladder on it’s tiptoes.

    Such a position, however, cannot be maintained, for not only does it require great balance and energy, it requires favourable circumstances, and, more and more, the circumstances grow averse for them.

    You can compare The Left to The Wehrmacht at Kursk in July of 1943, that brutal sledgehammer of a battle something which, even if they had won, they did not have the power to follow up on.

    But, yes, the Tigers were on the loose on the plains outside of Prokhorovka, and very threatening to the Russians who had to oppose them.

    What those Russians in their anti-tank guns and T-34s could not know at Prokhorovka was that the strength of the infrastructure that fielded those amazing German tanks and SS units, was growing discernibly weaker by the month.

    And so it is with The Left, for they not only have taken a losing Trump campaign and made it a likely win, they are minting thousands and thousands of ex-Lefties a day with their shenanigans.

    The current posture that The Left is in is not sustainable, on any level – neither culturally, politically, or legally, something which will be very evident 3,4, or 5 years up the road.

    In the end, all the Corporate-Globalist money in the world, or twisted machinations by The Deep State, and it’s web of NGOs, will not be able to prop The Left up, because, to John Q. American, The Left now looks outrageous, heinous, vile, repugnant, and thoroughly without a justifiable basis.

    You don’t have to be politically astute to see this, or feel it, something for which we have to be very very grateful to The Far Left, spoiled toxick jerks that they are.

    So, I agree with the headline premise of this article : —— ‘Reactive forces always emerge around times of crisis.’

    • Hello Ivan;

      Interesting points regarding an ultimate turn to the right. I believe you are correct, sir but perhaps we will zigzag to the left first to get there. If Slow Joe wins in November (and that is not certain) there will be a hard turn to the Left will which will be disastrous for everyone, including the Left.

      President Sleepy Joe will be sleeping on the couch in the Oval Office while National Security Advisor Hillary sits behind the Resolute desk, signing the President’s name to one Executive Order after another, wrecking everything. VP Gap-Toothed Stacey (all 400 Lbs.) or Camel Toe Harris will be travelling around the country railing against evil White people. The economy and therefore, the financial system will be collapsing while civil disorders also increase.

      This will frustrate the Left because having finally obtained power they will reap the whirlwind they have sown. Confidence in the U.S. will evaporate like the morning dew, both within and without the country. Unemployment will skyrocket, the dollar and stock markets will plummet and anarchy will be much worse than today. The colored people who will be in charge (nominally) will prove what everyone already knows; they cannot do anything.

      This will completely discredit the Left because of their abject failure to accomplish anything but more failure. Reparations, destruction of suburbs, environmental craziness etc. will all fail without money, the lifeblood of every government. The “Coalition of the Fringe’s” (HT Steve Sailer) agenda will come to nothing if Sleepy Joe makes it into the Oval Office. This will enrage the Left as they see their best chance to impose their regime and exact revenge fail.

      It will also show that the “conservatives”, especially the Republicans are also thoroughly incompetent and discredited by their own failures. Losing to an obvious derelict like Sleepy Joe will be the rejection of the Republicans, especially if they also lose the House and Senate, quite the accomplishment. This will cause the already shrinking political center to disappear.

      After the horror of a Sleepy Joe administration and the failure of “conservatism” to conserve anything the turn to the Right can really take place. When the average normie is more concerned with their daily bread and security than equality, global warming or any other shiny, nebulous thing that has the attention of the editors of the NYT, true progress can be made. Unfortunately, the current political system must fail and hit bottom before a real alternative arises to the present political failures.

      • @12AX7…

        Thank you, Sir, for your kind and thoughtful reply.

        Yes, I agree with you that the path will likely be zig-zaggy – like a seasaw battle.

        If Biden is elected, I believed you have correctly foreseen

        That said, I think that The Democrats has completely blown an election they had won with their plandemic destabilization economic ruination campaign, with their rioting shenanigans.

        Reliable polls show the president surging, and Independents, vital for the election, are now reading 75-25 in Trump’s favour. Battleground states, places where Biden was in a commanding lead but a few months ago, are now either even of favouring Trump slightly.

        So, I do not think that The Left is going to be in power. That so, we can expect continued plots and gigantic temper tantrums – huge riots in less policed cities throughout November, as the results gradually become irrefutable that they are living under Trump for another 4 years.

        And if The Left is not careful, they will get another all Republican dominance of all three branches, and this with a more confident president heading into his second term.

        Though it does not show yet, I believe The Left is running out of steam, for they have used every ruse in the book, and they still have nothing to show for it.

        I saw this as a little kid in the 1960s – insanity, riots, and general discontent from about 1963 to Watergate and the defeat in Vietnam in 1974.

        Then, suddenly, as Nixon got in the helicopter and flew back to California, the whole nation abandoned the wars of the previous decade very quickly, the rest of the 1970s being the party years.

        It all was over so quickly, because there is very difficult to keep a bonfire going.

        As to this system needing to hit bottom, I have to wonder if we are not close now.

        Certainly in rural north Carolina we have been hanging near the bottom like catfish and carp since the mid 1990s, when out last industry was shipped out!

        The biggest problem I think we have now is that we have very little credible leadership, and, thus, no reliable political structure, and that, as you point out, is going to take a while, because it will be zig-zaggy.

        I see some good things on the horizon, as Both Senator Josh Hawley and Tucker Carlson look like good and viable presidential candidates for 2024.

        In any case, I wish you and yours the very best!

      • @12AX7…

        One more thing – you put your finger on something very important. There are only two ways to change this country, one being all out armed force, the other being the ability to persuade a profound majority of the populace to side with you politically.

        As to #1, The Left does not have the experience, training, organization, or arnaments to pull that off, as it is an extremely difficult thing. Very few on the Left know how to shoot well, much less infantry tactics.

        Bushwhacking unsuspecting suburban residents and conservative reporters is their only tactic, and this will not pull them through a wart.

        As to #2, they cannot persuade the country to rebuild every house and ban cows for their Green New Deal; cannot persuade most Americans to part with their weapons, especially now, now can they persuade Americans that the police ought be toothless.

        To be clear, they have succeeded in making tens of millions of whites hide from themselves, and, as well, to construct a culture of fear where most will not say how they really believe.

        As well, they have usurpt the country through a clever judiciary strategy – forcing integration, abortion, gay marriage, and non-White immigration down our throats, the latter with the help of Congress led by Kennedy and Javitz in ’65.

        In the end, however, they are tired of waiting for the rest of us to become Bolsheviks, and, that so, they are going to continue to throw vile temper tantrums that will only detract from their power.

        Eventually, even the Democrat party, and their donors, will be forcet to disown them. I see it coming, at which point they will disband and break up into the pages of history books.

        In the end, Americans are moderate people – not given to extremism of any sort, and, it is in this that The Left has miscalculated in their impatience.

        They were doing better in hiding their extremism and working deceitfully, for, one notch at a time they were strangling the body politic in this country, but, by the time The Left finishes rioting at the end of this year, after Trump wins, they are going to be spent as an operable political force.

        Once their irregular guerrilla force is no longer effective, to any degree, I have to wonder what The Establishment will do?

        Another world war for aliens or how about a harsher plandemick?

        One thing I know – those in power will not quit once Antifa, Netflix, Patreon, Disney, BLM, Home Depot, Target, Starbucks, and Chick-Fil-A are through.

        They will keep resurfacing in new guises until this country splits up into Red and Blue zones.

        Like you say, this is going to be a long drawn out process, and, getting older, I and my wife are going to let the youngun’s settle it out here, while we watch with affection in Hungary – eating chicken paprikash, playing chess in parks, bathing in spas, having deep heart to heart conversation with the natives, drinking Palinka and Rakia until the cows come home, and alternating between attending church services and Far Right rallies in the town squares!

  3. What can be done while we are within the current historical cycle?

    For Dixie and the Southern People, there’s nothing, except to defend our localities against these foreign political Interlopers. We don’t have the political machinery to do any much more. Certainly not the ability to exploit Yankeedom’s current weaknesses and determination to self destruct.

    The Pacific Northwest is just too far away, geographically, to really matter to us here in the South. Furthermore, we just don’t matter at all, politically, in the Yankee grand scheme of things, except as scapegoats for all of their self inflicted problems. We’re on the sidelines, as always.

    Bring back the spirit of ’76. -1876.

  4. I find it interesting that a Russian professor, analyst for the KGB, saw this a few ago.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/06/map-of-the-day-ex-kgb-analyst-predicts-balkanization-of-us/58945/

    My version?

    -A strip down the west coast, for now, call it Mexifornia. Parts of current Cally, Oregon and Washington state as a negro/homosexual/illegal immigrant playground with the Hollyweird types as their leaders.

    -Yankeeland. Mass, NY, some of Penn, those can have it, yes. Maryland, too, DC? Of course.

    -The New CSA. Texas to South Carolina. Maybe some of Florida, too.

    And, as that cute girl warned, lots of folks moving to where they can do either market capitalism or crap like Cuba/Venezuela. Lots of negroes moving to Ghana, who, BTW, has said they’d welcome them and their horrid music.

    Pretty, no, but it may well come to that.

    • It may come to that….for a while. After a time, the morons will find their utopias quite unpleasant and will seek to invade the civilized lands once again. It’s a process that repeats itself. America let the wrong people in, and look where it got us. You have to know who to keep out, and the defense of territory must be enforced with the will to use violence.

  7. Great perspective. Hope you’re right. I’m not so optimistic that the current situation can be turned around. Will whites who allowed their civilization to be stolen from them in plain sight without lifting a finger for more than 50 years summon the courage to act now?

    I wonder. I hope so.

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