The Abundance

How did we move from a world that was full of variety, colour, mystery, variation to a grey world of cold, soulless matter, the machine and the bureaucratic control of our lives? Lived time and attachments to distinct, unique places are swapped for abstract time, abstract value and uniform space. The story is older than capitalism, though it is greatly heightened by it.

How does one worldview replace another (this is the theme of Basil Willey's great opening chapter). To talk of individuals or the power and truth of ideas, as if the web of ideas-and their expression in ways of life, social relations and the understanding of the sacred- of previous generations could be simply displaced or overturned by the discovery of some new concept seems far-fetched, to say the least. 

The 'climate of opinion' cannot suddenly turn like that unless there is a prior deep need for a new kind of explanation and unless there are social frameworks, pedagogical institutions and power relations already deep at work. How is it, for instance, that the notion of self-interest can come to dominate the western social imaginary against older notions of the 'self' and morality? Not simply by 'success' since what changes is the very notion of success (or a shift in the weight that is assigned to previously 'lower' motivations..lower, but more powerful, the moderns would (and did) say). 

How did we move from the recognition of abundance to the (op)pressing feeling that we live in a world of scarcity?

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It is humiliating. To belong to this world is humiliating..They kill humans and sell women in markets. They are destroying museums.. 

But in art there is no East and West. You see it in the paintings of Paul Klee and how he was inspired by Tunisia and Eastern Arabia. You see it in the paintings of Delacroix and how he was inspired by Morocco. When you read Rimbaud, you see that the best thing about Rimbaud is that he is not a Westerner; although he was born in the West, he was completely against the West.

The world is mud. We are primitive.

And if identity is a creation, then the "I" does not exist individually; it exists with the other, and the other is a part of it. For me to be myself, I have to pass through the other. Likewise, identity in Sufism is infinitely open.

The Sufi who calls himself a believer believes in a god that is completely different than the the official Islamic God-the God of tenet, law, and institution. So the true power of the human being is not in giving an answer..

Adonis, NYRB.

Lots to contemplate there. For reasons that those who have followed this blog will immediately understand I have a lot of sympathy with Adonis's views as expressed here. At the same time, the question of the relation between the modern west and extreme forms of violence is not posed. Which is regrettable. 

But the underlying sentiment is surely correct: religion is over. 

When the heart comes to its last stages is bitterness par for the course? 

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Not sure, but why is the New Yorker increasingly fixated by popular culture (Prince, Beyonce and television)? Or maybe it always has been?