I am currently reading Peter Sloterdijk's important little book Terror from the Air, published in English just this year, about which I will have more to say later, I think, but for now I wanted to note this striking little tidbit, from page 43, calling our attention to the "pseudo-normalizing" Nazi category of Volksschadling, the "public nuisance," which was, rather horrifyingly but unsurprisingly, "a term covering a vast semantic domain, including defeatism, black marketeering, anti-Fuhrer jokes, criticizing the system, and a lack of belief in the future" [emphasis added --d]. Here's why, in a nutshell, I cannot help but find this striking.
Updated from the Moot, Below: In their obsession with speed (think, "acceleration of acceleration") and with the metalization of the body (think, cyborgic-ecstasies and "techno-immortalization"), among many other topoi the Italian Futurists anticipate quite a lot of the quirks of trans/post-humanist futurological handwaving. Like the transhuman-types, the Italian Futurists were mostly just alienated white boys barking and banging into one another, flirting with fascism (think, "optimizing" humans with science, stainless steel technocracy, hostility to "degenerate" humanities, soft-porn and advertising imagery mistaken for art, disasterbatory Götterdämmerung fantasies of bad god AIs and nano-goo). Unlike our Robot Cultists, many of the Italian Futurists at least could write reasonably well -- no doubt due to their dabbling with avant-garde art movements. Most of the superlative futurological writing coming from transhumanists, extropians, singularitarians, techno-immortalists, and digital utopians sounds, to the contrary, something like a pastiche of Ayn Rand potboilers, an instruction manual for assembling a lawn mower, a Fox News broadcast, and garbage-disposal-loud commercials hawking teeth whitening and boner-pills after midnight.
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Are you familiar with the work of historian Jeffrey Herf?
In his 1984 book, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich, Herf coined the term “reactionary modernism” to describe the mixture of robust modernity and an affirmative stance toward progress combined with dreams of the past - a highly technological romanticism - which was characteristic of the German Conservative Revolutionary movement and Nazism.
Subsequently, Richard Barbrook argued that proponents of the Californian Ideology embrace the goal of reactionary modernism: economic growth without social progress.
Don't know Herf, will check it out, sounds right up my alley. I teach Richard Barbrook's essay all the time. Do you know David Noble's stuff? Seems like it might provide a good American correlate to Herf.
A "belief in *the* future" is a mark of membership or naïveté. Serious futurists talk about possible futures and futures studies.
"Serious futurists" sounds like an oxymoron to me.
> . . .the "pseudo-normalizing" Nazi category of _Volksschadling_,
> the "public nuisance," which was, rather horrifyingly but unsurprisingly,
> "a term covering a vast semantic domain, including defeatism,
> black marketeering, anti-Fuhrer jokes, criticizing the system, and
> a lack of belief in the future"
"whereas most psychologists have been concerned
with what group cultures do to neurotics, the evidence is...
that neurotics produce reductions in the syntality[*] morale
of groups to which they belong."
Raymond B. Cattell, 1994, _How Good Is Your Country?_
Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man.
[*] the coinage is defined in a Usenet article
( http://groups.google.com/group/misc.business.facilitators/msg/a244ee8926455357 )
which quotes Joseph Luft's _Group Processes: An Introduction
to Group Dynamics_ (1970): "Cattell [1956]. . . uses the term 'syntality'
to mean the quality of a group analogous to the personality of an individual."
"Cattell & Stice (1960) were able to show that there
are substantial causal effects of population characters
upon group performance. For example, neurotic traits
in the population significantly reduced one of the two
main morale dimensions of groups. Prior to this, psychologists,
with clinical restriction, had theorized more about
what the culture does to the neurotic than what the neurotic
does to the culture! A generation later this one-way
thinking is repeating itself in regard to the criminal."
"Population Intelligence and National Syntality Dimensions"
Raymond B. Cattell and Jerry M. Brennan, University of Hawaii
http://wollwage.home.att.net/popintel.htm
"Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke,
You gotta understand,
It's just our bringin' up-ke
That gets us out of hand.
Our mothers all are junkies,
Our fathers all are drunks.
Golly Moses, natcherly we're punks!"
A friend commented:
"Cultures with excessively high syntality morale
are beastly. They should be permitted just enough to keep them alive,
so that we can live off their decay products. [Bertrand] Russell says this
somewhere."
As for me, I've always been well aware that I'm gas-chamber
fodder.
;->
> "Serious futurists" sounds like an oxymoron to me.
The word "futurism" has other unfortunate associations.
For one thing, Futurism was the name of an ideologically-
overtoned Italian art movement of the early 20th century
which became tangled up with Fascism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism :
"The Italian writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was its founder
and most influential personality. He launched the movement in
his 'Futurist Manifesto', which he published for the first time
on 5 February 1909. . . In it Marinetti expressed a passionate
loathing of everything old, especially political and artistic tradition.
'We want no part of it, the past', he wrote, 'we the young and
strong Futurists!' The Futurists admired speed, technology, youth
and violence, the car, the airplane and the industrial city,
all that represented the technological triumph of humanity over
nature, and they were passionate nationalists."
http://counterlightsrantsandblather1.blogspot.com/2009/07/beautiful-ideas-which-kill-futurism-and.html
"We usually associate modern art, and modernism in general,
with left-wing politics. It is still something of a surprise
to discover a fully modern movement with strong ties to right-wing politics.
Futurism had right-wing political sympathies from the beginning,
and its creators developed ties with Italian Fascism in the years
following the First World War. Mussolini, unlike almost all the other
ideological dictators of the 20th century, took an active interest
in modernism and, for a while, cultivated it.
The links between Futurism and Fascism are a huge embarrassment for
Italians. Futurism is a source of national pride, a brief moment when
once again Italy led the world in art and culture. . ."
Futurism was the name of an ideologically-overtoned Italian art movement of the early 20th century
which became tangled up with Fascism.
Yes, indeed. In their obsession with speed (think, acceleration of acceleration) and with the metalization of the body (think, cyborgic immortalization), among many other topoi the Italian Futurists anticipate quite a lot of the quirks of trans/post-humanist futurological handwaving. Also, like the transhuman-types, the Italian Futurists were mostly just young white boys barking and banging into one another. Unlike our Robot Cultists, many of the Italian Futurists at least could write reaosnably well -- no doubt given their European educations in philosophy and their hob-nobbing with avant-garde art movements. Most transhumanist writing is something like a pastiche of Ayn Rand, an instruction manual for assembling a lawn mower, a Fox News broadcast, and commercials for teeth whitening and boner-pills.
'Believe in the Future' One of Goebbels' Ten Commandments for the nazi party...
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