Comments on: Romans of the decadence

By: Catherine

Catherine — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 21:48:50 +0000

Paul

Apologies for pitching in late here, and before all else thanks for writing this, and provoking me.

Some of the targets identified in this piece are certainly worth striking out against (vacuous celebrity culture to name one), and I take on board your call to confront conditions of cultural decadence. At the same time, I feel frustrated by the tired, hugely generalising rhetoric of the cultural jeremiad in which you make your case. One of my biggest hopes for the Dark Mountain project is that it might begin to crack open the forms, as well as the substance, of our myths of progress and civilisation; so to run up against a ‘today’s culture is a load of rubbish’ routine, worthy of the Daily Mail, is honestly disappointing.

As you yourself admit, we are too close to the early 21st century to make reliable pronouncements as to its cultural worth – let alone getting into knotty questions like, who enjoys that worth, and by what timescales should we measure cultural decadence, or indeed cultural endurance? I can remember many mournful conversations back in the golden 80s and 90s about how nothing was original, everything was recycled and postmodern. As time passes, we and our media surrounds do a fine job of filtering out the mediocrity and confusion which filled up bygone eras as much as our own, and crafting tidy tales of the cultural achievement of past decades which only include the good stuff. For every Billy Liar, remember that there was a Doctor in Distress.

Antonio in his comment is right: dwelling mournfully on the decadence of present times evades simply facing up to and creating the present. The present gets made anyway, with absolutely no cast-iron guarantees about how it measures up to either past or future – again, much depends on who’s doing the measuring. The sweeping condemnation of your jeremiad – all music is derivative cut-and-paste, all theatre is a musical nostalgia-fest – is simply wrong in failing to acknowledge that meaningful, spiritual, original, hard-grafting creation is still going on, all around us. If we fail to see it, maybe we are looking in the wrong places, or our radar isn’t tuned in. What, after all, will the Dark Mountain journal be filled with, if not this?

So, what might happen if we consciously gave up the rhetorical power of defining the past as a sequence of neat ten year chunks ,which get better the further back you look, and against which the present never has a hope of competing? What if we consciously gave up the rhetorical power of vast generalisations, and instead chose always to offer a more complicated, nuanced view? What is happening when complaint draws more energy than the new creation it is supposed to be making space for?

Reading your subsequent post, and about the reader who raised the need to mourn our past myths before we overcome them, I admit we’re all mired in the comfort and familiarity of these rhetorical habits. Yet they restrict our imagination as much as they actually diagnose problems, and risk cutting off the fresh possibilities for observing, thinking and acting within the world that I think we’d all agreed we need.

By: Chris Pendleton

Chris Pendleton — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:23:23 +0000

Good piece, we are in a very dull derivative rut at the moment. If you want some hope that new things are on the way though, go and see Jerry Dammers’ Spatial aka Orchestra. It might be what music will be like after civilisation.

By: Andy

Andy — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 13:48:01 +0000

We have become a society of cultural DJ’s – no real talent, originality or authenticity.. Just mixing it up for the masses.

By: Ian Christie

Ian Christie — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 12:04:56 +0000

Paul – thanks for a very interesting post.
Nostalgia and regret for a more vibrant world may be hard-wired in us – activated the older we get, and 30-40 years ago always seems to be the site of the golden, or at least less crude and rude, age. But as you say, just because every generation and culture can feel that things are on the wane does not mean that sometimes it is all too true.
One problem in the modern West is the downside of the post-50s social liberations and the sense that every aspect of the first wave of industrial culture – which was permeated by pre-industrial traditions and values – was clapped out, repressive, boring and incapable of speaking to the new age. Babies were hurled out with bathwaters, and the idea that complete disinhibition would promote more creativity took hold. But limits and conventions provide discipline and direction for creativity; lose them and you get not freedom, but sprawl. And inability to focus, channel, discipline our creativity seems to be widespread.
Two other problems strike me as relevant here. First, the endless flow of technological novelties and the speed of innovation give us the illusion that a) we live in unprecedented times and have nothing to learn from a dim and less enlightened past (even and especially the recent past); and b) we are seeing greater change than anyone has seen before, and are making amazing progress. But there is a good case to be made that nothing in the past 60 years has been as profound in social and technical innovation and expansion of knowledge as the 60 years from 1880 to 1940. We live off the breakthroughs of that time (including oil). And there is a disastrous result from the conceit that we live in such unprecedented times that there is nothing to learn from past centuries of Western (or other) cultures (Ford – History is Bunk). That is the hyper-ironic and decadent stance towards the people of the past – how peculiar and pitiful their knowledge and technology! how uncool they were! – coupled with near-total failure outside (and increasingly also inside) universities to transmit a rich sense of where we have come from, what values and traditions from the past can still teach us, and the timeless relevance of human spiritual responses to Earth and cosmos. Capitalism has use for spirituality and history only as a couple of consumer options among a billion others, and wants – needs – us to be amnesiac, ironic, restless consumers with a permanent sense that something is missing, which we might find in the next purchase.

By: Gavin

Gavin — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:38:28 +0000

Agreed, I have just picked it up for the first time after 33 years and can’t believe I waited so long. Beautiful and weird.

By: Paul Kingsnorth

Paul Kingsnorth — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:32:55 +0000

Gavin – thanks for that. Perhaps he should be on the list. The Wind in the Willows can be curiously subversive, and ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ is the single weirdest chapter in any childrens’ book ever. Deep animism in Edwardian England! Badgers in tweed jackets being led astray by the wild god of the woods. Marvellous stuff.

By: Gavin

Gavin — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:26:52 +0000

Funny that you begin with Rome and impermanence. I was just reading a passage in The Wind in the Willows in which Badger explains that his underground home used to be part of a Roman city.

***

“Here, where we are standing, they lived, and walked, and talked, and slept, and carried on their business. Here they stabled their horses and feasted, and from here they rode out to fight or to drove out to trade. They were a powerful people, and rich, and great builders. They built to last, for they thought their city would last forever.”

“But what has become of them all?” asked the Mole.

“Who can tell?” said the Badger. “People come, they stay for a while, they flourish, they build – and they go. It is their way. But we remain. There were badgers here, I’ve been told, long before that same city ever came to be. And now there are badgers here again. We are an enduring lot, and we may move out for a time, but we wait, and are patient, and back we come. And so it will ever be.”

“Well, and when they went at last, those people?”

“When they went, the strong winds and persistent rains took the matter in hand, patiently, ceaselessly, year after year. Perhaps we badgers too, in our small way, helped a little – who knows? It was all down, down, down, gradually – ruin and levelling and disappearance. Then it was all up, up, up, gradually, as seeds grew to saplings, and saplings to forest trees, and bramble and fern came creeping in to help.”

***

Kenneth Grahame for the Uncivilised reading list!

By: Rupert Cathles

Rupert Cathles — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:15:21 +0000

Does not ‘uncivilised’ mean wild?
From the point of view of wild life, all civilised culture, our urban world, is destructive. If wilderness is best, then civilisation is a curse and its progress has been a descent. This is as our ancestors saw it, from an original golden Age to Silver, Bronze, Iron, to Apocalypse, the end of the world.
From the summit of the Mountain there are great views, the vision of a new world which is neither uncivilised nor destructive, a view all the way to a future global Golden Age.
To reach the summit there is first an abyss to cross. The abyss is this: At the very time when we, clever naked apes, have discovered the scale of the universe and our possible future in it – almost limitless – we threaten ourselves with extinction! Deep this abyss: At very great cost humanity has climbed the peaks of cultural achievement, and all will be lost if we fall, making the struggles and sufferings of our ancestors futile and to no purpose. We not only risk becoming inhumanly barbaric but also are at risk of becoming completely soulless, mechanical, mere automata in a robotic world – apes in spacesuits.
It is not possible to exaggerate the depth of this abyss. It is the Abyss of Despair. Only the fear of despair makes you seriously consider, realise the seriousness of the danger. Stare into the abyss and only then ask what really matters. What cultural inheritances are really worth keeping? What is the best of human culture worth saving? Facing despair, only then can anyone seriously see what matters, what is of lasting value, both wild and cultivated.
Then, look up – There is an abyss to cross and a mountain to climb. And it can be crossed and it can be climbed, one step at a time, one person at a time.

This, from one who has seen the view from the summit.

By: Elizabeth

Elizabeth — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:14:33 +0000

Mark,

I entirely agree with your post – I have also thought this way for a while now. To borrow from William Blake, we are currently far too single-visioned; we need to work towards a more truthful, four-fold vision of reality instead.

And I’m not a religious fundamentalist either, or an enemy of reason, whatever that means, but I do think that as a society we need to pay serious and immediate attention to what could be called ’spirit’.

In this, I have been heavily influenced by Theodore Roszak among others, especially The Voice of the Earth and Where the Wasteland Ends. I’d like to discuss either of those with anyone else out there. (Though I admit now I’m highly biased – I think Roszak is a brilliant intellectual shot in the arm.)

Elizabeth

By: Sophie McKeand

Sophie McKeand — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:24:30 +0000

I don’t believe that an individual can ‘own’ ideas – nobody operates within a vacuum, the ownership of ideas is based on the capitalist model of selfish individualism rather than mutual co-operation…

didn’t Sartre say that anybody who claimed that their idea had never before been thought was either lying or it (the idea) must be completely rubbish… i like that take on it… so much so i wrote a poem about it:

thought

this thought is mine is it not?
this thought that
I created, that I alone
imagined

owned by this mind
is this thought,
rightfully mine
is this thought,
to be thought by
no-other without my express permission,
as this thought is mine

a single consciousness attached
to no-one
to no-thing
created this thought,
detached from all other thoughts
ever thought
is this mind, and
this thought is mine is it not?

i think that your own belief that we are coming to the end of this phase of civilisation explains perfectly how it is time to stop looking for ‘the new’ and remember ‘the old’ and by that i mean ‘the really really old’ isn’t that now so old it’s the new ‘new’?
cheers!