Self-Transcendence Part II

Part I    Self-Betrayal

Part II  The Destroyers

Part III The Heroes

Part IV The Defenses

Part V  Today and Tomorrow

The Destroyers

Introduction

Self-Transcendence Part I ended with:

"Now that I have offered an answer to the question To what extent is self-transcendence self-betrayal?, maybe we should back up a bit and ask a much easier and obvious question, What is self-transcendence?"

Readers familiar with my writing on this subject know that the simplest answer is self-transcendence is cultural transcendence and visa versa.

So an even simpler question would be Why self-tanscendence?

That is, What drives one to self-transcendence? Or, more to the point of Part II, When did self-transcendence get started? The short answer?

The 19th century. Why the 19th century? Well….

Let’s just say that the subject of the 19th century, as it relates to self-transcendence, will be our focus in Part II. Or rather, the survival of the 19th century into the 20th and 21st centuries. That it does survive there is no question. Americans live in the ugliest country in the world. It was ugly when I left 25 years ago and is even uglier now, if you can believe it.

The point here is that that ugliness is largely the product of the 19th century.

I’m not just talking about the country's architecture, but it’s people too, and its attitudes, its violence, its bullying (moral and physical, foreign and domestic), its politics, which avoids problem-solving the way the Devil shuns holy water, while squandering power so as to exchange one prejudice for another, and calling it all - Progress. This list doesn’t even scratch the surface, so I could go on, but I’d never finish. Instead I'll just add that even its once beautiful National Parks are now as ugly as the rest of that country.

I

Philadelphia is not just the birthplace of the United States, nor is it just the birthplace of my parents, and the city where the family I was born into, and later escaped from, started. Not at all. It was much more than that. It was also The Capital of World Class Ugly even before my parents were married.

But it definitely earned that title by the mid-50’s and held on to it for some decades after. Sure, in the 1980's it got a bit of the corporate clean up that most major cities across the United States did, and that lasted a short while.

But now? It’s back to where it seems to want to be, or where it belongs. In short, it’s back to being ugly. But this time a super-sized, drug-induced, child abused, poverty stricken, and above all, hostile elite-driven, megaton ugly.

Been to Kennsington lately?

Anyway, I’d like to direct attention to something that can serve as an example of what happened to Philadelphia, and how the point of that example can be applied to the rest of the country, and the rest of the Western world, and not just the West, thereby providing us with an historical perspective for the justification of self-transcendence. That example?

The row house.

The row house was not a 19th century idea, of course, but comes from an earlier time and continues to the present, as the wretched wastes of not just the incurable, irredeemable, new ugly of 21st Philadelphia makes so hideously clear, but even the old ugly Philadelphia that I remember as a child and, after we moved out of the city, as a young adult whenever I’d go into town (I was always grateful for the aptly named Speed Line, a rapid transit system that offered a fast and reliable way to the get the fuck out of Dodge whenever it was time to go home after a night out, or whatever).

My point is, what was done with the row house* in Philadelphia was the responsibility of the 19th century alone. When over 300 years ago Philadelphia was planned and began to grow, its builders had in mind the ancient notion of the Cty, the Urbs, the concentration within a limited area of the energies which make civilization possible. To be civilized is to be the product of a city, a place one can walk around in a couple of hours, or less, a place like Athens, or Rome, or London - in the time of Shakespeare.

*Since the hostile elite are busy as bees erasing History itself, let alone historical sites like the 18th century row house, this is as close as I could come to an example of a nice one.

Such a city the planners of Philadelphia had in mind.

Quiet streets, red and white, green squares, churches, buildings of civic dignity, markets, schools, small manufacturing concerns, great wharves, and in the background the Schuylkill, clean and wild, with farms and country houses, radiant in the clean air. A clean country, new, rich, and in the center of it all, the city, small and energetic, in a word - civilized. Philadelphia was the ideal of European civic imagination come to life. It was beautiful!

What the fuck happened to it?

The row house, a simple idea, and a good idea, when, as the 18th century planned, the houses were built around squares, or near them, and with the open country only two or three miles away! Brilliant idea. Beautiful place.

But in the 19th century something happened.

The squares were forgotten, the nearness of the countryside was forgotten, the necessary limits of a proper city were forgotten. What was it replaced with? Why was it replaced? And exactly Who replaced it? Who fought back against the destruction, anyone? How can those of us concerned about our present dilemma and future prospects respond now? The first three questions will take up the rest of Part II. The questions, Who responded then?, and How can we respond now?, will be answered later in Part III.

II

What was it replaced with? Specifically, what were the squares, the nearness of the countryside, and the necessary limits of any city, let alone Philadelphia, replaced with? In a word - Monotony. City block after block, mile after mile, pushing the country farther and farther away, blocks, miles of big ugly houses, blocks, miles of little ugly houses, endlessly stretching along drearily straight streets, no surprise, no relief, all appallingly alike, differing only in the increasing ugliness as the century wore on. Everything all alike, the houses, the mill-yards, the metal-working shops, the glass companies, all uniformly ugly, revolting, and repellent, like the people - a vast city more aesthetically arid than the arctic in midwinter.

Was there some vast conspiracy to make Philadelphia the ugliest city in the history of the world? Was there some kind of diabolical force at work?

Seriously, what the fuck happened to three centuries of the Renaissance culimnating in the peerless 18th century? What happened to the hundreds of years of Western Cultural Life, that are still cherished, and rightfully so, by “a happy few” in Europe and The US, a cultural life so masterly that a few forlorn fragments in the form of paintings are treasured in museums and pored over with revereance, awe, and a terrible nostalgia so painful it can drive you crazy and persuade you that you are. Of course, the crazy ones were and are The Destroyers. But we’re not ready to turn to them yet.

What could have happened that tempted the 19th century to pervert man’s most wonderful invention, the city, a place to which everyone wanted to come, into a place from which everyone wants to leave?

III

Though there is no single causal force that one can point to, there is no question that there was a primary driving force behind it all. Though it would be convenient to blame it all on blind economic forces, or population pressures arising from the population explosion (which, it is obvious, the West never recovered from), just as it would be reassuring to think of 19th century London in the same way, a city that some said at the time had become so ugly it was actually improved by the German bombing of WWII.

But we can’t do that. We can’t pin it on a single causal force.

But, we can identify and talk about, at least in a general way, the primary driving force behind it all. The planners and builders of what we once had in Europe and America were surrounded by the evidences of an infinitely superior ideal of city life, that didn’t just come from out of nowhere, but was evolved from centuries and centuries of definite and obvious values.

All of that was not merely abandoned. It was furiously denied, and savagely attacked. Such a denial, such hatred and destruction, could only have come from an opposing set of values, a concept of life to which the earlier ideal was deliberately sacrificed, together with its products, manifestations, and eventually, it’s people. So powerful and destructive was this driving force that was busy transforming throughout the United States and Western Europe, once beautiful cities into ugly dumps, that in a few years there was a rebellion by men like Ruskin and Morris, and in the USA Greenough and Olmstead, and that rebellion continues today and though hardly more powerful than it was two hundred years ago it is far more widespread, like the damage these rebels were responding to then and are responding to now.

IV

As early as 1820 Robert Southey and William Wordsworth saw what was coming, but their warnings were laughed at. Even after the new pattern was established similar warnings by Ruskin were compared to the ravings of a mad man. Obviously, the old ugly continues today in the new ugly, only it is no longer the product of a tiny group of builders (destroyers) and their choir of yes men. No. Today it is the product of entire cities, states, and nations.*

*Better proof that the human mind is literally insane would be impossible to imagine.

It’d be great to reduce this Revolution of Ugly to a single causal force, a revolution so deadly to human health and happiness, a revolution so destructive of values passionately and thoughtfully worked out over 5,000 years, but I can’t. That would be inaccurate and dishonest.*

*In other words, it would be a perfect reflection of the revolutionaries of ugly. Because that's exactly how they think, to the extent they think at all, ie; inaccurately and dishonestly, and of course, self-righteously. But one gets the point. Nothing about them could ever be confused with Reason.

It wasn’t just an excess of energy, itself the result of the immense growth of the population, seemingly from out of nowhere, and it definitely can’t be reduced to a little thing like classical economic theory. That was at best a feeble rationalization of what people were doing because they had no choice.

Nor was it simply “The Decline of the West” in the 19th century, since the Eastern World was also in bad shape and had been for a long time.

I can’t tell you what caused it all. What I can tell you is that a few great men rebelled. These rebels were the heroes of a culture crisis. And though these rebels will be the focus of Part III, what we can say about them now is what they were responding to. They were responding to the consequences of the 19th century, consequences that were inimical to the health, happiness, and sanity of the human race, and still are. But, above all, they were responding directly to the worst consequence of the 19th century - The Destroyers.

Throughout the whole world, but especially in the West, The Destroyers turned upon mankind’s achievements, the world that took 5,000 years to create, a natural world even more beautiful than it was when he started cultivating it, a world to which he had added thousands of cities - in China, India, Africa, in North and South America, throughout Europe - cities small and yet centers of proud cultures, cities so charming that old prints of them fill us with that terrible nostalgia mentioned above. The Destroyers turned on this world and began, deliberately and consciously, to destroy it!

And today, all over the world, that destruction continues.

Why did they do it? Because they’re The Destroyers, of course. Destruction is what they’re all about. Destruction, Power, and Hate. That’s why today they use their power to create Hate Speech Laws to hide behind, cowards that they are, and bullies, of course, since the two go together. Everything about them is psychological projection and moral reversal. Destruction is what they do because it’s who they are. And now we're back to our rebels.

These heroes of a cullture crisis started a tradition of rebellion, a rebellion that continues today, and that I myself am operating out of as we speak. So, to those great men and their tradition of rebellion in Part III, I shall turn.

Until then.