"I'm trad, dad!"

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version

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4. Each technological extension involves an act of collective cannibalism. The previous environment with all its private and social values, is swallowed by the new environment and reprocessed for whatever values are digestible. Thus, Nature was succeeded by the mechanical environment and became what we call the “content” of the new industrial environment. That is, Nature became a vessel of aesthetic and spiritual values. Again and again the old environment is upgraded into an art form while the new conditions are regarded as corrupt and degrading. Artists, being experts in sensory awareness, tend to concentrate on the environmental as the challenging and dangerous situation. That is why they may seem to be “ahead of their time.” Actually, they alone have the resources and temerity to live in immediate contact with the environment of their age. More timid people prefer to accept the content, the previous environment’s values, as the continuing reality of their time. Our natural bias is to accept the new gimmick (automaton, say) as a thing that can be accommodated in the old ethical order.

5. During the process of digestion of the old environment, man finds it expedient to anesthetize himself as much as possible. He pays as little attention to the action of the environment as the patient heeds the surgeon’s scalpel. The gulping or swallowing of Nature by the machine was attended by a complete change of the ground rules of both the sensory ratios of the individual nervous system and the patterns of the social order as well. Today, when the environment has become the extension of the entire mesh of the nervous system, anesthesia numbs our bodies into hydraulic jacks.
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sus

sus

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padraig (u.s.) said:
I don't rate Lasch like some people here, or on the Internet in general

tho having said, he'd very likely be aghast that reactionaries cite him as a prophet these days

he didn't think tradition was "good" so much as anything that served as a bulwark against corporate hegemony was probably desirable

everything else being subordinated to that concern

hence he looks excellent when it comes to something like woke capitalism and terrible when it comes to basically any type of modern identity politics
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He thought it was a bulwark against narcissism, which was corporate but also identitarian. You get some version of this narrative, where the hippies help usher in an era of self-centeredness, not just from Lasch but from Curtis's Century of the Self, or a tiny bit in Matt's new book on retreat, or in even Mark's writing, not to mention all the Brooklyn alt-left Bernie bro politicking, which makes it weird for it automatically get tied to some longing for Old World Morality.

I think what this is really coming down to is whether there are specific changes in the last century that are "legitimately" objectionable (whatever that means to you, I'm not quite sure) and not just, "wah minorities get all the co-stars in my Netflix series," which I nobody alive with a brain gives a shit about. Indeed, most of the progressive policy changes or civil rights expansions of recent history don't actually affect our target demographic's lives negatively. (A demo that, I agree, is not working class.) But this isn't what I see the folks linked throughout the thread complaining about—they're more likely to cite a dramatic fall in birthrates in Western countries, especially among the white collar class, and talk about how it's harder & less possible to home-own, how the blanket urge to abandon their hometown for a big city maybe wasn't ideal at an individual or societal level (brain-drain from the countryside). They talk about wanting to start a family but struggling with it as a woman who works. They talk about being disappointed in contemporary art. There is elitism in these stances, they're at least all middle-class perspectives on history and value, but 1) half of them are vanilla lefty stances, which makes the nrx shade-throwing weird, and 2) it seems over-simplifying to immediately reduce the movement to the worship of some "mythical form" of historical morality when very little of it seems, to me, about this—short of a vision of morality broad enough to encompass architectural styles, and bland enough to protect basic human urges like family making.
 
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sus

Moderator
thirdform said:
It's too courtly, too churchy and too stately. It is powerful, for sure, but nowhere near somber enough. The clarinet does not cry. Empty music for empty people who wouldn't have heard of Aristotle if us 'dirty ah-rabs' didn't rediscover it for you. It is beautiful, for sure, but not beautifully apparent. It is a conscious attempt to be beautified, not beautiful in the moment, warts and dissonances included. It's airbrushed, all acutely tuned.

Much more tonally rewarding.

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Wow I really feel wrecked... thirdform, go easy on me! Pretty tune tho.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
padraig (u.s.) said:
seriously tho - anyone cite any "traditionalist" movement of any time, any place, that doesn't draw on some mythical golden age to return to
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I don't disagree, but I thought we were arguing either 1) whether there are particulars of this trad resurgence that are worth talking about, and 2) whether hypothetically there may be specifics of the past that get left behind / forgotten which are worth remembering and trying to re-integrate in the present. If you agree with those even lightly, maybe we're on the same page?

FWhateverIW, in college I was really really anti-nostalgia, which was believe it or not a pretty aggro stance to take among the young kultur kritters there: Even though the school was radically leftist, at least in lip service—every day new demonstrations across campus, students who believed a woman's right to abortion included up to and after birth, students who argued passionately in front of a crowd that we needed to "burn the money, kill the bosses, and revert to a barter system"—it was also in love with 70s, dusty Instagram-filter aesthetics, with retro point-and-shoots and dreamy striped long-sleeve T-shirts like an Alvvays music video. With folky honky tonk n' banjo pickin', with the NY midcentury literary culture of Partisan Review. I found that kind of default, whitewash-the-past, everything's-dreamy-if-you-remove-bad-bits worldview really shallow and facile and damaging, especially when taken for granted.

But I've also come around to the idea that optimizing for one quality or trait frequently comes at the cost of optimizing for some other quality and trait. That certain qualities are prized by contemporary society, and as we optimize for them—efficiency, or convenience, or low material cost, or even Actually Good moral commitments like freedom and choice—we in turn take hits, make trade-offs, to other values, begin to realize that maybe some of our inconveniences or chains were for our own good. That something got lost along the way, and cultural archaeology is the way to actually retrospectively evaluate those trade-offs, and assess what's been left behind. I'm still against the automatic nostalgia and the unthinking traditionalism—most of my trad-y friends would be surprised by this thread, that I take the stance at all seriously instead of arguing against it, as I do endlessly with them—but I do now think there's merit to taking a lost past seriously.
 
sus

sus

Moderator
One of the best investigations of trad phenomena is Raymond Williams' The Country and the City

www.commentarymagazine.com

The Country and the City, by Raymond Williams

Counter-Pastoral The Country and the City. by Raymond Williams. Oxford University Press. 335 pp. $9.75. Early in The Country and the City Raymond Williams quotes a couplet by George Crabbe
www.commentarymagazine.com www.commentarymagazine.com

Defense of a “vanishing countryside”—“the open air,” “the life of the fields”—can become deeply confused with that defense of the old rural order which is in any case being expressed by the landlords, the rentiers, and their literary sympathizers. A physical hatred of the noise and rush of the city can be converted . . . to a powerful but acrid vision of the metropolis reclaimed by the swamp and the reappearance of a woodland feudal society.
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As Williams explains it, since the 16th century the “social condition of poetry” had been to give a false picture of contemporary life by employing idyllic tones of the past. The newer poets, however, not only write of a perfect past which never existed, they do so with a tragic sense of loss, since they have seen the cottages and fields of their childhood destroyed by the backlash of the improving spirit. Thus the tradition of the “counter-pastoral” is created. Even when, with Wordsworth and John Clare, there comes an affirmation of a living “Humanity” existing within the landscape of loss, it is made by a turning inward into the “Eden of the heart.”
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WashYourHands

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
One experience of the US that stuck with me was the quality of drinking water. East-coast centric phenomena, plastic bottles default option unless you had access (rarely on the road working) to a swanky fridge. I used to love flying home for a pint of cold council-pop. First thing after the key in the door and hugs.

If a western society can’t maintain decent drinking water, isn’t this whole notion of trad already seen through a warped, plastic, Deer Park lens?

Our spring water sources | Deer Park® Natural Spring Water

Deer Park® Brand Natural Spring Water is sourced from springs that span across the Eastern Seaboard and beyond. Take a tour of our carefully selected springs
www.deerparkwater.com www.deerparkwater.com
 
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WashYourHands said:
One experience of the US that stuck with me was the quality of drinking water. East-coast centric phenomena, plastic bottles default option unless you had access (rarely on the road working) to a swanky fridge. I used to love flying home for a pint of cold council-pop. First thing after the key in the door and hugs.

If a western society can’t maintain decent drinking water, isn’t this whole notion of trad already seen through a warped, plastic, Deer Park lens?

Our spring water sources | Deer Park® Natural Spring Water

Deer Park® Brand Natural Spring Water is sourced from springs that span across the Eastern Seaboard and beyond. Take a tour of our carefully selected springs
www.deerparkwater.com www.deerparkwater.com
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Good post, but I'll just "Yes and" that tapwater quality is super variable by municipality. New York tap is pretty good, the tap in my hometown was infamous garbage no one touched it. Out here in Wisconsin it's pretty good too, I never use a filter. OTOH, never tasted council pop so can't compare
 
WashYourHands

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Our unofficial Sunday dinner soundtrack during the entire Miners’ Strike

www.discogs.com

Chris Barber

Explore the discography of Chris Barber. Shop for vinyl, CDs, and more from Chris Barber on Discogs.
www.discogs.com www.discogs.com
 
T

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
In America traditionalism is an analogous narcissistic development to commodity leftism or communist business grift. It's impossible to be truly reactionary over there because the collective memory of pre-capitalist society was genocidally erased. This isn't so much the case in Europe. It's why American folksiness is not real folk culture but derived on the incoherent mishmash that is country music, wild West cowboy films, etc. Think about it: all good folk music fundamentally talks about struggles under feudalism. By the time mass dispossession of the peasantry takes place on an industrial scale the folk culture cannot accommodate the needs of village communities.
 
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