Daft Punk vs. Massive Attack

Leigh mentions that the humanity of the so-called Bristol sound is what defines it, along with its socially aware attitude.  Daft Punk (think Human After All) is all about humanity!  Just like Kraftwerk, Daft Punk's songs are inexplicably in pieced-together English, and, like Kraftwerk, Daft Punk sends a vaguely political message.  In the end, though, Daft Punk is all about having fun:  Human After All is probably less about racism than a riff on their hugely famous robot costumes.  I mean, they're probably more related to Richard Wagner and his idea of the gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art: they dig the total work of awesome, performing as they do in a totally sick triangle.

Daft Punk's influence's influence's influence (at least)--maybe the great-grandfather of French techno?

Edgar Varèse, the maybe-father of electronic music, was born in France in the nineteenth century.  His music, blurring as it does the boundary between electronic music and the normal sort, begins to describe what we might call the essential characteristic of electronic music:  noisiness.  His music, like Stockhausen's, is an exploration of sound and noise; unlike Stockhausen (who does claim to be influenced by Varèse), Varèse flirted with Dadaism and Surrealism before finally becoming grounded in his own musical language.  Before electronic music became a genre unto itself, Varèse acted upon electricity as a tool for making the jarring, unusual, and abstract music that he had previously only tried in such works as "Ionisation," a piece solely for percussion.

Varèse was still tied to the avant-garde of the early twentieth century, though.  Like them (in particular the group of six French composers who, like Satie, tried to establish a new musical language modeled on the rhythms of jazz), Varèse was obsessed with rhythm and timbre, as is evident in his "Poème electronique," a sort of amplification of Le Corbusier's glorified powerpoint presentation.  In evidence is the abstraction, the collage, and the isolated meaningfulness of sound, as well as his earlier quasi-Dadaist sentiment:

Daft Punk's influence: Primal Scream

I find myself, like Daft Punk, getting a little repetitive when I say again that Daft Punk is all about mixing:  their music is a mix of styles, genres, and eras.  Their influences are then obviously varied, ranging from the Beach Boys and Brian Wilson to Romanthony or Bob Marley.  But a major influence in terms of genre was the album Screamadelica by Primal Scream.

Primal Scream was a British band and major member of the acid house scene in the nineties.  Their career merged their early indie rock aesthetic and finally their dance/ house aesthetic.  Their song "Movin' on up" was immensely popular and serves as a good example of their mixture of rock with dance:

Stock-friggin'-hausen and Daft Punk (also John Adams?)

Dearest Liz,

I read your post about Stockhausen and I thought I'd share some thoughts (because I think he is awesome).  Alex Ross, in his short name-dropping session here, draws some attention to Stockhausen's enormous Gruppen (1955-1957).  I mention this mainly by way of saying that Stockhausen and the (at the time) new world of electronic music was still entirely an extension of what snobs call the classical tradition (their fusion is evident as recently as in John Adams's Doctor Atomic).  This is because electronic music, like so much of the other music of the twentieth century, is obsessed with music as sound:  the simple, quasi-scientific abstraction of sound in space, of waves and collisions and overlapping interferences.  More than most, Stockhausen was absolutely enthralled by this abstraction.  In his review of the performance of Gruppen, Alex Ross describes how the the space is almost as important as the music:  audience members are advised to change seats in between the two consecutive performances so as best to hear the spatial interaction between the three competing orchestras.

Just as Doctor Atomic is a sort of collage of various traditions and cultures (featuring as it does such varied sources as Baudelaire, the Bhagavad Gita, the sonnets of John Donne, and the musical traditions of Wagner, Stravinsky, medieval religious music, and pop songs from the forties), Daft Punk's music is a collage of international phenomena (there's an alarmist video on Youtube decrying Daft Punk's samples from terrible pop music that no-one listens to).  Their music, which is predominantly transformed from others' inferior work, is a sort of collage of international tendencies and fads that serves as a cute analogy to France's increasingly varied and international culture that finds the warriors of tradition dug in against the polluting influence of foreigners.

Stockhausen was a little bit of a fad himself, but electronic music has so far survived without him.  Stockhausen, even into his later years (he died in 2007), was such a mixture of odd parts, avant-garde German intellectual and hippie (he was called the Pied Piper of the Youth at some point), that he never really found a lasting base.  His abstract, unpopular philosophizing of September 16, 2001, on the events only five days earlier combined with his claim that he emanated from the star Sirius made him a kind of collage.

Interstella 5555, the animated House Musical

Interstella 5555 tells the story of an alien band that is kidnapped, taken to Earth, and made famous.  Their memories erased and put on disks, the band, mind-controlled by an evil manager, is finally saved by a loyal fan who gives his life to return them to their home planet.

As a sort of document of Daft Punk's musical universe, Interstella 5555 provides more than adequate fodder for some thoughts about identity.  The heroes obviously stand in for Daft Punk (besides performing Daft Punk songs, the end of the movie sees the camera slowly zoom out from a close-up of a "One More Time" record playing).  Daft Punk's views on pretty much everything are thus revealed to us:

5.  Daft Punk does it for the music and for the fans.  Besides the guitar-glorification of most of Daft Punk's music the blue-skinned band featured in the movie has not one but two guitars.  Their music, which is in some ways a celebration of pop culture throughout the ages (guess the origins of the samples in this, for example), is a kind of mélange of international past and present.

5.  Daft Punk is international.  The band in the movie begins by playing to a crowd of people inhabiting a planet entirely composed of blue-skinned people.  Their unity is destroyed when they are transformed (on Earth) into a band composed of some white guys and some black guys.  On Earth as well as on blue-planet, though, their popularity goes beyond race and nationality.

5.  Daft Punk is also nationalist/sectionalist.  The band in the movie urgently wishes to return to their home planet (country?).  The end message of the movie seems to condemn meddling in the affairs of others.

5.  Music will transform the world and bring peace.  The loyal fan (who dies to save his band) flies around in a sort of spaceship guitar, bringing peace to our band and freeing the innocent.  The unity in the crowd in the opening scene of the movie is mirrored by the unified gyrations of the crowd at the end.

It might also be worthy of note that Interstella 5555 was a thoroughly international venture, composed half by the French Daft Punk and half by the Japanese animator/director Takenouchi.

As requested

A very brief tour of Jewish history in Europe and some thoughts:

In 1492, the Jews were expelled from Spain.  At the time, anti-Semitism ran rampant.

Jews became citizens in the French Revolution (though the general anti-religion sentiment during the Terror obviously made times tough); Napoleon laws creating a sort of mini-Jewish state in France, but also declared all debts to Jews annulled and other such discriminatory laws (in 1808).

Jewish situations across Europe differed in the nineteenth century; France was fairly tolerant, but in, say, most of what is now Italy Jews were confined to ghettos until around 1870.  In the late nineteenth century, there are two developments:  zionism (Herzl) but also the Dreyfus affair.

I need hardly dwell on the Holocaust, where approximately six million Jews were killed, but the twentieth century also saw the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.  There are currently approximately 2 million Jews now living in Europe.

The most interesting aspect of anti-Semitism throughout European history is its transformation from a religious discrimination to a racial one.  I'm not sure about this last part, but I believe that it happens some time around the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth; the anti-Semitism of Wagner would have been dispelled had Jews converted to Christianity, but the anti-Semitism of Hitler was racial.  It would make sense if this corresponded to the pseudo-scientific ideas that abounded about racial hierarchies and such around the turn of the century, but I have no evidence to support this.

Some sources:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Europe

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/vjw/France.html

and the textbook

Before I get started on Daft Punk

...I thought it would be worthwhile to talk about what sort of things could make them characteristically French.

--Foreign attitudes

The French colonial effort was centered around the French-ification of the colonized.  Even today, the attitude of the French towards their immigrant population is hugely different from the American one.  Whereas Mexican immigrants are still Mexican in the United States, French immigrants become French when they immigrate.

The present-day French attitude towards immigration is different from that of the immediate post-war period.  Even though France, since 1973, has not encouraged immigration (and, for some periods of time, positively discouraged it) to France, its political attitude towards foreigners is not xenophobic like in the United States.  (This is not to say that there are no xenophobes in France; there is widespread xenophobic sentiment, at least according to Ms. Guiraudon.)

In her paper, Ms. Guiraudon obliquely refers to the growing globalization that has slowly been expressing itself in Europe.  When hundreds of Kurdish immigrants were beached on French shores, the British were upset because they suspected that the Kurds would be headed to Great Britain.  That is to say, France's coast is the last stronghold of European integrity.  France's politicians were then torn:  to speak against illegal immigration or to express solidarity with the refugees?  Their different reactions highlights the dual expression of France:  France at home and France abroad, as part of a greater Europe.

Decolonization totally sucked for everyone

Decolonization sucked for the western powers because they lost all their colonies! But Great Britain and the other western powers did maintain a pretty serious amount of influence in the Middle East and Latin America and Africa and pretty much everywhere, so it wasn't the end of the world for them.

It also looked like an opportunity for ze Russians because of all these new governments coming onto the market.  It was an opportunity for communism! But the USA did a pretty good job of installing autocratic, fascistic states in the place of old colonies.  Bummer for the Russians!

Decolonization at least initially sucked for the ex-colonies because of all these foreign interests and stuff.  In the long term it sucked, too, because the ex-colonies had to deal with national boundaries and things like that that weren't really very accurate reflections of where nations should lie and stuff like that.

So you know how everyone goes like, "Man, the thirties were the dishonest decade, la la la?"

The problem that France, England, and the USA had to deal with during the Second World War was that of their uneasy alliance with the Soviet Union.  Before the war, one rationale for the appeasement of Hitler's insatiable territorial appetite had been the creation of fascist buffer states in eastern Europe that could halt the expansion of Soviet Communism.  The war didn't change anything; before the war we allied with the fascists against the communists, during the war we allied with the communists against the fascists, and after the war we allied with the fascists against the communists.  (Not to keep harping on the same tune, but Tim Weiner in Legacy of Ashes mentions that most of the CIA agents that were recruited in eastern Europe were either ex-Nazis or otherwise undesirable.)  This is why the forties were totally the dishonest decade.

My version of our argument

Argument:  It matters that Daft Punk is French.  As a French band, they conform to (maybe even represent) French social, cultural, and political values and imperatives.

And, for kicks:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZeRqcTO_do&feature=related

Simulation, day 2: Why we didn't blow ourselves up

We didn't blow ourselves up because the Soviets knew next to nothing about the Americans and the Americans knew next to nothing about the Soviets.  The paranoia that grew out of poor intelligence (on both sides, but especially the American side) led to such scare tactics as Kennedy's missile gap.  In our simulation, however, it was brutally obvious to us (the Soviets) what the nuclear capabilities of our rivals were, and we also knew that they would not learn of our order to bomb them.  We weren't as isolated and afraid as our real-life Soviet counterparts.

Simulation, day 1

I thought I'd mention one problem with our simulation.  In the simulation, each side could acquire accurate information about the opposition by putting points into spying.  In real life, however, the Soviets severely outmatched the Americans in this regard.  Throughout much of the fifties and sixties, the CIA was focusing more on failed "covert operations" than on gathering intelligence.  In fact, according, at least, to Tim Weiner, the CIA was outmanned and outgunned from the beginning, and its earliest exploits were foiled because Soviet intelligence had infiltrated it at every level.  The question arises:  how did we win?  And why didn't we blow ourselves up?  (Stay tuned, I guess.)

Essay topics

So, guys, what's up?  Terrible music or Talleyrand?

"Communism was one manifestation of a growing desire amongst the European people for stability and security."

HELLA NOT, BRO

According to Charlie, the people of Russia (and, more generally, some other Europeans) willingly sacrificed personal liberty so that they would have stability and security.  False false false!  Neither the Germans nor the Italians nor the Russians sat down together and voted to erase personal liberty in favor of some idea of personal and national security and safety.  Hitler achieved power legitimately, then consolidated it under his control, never once consulting the dudes.  Mussolini marched to Rome, was given the government, and took over from there, only to be bloodily murdered in a riot (hardly a dignified exit from office).  The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 came about because of a minority's violence, not the greater expression of the will of the people.  When Stalin came to power in the thirties, it was not immediately clear that he planned to cleanse the government of anybody remotely ethical or competent.  The dudes never decided!

Appeasement

Why is everyone so hard on appeasement?  It was totally a good idea, if you realize that nobody had any ideas about Hitler's real intentions of taking over the known world.  The imperative, the absolute necessity of preventing another war like the Great one was, in the thirties, vastly more important than, say, the long-term military defenses of Czechoslovakia.  Germany had (deservedly) already gotten a pretty raw deal with respect to the Treaty of Versailles, and Chamberlain probably felt, just as Hitler did, that Germany was taking back what was rightfully hers.  The idea that appeasement was spineless corresponds exactly to the puerile notion that a powerful, masculine approach to foreign policy is one that involves the deaths of millions.  It wasn't like there never was a war; when things got out of hand, England responded.  I don't fault them for waiting.

Repentant Nazis and the other kind

While the banal, platitude-spewing evil of Höss is worthy of disgust, Liz's response to Leigh's post reminded me of a New York Times article that I had seen recently about the Neo-Nazi problem in Passau that mentions the other kind of evil:  the unrepentant evil.  (Hitler apparently spent some amount of time in Passau, and, while this isn't exactly stressed on the government tourism website, this visit has made Passau a kind of Neo-Nazi Mecca.)  The article is about an outspoken opponent to the radical NPD, a far-right political party of sorts, who was recently stabbed in connection to his insistence that a recently-dead former Nazi be exhumed so that the swastika-flag illegally buried with him could be removed.  It first blows my mind that a former Nazi (who died within the last couple of years) is still motivated by whatever disgusting forces drove him to Nazism over fifty years ago, and it second blows my mind that there is even a percentage of crime in Bavaria that can be attributed to far-right groups; it seems like this is actually a problem.

Why World War I and World War II are really the same thing

We can agree that two wars are different only when they are fought by different countries over different things, and I posit that World War II, which was fought by substantially the same countries as World War I, was also fought over the same thing:  whether or not German nationalism could take over the world.

Apparently some people disagree with me (this guy mentioned something to that effect), i.e. those who put it that World War II was a referendum on fascism.  To this I say:  Fascism is first and foremost nationalistic, so we're not entirely in disagreement.  All of fascism's tenets--the individual's personal subjection in the face of the state, the all-powerful centralized government, the cult of the mass spectacle and the strong man, and even the comfortable things like free education--are nationalist in nature.  So, just as I posit that World War I came about almost entirely because of German nationalism, I posit that World War II broke loose under the strain of German (but also Italian) nationalism.

Some thoughts on the debate and fascism

For some reason there is a widespread misconception (here, for example) that there is some sort of trade-off between fascism and liberal democracy--that fascism offers stability, security, a sense of well-being, and economic, industrial, and political efficiency at some small cost to personal liberty, whereas liberal democracy offers the protection of individual liberties at the cost of all the rest.  This is a falsehood bred by a convenient simplification of either scheme of government!  Fascism is less stable in the long-term (but, granted, typically more stable in the short-term due to conscientious police-work) because it is not necessarily sanctioned by the people; fascism is less secure from outside pressure and war in the long-term because of its militant, nationalistic, and confrontational nature; fascism fails to give a long-term sense of well-being to its victims because parades really aren't everything; and finally, the economic, industrial, and political efficiency attributed to fascism is a fantasy.  Many democracies have mechanisms for quick, top-down (autocratic, almost) reform; usually it comes about that what is most needed is swept through the legislature by popular mandate.

On flexible allegiance

Liz, you said that the Spanish Civil War reminds you of the Greek war for independence in its proxy nature, and that makes me think (not to leap into the future or anything) of the Cold War. Someone remarked that in the Cold War we allied with the fascists to defeat the communists, just as we had previously allied (in World War II) with the communists to defeat the fascists.  Likewise, in the Spanish Civil War, all sorts of pinkos from the West rallied to the anti-fascist cause.  But how can Europe countenance such a flexible allegiance?

This is not such a polar swap of ideals for Europeans, though.  Just as the United States was preserving its interests by first allying with the communists and then the fascists, Europe was paralyzed by mutually exclusive national interests.  Italy, always the great hangers-on, had no problem leaning Socialist and then fascist and then allying with Hitler (but the tide turned again in the riots where Mussolini was killed).  Since 1871, the German national interest had been at odds with the rest of Europe, and Great Britain remained the enforcer of the antiquated Congress of Vienna.

More on fascism

To the democracy girls:

There aren't a lot of things upon which Mussolini and I agree, but I really don't see how periodically consulting the people makes a government more or less evil than one that doesn't.  Mussolini's dictatorship was ugly, but was it by virtue of it being fascist that it was ugly?  Andra leveled the charge of brainwashing, but that's just unfair.  Hitler, for example, was elected by popular vote; isn't that democratic?  In what way was anyone brainwashed?

On fascism and "Major Tom"

This opens me up to a lot of criticism, but I think I can define fascism as ultra-nationalist, authoritarian, anti-socialism.  Fascism is about individual subjugation, mob-driven furor, and, above all, the veneration of the state.  Fascism had an easy hold on already-nationalist Germany.  But, for all its abridged personal liberties, fascism is not about taking away individual happiness and stuff, as this man would have you believe.

I'm not sure why we're talking about points, but the point of any government is to last, bringing stability and security to its people, because these are essential to any chance of personal happiness.  To say that the goal of fascism is to "make the state as strong as possible," is unfair; more correct is to say that the goal of fascism is to create the foundation of a lasting happiness by instituting widespread reform that is only possible through having a strong government.  Italians weren't all like, "Man, I'm going to sacrifice some personal liberties for the sake of our national strength;" it wasn't a choice.  Italians wanted to finally move past sharing the dubious honor of "sick man of Europe" with Spain, and fascism seemed like the smooth move.  Fascists actually showed an inordinate amount of interest in the individual, what with the eight-hour work day and stuff.

D-Es-C-H

Liz:  butting in on your conversation with Leigh, I wish to add one unfortunately complicating dude:  Dmitri Shostakovich.  Although intellectuals were mostly survivors if they were openly pro-Stalin, Shostakovich managed to survive the entire ordeal (he lived from 1906-1975) while being openly anti-Stalin (to a degree).  Though sometimes lauded by the Soviet government (he received the Order of Lenin three times; he assisted in propaganda campaigns; and he went through periods of great praise, notably during WWII), he was and continues to be a symbol of the oppressed composer for musicians throughout the west.

Things were not all rosy for him in Russia; he was denounced twice publicly, once in a damning article in Pravda famously titled, "Muddle Instead of Music."  Unlike the other notable Soviet composer Prokofiev, who emigrated to France in the middle of his life, Shostakovich spent his entire life in Russia, and, unlike many of his close friends and colleagues, Shostakovich was never imprisoned or disappeared.

I have no idea what this says about Russian intellectuals.

Dear Cas,

In class you mentioned the whole "Was Stalin at all in any possible way even the smallest justified in his killing of millions?" thing.  When we all loudly voiced our disgust at the slightest possibility of Stalin being justified, you brought up two things:  1.  We all adopted somewhat Stalinish methods of advancing Russia into the twentieth century in our little groups, and 2.  Russia became industrialized under Stalin.

In response to the first, nowhere did we check the box, "Kill millions... because."  I know there are better sources for this but Solomon Volkov's Testimony indicates in a very personal (and somewhat suspect) way that Stalin's purges were motivated more by paranoia than political necessity.  So fearsome was the person of Stalin that his death in 1953 was undiscovered for days because his guards did not wish to disturb the great man.

In response to the second, Stalin did more to keep Russia in the feudal era than to advance it.  Although Russia was transformed into a country with factories and modern infrastructure, Russia was handicapped by the economic poison of socialization.  Also, Stalin did little to advance his country into the future by killing the workers and intellectuals that could bring real improvement to the country.

The great "Plan XVII" vs. the much-lauded Schlieffen one

A terrible plan!  Even though I just wrote a post giving Germany more crap for starting World War I and ruining the twentieth century for Europe, it wouldn't have been that big of a deal if the Schlieffen Plan (all in all, not a terrible plan) had succeeded.

It's a stretch to say that the Schlieffen Plan failed because it was altered at the last minute.  But it certainly didn't help.  Since the Schlieffen Plan relied entirely on the mobility and unstoppable might of a large force sweeping through northeastern France and encircling Paris, it was paranoia to fillet it, thereby severely hindering the chance of success on the Western front, in favor of defending from the Russians.  Not to get into the hypothetical game here, had Germany maintained diplomatic relations with Russia, the war could have been just another Franco-German conflict.  As it was, though, the Germans invaded Belgium, turned Britain against them, etc.

But why do I seem so certain of the success of the hypothetical Schlieffen Plan?  As it turns out, it was up against France's Plan XVII (described some here), which dictated, in what appears to be a horrible realization that France had no single technical advantage over Germany, that France's single best plan to repel the mighty force of the German assault was to run carelessly into the German lines, bayonets stained with Teutonic blood.  The Plan, predicated on the belief that all French soldiers were imbued with some sort of mysterious "élan vital" that made each Frenchman worth countless Germans, sounds laughable!  But maybe this élan vital really does exist, because it seems to have worked in repelling the Schlieffen-planned assault.

Leigh:

I know this is like going into the fossil record, but I'm a little behind, as you can see.  Getting on, with regards to your post concerning Moose-olini, I am all in agreement... mostly!  Your second paragraph seems to suggest that Mussolini was something of an opportunist, stepping in at the right time with what the people wanted.  I say, "This is not how things went."  (Or:  "Here follows a slight clarification of how things went.")

The thing that Mussolini lacked (though Hitler did not) was popular support.  The fascist movement was not a majority movement in Italy before it came to power; it was just the most violent.  Representing middle-class interests, the fascists had support from the relative minority of landowners, because at heart, though fanatically nationalist, I think the fascists can most easily be described as anti-Socialist.  Like the Bolsheviks, who, while once a majority, became an increasingly radical minority, the fascists succeeded in achieving power by virtue of the political limbo game, effortlessly going lower than everyone else.

Germany, what the hell?

Do you know who's responsible for World War I?  Germany!  Seriously, what the hell, Germany?

The book had this thesis it kept advancing about the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the "centrifugal" forces of nationalism that tore it apart.  Maybe so and maybe no, but it was the forces of German nationalism that tore Europe apart.  It's a peculiar fantasy to talk about the inevitability of the war, but it is clear in retrospect that Germany launched itself on a collision course with the world when it came into being at the beginning of 1871.  Initially upsetting the balance of power by the mere fact of its existence, Germany launched into a series of military campaigns that set the foundation for the entangling alliances that eventually pushed Europe to war.

And then the whole navy thing:  Was there a need?  We saw Wilhelm II's declaration of the nationalistic imperative to empire, but I believe I side with Bismarck when I say that Germany, being squarely in the middle of the continent, should maintain continental, rather than colonial, interests.  Also, the forces that shaped early twentieth-century Europe (i.e. the second industrial revolution) were not colonial by any means:  the explosion was in the direction of steel, chemicals, and electricity.  From the navy it all went downhill, with submarines and the alliance with Austria-Hungary and the whole invasion of Denmark.  Even the spark for the whole thing (the assassination of Franz Ferdinand) was nationalistically motivated.

Nationalism--German nationalism in particular--is  totally a problem:  it was this war that tore Europe apart, changing European ideas of humanity as well as thrusting Europe into the global background.  So, Germany, what the hell?

What I don't dig about Freud: I think he's kind of hokey (855-862)

Freud sounds like he was a pretty cool dude, what with all his challenges to man's conception of himself and stuff.  He was careful, original, and tried to explain previously mysterious phenomena (cases of hysteria and insanity in particular) by unifying his clinical observations in a sort of unified theory, a characteristic ambition of the nineteenth century.

On the other hand, Freud's hypotheses were not supported by a large amount of actual evidence; Freud had no actual insight into the human brain (or even the mechanism by which dreams are produced) when he declared dreams to be valuable glimpses of the unconscious.  (By contrast, in the book Phantoms in the Brain, the author, V.S. Ramachandran, a neuroscientist, notes that his study of phantom limbs has led him to the hypothesis that the surprisingly widespread foot fetish is linked to the structure of the brain, whereas Freud attributed sexual feelings about feet to their alleged phallic shape.)

A recent article in the Science Tuesday section of the New York Times, about the business of analyzing dreams, mentioned that dreaming subjects of the study tended to attach "more significance to a negative dream if it was about someone they disliked, and they gave correspondingly more weight to a positive dream if it was about a friend."  But these aren't pros! the astute reader might object.  One Dr. Morewedge (apparently a prominent psychologist) suggests that such a "motivated approach" is equally applicable to researchers as well as subjects, citing "Freud's tendency to find what he was looking for--sex--in his 'Interpretation of Dreams.'"

Brief reading summary

Modernism was born in a quickly changing time.  The so-called second industrial revolution (in steel, electricity, and chemical manufacture) changed lives on a worldwide scale.  The extreme individualism engendered by the ultra-capitalism of the new industrialism gave rise to radical thought of all colors, but especially feminism and Marxism.  Workers found themselves at increasingly violent (cf. Bloody Sunday) with their governments.  As in the so-called age of revolutions, the countries that suffered the least instability (e.g. Great Britain) were the ones that were already mostly democratic and were continuing in the spirit of liberal reform.

Darwin and Spencer

To Spencer's credit, he was an excellent writer.  Darwin had nothing on him in this regard.  In every other regard, though, the essential difference between Darwinism and Social Darwinism is the difference between science and junk.  Darwin records observable phenomena and invents a plausible mechanism to explain trends in his numerous data.  Spencer's belief system, mostly wishful thinking, lacks a basis of observable data as well as a plausible mechanism.  As the excellent William James mentions, Social Darwinists would have you believe that a man, having dined in a group of thirteen and, weeks later, slipped on a patch of ice and died, died because he dined in a group of thirteen, since it is no the cause that is responsible for the effect rather than the circumstances that engender the effect.  Just as with Mr. Smiles, Spencer's thought serves only to justify greed and vanity.

More dudes

I trace all the problems and solutions of the later half of the nineteenth century to the fact that there were simply more dudes (also:  ladies) getting involved.  The huge scope of the new industrialism in steel, electricity, and chemicals created even larger working classes with interests that were wholly different from those of their rulers.  Given voice by the self-glorifying jingoism of national imperialism, these workers assembled themselves to protect their interests.  In the ugly transition to almost-democracy, workers found themselves (as Marx would have loved to see) at odds with their bosses.

Imperialism summary

Fueled by racism and an economic imperative, Europeans used their technological superiority to subjugate the rest of the world, its resources and its peoples.  The currents that drove the mid-century wars (people-concern and state-interest in particular, but also a quest for realism, the exotic, and outlets for Victorian-era-suppressed sexuality) found their way into the drive for all that was different and valuable in Asia and Africa.

On Lenin and Wilhelm

Once upon a time I offered a dual nature of nationalism:  state-interested and people-concerned.  Both Lenin and WIlhelm share these zests.  They make similar economic arguments about the merits of imperial power.  Lenin is of course entirely people-concerned (admittedly in a non-sectional way), while Wilhelm is people-concerned to the extent that his interests collide with those of the people.  While Wilhelm is definitely nationalist and Lenin is definitely unattached, imperialism is definitely a nationalistic phenomenon.

I pity the fool (787-793 but especially Kipling)

Perhaps the greatest and most ridiculous conceit of all Europe's great and ridiculous conceits is the deep-rooted conviction, the illuminating conviction that overtakes men sometimes in daytime aspirations to godliness, that Europe is above all else selfless.  The illusion of selflessness is ridiculous in and of itself; more ridiculous still are the black-and-white, day-and-night terms by which Kipling proclaims himself Jesus-like:  "Take up the White Man's burden... To seek another's profit/ And work another's gain."  Kipling is easily persuaded, but it is a tragedy of humorous proportions that his drawing is at best totally wrong.  Less humorous and far more disturbing is the patronizingly racist language of the whole poem, which, like the hilarious illusion of selflessness, will become the leitmotif for Europe into the twentieth century.

The collision of sectionalism, conceit, and selfishness (also: summary)

Imperialism as a nationalistic phenomenon is enough of a counterexample to disprove the idea that a nation is fundamentally defined by its land, but the race hypothesis (that nationalism is racially driven) deserves at least some attention.  Racism as a tool serves the vital objective of nationalism (and imperialism especially) to both glorify the self and objectify the enemy.  The atrocities committed under King Leopold in the Belgian Congo, which would by no means be committed by Europeans on each other for some time, could only have been explained by a deep-rooted belief that humans only come in white.

The Eastern question

Continuation:  The distinction of my previous post makes clearer the essential characteristics of each nationalism, which we see to be very much a product of the people as well as the state, which are ineffably linked:  though the Crimean War was definitely motivated out of state-interest, it drew huge attention to the popular side of nationalism:  the people-concern.

Observation:  The Crimean War is the end of land-power.  My feeling about the Crimean War and its status as the so-called wake-up call for Russia is that everyone kinda assumed that because Russia was hella big (half a continent) it was powerful; throughout the medieval period and even continuing into the Renaissance, land indicated strength in its correlation to resources and the ability of the government to collect revenue.  The crushing of Russia by a small island (to be repeated in the Russo-Japanese War in the early 1900s) proved this assumption wrong.  Following its defeat, Russia (essentially admitting its mistake) emancipated the serfs, making land no longer a power-source and bringing Russia into the nineteenth century.

On nationalism again (767-787)

Once upon a time I claimed that nationalism's essence was in its exclusivity; now I have a better word:  sectionalism.  Sectionalism's rise to prominence corresponded to nationalism's.

In class the argument was put that nationalism comes in two varieties:  top-down (i.e. state-sponsored) and bottom-up (i.e. supported by the people).  Putting the relative merits of this distinction aside, I propose a dual nature of nationalism that defines a sort of continuum for evaluating nationalism's different manifestations, because in its best form nationalism is two-pronged, a champion of the people but also of the state.  People-concern is manifested most obviously in the realism of (for instance) Gustave Courbet or any man with a camera; state-interest is most obvious in the wars of expansion in the mid-nineteenth century (the Crimean War and everything almost-Germany did in the 1870s).  German nationalism is thus more state-interested than people-concerned, and Russian nationalism is closer to the middle of the road.

The USA is totally a nation

In summary for this week and in response to those (i.e. Cas) who think the matter is really less clear-cut than it is:

First, it would serve us well to define "nation."  I agree with Mr. Renan in the sense that "Ethnographic considerations have... played no part in the formation of modern nations," and also that linguistic and religious considerations are equally inconsequential.  I also agree with his argument that it is the wish of the people that creates a nation, though I disagree with the idea that a nation is "a soul, a spiritual principle."  I posit that a nation is a social organization;  and, like clubs, nations have entirely arcane prerequisites for membership.

What defines a nation is its exclusivity:  in the case of the USA, the world is filled with people who want to be Americans, people that cherish and love the idea of individual freedoms and personal accomplishment (life, liberty, etc.).  Likewise, France, for instance, is highly desirable for some, and Qatar is intensely desirable if you are a wannabe Olympian.

What does membership get you?  Besides a home team and stuff like that, membership gives you access to all the primo perks of citizenship, such as a police force and a school system.

We adopt the notion of legitimacy practiced by the Concert of Europe, i.e. the notion that "if we say it's legit., then it's legit."  Essentially, nationhood is a product of (1) the desire of the people to be a nation and (2) arcane and arbitrary exclusivity.  You can't be a nation and let everyone in.

By this measure, the USA falls easily within the realm of nationhood.

On nationalism (762-767)

The emergence of the nation-state in the second half of the nineteenth century was an expression of both the revolutionary and conservative elements in Europe that followed the Napoleonic era.  On the revolutionary hand, there were the ethnically driven national movements (for instance,  the Slavophilic Russian movement); on the conservative hand, the more politically driven national movements, which seem more to be nations of convenience than nations of principle (consider the rise of Austria-Hungary, what with all its dissenting minorities in spite of its strong, centralized government).  As the conservatives of the Concert of Europe had feared, the pro-people, pro-individual rights tilt of the more populist elements led to widespread increasing entropy.  The worries of the Concert of Europe were further realized by the growth of the extra-large Austria-Hungary.

Also:  Coffin devotes a section to "centrifugal forces in the Austrian Empire."  Luckily for the Austrians, there is no such thing as the centrifugal force; it is a fictitious force in the sense that it only exists in non-inertial reference frames, and I believe the Austrian Empire is at least mostly an inertial frame of reference.  Ms. Coffin and Mr. Stacey could have evidently paid some more attention during high school science courses.

To "Makaveli"

In response to your post about the alleged inevitability of Marx's revolution:

1.  It's not a question of opinions or views.  Marx thought of history as a science and, believing that he had studied it sufficiently, found it to be a certainty that this revolution would come.

2.  I assume you mean "void," rather than "devoid."

3.  The argument that no perpetrators of the capitalist machine are endowed with the magical ability to understand the proletariat's will doesn't seem to be based on anything.  Also:  remember that Marx's family was pretty solidly bourgeois, and he didn't think that this precluded him from an understanding of the proletariat.

4.  Unemployment during the Great Depression went over twenty percent (according to the Encyclopedia Britannica article), but the revolution count by the end of the thirties was still zero.  Suffice it to say that ten percent unemployment alone is not enough to incite a revolution.

5.  It's difficult to believe that the mighty warriors of the proletariat who will destroy the oppressive capitalist regime are--right now--starving in the streets.  This sort of polarization is not going to lead to revolution.

In defense of the monarchs after Napoleon

In response to the post that shed an unflattering light on the Concert of Europe and the Congress of Vienna:

It's not a matter of dispute that each monarch acted extravagantly in his own interests by protecting his power with sometimes undue force.  This, though, is a little bit of a simplification:  "Stability, for these monarchs, meant stability of their power, not necessarily of the lives of the people over whom they ruled."  In the volatile post-Napoleonic Europe that these monarchs were ruling in, stability of their power was in fact stability for their subjects.  Whether or not stability was desired, stability was what was being offered.  The freedoms that were suppressed at this time were the cost of this stability.  Each leader feared that a revolution in Europe (which would necessarily be overthrowing a so-called legitimate government) would every time result in the complete immolation of European stability.  The fact that the Concert of Europe supported (visibly and invisibly) the Greek revolution against the Ottomans is not contrary to these codes in the sense that the Greek revolution, unlike, say, a possible Polish uprising, was legitimate:  it was rendering unto Europe what was Europe's.  Also, a revolution in Greece destabilized the Ottomans, not Europe, and was not a threat to the stability of the legitimate governments of the Concert.

Ground Control to Major Tom

Major Tom, this is Ground Control (there's something wrong).

If you re-read what I wrote, you may find that we are in agreement with respect to your first point.  I am indeed saying that Tsar Nicolas's actions were absolutist in that he equated the state's safety with his own.

With respect to your second point, I posit that an action in the interest of self- or power-preservation can very well be absolutist.  For instance, Louis XIV brought the nobility (i.e. those most likely to overthrow him:  Coffin, 540) to Versailles so that he could better preserve his power.  If you were trying to say that preservative efforts are not by definition absolutist, we are in agreement.

But, to qualify my conveniently cryptic comment that the Concert of Europe and the new idea of legitimacy following from it were "almost absolutist in nature," I will enumerate the reasons why I said this.

1.  The Concert of Europe promised safety, security, and order at some cost to personal (in this case, state-related) freedom.

2.  Just as Tsar Nicolas took the assault on the state to be an assault on his person, the Concert of Europe viewed an attack on a state of Europe as an attack on Europe in its entirety; thus the power in Europe was centralized and personified.

3.  Legitimacy and authority both stem from the Concert.

My thoughts on the Marx-man and the dialectic theory of history

Altogether:  a stupid simplification.  Let's consider a couple of important aspects, starting with the premise:  The history of the world is the history of class struggles.  This argument falls under one of two headings:  obviously accurate or obviously inaccurate; either way, it's useless.  Of course the thesis is true if we define classes broadly as "groups of people," but if we take the definition that Marx uses later when he lists the classes in Rome, i.e. socio-economic classes, then the thesis becomes obviously false.  The sacking of Rome was due to workers rising up against their oppressors just as much as the conquests of Napoleon represented the gilded heel of oppressive decadence striking against the unarmed peasantry of Europe.  The mechanism for creating unrest among the workers then neglects several aspects of the world that reverse his mechanism:  the constant drive for innovation, the cultural imperative (at least in the United States) for production and consumption, and the availability of credit.  Predicting the future, as they say, is a risky business, but more so when predictions are based on somewhat limiting assumptions.

709-717 and the woes of being rich and powerful (also: genesis)

The framers of the US Constitution, frightened by the concept of rule by the mob, placed the electoral college as a protection against democracy.  Their fear, predicated on the belief that a commoner does not know what is good for him, is visible throughout the crowns of post-Napoleonic Europe.  The few in power feared a violent shift towards democracy and did their best to protect what was theirs:  the thrones of Europe.  The Concert of Europe and the concept of the balance of power, ostensibly for the good of all of Europe, came to being as the result of various personal and national interests (most of them were personal and national safety and the preservation of the status quo).  Out of this fear grew a new conception of a legitimate state.  This new state, the international state (my coinage), was legitimized by international recognition, treaties and guarantees (as it says on age 712).  In that they protect the interests of the few over the many and reject the glorified individual of the Enlightenment, the formation of the Concert of Europe and the new conception of legitimacy associated with it seem almost absolutist in nature, just like Tsar Nicolas's brutal suppression of the Decembrists, when he treated them as if they, by attacking the state, had been attacking him personally.