Conservatives and the Moderns

Perhaps there's not much to be gained from setting up such dichotomies, for conservatives can be radical and they can be traditional. And strange that I should gravitate to some conservative voices (Berlin on deMaistre, for example) when most of them are of this infuriating Sunday-school-little-house-on-the prairie- type or from the world of mullahdom or the petty lower-middle classes with their fixation on the female body, "decency" and a bovine acceptance of things. Mid-west or small town Punjab-it doesn't make that much of a difference..it's a certain one dimensional vision and narrow temperament that is horrified by literature (it's lack of "truth") and jazz ("meaningless") and the rupture of the 'fabric of society' (read: immigrants).

On the other hand, nothing grates on my nerves more that the pseudo-moderns with their fake "spirituality" (Sufism) or their blind devotion to science-explaining anything and everything by some half-baked evolutionary theory, their keenness (though perhaps compulsion would be a better word) to speak "openly" and "frankly", to argue every single issue to death, to speak of abstract, universal 'Man'-some cardboard entity on which they project all sorts of desires.

The rational, atomistic individual (or the heroic individual), solid and uncomplicated, for whom nothing is 'given', who is his own project, against the real 'authentic' self or the community, the political animal. Distinctions are set up. Reactions and counter-reactions. The Dawkins-brigade, the Chomsky-devotees, the hadith-quoters, the statistics-pushers, Americans who talk about happiness, and the morons who think Zakir Naik is an intellectual, that Saudi has pure Islam. Lord, I ask you to save me from these people...

In a conversation with a friend the other day he excitedly stands up during dinner to explain how short the dresses women wear nowadays are in Pakistan. ..what with their deep slits and revealing...

Oh dear, get a grip of yourself man!

And another, a Jordanian woman, on how she would never go to the Dead Sea because that is where God destroyed the homos.

Er..hang on, I use those Dead Sea salts for my bath!

~~~

Notes from P.Rieff:

The unalterable 'I', identity and inwardness. Theory is conforming to reality, not transforming it (Marx?)

Modernity: a movement from the dichotomy between obligation, duty, and moral commitment to inclination and desire. [only the desiring self is true, no matter how that relates to 'the good'. The modern economy: the production of spectacles, of desire itself: eroticism, publicity, advertising]

What is authority but a limiting authority, a closing down of possibilities beyond one's self's desires, the repression of the impossible..the commanding truths are prohibitive. [ you can hear the modern attack..'repression', did you say? Freedom as autonomy -and that only. A 'lonely freedom' ! (Augustine)].

Arendt: the impossible became possible..thinkable (Auschwitz)
Zizek's succinct formulation: you can, therefore you must.
The knower walking into the known...over short distances of time, short times of space.

Transgression as creative. Sacrilege. Is nothing sacred? The consumer consumes all moralities like things. We do not even fear falling...fearless, without guilt, we celebrate celebrities, delight in trashing the decadence of others.

Yeats: And fastened to a dying animal it knows not what it is.

A credal self that cannot cross boundaries (cp. the self of late capitalism that is defined by its very ability to be nowhere, to not being tied down to a 'place').

Thomas More's strength, opposition..."not my pride, not my spleen nor any other of my appetites oppose it, but I do-I, I."

The intellectualization of culture: one can, in principle, calculate everything. [the reductionism of science has helped here]. Technology as the primacy of possibility that can transform our lives and bodies..Badiou: not ideology, but technology as the radically neutral re-maker of 'man'. Everything can be known....