Re: Baltic States vs. the Holocaust Center

I'm writing quick and sloppy:

On Nov 18, 11:23 pm, Vladimir Makarenko <vmak...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
The Black Monk wrote:
On Nov 14, 7:48 pm, Vladimir Makarenko <vmak...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
The Black Monk wrote:

Frankly I think you misinterpret as personal or anti Cristian attacks
arguments against your position: you have some kind of "static" model of
the world where there is a "high" point and there was a decent from it,
etc. You are not alone in adhering to "static" model, - so do a few
people around here even though not centering on religion or middle
class/nobility as you do - the question is not about particularities but
rather the idea behind them. Your idea is about preserving status quo
like XIX cent physics or today's neocons (God forbid I accuse you of
being one).
It is not so much "preserving status quo" as lamenting when things
have gone off track. A healthy Europe was certainly not static.  When
Europe was still healthy it had been changing considerably - compare
Europe of 800 AD with Europe of 1600 AD.
You provoked me - tell me exact date like 01/06 of 1678 when in the past
  the Europe was better than it is today: socially, culturally, etc.

Well, Europe is not unitary - degeneration came to different countries
at different times.  Austria-Hungary of 1910 was much healthier and
better socially and culturally than is modern central and Eastern
Europe. France in, say, 1750 was socially and culturally superior to
modern France.  

Proof please - the Full Monty: reference frame, facts in it.

I'll stick to France. In 1750 France was the most powerful nation in
Europe and therefore perhaps the world. In 1795 it was the most
populous country in Europe (its population even greater than Russia's)
and the third most populous nation in the world. It was also the
center of Western culture. Practically all educated people, including
France's enemies, spoke French. France dominated literature, art and
thought. Do you need references for these facts?

Today, of course, modern France is merely a museum. The population
decline began right after the middle classes took over. Prussia
defeated France and captured Paris in only a few weeks in the 1870's.
The accumulated cultural capital and power were all cashed in during
the Napoleonic wars which spelled the end of French power (a similar
though even more extreme process happened to Germany after World War
II).

We must of course take into account technology when
making such comparisons: there is no reason to give credit for
immunizations etc.

I'll come back very badly on you below for that.
But right now may I ask - what about elementary medical, social,
educational grounds?

What about them? The advances began about 100 years prior to the
Enlightenment.

  to the takeover of the middle classes when European

technology was expanding for centuries prior to 1800

You made me scream WHAT?
Prior to late 1700 Europe was a techno retard living off by digesting
what was learned from th East and the Ancient Greece and Romans. THE
ONLY I repeat THE ONLY real revolutionary development was Lenses and
based on them Telescope (Greeks knew how to use lenses for magnification)..

Prior to late 1700 Europe was a "techno retard?" Ever hear of the
Scientific Revolution that began in 1540's and ended at the end of the
1600s:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_revolution

You do realize that the modern Scientific Method was created by an
English monk working under the patronage of a Pope:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Bacon

What Euros built their development on? Compass, Gun powder, Book
printing - tell me which of this inventions was European.

The compass was first invented in China but may have been invented in
Europe independently of China:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compass#Question_of_independent_European_invention

Book printing with movable type was a 15th century German invention.

It took from Europe centuries to digest
Greek/Roman/East(Indian-Muslim-Chinese) knowledge to develop/built at
least comparable knowledge databases

Those others had a 2000 year head start on Europeans who until the 5th
century were illiterate forest-dwelling barbarians, comparable to
Zulus or any Native American tribe.

Amazing that within 1000 years they circled the globe and a couple
centuries after that took it over.

European worldwide dominance was pretty much established prior to
1800.

Even a steam engine was done first in Russia

Really:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_engine#History

as well as first hot air flying balloon.
Until Enlightenment Europe was mostly a student.

One who surpassed the teachers long before the Enlightenment:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_revolution#New_ideas

I would not denigrate the refinement and novel application of
technology. Yes, the Chinese invented gunpowder but the Europeans
mastered its use in the military context.

BTW here is a list of European medieval technological innovations.
Some were adopted from ancient times and significantly improved and
refined, others were pure inventions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_technology#Medieval_technologies

(thank you wikipedia for saving me a lot of trouble and looking this
up myself)

The overall picture from the middle ages through the scientific
revolution of the pre-Enlightenment Renaissance is of ongoing
innovation, refinement and technological advancement. A constantly
increasing ability to control and modify the natural world. The
trajectory began centuries before the Enlightenment. That is the "big
picture."

To a certain extent this reminds me of the arrgument that the
Bolsheviks should get the credit for Russia's industrialization, even
though Russia had the fastest rate of industrial growth inthe world
inthe late 19th century, massive increase in railroads, thanks to
Stolypin's and others' reforms etc.

  (indeed, the most

technolgically advanced society in 1900 may well have been
conservative monarchial Germany, rather than middle class England or
France).

About 1900 all three were about on the same foot scientifically and
technologically.
  That was the whole point of WWI - alpha dogs of Europe decided to find
out who really is the Alpha.

The ones most interested in seeing this through were the middle
classes, who were the source and greatest supporters of nationalism.

....cut...

From, say 1200 to 1750 there was dramatic progress in all of Europe.
This progress continued in countries who were free of the French
Revolution Virus.
As a matter of fact the XX cent produced more architects then centuries
before: Alvar Aalto, Kenzo Tange, mis van der Roe, etc - this names I
didn't learn in college, these were house names (and I left out Russian
constructivists who fed by ideas the whole XX cent).

I wonder to what extent this is due to greater technological ability
(enabling one's imagination to be realized in greater ways than
before) versus genius.  With access to an artistic program and a
computer a 5 year old child can produce colors, images and animation
that would appear to be dazzling jaw-dropping magic for someone of
Andrei Rublev's time, but is it genius?

I can if to use your approach dismiss the whole Renaissance for use of
new technology - mathematical perspective and its hardware - camera
obscure. Or Romans for use of concrete etc.

Maybe. We won't know until a long time from now whether the modern
architects will be considered masterpiecs. However a bad sign is that
the supposedly ultramordenistic and radical work of the beginning
twentieth century appears outdated and a kitschy memento of its time.
The supposedly radical Bolshevik poster and art of the 1920's is more
outdated than a cheap 150 year old tea cup.

Or just point to Barcelona pavilion of mis van der Roe as an
architectural gem which didn't use any "high tech" but a different way
to organize space.

Coming back to my point about the graphic computer program, we ought
to seperate something shocking and impressive from something
beautiful.

Here also comes Wright, Aalto of whom neither used heavily high tech.



I am not comparing Kenzo Tange to a five year old, of course, I was
being extreme to illustrate the principal.

What movies they were making in XVI cent? None? Let me guess - the tech
wasn't there.
So maybe it is not that Art disappeared but changed the pathways it walks?

A good point, but this also suggests a different way of thinking in
comformity to or a reflection of  the different media.

I am missing what you said.

Over the centuries Europeans refined and developed verbal though to an
extent I think never matched in history. The novel is an ultimate
reflection of this process.

This refinement of verbal thought has basically been thrown away in
the modern world, in favor of quick and superficial visual imagery.

I don't even touch the question how culture got elevated beyond any
imaginable because middle class took over from bankrupt nobility and
exponential expansion of knowledge:
Really? Because it's interesting that in general societies dominated
politically, culturally and socially by the middle classes have failed
to produce Dostoyerskys, Mozarts, etc.
Dostoevsky, Mozart etc can come only once - we don't need multiple
copies of them.

Well, prior to Dostoyevsky someone could have said that everything
that possibly could have been said through the novel had been said.
And then Dostoyevsky appeared.  And after him others.

OK, how many Homers you know? Suddenly it stopped.

But poetry did not.

   But it

suddently, it basically stopped after the generation following the
Revolution. Mozart came once, but was followed by Beethoven.  Who is
there now?

How do we know?
My idea of what is happening right now is - dispersion: we do not depend
on each other anymore for survival as human units  we move - everyone in
chosen direction and this how we meet each other.

This reminds me more of decomposition than advancement. From my
favorite Russian philosopher Leontiev:

"The phenomena of egalitarian-liberal progress are comparable to the
phenomena of combustion, decomposition, the melting of ice (water
less free, limited by crystallization); they may be likened, for
example, to the phenomena of the cholera process, which gradually
transforms originally rather diverse people into more uniform corpses
(equality), then into almost completely comparable skeletons
(equality), and finally into free elements (relatively so, of course),
such as nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, and so on."

In these processes of decomposition, combustion, melting, the
progressive movement of cholera, one perceives the same phenomena.

1.The loss of the peculiarities which till then distinguished the
despotically formed whole tree, animal, whole texture, whole crystal,
etc.

2.A greater resemblance in the component parts, a greater inner
equality, a greater uniformity of the structure, etc.

3.The loss of former, strict, morphological outlines,; now everything
merges, more freely and uniformly.

Whichever of the states, ancient or modern, we may examine, in all of
them we find one and the same thing in common: simplicity and
uniformity in the beginning, greater equality and greater freedom (at
least de facto, if not legal freedom) than there will be
later...glancing at a plant sprouting from the soil, we do not yet
know what it will become. There are too few distinct features.

Afterwards we note a greater or lesser assertion of power, a more
profound or less sharp division of classes, a greater variety of life
and diversity of character in the regions.

At the same time, the wealth increases, on the one hand, and poverty,
on the other; the resources of pleasure become more varied, on the
one hand, while, on the other, the variety and refinement
(development) of sensations and needs gives birth to greater
sufferings, greater grief, greater mistakes and greater undertakings,
more poetry and more comedy;
the exploits of the educated - of Themistocles, Xenophon,
Aristophanes, Alexander - are on grander scale and more appealing than
the simple and crude exploits of Odysseus and Achilles. Then a
Sophocles appears, an Aristophanes appears, the ranting heroes
Corneille appear, the laughter of a Moliere resounds...Shakespeare or
Goethe.

In general, these complex, flowering ages are dominated by some kind
of aristocracy...The eupatridae of Athens, the feudal satraps of
Persia, the optimates of Rome, the marquises of France, the lords of
England, the Spartans of Laconia, the dvoryane of Russia, the pans of
Poland...

At the same time, because of the inner necessity of centralization,
there also exists a tendency towards absolute monarchial power,
which, either de jure or de facto, always asserts itself in an age of
flowering complexity. There appear on the scene remarkable dictators,
emperors, kings, or, at least, demagogues and tyrants (in the
Hellenic sense) of genius, such as Themistocles, Pericles, and so
on...."

Look at scb - what a
mosaic of people of different ethnicities, beliefs and whatever ideas -
how come?
Sometimes you make me think that it is me who believes in God, - I
really not sure what will hit my brain tomorrow in the morning.

You will argue that musical geniuses now write rock and

roll, the medium has changed.  This may be true, but it supports
rather than contradicts my claim about the social and cultural decline
now that the geniuses must lower themselves to appeal to the mass
tastes of the middle classes.

I have a VERY mean question - it is just a question: are you absolutely
sure that Rock is simpler than Classical? Give me a Measure.

Simple 3 chord rock and roll vs. Mozart? Are you serious?

Rock music has its place - a sort of folk music for generational
cohorts rather than for villages. But if the Mozarts of the world use
all their talents in the creation of simple folk tunes this is hardly
"progress."

Have you seen the movie Idiocracy?

I did. I think it is mediocre.

It is indeed mediocre but it offers a much more realistic view of the
future than does, for example, Star Trek.

Its

a dystopian view of the world in the 23rd century.  My memory is a bit
fuzzy, but I recall a claim in the movie about future scientists no
longer trying to cure diseases or explore space but insterd focusing
all their efforts on cosmetic surgery techniques or fat removasl. Yes,
those scientists were still geniuses.  But such a society has indeed
fallen.

As I said above - I do think that we as species part and I think it is
going to happen rather soon - two three centuries from now. What I don't
believe that those who will do better will forget behind those who made
wrong choices.

Hopefully.

Remember Borges story about helpless "Don Quixote" exact
copy written centuries later and how useless it was in comparison with
original?   Art is another face of science - it is a discovery - once
discovered it is left to students to learn and enjoy and go after
unknown for the rest.

Sure. But are all discoveries equal?.

Obviously not- e.g. - anything I report as discovery MUST be revered,
everything else MUST be sent to me for approval.



Did you ever had a self offensive thought that maybe we are just a bunch
of calcified brains and cannot grasp the new culture establishing itself
in front of our eyes? My nephew writes very strange - like daily notes
observations of life - trip to country house, the morning look of the
city, etc. All at best maybe max two pages long. Usually a paragraph or
two. Is this art? He is a generation of tech I hate - SMS, twitter -
laconic.

This brings me back to my comment on different thinking.  Can this new
generation engage in the sort of contemplative thought necessary to
produce or appreciate novels or for that matter Tarkovsky films?  Or
does it require quick and sharp but very shallow and fleeting
thoughts?  People capable of being fed tons of little bits of
information at once but who can't maintain a long train of thought.

Humans change the techno environments to suit them not changing
themselves to suit a new techno gadgets.

Yes. And the point is that previously they changed the environment to
suit the best whereas now thanks to democracy and the idolization of
the middle classes they focus not on what is better but on what is
average. In music, there is no incentive to produce anything other
than folk music for the masses (rock and roll). The novel is
basically dead, etc. The replacement even of dramas and such on
television by "reality shows" is just another step in this process of
degeneration.

It is very philosophical
question you ask - are we on a way of self improvement or self
destruction - who knows.
I frankly do not know if you familiar with a Bible of my generation -
"Picnic aside the road" but if you are not I strongly recommend - almost
everything what we discuss here is answered there  - e.g. about tech -
P.A.R., 18-9, "and he said - you m**** ", etc.
Just joking.

I didn't get it - I was born in the 70's.


Oswald Spengler saw this sort of transformation of people's minds
about 80 years ago:

"Man does not speak to man, the press and its associate, the
electrical news service, keep the waking consciousness of whole
peoples and continents under a deafening drum-fire of theses,
catchwords, standpoints, scenes, feelings, day by day and year by
year, so that every Ego becomes a mere function of a monstrous
intellectual Something.

Today we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual
artillery that hardly anyone can attain tot he inward detachment that
is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama.  The will-to-
power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished off its
masterpiece so well that the object's sense of freedom is actually
*flattered* by the most thorough- going enslavement that has ever
existed.  The liberal bourgeois mind is actually *proud* of the
abolition of censorship, the last restraint, while the dictator of the
press keeps the slave-gang of his readers under the whip of his
leading articles, telegrams and pictures.  The book-world, with its
profusion of standpoints that compelled thought to select and
criticize, is now a profession for the few.

What is truth?  For the multitude, that which it continually hears and
read.  What the Press wills, is true.  Three weeks of press  work, and
the truth is acknowledged by everybody.  The Classical rhetoric, too,
was designed for effect and not content - as Shakespeare brilliantly
demonstrates in Antony's funerasl oration - but it did limit itself to
the bodily audience and the moment.  What the dynamism of our press
wants is *permanent* effectiveness.  It must keep men's minds
continually under its influence.  Its arguments are overthrown as soon
as the financial power passes over to the counter-arguments and brings
these still oftener to men's ear.  At that moment the needle of public
opinion swings round to the stronger pole.  Everybody convinces
himself at once of the new truth,
and regards himself awakened out of error...

Through money, democracy becomes its own destroyer, after money has
destroyed intellect..."

Spengler was speaking of the mass media of daily papers.  The current
twitter culture seems to be a further lightyears-ahead development of
this same process.

The world became transparent : before different social estates haven't
seen each other - now everything - from tabloids to loud music is just
next door. Otherwise nothing changed - I listen to Mozart, you and Vello
to Lube - "Makhorochka".

LOL.

warmest regards,

BM

Sorry, have to wrap it up.
Later.

VM.

If quantity were more important
than quality one would assume that thanks to mass literacy, in which
literally there are millions more people capable to producing culture,
there would be hundreds of Mozarts and Dostoyevskys and Chekhovs.
Hmmm...yet it hasn't happened, has it? It is not about the nobles as
individuals but about the system. Pre-Revolutionary Russia produced
giants.  This dramatically ceased after the system was destroyed.
Habsburg Vienna was perhaps the cultural center of the world.
Afterwards?
Here is what critics consider to be the single most significant work
of art of the middle-class dominated 20th century:
http://www.newsgd.com/culture/art/200412090042.htm
It is as comparable to Rembrandt as a culture dominated by the middle
class is to one in its healthy, traditional form.
a simple example - Moshkov Library
alone put under tips of fingers of millions and tens of millions of
people tens and tens of thousands of book volumes of the creme of the
creme of human thought from all around the globe. Alexandria Library is
just a provincial reading room in comparison.
That's great.  However I will remind you that technological progress
was dramatic and incredible for centuries before the middle class
takeover.
No it was not because there is a simple and very straightforward metric
to measure techo progress - consumption of energy which stayed almost
flat throughout history of mankind till the mid of XIX cent.

Really?  Because the amount of energy consumed was equal, there was no
technologival progress from 500 AD until 1700 AD when Euroepans went
from being forest-dwelling barbarians a la the Iroquois to people who
had gone to all corners of the world and conquered much of it? From
people building crude fortresses to baroque (there it is, Ostap!
Sorry...) cathedrals and palaces. Don't forget that genetics was
discovered by a monk through observing plants in his monastary and
that there were plenty of giants (Newton, Copernicus, Descartes, etc.
etc.) from the vanished pre-middle class dominated European world.
Monarchial Germany dominated by the nobility gave the world Einstein,
after all.  If they had held back society so much we should expect
many more Einsteins by now.  But there aren't any.  Because an
Einstein can only come once, or rather because the conditions for
producing an Eisntein, or a Decartes, or a Copernicus, or a Newton no
longer exist.  I suspect the latter.  And so now we don't have
Einsteins or Kants but Dawkins.

regards,

BM

VM.- Hide quoted text -

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