Modernists unite over fear of "the mob"

The authors and artists we think of as "The Modernists" did have their divisions.

Some exalted Modernity's materialism and rationalism while others opposed rationalism (so they said) and sought to go back to an golden age of myths and rituals, a sort of anti-Modernity.

But virtually all of them happily re-united around an abiding fear of democracy and of being ruled by a "mob" of the lower middle class, working class and the defectives.

And an astonishing number wrote of "exterminating" these "lesser" classes.

We can say this for certain of many of the best known Modernists because they left plenty of private papers and have had enough interest from scholars to see that all of their private and public writing has had a through going over with a fine tooth comb.

But I suspect the lack of evidence that the lesser studied Modernists also held these quasi fascist beliefs indicates only a lack of evidence or a lack of scholarly interest, not a lack of such beliefs among them.

Ordinary middle to upper middle class people from the period 1910 to 1945 are even less likely to get studied in the detail that prominent people of that period have been.

But I suspect that a through sampling of what personal writings and newspaper reports from that period that do remain would reveal an amazing amount of quasi-fascist talk from ordinary well-to-do individuals all over the world.

Emphasizing once again that what separated hard core Nazi from soft core Yeats or Elliot was more an matter of degree,  not kind ...

The high school teachers of WWII's leaders, got THEIR high school education back in the Early Victorian era

MY high school teachers ran WWII !

It is striking how just old the leaders of WWII were: not just politicians, but also the generals, bureaucrats, CEOs, professors and editors. Anyone who was anybody was usually far older than today's leaders is in equivalent positions.

Most were born in the 1870s and 1880s and so got their last science education in the 1890s, from high school teachers who themselves got their last science education at a high school at the end of the Early Victorian era !

So : the Science of the late 1840s used to guide the world of the early 1940s.

The leaders of WWII , Modernists to the core, had a firm faith grounded on a distinct impression that the First Law of Thermodynamics and Lyell's Law of Uniformitarianism was the Alpha and Omega of scientific knowledge ----- for all time.

When your high school science teacher tells you the universe is eternally unchangeable, why bother to drop by to be posted on the latest updates in basic science . There aren't going to be any , there can't be any.

Just take a bit of time to keep up on the latest wonderful new technological offerings.

Now do the horrors of Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Stalingrad seem more understandable ?

why global commensality is/isn't ROMANTICISM

   In a commensal world ,humanity dines with reality - not upon it.
   Hitler cherry-picked much from the Romantic Era - above all he saw that humanity could, be sheer force of will , create vast mental universes.

   But is was his great error was to imagine he - or anyone - could successfully impose these mental universes upon the physical universe (or universes).
   Romantics saw the physical universe, Nature, as endlessly dynamic , a constantly changing kaleidoscope of possibilities.
   They imagined the human individual was also a kaleidoscope of mental possibilities.
   The Modernists, such as Hitler and Einstein,  had a great weakness .
   It was to presume there was something they could drag into this Romantic Era from earlier (Plato to the Enlightenment) ages.
   They envisioned that one could fully know this natural kaleidoscope, fully know it to the point of freezing it and then re-molding it in your own mind-created kaleidoscope.
   They saw all of Nature's unceasing variety as a mere rococo surface, a showiness, because deep underneath, fundamentally, Nature was made up of a few knowable laws.
   Compared to the human mental universe, the physical universe they saw as much simpler.
   Now commensality agrees with the modernists that a single human mind might not just be able to convince itself, but all humanity, that cherry trees bloom year around on the top of Mount Everest.
   Virtual Reality behold yourself !
   But commensality argues that the physical reality remains equally successful in insisting that that no cherry tree ever blooms on the top of Mount Everest.
  Our mental universes are as free as the Romantics  and their foes, the Modernists,said they were, but they remain in, horizontal with, the physical universe, not superior to it.....

When Modernity said MAN above Nature, they meant it ...

"We must all learn to live together within Nature: all diners at her common table (commensal) or all learn to die together, frying up in the upcoming global climate meltdown."   (Blog Mission Statement.)

The MAN bit I mean.

Modernists did (and still do) see women,children ,natives, savages,primitives, animals, ethnic minorities, the 'defective' and pretty well everybody else but themselves as part of Nature, far, far, far below them.

If you plug in  'well-off' ,'powerful', 'but still angry' ,'old', 'white' ,'protestant', 'males' you pretty well have the sort of MAN that still ,still, thinks he is not part of Nature but flying in a sort of reverie/haze/daze miles above it.

In his mind.

And I mean that literally not figuratively - these guys sorta, half, admit that their bodies are part of sordid, damp, sticky, icky, Ole Nature.

But their minds, their minds !!!

Their pure Platonic , all-seeing, all-hearing, all-knowing, minds.

They are not part of part of Nature, but rather live in a parallel universe of mathematics, logic, rationality, utilitarianism .

Cool, calculating ,un-emotional, un-sentimental Man.

This is the sort of wet dream that all well-fed ,well-off, underworked & over-praised teenage boys have.

The sort of day-dreams you have when mom and dad wait on you hand and foot and you grow up thinking the whole world is your oyster.

Spoil your child and he will end up, inevitably, spoiling your world - your whole world, from the top of the atmosphere to the bottoms of the ocean.

If our teenage sons still have these wet dreams when they grow up, then the world knows them Modernists ( or Republicans or Soviets or Fascists or Progressives.)

However, rather like the Pharisee said long ago,  "I thank God that I am not a Modernist ---- I am a Commensalist..."

When Modernity said MAN above Nature, they meant it ...

Michael Marshall

The MAN bit I mean.

Modernists did (and still do) see women,children ,natives, savages,primitives, animals, ethnic minorities, the 'defective' and pretty well everybody else but themselves as part of Nature, far, far, far below them.

If you plug in  'well-off' ,'powerful', 'but still angry' ,'old', 'white' ,'protestant', 'males' you pretty well have the sort of MAN that still ,still, thinks he is not part of Nature but flying in a sort of reverie/haze/daze miles above it.

In his mind.

And I mean that literally not figuratively - these guys sorta, half, admit that their bodies are part of sordid, damp, sticky, icky, Ole Nature.

But their minds, their minds !!!

Their pure Platonic , all-seeing, all-hearing, all-knowing, minds.

They are not part of part of Nature, but rather live in a parallel universe of mathematics, logic, rationality, utilitarianism .

Cool, calculating ,un-emotional, un-sentimental Man.

This is the sort of wet dream that all well-fed ,well-off, underworked & over-praised teenage boys have.

The sort of day-dreams you have when mom and dad wait on you hand and foot and you grow up thinking the whole world is your oyster.

Spoil your child and he will end up, inevitably, spoiling your world - your whole world, from the top of the atmosphere to the bottoms of the ocean.

If our teenage sons still have these wet dreams when they grow up, then the world knows them Modernists ( or Republicans or Soviets or Fascists or Progressives.)

However, rather like the Pharisee said long ago,  "I thank God that I am not a Modernist ---- I am a Commensalist..."