Spengler's The Decline of the West: technology liquidates values
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Date: January 25th, 2022 10:11 PM Author: Gaped arousing range
I'm listening to this series on Spengler's Decline of the West and thought i'd share some parts XO would find interesting
Spengler contrasts his model of history with the flat, British model of cause and effect - the formulae and rites of the priests just become equations for the modern day scientists. For Spengler - historical forms are concrete, unfold over time and have distinct lifecycles. Civilization itself unfolds like a giant organism - an early phase, a late phase, a climax, budding, and then disintegration.
Almost everything is treated as a biological metaphor for Spengler, which I find especially interesting / useful - eg civilizations are superorganisms, and you can tell the health of the immune system by various behaviors / stages in its lifecycle (like for example how well a society responds to attacks on its founding myths is a critical immune response - there's also a relationship between the intellect and disease I need to go back over that has to do with decadence ..)
One of the foundational ideas is that civilizations (he lists 9 total) go through these two primary phases - culture phase, then civilizational phase. The coulture/culture phase is intensive, civilization phase extensive - inward looking and concerned with metaphysics versus outward looking and extending geographically. Typified when we think of the Greeks versus the Romans - the Greek soul versus Roman intellect. In the culture phase the main concern is metaphysics and art, then passes through and gives way to concerns with extensivity - social problems, politics, etc - society is motivated by politics, economics and ethics
It's too dense to cover but one especially interesting idea - he's talking about the idea of how technology liquidates values - all values -
we see another clash between the Germans and allies - where the world wars were a collision between the two ideas of utopia. The Germans were trying to escape the world they saw coming under British/allied hegemony. For the Germans, utopia was a moment frozen in time that preserved their ways of life. For the allies - a world governed by science and reason, a cult of change. Hanging on to metaphysical cosmic depth vs all surfaces and no depth - seen in the two genres fantasy vs science fiction. Wagner creates the mythology of the fantasy genre, backwards looking and a world of myths and mystical wonders, versus Jules Verne and the sci-fi - a world of proliferating gadgets of science and technology. Whether it's berating the Socratic man (and Socrates himself) for worshipping intellect/reason, or the allies' utopia - a consistent theme is that Spengler hates this worship of rationality - people think it's liberating them from convention but it just creates a sterilized world drained of all its life, and questioning / deconstructing everything just fractures tradition, communal values and is a path to lonely, sterile world
Spengler and the German philosophers nailed this - they saw what such a world would amount to - pure nihilism and a technopolis consumer shopping mall of proliferating gadgets where nothing matters but how much money you make.
New technology liquidates values, *all* values - allies and the germans, left and right - an example was the introduction of the gramophone, which brought the concert into the home, so musical education completely fell out since if you wanted to hear music you just popped on a record. A modern example is the proliferation of TVs into pubs/bars and restaurants - which killed singing in bars, killed the communal atmosphere, and just locked people into this private modality. A society that embraces change for the sake of it is a society that has no values or just willingly surrenders them
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5016809&forum_id=2#43847876)
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Date: January 26th, 2022 1:38 PM Author: Twisted fear-inspiring space
not like pubs/bars were some kind of elite haven of intellectual discourse. its in the main just rowdy morons without intellect killing time, which means their reallocation of time to television etc is not a big deal. and in fact technology affords new, in some ways more authentic ways of building community e.g. via the computer. its just a different kind of community based on one's inner self-perception and less on one's determined persona. This creates all kinds of difficulties in navigating a new society. But the idea that being and becoming is some kind of new problem whose solution is one over the other is to misunderstand the fundamental antinomic problem of being in becoming and becoming through being.
great content but at the same time who the fuck is spending genuine time with spangler lol.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5016809&forum_id=2#43850875) |
Date: January 29th, 2022 4:27 AM Author: diverse costumed stag film
Innovation in general is great for individuals who are bound by morals. It's not inherently harmful. Tech can make us more capable and productive. But ofc we're not all the same. Hyper wealthy are bound to see tech as a weapon, and because they consider themselves more important than the plant itself (to use the author's analogy) they will never allow tech to create a level playing field. Instead the playing field disappears and the plant lives at the mercy of its host. Most of us use tech to make daily life convenient, for entertainment, for socializing, and maybe even a hobby to make money on the side. Hyper wealthy otoh are doing everything they can to stay ahead of the curve to control innovation to turn trillions into tens of trillions, finance wars, buy political seats, alter population demographics, bring about transhumanism and change the course of humanity. Maybe not a first, but every "innovation" eventually gets subsumed into their sphere of control to enslave humanity. Ad agencies hijack everything into another opportunity to catch eyeballs and clicks. It's all repurposed in Darwinian fashion to do one thing mainly - increase spatial distance between accumulated power from those who might threaten it. If you are useful to the power structure, tech increases your political engagement. If you're a threat, tech is a prison for escapism and self destructive habits - the power structure needs threats to be powerless yet appear ever threatening to progress. There's a problem of distribution as tech gets more sophisticated. The wealthy have access to the best tech to better obscure wealth and form public opinion - change societal attitudes to their benefit while bleeding the people behind a ring of gyges. If you could use tech to change human behavior (not for profit for the sake of profit but to put pressure on people to act against their better judgment) you could change diets, habits, and major life decisions like religious affiliation and mate selection. For the hyper rich the best world possible would be one where the 99 iq drops a full standard deviation or two - all prudential inhibitions and barriers get removed that would otherwise prevent a healthy citizen from choosing a life of enslavement.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5016809&forum_id=2#43867129) |
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