Shallow Pessimism
Laurence Olivier as Hamlet.
In my post from March 16th, I ended by asking the question why is it we – by which I mean intellectual progressives - seem to enjoy ruthlessly deconstructing everything and finding our society “rotten to the core – that it is racist, sexist, imperialist society, one which can’t be trusted an inch”, to quote again the philosopher Richard Rorty. In this post I’ll explore a possible answer.
Yes. Western culture and society is very far from perfect. But around the time Rorty wrote his essay – the 1980s – the west lost confidence in its humanistic belief that the future will necessarily be better than the past and the present. It lost a special kind of social hope. But this loss of faith was already well under way by the second half of the nineteenth century. Nietzsche declared: “Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.” Albert Camus’ concept of the ‘absurd’ perfectly capturing the Zeitgeist of the 1940s and 1950s. The absurd is an experience so visceral Camus said it can hit anybody in the face at any time. The ‘sweet indifference’ of nature, as he calls it at the end of ‘The Outsider’ - challenged both religious faith in divine purpose and humanist faith in the inevitable melioration of humanity guided by the light of reason that aimed to replace it.
The process of disillusionment speeded up at the end of the Cold War, which pretty much definitively put paid to the Marxist utopian dream of a ‘classless society’, a social hope that had sustained many radicals for most of the twentieth century. But there was also an increasingly pervasive loss of confidence in the liberal democratic dream of the welfare state, as well. Both ideals, which are traceable to the eighteenth century Enlightenment, were now judged to be deformed birth, because, as Nietzsche had already announced over one hundred years earlier, the Enlightenment itself - the whole basis of modernity - was a sham. One only needed to look around to see that the so-called democratic ‘system’ was permanently rigged to let a tiny percentage of greedy and insecure people accumulate a huge amount of wealth and power, and that there was profound crisis of meaning, a slide toward nihilism.
In the past two decades, the recognition of existential meaninglessness and of failure to bring about social justice has been joined by the disaster of climate change. This situation now means that, quite literally, there will be no better future. The future we are bequeathing to our children and grandchildren will almost certainly be worse than this present one is. Just how much worse its going to be depends on the amount of residual faith you can muster in a narrative of social hope that still attempts to build a rickety bridge - using alternative sources of energy, probably - to a less than terrible future.
But why aren’t we as a society genuinely responding to these awful truths? Why are we going to war and binge viewing shows of Netflix? Because mainstream society, the status quo, is based on keeping it all at arm’s length through incessant optimistic messaging, designed to shield people from the truth. It disguises the loss of the hopeful dream of a better future by replacing it by shallow optimism. Western society hasn’t imploded. Instead, in genuine hope’s it place there was installed a shallow kind of optimism. What’s the difference? As I noted in a previous post, optimism implies wish-fulfillment with the aim of pacifying the present, while hope involves imaginative responses to reality and faces up to the real and potentially cataclysmic challenges the uncertain world inevitably presents. This shallow optimism is generated mostly through the mass media, which throughout the twentieth century become more and more efficient and skillful in cranking out the kinds of positive messages that serve to distract people from a tragic reality. Hollwood is called the “Dream Machine’, and has played an especially significant role. But the emergence of the consumer society with its fetishization of consumer products, it’s subliminal message that to shop is the way to give life purpose (As Barbara Kruger has it in one of her artworks, ‘I SHOP, THEREFORE I AM’), its assumption that it’s alright to be selfish and to horde, to strive for happiness without caring about anyone else, meant that shallow optimism in the form of countless distractions and pointless goals managed to paper over the fact that we have lost faith in a better future for everyone. The value in the short term of optimism for society is that it brings a sense of social coherence by making everything seem comprehensible and controllable. As a result, people feel strengthened through being able to make sense of, manage, understand, and feel masters of adversity. Optimism encourages the idea of hardiness, making a stressful circumstance seem an opportunity for growth and strengthening. It helps ensure preparedness by encouraging readiness to confront setbacks and successfully take advantage of opportunities. It also brings self-affirmation making decision-making in the present more efficient and collectively directed.
But all this comes at a high price. The façade of optimism has permitted the west to maintain its global supremacy and sense of self-efficacy and self-assurance while it has been rapidly collapsing from within. Optimism is a debased and less challenging substitute for the genuine hope that is almost no longer within reach. For, as Terry Eagleton writes in his excellent book Hope Without Optimism (2015): “the most authentic kind of hope is whatever can be salvaged, stripped of guarantees from a general dissolution. It represents an irreducible residue that refuses to give way, plucking its resilience from an openness to the possibility of unmitigated disaster. It is thus as remote from optimism as could be imagined.”
Which leads me back to the problem with the progressive’s default attitude of perpetual social critique.
Isn’t it simply the flip side of the west’s shallow optimism? Isn’t it shallow pessimism? For it surely can’t be genuine pessimism. After all, some of the most audible advocates of cultural critique - the tenured professors at prestigious universities - occupy extremely comfortable niches within society, and carry on their day-to-day lives pretty much like everyone else – like all the dumb optimists, in fact.
Just as shallow optimism is a way of shielding oneself from failure and misfortune, so too is shallow pessimism. It simply embraces the failure, disillusion, and disappointment in advance so as to forestall the risk involved in having one’s hopes dashed.
Image Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQ6ec4V6AJ4
The Bully (Part 2)
Three bullies from the same Korean family.
There are two versions of ‘modern Korea’. One is ruled by the most autocratic dictatorship today - which makes Putinism look very amateurish - while the other has just elected a new President coming from the political party that had previously been in opposition. Two radically different systems developed, starting with the same circumstances and the same people. One Korea seems to have used Nineteen Eighty-Four as its guidebook, while the other started out with an authoritarian regime but evolved into an American-style liberal democracy. This situation has nothing to do with intrinsic ‘Korean’ proclivities. How can it? The same ethnic and historically extremely homogeneous people have gone very separate ways, like identical twins separated at birth.
One explanation of this bizarre and tragic siutuation is to see Korea not in isolation but as holistically connected to everything else going on in the world, and so to more or less random factors. Specifically, in 1945 Korea had the misfortune of being a colony of the defeated Japanese, and so was carved up by the two victorious forces: the Soviets and the Americans and allies. As a result of the Cold War an Iron Curtain descended across the 38 Parallel. Two nations were created. War ensued. No definitive conclusion to the war was achieved – neither side was wholly vanquished - and so the two rivals Koreas remain to this day. And so here I am, writing my blog near to where the Iron Curtain still remains drawn and looks like staying into the foreseeable future.
But chance factors also extend down from the macro to the micro level. Yes. Korea became a pawn in the Great Power’s struggle for world hegemony. But what happened was also due to individual players on the ground. Specifically, Korean leaders and their entourages. The first President of the Republic of Korea, Sygman Rhee, the American choice, was no friend to liberal democracy. Ostensibly in order to protect the Republic from North Korean aggression (In 1968, for example, North Korean commandos almost succeeded in assassination Park, making their incursion to within a few hundred meters of the presidential Blue House in central Seoul), the South Korean leader, the former army General Park Chung-hee (who had taken control of the state in 1960), suspended the constitution in 1972 declared martial law, and wrote a new constitution that gave him much increased executive power for life. The new constitution would remain in force until Park’s assassination (by his own bodyguard, not the North Koreans) during a military coup 1979, whereupon the military extended its powers of repression even further. In 1980, there was a popular uprising in the south-eastern city of Gwangju which was brutally put down, and most of the 1980s passed under authoritarian rule. However, finally, after the amendment to the constitution in 1987, a democratic presidential election was held for the first time, and since then, elections have been peacefully held every five years.
Why was this possible? Critics will say the United States engineered the semblance of liberal democracy, making South Korea into a compliant a vassal state. But this can’t be true. The level of genuine democracy here cannot be imposed either from outside or above, by fiat. That much we know from history. It must grow from within and below. Which isn’t to say, like some apologist for democracy, that democracy is somehow inevitable. Is certainly is not. Which is one very good reason why democracy needs to be well defended. North of the DMZ, a very different political situation occurred. Things froze into totalitarian place, and this was largely due to the odious bully Josef Stalin and the equally odious bully Kim Il sung and his two progeny. The bullies are certainly there in the Republic of Korea. But the Republic of Korea, like other liberal democracies, devised ways to hem them in, limit the damage they can do.
Steven Pinker marshals plenty of compelling evidence in books such as the better Angels of Our Nature (2011) and Enlightenment Now (2018) to show that history can be read as a narrative in which societies have become increasingly buttressed against the inevitably of zero-sum thinking by creating checks and balances to diminish the chances of a bully getting so much power that he or she can enslave us. This has happened at all levels of society, especially over the past fifty years.
At my grammar school for example, which i mentioned in my previous post on bullies. In the mid-1970s the headmaster of Eastbourne Grammar School changed, and the new headmaster arrived with an updated education philosophy in which the aim was no longer to instil the necessary body of learning through intimidating, and, more profoundly, did not see life as a zero-sum game. There was now enough for everyone. Admittedly, by this time I was sixteen, so I was no longer at the bottom of the bullying pecking-order. But I’m sure what I perceived was generally felt - even by the even-year-old squirts who made up the First Year. The ethos at my school went very quickly from the terroristic to the consensual. You could say it went from totalitarian state to liberal democracy in less than five years. That is no trivial change, and was largely down to the revolution is how people thought about society that happened in the sixties. Obviously, bullying did not disappear. But it was no longer institutionalized, and so could do less harm.
This same process has occurred on the level of nation-states. Look at Donald Trump. He’s almost a caricature of the bully. When he was a reality tv star doing The Apprentice, that was basically his role. And, yes, the show as a hit, because, yes, we enjoy watching bullies at work – as long as they’re bullying someone else. The zero-sum psychology is something like this: if I’m watching someone else getting bullies, then it’s not me. But when he was President of the United States, Trump the Bully - who was largely elected because he was a bully - found he was unable to do what he needs to do as a bully, which is intimidate the vulnerable and keep all the pie for himself. The United States Constitution got in his way. What does this tell us? Yes. I know. The United States is very far from perfect, but it has a political system that is obviously more able to stop bullies than, say, Russia’s. Indeed, all liberal democracies have this in-built capacity. This is real progress, and we should be able to celebrate.
Which leads me back to the point I’ve been making in previous posts: in our eagerness to show how far our liberal democracies are from perfection, we progressives spend a lot of energy exposing their imperfections. In fact, this is precisely one of the main reasons why liberal democracy is the least bad political system: it makes room for criticism and opposition. It knows that if you don’t have freedom of speech and diversity of opinion, you don’t have the ability to stop the bullies. We can’t get rid of them entirely, because they are an aspect of being human. But we can make them less able to freely bully, to bully without consequences. The deeper problem is how to ween us of our primitive admiration for bullies.
To do that, we would have to address a very deep predisposition.
A few years back I was disgusted to discover that my Korean wife’s sister-in-law, who lives in the USA, had voted for Trump. When I asked her why, she replied it was because he was “strong.”
If we want to get rid of the cult of the bully, our acceptance of being bullied, and our collusion with bullies, we will have to change the whole idea of what human ‘strength’ is.
Not easy!
Credits:
Kim photos: https://www.freepressjournal.in/world/kim-jong-un-kim-jong-il-kim-il-sung-why-are-all-north-korean-leaders-named-ki
The Bully (Part 1)
A still from the movie Class of 1984.
In my previous post I discussed what makes one person stand up to a leader or a tyrannical system, and other people – most - just try to stay out of harms way, or even to become facilitators and accomplices. In this post I want to think about the person who’s causing all the sorrow. It’s probably fear of the bully.
We all remember being bullied at school. I had the misfortune of going to all-boys grammar school in a small provincial seaside town in England in the 1970s that was founded on what might be called the Bully Principle, or maybe just ‘traditional educational values’. It was all about discipline enforced through playing endlessly, and often ingenuously in a sadist sort of way, on us children’s vulnerabilities. Eastbourne Grammar school in the early 1970s was intimidation and bullying from top to bottom. The teachers (or many of them) did it, the Prefects did it, the Sub-Prefects did it, the older boys did it to the younger boys, and the bigger boys did it to the smaller boys of the same age. As a result, my school life from age 11 to sixteen was full of dread.
A bully must remind people on a regular basis that that’s what they are, which, as a typical dictionary definition has it, is ‘a person who habitually seeks to harm or intimidate those whom they perceive as vulnerable.’ But what exactly did these bullies at school want? Power? Prestige? Glamour? Status? Love? Attention? Revenge? I suppose, all of the above, which means they wanted what we all want to a greater or lesser extent but are willing to share with others, or to leave unobtained. The bully, by contrast, thinks there’s only one person who can have these things, and so they must make sure that the others don’t. And the best way to do that is by keeping them down and keeping them fearful. Vulnerability is therefore perceived by a bully as a sign that someone is inherently weak and inferior, and if they are shown to be weak and inferior, they cannot be a threat.
Most people – let’s say the Russian populace who are not either part of the state’s organs of repression nor active protesters, like Marina Ovsyannikova whom I discussed in my previous post, the tv news editor who ‘invaded’ the news programme she worked for recently, and held up a banner saying the Russian people should not believe the propaganda – are basically OK with the limited power they can obtain by conforming with the status quo, keeping out of trouble, cooperating with others, and having a secure and good enough time. Some are OK with colluding with the bullies so that they won’t get bullied themselves, or with doing some minor bullying themselves. But a few hard cases think they can only have enough power if others don’t have any. This is because they think there just isn’t enough to go round. In other words, bullying is a zero-sum game. It’s winner takes all.
Which explains Putin, to some extent.
***
George Orwell, 1917. shortly after leaving St. Cyprian’s in Eastbourne.
I went to school in the same town as George Orwell, who was at a Prep School named St. Cyprians before going on to Wellington and Eton. This school had ceased to exist by the 1970s, but when I was recently back in my hometown I noticed for the first time a plaque marking the place where it once was. At St. Cyprians, Orwell said he was often bullied. As a young adult, between 1922 and 1927, he was a member of the Imperial Police in Burma. There, he had plenty more chances to witness officially sanctioned bullying, and to resist the temptation to do it himself.
In an article Orwell wrote for Tribune, published on November 29, 1946, he reflected on the topic of bullying, which, in a sense, is his fundamental theme:
It is commonly assumed that what human beings want is to be comfortable. Well, we now have it in our power to be comfortable, as our ancestors had not. Nature may occasionally hit back with an earthquake or a cyclone, but by and large she is beaten. And yet exactly at the moment when there is, or could be, plenty of everything for everybody, nearly our whole energies have to be taken up in trying to grab territories, markets and raw materials from one another. Exactly at the moment when wealth might be so generally diffused that no government need fear serious opposition, political liberty is declared to be impossible and half the world is ruled by secret police forces. Exactly at the moment when superstition crumbles and a rational attitude towards the universe becomes feasible, the right to think one’s own thoughts is denied as never before. The fact is that human beings only started fighting one another in earnest when there was no longer anything to fight about.
He concluded:
The desire for pure power seems to be much more dominant than the desire for wealth. This has often been pointed out, but curiously enough the desire for power seems to be taken for granted as a natural instinct, equally prevalent in all ages, like the desire for food. Actually it is no more natural, in the sense of being biologically necessary, than drunkenness or gambling. And if it has reached new levels of lunacy in our own age, as I think it has, then the question becomes: What is the special quality in modern life that makes a major human motive out of the impulse to bully others? If we could answer that question—seldom asked, never followed up—there might occasionally be a bit of good news on the front page of your morning paper.
This is an excellent question to ask. “What is the special quality in modern life that makes a major human motive out of the impulse to bully others?” Why is “pure power” so appealing? Is modern life really especially prone to idolizing ‘pure power’, thereby also idolizing those who achieve and maintain it? Is Nietzsche’s vision of the master/slave relationship, and his admiration for the master (which the Nazis found especially appealing) a prognosis of human nature in general, or was he diagnosing the symptoms of a specifically modern sickness, as Orwell suggests? Are we talking about a fundamental human weakness for power, and of a weakness of the weak for the powerful who oppress them, or some modern perversion?
Of course, as Nietzsche knew very well, it’s misleading to talk about ‘human nature’ as if it’s something fixed and essential. We are socially constructed. The raw material of our biological nature places limits on the range of this construction, but it doesn’t fully determine what we end up being. There’s a kind of feedback loop in which a society reinforces certain preferential traits, and often these are very far removed from what Evolution has in mind. Think of religion and ideology. These do not simply mirror the apparently pristine state of human nature. They are social constructions that feed on themselves, and this leads to weird and grotesque versions of what ‘human nature’ is. Take the God of the Old Testament, for instance. He’s certainly not something that Evolutionary theory would expect to appear. Or, take Kimilsungism-kimjongilism, the reigning creed in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea…….
So, is Orwell correct in thinking that modern society is especially prone to idolizing the bully? It must have looked like that in 1946. But surely less so in 1946 than in 1940. After all, the Allies had just defeated Hitler, the ace bully on the Western block. True, Stalin was very much still there. In fact, the Cold War was just getting under way, and China was about to get its very own super-bully. But shouldn’t the fact that an alliance of liberal democracies thoroughly defeated totalitarian Germany and Japan - with, it has to be added, quite a lot of help from Stalinist Russia - suggest that things were not as bleak as Orwell thought, certainly not as bleak as the novel he was soon to write, Nineteen Eighty-Four, makes out: a dystopian vision captured by the harrowing words of O’Brian: “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever”? If this is really true, then there is surely no hope at all that we can successfully oppose the Bully Principle, or at least minimize the damage done.
There are plenty of examples from the present day to suggest Orwell is correct. Russia, for instance.
And yet…..
History shows that humans have always grudgingly admired might. After all, in less civilized times, ‘might was right,’ and you’d have been dumb not to respect it. And old habits die slowly. Very slowly. Over millennia.
The point Orwell is making, however, it that this behaviour, or more significantly, people’s respect for it, may have made sound if regrettable sense in the past, but in modern times had become much less essential, and therefore a seeming anomaly. Orwell couldn’t understand why it is that a society that has managed to gain such secure levels of comfort and control over nature would still wants to idolize the archaic bully.
Maybe the cult of the bully is a negative consequence of the Enlightenment’s declaration that everyone is born free and equal. Ideally, this is a wonderful vision of social justice in the future. But it could also be a recipe for social injustice. It could make someone think that life really is a zero-sum game. If there are no traditional hierarchies serving as entrenched checks and balances, then it really is a case of if you don’t stop others having the pie there won’t be any left. The individual within a competitive meritocratic system sees a level playing field in which the most ruthless are the winners.
***
The majority of people do not “habitually seek to harm or intimidate those whom they perceive as vulnerable.” After all, it’s hard work, and likely to end in tears – the bully’s own, as well as the vulnerable’s – because if bullying is a zero-sum game, then logically speaking, it’s only a matter of time before someone else grabs your pie.
There are many ways to theorize or explain why some people think life is just winners and losers. Psychologists point to the childhood of a bully, and argue that a cruel father or mother, or cruel siblings or relatives, or the wrong choice of friend, or sadistic teachers, set in train the compulsion to repeat the traumatic experience of being powerless and dealing with it in the same way that you were once dealt with. Sociologists refer to environmental conditions of deprivation or alienation, or conditions that in one way or another encourage bullying. But there is no overarching explanation for why bullies are bullies in general, or of why a few people perceive powerlessness as caused by a finite amount of a resource that is non-shareable.
But with a Russian arch bully currently grabbing headlines, one might feel like asking if there is something specifically about Russians - or certain peoples - that makes them prone to idolize bully-types? It’s a risky question, as it suggests there’s an essential ‘Russian-ness’ to be analyzed. But there isn’t. Peoples’ societies evolve. For example, none of the liberal democracies have always been liberal democracies, of course. The places where they are now more or less well established were previously ruled by fairly freely-operating bullies: absolute monarchs, for instance.
Sources:
George Orwell, ‘The Impulse to Bully Others’, Tribune, 29 November 1946. http://alexpeak.com/twr/titbo/
‘Class of 1984’ photo: https://reelrundown.com/movies/The-Top-10-Best-High-School-Gang-Films
Orwell photo: https://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/engelsineastbourne/2020/11/16/george-orwell-and-st-cyprians-school/
Which one are you?
Marina Ovsyannikova interrupts the Russian state television news to protest against the war in the Ukraine. A still grabbed from the video available on The Guardian’s website ((https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/16/marina-ovsyannikova-russia-propaganda-putin)
When I saw the photograph above, I was led, perhaps like you, to ask myself an uncomfortable question: in such a situation, which one of these two people was I more likely to be, the newsreader or the woman holding the anti-war banner?
Of course, I would like to think I’d be the latter, that I would have the principles and the guts to risk my comfortable future, perhaps even my life, because I believed in standing up to the orchestrated state aggression being perpetrated in my name. But what are the psychological and statistical odds that this really is the case?
Evidence coming from schoolyard to totalitarian regime shows that most people do not take risks like this anti-war protester, Marina Ovsyannikova. They will be like the newsreader, Ekaterina Andreeva, or the cameraman, the programme producer, the editor, the make-up lady. They will be silent. They will not rock the boat. They will maintain the status quo. But of course, they will not admit that this means they are also complicit in horrible levels of violence and oppression going on.
We humans all basically want three things: to survive, to feel attached to others, and to have a sense of control over our lives. We will do almost anything to guarantee we don’t die, are not alone, and our secure existence is guaranteed into the future. To ensure we get them, we are obliged to conform with the status quo. This inevitably entails compromising our innate sense of what is just and fair. For it seems a tragic fact of life that, while we all know instinctively what is right, we are willing to turn a blind eye to get the sense of security we need.
The most obvious reason not to speak out is fear. It’s clear that Putin will ruthlessly punish anyone who steps out of line. This fear if often freely admitted, but other times, rationalized excuses are offered. A very common one is: “I have a family.” Another is: “What’s the point, protest is useless?” Another is: “I am resisting in subtle ways, I am only ‘playing the game’ just for now.” A news report by Denis Kataev in The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/16/marina-ovsyannikova-russia-propaganda-putin) added a specific example: ‘A source I know at VGTRK, the state media holding company, has said that many others at the main news programme were considering resigning, and the mood among remaining employees was nasty. They said: “If we didn’t have our mortgages, we would quit too.”’ Other excuses can feign or rationalize a commitment to the status quo: “I believe that, were it not for Putin, Russia would descend into anarchy. OK. I don’t agree with everything he does. But the alternative would be much worse.” Some - the weirdest of all, really - are fellow-travelers who are there out of ideological or religious conviction. Despite all the evidence that can be marshaled against the version of reality and truth to which they adhere, they will remain faithful. Indeed, evidence, or reasoned argument, are not significant determining factors. The ‘leap of faith’ is also a leap into fantasy.
But actually, all these dissembling alibis or motives are based on one sort of optimistic fantasy or another. An optimistic fantasy has two broad features: narrative structure, in the sense that we construct a plausible story-line, and an egotistical ideal, a way of maintaining self-esteem. The optimistic fantasy makes the story we tell efficacious (I am the bread-winner, and have people who depend on me.”) They help us imagine that some - enough - of our desires have been satisfied (“After all. I have a family, live in a society which offers mortgages and well-paid jobs in the media.”). But optimistic fantasizing inevitably detracts from one’s ability to turn intention into action, and distracts from the ability to form plans responsive to real-world obstacles. It also disposes one to expect that things will improve, and that reality is better than is actually is.
This means we are all inclined to approach situations having already decided to shield ourselves from anything that could puncture our vulnerable sense of security. We cushion ourselves from unwelcome facts. We will explain terrible events so that we can put distance between them and us, and circumscribe their impact on us. In other words, we make excuses to lessen the impact of current and potential awfulness.
To this end, we externalize the awfulness by placing the blame on factors beyond our immediate social world and outside our control. We tell ourselves that we really can’t do anything about it, and that we have more tangible and real responsibilities - a mortgage to pay, children to raise, grandparents to care for. We evaluate the awfulness going on around us as just temporary. We say that things will improve. We conclude that, actually, things are really not so awful here and now. The awfulness is happening in some other places and to some other people. It doesn’t concern me.
Does this mean we are mostly all cowards? Probably. Life is about getting by, after all. We can’t all be heroes. But we are mostly not bullies or tyrants. We are, however, complicit with bullies and tyrants, because by trying to keep our head down and being shallowly optimistic we make the bullies and tyrants possible.
So, I suppose this means I’m the newsreader.
But why did Marina Ovsyannikova do what she did? What turned her from a complicit cog in the tyranny machine into a heroic protester, a beacon of light?Apparently, according to another news item I read, a Russian colleague confided that up till that moment Marina Ovsyannikova had mostly been interested to talk about her dogs, clothes, and home. She was definitely not a member of Pussy Riot. In her video statement she admitted she was someone who had played along, worked quietly for the state media propaganda machine, served the status quo. But something had forced her to stop making excuses or staying in the mental shallows so she could enjoy life’s little pleasures. What was it?
Interestingly, in the video she released Marina Ovsyannikova mentioned that her father was Ukrainian and her mother Russian. So, the war had a very personal dimension. It struck her as not just a war, or even a civil war, but as a repudiation of who she biologically and culturally was as a human being. In other words, the war was not an abstraction, something that could relatively easily be dealt with through dissembling. It was horribly personal.
This fact made me think of something I’d recently read which the American philosopher Richard Rorty wrote about Martin Heidegger in an essay from 1990 called ‘On Heidegger’s Nazism.’ Rorty asked himself what would have stopped Heidegger being a Nazi and behaving as he did. Another kind of thinker might have searched for some ideological, philosophical, or spiritual leverage. But Rorty asks us to imagine something very tangible, something very human:
Imagine that in the summer of 1930 Heidegger suddenly finds himself deeply in love with a beautiful, intense, adoring philosophy student named Sara Mandelbaum. Sarah is Jewish, but Heidegger barely notices this, dizzy with passion as he is. After a painful divorce from Elfride [his real-life wife] – a process that costs him the friendship of, among other people, the Husserls – Heidegger marries Sarah in 1932. In January 1933 they have a son, Abraham.
The point is that, had such a love affair actually happened, Heidegger would almost certainly not have given his support to the Nazis and condoned their antisemitism. If Heidegger had been personally involved in the tragedy of the Holocaust through love of a Jewess, and so gained intimacy through her with her culture, he would have been unable to have the beliefs and opinions he did regarding the racist nationalism of the Nazis. In other words, for something to really affect us it needs to be personally felt. It is very unlikely that we will be willing to sacrifice our secure lives for something abstract. And the chances are, if we did feel driven to action by some abstraction, we would be tempted to act in precisely the manner of those we thought we were opposing, because our actions do not come from empathy and compassion but from impersonal principles. Only when we act from genuine compassion, from personal experience of the Golden Rule - ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’, or ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ - can genuine resistance to oppression be launched.
This means that one of the primary ways in which the powerful maintain their power is by alienating us from each other. How do they do this? There are plenty of tools at hand. Some are very old, like a religion that teaches that only those who believe in our God are worthy of compassion. Or like a political ideology, which teaches that only our race or our class or our nation is worthy. If one was to be especially gloomy about the human prospect, one might argue that it is almost impossible for people to extend the net of compassion much further than immediate biological family, or at most, their tribe. One might then conclude that being human means being aggressively sectarian. But then, the fact that almost all world traditions have sooner or later come up with a variation on the Golden Rule, suggests that this is being too pessimistic. For example, the xenophobic bully-God of the Old Testament was superseded by the Christ of the New Testament who said, “love they neighbour as thyself.” (Not that Christianity has in practice done very well on that score.)
In the modern age, the mass media have greatly extended the means through which the powerful can divide and rule us, making the Golden Rule difficult to live by, even as communication technology has turned the world into a ‘global village’. It has also created new kinds of warring tribe. The Internet and social media, in fact - all the visual communication media - have probably helped make us more compassionate. Images are more emotive. More conduits for empathy. Think of all the pictures from Ukraine, and how they create affective bonds much more effectively than words. But information overload breeds indifference, and greatly facilitates those who for one reason or another want to bully and cause pain. And images can be a poor basis for genuine compassion: because they work on our emotions, they short-circuit of rational faculties. The Golden Rule is not just about feelings. It is a considered, rational principle based on empathetic experience.
So, it is especially poignant that Marina Ovsyannikova worked for Russian state television. Because the media can be used to expose the powerful as well as protect it, those who crave absolute power can truck no genuine freedom of speech. Here is Denis Kataev in The Guardian article:
The programme she protested on, Vremya, is a legacy of the former USSR. It is perhaps the most prestigious news show on Russian TV. For millions, it is part of a daily habit for years, even decades, to watch the big evening news at 9pm.
Fitting for its Soviet beginnings, it has been an ideological weapon for decades, shoring up the government with strict pro-regime coverage. It is not subtle. The hosts look like robots, or Soviet or North Korean broadcasters. Just watch when Ovsyannikova makes her shocking move. The host Ekaterina Andreeva doesn’t even bat an eyelid. It doesn’t compute. I’m not sure she even sees herself as a propagandist, just a person with a social mission. This didn’t fit into it, and she – along with all the others – had no response.
If the Golden Rule is ultimately the only genuine way to fight tyranny, then that means the more cosmopolitan - the more open - a society is the more likely it will be to recognize that justice must be extended to all. At the very least, a cosmopolitan society will act to ensure that there are checks and balances in place to hinder those who want to divide and rule ruthlessly.
Ruthless Deconstruction
Edvard Munch, ‘Friedrich Nietzsche’ (1906), oil on canvas, 201 x 160 cm. Thiel Gallery (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)
I recently read an essay from 1989 by my new favourite philosopher, Richard Rorty, in which he imagines what will have happened by 2010 to the ‘Nietzschean left’, a term he borrows from Allan Bloom, the author of the then controversial book The Closing of the American Mind, that was intended to label the advocates of the hyper-theoretical social justice ideology that was taking over the Humanities departments of American universities in that period. This, Rorty writes, was an ideology that “tells the country it is rotten to the core – that it is racist, sexist, imperialist society, one which can’t be trusted an inch, one whose every utterance must be ruthlessly deconstructed.” Rorty was confident that by 2010 “the brightest Ph.Ds in English that year will be people who never want to hear the terms ‘binary opposition’ or ‘hegemonic discourse’ again as long as they live.”
Oh dear. He was wrong. Instead, the ‘Nietzschean left’ dug in and moved mainstream.
So, in 2022 we have Russell Brand’s entertaining cheerleader version to enjoy on YouTube. Now, as I mentioned in my last post, I am a fan of Russell. It’s exhilarating to listen to a handsome guy who talks so fast and so furious, while also making you laugh. But as I mentioned in my last but one post, since the Ukraine-Russia War began, Russell’s brand (sorry) of ‘Nietzschean leftism’ suddenly seems rather awkward, even callous.
He always begins by saying something like: “Now, I know there’s no excusing the brutal aggression of Putin, and I totally empathize with the suffering of the Ukrainian people. But….” And then he shares with us yet another iteration of basically the same story: western society is “rotten to the core – that it is racist, sexist, imperialist society, one which can’t be trusted an inch, one whose every utterance must be ruthlessly deconstructed.” The Ukraine-Russia war seems to be just another opportunity to do some “ruthless - but fun- deconstruction.”
Now, ‘ruthless’ may not seem like an appropriate word to use in relation to Russell, who seems to be a genuinely nice guy, someone who’s been down to Hell and come back up again, and wants to share his wisdom with the world. But what else is it, really? A typical dictionary definition of ‘ruthless’ is: ‘having or showing no pity or compassion for others.’ As I said, Russell is definitely a guy who is full of pity and compassion for others. In fact, he would probably want to say that he is all about the very opposite of ruthlessness: he is into mercy, compassion, and gentleness. But is this true, in practice?
I wouldn’t say so, at least not in his ‘Under the Skin’ podcasts on YouTube. I’m not talking about the subscription ‘Luminary’ podcasts in which he interviews people. In the former, I think he’s unfortunately often pandering to his immense audience’s resentment and anger, our perverse desire to see everything as “rotten to the core.” Yes. I see myself as participating in this destructive impulse. Especially when I was young I was very keen to see everything as conspiring to hide the terrible truth.
Weird isn’t it, how the usually pretty nasty official ‘‘mainstream’ version of the terrible things going on is always less appealing than the alternative nasty versions spotlit by radical deconstruction?
I can’t talk for anyone else, so I will ask myself: From where within me comes this seemingly insatiable desire to see things as being “rotten to the core”? I think it probably comes from the sorrowful feeling that there’s a great and disheartening chasm between how I believe things should be – for myself and the world in general – and how they actually are.
What would Richard Rorty say? Rorty is a neo-pragmatist. Pragmatists, Rorty writes, “do not believe there is a way things really are. So they want to replace the appearance-reality distinction by that between descriptions of the world and of ourselves which are less useful and those which are more useful. When the question ‘useful for what?’ is pressed, they have nothing to say except ‘useful to create a better future’.” I think this puts a finger on the problem with my younger self and the so-called ‘Nietzschean left’ in general, but perhaps most especially its hipster incarnations. We still assume there’s an ‘appearance-reality distinction’. The ‘appearance’ is the tawdry facade that has been erected by the rich and powerful, and our ‘ruthless deconstruction’ is driven by the belief that this nasty ‘appearance’ goes all the way down.
This is of course precisely what Nietzsche said. There is no reality, or truth, or essence, just different perspectives, and these perspective, so he pronounced, are driven by the ‘will to power.’ Rorty agrees. At least with the first bit. There are indeed no bedrock essences to dig down to. But he fervently disagrees with the second bit. Thinking about the ‘will to power’ is not the best way to explain how the world is the sad way it is. Rather, one should consider the relative usefulness of a given perspective in relation to how well it carries forth the project of creating a better future.
So, I ask: is Russell Brand helping us to feel our way to a better future?
He surely thinks he is. And indeed he is, in the main. But he is also the victim of the default perspective of the ‘Nietzschean left’, which is to see the corrupting influence of power all the way down. And it gets its intellectual and ethical sustenance - and also an emotional ‘high’, and certainly a sense of superiority and clannishness - from this apparent insight into the truth.
Rorty writes of Michel Foucault, a key figure for the ‘Nietzschean left’: “when asked why he never sketched a utopia, Foucault said ‘I think that to imagine another system is to extend our participation in the present system.’” Really? Oh, come on! Rorty rightly call this “one of Foucault’s most fatuous remarks”, but it reflects the general resistance amongst today’s radicals to imagine a better future, simply because the present is so rotten and one can never free oneself from its rottenness.
Russell Brand will rightfully protest vociferously. He will say that of course he is all about imagining another and better future, but that first of all you have to ‘ruthlessly deconstruct’ the present. But I ask: at what point does the secret joy of deconstruction become an end in itself? The feelings and thoughts it panders to make one feel smarter, freer, more exclusive than the dumb masses, less bowed by the powerful, and part of a community of like-minded deconstructors who think the scales have fallen from their eyes and who see the bitter truth.
***
There’s a Korean Seon (Zen) Buddhist saying that has been resonating in my mind ever since I first read it. It goes like this:
Mountains are mountains. Rivers are river.
Mountains and not mountains. River are not rivers.
Mountains are mountains. Rivers are rivers.
Now, this can mean many things – or nothing at all. But in the present context, I like to think it means this: we start our naively thinking the world we inhabit is the real and only world. Then we get savvy and see that it is a mere appearance, one foisted on us when we were to young to defend ourselves. But then, there’s the third stage. It seems to be a reversion to the first stage. But it’s not. In the third stage, we realize that the ‘reality-appearance’ binary is the cause of all the problems in the first place. It is in itself an illusion.
Where does that leave us? Back with ‘Mountains are mountains. Rivers are rivers.’ But now we understand them as a pragmatist might: we don’t go around constantly pointing out that the mountains really aren’t mountains, and the rivers really aren’t rivers. Instead, we strive to live with the version of mountains and rivers that is most useful for helping to realize a freer, more egalitarian, and more fraternal future.
Russell Brand is undoubtedly deeply committed to articulating the values of the third stage. But it’s the second stage that brings him the high ratings. The NOT stage. It can be useful, and it can be fun. But, frankly speaking, I don’t think the NOT stage is a useful platform from which to deal with the tragedy unfolding now in the Ukraine.
War and Peace
Driving past the DMZ on the Ja-yuro - the Freedom Highway. Along a stretch of about 3 miles, one can actually look across the estuary toward North Korea itself.
In a previous post (September 28, 2020) I discussed the Roman General Flavius Vegetius Renatus dictum, ‘Si vis pacem, parabellum” - “If you want peace, prepare for war. “ My home, a few miles from the DMZ, provides exemplary evidence that this is sound but sad advice. War between the two Koreas has so far been avoided, and peace has reigned precariously here for almost seventy years largely thanks to military deterrence.
Now, suddenly, thanks to the war in Ukraine, the awful truth of the General’s dictum has been brutally rammed home once again.
“War is the father of all things” (Heraclitus). “Only the dead have seen the end of war” (Plato). For the people of the ancient world - actually, for pretty much the whole of human history - war was a fact of life, even a glorious fact of life, insofar as the ideal of the warrior is so important for patriarchal societies. But for us, it is not. By ‘us’, I mean the amazingly privileged people living in those societies an parts of the world that have not experienced warfare for decades. As a boy growing up in England, I spent a huge amount of time and energy on what, in retrospect, I understand was getting acquainted with the ‘warrior’ archetype so as to define myself as a ‘male.’ I played with toy guns, read war comics. One day, I recall I went to visit my best friend, a girl named Mary. I must have been about seven years old, and it had recently dawned on me that boys weren’t supposed to have girl best friends. So, I took my toy revolver along with me, and pulling it out in front of Mary, said ‘You don’t want to play with this, do you?” OK, Freudians, laugh at my infant self. What more obvious evidence could there be of the link between being a ‘warrior’ and having a penis. But as a British baby-boomer, I have never had to put on a military uniform and learn how to fire a weapon. The ‘warrior’ isn’t exactly a suitable role-model for people like me – a fact that people like Jordan Peterson are grappling with, and which is a major reason why he is so popular amongst young men. The ‘warrior’ archetype just doesn’t resonate. But it is still unclear what positive archetype for a young male can take its place.
I recall a few years ago talking to a German who at the time was in his mid-sixties and so born not long after the end of the Second World War, and sharing with him my militaristic upbringing. He surprised me by saying he’d never ever played at war as a kid. War was taboo in Germany for obvious reasons. But now, because of Russian aggression, Germany has announced a huge increase in its military budget. But as several commentators have noted, including the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQqthbvYE8M&t=3s) this is good news. The Germans are no longer afraid that everyone thinks they’re closet Nazis, and they realize they must play their role in trying stabilize the new situation. Prepare for war if you want peace.
The almost miraculous fact that I have never been compelled to wear a military uniform, let along go to war, is impressed on me almost every day here in South Korea, where all able-bodied males must do two years military service. But living near the DMZ I am obviously even more acutely aware of the way in which peace is guaranteed by preparedness for war. The other day, for example, we were obliged to wait at a nearby traffic intersection as a convoy of huge tanks rumbled by. We often hear guns being fired by soldiers training in the nearby bases. Every time we take a walk, we pass pillboxes and trench lines (see the photos below).
The view from a gun emplacement, and from a strategic hilltop. That’s North Korea in the distance.
As I wrote in my previous post: “the current state of so-called ‘peace’ on the Korean peninsula has come at a high price. There may have been no armed conflict since 1953, but the result of a situation in which ‘peace’ is guaranteed by the perpetual preparation for ‘war’ has been the creation of militarized surveillance societies on both sides of the DMZ. This is obviously the case in North Korea, but who can deny that South Korea is also constrained in far-reaching ways - social, economic, political, cultural - by the necessity of its perpetual preparedness for war?”
I am against war. Any sane person must be. But although we think we no longer live in the endemically belligerent world of Plato, Heraclitus, and General Flavius Vegetius Renatus, or even of our parents or grandparents, we are only a small way along the road towards guaranteed peace. Here are a couple of graphs:
The graphs clearly show that war is less deadly and less pervasive than ever before. For us in the west, with the terrible exception of the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s, it has only seemed to happen just over the horizon – in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria. Well now, it’s happening rather closer to home, and on a potentially much more disastrous scale.
Our pacific existence has had enormously positive consequences, but also some intellectually negative ones for people like me. For example, I can see now that when I wrote the above quote in my earlier post I was succumbing to an intellectual relativism which too readily flattens opposites down to a state of moral parity so as to chastise my own culture. Of course, South Korea has suffered as a result of its need to be ever-ready for war. But the stance it has adopted is defensive, not offensive. The Ukraine war makes this all to horribly obvious. There is a world of difference between preparing for peace through defensive military action and using one’s army for offensive action like the Russians have done.
Being a progressive and being critical of one’s own society’s many shortcomings has led to a dangerous loss of conviction. For example, it has made patriotism very difficult. But as Richard Rorty observed back in 1994 in an essay about the political left’s dominance of the Humanities in the American academy (which has only got stronger since then): “like every other country, ours has a lot to be proud of and a lot to be ashamed of. But a nation cannot reform itself unless it takes pride in itself – unless it has an identity, rejoices in it, reflects upon it and tries to live up to it. Such pride sometimes takes the form of arrogant, bellicose nationalism. But it often takes the form of a yearning to live up to the nation’s professed ideals.” As Rorty concludes: “A left that refuses to take pride in its country will have no impact on that country’s politics, and will eventually become an object of contempt.”
In 1941 at a low point in the war against Hitler, George Orwell penned an essay entitled ‘England, Your England’, which begins: “As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.” Orwell reflected on what it was he loved about England - what was worth dying for - and observed:
An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face. The familiar arguments to the effect that democracy is ‘just the same as’ or ‘just as bad as’ totalitarianism never take account of this fact. All such arguments boil down to saying that half a loaf is the same as no bread. In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions. The belief in them influences conduct, national life is different because of them. In proof of which, look about you. Where are the rubber truncheons, where is the castor oil? The sword is still in the scabbard, and while it stays there corruption cannot go beyond a certain point. The English electoral system, for instance, is an all but open fraud. In a dozen obvious ways it is gerrymandered in the interest of the moneyed class. But until some deep change has occurred in the public mind, it cannot become completely corrupt. You do not arrive at the polling booth to find men with revolvers telling you which way to vote, nor are the votes miscounted, nor is there any direct bribery. Even hypocrisy is a powerful safeguard. The hanging judge, that evil old man in scarlet robe and horse-hair wig, whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what century he is living in, but who will at any rate interpret the law according to the books and will in no circumstances take a money bribe, is one of the symbolic figures of England. He is a symbol of the strange mixture of reality and illusion, democracy and privilege, humbug and decency, the subtle network of compromises, by which the nation keeps itself in its familiar shape.
So, let’s try to remember as we scramble to make sense of and form an opinion about what’s happening in the Ukraine that half a loaf is NOT the same as no bread.
Total Lies and Half-Truths
One of the places I go to hear alternative points of view on what’s going on in the world is Russell Brand’s podcasts on YouTube. Usually, I appreciate his irreverent but compassionate take on things. But in a recent podcast (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=595Esg6Mz0U) on the war in the Ukraine I found myself being very troubled by something he said.
Brand claimed that we are so ‘knowing’ about the ways of the world that we recognize that “everyone’s a ‘bad guy’ now.” He meant we can’t any longer sustain the illusion that any war is fought between ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’, as was the case, say, during World War Two. We are too aware of how any claim to the moral high ground conceals mendacity, greed, and the will to power. For instance, Brand mentioned the way in which the mainstream media stokes the fire of war because it increases ratings, how the armaments industry is set to make huge profits, and how the USA and NATO may have forced Putin’s hand.
But to claim that this means we must proceed in general to make judgments from a position that considers everyone is a ‘bad guy’ is obviously a failure of the imagination. First of all, it’s logically impossible, because if no one is a ‘good guy’, then no one is a ‘bad guy’ either, insofar as the two positions must be relative to each other, and possess their meaning by being in a binary pairing. You can’t have a sense of what is bad without also having a sense of what is good. Brand’s comment is like saying that because not everyone passes the moral test 100%, then no one does.
As if to help me get my head around Brand’s comment, I came across a piece by the professor of journalism and political science Peter Beinart in The Guardian entitled ‘Russia speaks total lies. That doesn’t diminish America’s half-truths’ (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/26/russia-lies-america-half-truths). Beinart seemed to be reflecting on the same problem – that of claiming moral equivalence because we can no longer see issues in clear black-and-white terms. He quoted the Hungarian-born journalist Arthur Koestler, who in 1943 at the height of the war against Hitler, wrote: “In this war we are fighting against a total lie in the name of a half-truth.” Beinart noted: “That’s a good motto for American progressives to adopt in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.”
Implicit in Koestler’s wise insight is the recognition that morality is a spectrum not a see-saw. You can be very far from speaking the unblemished truth and still be a lot closer to it than someone else – Putin, for example. In other words, there are ‘bad guys’ and ‘good guys.’ You just have to see that some are more bad than others, and some are so bad that they must be condemned wholeheartedly, even though one also recognizes that this means bracketing out a lot of the misgivings that under less extreme circumstances would challenge one to dissent.
This is obviously not the time to be berating the USA, Europe, or NATO for all their many failures. In fact, amongst much else, this crisis is a reminder that the critical intellectual and activist juggernaut that exposes systemic racism and sexism, political chicanery and greed, within our own society is a luxury of peaceful times made possible by the relatively smooth functioning of the ‘open’ society that is the focus of the progressives’ critique.
Which isn’t to say that such critique shouldn’t be undertaken!
What is ultimately at stake here is a way of seeing things that reduces them to simple moral choices - the fallacy that Brand himself is so adamant to draw attention to. He is usually excellent at revealing how complex any given issue is, but is clearly not up to the challenge in this case.
This recognition also led me consider how Brand’s usual focus of criticism – that most crises are usually caused by people wanting money and power – cannot be a sufficient explanation in many cases. Putin, for example, is not primarily motivated by either money or power. His motivation lies somewhere near the kind that religion channels, but in our secular age are more commonly driven by ideology. An Ideology is not just a cloak under which to conceal the desire for money of power - although it is also this. An ideology is not only about abstractions. Rather, an ideology addresses very basic and very real human anxieties – above all, perhaps, the need to have a confident sense of mastery, security, and attachment to others. Totalitarianism’s enforcement of ideology, as Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1968), “differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the ‘riddles of the universe,’ or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws, which are supposed to rule nature and man." This is what gives Putin the capacity to lie.
Brand knows that today we cannot ignore all the plentiful signs of violence, war, genocide, sexism, slavery, economic exploitation, inequality, dehumanizing technology, and catastrophic ecological despoliation. He is aware that there is a huge distance between how things should be and how they actually are. Wars proliferate endlessly, racism and sectarianism is on the rise. 1% of the planet’s human population own 82% of the wealth; if the United States was an apple pie, the top 20% are currently helping themselves to 90%. The fragmentary and speeded-up nature of our culture distinguishes it from all others in ways that have shattered the old hierarchies. Especially in the west, for those educated within the secular humanist ideology, modernity is characterized by disenchantment and disillusion. The experience of what Heidegger called ‘groundlessness’, the loss of faith in a convincing ‘grand narrative’ through which to securely establish and maintain faith in the meaningfulness of existence, has led to a pervasive yet intangible feeling of disillusionment, anxiety, resentment, and inner void.
Let’s not beat about the bush: Brand is flirting with nihilism, literally, ‘nothing-at-all-ism’. The term defines one of the most significant tendencies in modern culture. In the nineteenth century, as the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev has one of the characters declare In Fathers and Sons, it became a way of describing “a man who doesn’t acknowledge any authorities, who doesn’t accept a single principle on faith, no matter how much that principle may be surrounded by respect.” For Friedrich Nietzsche, nihilism was an inevitable consequence of the Enlightenment. The idea of the Christian God furnished the faithful with a sense of absolute worth in a world in which they believed they were masters, and where there was the possibility of attaining knowledge of ultimate meaning. But science left no place for such an omnipotent God, and the value system which belief in God produced. Everything could now be explained without him, and so, “God is dead, and we killed him.’ But as Nietzsche also saw, while this Christian God may be ‘dead,’ modern people still mainly clung onto a mindset that forged centuries before around God’s image. As a result, nihilism bred in the empty void created between what modern humans value and how the world appears to be. Being a nihilist requires removing God from the world and then recognizing that the world is now lacking something. Life now seems devoid of meaning, because the old values are absent. Those who collectively gave birth to the secular Enlightenment had believed that it was possible to transfer the values of the religious world to the purely human realm, safeguarding citizens from the dangers of a loss of meaning, inequality of life, and the rule of the strong over the weak. But the project tragically failed. No credible metaphysical framework was created to replace the one once provided by Christianity. Slowly but surely, faith in progress was replaced by a pervasive sense of dread.
But Nietzsche believed that nihilism was not only a disaster. It does not simply have to be a passively endured condition, and could also be an opportunity. Nietzsche identified what he termed ‘passive’ and ‘active forms of nihilism. Nietzsche saw that ‘passive’ nihilism involved the perpetual search for the original values that were once embodied in religion and tradition. In this sense, nihilism is inevitably wedded to pessimism, and to the disjunction between the world we can imagine and the one we must live in. The passive nihilist sees that the world they inhabit does not correspond to the one they recall or have been led to expect, and so they accuse this world failing to provide them with the sustenance they need. There can only ever be temporary distractions from the crushing reality of the empty void within which they are forced to exist, and this offers no enduring consolation. The passive nihilist is forced to live in a world that doesn’t provide them with a sense of purpose, but at the same time seems to them to suit others very well. It is the world that is at fault, or rather the people who seem to be profiting from this world while they are made to suffer. It is the politicians who control government, the one percent who get ever richer, the wreckers of the planet, the wired cosmopolitans of the global network, the foreigners who steal jobs.
But Nietzsche also identified what he saw as a second kind of nihilism, which he called ‘active.’ The recognition of life’s fundamental meaninglessness then serves to free those strong enough to embrace nihilism, who know that they can do whatever they want, and can create their own purpose. Nihilism then empowers. The ‘active’ nihilist embraces destructive action against what they recognize to be an empty value system. Because this system is based on reason, they pursue the irrational, and because it is founded on obedience to the moral law, they flout conventional morality. They embrace the will to power, and through their actions prepare the way for the overcoming of nihilism. They no longer conform to the values and standards of the society within which the unenlightened masses live like obedient cattle, because they have seen through the sham.
‘Active nihilism’ seems to be what Brand endorses. But it is tragically evident that this posture of defiance becomes the pretext for believing that the most ‘honest’ and ‘honourable’ actions are those that are taken in pursuit of one’s own self-interest. If there is no purpose to existence - if everyone is a ‘bad guy’ - then one may well conclude that only one’s own profit counts. In this sense, so-called ‘active’ nihilism becomes little more than an intellectual justification for behaving in ways that are immoral and selfish.
Now, I of course know Brand would wholly disagree with this prognosis, and his goals are far from immoral and selfish. But it is the unforeseen consequences of holding the views he does that worries me. The course of history since Nietzsche’s time has revealed that the commonest outcome of a sense of meaninglessness has been destructive violence motivated by the anger and resentment that arises when there is an unbridgeable chasm between hopes and expectations and the social reality that always thwarts these aspirations.
Hope or Optimism?
North Korean ‘Juche Realism’. Hopeful or optimistic art? This painting is entitled ‘At the Site of the Bumper Pumpkin Crop’, and shows the founder of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea walking around a pumpkin farm. A commentary on the work declares: “At the Site of the Bumper Pumpkin Crop, movingly transmits the Great Leader’s high communist virtues by capturing the Great Leader showing his kindness to a group of farmers during his visit to a pumpkin farm…… With a broad smile on his face, the Great Leader is locked arm in arm with an elderly farmer dressed in working clothes and holding his farmer’s hat respectfully, paying his respect to the Great Leader. Speaking freely with the farmers and asking about the number of pumpkins and their weights, and the amount of pumpkins required for feeding livestock, the Great Leader is actively developing a solution for providing sufficient feed for livestock. The Great Leader also recognizes the peoples’ loyalty, which is pure and clean as crystal, and is encouraging the hard efforts of the farmers. The painting glorifies the Great Leader’s noble communist virtues through his benevolent image. It reminds the viewers that the Great Leader is always one with the people and receives immense gratification from the happy lives of the people—the bliss and happiness increasing day by day.“
Recently, I’ve been thinking and reading a lot about ‘hope’, with the intention of eventually writing a book on the subject, but in the short terms because I am writing an essay on North Korean art of the 1970s and 1980s (called Juche Realism) and the way it encodes optimism rather than hope, compared to the abstract art produced in South Korea during this period, known as Dansaekhwa, which i suggest encodes a kind of ‘radical hope.’ Here, I will simply make a few comments about what I think is different between hope and optimism.
Hope involves the enhancement of agency, while optimism is directed toward the enhancement or maintenance of self-esteem. As a result, hope is about attuning to uncertainty while optimism is about grasping hold of certainty. Optimism is a rigid mental predisposition set within a binary whose opposing pole is pessimism, while hope is not in so much in a binary relationship with despair, but inherently non-binary, because it incorporates the reality of tragedy. “An optimist is…someone who is bullish about life simply because he is an optimist”, writes Terry Eagleton in his pointedly entitled study Hope Without Optimism (2017) An optimist “anticipates congenial conclusions because this is the way it is with him. As such, he fails to take the point that one must have reasons to be happy.”
As the philosopher Michael Milona summarizes, two general forms of optimism can be identified ‘dispositional’ and ‘positive illusion’ optimism. The former involves a general predisposition to expect things will improve, while the latter involves irrational beliefs about how much control one has over achieving goals, and is a distortion of reality so things appear better than they really are. In both forms of optimism, the goal is to approach every situation having already made a decision to shield oneself from the possibility of danger, failure, and loss. Optimists tend to explain events in ways that permit them to distance and limit their failures, and make various kinds of mental excuse to lessen the impact of failure – in the present and potentially in the future. This puts the optimist at a distancefrom the very real chance of a negative outcome, and as such, an optimist is more likely to fail to recognize that one will inevitably face major crises in life, and is usually less capable than the hopeful of overcoming obstacles when they inevitably appear.
The psychologist Lisa Bortolotti argues that optimism works along four avenues. It communicates a sense of coherence, hardiness, preparedness, and self-affirmation. But as C.R. Synder emphasises in The Psychology of Hope (1996) these positive emotional states all come at a high price: “optimists have a style of explaining events so they distance and circumscribe their failures. In other words, optimists make excuses to lessen the impact of current and potential failures.” As Jonathan Lear puts it: “It is a hallmark of the wishful that the world will be magically transformed – into conformity with how one would like it to be – without having to take any realistic practical steps to bring it about….Symbolic rituals take over life or in the group activities of culture – and they become a way of avoiding the real-life demands that confront one in the everyday.”
Effective hope, by contrast, arises from a realistic assessment of how much volatility and uncertainty can be handle before making a risky investment in a future outcome. It is the ability to trust that nature is somehow on one’s side, despite all the evidence suggestion the contrary. If goals are chosen intelligently, and the interest of the community and of nature are borne in mind, hopefulness makes it possible to find meaning in the present moment, no matter how troubled that moment may be. Unlike the essentially wish-fulfilling focus of optimism, genuine hopefulness is about coming to terms with the uncertainties of life, its inevitable obstacles and failures, through the willingness to actively confront them.
Metaphors for optimism and hope often overlap, and can include a correlation with something valuable, fragile, beautiful, or brightly coloured that can be searched for, given, lost, stolen, and retrieved. They can be described as luminous and warm, as fire, gas, or liquid. They can be conceived as containers in which we are located, or that are located within us, such as in the soul, heart, or eyes. Hope and optimism are described as a cloud with a ‘silver lining’, which draws on the familiar experience of observing changing weather. They can be described as food that is nourishing, a remedy or prescription, a protected area, a bridge – in the sense of a means, an intention that involves focused attention, a performance, and also a deception or illusion. People often describe optimism and hope as a movement - as something rising upwards, defying or working with gravity and elevating them above the baseline of the everyday. Writing in the nineteenth century, the American poet Emily Dickinson described hope in zoomorphic terms as “the thing with feathers – / That perches in the soul - / And sings the tune without the words - And never stops – at all -”. Hope is a beautiful and persistent songbird. But Dickinson could also be describing optimism. Hope and optimism can be anthropomorphized, as when we say, ‘hope betrayed us’, hope or optimism is ‘mad’ or ‘crazy’, negative associations that remind us that both can be delusional and/or easily dashed. Summarizing current research. But hope metaphors differs from those of optimism in that they are often described in terms of a journey involving confrontation with recognized obstacles that may prove unsurmountable. Therefore, hope metaphors also acknowledge that hopes can be dashed. A primary optimism metaphor in English is that of a glass half-full (as opposed to a pessimism metaphor, which sees it as half-empty). This metamorphizes optimism as a way of assessing the amount of liquid filling a container, indicating its dispositional character. Hope cannot be described in such broad terms.
In my next post I’ll talk about North Korean Juche Realism.
Notes
Lisa Bortolotti, ‘Optimism, Agency, Success’, Ethical Theory Moral Practice, 21 (5), 2018, 521-535.
Terry Eagleton, Hope Without Optimism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017)
Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope. Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation ( Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2006)
Michael Milona, ‘Hope and Optimism’, John Templeton Foundation White Paper, October 2020, 4-18.
C.R. Synder, The Psychology of Hope (New York: The Free Press, 1996)
A Valentine’s Day Post about Roses
Image courtesy of: https://infinityrose.com/valentines-day/
As it’s Valentine’s Day today, here is a short adapted extract from my book, ‘By Any Other Name. A Cultural History of the Rose’, recently published by Oneworld:
“I began writing this Chapter just before Valentine’s Day which in the United States was worth $20.7 billion in 2019. The average American spent $161.96 on gifts, meals, and entertainment, and men spent twice as much as women. In 2018, according to the Society of American Florists, an estimated 250 million roses were produced for the special day in the USA alone. But people also gave and received huge quantities of products with red roses emblazoned on them – cards, chocolates, lingerie. In 2009 it was estimated that in the United States, the 100 million roses given on Valentine’s Day generate about 9,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide on the journey from field to florist. In 2019 the level for the UK was 5.65 cubic tones. To put this in proportion, the average American has a carbon footprint of about 15 metric tons a year, which is the highest in the world. (And the carbon footprint of the cut-rose trade will continue to increase, because the Internet has made ordering on-line so effortless, while simultaneously widening the chasm between our commendable intentions and any sense of the real-world consequences of our actions, which have also been highjacked by social media in cahoots with commercial interests. All this means that rather than taking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and giving out oxygen, like normal plants, cut-roses are actually adding to the disastrous toxic payload.
That’s quite a legacy for an anniversary that seems to have been invented by the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer in the fourteenth century. His The Parliament of Fowls includes a love debate among birds who choose their mates on ‘Saint Valentine’s Day’, and this is the first known mention of the annual festival of love. He seems to have consciously fabricated the festival, introducing it to the English court as a special courtly-love anniversary, loosely derived from Catholic tradition. The historical precedents include the fact that in the fifth century, Pope Gelasius made February 14th St. Valentine’s Day, after a martyred bishop, Saint Valentine of Terni. There is some documentary evidence supporting a link between this saint and ideas of fertility, but it isn’t substantial enough to warrant the forging of a concrete alliance that makes Valentine’s Day the day of lovers. But thanks to Chaucer, by the middle of the 18th century friends and lovers were exchanging small tokens of affection or handwritten notes on February 14th.
The arrival of printing technology capable of mass-producing greeting cards, the emergence of the advertising industry, and cheaper postage rates, encouraged the channeling of expressions of amorous affection towards this one particular anniversary. Roses were already traditionally associated with love, a fact reflected in the nineteenth century vogue for floriography – the ‘language of flowers’ – where different flowers stood for different emotions. The red rose was associated with deep love, becoming the flower of choice to signal one’s love for someone. So in this way, the grounds for the co-opting of the rose for an anniversary celebrating love became more or less inevitable, despite the fact, of course, that February is not a month known for its rose blossom.”
The typical cut-rose we give on Valentine’s Day is ‘high-centered.’ The ensemble of petals divide into four equal parts, and the petals at the centre stand above the outer opened petals. This is the form of the Hybrid Tea roses bred for the cut-rose business.
These are also the kind favoured by the dastardly President Coriolanus Snow in ‘The Hunger Games’ movies. Snow wears a white one in his lapel buttonhole at all times. In the final episode, ‘‘The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part II’ (2014) the heroine Katniss Everdeen visits the now defeated Snow in the winter garden of his mansion and sees beds of white roses growing. Snow wears the rose, we are told, to hide the stench of the rotting ulcers in his mouth caused by imbibing the poison he is obliged to drink small doses of while toasting the unexpecting rivals and enemies he dispatches by putting poison in their drinks.
President Snow in ‘The Hunger Games. Mockingjay’ (2014)
Image courtesy of: https://thehungergames.fandom.com/wiki/Coriolanus_Snow
The choice of the rose was a masterstroke in ‘The Hunger Games’, as it perfectly symbolizes the nature of the regime of Panem, whose name derives from the Latin phrase Panem et circenses - 'bread and circuses'. In other words, the rose plays a role in making coercive power seem pleasing, not just by being beautiful but by concealing the truth. I wouldn’t want to say that Valentine’s Day plays a similar role within our neoliberal capitalist order. Not quite…..
In my book, I don’t mention ‘The Hunger games’, as I hadn’t remembered the roses, but watching ‘Mockingjay’ recently on Netflix reminded me. But I did note the comments of the celebrated graphic designer Pete Saville, who borrowed a reproduction of a Henri Fantin-Latour’s still life painting for the cover of the electronica band New Order’s album Power, Corruption and Lies (1983). Saville commented: “Flowers suggested the means by which power, corruption and lies infiltrate our lives.” , it is almost certain that the roses used in the movie are completely without scent, like pretty much all of the cut-roses sent at Valentine’s Day.
“Welcome to the Wild West”
HAPPY NEW LUNAR YEAR! It’s the Year of the Tiger.
This is one of my Book-Paintings. You can see lots more on my artist’s website: www.simonmorley.com
I’ve been silent for a while on this blog after a period when I focused exclusively on a series of posts celebrating the publication of my book ‘By Any Other Name. A Cultural History of the Rose’ because over Christmas and New Year I went back to my homeland, the United Kingdom, and since then (I’m now back in Korea) I’ve been mulling over my rather disturbed and disturbing experience over there. I am referring to the impact of Covid-19, and especially to the culture-shock I felt when experiencing the different responses of people in the UK compared to here in Korea. My book, by the way, is doing well. It’s had some good reviews. The Times Literary Supplement said: “Fascinating material, surveyed with relish and acumen.”
But I want now to get back to more general blogging, and especially to think about the complexities and paradoxes of East-West cultural dialogue once again.
I said I wouldn’t write about face-masks again, but here I go again.
On my second or third night in London, while I lay awake with jetlag, a voice in my head seemed to say: “Welcome the Wild West!” Yes. That’s what it felt like being in the UK. Compared to Korea, things seemed very anarchic, especially in relation to Covid-19 and the threat posed by the new Omicron variant. I was amazed to find that people considered that their responses to the requests for compliance regarding the pandemic - to wear face-mask on public transport or to get vaccinated - were to see them as personal choices rather than social duties. Now, there are many ways of explaining this. One is related to specific political conditions. In the UK (and I think more broadly in the West in general) there seems to be a fundamental loss of trust in the state. This distrust means that people do not believe in what the institutions vested with authority say. They see them as, for example, a patriarchal plot or a way to make more money for the ‘one percent.’ This loss of trust is pervasive. It extends to all levels of social life, from personal relationship to political leadership. The causes are obviously complex, but I think have much to do with a basic flaw in individualistic conception of the self, or in what has been called ‘possessive individualism.’
Now, I know it’s risky making hard-and-fast distinctions between cultures, and I am aware that there is no such thing as fixed cultural identities. However, there is plentiful evidence provided by the responses to the pandemic that confirm that Western societies function very differently from East Asian. Let me try to suggest some ways to understand these differences – albeit differences proposed by Westerners.
The Canadian social psychologist Stephen Heine, for example, discusses how concepts of selfhood are determined by interactions with the cultural environment and ossify into recursive cultural orientations. He describes an East Asian cultural bias towards what he calls the ‘interdependent self’, where individuals are understood to be connected to each other via a network of relationships. This Heine contrasts to the Western model of the ‘autonomous self’, where selfhood is generated in contrast to others. As Heine notes: “In general, across a wide variety of paradigms, there is converging evidence that East Asians view ingroup members as an extension of their selves while maintaining distance from outgroup members. North Americans show a tendency to view themselves as distinct from all other selves, regardless of their relationships to the individual.” The individualistic West confronts the collectivist East. “The resultant self-concept that will emerge from participating in highly individualized North American culture will differ importantly from the self-concept that results from the participation in the Confucian interdependence of East Asian culture”, writes Heine.
The American social psychologist Richard E. Nisbett argues that in the West consciousness is construed as non-corporeal, detached and autonomous. ‘”For Westerners,” writes Nisbett, “it is the self who does the acting; for Easterners, action is something that is undertaken in concert with others or that is the consequence of the self operating in a field of forces.” As he continues: “to the Asian the world is a complex place composed of continuous substances, understood in terms of the whole rather than in terms of the parts, and subject more to collective than to personal control.” In this world-view there is an intrinsic overlap between self and world.
Meanwhile, for the Westerner, writes Nesbitt, “the world is a relatively simple place, composed of discrete objects that can be understood without undue attention to context, and highly subject to personal control”. The ‘analytic thought’ prioritized in the West follows patterns organized through visual segregation. It dissects the world “into a limited number of discrete objects having particular attributes that can be categorized in clear ways”. Nisbett details research that shows that Japanese participants in his experiments are more attentive to the whole perceptual field than Americans, who are more drawn to individual foci of attention.
This divergence is also paralleled in the structure of language. East Asian languages like Korean are highly contextual; words typically have multiple meanings. The absence of personal pronouns in Korean adds to its inherent ambiguity, and foregrounds the role played by context in determining meaning. Western languages, in contrast, are more context-free and preoccupied with focal objects as opposed to context. The ‘holistic thought’ characteristic of East Asia, “responds to a much wider array of objects and their relations, and [...] makes fewer sharp distinctions among attributes or categories, [and so] is less well suited to linguistic representation.” Awareness of process predominates over the search for essences or fixed and finite forms. It is therefore non-binary, promoting a ‘both/and’ approach to problem solving.
One way of observing these different world-views at work is to think about how ‘mind’ – the part of the self that thinks, reasons, feels and remembers – is conceptualized. Most Westerners will point to their cerebrum when asked to locate the physical location of this elusive entity, while most East Asians will point to the region of their heart. Etymologically, the meanings of the English word ‘mind’ cluster around the act of remembering and memory, while the French word ‘esprit’ suggests another etymology that brings meaning closer to spirit, energy or liveliness. But s the West developed a more thoroughgoing dualistic view of consciousness within modern rational thought, ‘mind’ has been opposed to ‘body’, which explains why Westerners point where they do. In contrast, the Chinese written character translated into English as ‘mind’ is composed from the ideogram for heart. Since ancient times the heart was understood to be ithe mind’s location, and so the two are interchangeable and inextricable.
Both concepts of ‘mind’ are congruent with the contrasting ‘analytic’ and ‘holistic’ world-views from which they arise. In the former, the self is detached from a world that is viewed as static and compartmentalized, while in the latter, the self is corporeally immersed in the flow of life.
The clear benefits to be gained from both paradigms explain their cultural recursiveness. The Western model has the following broad characteristics: it fosters an intellectual attitude preoccupied with mental activity and values, differentiating intellect and psychology from the somatic dimension. Emphasis is placed on analytic thought, which means experiences are processed by being abstracted, and divided into elemental parts or basic principles. The discursive mode of thinking is valued, in which thoughts proceed to a conclusion through deductive logic, reasoning and objective analysis rather than emotion and intuition, promoting a cognitive style uninfluenced by personal feelings or opinions when considering and representing facts. It thereby ensures grounds for publicly verifiable objective facts freed from affect. This world-view fosters self-consciousness and reflectiveness, and generates the idea of a transcendent realm of pure forms or non-material entities, of a God who is separated from the natural world.
The East Asian world-view, on the other hand, offers the self a greater sense of being united with a trans-personal whole. It fosters awareness of complementarity and intimate connectedness. Furthermore, it is somatically oriented, seeing the self as immersed in a living, bodily and participatory context. Ontologically, there is the notion that the self exists in the midst of things rather than externally. More attention is paid to affect – to pathos as well as logos – as a component of knowledge, and this leads to the acknowledgement of the value of non-verbal understanding. Some important knowledge is construed as essentially ‘esoteric’ or ‘dark’, rather than bright and clear. Epistemologically, this means non-duality or monism. Distinctions between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ therefore have little value. Metaphysically, it fosters the idea of an immanent spirituality, occurring in the here and now.
Because of the East Asian bias, the self within this cultural matrix tends to be uncomfortable with the analytically cognitive, and with abstractions. As a result, there is an absence of individual, reflective, affect-free critical thought. Because much cognition is understood to happen beyond the scope of language, within the discursive domain there is a tendency to depend on shared tacit knowledge that remains unchallenged and under-articulated subjectively. This means a proclivity towards reliance on the consensus view and shared viewpoint, rather than on individualized and potentially dissenting expression.
A detrimental consequence of the Western recursive paradigms is that the atomization of selfhood into individualistic ‘autonomous’ units isolates the self from the wider community, fostering potential antagonism between the interests of the self and the social realm. When thinking, Westerners tend over-value the medium of verbal language, believing that if they put thoughts and feelings into words, and then act upon them, they are in control. Failure to realize these criteria, which often appear to the self as a critical and antagonistic relationship to the status quo, signifies a lack and a loss of mastery.
One can see how these fundamental differences in the social construction of consciousness impact on the requirement to wear face-masks or to be vaccinated. Westerners are inherently more likely to consider these issues in terms of individual integrity rather than group intimacy, that is, they will consider the mandates coming from government and underwritten by scientific evidence, which is reinforced by social pressures, primarily in terms of a personal demand to comply, as a request to subordinate one’s preeminent goal of maintaining a zone of personal freedom to an essentially threatening outside. In Korea, by contrast, people on the whole do not see the mandates as impinging in any significant way upon their personal integrity, which is constructed more permeably in relation to others within society.
Which reaction is more efficacious in these worrying circumstances? Almost certainly the Korean. But I have to say that after my initial shock on first being back in the UK I ended up feeling relieved to be in a country where individualism is so stridently policed by individuals. Now I’m back in Korea I can see that the compliant conformity certainly brings a sense of security, but, at least to this individualistic Westerner, it can feel unbearably dispiriting.
References::
Steven J Heine, “Self as Cultural Product: An Examination of East Asian and North American Selves”, Journal of Personality, 69 (6), 2001, pp881–906. http://www 2.psych.ubc.ca/∼heine/ docs/2001asianself.pdf.
Thomas P. Kasulis, Intimacy or Integrity: Philosophy and Cultural Difference (Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press. 2002)
Richard E. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why (New York: Free Press. 2003)
A Rose a Day No.50
Today in my 50th and final post on roses.
Ever since I first saw this photograph by Edward Steichen, it’s haunted me. It’s entitled ‘Heavy Roses, Voulangis, France’ and was taken in 1914. Talk about funereal!
This from a Christie’s auction catalogue (October, 2018):
Edward Steichen’s Heavy Roses, Voulangis was taken in 1914, shortly before the break of World War I, and is believed to be the last photograph Steichen would take in France before fleeing the German invasion. At the time, Steichen, whose early artistic aspirations veered toward painting, was still employing a Pictorialist sensibility in his photographic practice. By that year, Steichen had taken some of his most celebrated images, among them, In Memoriam, 1901; Rodin, Le Penseur, Paris, 1902 and The pond – Moonlight, 1904, all depicting classical subjects—from noble portraits to sweeping landscapes—in a variety of sumptuous printing techniques—from gum bichromate to platinum.
Likewise, Heavy Roses, Voulangis depicts a closely cropped arrangement of overlapping plump roses in varying degrees of bloom and decay. The flowers in the photograph appear to be actual size, heightening their near-tactile quality and relatability, subsequently appearing as an extension of the viewers’ immediate reality. At the time of this image, Europe was at the brink of war, and the flowers, it has been suggested, were emblematic of the pending disaster and the loss in livelihood; an homage to passing beauty. Of the poignant, powerful ability of photographs for storytelling, Steichen would later write, 'I am no longer concerned with photography as an art form. I believe it is potentially the best medium for explaining man to himself and to his fellow man.'
The roses seem to be picture of Centifolia - the ‘Provence Rose’.
Image and text: https://www.artsy.net/artwork/edward-steichen-heavy-roses-voulangis-france-4
A Rose a Day No.49
In his religious works Sandro Botticelli painted roses associated with the Virgin Mary, but in this, his most famous painting, ‘The Birth of Venus’ (mid 1480s), the roses have a wholly different symbolic meaning. They are bound on the level of the symbol to the pagan subject through an accumulation of visual references from literary sources derived from Homer and Ovid.
Many Classical myths refer specifically to the rose in relation to Venus, or Aphrodite as she was known to the Greeks. At her birth, she causes the sea-foam to become white roses as it fell onto dry land. The rose becomes red through the spilling of Aphrodite’s blood. While running to Adonis, her lover, Aphrodite scratches herself on the thorns of a rose bush and turns the white roses to red. In another myth, Adonis is mortally wounded by a wild boar while out hunting, and from the mixture of his blood and her tears there grows the first blood-red rose. But in another myth the transformation is caused by the blood of Aphrodite’s son, Eros (the Roman Cupid or Amor), the god of love, youth, vitality, and fruitfulness. The thorns on the rose were also added by Eros, who, while kissing the most beloved of his as yet thornless roses, is stung by a nectar-gathering bee concealed inside the flower (the bee is another symbol of Aphrodite). His mother gives Eros a magical quill of arrows so he can take revenge, and Eros shoots at the bees on the rose bushes, and the thorns appeared where he missed his mark.
Aphrodite was married to Hephaestus, but she was never faithful to him, and had numerous affairs, including with the god of war, Ares (Mars to the Romans). In one myth, Aphrodite names a flower created by Chloris (Flora to the Romans) and dedicates it to Eros, who then offers the rose as a bribe to Harpocrates (the god of silence), hoping to keep secret his mother’s perpetual sexual indiscretions. As a result, the Latin term sub rosa, ‘under the rose’, links the rose to silence, secrecy, and the unknowable. As this and many other myths suggest, Aphrodite may personify sexual pleasure and love, but her unpredictability led sometimes to wanton lust and violence. In fact, she was also a warrior goddess, and sometimes went by the name the ‘Black One’, ‘Dark One’, and ‘Killer of Men’. Such was her power that acts of honouring her brought reward, but disrespect or disregard meant brutal punishment.
Several flowers and fruit, such as the red anemone, myrtle, apple, and pomegranate, were sacred to Aphrodite/Venus, as were birds like the dove, sparrow, swan, goose and duck, and shellfish. The importance of water-fowl indicate that Aphrodite was the daughter of Poseidon, and that ‘Aphrodite’ means ‘born from the sea’, that is, from the womb of the Great Mother Goddess. But the rose would become especially sacred to the goddess of love. The Odes of Anacreon, which contain the earliest poetic reference to the rose, refer directly to the goddess of love and her intimate relationship to this special flower: ‘The gods beheld this brilliant birth [of Aphrodite], / And hail'd the Rose, the boon of earth!’, writes Anacreon.
Botticelli depicts her floating to land on a conch shell being blown by Zephyr, the west wind, and Chloris, the goddess of flowers, towards a Horai, goddess of spring, who is about to dress Venus in a flowered mantle. The painting includes a lovely shower of Damask Roses. Here are some details of the roses:
The special relationship of the rose to the sacred empyrean was also encoded on a linguistic level. The Greek word rhódon is connected phonetically with rheein, meaning ‘to flow’, linking the rose’s life-cycle and scent to endless effluvious life, and thereby making it closely associated with the metamorphosis that is characteristic of humanity’s relationship to nature. In Latin, rosa sounds like ros – ‘dew’ – which is an especially ethereal natural phenomenon also closely associated with the realm of the gods. The words rhodon and rosa are the colour of light itself, and so the plant was deemed to originate in the world of the gods. In relation to sexual love, the word rosa sounds very close to the Greek eros, the name of Aphrodite’s son which was also used by the Romans, and this provided a linguistic basis for the association. These interconnections, reinforced by a purely visceral delight in the visual and olfactory beauty of the rose, meant the rose was understood to be both an earthly creation and a material sign of the world of the immortals.
But the rose’s relationship to the goddess of love was also cemented on a sensory level which is directly related to more general social practices of the period. The rose was deemed to be an earthly thing both beautiful and valuable, but it was also pleasing to the gods, who were imagined, described, and depicted wearing floral garlands and dresses, and emanating intoxicating scents from anointed oils. In a poem fragment, the poet Sappho summons Aphrodite to her temple on the island of Crete, and describes the setting in a sacred grove of apple trees, blooming with rose and spring flowers, where the altars are smoky with sweet-smelling fragrance of roses. At the end of the Illiad, Aphrodite is described as using immortal rose oil to protect the body of Hector from savage dogs. She ‘anointed him with ambrosial oil of roses that his flesh might not be torn.’ The first recorded reference to a rose, on a tablet excavated in Pylos on the Peloponnesian peninsula, probably from the 13th century BC, mentions aromatized oils that included rose extract. Rose oil was used by priests and priestesses during sacred rites to generate a heady atmosphere of conducive to communion with the Olympians, but also by lovers, who anointed themselves when they met for trysts, but The female poet Nossis, writing in the third century BC, declared: ‘There is nothing sweeter than love: all other blessings / Take second place. I even spit honey from my mouth. / This is what Nossis says./ Whomever Kypris has not kissed, / Does not understand her flowers, what kinds of things roses are!’.
The symbolic connection of the rose with goddess of sexual love was also tangible in other ways. A rose flower is literally the plant’s sex organ – a hermaphroditic one, like 80% of all flowers. Pollination in a rose occurs through the interaction of the anther (female) and the stamen (male), and fertilization results when the sperm from the pollen unites with an egg in the flower’s ovary. In these senses, the rose is the direct vegetal equivalent to the human sexual organs, with which it also has physical similarities – the arrangement of petals to the vagina, for example. But the relationship between the rose and human sexual activity was also construed on a directly perceptual level in that the analogy was based on a convergence or parallelism between the rose and sexual desire and its emotions and actions. Through the shape of its flower, spatial arrangement of petals, stamens, leaves, prickles, and cane, the rose was equated with femininity, youth, vivacity, fecundity, love, beauty, pleasure, desire, the delicious pain of passion, the waning of these things
Images courtesy of the Uffizi Museum, Florence.
A Rose a Day No.48
This seventeenth century etching is of a Rosa centifolia (hundred petalled rose) aka the Cabbage Rose, Holland Rose, Provence Rose, Rose de Mai, or Grasse Rose. It has shrubby with long drooping canes, and before the nineteenth century it was unique in having round, globular flowers comprised of numerous densely-overlapping petals, hence the name – it resembles a cabbage. These petals are usually pink, but sometimes white or dark purplish-red. As Rosa gallica, Rosa moschata, Rosa canina, and Rosa damascena were all participants in parenting the Rosa centifolia, it can claim to be the most truly communally European rose, although conception occurred somewhere in the Near East.
It used to be assumed the Cabbage Rose was quite ancient and was known to the Romans. The English nurseryman and author Thomas Rivers, for example, in The Rose Amateur’s Guide (1837), writes: “This rose has long and deservedly been the favourite ornament of English gardens; and if, as seems very probable, it was the hundred-leaved rose of Pliny, and the favourite flower of the Romans, contributed in no small degree to the luxurious enjoyments of that great people, it claims attention as much for its high antiquity, as for its intrinsic beauty. 1596 is given by botanists as the date of its instruction to our gardens.”
But it seems Rivers was mistaken. The consensus is that Dutch traders introduced the Centifolia to Western Europe in the sixteenth century from Persia. Long before it became a favourite in Europe, gul-i sad barg (hundred-petaled rose), was already a much-prized species in the Islamic world, and had important economic and cultural significance, as its sweet, and honey-noted fragrance made it highly valued in the production of rose-water. One of its names in Western Europe, Provence Rose, is an indication that this region of southern France became an important one for the rose’s cultivation for the perfume business.
A Rose a Day No.47
Still-life paintings of roses are a staple of Western art, although they are very rare in East Asian art, at least before the forces of Westernization influenced taste, and made the rose a familiar icon of beauty. But the flatness and all-overness of the composition of this painting stakes a somewhat ‘Oriental’ note.
Two important wild roses that are native to Korea are Rosa multiflora and Rosa rugosa.
Nowadays in Korea, domesticated roses are still less prominent in gardens and parks than in the West, but cut-roses are a very common gift. Korea now has its own home-made hybrid roses, and by coincidence, the centre of the rose-farming business is near where I live in Paju county. There is also a lively Korea Rose Society.
This is an oil painting by a Korean, Lee Kyung Soon. It was made in 2004 and is called ‘Roses in the Garden’. It’s nice to think that her roses, although almost certainly hybrids bred in the West to suit Western taste, actually have Chinese parents, and that is why the flowers have the form they do, repeat blossom, and some are yellow.
Painting courtesy of Lee Kyung Soon and Cho Kheejoo.
A Rose a Day No.46
This lithograph on paper is by the conceptual artist Joseph Beuys. It’s entitled “We Won’t Do It without the Rose, Because We can No Longer Think’, and is from 1972.
The Tate Gallery says:
Taken from a photograph by Wilfred Bauer, this lithograph shows Beuys at the desk of his Information Office at documenta V, Kassel in 1972. The Information Office was run under the auspices of the Organization for Direct Democracy, a platform for the propagation of the artist’s radical ideas, which he had founded the previous year. For 100 days Beuys tirelessly debated his ideas with visitors to the exhibition. On the last day, he fought a Boxing Match for Direct Democracy.
Beuys probably had in mind the traditional idea of ‘sub rosa’ - under the rose - meaning, secretly and securely. As a follower of Rudolf Steiner, he may have had in mind the Rose-Cross mediation, which I mentioned in a previous post on the rose and the Occult and mysticism.
But perhaps Beuys was also thinking about the seventeenth century Catholic mystic poet Angelus Silesius in The Cherubinic Wanderer, who evokes the rose as a striking metaphor for living ‘without why’. Humanity, Silesius pointed out, is always doing things. We are aware of our doing, and are often concerned about what others make of our actions, and this, Silesius noted, is precisely the root of our unhappiness. By contrast, Silesius wrote: ‘ The Rose because she is Rose / Doth blossom, never asketh Why; / She eyeth not herself, nor cares / If she is seen of other eye. Silesius used the image of the rose to give beautiful concrete form to the observation that all too often we contract into ourselves in attachment to our own desires, and so we become ‘closed’, cut off by too much self-love. But when we are willing to ‘open’ ourself to God’s gift, we will be truly with God. But this means letting go, or ‘abandoning’ oneself, as only then can the divine rush in, like a rose bloom opening to absorb the sunlight.
Silesius, in his turn, was inspired by the medieval Catholic theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart who believed that the truly spiritual life must be lived without any reason or purpose extraneous to the love of God. Eckhart was specifically protesting against the Catholic moral doctrine of the period that seemed to trade ethical behaviour for the divine favour of the Beatific Vision. Instead, Eckhart suggested that ‘[The just person] wants and seeks nothing, for he knows no why. He acts without a why just in the same way as God does; and just as life lives for its own sake and seeks no why for the sake of which, it lives, so too the just person knows no why for the sake of which he would do something.’ Eckhart therefore counseled that we should strive to exist out of the plenitude of our own being alone. “I live because I live”, he declared. ‘God’s ground is my ground and my ground is God’s ground……You should work all your works out of this innermost ground without why.’
In the early nineteenth century, the American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson looked out of his window on spring morning of 1840 in Concord, Massachusetts and saw roses in bloom, and wondered why people immediately turn them into symbols instead of just appreciating their joyful presence. The problem, Emerson concluded, lay with the character of a society which inevitably alienates its members:
Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say ‘I think’, ‘I am’, but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These rose under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time for them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied and it satisfies nature in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present above time.
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger, writing in the mid-twentieth century, became fascinated by Angelus Silesius’s rose that knows no ‘why’, and sought to free what he saw as a profound existential insight from the limits of metaphysical Christian context and to place it within a modern secular worldview in which the goal was seen to be self-realization. Heidegger noted that in modern culture people value above all mental control, and crave clarity of communication, which is achieved through unambiguous, exact, graspable, objective and concrete information. There is nothing that is without some reason or ground. In other words, we excessively value the head over the heart.
Heidegger argued that the contemporary importance of the spiritual metaphorical rose envisaged by Silesius was that it is telling humanity to strive to live for the sake of life, not in relation to some external purpose. As Heidegger wrote: ‘But blooming happens to the rose inasmuch as it is absorbed in blooming and pays no attention to what, as some other thing – namely, as cause and condition of the blooming – could first bring about this blooming. It does not first need the ground of its blooming to be expressly rendered to it. It is another matter when it comes to humans.’ Heidegger used the word Gelassenheit, or ‘releasement’ , to describe a state of unselfish surrender, letting-be, or will-less existence. Such ‘release’, Heidegger declared, was what it means to live like a rose – ‘without why’.
In a poem entitled ‘Walking Past a Rose This June Morning’ the contemporary British poet Alice Oswald mediates on an encounter with a rose that launches many profound associations. The poem takes the form of a series of unanswerable questions: ‘is my heart a rose? how unspeakable’, Oswald writes. She evokes the deep sense of absolute otherness she feels in the rose’s presence. Oswald’s reactions do not engender tame emotions associated with the kind of domesticated beauty with which the rose is so often associated. On the contrary, the rose puts her in a fluid and intimately entangled relationship with the world. For Oswald, the rose evokes the vulnerability of existential openness that is intrinsic to the ways of the heart. During an interview, Oswald (who used to be a professional gardener) explained that her poem came ‘from the way I always feel when I meet a rose: it's a point of metaphor, and it's so unbelievable that it throws you into a sort of metaphorical and remembered world.’ And then she added: ‘I'm wary of roses because they are used so much as symbols, and yet the actual rose still remains. It's somehow a hinge between the spiritual and the tangible world.’
Image courtesy of the Tate Gallery.
A Rose a Day No.45
This Iranian woman is harvesting the Autumn Damask rose in the Fars region. Where she comes from it is called ‘Gol-e-Mohammadi ‘– ‘Mohammadi Rose’ (‘Muhammed’s Rose’). In Fars, as in other regions of the Near East, such as Syria and Turkey, but also Bulgaria, this rose is an important cash-crop.
The Autumn Damask has two important characteristics: a strong perfume and remontancy. Until recently, it was believed that Northern Persia is the only region where all three of the parents of the Autumn Damask grow together, so it was assumed to be the birth-place of the new species, and that with human assistance the Autumn Damask subsequently spread from there east towards India, south to Arabia, and west into north Africa and Europe, bringing with it the remontancy gene. Persia in particular was a major centre for the cultivation of roses, and the rose was a much loved flower. There was a long-established tradition of growing roses as ornamental plants in gardens. But new research has pushed the origins of the repeat-flowering Damask even further east to the Amu Darya River in the Aral Sea Basin in northern Turkmenistan and southern Uzbekistan, an area north of Afghanistan, which was known as the Transoxiana in Alexander the Great’s time, or the River Oxus of classical Latin and Greek. This discovery, in its turn, leads to the hypothesis that the remontancy gene from Rosa fedtschenkoana which is necessary for there to be the Autumn Damask, comes from further east still, in central Asia or north west China. The Aral sea Basin was the centre of Bactrian civilization between 329 – 125 BC, and was an important point of interface between Central Asia and the Chinese Han Dynasty.
Such is the disparity in the geographical distribution of the roses that hybridized to produce the Autumn Damask that it seem probable their crossing could only have been facilitated through ‘artificial selection’, through conscious human intervention. This hypothesis would then imply that Asiatic rose genes have been an unacknowledged part of the western rose gene pool since at least Roman times. For centuries, traders had been making their way into China and back again along the caravan routes, and plants and seeds came and went with them. Roses could easily have traveled from China along the trade routes which traversed 6, 440 kilometers, and linked China with the west from the 2nd century BC to the 14th century AD, and attempts could have been made long ago to cultivate remontant roses.
Rose water is an important part of daily life in the Middle East, and has been for centuries. When Saladin triumphantly entered Jerusalem in 1167, he ordered the floor and walls of Omar’s Mosque to be washed with rose-water to purify it of the stench of the Crusaders. It was said that five hundred camel loads of rose-water were needed, and that much of it came from Damascus. When Sultan Mehmet II conquered Constantinople in 1453, he had Hagia Sophia cathedral washed with rose water before converting it into a mosque. Rose-water was also used as flavoring ingredients for drinks, and desserts such as ice cream, jam, Turkish Delight, rice pudding, yogurt and sherbet. As we will see in more detail in a future Chapter, rose ointment and rose water were also used for their medicinal benefits. Roses motifs also adorned Persian carpets, featured in miniature painting, and were incorporated into architecture decoration. As Islamic tradition spread and assimilated the indigenous cultures of conquered lands, the rose travelled too. When the Mughal Dynasty invaded in India, it eventually merged Persian with indigenous Indian culture, making the rose an important feature of Indian life.
Another profitable use for the rose in the Middle East was the perfumed attar of roses, which involves distilling volatile oils from the flowers. Knowledge of this process dates from at least the first century AD, and by the ninth century attar of roses was especially being exported from Fars region in Persia to places as far afield as Spain, India, and China. From the tenth to the seventeenth century, Persia was the acknowledged centre of the industry. The Damask rose was cultivated for this purpose especially around Shiraz in the Fars province, and still is to this day, but Rosa centifolia is also used in the Near East. The Moors brought the technology of rose-water production to southern Spain, and the Monghuls to India, and a traditions says that it was actually Queen Noor Jehan in sixteenth century India who discovered rose oil when she collected droplets of the oil from a canal flowing with rose petals. Today, roses for oil a significant cash-crop in regions of India such as Kashmir and Uttar Pradesh. As an enduring legacy of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, cultivation of roses for rose-water and rose oil also continues today in Turkey and Bulgaria.
Over the centuries, not much has changed in how roses are cultivated and processed to make oil. In the spring the pickers still work quickly from the early morning, as the harvesting period is short and dependent on the weather. During a cool, cloudy day in spring harvesting can last for a month, while in hotter seasons, for only 16-20 days. The flowers are then brought to sills (copper or iron), mixed with water, and the distillate collected in metal tubing. The primary distillate is then further processed to obtain the desired properties. To produce just one kilogram of rose essence in a still, takes about 12 tonnes of fresh roses. Industrialization of the time honoured practices began in the early twentieth century, especially in Bulgaria, where steam still and volatile extraction systems were developed. Under communism, copper sills were abandoned and the rose farms were collectivized and nationalized. Today, Bulgaria remains a world leader in the production and export of attar. There is even a Valley of the Rose dedicated to the cultivation of the Alba, and especially the Damask Rose, Rosa damscenea trigintipetala, aka the ‘Kazanlik Rose’.
In the twelfth century, returning Crusaders may have carried knowledge of rose distillation back with them to Western Europe on their return home, although it could have arisen independently in Europe. Eventually, the rose became important ingredient for the Western perfume industry. In the sixteenth century around the town of Grasse in southern France, rose cultivation developed for this purpose. But it was pink Cabbage Rose, Rosa centifolia, aka ‘Rose de Provence’ , not the Damask, that is the species of choice, and it remains today at the heart of a thriving business. Dior, Chanel, and Hermès all source their roses in Grasse.
Image:
http://www.iranmirrorbd.com/en/2017/05/10/rose-harvest-season-in-southern-iran/
A Rose a Day No.44
Perhaps the greatest paintings of seductively dangerous roses from the Victorian period were created by the Pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones: his series called ‘The Legend of the Briar Rose’ (1885-1890), which has been carefully integrated into the décor of the Salon in Buscot House, Oxfordshire, through the extension of the frames and the filling of the intervals with joining panels that continue the rose motif. Under each of the paintings there is written a verse from a poem by William Morris.
The first in the series, called ‘The Briar Wood’ [Illustration], shows the Prince standing on the far left, and the sleeping retinue sprawled amongst the Briars. Morris’ poem is as follows: The fateful slumber floats and flows / About the tangle of the rose; / But lo! the fated hand and heart / To rend the slumberous curse apart!
We know the story of the Briar Rose best as ‘Sleeping Beauty’. A curse means the princess will prick her finger on a rose, and then she and everyone around her will immediately falls into a deep sleep for a hundred years, until she is kissed by a prince. The original ‘Sleeping Beauty’ story is by Charles Perrault, and makes no mention of roses, just ‘’brambles and thorns’. But in the Brothers Grimm’s re-telling the story, called ‘Briar-Rose,’ the princess herself is called the ‘Beautiful Briar-Rose’, or the rose on the thorny briar. It seems likely that the Brothers Grimm chose to develop the theme in relation to the medieval allegory of the Roman de la Rose . But in fact, the story of sleeping beauty goes all the way back to The Book of the 1001 Nights, where it is more obviously about the relationship between sexual desire, violence, and death. This theme is still subliminally there in Perrault’s story, in which the Prince must ‘penetrate’ the enclosing thicket. After ‘awakening’, the princess has two children, and is then tormented by any angry mother-in-law. In the Grimm’s narrative the emphasis is also on the necessity of penetration, but the tale ends when the prince weds ‘Beautiful Briar-Rose’.
Burne-Jones also includes other references to the rose – petals painted on a knight’s shield, and four heraldic ‘Tudor’ roses on a tapestry in Sleeping Beauty's bower:
The star of the suite is definitely the Briar itself – a real rambler. But which species rose is it? Definitely Rosa canina. Burne-Jones shows them as pink buds, then whitish pink fading to white blooms. His specimens are extremely sinuous, and have very aggressive-looking prickles. Although certainly painted from life, this is like no rose one is ever likely to see in reality. It seems to be enveloping the whole world, a primeval rose from the time of the dinosaurs, a huge spiky serpent, although spotted everywhere with lovely small, delicate five-petal white flowers.
There is, in fact, a very personal dimension to Burne-Jones’ painting. The model for the beautiful sleeping princess is the artist’s own eighteen-year-old daughter, Margaret. Her father, evidently feeling ambivalent about her awakening sexuality, made sure the Briar was especially thick and impenetrable so as to prevent any suitor from coming to steal her ‘innocence’ – her ‘rosebud’ – or to ‘de-flower’ her. Tellingly, Burne-Jones doesn’t depict the moment when the Prince achieves his goal, and Briar-Rose is awakened. Instead, he has delayed the moment of ‘surrender’ indefinitely. As long as his daughter/Sleeping Beauty remains asleep, protected by the wildness of the Briar rose, she will never be fully alive, but as soon as she moves she will inevitably be ‘pricked’ and feel pain. The rose symbolizes here the wounding danger of sexuality, particularly young female sexuality, and the social prohibitions that hem it in like the Briar surrounding Sleeping Beauty’s castle. In this sense, one could say the rose in this painting is playing the role of chastity belt. So there is no evidence of penetration, nor any likelihood of it, in Burne-Jones’ paintings. An overwhelming soporific, death-like air pervades all of the works. Everybody except the Prince is fast asleep, and he looks no more than decorous.
Pictures courtesy of Riger Vlitos, Curator of the Farringdon Collection at Buscot Park.
A Rose a Day No.43
This huge rose has been drawn in the sand!
It’s interesting take on Sir Richard Fanshawe poem about the transience of life, in this case aided and abetted by the tide:
Thou blushing rose, within whose virgin leaves
The wanton wind to sport himself presumes,
Whist from their rifled wardrobe he receives
For his wings purple, for his breath perfumes;
Blown in the morning, thou shalt fade ere noon,
What boots a life which in such haste forsakes thee.
Sir Richard Fanshawe, ‘A Rose’ [1607]
Thanks to Erin Macairt for sending me this via Instagram: #rachelshiamh, #monolofroelich
A Rose a Day No. 42
Jan Davidsz. de Heem, ‘Vanitas Still-Life with a Skull, a Book and Roses’ (c.1630)
In Protestant countries, the ban on religious imagery obliged artists and their audience to develop other genres with an overtly moralizing content. In such cases, the beauty of the rose was often intended to remind the faithful that the pleasures of this life are transitory and fickle, a theme that derives from the Book of Ecclesiastes 1:2, which declares: "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." A vanitas theme typically places wilting roses as a symbol of death in the company of, for example, a skull, butterflies (symbolizing transformation), or ruined parapets.
In Jan Davidsz. de Heem’s ‘Vanitas Still-Life with a Skull, a Book and Roses’ (c.1630), two cut Centifolia Rose flowers lie to the side of the book, skull, and a glass of water, adding a warm and beguiling note to the otherwise overwhelmingly austere and morbid composition. A vanitas painting conveyed to the prosperous patron who purchased it that the pleasure, money, beauty, and power they were enjoying in this world were not everlasting, and that it was the essence of earthly life to be fleeting and therefore fundamentally lacking in enduring value. But the message was ultimately meant to be one of hope, as on the other side of death for the faithful lay eternal life.
Source: http://collection.nationalmuseum.se/eMP/eMuseumPlus?service=ExternalInterface&module=collection&objectId=23891&viewType=detailView
A Rose a Day No.41
This is a photograph posted a few days ago by my friend Peter Abraham in the UK on Instagram.
This is his website:
https://www.axisweb.org/p/peterabrahams/#info