October 4, 2004
FATAL ATTRACTION:
When you forget why you hanged yourself (Spengler, 10/05/04, Asia Times)
Europe first heard a formal invitation to suicide in 1870, at the premiere of Wagner's Die Walkuere, the second part of the Ring tetralogy. Its protagonist, the doomed god Wotan, uttered the lines that might serve as Europe's epitaph: "Let everything that I have built collapse! I still want only one thing: The end! The end!" Wotan is the first protagonist in European literature to pronounce a collective death wish.Wagner was the definitive personality of senescent European culture. He was the first artist to state without hesitation that the old order of Church and empire had rotted past repair, and urged in its stead absolute freedom of the will. By merging Teutonic paganism with Arthur Schopenhauer's mock-Oriental pessimism, Wagner touched the nerve of his time more forcefully than any artist before or since.
In The Ring of the Nibelungs, the Norse god Wotan rules by laws to which he himself is bound. He needs the giants (the proletariat) to create the great fortress of Valhalla, and to pay them, he must steals the treasure of the Nibelungs (the capitalists, with some anti-Semitic coloration). This ring, the power to create wealth and rule the world, is the poisonous power of capitalism, dissolving all the bonds of tradition. It is cursed and eventually kills its master. Once Wotan appreciates that even he, the god, is not free, he simply wants the world to come to an end, as he explains in the above-cited outburst.
All the little Wotans of Europe - Hapsburg, Hohenzollern, Romano - met their common end in World War I. Of all the elements of the old order on which Wagner wished annihilation, the Hapsburg monarchy stood first on the list. The Austro-Hungarian Empire - Bolkestein's historical parallel for the European Community - was the last remnant of the Holy Roman Empire, and the living exemplar of the old order Wagner despised. As I wrote under the rubric Why Europe chooses extinction:
Siegfried triumphed over Christ during World War I. No shred of credibility was left in the Christian idea of souls called out of the nations for salvation beyond the grave. In 1914 Europe's soldiers still fought under the illusion of a God that favored their nation. Germany fought World War II under the banner of revived paganism. For today's Europeans, there is no consolation, neither the old pagan continuity of national culture, nor the Christian continuity into the hereafter. [...]
Even Richard Wagner, the well-poisoner of European culture, would be aghast at how modern Europe treats his legacy. Alone among composers, Wagner enjoyed a summer festival dedicated exclusively to the performance of his works in a theater of his own design, still managed by his descendants in the Bavarian town of Bayreuth. His widow Cosima, the daughter of Franz Liszt, befriended Adolf Hitler at the outset of his political career.
Some combination of guilt and cupidity has led the Wagner family to hire a series of manic nihilists from the alternative culture milieu to direct his operas, eg the "performance artist" Christoph Schlingensief, responsible for a new production last summer at the Bayreuth festival. About this The New Yorker magazine wrote on August 9:
"A ray of light: the Grail is fully radiant. A dove floats down from the dome above." These are Richard Wagner's stage directions for the maximally transcendent final moments of Parsifal, his last opera. Christoph Schlingensief's production at the Bayreuth Festival last week gave us instead two dead rabbits, their rotting bodies intertwined, their images projected on a screen above the stage. We then saw a sped-up film of one rabbit decomposing, its body frothing as the maggots did their work. I've seen a lot of stupid, repulsive, irritating, befuddling, and boring things on opera stages over the years, but Schlingensief's dead-rabbit climax was something new: for the first time, I left a theater feeling, like, ready to hurl.
A decomposing rabbit in place of a dove is not a bad metaphor for Europe's spiritual condition. Nations who despise themselves to this extent will not inflict their children on the world, and will bequeath their hills, valleys, railway stations and pedestrian zones to whoever might walk in to take possession of them.
Besides Schopenhauer you also had, Communist Manifesto (1848), Origin of Species (1859), Gay Science (1880s), Freud by the turn of the century, and so on and so forth. Wagner may express it most magnificently, but nihilism is and has been the European zeitgeist for some time now. Posted by Orrin Judd at October 4, 2004 11:32 PM
Judd, Judd, Judd. There you go again, lumping Darwin in with Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche. If the theory of evolution is wrong, then answer me this: You're infected with a lethal disease. The doc tells you the strain you've contracted used to be killed by penicillin, but now has evolved resistance to it. "Not to worry" he continues, "we have a new antibiotic to which the bug isn't resistant." But the new antibiotic is more expensive than penicillin. Since you don't believe in evolution, you don't worry about a resistant bug. So you'd choose the penicillin...right?
Posted by: Tom at October 5, 2004 9:08 AMTom:
That's breeding, not evolution. It's what Darwin observed--the human capacity to change organisms--he just got carried away.
Posted by: oj at October 5, 2004 9:16 AM"Spengler" outdid himself this time.
Every thing he writes is spot on. However, the vast majority of European "intellectuals" (journalists, teachers, generally people with a liberal arts education) are impervious to reasoned argument.
I started a thread (pseudonymously) some weeks ago on a German-Jewish web forum from which I was banned last year. Like Spengler, I tied together Bernard Lewis, Frits Bolkestein and European nihilism (although much less elegantly, lacking as I do his erudition and talent). The leftist atheist-Christian-Jewish-Muslim incrowd that rules the forum decided to turn the thread into an exchange of favorite cooking recipes, thus smothering any attempt to get something resembling discussion going.
Posted by: Eugene S. at October 5, 2004 9:21 AM"[A] German-Jewish web forum?" Does it torture itself before it commits suicide?
Posted by: David Cohen at October 5, 2004 9:53 AMDavid,
With the immigration from CIS (Russia, Ukraine, etc.) in recent years, Germany's Jewish population has become the fastest growing worldwide (some 100,000 now).
The forum in question, however, is run by two Israelis living in Berlin, who (allegedly) are wanted for tax evasion by the authorities in Israel.
I am told that they are financed largely by a grant from the German mainstream Protestant Church.
Gush Shalom, the organization of Arafat butt buddy Uri Avneri in Israel, lists them as its German web site.
Most of the registered members are not Jewish, although some pretend to be (something that occurs with some regularity in Germany, see B. Wilkomirski).
They get far and away the lion's share of web traffic from people who enter "Juden" into search engines, the result of a very effective "Googlebombing" strategy. This is good because the top-ranking search engine hits used to lead to Nazi websites, and because they have a vast and well-maintained articles archive on Judaism and Israel.
What is not so good is that the viewpoints of the defeatist Israeli far left are heavily over-represented, apparently to cater to the expectations of the German readership.
I've introduced my son gradually to Wagner initially via the few themes in which it is used
for the film "Excalibur".
It is hard to believe he would ever associate the
music with the postmodern performance art that
some would now use to weaken it.
O.J.,
I think pessimism and optimism are two halves
of the Western soul. Proclaiming the death of the
old order of the West should not be mistaken for
a death pact, anymore than marveling at a sunny
day (proclaiming what is).
J.H.:
Celebrating the end of cultural order and the coming of personal freedom is a death pact.
Posted by: oj at October 5, 2004 10:42 AMJ.H.
Why not use "What's Opera, Doc?" instead?
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at October 5, 2004 12:36 PMI can't hear that theme from The Ride of the Valkyries (Robert Duval notwithstanding) without my mind adding the proper lyrics—
"Kill the Wabbit. Kill the Wabbit!"
Posted by: Raoul Ortega at October 5, 2004 2:42 PM"Siegfried triumphed over Christ during World War I. No shred of credibility was left in the Christian idea of souls called out of the nations for salvation beyond the grave. In 1914 Europe's soldiers still fought under the illusion of a God that favored their nation. Germany fought World War II under the banner of revived paganism. "
You gotta ask the question: Is there something about Christianity that leads a society to nihilism? Why couldn't it maintain itself, why wasn't it capable of fighting off the modern onslaughts of science, and the revival of paganism? Maybe it carries the seed of its own destruction.
Posted by: Robert Duquette at October 5, 2004 2:49 PMSo, who is "Spengler"?
He writes for the Asia Times, a Hong Kong publication, but that doesn't have to mean he lives there.
I've heard that he is a Jewish writer, which is possible, but his fascination with Judaism is that of an outsider, a scholar.
Could he be a Catholic? No, he views the Vatican from a vast ironic distance.
A Protestant conservative? With a divinity degree? Or training in an unrelated field?
Posted by: Eugene S. at October 5, 2004 3:15 PMYeah, they're kicking themselves for getting rid of the Inquistion. You hear it in all the cafes.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at October 5, 2004 3:46 PMWho would rather be a Spaniard today than in 1492 if he cared about his grandchildren's future?
Posted by: oj at October 5, 2004 4:28 PMDon't forget, Nietzsche was a theology student before going on to bigger and better things. So was Stalin. And, I believe, Pol Pot.
Posted by: jim hamlen at October 5, 2004 4:35 PMRobert:
The State is stronger than the Church. Nations that relied heavily on the former destroyed the latter, which was the Statists goal.
Posted by: oj at October 5, 2004 4:38 PMI tend to think Spengler went to an American university, probably Chicago, where he learned about Leo Strauss, who was until last year a pretty obscure guy. Since his knowledge of Judaism comes from Rosenzweig, who has a fine reputation, but who is not much read and not much discussed by most Jews, I would agree that he is probably not Jewish.
Didn't I post something about opera productions that looked exactly like the abu grahib pictures?
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at October 5, 2004 10:07 PM