“STEM! Trades! Moar STEM!” sums up most of what I see in dissident sphere discussions about what endeavors are worthwhile. This bias reflects the practical sensibilities of the upper working class core with its skilled tradesmen and small business owners.
The engineers and computer programmers of the dark enlightenment suffer from the same conceit, heartily recommending more of what they already do as the highest virtue.
Then in the same breath I see ranting and raging about how Jews make all the movies. They recognize a weakness in themselves but they willfully get their priorities wrong. So long as they do that, nothing changes.
To be fair, I see commendable support for revival of the classics of the Greco-Roman world but this is part of a larger conservative trend to focus on the old without making anything new.
I also wholeheartedly agree with the reaction to degenerate modern art but a return to monolithic marble columns, sterile white statues, stuffy baroque decor, the 10^19th painting of St. Sebastian looking rather bored as he gets shot full of arrows, or heroic St. George spearing a pitiful, dog-sized dragon just brings us back to the origins of modern problems.
One of the obvious growth areas for alt-dissidents is culture and aesthetics, which are too often dismissed contemptuously as the province of soy-addled literature majors. In reality, conceding this battlefield to the enemy is a grave strategic error that stems from wounded pride and class resentment.
No one is inspired by the artistic output of no-frills proles with greasy hands. Even positive portrayals of the white working class such as biscuit and gravy Terran marines flying Confederate flags are created by SWPLs and Jews in the gaming industry. Look at any actual worker’s revolution and we see the art is always grandiosely uninspired. At their best, the common people can sustain a steady folk-culture.
Good aesthetics come from creative, high IQ people with high openness to novelty. We can take a quick look at something as mundane as beer. Proles drink watery lager and tend to stick to the same brand. Meanwhile craft beer comes in dozens of different varieties and there’s always new ones to try. IPAs in particular have distinct aromas from different blends of hops.
As infuriating as the SWPL culture can be, it blows the combined might of the red states out of the water. That’s part of the deceptively great power of culture—a small number of creative people easily overpowers and reprograms masses who are lesser in beauty and ideas.
In the current order, many creative people end up as hardcore social justice warriors. The rulers only need to inundate those of heightened sensitivity with injustice porn and beautiful rainforests getting cut down from an early age to command their allegiance for life. The creative people won’t listen to the arguments of the other side because the other side is ugly. Until the emergence of internet countercultures, this kneejerk assumption was rarely challenged.
The rigid right-wing personality type, on the other hand, tends to unimaginatively double down on the enlightenment error of ignoring culture. Rightist rulers such as Franco, Salazar, or Pinochet successfully crushed open opposition as they blissfully let their opponents take over the universities. Sepsis eventually spread to the officer corps and once that happens a right-wing ruler’s days are numbered.
Even in the best case with Franco dying of old age after being in power for decades, the cultural and aesthetic reality of Spain had already aligned with the rest of the “international community.” Now it’s just another Euro country with massive youth unemployment, waves of migrants, and abysmal fertility rates.
Fortunately, the mainstream culture now grows weaker and more insipid by the day as censorship and conformity stifles even the best creative types. It’s become a meme to point out how even educated adults draw heavily on Harry Potter, a series of books written for kids, to make cultural references and analogies.
Hollywood movies have sunk into embarassing mediocrity with a lineup dominated by remakes of remakes and x superhero of the week. Musically, there hasn’t been much memorable or distinct since the 1980s.
Strangely, television shows, which were largely mid-tier schlock as recently as the 90s are the last medium with any sort of vitality, and much of that is borrowed from dissident ideologies which as of yet can only be hinted at.
There’s nothing to stop a burst of real creativity from challenging and displacing the established aesthetic.
Dissident dominance over the generation of memes and the realm of uncensored ideas already demonstrates just how sickly the mass culture really is.
A next step might be as simple as an alt-sphere literary magazine like many ordinary high schools have—or even a neighborhood band with an alt-right theme. The important thing is ridicule and destruction only goes so far. It should be clearly understood the birth of a new dominant aesthetic and culture is the larger strategic goal.
See Also: The Aesthetics of Dominance
FORWARD BASE B 
63 replies on “The Alt-Sphere Should Embrace Culture and Aesthetics”
Brilliant! Absolutely fucking Brilliant. Your dealing with ideas no one else is thinking about. Jim hints at these ideas, but does not develop them.
Should check out my twitter, I’m not the only one that’s thinking these things. I haven’t developed anything yet either, I’m just pointing out that all the signalling against being cultured and artistic is the opposite of what they need to be doing. Encouraging an attitude change is a start I suppose.
Both medieval and classical art provided imaginative support (temples/cathedrals, statues of gods/saints) for the society-ordering/directing “religious idea”. It seems as though new dominant religious ideas have to emerge like organic growths — they can’t be “made up” — and so the same would be true of art-forms.
You’ve mentioned the alt-right attraction to the Warhammer-mythos — this might point in the right direction. If a really energetic space-colonization program got underway, something might develop along these lines. There’s already Warhammer art being published online; more ambitious and publicly visible space-empire-themed art might be generated in large quantities … if Musk and other space-lords actually sponsored it in the way that classical and medieval ruling elites sponsored classical and medieval art.
The attraction to the mythos is due to its essential qualities of an admiration for courage, sacrifice and faith: increasingly rare qualities in a world of plenty fit for cowards and narcissists.
Great article. I’m not sure an aesthetic movement goes well with an essentially Conservative one,. Creative, high IQ people with high openness to novelty are nearly the very definition of Leftists
To Garr’s point , the chance of a space program 2.0 within a several generations is near zero. The 1960’s early 70’s efforts were a product of non repeatable circumstances .
That said there is a vast amount of options and more good art now than ever. Since movements have to kind of organically develop over time I’d go with Colonial revival o something like that until the natural trends assert themselves
“I’m not sure an aesthetic movement goes well with an essentially Conservative one”
Curiously, everyone was “conservative” before, say, 1789. They didn’t do so bad aesthetically, i.e., ancient Greeks.
ia, that style wasn’t a movement. It developed organically
Also Greece had its won Liberals vs Conservative issue. Socrates ended up with a cup of hemlock because of the local variation of Left vs. Right
later the modern Junior Anti sex league was filled in by Cathar nutters who were novelty seeking and very creative
“ia, that style wasn’t a movement. It developed organically”
If alt-right is going to succeed it had better be organic.
Me, I think conservative vs. liberal is misleading anyway. The point I was trying to make is that modernism is more akin to early Christianity in that it rejects the entire history of the West. Actually, it’s even worse. According to the modernists everything before, say, 1907 is stupid and evil. Maintaining political correctness requires enormous effort because it’s so unnatural and ugly.
The creatives tended to transgress against whatever boundaries of the day were. Fortunately, the boundaries of the day are pretty much to encourage creatives to rebel against political correctness. That said, they will most likely look more like Gamersgate’s base of support than traditional conservativism.
I sort of point out in the article that artistic people are natural leftists because the social institutions show them a vision of helicopter footage of the misty rainforest, world peace, fair trade coffee, and breaching humpback whales set to expansive symphonic music. Then they are trained to see the other side as marching in lockstep as the villain screams to them in guttural German, the propeller scars on a manatee’s back, starving kids in Africa, or fat gap toothed meanly grinning hillibillies in sweat-stained wifebeaters with shotguns, dueling banjoes, jugs of xxx moonshine, and burning crosses. It’s no contest, really. I think high creatives are actually neutral, adopting whatever strikes them as beatiful and desirable, especially within the context of social values and patronage. When society is sick, so are its artists. So conceding creatives must be degenerate leftists is perhaps just conceding the battle without a fight. A big reason I wrote this article was to keep challenging the defeatist mindset conservative types seem so enamored of for reasons I cannot begin to fathom.
They hate cities for one thing. Cities to American conservatives are like motorcyclists to many motorists – Hells Angels starring Marlon Brando. Once it gets into the culture that anyone who rides a motorcycle is supposed to be a sexy, violent, degnerate rebel, if there’s no compelling reason to change the perception, then it just stays there.
In Europe they didn’t have Hells Angels (they had Nazis) so there never developed any stigma. Everybody rides scooters and motorcycles. No big deal at all.
On the other hand, European conservatives don’t hate their cities and can even live there like Houellebecq. But you’re a Nazi anyway if you don’t follow the current lunacy.
Again, I feel I cannot emphasize enough that victory is not possible by resignation and retreat. The cities need to be taken back, not surrendered.
Well, for one example: Lovecraft was reactionary even for his time but with the limited speed of communication, there was a pretty wide Overton window such that no one seriously thought to “deny platform” just because he wrote disagreeable things, though we do have chains of letters where people wrote to debate him.
Social media has replaced discussion with a lot more mob activity.
To what out host said re; city reclamation , the gap between the city and countryside is so great, a measurable portion of the Right would be fine with simply leveling the cities or allowing them decay and cease to exist
I’ve seen “famine as a weapon” and worse discussed openly which is an oddly Maoist/Stalinist approach for a movement bounded by Christianity.
Screw reclaiming the institutions, we don’t need them , don’t need the cities either, they create the problems. Le then die seems to be a significantly common point of view
I am sympathetic to that point of view in small ways but some kind of Neo-Romantic/Net Linked small town system doesn’t seem practicable to me , the Ariel Board of Control series by Kipling is interesting Edwardian fiction but its not a social model that would work.
In any case, well run clean homogeneous cities are cool and useful
I suppose in some sense, some of us can just go out and try to do this. But in another sense, in order to create cultural products, we need a culture from which to operate.
This has been a fundamental error in the Christian sphere for quite sometime. Leaders talk about a ‘culture war’, but have a reflexive fear of actually competing against the government/economy that funds these cultural products that they don’t like. They know where their paychecks and retirement come from, so they essentially become cucks, and waste their money on Christian branded versions of progressive projects.
While some bootstrapping is possible, I suspect real cultural production happens when there are a core group of people actually living near one another.
For all of their many failings, the hippies knew that they had to live near each other to have a micro-culture. US dissidents, a handful of exceptions aside, never learned that lesson.
” I suspect real cultural production happens when there are a core group of people actually living near one another.”
This is one reason why I think Charlottesville is so important. They are fighting for the right of dissidents to meet in person.
I’ll put in my two cents as I was part of an artist’s guild that for some time created a lot of content:
1) As noted, there needs to be a cultural space. This doesn’t actually need to be in real-life, this can be online. However, the issue is that this tends to get destroyed unlike left-wing groups.
2) There’s the obvious destruction by being targeted by the left. Nothing needs to be elaborated on here, but shaming is a powerful weapon and artists are sensitive by nature.
3) The second way to be destroyed, less obvious, is inclusion of women. Women tend to bring a group’s output to a halt, since the male members end up pursuing them or using female approval to show status. Its pretty harmful no matter what. A group might survive including one or two women, maybe, tops.
4) For a group to be viable and useful, there needs to be a scattering of “masters” or other mentoring individuals, as well as a number of people seeking to learn. Such things tend to happen organically in my opinion. At any rate, the organization of medieval guilds is fairly sound and certainly seemed to have worked for us. Unfortunately, such mentors or masters are likely targets of any SJWs: their output also makes them distinctive, most likely.
5) More general freedom of thought should be expected – artists tend to be transgressive by nature –
certainly no dogma should come from non-artists. Artists will only respect artists, so expecting them to listen to anyone who isn’t a creator of some sort is silly. Also criticism is natural and in a functioning ecosystem, serves to improve its members. Any epistemic control needs to come from within, not without.
6) Patronage is important. So as long as there can be a steady supply of funds going into such groups and the ecosystem of skill is there, output can be expected.
On #4-6: the “masters” idea requires that art be understood as craft — this is how it was understood during the European pre-Renaissance (including Gothic) era, I believe. And while craftsmen may be assumed to be willful and eccentric they nevertheless work by commission and are expected to produce more or less the sort of thing that they’ve been asked to produce. So the patron (Elon Musk paying for space-colonization-propaganda-art, for example) must more or less exercise ultimate control over what they do. (This was even true of Pope Whatever’s patronage of Michelangelo.)
A key thing I’ve considered about patronage. Yes, the artist has to deliver what the patron asks for, but there is potential to have considerable room for negotiation. Look at Michelangelo’s rocky relationship with the Pope, for example. The Pope took time to deal with Michelangelo’s eccentric personality when he had affairs of statecraft and wars to deal with rather than telling Mikey to get lost. As leader of a small state surrounded by enemies, the Pope was willing to do what it took to keep the best talent happy in order to build up his prestige.
At least as depicted in the movie Amadeus, Mozart’s patron, the Emperor is tone deaf and doesn’t really care what Vulfie composes so long as everyone claps at the end. This meant an unusual degree of creative freedom and a secure living.
Now let’s contrast with a modern artist enjoying the complete free freedom of the free market. There’s still a patron: the aggregate rational economic everyman who must be pandered to and there’s no room for negotiating. If it has no mass market appeal, you’re just another starving artist.
You’re certainly right about this but I’m not so sure that much can be done about it. As a general rule conservative personalities aren’t wild about flamboyant alternative arts. To get good art you also need a lot of dreck as practice. Liberals can pretend that dreck is not dreck even though we all know it is.
I think it’s a misnomer to say that conservative types have no creativity. They most certainly do but it’s in more practical things. They would tend to look at a new way to make semi-conductor junctions as HIGH ART of great significance while the liberals call this…work. Liberals only seem to value abstract creativity and everything else is just prolish work. It a matter of what they value as to what the different type cultures put their creative work in to.
The trouble is semi-conductor junctions are only meaningful to a few people who have the knowledge to appreciate them. A good book also requires a skill (literacy) to enjoy but it’s something a much wider range of people have access to. Also, I would say beauty in engineering is defined by practical functionality. Whereas a more typical artist is trying to send a message and inspire an emotional response even if all methods used or scenarios depicted are wildly impractical.
Should mention offhand the Salo forum as one place where right-aligned creatives exist. Naturally, its considered as fairly degenerate in the right-aligned noosphere but it does come out with interesting stuff.
It’s asking quite a lot for a right-wing artistic movement to instantly bloom into something with the (admittedly subversive & decadent) sophistication & maturity of the mainstream progressive entertainment industry.
However toxic the products of Hollywood are, they are the result of extensive trial & error, apprenticeship & building on predecessors efforts.
We could, however, begin a new tradition at a less sophisticated level.
Simply narrating & dramatizing heroic episodes of our civilization’s history with a pro-west & pro-male POV would be compelling viewing for the millions of normal people starving for that. And it could begin building an industry, network & aesthetic for future creatives to build on.
The arts establishment, academia and the media will never allow a white man to assert his identity in a non-ironic way. Artists are gonna have to bypass the establishment to find patrons. One way is for the artist to exploit the celebrity culture. You need charisma though, like Spencer. Wealthy patrons need to cough up the dough also.
An easy way would be to write the progressive narrative but introduce villains who just happen to be well spoken and well-argued. That’s often been the way to get around the censors.
That’s true. Or allegory, the description of one thing under the guise of another.
[…] we build our own institutions, our own religions, our own sense of aesthetics and culture. We enjoy building because we know that it is pleasant and fulfilling and it is our […]
“Good aesthetics come from creative, high IQ people with high openness to novelty.”
Interestingly enough, creativity does not seem to be correlated with IQ. I read that Jimi Hendrix didn’t test very high on an IQ test and I would surmise that this was taken while he was in the military and he didn’t try very hard. (He joined the military to avoid jail.) I would guess that he would be at least average in intelligence and far higher in creativity as he essentially re-invented rock guitar. There are other guys like Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, but…
Anyways, I think you are seeing what will be the major downfall of the alt-right/manosphere. They don’t attract artistic people and they won’t make a lasting impact on culture because of this. When you see douches like Capt. Capitalism worship STEM and basically call guys into art and music fags, well…
Lots of computer games are beautiful and complex and necessarily rightward because pro-order, anti-chaos. Novels, poetry, painting, and sculpture may be senile, but games have just been born.
Also, the recent rallies look like performance-art, and some social media productions might be looked at in the same way. (Here I’m just guessing; I don’t know anything about social media.)
My general point is that you might have a lot of good artists out there making interesting art, only not where the labels “artist” and “art” are hanging.
Interesting observation about video games.
Y’know if you and I were to play an oldschool shooter like R-Type, we would likely have a very similar experience and we would go through the bosses in the same order. In fact when I was on different job sites, I would usually talk about old Nintendo games with co-workers. If you and I were to read the same book, let’s say Crime and Punishment, I think that you and I would have different interpretations. IE I thought it was written as a direct critique of the idea of a”ubbermensch.” We would read the chapters in the same order but our minds eye would create different images of the characters, we would be drawn to different parts of the story and we would each have a very different experience of the book.
Okay, there was some controversy awhile back because the ex-Kiss guitarist said something about Nazi’s having the coolest outfits. I think I read somewhere that George Lucas was influenced by the imagery of the Nazi’s when creating the Imperial Army…
My guess is that if you were to look at the art of the Nazi’s you would find design principles that valued orderliness. Whereas if you studied the music of Jimi Hendrix you would find synthesis. That is taking elements from several styles of music-funk, blues, psychadelic rock and using what was a t the time new technology (high powered Marshall amps, wah pedals, fuzz boxes and new recording studio tricks) to create something that was “new.”
“if you studied the music of Jimi Hendrix you would find synthesis. . . create something that was “new.”
Okay, but did he influence anybody? Is there a Jimi Hendrix school? I don’t know but if not he’s a cultural dead end.
haha,
at first I thought you were joking, but then I realized there are people out there who don’t listen to any guitar based music…
https://mic.com/articles/104162/jimi-hendrix-is-the-most-influential-guitar-player-to-ever-live#.k7WcG7Cmk
That is literally the point though, there is no school of Jimi Hendrix and yet his influence on rock music is undeniable. It is almost as if we are talking across an ideological firewall.
These guys get paid to write this crap. I suppose in a few years they’ll say Hendrix invented the guitar. Along with the light bulb.
The article may be crappy but there is no denying Jimi’s influence….
I’ll deny it. It’s bullshit.
“…I suppose in a few years they’ll say Hendrix invented the guitar…”
No way. Jimi Hendricks was unbelievable. His playing is extraordinarily beautiful. I say Pete Townsend talking about him once. He said that they’d all heard about him in England so when he went there all the bands came out to see him. He said after seeing him he said to himself,” What will we do now”? Hendricks playing was so far above anyone at the time.
Our friend compared Nazi orderliness to Hendrix synthesis. Wealthy people and their paid lackeys admiring Hendrix guitar playing, immune from the consequences of multiculturalism, isn’t convincing. It’s bullshit.
“… admiring Hendrix guitar playing, immune from the consequences of multiculturalism…”
I’m hardly in the Blacks lives matter glee club type fellow but no matter what color Hendricks was he was an amazing and major influential guitar player. Talent is talent.
This guy didn’t have a lot of Hendricks influence.
Computer games combine both engineering and art, kind of like architecture and I’m sure we all know what state architecture is in.
I think it’s the newness that mattered most with games, an outlet for talent outside the colonized, co-opted disciplines. They’ve tried to take over gaming too, but the overwhelmingly (under 40) male fan base has made it harder for them, especially since it’s become the last refuge of men from a rabidly anti-male society. The kickass waifu heroes and diversity characters have crept in but can’t really change the fundamentals of what teenagers want in their entertainment.
So if you’re pointing out the talent is already out there, all we need to do is set some up with security and a platform.
Btw, quite the animated discussion you guys are having!
By the way Jimi Hendrix murdered by Jewish manager, claims roadie.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2009/jun/02/jimi-hendrix
“…creativity does not seem to be correlated with IQ…”
I think Black people have a good deal of creativity because Black Women in Africa mostly take care of themselves so the Men that are singers, dancers, whatever…Women love that stuff and that’s who gets to breed. Some people would say that there’s no evolutionary advantage in being a performer but it doesn’t have to be an advantage, Women just have to like it and you’ll get more of it.
Sam, your video reminds me of my initial question. Was Hendrix a cultural dead end?
“Was Hendrix a cultural dead end?”
If it can’t be easily commodified and replicated, does it make a cultural dead end?
If diverse artists can legitimately claim influence even though they don’t sound similar, can it be said that Jimi lives on?
Stevie Ray Vaughn, Frank Marino and Mahogany Rush, man there’s lots of direct copies and even more tangential. Lots.
“…Was Hendrix a cultural dead end?…”
Not at all. Not even close. He influenced a huge number of guitarist. He would play blues along with melodic softer passages and then break out into severely distorted heavy metal. There’s a lot of this in metal bands. I can’t write enough to say how influential he was. Big time.
Now as a person he was a drug addled fool. Ted Nugent hung out with him a few times and warned him where he was headed. There’s a hoard of evidence his Jewish manager killed him. His manager was being dumped as he, like all Jewish managers, was ripping him off big time. If Hendricks died, as he did, he got I think it was $2 million. Lot of money back then. Like retire type money. If he lived…nothing. They said it seemed like gallons of wine poured pout of him in the hospital.
“…Hendricks death…”…”…Other versions of the story include that Hendrix was killed by Dannemann (apparently, a scarf was wrapped tightly around his neck when he was placed on the ambulance), and that his manager killed him because Hendrix sought to terminate his contract.
This latter theory is supported by the doctor who performed the autopsy, who believed the amount of wine found in Hendrix’s body would be impossible for one person to have consumed…”
http://biography.yourdictionary.com/articles/how-did-jimi-hendrix-die.html
there are many stories surrounding his death, much like Bruce Lee. Interestingly enough, Monica Dannemann was later involved with the Scorpions guitarist Uli Jon Roth who absolutely worships Hendrix.
As for your first point, artists as different as Metallica, Prince and U2 can call him a huge influence even though it would be hard to say they “sound like Hendrix.” Of course individuals like Stevie Ray, Robin Trower, Frank Marino “sound” allot like Jimi.
Speaking of Scorpions one of my all time favorite heavy metal lead guitar solos ever. Speedy`s Coming (Live Tokyo Tapes)
These guys say Hendriks influenced them also.
This was, my opinion, the best Black Flag line up. The guy singing quit after this as he said it was just too dangerous and violent. Funny enough that I like this line up best, being an ardent hater of mass immigration, as the drummer and singer were illegal aliens I believe. The cops used to come to their concerts and just beat the hell out of everyone to drive them off. I was in Las Vegas about this time and I had friends in Pasadena and San Gabriel. The cops there, and Vegas, have a kind of…let’s say.. you will not gather or organize,,,at all. So if a gathering of kids comes about they immediately squash it. I thought that was stupid but as I’m older now I think I understand. In LA there’s just SO DAMN MANY PEOPLE. It’s fucking oppressive. Some areas are nice but there’s just people everywhere. The cops look at all those people and know that there are only, what??? a couple of thousand cops??? If things ever got out of hand they would be able to do nothing and would be consumed by the mob so they crack down hard on any resistance. Even if it’s not resistance. I was in the desert at a Desert rock party once. Like ten miles out of town and there a band and they lit on fire a compressed block of cardboard for a fire, right away, helicopters, the police and the firetruck. There was exactly ZERO to burn there. Rocks, sand but they couldn’t even let that go miles out of town in the desert. I will say that the cops out West if you didn’t draw attention to yourself mostly ignored you. They, to me, didn’t seem to be looking for trouble.
“Our friend compared Nazi orderliness to Hendrix synthesis.”
More accurately, I contrasted them as perhaps two opposing things. Nazi’s had a strong visual sensibility, even though, ironically, they lifted the infamous swastika from Indians. Both can be considered artists though.
The Nazis had great looking uniforms. I think I’m not alone in thinking that looking cool is a great moral booster.
Jimi seemed to agree..
A couple of other things about Hendrix (just my sense of him):
— (1) he was a sci-fi/fantasy-nerd, like the nerdy Black kids who cut school to spend the day in the graphic novels aisle at Barnes & Noble.
— (2) His lyrics are in a Renaissance/Romantic metaphysical-eros groove (“Waterfall,” “Angel,” “Gold and Rose”).
People like Hendrix, Sly Stone, and George Clinton seem to me to have been an entirely different sort of human being from our “rappers” and “hip-hop” celebrities. As I said, you can still find people like this in the graphic novels aisle at Barnes & Noble.
Your suggestion that game-players would tend to interpret the game similarly, while novel-readers would tend to interpret the novel differently, is interesting.
I’m only aware of computer/video games via watching my kid play them and watching the “Let’s Play” videos that he watches, over his shoulder.
When I first read Dostoevsky in High School I, like you, focused on the Big Ideas. When I reread The Brothers K and Demons as an adult I was impressed by the bizarre social scenes that he constructs — the complicated conversations in interior spaces, with people moving in and out during the scene. The Big Ideas now seemed pretty basic — just the standard 19th Century Big Ideas. His Diary Of a Writer looks like a blogger’s archives.
I would think if Dostoevsky were time transported to view what passes for culture today he’d react with unmitigated horror.
Ia, one of Dostoevsky’s blog-posts in Diary of a Writer is weirdly feminist. He seems (but maybe I’m not remembering correctly) to endorse the entire feminist program, including girl-professionals and easy divorce. I don’t think he was a conservative or reactionary; he was a Slavic national-theo-socialist or something like that. (Whether he was really a Christian in any serious sense is debatable.) Women often participate as equals in the theoretical living-room chats that he presents, and he doesn’t think that it’s silly of them to do so. Nobody’s really happily married in his novels anyway. There are hardly any children. There’s the kid whose father had his beard pulled by Dmitri Karamazov (?) … I can’t think of any others.
Thanks, I haven’t read Dostoevsky for a long time. But, surely the women characters weren’t trying to take down the patriarchy?
Also, wasn’t he interested in the state of his or his character’s soul? And if so, wouldn’t that imply some sort of divine order he’s concerned with?
You’re right, the women in his novels aren’t trying to take down the patriarchy. They mainly like hanging out and chatting with men.
His characters have various obsessions. Alyosha Karamazov and Prince Mishkin (The Idiot) seem more focused on the permeation of the Russian folk by divine love than on their own souls. At least, that’s how I remember it — but it’s been a while and maybe I’m not remembering correctly. Dostoevsky likes to get these weird characters with different weird obsessions into multi-angled conversations in living rooms with each other, new characters walking into the room as others leave.
I don’t know whether he really thinks in terms of a divine order. He seems very focused on his odd individual characters. His religious characters feel God as a kind of love-fluid.
I think that Spengler had Dostoevsky in mind when he asserted (somewhere in Decline of the West / Undergoing of the Evening-lands) that Russian Christianity is very different from Northwest European “Faustian” Christianity. Spengler said that while Faustian Christianity focuses on the individual person’s upward zoom into infinity, Russian Christianity favors the image of a horizontally spread “brotherhood of man” permeated by divine love.
“Dostoevsky likes to get these weird characters with different weird obsessions into multi-angled conversations in living rooms with each other, new characters walking into the room as others leave.”
Before modern technological distractions and mass media-induced conformity everybody was like that. Dickens is full of weird characters chatting in rooms and walking around. People told each other old tales and played instruments and sang and danced. People did this for millennia.
Yeah. Dostoevsky liked Dickens a lot. They both seem cartoonish (Dickens especially so) but the cartoonishness seems somehow more true to life than what one finds in more “realistic” novels.
“…People like Hendrix, Sly Stone, and George Clinton seem to me to have been an entirely different sort of human being from our “rappers” and “hip-hop” celebrities…”
These guys had a TOTALLY different attitude from Blacks today George Clinton was massively into Niggars in Space! I think they were much more into
we’ll do our thing” instead of worrying about if there was a White guy who was racist somewhere.
You forgot James Brown
60 comments!! This blog is turning into a small forum.
This is a really interesting essay about thematic contrasts in video games (mainly), linked to by a commenter at Slatestarcodex, indirectly suggesting that video games are indeed the rightist art-medium of the future:
https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Noblebright