Hunting for the Bourgeois

First let us admit that it is no use hunting for the bourgeois.  For we are all more or less bourgeois and our civilization is bourgeois from top to bottom.  Hence there can be no question of treating the bourgeois in the orthodox communist fashion as a gang of antisocial reptiles who can be exterminated summarily by the revolutionary proletariat; for in order to “liquidate” the bourgeoisie modern society would have to “liquidate” itself.

This is where Marx went wrong. His theory of increasing misery led him to suppose that the line of class division would become sharper and more strongly defined, until the rising tide of popular misery broke the dykes and swept away the closed world of privileged bourgeois society. Instead of this we have seen the bourgeois culture, the bourgeois mind, even the bourgeois standards of life advancing and expanding until they became diffused throughout the whole social organism and dominated the whole spirit of modern civilization.

Marx's objection to the materialists of his time is somewhat different from that of many of his followers today.  The latter criticize the old materialism as too mechanical in it conceptions, and in a sense as too materialistic.  Marx, on the other hand, criticized them on account of their residual idealism, i.e. because they were not materialistic enough. It was no use disproving the metaphysical truth of Christianity if you still remained in bondage to its moral ideals.

Thus in Marx, the cult of equality and social Justice led to the sacrifice of human freedom and spiritual creativeness to an inhuman economic whole.  He condemned the whole humanistic morality and culture as bourgeois, and accepted the machine, not only as the basis of economic activity, but as the explanation of the mystery of life itself.  The mechanical processes of economic life are the ultimate realities of history and human life.

All other things - religion, art, philosophy, spiritual life - stand on a lower plane of reality; they are a dream world of shadows cast on the sleeping mind by the physical processes of the real world of matter and mechanism.

Hence Marxism may be seen as the culminating point of the modern tendency to explain that which is specifically human in terms of something else.  For the Marxian interpretation of history is in fact nothing but an explaining away of history.

Grexit Hinterlands

One forgets how punitive the German empire was after the Franco-Prussian war, and how this caused the post WW1 Versailles treaty which was perceived as the punitive turn which drove them into the arms of national socialism.
Of course Bismarck was behind the Franco-Prussian war.  Note it wasn't called the 'franco-bavarian' war, this was because Bismarck, wannabee Napoleon, and had downed the 'dream-king', the Catholic Bavarian Ludwig II, who, far from being a warmonger, was a castle builder and artistic patron (Wagner). 
Ludwig's legacy are now Deutschland's most popular tourist destinations (notably Neuschwanstein castle).  Whereas Bismarck's is a legacy of abysmal empire building (breaking up of duchy's) and wars, following Napoleon and Frederick II as examples,
which led directly to the horror of the Chaplin caricature and non-humorist, Adolph (may his name be obliterated).

Bismarck:

"In the 1870s he allied himself with the Liberals (who were low-tariff and anti-Catholic) and fought the Catholic Church in a culture war [kulturkampf].
He lost that battle as the Catholics responded by forming a powerful Center party and using universal male suffrage to gain a bloc of seats."

One of my main negative inspirations is to topple the wretched historical narrative of the recently-deceased Austro-Jewish historian

Eric Hobsbawn, who emigrated to England, wrote in English, championed Bismarck and Stalin..
and who is considered the greatest British Historian, (discounting Toynbee) his reign is one of pure and relentless falsehoods,

reshaping history to uphold and further the 19thC anti-catholic Whig interpretation of history.

I like that Piketty, here is essentially addressing Merkel's "Schuld" comment on relation to the Greek debt, Schuld, meaning their Guilt at

being in debt.  

In Milton

Satan as a son of God, or an emanation of his light, Rebelled

because he thought he could improve on his father, took

the proud position that he, as son,  would be better.

Thus the idea in the modern era, of the past as ever significantly

inferior to the present, just as the present will be inferior

to the future.  This malign heresy is so common today as to be

almost crystallized completely.  It wasn't always so,

we used to believe we 'stood on the shoulders of giants',

while today you'd be led to believe we are giants standing on the heads

of deluded little fools, who did nothing but confuse and

sacrifice the wrong people to the wrong Gods, who squandered

plundered and pilfered, who gave us only unwittingly the tools to build

a future eco-friendly perfection, all wind farms and hermetically

sealed draft-proof houses and fair trade chocolate.

That we live in a very vulgar age

is undeniable.  Bolliticks seeks to court

and squire the demeaning slop we call culture in the Roman

sense of vox populi, bread and circuses, when they

flung gladiators at bears and lions.

Broadway Market, Tragic Seduction

Hardly anyone has any money here.  
Wondrous strip of gastronomique emporia,
a former eels 'n mash veg market.

The cars are flashier in 
more-colonised neighbouring Hoxton,

They're hanging by fingernail 
to exclusive Bohemia

they think its a birthright, waiting for Asiatic

Oligarchs to price them completely off the board. *

But knowing all the while that Asia is tragically
 seduced by our template, by the

challenge of meeting our culture.  That's the bluff.
Bourgeoisie bohemian decadence wins one day
at a time.  Until 
it's values are challenged, its liberal market mode

thrown and replaced with theocracy

of patriarchal, despotic supremacism,
the triumph which may never occur, then

this bourgeoisie farce must continue to its eventual

clash with its nemesis.
(whatever that may be)
 They're all living in converted

drawing rooms, or sharing narrow boats on the canal

avoiding mooring fees, furnished by skip toss-outs, smoking

shaggy rollies and drinking real ale like Victorian factory

workers, waiting for a retirement slot in the new workhouse.

* (by subtle, atomised international property investment

portfolios, buying into ghi ghi-ed up council blocks along the Regents canal)

C'orporeal

You don't have a body 

without a soul.

there's no such thing as a corpse 

with body.

Without the soul, there is no body.

A Giraffe has a soul

That's why they called it a Giraffe.

It is a corpse

because it isn't a body.

Nature and Grace inseparable,

The corpse is the only illusion.
It alludes,
just as a painted portrait
alludes to the sitter.

Puritan

"Puritanism descended on England like a hoarfrost" - Weber

The hatred of mess, the brushing away the relics of death

- this is puritan.   To despise imperfection, is inhuman.

To judge constantly, interminably, whether something is clean or good enough,

is puritan. 

It is not of the faith.  It is definitively faithlessness.

It is normal in England to judge like this

for there is nowadays a Great Taboo about Death in this country.

It is also normal to be 'contrary' here, so lots of disingenuous

people running around - 'crusties'  who pretend to be pagan
almost always a cover for inner puritanism - you should see Stonehenge

at solstice. Its not just a spectacle for social anthropology, but
an eye opener onto whats out there.  For puritanism happened in England
with an excess unlike anywhere else.

That's why I abjure the left, or the 'protestors'. 
They are essentially rejecting the world as not good enough, people

as not good enough, reality, all not good enough and this
'problem' is solvable only by their politics. (after leaving
their perversion of religious faith behind them).

The great myth of Protestantism is that it was original.
Nothing about it is.  It is an innovation on a bare aesthetic. 
It is a modification by taking away something.
Its modification was no more than one of notional temperament.

Temperance is the same as northern providentialism.  Store things
away, you may need them later, for it is cold here for too many moons
before springtime.

The passing of the Men of the Middling sort

The world has changed again.  No longer are Teachers, Architects, Doctors, Professors or even Barristers as well paid as they were hitherto used to. (Source: BBC - Clinging on: the decline of the middle classes - audio: Here )

 Too many people studying now have to get Phd's to be competitive.  And they usually end up as Professors - a self-propagating paradigm, revealing that scholarship has use only inside of its own sphere.  This falling away of the great fat in the middle, the capitulation of the men of the middling sort is supposedly because of the Internet.  Doctors, for instance, often refer to the same site the patients can do from home to diagnose symptoms.  

After my personal researches into history it appears we've gone full circle. The quality of higher education is so much lower because of the emphasis on ever specialised subject areas. Most of which are impractical, abstract and theoretical.  The clue is in the word University.  Universal knowledge is not what people acquire anymore from "university".   Our greatest architects studied theology, philosophy, astronomy and geometry.  They were interested in alchemy.  They built sets for theatre and were excellent artists in that they could render drawings to a certain standard.  They ended up building St. Paul's (Wren) or St. Luke's (Hawksmoor).  

There was no need to have a graduate degree in Architecture, because they had learnt all the necessary skill components from studying other subjects, which could be classed as the general humanities.  They could choose to apply themselves in any field, practically, from this base.  In comparison, the average architects today are minnows.  They study one field for 7 years.  They end up on a computer programme designing buildings which look like they are designed by computers. Tools.  

Is this bad for civilisation, and its inevitable decline ? Perhaps.  But this could also be a blessed relief, an end to the superfluous mediocrity that has built up like a crust, a shield protecting these inane mediocre, meagre impotent potentates, and yielding a return to the pre-industrialised culture, as prophesied by William Morris and John Ruskin in the 19thC,  when the blacksmith or the tanner had something akin to inalienable rights, not defined for him by political rhetoric, but of himself and by his own means without the interminable intervention of middlemen.  Universal suffrage and welfare is the argument against this freedom, but that is itself ironically, only achieved by the giving up of personal freedom.  Which, of course only benefits the middlemen, the clerical classes.  Medieval man worked very little. Between 90 and 140 feast days (besides the Sundays) were no rarity.

This could be the defining moment in the difference between Civilisation and Culture.  Civilisation being built on the back of Culture and not the reverse.