The barbarism that does not know its name

One's homeland is either a world of texts or a society of persons. All civilization relies on the former, though there is no reason these two sources of orientation need be opposed, as in highly stratified societies they are.

The left wants to diffuse high culture. The elites on the right want to keep it for themselves, while their populist accomplices want to destroy it, their efforts furthering the new feudalism that the financial and tech oligarchy uses and that is often manifest in civil and foreign conflicts. I think this helps explain the common hatred of “white people” among some of our ghettoized urban poor. America’s elites have not minded rampant urban violence, which serves their agenda. The liberals among them have long been content merely to police attitudes. That is popular. Accordingly, they promote the false belief that American society’s problems have much to do with differences and antagonisms between social groups, when they have little to do with this in fact. But it does make life in this society often very unpleasant indeed, and there’s rarely any point disagreeing with people who are. Their arrogance is that of our corporate state. When in crisis, it goes to war against people who it regards as a possible threat to it, people in foreign lands or here. I have been treated this way and was not amused.

Americans in public are vehemently committed to their way of being-with and working together. The prevailing norm is a social conformity that is strongly enforced, with violence a possibility surprisingly often. This gregarious culture is normally friendly though somewhat hostile to the life of the mind. If your mind is shaped as mine always has been mainly by what you read, be cautious. It is diversionary in effect when people insist, as they often do, that what is important is some idea to which they are committed. Simply, American culture is a corporate society of team players. Enforced above all is equal respect for persons. All the noise about policing and censoring every prejudice is, or was, about that. The claims to effective social equality to which they were attached were quite overstated. A wise person should suspect every posture of militancy, as more likely than not it protects the corporate state. When what is attacked is only people expressing attitudes and seeming suspiciously like detestable aristocrats, relics of an old world, you should suspect that what is really being defended is the corporate state in the guise of American values of an ostensive equality that requires little substance but whose appearance is aggressively enforced.

The society of the United States has two factions. Both have a culture defined by its rhetoric. The Democratic Party affiliated elites and groupings cultivate what may seem "far left" rhetoric at the grass roots, but it is only effective as rhetoric. Its purpose is to attract people who can then be held and used. Corporate state factions will welcome you if you have complained about their adversary. Then they quickly start demanding you play by their rules. This is a society of teams demanding compliance from team players. This is why as a writer I cannot be an activist. When I am around activists, it doesn't take them long to realize they don't like me. The deeper reason is their sometimes populist corporatism.

We are living through times similar to the end of the Roman empire. This is obvious. The common sense is always either that the empire must be defended (and the rebels defeated or worse) or that it must be destroyed (and whoever may be identified with it treated by rebels as an enemy of the people to be hated or worse). Whichever side wins, the empire or the barbarians, I pray for the future of the books read by the scholars who in public may fear both imprisonment by the government that fears the mobs and murder by the mobs who hate the government. We know the government is oppressive, the mobs blind. Their books their only real tools or weapons, the scholars expect to be hated and abused. As for the government, we may pray for its welfare enough out of fear that its abuses may become worse.

The new feudalism is furthered by masses of people taking for granted that there is nothing about the imperial order worth preserving and that it should only be torn down. Often it's citizens, especially those clinging to the old forms, are hated, as colonialists often were.

The tech and financial elites in the metropolitan centers have little stake in the world's people being widely educated, and it fits their projects if mathematical and scientific knowledge are mainly the province of the corporate state and its military operations, as they are.