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From the beginning when you pointed out the false dichotomy between traditional conservative cultural trends and the flip side decadence of modern liberal aesthetes, to the observation that we have to stop viewing everything from these limited ideological lenses, I felt like I was hearing many of my own thoughts, with only a few minor variations. My literary endeavors have, for starters, been driven by desire to not fall into precisely the kinds of traps you identified.

A few years ago, I founded a classical arts and letters website called The Chained Muse. The goal was to create a sanctum for classical aesthetics, biting criticism, and modern beauty (as opposed to modern ugliness). One of the polemics we try to focus on is to re-situate the debate around all things art, culture, and beauty by introducing the question of timeless art. Politics and ideological lenses aside, what makes a work of art timeless? It's not a left-right question.

In one of his letters on the aesthetic education of man, Friedrich Schiller makes the point that the artist should be a citizen of his age, but not its captive. From the Apollonian vs. the Dionysian to the Conservative vs. Liberal schism, Schiller goes on to make a series of great reflections on how to avoid falling into the many traps and false dichotomies that plague these debates.

Among other things, Schiller writes:

”The Artist, it is true, is the son of his age; but pity for him if he is its pupil, or even its favorite! Let some beneficent Divinity snatch him when a suckling from the breast of his mother, and nurse him with the milk of a better time that he may ripen to his full stature beneath a distant Grecian sky. And having grown to manhood, let him return, a foreign shape, into his century; not, however, to delight it by his presence; but terrible, like the son of Agamemnon, to purify it. The matter of his works he will take from the present; but their Form he will derive from a nobler time, nay from beyond all time, from the absolute unchanging unity of his nature. Here from the pure aether of his spiritual essence, flows down the Fountain of Beauty, uncontaminated by the pollutions of ages and generations, which roll to and fro in their turbid vortex far beneath it.”

I'd say many of the Modernist writers and artists were the captives of their age, whether their approach was based more on trying to embrace it or push back against it. Neither is correct. The question that has often guided me is "how to not fall into that trap and focus on creating something new and original?" In very brief terms, I think a lot of it comes down to re-discovering the timeless and unchanging principles within our own unique age, which every great artist has to do, regardless of the age he's in. Art has to embody some kind of timeless principle that reflects the timeless principles of nature, but it should also be done in such a way that it's as if these principles were being discovered for the first time. Da Vinci revolutionized painting through his development of perspective and contrast, even as he treated some very old themes. His pioneering imagination allowed him to create a world of irony and paradox that, say, a static Byzantine icon could never capture. Bosch's wildly imaginative surrealist-like paintings were extremely original and "new," but they were also deeply metaphorical and philosophical, embodying some of the most timeless truths and ideas concerning human nature. The same can be said of Shakespeare who rarely even created his own stories, but took stories and legends that existed for a very long time and gave them original and compelling treatments which allowed him to unearth new layers of Beauty, Truth, and Wisdom. I don't think the basics of the approach have really changed, and the same essential thing could be done today with film, for example. Shakespeare was definitely not afraid to experiment, but he was guided by sound and timeless principles, as opposed to the zeitgeist or some Romantic fervor.

There’s no reason there can’t be another Shakespeare or Dante today. It’s just a question of resolving the paradox between those which are eternal and unchanging and those things which are always only changing.

Great art always successfully unites both.

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Yet another wonderful article from the distributist! Wooooo!

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Too big-brained for me, but to put into layman terms what I think the author was going for was 1) the need to jettison the ideological systems we have now and return to first principles 2) implement new best practices that work (Lindy refers to things that work and last the test of time, or are perennial, perhaps?) 3) create a new "culture" around the first two points.

Was I close?

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The Amish and Conservative Mennonites show us what a strong religion, family, culture, work ethic looks like. If only we would follow their Parallel Society path. Technology can be a force of good, but more commonly it is used for evil.

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Sometimes it feels like people have jumped over the first question in on this - what is it to be a conservative or to be right-wing. Oakeshott's attempt to answer that is probably not as widely read as it should be. It is not just an ideological orientation but a manner of being. It certainly informs how such people perceive art. Art became a sort of initiation rite in the contemporary era, more so than even a signal of how to identify with others. Class and caste are inescapable parts of this. The 'right wing' bemoan woke dance schools dropping ballet, yet how many even have been to a live ballet performance? The attempt to subvert art is most obvious when they destroy high culture markers, less obvious in the low culture markers. Country music has gotten worse over time despite ideologically remaining at home in the blue collar communities. Bluegrass is now appreciated by shitlib bugmen in the inner cities.

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It's funny, in a disorganized way similar thoughts have been rattling around in my brain for years, but more recently coalescing into a question. What do I actually have left from the past? My parents, their parents, didn't pass onto me any specific ethnic or cultural heritage from Europe. They barely imparted a religious tradition to me, made up of faint traces of vaguely evangelical theology and a habit of frequently changing churches and denominations before any ties to the community to strong to break could be formed. As far as I can from genealogical research, this pattern has repeated each generation since we came to North America, at the very beginning of colonization. Since then, my directly line have always been pioneer, living on the edge if whatever America considered the frontier at the time, until two or three generations ago, the West became civilized and there was no further to go. I used to hate being called a redneck, but really it's true. Even those of us in my family with degrees and white-collar jobs are, deep down, lacking any real heritage and now, lacking any real pioneer life either.

Everything I have from the "old world" I learned. After a few adult years of degeneracy God called me to Catholicism. I started to wrap my head around being right wing. But coming to the Lord and converting is not the same thing as having a heritage. Adopting a political ideology is not the same thing as having a heritage. These are not artifacts from the old world, they are constant truths.

So I've become tired of hearing, from people on the right, "reclaim your Western heritage" and so on. The last trace if any heritage I had is my mountain accent, which of course has been pretty much destroyed by years of being surrounded by Californians and wanting to avoid the shame of being mocked for saying "ain't" sincerely. That's not much.

I'm mostly German, biologically, but reclaiming some German tradition would be a LARP for someone like me. Both my direct lines of decent where British settlers, but not only has none of that been carried on, the Brits have nearly completed the work of deliberately destroying their own culture. So that might be even more of a LARP. I could and do read the classics, but only for the truth and insights. For culture, I have no more claim to them than I do to the Eastern cannon.

I know I'm not alone. And I know others, who claim to preserve and embrace some heritage, calling themselves by the names of old ethnicities and so on, while I know for a fact they didn't get these things from their parents. Of course, a few actually have, but eventually it will be destroyed from them like it was for us.

So where do we go from here?

We can and should cling to what remains transcendent true from the past. But the cultural which accrued around those truths is gone. We can't rebuild it as it was, nor do we have the right, having lost our birthright. So we'll have to make something new.

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R E M E M B E R

Beware large beaks

(Pass it onto the next generation)

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A fantastic video, very thought provoking and correctly avoiding the easy answer of neo-rococo realist art. Thank you.

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As someone who is reading Spengler at the moment while reading this it resonated on so many levels; I’ll take this over LoTR metaphors 10 times out of 10.

💪💪

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Your solution reminds me of the theme of the book A Canticle for Leibowitz. I don't know if you've read it but it is masterpiece of mid century Sci-fi.

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I came across you recently on YouTube, and it was a breath of fresh air.

As for cultural luditism, I do see it all around. It has been interesting and tragic to see bright minds go alight (such as the videos of Jordan Petersen thinking aloud in his fascinating free associations with cultural imagery) and then go dark (his current angry YouTube rants entitled "Message to..."). And I hear so much right wing debates and criticisms, I was actually excited to see a discussion with Judith Butler, I name I once recognized as a fresh voice, if not one I agreed with. However, within minutes the video devolved into woke platitudes that I could have easily consumed anywhere else.

Central to this decline, whether cause or symptom, is an ethos of tribe-first communication instead of human-first communication. We recognize the hallmarks of this: initiating communication looking for agreement with your position rather than understanding, a focus on quick labels rather than exploring another point of view, attacking positions of any and all outgroups rather than responding to the presented statements of the person in the conversation, and hyperfocus on differences of values to the complete ignorance of common ground. The opposite would be a return to simplicity and what is, without necessitating the sacrifice of ideas. Presence with the person in the conversation first, asking open ended questions, summarizing statements with "did I get that right?" in search of understanding instead of "that's why you're wrong," looking for common ground to build things on.

Ultimately, I don't think the collapse of liberalism is driven by our many sins against liberal principles. I think we lost our ability to connect to and trust in the depth of our common humanity, and this faithlessness weakened our cultural spine against the voices of those fighting for tribe above humanity. Without the trust in our human connection, we cannot trust people to be free to speak to congregate or abide by the same laws.

If only we could make human-first interaction as catchy as the progenitors of wokeness made their tribe-first dialectics, we might find our way back to some semblance or peace and civility. Or even, hope against hope, a form of liberalism better for the critique against 1950s culture hegemonies instead of crippled by the rehashing of it and the attempt to restore it under the control of special interest groups.

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Too long Dave!

Cuckservatards are unable to appreciate abstract art because most of them are indeed rednex and low IQ dysgenic material. Knowles is not, but he panders to the bunch.

What we need is a revolutionary, NON conservative right, that seeks power just like the left, and is able to pursue IDEALS, even when unrealistic.

Also, Knowles and the cuckservatards would never have the balls to promote somebody like Arno Breker. Until such a blockage is removed so we can once again pursue the ideal forms, nothing will change, and cuckservatards will forever be losers that cannot adapt and reinvent themselves.

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If the laws are wrong, the culture will be wrong. If the laws are wrong, the moral system is wrong. If the moral system is wrong, change it for the best possible one available.

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