Modern guilt

I published a post in January called Born into Debt, in which I wrote "just by being born, we're guaranteed to have a negative impact on the world", and asked whether millennial culture will be plagued by "the cringe of innate guilt" as a consequence.

If I hadn't published that post in January, I'd almost certainly be open to the accusation of having plagiarised ideas from this piece by Wilfred McClay in The Hedgehog Review, in which he says:

Indeed, when any one of us reflects on the brute fact of our being alive and taking up space on this planet, consuming resources that could have met some other, more worthy need, we may be led to feel guilt about the very fact of our existence.

McClay makes the point that the situation is even worse than I'd realised: not only do we now know that we're causing terrible harm to the environment and to the victims of globalisation, we also through technology and globalisation and markets have a chance to do something to rectify that harm - as well as naturally occurring suffering - in some way, but generally don't.

His piece then goes off in a different direction to my short post: rather than asking whether guilt would be a prevalent undercurrent in millennials' culture, he suggests that it has led to the rise of victimhood-claiming and sin-shaming:

claiming victim status is the sole sure means left of absolving oneself

He then goes on to suggest that the insolubility of modern guilt might be a reason to revive religion, since religion has systems of absolution that modernity does not.

I'm not convinced, personally: I think rather that we should in fact each be doing much more to reduce the genuine reasons for our warranted guilt, up to a point - beyond which we should simply accept that nobody asks to be born and life is bittersweet, including in the sense that while we can all be forces for good, we're also inevitably all forces for bad sometimes.

Perhaps there could even be a positive to that: it might teach us all a little humility and greater understanding of others' flaws.

What should we do?

What should we do, eh?

What should we do about our depression, anxiety and loneliness?

Now that a climate change-denying, disability-mocking, sexist, racist liar has been elected the most powerful person on Earth, we should probably spend the next four years fighting political fires. But what about after that?

As I wrote about here, Christopher Lasch thought we should establish systems of education, government and life in general that empower people, since small accomplishments achieved in local communities would involve the fostering of human connections and result in the satisfaction of jobs well done.

Which sounds great.

But it does rely on there being a sufficient number of appropriately difficult challenges for us to solve, forever.

Curing all diseases, alleviating all poverty and ending all wars and oppression are pretty decent goals that we're already trying hard as a species to achieve. Well, we're trying a little bit, anyway. But is it possible for all of us to make meaningful contributions to those tasks? I doubt it.

Preventing harmful climate change is probably the next-most pressing issue, and we can certainly all do our bit there, but can we do much as local communities? Again, I don't see it. Likewise preventing biodiversity loss.

Besides, while we certainly should be trying to repair the damage we've wrought on the planet, merely undoing our previous crimes feels like a waste of human potential. Think of it this way: if all you can say on your deathbed is that you did no harm, will that feel like a life well lived? You may as well have stayed in bed the whole time.

Likewise raising kids to be good people so that they in turn can raise kids to be good people so that they in turn can...

We need something else.

But what?

I don't know yet.

The best ideas I can come up with are a Star Trek-like interplanetary policing role and some kind of galactic artwork of the sort Fry carries out for Leela in an episode of Futurama:

But the first of those looks like a bit of a stretch given that we've proved to be pretty shit at even terrestrial policing, and the second would probably be an even more hideous misuse of our powers than any of the fuckups we've yet managed here on Earth (I'm reminded of a moment in one of the Red Dwarf books when a space crew rearranges the stars into an advert for Pepsi)... Oh, and they're both technologically impossible, too.

So I'm stumped for now. But it seems worth thinking about.

Book review: The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch, 1979

The Culture of Narcissism posits that when we tumble forth from the bliss-like satisfaction of the womb into the cold hard world, where not all of our needs are satisfied, we develop the capacity for anxiety; and that because the modern advertising industry keeps us in a state of constant desire, and because the bureaucratic nature of modern life makes us feel, and indeed often makes us in fact, helpless to act in many of the ways we wish to, we're not able to achieve or be satisfied with the minor victories that ought to be all we need to live fulfilling lives; and that we've therefore become creatures of anxiety and narcissism (as defined by psychotherapy as opposed to general usage) who vacillate between feelings of implausible entitlement and bewildered, depressed dissatisfaction; and that we therefore need to build a system of education and government that empowers people rather than swaddling and failing them.

Which is all pretty fucking good. Sadly it's mixed up with a fair dollop of Freudian codswallop about Oedipal complexes and castration fantasies and all that guff, but if you can hold your nose through that nonsense there's a great deal to like.

Too much to quote, in fact, although one turn of phrase in particular I thought was magnificent:

"Since the society has no future, it makes sense to live only for the moment [...] to become connoisseurs of our own decadence."

If that's not the perfect description for our modern inclination to do things like down 14 pints, vomit in our own lap and then brag about it to our friends, I'm a mongoose.

It's also highly pertinent to our recent fondness for voting for ludicrous quick fixes to complex problems, as I've written about here.

Book review: Mythologies, Roland Barthes, 1957

Like any self-mythologising French philosopher, Barthes doesn't make life easy for the reader. He's not as nonsensical as Baudrillard, but then I think he preceded him, giving the latter the chance to up the stakes still further.

Anyway, Mythologies is about myth, which is what Barthes calls second- or further-order semiology - when something that's already been used to signify something is then used in another context to signify something else - and what happens to the original thing and what it originally signified, as well as the properties of what those two together then jointly signify at the new level. Clear? It won't be.

But there are some fun examples, like what beads of sweat mythologise in the film Julius Caesar, and what a photo of a writer on holiday mythologises. It's good stuff in places, I just wish it was less deliberately opaque in others.

Modern dating / Giulia

So modern dating now involves deciding whether you like the look of the person you've just been presented with on Tinder enough to leave their profile open on your phone, preventing any other use of said phone, until your "super like" gets renewed and you can tell them you like them, which might be anything up to 12 hours. "I waited 11 hours for you!" What romance!

Book review: Fear of Music, David Stubbs, Zero Books, 2009

Best read with Spotify or similar to hand.

Despite being subtitled "Why people get Rothko but don't get Stockhausen", Fear of Music doesn't actually address the question of "why modern [read: avant garde] art is embraced and understood while modern [as above] music is ignored, derided or regarded with bewilderment as noisy, random nonsense perpetrated and listened to by the inexplicably crazed", as the blurb puts it, until its conclusion - a mere 26 pages out of 137. Rather, the first 111 pages set out the parallel histories of the two beasts.

The answers eventually proffered are: because the megabucks associated with modern art have familiarised the public with it; because modern music can feel like an infliction; because music more powerfully depicts the future, and the future is bleak; because humans are inherently more tolerant of visual than auditory chaos; and, a more general repetition of the first, because people aren't used to modern music.

Of these, I give most credence to the infliction and tolerance suggestions. To take the latter first, modern music much more commonly causes physical pain through sheer extent (in its case, volume) than modern art when experienced live, and auditory chaos also much more readily causes headaches (even at reasonable volume).

The infliction point is related. Although modern art often aims to challenge, it doesn't generally aim to cause as much unpleasantness to its audience as possible, whereas this does seem to be the aim of bands like Throbbing Gristle, Napalm Death and Sunn O))). A more appropriate comparison to these more extreme avant garde bands than the sublime (in an artistic sense) works of Rothko would be images of violence such as those force-fed to Alex in A Clockwork Orange.

The very premise of the book is on shaky ground in this respect. In setting out the history of avant garde music, Stubbs includes such figures as Jimi Hendrix, Kraftwerk, Joy Division, Brian Eno and Radiohead - hardly musicians that lacked a popular following. Furthermore, he states that millions of people already do embrace avant garde music (albeit calling this "a tiny fragment of the overall demographic"). Most damagingly, he even says "it's hard to conceive that Duke Ellington's music was once considered 'dissonant' or to recapture just what a fissure the joyful peal of Louis Armstrong's trumpet represented" - i.e., that in these cases at least the avant garde has been wholly accepted by and subsumed into the mainstream.

Likewise, although Rothko is indeed extremely popular, the same cannot be said of all avant garde art. The Tate Modern may receive millions of visitors per year, but this is due more  to its cannily having been established as a symbol of trendy London and to the monumentalism of the building itself than to its housing works by the likes of Giacometti, which are barely glanced at by the incessantly shuffling crowds, despite a Giacometti having sold for $141m this year. The public much prefers shows of works by old masters like Rembrandt and Leonardo or impressionists like Monet to the Futurists or conceptualists.

Having said all that, I like the premise of the book even if it's a false one, simply because it gives Stubbs the chance to provide his parallel histories of these two fascinating movements. And I like the book itself: Stubbs writes well and with a keen eye for what to cover from what must have been a wealth of material, and includes just enough of himself to add an extra dimension without being intrusive. I read it in one day, fighting to keep going through straining eyes (see the glasses in the photo above).

The book is also a fantastic way of discovering new music, and I recommend having access to Spotify or similar when reading it so that you can appreciate what's being discussed as you go along.

I also like the ethos of Zero Books, which claims to have the lofty aim of fighting the contemporary elimination of the public and the intellectual.

However, while both the publisher and the author seek to stand up for the avant garde, I do wish they hadn't taken such a free-thinking approach to grammar and spelling in the edition of FoM I read: practices such as printing words in a meaningful order, including every word in a sentence but only as many times as is required, subject-verb agreement, apostrophe placement, knowledge of what commas are for and reserving paragraph returns for the ends of paragraphs do help to convey a message more easily, boringly conservative though they may be.