The people of North America and Western Europe now accept a level
of ugliness in their daily lives which is almost without precedent in the
history of Western civilization. Most of us have become so inured, that the
death of millions from starvation and disease draws from us no more than
a sigh, or a murmur of protest. Our own city streets, home to legions of
the homeless, are ruled by Dope, Inc., the largest industry in the world, and
on those streets Americans now murder each other at a rate not seen since
the Dark Ages.
At the same time, a thousand smaller horrors are so commonplace as to go
unnoticed. Our children spend as much time sitting in front of television sets
as they do in school, watching with glee, scenes of torture and death which
might have shocked an audience in the Roman Coliseum. Music is
everywhere, almost unavoidable—but it does not uplift, nor even
tranquilize—it claws at the ears, sometimes spitting out an obscenity. Our
plastic arts are ugly, our architecture is ugly, our clothes are ugly. There
have certainly been periods in history where mankind has lived through similar
kinds of brutishness, but our time is crucially different. Our post-World War II
era is the first in history in which these horrors are completely avoidable. Our
time is the first to have the technology and resources to feed, house, educate,
and humanely employ every person on earth, no matter what the growth of
population. Yet, when shown the ideas and proven technologies that can solve
the most horrendous problems, most people retreat into implacable
passivity. We have become not only ugly, but impotent.
Nonetheless, there is no reason why our current moral-cultural situation
had to lawfully or naturally turn out as it has; and there is no reason why
this tyranny of ugliness should continue one instant longer.
Consider the situation just one hundred years ago, in the early 1890's. In
music, Claude Debussy was completing his Prelude to the Afternoon of
a Faun, and Arnold Schönberg was beginning to experiment with
atonalism; at the same time, Dvorak was working on his Ninth
Symphony, while Brahms and Verdi still lived. Edvard Munch was showing
The Scream, and Paul Gauguin his Self-Portrait with Halo, but in
America, Thomas Eakins was still painting and teaching. Mechanists like
Helmholtz and Mach held major university chairs of science, alongside the
students of Riemann and Cantor. Pope Leo XIII's De Rerum Novarum
was being promulgated, even as sections of the Socialist Second International
were turning terrorist, and preparing for class war.
The optimistic belief that one could compose music like Beethoven, paint
like Rembrandt, study the universe like Plato and Nicolaus of Cusa, and
change world society without violence, was alive in the 1890's—admittedly, it
was weak, and under siege, but it was hardly dead. Yet, within twenty short
years, these Classical traditions of human civilization had been all but swept
away, and the West had committed itself to a series of wars of inconceivable
carnage.
What started about a hundred years ago, was what might be called a
counter-Renaissance. The Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries was a religious celebration of the human soul and mankind's
potential for growth. Beauty in art could not be conceived of as anything
less than the expression of the most-advanced scientific principles, as
demonstrated by the geometry upon which Leonardo's perspective and
Brunelleschi's great Dome of Florence Cathedral are based. The finest minds
of the day turned their thoughts to the heavens and the mighty waters, and
mapped the solar system and the route to the New World, planning great
projects to turn the course of rivers for the betterment of mankind. About a
hundred years ago, it was as though a long checklist had been drawn up, with
all of the wonderful achievements of the Renaissance itemized—each
to be reversed. As part of this "New Age" movement, as it was then called, the
concept of the human soul was undermined by the most vociferous intellectual
campaign in history; art was forcibly separated from science, and science itself
was made the object of deep suspicion. Art was made ugly because, it was
said, life had become ugly.
The cultural shift away from the Renaissance ideas that built the modern
world, was due to a kind of freemasonry of ugliness. In the beginning, it
was a formal political conspiracy to popularize theories that were
specifically designed to weaken the soul of Judeo-Christian civilization in
such a way as to make people believe that creativity was not possible, that
adherence to universal truth was evidence of authoritarianism, and that
reason itself was suspect. This conspiracy was decisive in planning and
developing, as means of social manipulation, the vast new sister industries
of radio, television, film, recorded music, advertising, and public opinion
polling. The pervasive psychological hold of the media was purposely
fostered to create the passivity and pessimism which afflict our populations
today. So successful was this conspiracy, that it has become embedded in
our culture; it no longer needs to be a "conspiracy," for it has taken on a life
of its own. Its successes are not debatable—you need only turn on the radio
or television. Even the nomination of a Supreme Court Justice is deformed
into an erotic soap opera, with the audience rooting from the sidelines for
their favorite character.
Our universities, the cradle of our technological and intellectual
future, have become overwhelmed by Comintern-style New Age
"Political Correctness." With the collapse of the Soviet Union, our
campuses now represent the largest concentration of Marxist dogma
in the world. The irrational adolescent outbursts of the 1960's have
become institutionalized into a "permanent revolution." Our professors
glance over their shoulders, hoping the current mode will blow over
before a student's denunciation obliterates a life's work; some
audio-tape their lectures, fearing accusations of "insensitivity" by
some enraged "Red Guard." Students at the University of Virginia
recently petitioned successfully to drop the requirement to read
Homer, Chaucer, and other DEMS ("Dead European Males") because
such writings are considered ethnocentric, phallocentric, and generally
inferior to the "more relevant" Third World, female, or
homosexual authors.
This is not the academy of a republic; this is Hitler's Gestapo and Stalin's
NKVD rooting out "deviationists," and banning books—the only thing
missing is the public bonfire.
We will have to face the fact that the ugliness we see around us has been
consciously fostered and organized in such a way, that a majority of the
population is losing the cognitive ability to transmit to the next
generation, the ideas and methods upon which our civilization was
built. The loss of that ability is the primary indicator of a Dark Age. And,
a new Dark Age is exactly what we are in. In such situations, the record
of history is unequivocal: either we create a Renaissance—a rebirth of
the fundamental principles upon which civilization originated—or, our
civilization dies.
I. The Frankfurt School: Bolshevik Intelligentsia
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