The Failure Of Modern Metaphysics
Yesterday, Donald Trump signed an Executive Order banning federal buildings from being constructed in styles other than Neoclassical, Georgian, Federal, Greek Revival, Beaux-Arts, or Art Deco. Some of you may think the President should be focusing on issues other than the shape of federal buildings, but personally I believe it would be the least harmful thing for the President to focus on.
But still, the culture warriors thing this is important, and when they think it’s important, it likely is important. Michael Knowles, a leading figure in many of the worst ideas of the culture warriors, tweeted “If the federal Blob follows the order, this could go down as the most important accomplishment of the Trump presidency.” And the war on brutalism (or the shocking idea that buildings serving their purpose is more important than if they look pretty) has been going on for ages. E. Michael Jones once wrote a book entitled Living Machines: Modern Architecture And The Rationalization Of Sexual Misbehavior. Its description reads the following:
Written by E. Michael Jones. Following up his best selling books Degenerate Moderns and Dionysos Rising, E. Michael Jones completes the trilogy as he reveals how modern architecture arose out of the disordered lives of its creators, who catered to the new needs of modern man as a sexual nomad, who would have no need for home or family, no need to be rooted in a particular time or place or family or soil or culture. Living Machines explains where that vision came from, where it led, and why it ultimately failed.
Jones is well known for saying things that sound smart but are actually utter nonsense. It’s hard to tell a difference between this and the infamous headline “‘Upward-Thrusting Buildings Ejaculating Into The Sky’ — Do Cities Have To Be So Sexist?” from The Guardian at a moments notice. However, both of these views suffer from the same flawed view of the world, as well as the flawed view of the metaphysically minded in general: The view that you cannot separate the material from the metaphysical in any sense.
This is a point I’ve been making for awhile, but American culture has allowed metaphysics to take over every aspect of life. A cigar can no longer be a cigar, it has to be a spiritual experience that says something about our civilization as a whole. Buildings can no longer exist for their physical purpose, to be large areas where people and objects enter and leave for various purposes, they must be a spiritual experience that moves the individual. Of course, the point of brutalism has been to deal with higher amounts of population density — but I’m sure those homeless people will be fine as long as the buildings rapture them like a drug from Brave New World.
The smarter ones realize it’s a scam, they use language with the goal of shutting up their critics. If you realize it’s a scam, the best thing you can do is get it on it, become part of the elite who understand how to use the gibberish to your advantage. But even giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming they aren’t frauds, they still fail to justify their own existence. They exist for no other reason than to waste your time and force you into a conversation where the goal is to take you from point A to a point where you don’t even know your own name. They should be ignored like the pretentious morons they are, and any attempt to appeal to them should be laughed out of the room.
