The Decline and Fall of Western Art

by Brendan Heard

  “I said what I now say once more, that the majority of the world are of opinion that there never were any knights-errant in it; and as it is my opinion that, unless heaven by some miracle brings home to them the truth that there were and are, all the pains one takes will be in vain (as experience has often proved to me), I will not now stop to disabuse you of the error you share with the multitude. All I shall do is to pray to heaven to deliver you from it, and show you how beneficial and necessary knights-errant were in days of yore, and how useful they would be in these days were they but in vogue; but now, for the sins of the people, sloth and indolence, gluttony and luxury are triumphant.”

  - Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes

  Hierarchical industrialization

  “The myth that is trying to be born in science, and it has to be born there because that’s the dominant church, is the rebirth of the spirit.”

  – Terence McKenna, Ecology of the Soul lecture

  In our modern lives industry and mechanization have poisoned, softened and neutered Westerners, partially because technology has become crucial to daily survival. Not in absolutely negative ways but negative enough that we are losing things like art, wellbeing and resourcefulness, while teetering on acute ecological and demographic disaster. However, even if we are consumed in a new dark age, all machine technology is not likely to vanish. Therefore the ideal solution lies in a more limited, focused and hierarchical (heroic) application of technology.

  Whatever the future holds (collapse or rejuvenation), a renewed respect for nature in all her harshness and beauty will be essential, and unavoidable. We cannot be nor should we want to be ever against nature or think ourselves above her. What makes an industrialized world hyper-threatening to nature is exploitation via our misguided democratic morality. Democracy and equality, despite supposedly being our newfound ‘core values’, are largely phantoms and falsehoods. Yet they are the fuel for the industrial machine that directs culture in the most irresponsible and wasteful directions, with disastrous results for the entire biosphere. The entirety of nature is very negatively impacted by ever-expanding human rights laws, globalist markets, plastic waste, overpopulation and other offshoots of economy and democracy worship.

  What I propose we steel ourselves for, if the future is not total extinction, is the concept of hierarchical industrialization. To extoll the Hellenic virtue of temperance or measure, but applied to technology, to limit and prioritise in service of only those progressions which are mature and healthy, and reject those that are fleeting, mercantile, and regressive. We cannot un-invent things but we can progress our utilization — we could view technology as a tool primarily for heroic advancement and not a means to endlessly increase convenience culture for every world citizen, making them more larval and weak with every passing year. A healthy use of high technology would be in furtherance of hard exploration and high culture: aristocratic and objective, as opposed to the usual exploiting of crass distraction and hedonism. Simply saying no to polluting smokestacks and transient junk items that exist, above all, to create middleman wealth, which then go on to glut landfills and ocean gyres, so that capitalist money-power can feed parasitically without working themselves.

  There are primarily three technological inventions of the twentieth century (along with the shift in political views after the Great Wars) which fast-tracked life for Westerners towards this plebeian neutering. Firstly, nuclear weapons, which altered previous heroism-testing ground war conceptions, giving us fewer battle-hardened men and dissipated the need for certain nationalist duties. Secondly, the contraceptive pill for women, making birth control easy and paving the way for the ravages of feminism. And finally, the TV, which has kept the masses brainwashed for 70-odd years, though it is thankfully beginning to lose its grip somewhat. These technologies have been misused, or possible should not have been invented.

  Space exploration, and all technology related to it, is an example of heroic endeavour that has more recently fallen by the wayside to make way for equality convenience culture. To be spacefarers requires a level of necessary industrialization and would require oil production and advanced systems. Also, probably, nuclear power for space vehicles, should we finally manage to get out into the wider Solar System. I believe that despite the lessons of tradition about seeking inwardly (rejecting the obstinate outside world) setting and achieving the impossible goal is our true outward purpose. Inner struggle and outer struggle. True progress for us is adventure and risk. Dangerous, nearly impossible tasks keep us thriving. Let the explorers burn their dangerous fuel systems out in the void, in the name of exploration, and keep mother Earth a protected garden.

  Recent NASA activity has shifted towards getting diversity into space, while failing to send up anything but a few robots out of an effete fear of actually risking lives, despite the willingness of candidates. An example of how the emasculated and unimaginative managerial class cluelessly scuppers innovation, fussing over the graphic design of internal reports, incapable of grasping idealism. Materialist values refuse to let them risk life. The result being the activity of NASA today amounts to a collective yawn. Egalitarian diversity quotas for space missions or any other project do not ensure excellence or improvement of any kind. Space science (like classical art) is now considered ‘Eurocentric’ or ‘sexist’ for the reason that white men have excelled at it. Of course, that is because they invented it, it is their science — just as Western art was their art. And these were inventions to the benefit of everyone, I might add. Indeed, the left is revising the history of Western scientific achievement as we speak, with non-Europeans finding exaggerated roles in fabricated historical stories wherever possible. If left unchecked, this will lead to the inevitable unravelling of not just the present and the future but everything that ever happened.

  We know from the past that better systems are possible. We had natural systems and sacred hierarchy for much longer than we have had capitalism and communism. To see archaic politics revived, with the addition of our modern technology, would be an interesting twist. As many libertarians concede, Monarchical systems were more economically sound than democratic ones, resulting in less debt and more responsibility. The ruling families used to represent and take responsibility for the nations, while politicians now come and go with ease and represent only themselves. In an archaic hierarchically developed system, the wasteful commercial use of resources would be limited. The visceral, unhealthy cruelty and land wastage of capitalist factory farming could be curtailed. Technology need not be discarded if we discard Modernism and democracy. But we must recognize that not all new things are good, or well considered, and exercise discrimination upon fleeting trends that are foisted on us by our hidden oligarchs.

  Middleman exploitation in all of our systems should be addressed as a fundamental evil. Via the managerial class bureaucracy, they control technology as a supra-force to further their control and spread anti-heroic mercantile culture: brainwashing, coddling, selling. As Ezra Pound said:

  “Until you know who has lent what to whom, you know nothing whatever of politics, you know nothing whatever of history, you know nothing of international wrangles. The usury system does no nation . . . any good whatsoever. It is an internal peril to him who hath, and it can make no use of nations in the play of international diplomacy save to breed strife between them and use the worst as flails against the best. It is the usurer’s game to hurl the savage against the civilized opponent. The game is not pretty, it is not a very safe game. It does no one any credit.”

  Centralized world banking and aggrandized free trade are high water marks of mercantile goals. All these middleman exploits benefit from democratized industrialization.

  Any system we have in place that can be proven to be parasitic or commercial before healthy (culturally or environmentally) and without merit in the heroic sense should be discarded. Our twentieth and twenty-first century culture has the strange inability to rid itself of bad ideas, no matter how destructive. They l
inger and fester and erode in the vacuous spaces of faux-individualism. Despite supposedly worshiping science, modern man seems to only support the science of the latest cell phone app, or the pseudo-science of gender theory, and other politically motivated inanities and frauds.

  The world will not survive modern living. Plastic pollution is now found to be poisoning life at the deepest levels of the ocean. We must also face up to deforestation, loss of wildlife, factory farming, over-fishing, toxic dumping and nuclear accidents. Oil production and use must be limited to specific, advancing tasks and not in a social free-for-all of ‘convenience’ that is beyond the Earth’s capacity to sustain. Part of our current failure to break away rests in the reliance on the technology of cars, essentially technologically unchanged in a century, as well as the infrastructure based around cars (roads, petrol stations) keeping us locked in a car-culture stasis. The contrived cycle of car manufacture and use is also completely reliant on geopolitical situations and ruts that are disadvantageous and anti-culture (mass production, free trade). The urbanites will never toil to produce their own food, until by necessity. Everything scares them, everything offends them. A rejuvenated philosophy of nature might force them to restore Victorian-era deep ecology (green technology), restore organic food production, and restore art and architecture.

  Permaculture is the ideal means of food production, and the cultural shift required to accomplish that concept in a localized fashion would impact our daily lives with a humbling respect for nature. We should be encouraging the local, the homegrown, the individualism of a community, the parochial arts, spiritualism and local pride. You must return to the soil what you take from it.

  We once structured society not to facilitate equality but to engineer the furtherance and nourishment of a certain type of man – a fierce and capable man, a Renaissance man, one who has the correct capabilities for his time, a man of action. Such men are not concerned with the ease of a thing or with mass-producing machines to increase luxury. Their goals lie in the destiny of glory and the limits of human achievement. Equality-world does not respect achievement, unless it is the hackneyed virtue-signalling of worshiping as heroic the half-wit who has discovered how to tie his shoelace.

  In this theoretical world of hierarchical mechanization, technology would continue to evolve but not democratically. Open hierarchy systems are superior due to transparent leadership and they would help ensure technology does not get squandered on those without the idealism to know when their personal exploitation has reached its limits. It ensures the business and merchant class cannot wrest control of everything and take the soul out of our existence. In renouncing convenience values and economy-worship, we can regain not only high art and culture but that vision of an optimistic future of exploration that was nearly true, before it was squandered when the Baby Boomer generation came of age. Expansion and a solar empire should be our goal and quality over quantity our motto, from now to the grave.

  All further industrialization must be ranked and prioritized, and we must accept the superiority of doing certain tasks by hand (art, craft, farming, textiles). The actual workings of such a system are secondary to the result. Nothing surpasses the irreplaceable excellence of the handcrafted over the products of the assembly line. Art and material necessities, once intertwined, are not satisfied by the machine age. Quality over quantity is the human touch, it is the opposite of mass-production and homogenization. The pyramids and the Parthenon were built by hand. The already crumbling fruits of industrialization do not have the same eternal resonance and certainly no spiritual significance. The fact that the pyramids may have used slave labour is immaterial. Better to have outright slavery than pretending you are free when you are patently not. Capitalist wage slavery is very far from the freedom it masquerades as. To have everything made by hand requires a system in which human labour is valued and not a thing to be avoided. We laugh today at the life of serfs, who in every important sense (a secure future, family, homeland) had better, more meaningful lives than our increasingly depressed and long-working cubicle zombies. And slavery itself? This now ultimate taboo, do we think we have discarded it? More emotional hand-wringing. Slaves were the unfortunate, not the inferior. You could have been a slave to a wealthy man in Rome and lived much better than a free poor person. The most important aspect for a worker is that the endeavour is something he can take pride in, which ideally reaches for the eternal. If he can achieve this as action, and even get well paid for it, then so be it, that is destined by the limits of his own ability, as ordained by wyrd.

  In a distributed hierarchy that limited mechanization (for hard science and exploration pursuits), handcrafting would regain a pre-eminence and beautify our daily lives. Capitalist profiteering would likely be adequately restrained by simple economic barriers to monopoly and media control.

  Werner Von Braun with the F-1 engines of the Saturn V first stage rocket he invented, which took men to the moon, at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center.

  But evil starts with a rejection of nature. A tree is still a tree, it was a tree 10,000 years ago. It is as beautiful now as it was then, though we may try to pretend we have new beauty values. But the truth of its beauty, then and now, which we all sense, means beauty is an eternal and objective principle. We may think we are advancing beyond the past but we are the same material animal we were a thousand years ago. Technology will not take us beyond the bounds of our flesh — it is not a new God, and we have put too much faith in it already. It is merely a useful tool, a valuable animal we must recapture and corral back to our stable of tradition, as opposed to changing our morality to match the whims of technology. Progress as a word has been redefined to mean equality-progress, much as art was redefined by Modernist art criticism. That kind of progress is false and impossible, as we can see it is the opposite of progress. What is true in the past and the future is the heroic overbecoming. To view the future as overcoming incredible odds for total exploration, total confidence and total courage. The culture of the French Revolution, the equality-progress, will not sustain a future. If we envision a future that is apart from nature, we will again lose ourselves. Technology is not an end to itself. If we keep a focus on advancing technology, while rolling back mass industrialization to a point, and learn to be tough again, learn to tame horses, to be cold in the winter again, then men will return.

  The true Promethean discipline is a grail quest, an unending search for the best way forward. It is a striving to make ideas real. If we look with brutal honesty at the state of civilization, at what works and what worked or failed historically, we can see a patchwork of methods from either end of the political spectrum that could be revived and perfected. Overabundance (in the West), and the warring of various political ideas defined the last half of the twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries are defined by a pall of stagnating ruts. From everything that has happened or been tried, and can be examined in hindsight, we should be able to pick with impunity which ideas to sow again in fertile ground. To fail to cherry-pick from the past is dysgenic. The rejuvenation of localized craft and artisans is of more value than can be measured, it is a crucial cog in the mechanism of having a culture and a people. This devolution of art indicates a cycle is ending and we must prepare for a new one. We should wish for the return of responsible leadership and a limited industrialization in the service of heroic hierarchy values, not exploitation and profit. And in the absence of an option for limited industrialization we should wish for no industrialization.

  If technology does not serve heroism and risk-taking, it serves comfort, and comfort is stasis: sterility, entropy, decline. If we will not limit industry, because of an addiction to material function and a disregard to form, then the loss of art will be the least of our worries as we enter a dark millennium to rival the Ice Age.

  I often imagine how it would be if the Romans or holy Emperors discovered space flight while traditionally sound and civilizationally intact. In my imagination, I visualize the æsthetic
vistas of such a solar Roman empire — the technology imbued with high symbolic art, the animistic space vessels, the hardened terraforming and sculpting of planets to meet sovereign goals. The unapologetic application of technology and art towards glory, and the ascendent evolution of a spiritual science towards the furnace of God. That is a future a man can look forward to.

  This marks the end of our exposition of the triumvirate of evils (Modernist theory, tolerance-culture and industrialization) that maintain and increase our monstrous modern edifice. From here we must summarize the art question in relation to this information and give examples of specific historical institutions that are necessary to ensure true art and beauty values keep their rightful scared place in society.

  Form and function:

  The Kaiser & Barnett Newman

  One of the elements that is apparently most crucial for creating contemporary art is to have a message, or have the semblance of a message, even though this can supposedly be irrationally interpreted in any way by the individual and still somehow construe the artist’s message. As I recently overhead in some hubristic online dialogue: “All artists have something to say, otherwise they’d make shoes.”