What I mean is that everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life: every display of individualism (because a deviation from the collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt (because anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself) [and] all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously).
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
I will begin this post by saying something that I think will gain almost universal acceptance amongst readers, irrespective of where in the world they live or what their opinions are: something truly dreadful has happened to politics. We are now living in Milan Kundera’s nightmare; our governing classes have become almost totally swept up into “fantasies, images, words and archetypes that come together to make up this or that political kitsch”. There is no longer anything resembling sensible, rational discussion of policy in public life – there are merely atavistic contrasts between us and them, in-group and out-group, goodies and baddies, four-legged and two-legged.
Voters, in this environment, find themselves being cast in the role not of reasoning actors but rather simply as bundles of instinct, whose job is to determine which side, red or blue, is most fittingly aligned with the angels or demons. What will actually happen as a result of an election is considered to be an issue which only a pedant or hopeless nerd would find interesting – what matters is (it is fitting to use an entirely inane word at this juncture) the identification of the better set of ‘vibes’. And this, as you will no doubt have noticed, extends far beyond electoral affairs – our entire political lives indeed now seem to revolve around whether or not we are able to tune in, at any given moment, to the appropriate mood music and act accordingly.
We have a vague sense of what the underlying cause of this disastrous state of affairs is: the technology, stupid. But technology, I would like to here argue, is in itself not the real problem. Our crisis is properly understood as an aesthetic one. And we need to be clear-eyed about what this means: there is no technical fix. Things will get worse before they get better. Indeed, they will likely get much, much worse before we see a recovery. The appropriate metaphor to use for our predicament, as we shall see, is a train: we are going in one direction, and we cannot deviate or reverse. At some point, we’ll crash. So, at the risk of overextending that metaphor – make sure you’re sitting close to the emergency exit and that you’ve got your luggage ready for when things come shuddering to a halt.
The fin de siècle French constitutional theorist Maurice Hauriou is hardly a household name even amongst French constitutional lawyers, but he long ago gave us the tools to understand our predicament. Writing in ‘The Theory of the Institution and the Foundation’, Hauriou described human social movements and purposive associations (what he called ‘institution persons’) as being imbued with “directing ideas” – relatively fixed concepts which pass from individual to individual, and “from one mind to another”, by their own “force of attraction”.
Purposive human associations, then – whether a political party, company, church and so on – are characterised by moments of “communion” in which a group of human individuals gets together to proclaim their shared commitments to such directing ideas, and thereby interiorise them. These ideas are then “refracted into similar concepts” in their minds, and this unites the group in a sense of shared ownership over the ideas in question. Once the moment of communion is over, the individuals involved all then go out into the world and put those ideas into effect in acts of power, in anticipation of the next communal moment of shared feeling. And this is what gives the relevant ideas continuity across time – sporadic meetings of communion during which the participants jointly ‘obsess’, linked together by the actions which those participants subsequently undertake, in the name of those ideas, in the interim.
The result, for Hauriou, is something like “the couplings thrown between rail-road cars to establish the trembling continuity of an express”. Human social movements are driven forward. They are directed by ideas. Those ideas have an independent existence, and individual human beings imbibe them at communal meetings, and make them concrete in their own minds through action in between. Human associations, therefore, almost literally, have lives of their own; with apologies to Jung, individual people do not drive their associations, but rather associations drive people.
The classic, stereotypical example of this would be the religious movement, wherein on a weekly basis a congregation gets together to interiorise and re-interiorise a common set of concepts and feelings, and then (ideally) puts them into effect in between. No individual believer originates those concepts and feelings in question himself; they rather come to him, in relatively fixed form, for him to swallow and digest. And the same pattern, for Hauriou, can be seen in any sort of purposive association in the very broad sense – from labour unions to companies to charities. People are not animated by their own ideas, and such associations are not amalgamations of the individualised visions of all of their participants; rather the opposite. Ideas, if you like, are, to use modern parlance, memetic. They spread like a ‘mind virus’. And purposive associations are therefore to be understood, to return to the metaphor of the train, as akin to a railway express: the human individual gets on board and is swept along. He does not steer; he is carried to a destination.
Hauriou’s admittedly schematic analysis shows remarkable insight into the basically aesthetic nature of political preferences. For most people, most of the time, ideas are interiorised during moments of shared feeling. It is not that people are reasoned into what they believe. Rather, what they believe comes to them through ‘communion’ with others who they know to have a similar emotional response to the world around them. The individual feels something, and becomes aware that others around him feel the same thing. And this causes everybody involved to drink from the same conceptual well, and take in the same conceptual cocktail, not in the manner of a debate club who arrive at a conclusion about a discussion topic, but in the manner of a crowd of dancers raising their hands in unison at a rave.
To return to Kundera, this is why it is important to understand politics as rooted in ‘kitsch’ rather than in reason. Kitsch, for Kundera, is in essence to be understood as an emotional response to a work of art or set of circumstances that a person, crucially, knows himself to be sharing with others. Seeing a group of children playing in the sunshine on a patch of grass, a person is moved and sheds a bittersweet tear. But he also knows that the rest of mankind, seeing such a scene, would react in the same way – and, therefore, he also knows that, in shedding his tear, he is partaking in a communal feeling. This, Kundera tells us, is the heart of kitsch: not the feeling of being moved by seeing children playing, but the feeling that, in being moved by such scene, one is thereby united with all of right-thinking humanity in being so moved.
Politics is a phenomenon of kitsch, for Kundera, because it operates on the same conceptual basis. People do not, by and large, arrive at political opinions through the application of reason. Rather, they feel something. And they feel that what they feel is a feeling shared by good people everywhere. This, in turn, sets in motion a force of vast social power. And, of course, we see its effects all around us – the formation of political belief based not on thought but on the intoxicating and magnetising energy of kitsch: the glee and sense of abandon that results from knowing oneself to be swept along by a communal march of progress with everybody that one respects and admires.
This analysis is endorsed by a passage in For Whom the Bell Tolls, in which Hemingway lays out a similar dynamic, describing the mood that animated the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War:
[Y]ou felt that you were taking part in a crusade. That was the only word for it although it was a word that had been so worn and abused that it no longer gave its true meaning. You felt, in spite of all bureaucracy and inefficiency and party strife, something that was like the feeling you expected to have and did not have when you made your first communion. It was a feeling of consecration to a duty toward all of the oppressed of the world which would be as difficult and embarrassing to speak about as religious experience and yet it was authentic as the feeling you had when you heard Bach, or stood in Chartres Cathedral or the Cathedral at Leon and saw the light coming through the great windows; or when you saw Mantegna and Greco and Brueghel in the Prado. It gave you a part in something that you could believe in wholly and completely and in which you felt an absolute brotherhood with the others who were engaged in it.
It is the last sentence that is the most important: what matters, and what ignites the magic of kitsch, is the fact that one is giving oneself to a cause and knowing others to be engaged in it too. It is the communality that sets the metaphorical train in motion – not the hearing of Bach or the vision of Chartres Cathedral, but the ‘brotherhood’ one hears or sees along with, and who are similarly moved (and who one knows to be moved in the same fashion as oneself).
There are three things to say about this in the current context.
The first is that, while technology is not itself the problem, it is making things vastly worse. This is because it widens the net of communal feeling to the entire globe – it is possible, thanks to the internet, to imagine oneself as being united in a shared emotional response to, say, what is happening in Ukraine or Palestine, with literally all of the decent people on planet Earth. It is also because it rapidly accelerates the forward motion of Hauriou’s railroad express by shortening the gap between moments of communion to the timespan between the last time one looked at one’s phone and the current second. Now, the meetings when one’s ‘brotherhood’ bands together to ‘obsess’ over directing ideas in light of a shared emotional response can happen whenever one desires. For many people, this will mean tens or even hundreds of times a day. When one’s ‘brotherhood’ is potentially billions strong, the force of kitsch thereby becomes amplified to truly monstrous proportions, and the ‘current thing’ becomes almost impossible to avoid – it inserts itself into the mind not so much like the infiltration of a virus as like the forceful stomping of the sole of a heavy hobnailed boot.
The second thing is that this all explains why it is that our politics is so fraught. What Kundera sought to emphasise is that political kitsch, like any other form of kitsch, is characterised above all by the “denial of shit”. When people are caught up in an idealised aesthetic – when they have become convinced that they, along with their brotherhood of fellow Good People, have aligned themselves with truth and beauty and are partaking in the heady emotional payoff of imagining themselves to be envisioning perfection – the last thing they want is anybody casting flies in the ointment by asking awkward questions or raising points of dispute. And therefore, when anyone causes a disruption of any kind, they immediately trigger an enraged, irrational response. Honest questions are not met with good-faith answers or explanations; instead, they are met with aggravated put-downs and loud, red-faced shouting, because honest questions, simply put, spoil the mood. They allow shit to intrude. Fiercely aggressive responses to honest questioning – a style of response with which we are all growing increasingly familiar – are the natural consequence when one has convinced oneself that one is fighting off people who are simply flinging faeces for the sake of it.
The third thing to mention is that this also gives us an idea of where things are heading. When people are in the grip of an aesthetic response, they cannot be reasoned out of it: that would be a category error. As Immanuel Kant pointed out long ago, when someone is gazing adoringly at a beautiful sunset, they do not respond in kind to those who point out that there are more important things to do than look at sunsets, or who launch into a discussion of the underlying science, or who compare tonight’s sunset with a nicer one from a few days ago. Indeed, they despise those people and find their failure to share their own response to the sunset appalling and small-minded.
Instead, one is only shaken out of an aesthetic frame of mind by the intrusion of reality into one’s reverie and the consequent disruption of it. This is always a distressing experience and can be quite painful. Because one is not argued or debated into a different frame of mind but forced into it, the process is necessarily unpleasant.
And that, I am afraid, is the position we are in. It seems obvious to me that the reason our age is so strongly characterised by the aesthetification – or kitschification – of politics is that non- or pre-political associations have diminished in role in our societies compared to previous eras. It is not that there were ever distant, halcyon glory days for the human race during which people sat around having reasonable political discussions to resolve their differences and design perfectly functioning institutions. Rather, it is simply that politics matters less when people devote their attention to their extended families, religious institutions and communal activities – and matters more when they do not attend to such matters.
We are now in a position in which very large proportions of the population in our societies do not have extended families, religious commitments or communal lives to speak of, and as a result, the political sphere has become grotesquely enlarged. This means that non- or pre-political forms of association are losing their effectiveness as alternative sources of shared feeling and, hence, of animating ideas. All that we have – returning to the beginning of this post – is competing political aesthetics. This, depressingly, has the short-term consequence of reducing politics to a struggle between two bitterly opposed ‘sides’. But it has the long-term consequence that people increasingly find themselves, often largely unknowingly, being locked into a kitschified identification with some political movement or other – a state of affairs that will only end when the mood is shattered by reality reasserting itself.
And what is true at the individual level is, as will be obvious, true societally too: we are rattling at increasing speed down a railway line – “wrong way on a one-way track”’, as the old song used to go – and we cannot be reasoned off course or provided with some sort of engineered alternative. We can only wait for the mood to be dispelled by what is real. We can no doubt go along in this way for some time yet, but we cannot do so forever – and something big is going to happen when we are forced to a halt and the aesthetic and the actual are finally forced into collision. Get ready for it.
Dr. David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. You can subscribe to his Substack – News From Uncibal – here.
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“ I suppose their explanation was superior to stating that their dog had eaten the raw data.”
Very good.
The problems with modelling for political purposes are replicated with horrific effect upon Western Civilisation through the Climate Crisis Hoax. It has become fuel for the most criminal power grab in human history and excised the most destructive forces upon human freedom and prosperity ever seen.
Sorry but this statement is bullshit:
population starting to distrust other vaccines and protective healthcare in general – this could end up with many people suffering serious illness or even death from the scourges of humanity’s past, such as measles, diphtheria and polio
Utterly freaking wrong. Typhus/dipth from horse shit,fecal matter spread by flies or ingestion. Polio is from arsenic and chemicals in food / water. Measles IFR is close to zero and always has been. There is zero proof that the stabs did anything vs sanitation.
Please read Turtles all the way down for more info, there is an entire elucidating chapter on polio which shatters the myth of quacksine science.
They all contain poisons.
Leaving aside the merits or otherwise of vaccines in general and vaccines that are in common use, on which I am not qualified to pronounce, I think that people developing a strong scepticism for anyone who tells them “this is for your own good” must be a good thing rather than a source of regret.
Quite. Hygiene, sanitation and clean water have saved ANY more number of lives compared to jabs.
http://vaccinepapers.org/
It’s an interesting debate for sure. I’m certainly no expert, but have listened to both sides of the argument and find it very difficult to wholeheartedly agree with one side or the other. I certainly do think that vaccine harm in general is underplayed. My gut instinct is that the truth lies somewhere in the middle, which it usually does, in that there may be some vaccines that have a net benefit, but that the gradual improvement of sanitation and healthcare has played a significant hand. I don’t believe that the ridiculous child vaccination schedule can do anything other than net harm. That’s just my gut though.
While I disagree with your statement, I very much accept that it is a point that you’re entitled to bring up. There’s far too much ‘bow to authority’ in medicine, and some of the rationale behind some (too many) of the recommendations is rather weak.
I suggest that medicine is going to have a lot of work to undo the harm that has been caused over the last 3 years. Hopefully this will lead to some robust studies into the effectiveness of many of the medical products that have been thrust upon society over the decades.
All this flipflopping smacks of desperation.
Implausible Modelling behind climate & covid Claims
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We are now seeing signs of the population starting to distrust other vaccines and protective healthcare in general …
Yep, that’s me. I’ll never trust a doctor or medical professional again. Sorry, they’ve earned it.
A profession without a shred of credibility.
Anyone want to argue the opposite?
“A profession without a shred of credibility.”
Talk about a profession, indeed a whole industry being hollowed out. This 100 year old medical pharmacology business is shortly to enter its death throes and not before time. Holistic and nature based medicine is needed now more than ever.
My branch of medicine, sports and exercise medicine, deals primarily with lifestyle.
I no longer work with professional sportspeople and focus on lifestyle, diet, as well as musculoskeletal disease and injury.
I rarely prescribe drugs, and frequently cease people’s medications, improving pathology with a healthier lifestyle.
Not rocket surgery, though amazing how 99% of the profession resets to pills first.
99% of the profession resets to pills first
Yep, that’s what I’ve seen – and can’t think of any instances where it’s done any good.
Seriously though – as a doctor – don’t you think the profession is now reputationally broken? I don’t see how it recovers from this, inside of a generation.
Sports medicine: in my experience one of the biggest problems is over-training, leading to immune system depletion and musco-skeletal injuries.
I swim a fair bit – so not much risk of significant musco-skeletal injury. One problem though can be outer ear infections. I’ve had loads. Years ago I’d go to the doctor who’d prescribe anti-biotics, which worked for a few days then as soon as the course finished the infection would come back. And so more anti-biotics …
Then I discovered rubbing alcohol. Now I treat ear infections myself and cure them much quicker than any doctor I’ve ever dealt with. Even vinegar can work. Presumably whisky or brandy might as well. I guess any actual doctor would be horrified.
“Seriously though – as a doctor – don’t you think the profession is now reputationally broken?”
Yes.
Regarding overtraining – agreed that it can be an issue, at times with major consequences.
Hence my avoidance now of elite spert.
Amateur sport avoids this, as well as gambling and doping.
Ethically much more rewarding.
Yes.
Well thanks for being so candid.
Do you think anything can be done about it? Society needs health care it can trust, so something has to be done.
I suppose that implicit in my question is what has gone wrong with the profession?
Two potential explanations spring to mind.
First, doctors, intelligent and well-educated as they clearly are, lack capacity for critical thinking.
Second, they just don’t care.
I don’t think no. 2 can be entirely true (although it might be in some individuals). So I’m left with no. 1. But has doesn’t seem satisfactory either. How can well-educated, intelligent people be so dumb??
I’m struggling with this. Anyone think of anything else?
Always good to hear the opinions of medical professionals and pharma employees on here btw.
And I always imagined over-training was more of a problem in amateur sports, as generally amateurs don’t have coaches observing them to see when things are going awry, but I’d stand to be corrected on this. I suspect a lot of dark things go on in professional sports, that don’t make the back pages or TV screens. And from what I’ve seen once elite athletes drop out of professional sports they are on their own, not always with happy consequences.
My son may move in that direction. He’s currently a GP but doesn’t see that as a long term job any more.
It’s the protocols and pills that I see as an unattractive part of the job and the lack of individualisation nowadays. The sad thing is that many people just want to take drugs but not take charge of their own health.
The sad thing is that many people just want to take drugs but not take charge of their own health.
Yes, I think that’s spot on.
The even sadder thing is that their sense of entitlement extended to expecting others to take an untested gene therapy such that they didn’t need to take responsibility for their own health.
Same here.
Not for a moment TJN, who could blame you?
I rejected the jabs and I won’t be having any vaccines or “vaccines” in the future. I stay away from the medical profession as much as I possibly can …. which (although I’m in my early 60s) is most of the time since I take care of my own health.
If I had young children I would be VERY particular about the vaccines / “vaccines” they would have.
Something is driving the huge increase in autism-spectrum amongst children and I strongly suspect it is the amount of chemicals that are being injected into their young bodies at a very young age.