I was reading Collected Letters vol 3 by H.P. Lovecraft for the first time this week, and his letters never cease to amaze me how prophetic, and intelligent he was in regards to life on this planet, especially human nature, extrapolated out to aesthetics, politics, and history. That is to say, 'civilisation.'
Please read this and tell me it is not the spitting image of what is going on right now. This letter was written about a hundred years ago, in about 1929.
It's main themes are the 'current obsession with quantity and speed vs quality and aesthetics, and learning:
As for democracy-I don't really see much to add to what I said before. The whole thing is as much an illusion as "romantic love"-only it happens to be the illusion of the 20th century instead of the 19th. It is a mere deification of the ethical abstraction of "justice," plus the crude modernistic devotion to quantity as opposed to quality. If made a cardinal principle, it can do nothing but harm to civilisation .... The evil is very definitely on the increase, and will probably spread until it has lowered our culture to a level scarcely endurable to a civilised being-unless, by chance, a counter-movement of intellectual-aesthetic aristocracy can somehow manage to coexist with a state of social-political democracy.
The social-political future of the United States is one of domination by vast economic interests devoted to ideals of material gain, aimless activity, & physical comfort-interests controlled by shrewd, insensitive, & not often well-bred leaders recruited from the standardised herd through a competition of hard wit & practical crafti-ness-a struggle for place & power which will eliminate the true & the beautiful as goals, & substitute the strong, the huge, & the mechanically effective. I'd hate to have descendants living in such a barbarism-a barbarism so tragically different from the old civilisation of New England & Virginia which rightly belongs to this land. Thank God I'm the last of my family-requiescamus in pace!...
If everybody in a nation could be given the mellow culture that characterises the nation's highest thought, there would of course be no need for social classes. But it simply can't be done. There's no way of establishing a set of influences calculated to ensure the high education, emotional refinement, & civilised living of uncounted millions of people doing thousands of different things. Obviously, if a civilisation is to exist, a certain number of individuals must be given a training & environment above the average, with more than the average opportunities for freedom, influence, & self-expression. This is virtually axiomatic except among utterly irrational & ethics-mad communists & I.W.W.'s..
.. At present it cannot be said that the life of any civilised & sensitive man in America is really worth living-except so far as he is able to make an imaginative escape from the encroaching milieu, either into the past of his culture-stream or into a fantastic & hypothetical future of his own dreaming.
Clods can stand the usurping barbarism very well-it quite expresses their utilitarian minds & stunted personalities-but fully evolved human beings will have to return to the old world unless some-thing can be done toward restoring the civilisation of the new.
Already the exodus of sensitive men to France & England is becoming marked. The quantity ideal of the overspeeded machine "civilisation" of this continent is too utterly sterile to make the process of consciousness bear-able to anyone of evolved imagination & delicately attuned emotions. There is no reward for keeping alive-no food for the myriad spiritual hungers of the civilised personality. It became that way in later Imperial Rome, & sensitive men had to flee to the Hellenistic East-to Alexandria & Athens, Pegamus & Antioch-in order to find an air that they could breath....
...group of I's becomes strong enough to challenge it. Then the new group wins & reigns until another group gets strong enough to depose & sup-plant it. As long as the humanistic I-element remains a motivating force, democracy cannot exist. WHAT IS NOW MAKING DEMOC-RACY NOT ONLY POSSIBLE BUT SADLY INEVITABLE IS THE DECLINE OF THE HUMANISTIC I-ELEMENT AS THE GROWTH OF THE MACHINE AGE DESTROYS HUMANISM & SPLITS UP THE LIFE OF MEN INTO ROBOT ME-CHANICALISM & ANIMAL SIMPLICITY. HUMANISM & DEMOCRACY CAN-NOT COEXIST
Democracy means decadence the triumph of the machine over the individual.
Democracy, we agree, is inevitable in the early machine M age. BUT WHAT THEN? Here is the situation in a nutshell-2100 or 2200 A. D. Huge machine barbarism with incredible physical luxury & a vast ruling class of highly intelligent men trained to think in terms of money, size, speed, profit, & activity for its own sake.
Technique & machinery so perfected that there are too many intelligent men for the number of directive jobs requiring them; a wealthy surplus trained to think so materially that aesthetic & intellectual traditions will be virtu-ally closed to them. A new aristocracy without the souls of aristocrats. Here is where your common-peepulism breaks down. This aristocracy will be open to all-but who save its own members can mentally qualify? Remember that it was produced by the selection of all the first-rate brains (never a great percentage) in the race. What of the surplus?
To me it looks very much like the old story of wine, woman, & chance just what you object to in the baser elements of the present aristocracy! You see, history has quite a repetitive tendency, & you can't dodge the order of nature-which is essentially stratified no matter how many ethical illusions you pile on! Of course it is conceivable that even in a machine age a new aristocratic culture might be worked out by the lei-sure class. That would bely both your wishes & my antimachine predictions, but it is possible.
Given a few generations of enforced leisure through lack of jobs, the wealthy surplus may at last turn to ways of cultivation & try to recapture the art of life the art of being instead of doing, & of enjoying quality instead of quantity. But it will be uphill work, for the lack of traditional background & the standardisation of a mechanised world won't be any myth or joke. Below this administrative & surplus ruling-class there will naturally be a fairly large subordinate-executive or manager class composed of moderate, third-rate intellects.
This may be an independent stratum made up of rising proletarians, belted by limited brains, or it may be a social appendage of the ruling class, recruited from the occasional inferior minds from which the superior stock will breed. And below this, infinitely varied within itself according to occupation, but virtually brainless because it will be the residue of a selective process, will be the vast industrial proletariat—well-fed, well-housed, well-amused, well-clothed, well-medicated, well-treated, and well-flattered; living its half-animal, half-vegetable round in perfect physical comfort, and with ample leisure for as much diversion as its brains will enable it to enjoy. It will have the privilege of rising as high as it can, but its potentialities of ascent will have long been exhausted. It will be the utter and implicit property of its intelligent masters, free in law and tradition but in fact completely and benevolently enslaved.
The only place I would disagree with him is that I am not a materalist, and I don't think that our 'ruling class' is that intelligent at all. Maybe they used to be.....
Tune the idiots into their 'smart phones' and 'subscriptions of content' with the illusion of choice, and slowly kill the love of learning , reading, and thinking, and foster blind pursuit of pleasure. Check....
Please read this and tell me it is not the spitting image of what is going on right now. This letter was written about a hundred years ago, in about 1929.
It's main themes are the 'current obsession with quantity and speed vs quality and aesthetics, and learning:
As for democracy-I don't really see much to add to what I said before. The whole thing is as much an illusion as "romantic love"-only it happens to be the illusion of the 20th century instead of the 19th. It is a mere deification of the ethical abstraction of "justice," plus the crude modernistic devotion to quantity as opposed to quality. If made a cardinal principle, it can do nothing but harm to civilisation .... The evil is very definitely on the increase, and will probably spread until it has lowered our culture to a level scarcely endurable to a civilised being-unless, by chance, a counter-movement of intellectual-aesthetic aristocracy can somehow manage to coexist with a state of social-political democracy.
The social-political future of the United States is one of domination by vast economic interests devoted to ideals of material gain, aimless activity, & physical comfort-interests controlled by shrewd, insensitive, & not often well-bred leaders recruited from the standardised herd through a competition of hard wit & practical crafti-ness-a struggle for place & power which will eliminate the true & the beautiful as goals, & substitute the strong, the huge, & the mechanically effective. I'd hate to have descendants living in such a barbarism-a barbarism so tragically different from the old civilisation of New England & Virginia which rightly belongs to this land. Thank God I'm the last of my family-requiescamus in pace!...
If everybody in a nation could be given the mellow culture that characterises the nation's highest thought, there would of course be no need for social classes. But it simply can't be done. There's no way of establishing a set of influences calculated to ensure the high education, emotional refinement, & civilised living of uncounted millions of people doing thousands of different things. Obviously, if a civilisation is to exist, a certain number of individuals must be given a training & environment above the average, with more than the average opportunities for freedom, influence, & self-expression. This is virtually axiomatic except among utterly irrational & ethics-mad communists & I.W.W.'s..
.. At present it cannot be said that the life of any civilised & sensitive man in America is really worth living-except so far as he is able to make an imaginative escape from the encroaching milieu, either into the past of his culture-stream or into a fantastic & hypothetical future of his own dreaming.
Clods can stand the usurping barbarism very well-it quite expresses their utilitarian minds & stunted personalities-but fully evolved human beings will have to return to the old world unless some-thing can be done toward restoring the civilisation of the new.
Already the exodus of sensitive men to France & England is becoming marked. The quantity ideal of the overspeeded machine "civilisation" of this continent is too utterly sterile to make the process of consciousness bear-able to anyone of evolved imagination & delicately attuned emotions. There is no reward for keeping alive-no food for the myriad spiritual hungers of the civilised personality. It became that way in later Imperial Rome, & sensitive men had to flee to the Hellenistic East-to Alexandria & Athens, Pegamus & Antioch-in order to find an air that they could breath....
...group of I's becomes strong enough to challenge it. Then the new group wins & reigns until another group gets strong enough to depose & sup-plant it. As long as the humanistic I-element remains a motivating force, democracy cannot exist. WHAT IS NOW MAKING DEMOC-RACY NOT ONLY POSSIBLE BUT SADLY INEVITABLE IS THE DECLINE OF THE HUMANISTIC I-ELEMENT AS THE GROWTH OF THE MACHINE AGE DESTROYS HUMANISM & SPLITS UP THE LIFE OF MEN INTO ROBOT ME-CHANICALISM & ANIMAL SIMPLICITY. HUMANISM & DEMOCRACY CAN-NOT COEXIST
Democracy means decadence the triumph of the machine over the individual.
Democracy, we agree, is inevitable in the early machine M age. BUT WHAT THEN? Here is the situation in a nutshell-2100 or 2200 A. D. Huge machine barbarism with incredible physical luxury & a vast ruling class of highly intelligent men trained to think in terms of money, size, speed, profit, & activity for its own sake.
Technique & machinery so perfected that there are too many intelligent men for the number of directive jobs requiring them; a wealthy surplus trained to think so materially that aesthetic & intellectual traditions will be virtu-ally closed to them. A new aristocracy without the souls of aristocrats. Here is where your common-peepulism breaks down. This aristocracy will be open to all-but who save its own members can mentally qualify? Remember that it was produced by the selection of all the first-rate brains (never a great percentage) in the race. What of the surplus?
To me it looks very much like the old story of wine, woman, & chance just what you object to in the baser elements of the present aristocracy! You see, history has quite a repetitive tendency, & you can't dodge the order of nature-which is essentially stratified no matter how many ethical illusions you pile on! Of course it is conceivable that even in a machine age a new aristocratic culture might be worked out by the lei-sure class. That would bely both your wishes & my antimachine predictions, but it is possible.
Given a few generations of enforced leisure through lack of jobs, the wealthy surplus may at last turn to ways of cultivation & try to recapture the art of life the art of being instead of doing, & of enjoying quality instead of quantity. But it will be uphill work, for the lack of traditional background & the standardisation of a mechanised world won't be any myth or joke. Below this administrative & surplus ruling-class there will naturally be a fairly large subordinate-executive or manager class composed of moderate, third-rate intellects.
This may be an independent stratum made up of rising proletarians, belted by limited brains, or it may be a social appendage of the ruling class, recruited from the occasional inferior minds from which the superior stock will breed. And below this, infinitely varied within itself according to occupation, but virtually brainless because it will be the residue of a selective process, will be the vast industrial proletariat—well-fed, well-housed, well-amused, well-clothed, well-medicated, well-treated, and well-flattered; living its half-animal, half-vegetable round in perfect physical comfort, and with ample leisure for as much diversion as its brains will enable it to enjoy. It will have the privilege of rising as high as it can, but its potentialities of ascent will have long been exhausted. It will be the utter and implicit property of its intelligent masters, free in law and tradition but in fact completely and benevolently enslaved.
The only place I would disagree with him is that I am not a materalist, and I don't think that our 'ruling class' is that intelligent at all. Maybe they used to be.....
Tune the idiots into their 'smart phones' and 'subscriptions of content' with the illusion of choice, and slowly kill the love of learning , reading, and thinking, and foster blind pursuit of pleasure. Check....
