Tea at Trianon: Modernity’s Self-Destruct Button

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, December 16, 2024

Modernity’s Self-Destruct Button

From Louise Perry at First Things:

Put bluntly: The people on whom modernity depends are failing to reproduce themselves, which means that modernity itself is failing to reproduce itself. Most voters have no idea that this is happening. Nor do most politicians. But it is happening nonetheless, and we are experiencing its early stages in the form of diverse political crises across the modern world.

We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters” is the phrase coined by Peter Thiel to describe the nature of twenty-first century innovation, or the lack of it. Digital technology gives us the impression of explosive growth, but it is a false impression. As Thiel wrote in these pages in March 2020 (before the recent spate of Boeing failures, which have further underlined his point):

When Boeing introduced its flagship 707 jet airliner in 1958, the power to cruise at 977 kilometers per hour did more than enable routine transcontinental commercial flights. It fed the optimistic self-understanding of a society proud to have entered the Jet Age. More than sixty years later, we are not moving any faster. Boeing’s latest plane, the 737 MAX, has a cruising speed of just 839 kilometers per hour—to say nothing of its more catastrophic limitations.

As a civilization, we are running on the fumes of the accomplishments of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. They gave us electricity, sanitary engineering, antibiotics, antisepsis, vaccination, rail transport, the airplane, the computer, and the theory of evolution by natural selection. We haven’t been back to the moon in fifty-two years. (Read more.)

From Steam Calliope Scherzos:

Let me try to explain what distinguishes proper art from “bad art.” Art snobs share Kant’s aesthetic views in a couple key ways. For one, they separate beauty from utility. For another, they share the belief that the aesthetic experience contemplates the object as a standalone item, often ignoring the role that perceptual context plays. But they differ immensely from Kant in one important way, and it’s in his idea that the aesthetic experience is essentially non-cognitive. For art snobs, the aesthetic is purely rooted in cognition — rudderless, wandering cognition — and it extracts value from an artwork mainly as a discursive task. If the work looks pleasing to the eye, we can call that a nice bonus, but that really isn’t the point. The point is that a good artwork doesn’t manipulate the emotions or compel an aesthetic response without eliciting some cognitive effort from the viewer. And, as it happens, our society has designated the museum to be the place in which this allegedly superior mode of art appreciation must take place. The museum is the refuge we’ve collectively designated for this type of art appreciation. The museum is itself a kind of medium, and here it’s the one through which an artwork attains its true meaning. Only through the museum can the full significance of a true, non-kitsch creation come into relief.
Of course, there are other places where art goes. There are small private galleries; and there are public art installations, sculptures, and unusual architectural works in/of state-funded buildings and various public outdoor areas; and the ultra-rich now spend more money on paintings than museums themselves do. But the idea of the museum always remains within the highbrow art appreciator’s mind — if only as a memory, or a target, or just a vague notion. When some dullard billionaire decides to purchase an ultra-expensive abstract expressionist painting, the idea of the museum lurks in the shadows of his thought process. The same goes for when an educated person assigns aesthetic value to a sculpture, like those supposedly bad ones above. The unstated question that always informs the assessment is, “Would it belong in a museum?”
And, well…? Would it…? Well, let’s consider a few situations in which it would. If the work is historical, then of course the answer is yes. There’s no utility in the historic. The “pastness” of the past belongs to its own distinct category of human understanding, and the museum’s role is to house the various objects that contain this feeling of “pastness,” which then further renders the feeling official. Of course everything from “the past” is still with us here in the present; an object’s “pastness” is essentially an illusion, even though it really was made in such-and-such a year. But much like church during the medieval period, the museum’s role is to take us to a place outside of normal worldly time, a realm wherein the past can be channeled through the present. (Read more.)