THE CHE GUEVARA OF SUGAR CANDY MOUNTAIN
Colin Liddell
The big political news story in the UK at the moment is the political ranting of Russell Brand, a recovering(?) junkie sex maniac celebrity, who was recently invited to guest-edit one of the country’s most respected left-wing political magazines, The New Statesman.
Brand has essentially two “Big Ideas,” which can be summarized as follows:
- Normal politics is shit. The only hope is the left-wing, but they are smug, self-important, and have no sense of fun, so it’s no wonder that people are apathetic and prefer sport and computer games to politics.
- We need a spontaneous, grassroots, Utopian, spiritual revolution to share all the wealth and save the environment. P.S. I have a personal fortune of $15 million and constantly use jets.
While the first idea plays to lazy cynicism about politics, the second substitutes pop yogi mysticism for practical details. . . .
Judged on his own merits, Brand would not be worthy of comment, but he is part of a bigger pattern that casts light on how modern society works.
What we are seeing in this case is the way that modernism protects itself through post-modernism. Modernism is essentially the scientific-financial system that underpins our materialistic and ecologically insensitive society. Its essence is brutal efficiency combined with anti-humanistic soullessness. Alas it is a poor fit for humanity, which is doomed to feel forever ill at ease in modernity.
In the past, ideological theorists, starting with Marx and Spengler, believed that modernism would break down under its own contradictions. As time went on, however, and modernism continued to flourish, new theories emerged, such as post-modernism, which was typically seen as either a positive evolution of modernism or as a negative sign of its decay and coming collapse.
Both of these theories are wrong. As a social phenomenon post-modernism essentially represents an irrational, self-defining free-for-all, where things like gender and race can be 'chosen' or 'unchosen.' Everything becomes relative, no standards exist, and everything becomes a great big ironic joke.
There is no way that such a system could replace modernism as it would effectively turn off the materialist cornucopia that we all depend on and which depends on modernist man with his rationalism, mathematics, chemical formulas and train timetables. Yes, by all means have your absurd gay parades or celebrate primitive dung painting from Bongo Bongo Land, but at the end of the day you have to step back onto a subway train that works or get into a car with gas imported from half-way around the world.
As for the other theory that post-modernism is a sign of materialism’s collapse, this is odd too, because it actually helps modernism to survive. As already said, humanity is constantly irked by living in modernity. Post-modernism exists as a salve to modernity. It is the oil that keeps the machine smoothly running and which reconciles mankind to its modernist destiny. . . .
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