Undercurrents

U.S. Marshals spoke with NBC about the antifa violence perpetrated against officers protecting federal property in Portland. Some have been badly injured by explosives, rocks, concrete & much more. Rioters are trying to break inside the courthouse & burn it down. pic.twitter.com/lNRDzo6JNq

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) August 1, 2020

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 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. 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.

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.

Note: The Reformation brought about the end of the Renaissance Cycle.