Wittgenstein on Science and Technology

It is not absurd to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity ; that the idea of great progess is a delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known ;  that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap.  

 -  Wittgenstein,   'Culture and Value'

Nietzsche, the Decadents, and the end of Humanism

During the last period of the nineteenth century the goal of the Liberal Enlightenment and revolution had been reached, and Europe at last possessed a completely secularised culture.  The old religion had not been destroyed;  in fact throughout Protestant Europe the churches still possessed a position of established privilege.  But they held this position only on the condition that they did not interfere with the reign of Mammon.   In reality they had been pushed aside into a backwater where they were free to stagnate in peace and to brood over the memory of dead controversies which had moved the mind of Europe three centuries before.

On the other hand the intellectuals who had contributed so much to the victory of the new order of things were in a somewhat similar plight.  They found themselves powerless to influence the movement of civilisation, which

had cut itself free, not only from tradition, but also from art and thought.  The spiritual leadership that was possessed by Voltaire and Rousseau, by Goethe and Fichte, was now a thing of the past.  
The men of letters were expected to follow society, not to lead it.  And this is what many of them did, whether with the professional servility of the journalist or with the disinterested fanaticism of the realist, who affirmed his artistic integrity by the creation of an imaginary world no less devoid of spiritual significance than was the social world in which he lived.

A large number found neither of these alternatives satisfactory.  They turned to literature and art as a means of escape from reality.  That was the meaning to many of the catchwords  "Art for Art's sake"  Symbolism and aestheticism, the Ivory Tower and the Celtic Twilight, Satanism and the cult of "Evil", hashish and absinthe ; all of them were ways by which the last survivors of Romanticism made their escape, leaving the enemy in possession of the field.

There was, however, one exception, one man who refused to surrender.  Whatever his weaknesses Friedrich Nietzsche was neither a time-server nor a coward.  He at least stood for the supremacy of spirit, when so many of those whose office it was to defend it had fallen asleep or had gone over to the enemy.  He remained faithful to the old ideals of the Renaissance culture, the ideals of creative genius and of the self-affirmation of the free personality, and he revolted against the blasphemies of an age which degraded the personality and denied the power of the spirit in the name of humanity and liberty.

The tragedy of Nietzsche is the tragedy of the end of humanism.


- Christopher Dawson.  "Christianity & the New Age", 1931

God-man's got a White complex

It is colonialism turned inward.  Every spiv and his dildo wants a paddock with a coterie of cheap skivvies to press the shirts and mop the shower rooms.  We've been fed the dream of colonial mastery for so long it became an unbearable yearning.

Seems everyone and their monkey-heart wants to be a colonial steward, living in ivory towers with a major population of cheap helots to carry them in sedan chairs, affording the kind of patronizing they feel to be their long-awaited due; the servants gleefully shaking the cocktails, with the dreaming of becoming Trimalchio's themselves one day, with their own court of au pairs, jesters and naked man-friday's.

Everyone wants the ostentatious dream, not merely nasty aristos and their foreign oligarch apes.  Those leftists with relatively superior educations ('uni' - says it all - university-lite) and private property welcome immigration for these reasons+, hoping that masses of man-mulch beneath their sandals will raise them up in sheer material status (due to filling the rents on the bottom rungs)* -for they are, after all, soulless self-proclaimed materialists- They can be that ex-pat everyone knows, 'living abroad' somewhere like Malaysia, or Thailand, with an army of  de-personalised gurning eunuchs at the beckon, being paid pitta-bread money.  

This is the real purpose of the pro-immigration brigade: the supreme late-decadence of "It felt special on holiday, I want it here full time, so please bring in banana boats of hapless human-tools and make them fight for crumbs of employment with dwindling wages at our feet".  Meanwhile governments shall slowly phase out the euro-dole because of the inevitable, interminable grande recession (helped by fresh millions or of humans haplessly draining the circus)#.
   
So we're taking third-world snapshots and saying "Yes, cheap lackeys here too please !" - 'A service economy'.

Just like the aspiration to free ourselves of the working burden of making our own things was only made possible by sneakily setting up a much larger network of liberal-economic sweatshops all over the far east, Saharan Africa, Turkey and the middle east,  so now everyone wants not only to free themselves of all meniality, but to acquire a kind of Edwardian Aristo status we see in the endless (utterly relentless) Jane Austen and Downtown esque productions, albeit on micro, ex-pat scale.

Because these lordlings are shorn of all true noblity, since they feel sick and loathing looking in the mirror at their lonely visages without the definition cast by the shadow of helotry. 

+The Oligarchs are against immigration because they can afford staff;  the typical London fat middle class will be for it for humanitarian reasons, but really because they'd like to have a choice of exponentially cheaper builder lackeys and doorknob polishers.

* but what if those on the middle rungs bail out of this grisly game of musical chairs ?

#The Huns welcome 'economic migrants' because they sorely need raw labour to continue their industrial building machine that makes them "Supermasters of Europa" while having a declining birth rate as their native sons aspire to something more (read: finance sector) than the basement factory floor of Vorsprung durch Technik, for being the weathiest nation in Europe, they don't wish to raise themselves up anymore as reprobates of the war with the guilt-driven slave work-ethic.