Aesthetic Materialism

  As I have said, no one escapes from romanticism.  I'm not sure that there is any way out of romanticism.  Romanticism is modern culture.  I don't see any means of escape. That said, there are, directionally, some paths forward that we can recognize. The first is to admit that you are a romantic.  As the 12-steppers say, first, admit that you have a problem.  Romantics tend to think that they are not romantics.  They see others as being the romantics.  "He's the romantic, not me."  So, by recognizing that you are a romantic, and taking full responsibility for that, you take a step forward.  Another is to accept that there is no escape from romanticism.  So long as you are looking for an escape, you are still a romantic.  Once you reach some kind of acceptance, this can be a kind of step forward.  Call this the Kafkaesque strategy. A third crucial strategy is related to the first two: the recognition that everyone else is...

One way of understanding romanticism:  I had a conversation with friends - one of my friends, a sort of "New Atheist" type, was expressing frustration about art, and some of my other friends are in the art world. The New Atheist type said, "I wish there were a group of objective standards by which one could judge whether art is good or bad." I can understand my New Atheist friend's frustration.  But all my other friends got very angry about this, and utterly rejected it.  (Including me!) To my mind, this shows that we are still, in some sense, romantics. That is: romanticism resists the existence of a standard by which one would judge whether something is romantic.  To me, this shows that modernism is just an extension of romanticism, and postmodernism is an extension of modernism.   We are still romantics.  Even classicism is a kind of romanticism.  (The classicist romanticizes the classical.) I'm not sure that there is any way out of romanticis...

  How does limited government happen? 

  The Netherlands may have been the region in which the bourgeoisie as a class developed its defining characteristics.  But for more than a century - the century of industrial transformation - it was the UK that pulled ahead, dominated, and became the envy of all the other capitalist powers - and was therefore the hegemon of global imperialism. By the late 19th century, however, the United States of America had grown into the world's greatest industrial power - perhaps not a surprise, since the USA had almost double the population of the UK by the turn of the century (USA was around 76 million, UK around 44 million).  But this heralded a profound shift, not only in global supply chains, but in the character of imperialism and geopolitics.  And the peripheral countries of the global capitalist system recognized this shift, and saw in it both new challenges and new opportunities.  It may have taken a global crisis in imperialism (1914-1948), but by its end, the wo...

  Why do I love egos?  It's hard to say....  Why does anyone love what they love?  Why do you love those you love?  In a way, love never has a reason.  (Or at least, not one that one could put into words....)  Because if there is a cause of your love that you could name, that would imply a kind of exchange, or the possibility of an exchange.  It would imply that if something could take away the cause of your love, or present the possibility of getting what you love elsewhere, then you would no longer love the person you love - which would imply that you don't love them in the first place.  So, I cannot assert anything as the reason that I love egos - all I can say is, here are some of the ways that I notice that I love egos. ...And, I'll bet that you love some egos, too.  And I invite you to notice that you love them.  And perhaps notice that you love some egos that you hadn't noticed that you loved. For love is, truly, the answer. ...

  Sometimes you will find textbooks, magazine articles, etc., that date postmodernism as having arisen in the 1960s.  I think this is a perfectly silly, stupid, and arbitrary way of dating it, which should be completely scrapped.  If, by postmodernism, we mean something that arose in the 1960s, then postmodernism is truly meaningless, a totally arbitrary non-concept.  (And even in the sources that cite 1960 as the beginning of postmodernism usually hedge their bets, by putting in disclaimers that say something along the lines of "but we can find precursors of postmodernism even earlier" yadda yadda.) If postmodernism is to be a meaningful division of cultural history, then the most reasonable way of sketching it would be to say that postmodernism gradually arose during the great crisis that spanned from 1914 to 1948, and that it had been fully established by 1945, with the development of nuclear weaponry and the defeat of that particular wave of fascism.  I woul...