On Apr 22, 2010, at 7:29 AM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
> i say this because we've had this conversation before and, as it
> turned out, I am one of the few people who did live through economic
> hardship having grown up in a town where, at one time, there were
> literally no jobs to be had and I slept in my $200 Ford Pinto.
Adorno has a great aphorism in Minima Moralia about how exclusion breeds not resistance but a desire to belong. I haven't posted it in over 4 years, so why not now?
Doug
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32
Savages are not more noble. - There is to be found in African students of political economy, Siamese at Oxford, and more generally in diligent art-historians and musicologists of petty-bourgeois origins, a ready inclination to combine with the assimilation of new material, an inordinate respect for all that is established, accepted, acknowledged. An uncompromising mind is the very opposite of primitivism, neophytism, or the 'non-capitalist world'. It presupposes experience, a historical memory, a fastidious intellect and above all an ample measure of satiety. It has been observed time and again how those recruited young and innocent to radical groups have defected once they felt the force of tradition. One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly. That snobs show more aptitude than proletarians for avant-garde movements in art throws light on politics too. Late-comers and newcomers have an alarming affinity to positivism, from Carnap-worshippers in India to the stalwart defenders of the German masters Matthias Grünewald and Heinrich Schütz. It would be poor psychology to assume that exclusion arouses only hate and resentment; it arouses too a possessive, intolerant kind of love, and those whom repressive culture has held at a distance can easily enough become its most diehard defenders. There is even an echo of this in the sententious language of the worker who wants, as a Socialist, to 'learn something', to partake of the so-called heritage, and the philistinism of the Bebels ties less in their incomprehension of culture than in the alacrity with which they accept it at face value, identify with it and in so doing, of course, reverse its meaning. Socialism is in general no more secure against this transformation than against lapsing theoretically into positivism. It can happen easily enough that in the Far East Marx is put in the place vacated by Driesch and Rickert. There is some reason to fear that the involvement of non-Western peoples in the conflicts of industrial society, long overdue in itself, will be less to the benefit of the liberated peoples than to that of rationally improved production and communications, and a modestly raised standard of living. Instead of expecting miracles of the pre-capitalist peoples, older nations should be on their guard against their unimaginative, indolent taste for everything proven, and for the successes of the West.