The mystic knowledge of the ancients, and some other fictions and factions
I haven't taken a look at what David Brin has written lately, because his blog "Contrary Brin"
feels these days a lot messier than it used to be. The best stuff can
be found in the home page, including the often-linked essay "The Case for a Cheerful Libertarianism".
But my favourite observations by Brin have been those about the two competing worldviews that we could name "romanticism" and "enlightenment modernism". These two worldviews have a lot of eye-opening explanatory power, plus they are also nice in the sense that they transcend the traditional left-right divide, finding adherents and opponents for both worldviews on both sides of the political left-right fence. Brin makes the struggle between the worldview of romanticism and enlightenment modernism most vividly in his graphic novel "The Life Eaters" (although it helps to be aware of his basic ideas before reading it, as I fortunately happened to be), and more theoretically in his 15-part blog series about modernity, which can be read in the blog archives from January 2005 to February 2005.
The struggle between romanticism and modernism is discussed more entertainingly in his movie essays "We Hobbits are a Merry Folk" about the Lord of the Rings trilogy, "Star Wars despots vs. Star Trek populists" about Star Wars movies. I remember when I first noticed somewhat the same serious problems in the worldview that were sold by these popular and beloved movies. For example, the not-to-subtle fact that LOTR celebrates medieval primitivism of feudal overlords over the nascent "satanic mills" industrialism and technology. Even more astonishingly, many other people, some of whom I even respected, seemed totally oblivious to the fact that their beloved movies were based on a putrid ideology that they would have normally loathed in the real world. I can only assume that if somebody made a movie in which the heroes were a rebel band of communists bravely fighting against free market, almost every right-winger would cheer for this movie, and if you asked them why, they would rationalize this by saying that these heroes were handsome and they helped people, so they had to be heroes in the objective sense, whereas the nasty capitalist villains were ugly and they did evil things.
As described by Brin, romanticism is an ideology that stems from the more primitive eras when brutal conqueror kings and feudal lords ruled their small patches of Earth. The people with the biggest swords enslaved the rest to toil and moil in the fields. To maintain this control their bards and other toadies sang songs to justify and cement the idea that these unaccountable elites naturally belonged to the top the pyramidal society simply by virtue of birth and were somehow better than the rest of us. (To see how tremendously successful they were, just look at the present-day connotations of the words "knight" and "noble".)
This aristocracy of the romantic elites is not a meritocracy of social mobility to which each individual would rise to or fall out of based on objective merits and actions, but either you are born into the aristocracy or you are not. The right to rule is inherited, and it is a truly heinous sin for the commoners to even imagine that they could make their own decisions and run their own lives as they see fit. The only freedom that the hoi polloi has at most the freedom to choose which aristocrat they follow. Usually even that much is too much to ask, as their birth has already made this choice for them.
In other words, the ideal world of romanticism is in all essential respects just like the fictional universes depicted in the Lord of the Rings and the Star Wars movies. I would personally add to this list the cartoon "The Incredibles", which was about one of the ideologically most disgusting movies that I have ever seen. The villain in it plans to manufacture and sell technology that would allow anybody to have super powers, which the band of "heroes" simply cannot stand, since only they are entitled by their accident of birth to possess super powers. I can't even begin to comprehend why libertarians seem to adore this movie so much. Maybe because the heroes are toadied by an irritating Ayn Rand clone who never actually does anything useful but who takes delight in her fantasies that associating with her betters somehow makes her one of them. Ah well, this certainly tells me quite a lot about the real motivation, worldview and goals of libertarians. Squeeze a libertarian and out comes acne puss and gun oil, as somebody on the left joked years ago.
Of course the fictional aristocrat might initially be a shepherd or a bored farmer in some desert planet or some other lowly position, from which he then rises during the story. But the direction of cause and effect is essential here. In the romantic worldview, the hero doesn't rise to the aristocracy by doing great things, but he does great things because he already really is an aristocrat, it's just that the unfair and unjust world hasn't acknowledged this. Similar social mobility is not possible for the proles no matter what they do, as they don't have the proper blood, and it is their lot in life to obey their masters. It should also go without saying that the fine details of the emotional life of a romantic aristocrat vastly outweigh in importance the lives of thousands or even millions of lowly commoners who in the end are no more important or interesting than worker ants.
The ugly remains of romanticism still continue to live on in today's world. For example, one of the hallmarks of romanticism is the idea of secret and mystical knowledge possessed by the snobbish aristocratic elite that the commoners shouldn't even try to acquire. Otherwise the commoners might quickly learn that the emperor has no clothes! As Brin noted in his anti-LOTR essay, the scariest thing about the One True Ring was that just anybody could put it in his finger and use its power. What a chaos that would be, the old order totally thwarted!
For this reason, romanticism stands deeply opposed to science, skepticism and open inquiry, and derides "cold reason" and extols emotion. Wherever you find such opposition in the real world, you can pretty much always see a romanticist desperately trying to cling to his historical power and privileges. And pray tell, which groups and people is it who are the most vocal against science and open inquiry? Which side of the cultural divide was horrified when Isaac Newton committed the unpardonable crime of showing the spectrum of light and thus robbed the rainbows of their deep and holy mysticism? For the literary intellectuals of the C.P. Snow fame, science is evil because it takes away the mystery that allows the romanticist to be more authentic and wallow in his loathing toward technology or progress.
In the present-day literary world, Brin has identified Michael Crichton and Margaret Atwood as archetypical anti-science romanticists, these two dastards being deeply similar in spirit despite their superficial political differences. And as astonishing as this might sound today, there really once was a time when the political left enthusiastically supported reason, science and technology. Of course, this was before they learned that these things don't really support their visions and instead of admitting their mistake, fell in thrall to the more romantic worldviews. The romanticists on the right side of the fence hate it when the open society throws their cherished traditions to the dustbin of history, creationists being the most visible example of this.
Humorously, the modern-day romanticist doctrines tend to find the most fertile ground in the minds of many people who would otherwise find the idea of a genetic aristocracy to be repugnant. For example, many outcast leftists imagine themselves to be the real aristocracy that the masses of stupid proles around them should obey but have unfairly decided to no longer do so. Unable to face the horrible reality that has rendered them totally irrelevant and comical amusements at best, these leftoids find solace and confort in the narcissistic power fantasies that romanticism offers them. To build on the ideas that Tommi has often expressed, the whole cultural mythology of "cool" "outcast" "rebels" basically consists of denial of the simple fact that most social outcasts are despised and socially discriminated for perfectly valid reasons.
For every misunderstood tragic genius, there are about a hundred correctly understood fools who have been relegated to their proper place in society by the cold market reality that automatically follows whenever people can freely choose who they associate with. This is why any system of thought that idealizes outcast "rebels" and despises the masses as being out of step is necessarily deeply flawed and stands in direct contradiction to enlightenment and its values. In a meritocratic system where individuals rise and fall according to their own actions and achievements, Tommi's handy rule of thumb says that if everybody seems to think that you are stupid, you probably are stupid, and if everybody seems to think that you are repugnant, you probably are repugnant. A century ago it was possible to really be a lone tragic genius that nobody truly understands, but certainly not today.
But that's enough of of putrid stench of romanticism. Let's look at the contrasting enlightenment worldview. First of all, unlike the snobbish secrecy of romanticism, in enlightenment modernism all knowledge is open and freely available to everyone to build on, improve, extend and refine. Things are not true or false just because somebody in the scientific or technological or any other aristocracy says so, but knowledge emerges in an open and transparent system of the scientific community. Instead of being a closed priesthood that uses mystical hieroglyphs, anybody is free to join the ranks of scientists and experts simply by doing the necessary studying. This is easy, because most scientists actually want to do their best to share their knowledge with others.
Whereas nothing can ever improve in romanticism, enlightenment modernism has given us a world of unimaginable freedom, abundance and wealth. Individuals get to freely choose their life paths and allegiances while democratically controlled institutions protect and help them under a system of transparent accountability and oversight. Rebellion and skepticism of elites are actively encouraged (as Brin has often asked, how many mainstream movies can you name that do not promote individual rebellion?), safe in the knowledge that in the end, despite all their occasional pseudo-rebellious posturing, most people will happily choose to support the things and systems that demonstrably work. Life is good and just keeps getting better.
Brin has several times identified Steven Spielberg as the premier moviemaker in the enlightenment side. It is pretty funny that some people consider Lucas and Spielberg to be similar, because in their work these two men are practically ideological antipodes. Or as Brin put it:
But my favourite observations by Brin have been those about the two competing worldviews that we could name "romanticism" and "enlightenment modernism". These two worldviews have a lot of eye-opening explanatory power, plus they are also nice in the sense that they transcend the traditional left-right divide, finding adherents and opponents for both worldviews on both sides of the political left-right fence. Brin makes the struggle between the worldview of romanticism and enlightenment modernism most vividly in his graphic novel "The Life Eaters" (although it helps to be aware of his basic ideas before reading it, as I fortunately happened to be), and more theoretically in his 15-part blog series about modernity, which can be read in the blog archives from January 2005 to February 2005.
The struggle between romanticism and modernism is discussed more entertainingly in his movie essays "We Hobbits are a Merry Folk" about the Lord of the Rings trilogy, "Star Wars despots vs. Star Trek populists" about Star Wars movies. I remember when I first noticed somewhat the same serious problems in the worldview that were sold by these popular and beloved movies. For example, the not-to-subtle fact that LOTR celebrates medieval primitivism of feudal overlords over the nascent "satanic mills" industrialism and technology. Even more astonishingly, many other people, some of whom I even respected, seemed totally oblivious to the fact that their beloved movies were based on a putrid ideology that they would have normally loathed in the real world. I can only assume that if somebody made a movie in which the heroes were a rebel band of communists bravely fighting against free market, almost every right-winger would cheer for this movie, and if you asked them why, they would rationalize this by saying that these heroes were handsome and they helped people, so they had to be heroes in the objective sense, whereas the nasty capitalist villains were ugly and they did evil things.
As described by Brin, romanticism is an ideology that stems from the more primitive eras when brutal conqueror kings and feudal lords ruled their small patches of Earth. The people with the biggest swords enslaved the rest to toil and moil in the fields. To maintain this control their bards and other toadies sang songs to justify and cement the idea that these unaccountable elites naturally belonged to the top the pyramidal society simply by virtue of birth and were somehow better than the rest of us. (To see how tremendously successful they were, just look at the present-day connotations of the words "knight" and "noble".)
This aristocracy of the romantic elites is not a meritocracy of social mobility to which each individual would rise to or fall out of based on objective merits and actions, but either you are born into the aristocracy or you are not. The right to rule is inherited, and it is a truly heinous sin for the commoners to even imagine that they could make their own decisions and run their own lives as they see fit. The only freedom that the hoi polloi has at most the freedom to choose which aristocrat they follow. Usually even that much is too much to ask, as their birth has already made this choice for them.
In other words, the ideal world of romanticism is in all essential respects just like the fictional universes depicted in the Lord of the Rings and the Star Wars movies. I would personally add to this list the cartoon "The Incredibles", which was about one of the ideologically most disgusting movies that I have ever seen. The villain in it plans to manufacture and sell technology that would allow anybody to have super powers, which the band of "heroes" simply cannot stand, since only they are entitled by their accident of birth to possess super powers. I can't even begin to comprehend why libertarians seem to adore this movie so much. Maybe because the heroes are toadied by an irritating Ayn Rand clone who never actually does anything useful but who takes delight in her fantasies that associating with her betters somehow makes her one of them. Ah well, this certainly tells me quite a lot about the real motivation, worldview and goals of libertarians. Squeeze a libertarian and out comes acne puss and gun oil, as somebody on the left joked years ago.
Of course the fictional aristocrat might initially be a shepherd or a bored farmer in some desert planet or some other lowly position, from which he then rises during the story. But the direction of cause and effect is essential here. In the romantic worldview, the hero doesn't rise to the aristocracy by doing great things, but he does great things because he already really is an aristocrat, it's just that the unfair and unjust world hasn't acknowledged this. Similar social mobility is not possible for the proles no matter what they do, as they don't have the proper blood, and it is their lot in life to obey their masters. It should also go without saying that the fine details of the emotional life of a romantic aristocrat vastly outweigh in importance the lives of thousands or even millions of lowly commoners who in the end are no more important or interesting than worker ants.
The ugly remains of romanticism still continue to live on in today's world. For example, one of the hallmarks of romanticism is the idea of secret and mystical knowledge possessed by the snobbish aristocratic elite that the commoners shouldn't even try to acquire. Otherwise the commoners might quickly learn that the emperor has no clothes! As Brin noted in his anti-LOTR essay, the scariest thing about the One True Ring was that just anybody could put it in his finger and use its power. What a chaos that would be, the old order totally thwarted!
For this reason, romanticism stands deeply opposed to science, skepticism and open inquiry, and derides "cold reason" and extols emotion. Wherever you find such opposition in the real world, you can pretty much always see a romanticist desperately trying to cling to his historical power and privileges. And pray tell, which groups and people is it who are the most vocal against science and open inquiry? Which side of the cultural divide was horrified when Isaac Newton committed the unpardonable crime of showing the spectrum of light and thus robbed the rainbows of their deep and holy mysticism? For the literary intellectuals of the C.P. Snow fame, science is evil because it takes away the mystery that allows the romanticist to be more authentic and wallow in his loathing toward technology or progress.
In the present-day literary world, Brin has identified Michael Crichton and Margaret Atwood as archetypical anti-science romanticists, these two dastards being deeply similar in spirit despite their superficial political differences. And as astonishing as this might sound today, there really once was a time when the political left enthusiastically supported reason, science and technology. Of course, this was before they learned that these things don't really support their visions and instead of admitting their mistake, fell in thrall to the more romantic worldviews. The romanticists on the right side of the fence hate it when the open society throws their cherished traditions to the dustbin of history, creationists being the most visible example of this.
Humorously, the modern-day romanticist doctrines tend to find the most fertile ground in the minds of many people who would otherwise find the idea of a genetic aristocracy to be repugnant. For example, many outcast leftists imagine themselves to be the real aristocracy that the masses of stupid proles around them should obey but have unfairly decided to no longer do so. Unable to face the horrible reality that has rendered them totally irrelevant and comical amusements at best, these leftoids find solace and confort in the narcissistic power fantasies that romanticism offers them. To build on the ideas that Tommi has often expressed, the whole cultural mythology of "cool" "outcast" "rebels" basically consists of denial of the simple fact that most social outcasts are despised and socially discriminated for perfectly valid reasons.
For every misunderstood tragic genius, there are about a hundred correctly understood fools who have been relegated to their proper place in society by the cold market reality that automatically follows whenever people can freely choose who they associate with. This is why any system of thought that idealizes outcast "rebels" and despises the masses as being out of step is necessarily deeply flawed and stands in direct contradiction to enlightenment and its values. In a meritocratic system where individuals rise and fall according to their own actions and achievements, Tommi's handy rule of thumb says that if everybody seems to think that you are stupid, you probably are stupid, and if everybody seems to think that you are repugnant, you probably are repugnant. A century ago it was possible to really be a lone tragic genius that nobody truly understands, but certainly not today.
But that's enough of of putrid stench of romanticism. Let's look at the contrasting enlightenment worldview. First of all, unlike the snobbish secrecy of romanticism, in enlightenment modernism all knowledge is open and freely available to everyone to build on, improve, extend and refine. Things are not true or false just because somebody in the scientific or technological or any other aristocracy says so, but knowledge emerges in an open and transparent system of the scientific community. Instead of being a closed priesthood that uses mystical hieroglyphs, anybody is free to join the ranks of scientists and experts simply by doing the necessary studying. This is easy, because most scientists actually want to do their best to share their knowledge with others.
Whereas nothing can ever improve in romanticism, enlightenment modernism has given us a world of unimaginable freedom, abundance and wealth. Individuals get to freely choose their life paths and allegiances while democratically controlled institutions protect and help them under a system of transparent accountability and oversight. Rebellion and skepticism of elites are actively encouraged (as Brin has often asked, how many mainstream movies can you name that do not promote individual rebellion?), safe in the knowledge that in the end, despite all their occasional pseudo-rebellious posturing, most people will happily choose to support the things and systems that demonstrably work. Life is good and just keeps getting better.
Brin has several times identified Steven Spielberg as the premier moviemaker in the enlightenment side. It is pretty funny that some people consider Lucas and Spielberg to be similar, because in their work these two men are practically ideological antipodes. Or as Brin put it:
In other words, unlike George Lucas, Spielberg is grateful to a civilization of democracy, egalitarian science and general decency. He simply cannot bring himself to spit in its face. Especially not after it has been so good to him.
When I first read this paragraph, I
realized it to be so totally true, especially in Senor Spielbergo's
more recent movies such as "Minority Report", "AI" and "War of the
Worlds", each one of which I was delighted to see to be much better
than I had expected. The whole world was truly lucky when Spielberg
stopped making those idiotic movies about little kids with baseball
caps and became a serious filmmaker by starting with "Schindler's
List". For some reason, I still haven't seen Private Ryan (I have never
enjoyed war movies and find them depressing and boring), but I just bet
that it has lots of young all-American citizen soldiers in it, bringing
hope to the world with their packets of chewing gum and aw-shucks
smiles. Am I right?
Peter Jackson is another skillful moviemaker
whose ideological position in this axis is hard to ascertain because he
didn't really have much artistic freedom in either LOTR and King Kong,
but quickly judging from his older movies, he is nowhere as bad as
George Lucas. Besides, to paraphrase an observation that Tommi made
after seeing King Kong, this very romantic movie ended with a perfect
demonstration of the superiority and a triumph of enlightenment values
when the biplanes, which were themselves the pinnacles of technological
achievement of that era, mercilessly shot down the irrational rampaging
ape and thus prevented it from ruining the important Art Deco cultural
landmark. Which was exactly the way that it should be.
Am I ever
glad that in our world, Sauron and the forces of industrialization and
enlightenment triumphed over the bearded forces of mysticism and
primitivism, so that the latter can only throw occasional little
tantrums but have no real chance of spreading their misery and general
wretchedness to my life. Live happily under your feudal lords and fight
for them. Perhaps they will give you a ciggy if you are especially
obedient!
Andre Norton has some very fine stories about the mythic wisdom and knowledge of The Ancients. In his novels _we_ are The Ancients.
Posted by Catilina | 6:38 AM
The one problem with your desciption of feudalism - people with big swords enslaving others - is that it neglects to grapple with the fact that for most of human history, if you didn't have a protector with a big sword letting you farm your land at the price of service and taxes, you were going to end up enslaved by someone much nastier. Feudalism isn't the highest and best social order, but it's not the worst either. Serfdom isn't fun, but it's vastly preferably to outright chattel slavery, or to being slaughtered by another tribe.
There is another reason that people have cozy feelings about feudalism besides wanting to return to a world where social position is inherited, and that is that feudalism is a social order that protects the weak. The Industrial Revolution allowed a lot of people to starve in the streets who would have had certain rights under a feudal order. It destroyed the aristocracy's sense of duty to the lower orders, and in so doing, destroyed the aristocracy. Now we live today in a highly industrialized world where there is so much surplus there is no reason for anyone to starve in the street, and it is easy for the vast majority of the population to have a certain amount of noblesse oblige. We are all aristocrats now, or at least can be. There is no reason for feudalism. But when Mongols will come and slaughter you or Turks will come and enslave you, feudalism is the best you can have, and we should respect it as necessary and appropriate to a certain level of technological development, and have more tolerance for feudal nostalgia.
Posted by Anonymous | 5:56 PM