by
Adam Kirsch
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[...] Caring about our group can be considered a kind of false consciousness only if there is also a true consciousness, which would entail caring about our own individual genetic prospects. But while discussions of evolution often use metaphors of agency--as when we talk of evolution "selecting for" a trait--for a gene there is no such thing as "caring" one way or another. There is only an endless process of differential reproduction, in which genes that make more copies of themselves outnumber genes that make fewer copies. In other words, it makes literally no sense for a human being to care about her own genes or feel duped if she is made to care about someone else's genes. There is no one, no thing, to be the object of this concern. When we say that we care about our genes, what we really mean is that we care about our selves--but the self is an entity of an entirely different order, a humanly created order with its own priorities and values. It is because he wanted to perpetuate his self that Shakespeare wrote his boasting poems. Selves live by other means than genes do.
When Fukuyama published his book, in 1992, he was specifically concerned with the loss of thymos among Americans. It was America that had won the Cold War, thus establishing the uncontestable superiority of liberal democracy and inaugurating the end of History. Yet it was also America that, to Fukuyama, seemed to be growing soft in its prosperity--concerned with material goods and self-esteem, indifferent to duty and sacrifice. "Those earnest young people trooping off to law and business school," he wrote, "who anxiously fill out their resumes in hopes of maintaining the lifestyles to which they believe themselves entitled, seem to be much more in danger of becoming last men, rather than reviving the passions of the first man." [...]
honestly Fukuyama has good point here. links to how I feel about fitting within the system etc
Three more different writers could hardly be invented--which makes it all the more suggestive that their portraits of the spiritual state of contemporary Europe are so powerfully complementary. They show us a Europe that is affluent and tolerant, enjoying all the material blessings that human beings have always struggled for, and that the Europeans of seventy years ago would have thought unattainable. Yet these three books are also haunted by intimations of belatedness and decline, by the fear that Europe has too much history behind it to thrive. They suggest that currents of rage and despair are still coursing beneath the calm surface of society, occasionally erupting into violence. And they worry about what will happen when a Europe gorged on its historical good fortune has to defend itself against an envious and resentful world.
[...] the occult appears rather institutionalized, objectified and, to a large extent, socialized [...]
[...] The type of people we are concerned with take astrology for granted, much like psychiatry, symphony concerts or political parties; they accept it because it exists, without much reflection, provided only that their own psychological demands somehow correspond to the offer. They are hardly interested in the justification of the system. In the newspaper column to which this monograph is mainly devoted the mechanics of the astrological system are never divulged and the readers are presented only with the alleged results of astrological reasoning in which the reader does not actively participate.
[...] People always wanted to learn from occult signs what to expect and do; in fact, superstition is largely a residue of animistic magical practices by which ancient humanity tried to influence or control the course of events. But the sobriety, nay the overrealism, of our material at the expense of anything remotely reminiscent of the supranatural seems to be one of its most paradoxical and challenging features. Overrealism in itself may be, in some directions, irrational, in the sense of that overdeveloped and self-destructive shrewdness of self interest, pointed out before. In addition it will be proved during the course of our study that astrological irrationality has largely been reduced to a purely formal characteristic: abstract authority.
[...] Hardly ever does the practical advice tendered to the reader transgress the limits of what one finds in any column dealing with human relations and popular psychology. The only difference is that the writer leans on his distinctly magical and irrational authority which seems to be strangely out of proportion with the common-sense content of what he has to offer. This discrepancy cannot be regarded as accidental. [...]
[...] The fact that one cannot countenance two contradictory desires at the same time, that, as it is loosely called, one cannot have one’s cake and eat it too, induces the advice that irreconcilable activities simply should be undertaken at various times indicated by celestial configurations. This again feeds on realistic elements: the order of everyday life takes care of a number of antinomies of existence, such as that of work and leisure or of public functions and private existence. Such antinomies are taken up by the column, hypostatized and treated as though they were simple dichotomies of the natural order of things rather than sociologically conditioned patterns. Everything can be solved, so runs the implicit argument, if one only chooses the right time, and if one fails, this is merely due to a lack of understanding of some supposedly cosmic rhythm. [...]
bi-phasic approach section
By dichotomies of this kind a pseudo-solution of difficulties is achieved: either–or relationships are transformed into first–next relationships. Pleasure thus becomes the award of work, work the atonement for pleasure.
As to pleasure, it is, according to the bi-phasic approach, mainly reserved for P.M. and for holidays as though there were an a priori understanding between celestial revelations and the present calendar system. For the sake of variation and in order not to make the bi-phasic monotony too obvious, there are exceptions to the rule.
work and pleasure
he later castigates the idea of "pleasure" as being a means to an end (maintaining status, rational self-interest); just like @ me next time adorno