Note added, 9.15.14: It’s come to my attention that a link to this post is making the rounds of a white supremacist SubReddit. I’m amazed, though I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised. Anything can be taken out of context, and this indictment of sentimentality could, conceivably be stretched and distorted to be used as an excuse for cultural violence. This can only happen if those wanting to support their own stereotypes and hatred of others remain blind to the shadows that underlie their own fears and hatreds.
This is great. I've got to re-read it to absorb every nuance.
First, holy crap, that's crazy news. I'd love to know what parts of your original essay they tore off to use as an ingredient in their dark ceremonies. But maybe privately.
All this fits tremendously with what I've been reading from Arno Gruen -- that it's the pretense of parental love (false feeling) that forces a child to betray their own perceptions and autonomy and orient themselves instead to the parents' sentimental images of themselves, colluding in their own subjugation in order to partake of this measly meal of conditional acceptance.
It is also worth re-reading this a few more times to absorb the strange collision of two honest perspectives at apparent odds. There are times when a necessary counter-charm to previously unnoticed poisons goes unrecognized as a virtue even by someone as profoundly insightful as Jung. Sometimes the poison of the age has to be made into an antidote. But this antidote will appear only as "yet more poison" to those who are not fully of that new moment. Jung could see the poison, but didn't suffer its consequences as Joyce's generation suffered it. His perceptivity revealed the presence of the poison, but not the presence of an antidote.
"Disclaimer: This is about attitudes, not people. It’s a shame this has to be explicitly declared! Too bad it is even then rarely absorbed. Again, this is connected to our “hideous sentimentality.”
Minor note of synchronicity. Had just written a note to distinguish precisely what you just distinguished -- that what we're talking about are patterns of thought ("attitudes"), not any individiual person. No individual ever fits the pattern of thinking we describe. The pattern is a fictional way of alerting ourselves to the qualities of an undead momentum or sentimentality out of which the individual is eventually born as a creative force -- as a rebellion or evolutionary leap out of that momentum.
Thank you for your deep engagement with this piece! I wrote the core of it in 2011, very early on in my interrogation of our Predicament. I don't know in detail, and at this point don't even remember how I heard about the piece's "popularity" on Nazi-Reddit. I think someone wrote a comment…. All I can see is that having mentioned Nazis and having said they were, "Our perennial bogeyman,…" that must have raised some interest in the way over simplistic search engines and hashtag chasing is designed to do.
I'd been familiar with the quote, "Sentimentality is the superstructure erected upon brutality." for decades. It always made intrinsic sense. What struck me in 2011 was that Jung had written it in response to Ulysses.
You've found just the language I've been struggling to bring to light when you say that,
"There are times when a necessary counter-charm to previously unnoticed poisons goes unrecognized as a virtue even by someone as profoundly insightful as Jung. Sometimes the poison of the age has to be made into an antidote. But this antidote will appear only as "yet more poison" to those who are not fully of that new moment. Jung could see the poison, but didn't suffer its consequences as Joyce's generation suffered it. His perceptivity revealed the presence of the poison, but not the presence of an antidote."
So well said….
And this,
"No individual ever fits the pattern of thinking we describe. The pattern is a fictional way of alerting ourselves to the qualities of an undead momentum or sentimentality out of which the individual is eventually born as a creative force -- as a rebellion or evolutionary leap out of that momentum."
This is great. I've got to re-read it to absorb every nuance.
First, holy crap, that's crazy news. I'd love to know what parts of your original essay they tore off to use as an ingredient in their dark ceremonies. But maybe privately.
All this fits tremendously with what I've been reading from Arno Gruen -- that it's the pretense of parental love (false feeling) that forces a child to betray their own perceptions and autonomy and orient themselves instead to the parents' sentimental images of themselves, colluding in their own subjugation in order to partake of this measly meal of conditional acceptance.
It is also worth re-reading this a few more times to absorb the strange collision of two honest perspectives at apparent odds. There are times when a necessary counter-charm to previously unnoticed poisons goes unrecognized as a virtue even by someone as profoundly insightful as Jung. Sometimes the poison of the age has to be made into an antidote. But this antidote will appear only as "yet more poison" to those who are not fully of that new moment. Jung could see the poison, but didn't suffer its consequences as Joyce's generation suffered it. His perceptivity revealed the presence of the poison, but not the presence of an antidote.
"Disclaimer: This is about attitudes, not people. It’s a shame this has to be explicitly declared! Too bad it is even then rarely absorbed. Again, this is connected to our “hideous sentimentality.”
Minor note of synchronicity. Had just written a note to distinguish precisely what you just distinguished -- that what we're talking about are patterns of thought ("attitudes"), not any individiual person. No individual ever fits the pattern of thinking we describe. The pattern is a fictional way of alerting ourselves to the qualities of an undead momentum or sentimentality out of which the individual is eventually born as a creative force -- as a rebellion or evolutionary leap out of that momentum.
Jeff,
Thank you for your deep engagement with this piece! I wrote the core of it in 2011, very early on in my interrogation of our Predicament. I don't know in detail, and at this point don't even remember how I heard about the piece's "popularity" on Nazi-Reddit. I think someone wrote a comment…. All I can see is that having mentioned Nazis and having said they were, "Our perennial bogeyman,…" that must have raised some interest in the way over simplistic search engines and hashtag chasing is designed to do.
I'd been familiar with the quote, "Sentimentality is the superstructure erected upon brutality." for decades. It always made intrinsic sense. What struck me in 2011 was that Jung had written it in response to Ulysses.
You've found just the language I've been struggling to bring to light when you say that,
"There are times when a necessary counter-charm to previously unnoticed poisons goes unrecognized as a virtue even by someone as profoundly insightful as Jung. Sometimes the poison of the age has to be made into an antidote. But this antidote will appear only as "yet more poison" to those who are not fully of that new moment. Jung could see the poison, but didn't suffer its consequences as Joyce's generation suffered it. His perceptivity revealed the presence of the poison, but not the presence of an antidote."
So well said….
And this,
"No individual ever fits the pattern of thinking we describe. The pattern is a fictional way of alerting ourselves to the qualities of an undead momentum or sentimentality out of which the individual is eventually born as a creative force -- as a rebellion or evolutionary leap out of that momentum."
Thanks again.