I was interested to read in a recent article (here) from the Australian that the phrase 'the right side of history' has been growing in popularity. For example President Obama has claimed that American foreign policy during the so-called Arab spring is on the 'right side of history'.
I didn't agree with Frank Furedi's analysis of the phenomenon: this has absolutely nothing to do with a resurgent belief in Fate. Yet the observation is an interesting one all the same.
When people speak about the 'right side of history' they are using a moral rhetorical device. They are saying 'I am in the right because history will judge me to have been correct.' This argument seems to acknowledge that when someone is in the midst of an issue it can be hard to know what is right or wrong, because as history is being made, it is hard to know what to do. However eventually the benefit of hindsight will bring moral clarity and at some time in the future people will come to a consensus about what was the right decision, and they will be right. The 'right side of history' is the side which people some time in the future will uphold as correct,
There could also be a more pragmatic view of morality embedded in this rhetorical flourish. This is the sense that there will be a 'winning' side who will get to write the history, and if you make the right choice now, you will find yourself on that winning side, and those who write history will look more kindly on your contributions and think better of you.
For example, many British people supported Chamberlain's appeasement stance at the time, but 'history' ruled against Chambelain, both in terms of a moral judgement – Chamberlain's 'peace in our time' slogan came to be destested as a grotesque deception – and because the opposing position represented by Churchill won out politically and militarily. Appeasement did not win WWII.
As another example, most British politicians at the end of the 18th century supported the slave trade. This was a popular, mainstream view at the time, but 'history' has rejected it as abhorrent.
The phrase 'the right side of history' seems to presuppose a belief in progress, that people in the future will know best, because they will be morally more enlightened. It also seems to presuppose that a stable consensual view of history will emerge as the 'correct' one. Not true. Historical perspectives shift and things thought admirable in one era will be detested in another.
The phrase also acknowledges a degree of moral confusion and uncertainty, that people find it hard right now to know what is right and wrong. Surely moral uncertainty is part of the spirit of our age. The person who uses the phrase is claiming that despite this uncertainty, their views will win the day. "Trust me - sometime in the future people will come to see that I did the right thing."
There is, it seems to me, an element of cowardice and moral surrender in the phrase, with its overtones of 'winner takes all' virtue. We should not do what is right just because it is right, but only because future generations will find it to be right. Does this mean that if the Third Reich had won WWII, they would have been on the 'right side of history', and Hitler's genocidal policies would have been judged to have been virtuous? Is that all that morality consists of – the judgement of history?
Surely this is a desperate rhetoric, the forlorn cry of a lost and confused generation, without any moral compass of its own, which is desperately scrambling to second-guess the moral judgement of future generations in an attempt to find some point of certainty. Is this all we are left with as the foundation of morality: if our grandchildren will only think well of us, all will be well. Such rhetoric plays on people's fears of being shamed, but that is a hopeless basis for distinguishing right from wrong.
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
The Rise and Rise of Horror - David Goldberg (aka 'Spengler') on Horror in US popular culture
How the hijackers changed American culture
By Spengler
This essay is excerpted from my collection of essays, It's Not the End of the World - It's Just the End of You [1]. It appears simultaneously with my new book, How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying Too). [2].
A month after the September 11, 2001 attack, I wrote in this space:
The grand vulnerability of the Western mind is horror. The Nazis understood this and pursued a policy "des Schreckens" (to cause terror) and "Entsetzens" (horror, literally: dislodgement). Horror was not merely an instrument of war in the traditional sense, but a form of Wagnerian theater, or psychological warfare on the grand scale. Hitler's tactical advantage lay in his capacity to be more horrible than his opponents could imagine. The most horrible thing of all is that he well might have succeeded if not for his own megalomaniac propensity to overreach.
America, as Osama bin Laden taunted this week, lost in Vietnam. But it was not military setbacks, but the horrific images of Vietnamese civilians burned by napalm, that lost the war. America's experience in the war is enshrined in popular culture in the film Apocalypse Now, modeled after Joseph Conrad's story, The Heart of Darkness. The Belgian trading company official, Paul Kurtz, sinks into bestiality and dies with these words: "The horror! The horror!" It was a dreadful film, but a clever reference. At the close of World War I, T S Eliot subtitled his epitaph for Western civilization, The Waste Land, with a quote from the Conrad story: "Mr Kurtz, he dead." [3]
In this essay, adapted from material first published in First Things magazine, I argue that the 9/11 terrorists succeeded in precisely this goal: to employ the theater of horror to demoralize Americans. The culture has changed in consequence of the attack, to our detriment.
The "horror" genre supplied one out of 10 feature films released in the United States in 2009, according to the International Movie Database. During Universal Studios' heyday in the 1930s, the proportion was one in 200; only a decade ago it was one in 25. Vampire teen heartthrobs meanwhile take first place on some lists of best-selling books.
By way of contrast, 716 horror features were released in 2009, compared to 39 Westerns, a ratio of almost 20 to one. During 1960-1964, Americans saw more Westerns than horror movies. The earlier date is pertinent because it includes two of the most fearful events in post-war American history, namely, the Cuban missile crisis and the assassination of president John F Kennedy.
Westerns invariably portray a well-understood form of evil and contrast it to the courage to stand up to evil. Horror films involve an evil that is incomprehensible because it is supernatural and so potent that ordinary courage offers no remedy.
Americans never were more frightened than during the Cuban missile crisis, when nuclear war might have erupted, and never more affected by an act of violence than by the murder of a president. But in the 1960s, Americans thought they understood what they most feared; today they appear to fear most what they cannot understand.
What has horrified them?
The element of incomprehension, that is, of the supernatural, distinguishes the horror genre from mere gratuitous violence. It is not the spurting blood or mangled flesh that defines horror but the presentiment that the world itself is disordered: Demons abound in the absence of a beneficent God, who is somehow absent.
There is nothing new in the monsters that infest popular culture, indeed, nothing particularly scary about them compared to the lurid products of the pagan imagination in antiquity. What is new is the unprecedented way in which they have proliferated in the American popular media.
In biblical terms, we may define horror as the presentiment that the forces of chaos have escaped their appointed bounds and that a good God no longer exercises mastery. Fear and awe of God differ radically from horror: We fear God's punishment and stand in awe of his presence, but we are horrified when we no longer believe that God will do justice. One might mention in this context Psalm 74:
O God, my king from of old,
Who brings deliverance throughout the land;
It was You who drove back the sea with Your might,
Who smashed the heads of the monsters in the water;
It was You who crushed the heads of Leviathan,
Who left him as food for the denizens of the desert.
As Jon Levenson of Harvard University observes (in Creation and the Persistence of Evil), these are unmistakable references to a Canaanite myth discovered in the excavation of Ugarith (14th century BCE). "Each of these words occurs in some form in the passage just quoted. Without the Ugaritic literature, these allusions would remain tantalizing obscurities."
In Levenson's reading, creation ex nihilo in the sense of an instantaneous change from nothing to something fails to capture the theological implication of the biblical creation story.
Two and a half millennia of Western theology have made it easy to forget that throughout the ancient Near Eastern world, including Israel, the point of creation is not the production of matter out of nothing, but rather the emergence of a stable community in a benevolent and life-sustaining order.
The defeat by YHWH of the forces that have interrupted that order is intrinsically an act of creation. The fact that order is being restored rather than instituted was not a difference of great consequence in ancient Hebrew culture. To call upon the arm of YHWH to awake as in "days of old" is to acknowledge that these adversarial forces were not annihilated in perpetuity in primordial times. Rising anew, they have escaped their appointed bounds and thus flung a challenge at their divine vanquisher.
There is a radical difference, by the same token, between Christian apocalyptic literature and the corresponding subgenre of horror films: In the former, God manifests himself in the world and his mastery over the fearful apparitions never is in doubt. But God remains inexplicably absent while hell rampages in The Omen or Rosemary's Baby.
Biblical faith has no need of theodicy (YHWH explicitly condemns the theodical arguments of Job's friends in 42:7). Jeremiah's famous accusation (Jer 12-13) against YHWH is neither a philosophical judgment of God nor a cry of horrified despair but rather an indignant demand that God rise up and destroy the wicked:
You will be in the right, O LORD, if I make claim against You,
Yet I shall present charges against you:
Why does the way of the wicked prosper? ...
Drive them out like sheep to the slaughter,
Prepare them for the day of slaying!
As Levenson comments: "The answer - and please note that there is an answer here - is nothing like those rationalizations proposed by the philosophers: 'Drive them out like sheep to the slaughter.' The answer to the question of suffering of the innocent is a renewal of activity on the part of the God of Justice. In light of the answer, it becomes clear that the question is not an intellectual exercise but rather a taunt intended to goad the Just God into action." Jeremiah recounts dreadful events, but he is outraged rather than horrified. That is the decisive difference.
The faith of the West too easily devolves into philosophical rationalization about divine justice rather than persisting as faith in the covenantal relationship with a just and loving God. We then become vulnerable to a neo-pagan foe that wielded horror as an instrument of policy.
What produces monsters is not the sleep of reason but the absence of faith. God's creation metaphorically banished the monsters from the world in the biblical creation story. If we cease to believe that God will rise up as of old and fight our fight, then we will reify the world's evil in the guise of fictional monsters. That is the secret of our morbid fascination with the horror genre.
Why do Americans pay to watch images as revolting as the cinematic imagination can discover? Many things might explain the vast new market for uncanny evil. If you do not believe in God, you will believe in anything, to misquote G K Chesterton; and, one might add, if you do not feel God's presence, you will become desperate to feel anything at all. Terror and horror are at least some kind of feeling. After pornography has jaded the capacity to feel pleasure, what remains is the capacity to feel fear and pain.
But there is to the horror genre a pattern, of highs and lows, that may reflect something specific about Hollywood's feeding of the mood of the United States - something about America's encounter with truly horrible events, from World War II through Vietnam and down to the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the lingeringconflict in Iraq. Terror loiters in dark corners just off the public square.
Among all the film genres, horror began as the most alien to America. The iconic examples of the genre in the 1930s required European actors and exotic locales - vampires from Central Europe, for example, and zombies from Haiti. The films were noteworthy precisely because they were so unlike the cinematic mainstream: In 1931, the year that Frankenstein and Dracula first appeared, the worldwide film industry managed to make and release 1,054 features, of which only seven could be called supernatural thrillers.
After retreading the same material for 20 years, Hollywood finally put a stake through the genre's heart. By 1948, the few horror films being made were the likes of Abbott and Costello encountering Dracula, the Wolfman, and Frankenstein's monster. Laughing at monsters was emblematically American - and remained so, as when Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder did it, perhaps best of all, in 1974 with Young Frankenstein.
In other words, Hollywood gave us a small run of exotic-origin horror films in the 1930s, all drawn from European fiction: Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Portrait of Dorian Grey. After World War II, however, these nightmares of tormented Europeans were mostly naturalized as sight gags for American adolescents.
And that was how it was supposed to be. The monsters had a different meaning in their Old World provenance. The pagan sees nature as arbitrary and cruel, and the monsters that breed in the pagan imagination personify this cruelty. Removed from their pagan roots and transplanted to America, they became comic rather than uncanny.
America was the land of new beginnings and happy endings. The monsters didn't belong. After 1946, Adolf Hitler had been crushed, and that was that. Americans did not want to think about it anymore. And at the height of the national self-confidence that followed, the horror genre almost disappeared from American film. In 1950, for example, Hollywood managed only four films in the genre, all B-movie filler.
Horror recolonized American culture during late 1960s. The genre jumped from 2% of all films to 6% between 1968 and 1972. The homegrown American horror film, moreover, evolved from summer-camp slashers to truly disturbing portrayals of torture and madness.
As the online commentator Marco Lanzagorta notes, "A renewed interest in the horror genre" arrived "in the late 1960s, most probably due to the success of sophisticated and revolutionary horror films" in the vein of Night of the Living Dead (George Romero's 1968 surprise B-movie hit) and Rosemary's Baby(Roman Polanski's 1968 major-studio release).
What motivated so many Americans to subject themselves to such torment? Perhaps the explanation is that, with Vietnam, horror had returned as a subject in American life. United States troops were engaged with an enemy that made civilian populations the primary theater of battle, fighting a different and terrible sort of war. The images of civilians burnt by napalm transformed my generation. Until our adolescence - I was already 12 when John F. Kennedy was killed - America's civic religion was taken for granted. In 1963, my peers and I put our right hands over our hearts when the flag passed; by 1967 we did not flinch at flag burning. Horror over a war in which civilians could not be distinguished from combatants destroyed America's civic religion, and it was, I suspect, also the beginning of the end of mainline Protestantism.
Long after the fact, Francis Ford Coppola took Joseph Conrad's tale of horror in the jungle and transplanted it to Vietnam. Compared to what we had seen on television, the Apocalypse Nowof 1979 seemed trivial, but it gave permanent images to the post-Vietnam national mood: the sense of being lost in a nightmare of pointless and pervasive cruelty.
As data drawn from the Internet Movie Database shows, the horror genre grew from insignificance during the 1950s to 6% of all releases by 1972, in the last phase of the Vietnam War. A second spike came in 1988, driven by a bumper crop of sequels to established series (Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Critters, Friday the 13th, and so on).
But what accounts for the six-fold increase in the total number of horror films released since 1999? Subgenres such as erotic horror (mainly centered on vampires) and torture (the Saw series, for example) dig deep into the vulnerabilities of the adolescent psyche. Given the success of these films over the past 10 years, the number of Americans traumatizing themselves voluntarily is larger by an order of magnitude than it has ever been before.
There are any number of possible explanations for this phenomenon. What the bare facts show, however, is that moviegoers are now evincing a susceptibility to horror. People watch something in the theater because it resonates with something outside the theater. To see the cinematic representation of horrible things may be frightening, but the viewer knows that it is safe.
And the sense of safety we derive from watching make-believe things helps us tolerate the prospect of real things. What in the world today horrifies us the most? The horror that attended the Vietnam War had far-reaching cultural effects even though not a single shot was fired on American territory. All the more so should we expect the attack on the World Trade Center and its aftermath to have such consequences.
Random acts of terror against civilians seem a new and nearly incomprehensible instrument of war to most Americans. That is why they have such military value: The theater of horror has a devastating effect on our morale. The same is true for suicide attacks, which continue on a scale that has no historical precedent.
The enemy's contempt for his own life is, in a sense, even more disturbing than his disregard for ours. Nor should we underestimate the cultural impact of the torture debate. Not only has America considered regularizing an abhorrent practice, but our armed forces have became entangled in countries where torture is a routine and daily matter. Americans do not need to imagine what might be going on in Afghanistan. On YouTube they can see videos of young Muslim women being tortured for minor infractions.
Starting on September 11, 2001, Americans were exposed to an enemy that uses horror as a weapon, as did the Nazis - who never succeeded in perpetrating violence on American soil. In its attempt to engage the countries whence the terrorists issued, America has exposed its young people to cultures in which acts of horror (suicide bombing, torture and mutilation) have become routine.
As long as we insist that there is no fundamental difference between our outlook and theirs - and as long as we make only weak attempts to take responsibility for the civic outcome in such cultures - their horror becomes ours. In World War II, America portrayed its cause as a crusade against the forces of evil. Today, we send female soldiers wearing headscarves under their helmets to show cultural sensitivity to the Afghans.
How much damage the souls of Americans have incurred in consequence of this exposure to real horror, we cannot say. But the growing morbidity of America's imagination as shown in the consumption of cinematic horror suggests we might heed the tagline of Jeff Goldblum's 1986 remake of Vincent Price's The Fly, made famous by Christina Ricci in the 1993 spoof Addams Family Values: Be afraid - be very afraid.
Notes
1. It's Not the End of the World, It's Just the End of You: The Great Extinction of the Nations by David Goldman. RVP Publishers (September 19, 2011). Price US$22.95, 384 pages.
2. How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too). by David Goldman. Regnery Publishing (September 19, 2011). Price US$27.95, 256 pages.
By Spengler
This essay is excerpted from my collection of essays, It's Not the End of the World - It's Just the End of You [1]. It appears simultaneously with my new book, How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying Too). [2].
A month after the September 11, 2001 attack, I wrote in this space:
The grand vulnerability of the Western mind is horror. The Nazis understood this and pursued a policy "des Schreckens" (to cause terror) and "Entsetzens" (horror, literally: dislodgement). Horror was not merely an instrument of war in the traditional sense, but a form of Wagnerian theater, or psychological warfare on the grand scale. Hitler's tactical advantage lay in his capacity to be more horrible than his opponents could imagine. The most horrible thing of all is that he well might have succeeded if not for his own megalomaniac propensity to overreach.
America, as Osama bin Laden taunted this week, lost in Vietnam. But it was not military setbacks, but the horrific images of Vietnamese civilians burned by napalm, that lost the war. America's experience in the war is enshrined in popular culture in the film Apocalypse Now, modeled after Joseph Conrad's story, The Heart of Darkness. The Belgian trading company official, Paul Kurtz, sinks into bestiality and dies with these words: "The horror! The horror!" It was a dreadful film, but a clever reference. At the close of World War I, T S Eliot subtitled his epitaph for Western civilization, The Waste Land, with a quote from the Conrad story: "Mr Kurtz, he dead." [3]
In this essay, adapted from material first published in First Things magazine, I argue that the 9/11 terrorists succeeded in precisely this goal: to employ the theater of horror to demoralize Americans. The culture has changed in consequence of the attack, to our detriment.
The "horror" genre supplied one out of 10 feature films released in the United States in 2009, according to the International Movie Database. During Universal Studios' heyday in the 1930s, the proportion was one in 200; only a decade ago it was one in 25. Vampire teen heartthrobs meanwhile take first place on some lists of best-selling books.
By way of contrast, 716 horror features were released in 2009, compared to 39 Westerns, a ratio of almost 20 to one. During 1960-1964, Americans saw more Westerns than horror movies. The earlier date is pertinent because it includes two of the most fearful events in post-war American history, namely, the Cuban missile crisis and the assassination of president John F Kennedy.
Westerns invariably portray a well-understood form of evil and contrast it to the courage to stand up to evil. Horror films involve an evil that is incomprehensible because it is supernatural and so potent that ordinary courage offers no remedy.
Americans never were more frightened than during the Cuban missile crisis, when nuclear war might have erupted, and never more affected by an act of violence than by the murder of a president. But in the 1960s, Americans thought they understood what they most feared; today they appear to fear most what they cannot understand.
What has horrified them?
The element of incomprehension, that is, of the supernatural, distinguishes the horror genre from mere gratuitous violence. It is not the spurting blood or mangled flesh that defines horror but the presentiment that the world itself is disordered: Demons abound in the absence of a beneficent God, who is somehow absent.
There is nothing new in the monsters that infest popular culture, indeed, nothing particularly scary about them compared to the lurid products of the pagan imagination in antiquity. What is new is the unprecedented way in which they have proliferated in the American popular media.
In biblical terms, we may define horror as the presentiment that the forces of chaos have escaped their appointed bounds and that a good God no longer exercises mastery. Fear and awe of God differ radically from horror: We fear God's punishment and stand in awe of his presence, but we are horrified when we no longer believe that God will do justice. One might mention in this context Psalm 74:
O God, my king from of old,
Who brings deliverance throughout the land;
It was You who drove back the sea with Your might,
Who smashed the heads of the monsters in the water;
It was You who crushed the heads of Leviathan,
Who left him as food for the denizens of the desert.
As Jon Levenson of Harvard University observes (in Creation and the Persistence of Evil), these are unmistakable references to a Canaanite myth discovered in the excavation of Ugarith (14th century BCE). "Each of these words occurs in some form in the passage just quoted. Without the Ugaritic literature, these allusions would remain tantalizing obscurities."
In Levenson's reading, creation ex nihilo in the sense of an instantaneous change from nothing to something fails to capture the theological implication of the biblical creation story.
Two and a half millennia of Western theology have made it easy to forget that throughout the ancient Near Eastern world, including Israel, the point of creation is not the production of matter out of nothing, but rather the emergence of a stable community in a benevolent and life-sustaining order.
The defeat by YHWH of the forces that have interrupted that order is intrinsically an act of creation. The fact that order is being restored rather than instituted was not a difference of great consequence in ancient Hebrew culture. To call upon the arm of YHWH to awake as in "days of old" is to acknowledge that these adversarial forces were not annihilated in perpetuity in primordial times. Rising anew, they have escaped their appointed bounds and thus flung a challenge at their divine vanquisher.
There is a radical difference, by the same token, between Christian apocalyptic literature and the corresponding subgenre of horror films: In the former, God manifests himself in the world and his mastery over the fearful apparitions never is in doubt. But God remains inexplicably absent while hell rampages in The Omen or Rosemary's Baby.
Biblical faith has no need of theodicy (YHWH explicitly condemns the theodical arguments of Job's friends in 42:7). Jeremiah's famous accusation (Jer 12-13) against YHWH is neither a philosophical judgment of God nor a cry of horrified despair but rather an indignant demand that God rise up and destroy the wicked:
You will be in the right, O LORD, if I make claim against You,
Yet I shall present charges against you:
Why does the way of the wicked prosper? ...
Drive them out like sheep to the slaughter,
Prepare them for the day of slaying!
As Levenson comments: "The answer - and please note that there is an answer here - is nothing like those rationalizations proposed by the philosophers: 'Drive them out like sheep to the slaughter.' The answer to the question of suffering of the innocent is a renewal of activity on the part of the God of Justice. In light of the answer, it becomes clear that the question is not an intellectual exercise but rather a taunt intended to goad the Just God into action." Jeremiah recounts dreadful events, but he is outraged rather than horrified. That is the decisive difference.
The faith of the West too easily devolves into philosophical rationalization about divine justice rather than persisting as faith in the covenantal relationship with a just and loving God. We then become vulnerable to a neo-pagan foe that wielded horror as an instrument of policy.
What produces monsters is not the sleep of reason but the absence of faith. God's creation metaphorically banished the monsters from the world in the biblical creation story. If we cease to believe that God will rise up as of old and fight our fight, then we will reify the world's evil in the guise of fictional monsters. That is the secret of our morbid fascination with the horror genre.
Why do Americans pay to watch images as revolting as the cinematic imagination can discover? Many things might explain the vast new market for uncanny evil. If you do not believe in God, you will believe in anything, to misquote G K Chesterton; and, one might add, if you do not feel God's presence, you will become desperate to feel anything at all. Terror and horror are at least some kind of feeling. After pornography has jaded the capacity to feel pleasure, what remains is the capacity to feel fear and pain.
But there is to the horror genre a pattern, of highs and lows, that may reflect something specific about Hollywood's feeding of the mood of the United States - something about America's encounter with truly horrible events, from World War II through Vietnam and down to the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the lingeringconflict in Iraq. Terror loiters in dark corners just off the public square.
Among all the film genres, horror began as the most alien to America. The iconic examples of the genre in the 1930s required European actors and exotic locales - vampires from Central Europe, for example, and zombies from Haiti. The films were noteworthy precisely because they were so unlike the cinematic mainstream: In 1931, the year that Frankenstein and Dracula first appeared, the worldwide film industry managed to make and release 1,054 features, of which only seven could be called supernatural thrillers.
After retreading the same material for 20 years, Hollywood finally put a stake through the genre's heart. By 1948, the few horror films being made were the likes of Abbott and Costello encountering Dracula, the Wolfman, and Frankenstein's monster. Laughing at monsters was emblematically American - and remained so, as when Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder did it, perhaps best of all, in 1974 with Young Frankenstein.
In other words, Hollywood gave us a small run of exotic-origin horror films in the 1930s, all drawn from European fiction: Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Portrait of Dorian Grey. After World War II, however, these nightmares of tormented Europeans were mostly naturalized as sight gags for American adolescents.
And that was how it was supposed to be. The monsters had a different meaning in their Old World provenance. The pagan sees nature as arbitrary and cruel, and the monsters that breed in the pagan imagination personify this cruelty. Removed from their pagan roots and transplanted to America, they became comic rather than uncanny.
America was the land of new beginnings and happy endings. The monsters didn't belong. After 1946, Adolf Hitler had been crushed, and that was that. Americans did not want to think about it anymore. And at the height of the national self-confidence that followed, the horror genre almost disappeared from American film. In 1950, for example, Hollywood managed only four films in the genre, all B-movie filler.
Horror recolonized American culture during late 1960s. The genre jumped from 2% of all films to 6% between 1968 and 1972. The homegrown American horror film, moreover, evolved from summer-camp slashers to truly disturbing portrayals of torture and madness.
As the online commentator Marco Lanzagorta notes, "A renewed interest in the horror genre" arrived "in the late 1960s, most probably due to the success of sophisticated and revolutionary horror films" in the vein of Night of the Living Dead (George Romero's 1968 surprise B-movie hit) and Rosemary's Baby(Roman Polanski's 1968 major-studio release).
What motivated so many Americans to subject themselves to such torment? Perhaps the explanation is that, with Vietnam, horror had returned as a subject in American life. United States troops were engaged with an enemy that made civilian populations the primary theater of battle, fighting a different and terrible sort of war. The images of civilians burnt by napalm transformed my generation. Until our adolescence - I was already 12 when John F. Kennedy was killed - America's civic religion was taken for granted. In 1963, my peers and I put our right hands over our hearts when the flag passed; by 1967 we did not flinch at flag burning. Horror over a war in which civilians could not be distinguished from combatants destroyed America's civic religion, and it was, I suspect, also the beginning of the end of mainline Protestantism.
Long after the fact, Francis Ford Coppola took Joseph Conrad's tale of horror in the jungle and transplanted it to Vietnam. Compared to what we had seen on television, the Apocalypse Nowof 1979 seemed trivial, but it gave permanent images to the post-Vietnam national mood: the sense of being lost in a nightmare of pointless and pervasive cruelty.
As data drawn from the Internet Movie Database shows, the horror genre grew from insignificance during the 1950s to 6% of all releases by 1972, in the last phase of the Vietnam War. A second spike came in 1988, driven by a bumper crop of sequels to established series (Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Critters, Friday the 13th, and so on).
But what accounts for the six-fold increase in the total number of horror films released since 1999? Subgenres such as erotic horror (mainly centered on vampires) and torture (the Saw series, for example) dig deep into the vulnerabilities of the adolescent psyche. Given the success of these films over the past 10 years, the number of Americans traumatizing themselves voluntarily is larger by an order of magnitude than it has ever been before.
There are any number of possible explanations for this phenomenon. What the bare facts show, however, is that moviegoers are now evincing a susceptibility to horror. People watch something in the theater because it resonates with something outside the theater. To see the cinematic representation of horrible things may be frightening, but the viewer knows that it is safe.
And the sense of safety we derive from watching make-believe things helps us tolerate the prospect of real things. What in the world today horrifies us the most? The horror that attended the Vietnam War had far-reaching cultural effects even though not a single shot was fired on American territory. All the more so should we expect the attack on the World Trade Center and its aftermath to have such consequences.
Random acts of terror against civilians seem a new and nearly incomprehensible instrument of war to most Americans. That is why they have such military value: The theater of horror has a devastating effect on our morale. The same is true for suicide attacks, which continue on a scale that has no historical precedent.
The enemy's contempt for his own life is, in a sense, even more disturbing than his disregard for ours. Nor should we underestimate the cultural impact of the torture debate. Not only has America considered regularizing an abhorrent practice, but our armed forces have became entangled in countries where torture is a routine and daily matter. Americans do not need to imagine what might be going on in Afghanistan. On YouTube they can see videos of young Muslim women being tortured for minor infractions.
Starting on September 11, 2001, Americans were exposed to an enemy that uses horror as a weapon, as did the Nazis - who never succeeded in perpetrating violence on American soil. In its attempt to engage the countries whence the terrorists issued, America has exposed its young people to cultures in which acts of horror (suicide bombing, torture and mutilation) have become routine.
As long as we insist that there is no fundamental difference between our outlook and theirs - and as long as we make only weak attempts to take responsibility for the civic outcome in such cultures - their horror becomes ours. In World War II, America portrayed its cause as a crusade against the forces of evil. Today, we send female soldiers wearing headscarves under their helmets to show cultural sensitivity to the Afghans.
How much damage the souls of Americans have incurred in consequence of this exposure to real horror, we cannot say. But the growing morbidity of America's imagination as shown in the consumption of cinematic horror suggests we might heed the tagline of Jeff Goldblum's 1986 remake of Vincent Price's The Fly, made famous by Christina Ricci in the 1993 spoof Addams Family Values: Be afraid - be very afraid.
Notes
1. It's Not the End of the World, It's Just the End of You: The Great Extinction of the Nations by David Goldman. RVP Publishers (September 19, 2011). Price US$22.95, 384 pages.
2. How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too). by David Goldman. Regnery Publishing (September 19, 2011). Price US$27.95, 256 pages.
Saturday, August 20, 2011
More on the UK Riots
Here are two posts from people in the UK about the riots.
J. John, (writing in Christian Today) believes that the core issue is rejection of Christian faith, with a resulting erosion in moral values, among both the rich and the poor:
How long could it take for a nation to turn these failures around, even if they have the will and the understanding to do so?
And what if J. John is right, and the policy failures Sergeant identifies stem from a deeper spiritual malaise, which is ultimately the rejection of faith in God, and the embracing of worldviews built on a mistaken understanding of humanity? What then does the future hold for Britain?
Are there signs that the people of the UK are ready to adopt the medicine of repentance which J. John is offering? And if not, how then will British society's leaders find their bearings in these confusing and troubled times?
J. John, (writing in Christian Today) believes that the core issue is rejection of Christian faith, with a resulting erosion in moral values, among both the rich and the poor:
"My own diagnosis is that the nation has lost the Christian faith that, in a quiet and unnoticed way, acted as the glue that has held the British social fabric together. For two generations it has been fashionable to sneer at Christianity and to consider it unnecessary for a modern civilised society. The result has been a moral vacuum and amongst the noise of sirens and breaking glass many people heard the sound of chickens coming home to roost."On the other hand, Harriet Sergeant (writing in The Spectator) calls the rioters 'Blair's children', and attributes their destructive rampage to three factors, traced back to a failed social policies of the Blair government:
- The failure of schools. A leading symptom of failure is illiteracy: "A full 63 per cent of white working class boys, and just over half of black Caribbean boys at the age of 14 have a reading age of seven or below." Sergeant argues that educational ideology and 'wishful thinking' has taken precedence over teaching methods which actually work. Instead of structure and discipline, children have been subjected to ideologically-driven 'student-directed learning'. As one young person put it: "School shatters your dreams before you get anywhere."
- Changes in the job market. The decline in the availability of unskilled jobs has been matched by an influx of immigrants who are eager to take up what unskilled jobs do remain. The result is crippling unemployment for poorly schooled British youth.
- Degradation of family life. The British family shows signs of mortal illness: "In a recent survey 49 per cent of British parents did not know where their children were in the evenings or with whom." Britain has the highest rate of teen pregnancy in Europe, while government support for single mothers has been climbing at a staggering rate: "The government have put young girls in a position where the only career open to them is to have children, whether they want to or not and regardless of whether or not they are good mothers. The state has taken over the role of both husband and father and, as it is all too clear, have failed at both."
How long could it take for a nation to turn these failures around, even if they have the will and the understanding to do so?
And what if J. John is right, and the policy failures Sergeant identifies stem from a deeper spiritual malaise, which is ultimately the rejection of faith in God, and the embracing of worldviews built on a mistaken understanding of humanity? What then does the future hold for Britain?
Are there signs that the people of the UK are ready to adopt the medicine of repentance which J. John is offering? And if not, how then will British society's leaders find their bearings in these confusing and troubled times?
Saturday, August 13, 2011
More on England - unhappy children to disturbed young adults?
In relation to the English riots, I was interested to discover that in 2007, UNICEF published a report entitled ‘Child poverty in perspective; an overview of child well-being in rich countries’ (UNICEF, 2007). This provided an overview of child well-being in industrialised nations. It used six main headings: material well-being; health and safety; education; peer and family relationships; behaviours and risks; and young people’s own sense of subjective well-being.
The report placed UK at the bottom of the league table.
The report placed UK at the bottom of the league table.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
The British policing 'with consent: speaking softly, while saying "No Big Stick"
Hugh Orde, police chief in Britain has responded to the London riots:
Pride in the 'British' way shines through here. But what happens when consent breaks down?
Below is Bill Muehlenberg's post on the riots:
There are a number of features which have contributed to this madness. They include: the abject failure of multiculturalism; the rise of the welfare state and the incessant demand for entitlements; the meltdown of family and community; the secularisation of society; the relativisation of morality; and the stranglehold of political correctness.
But it might be wisest to allow some English and international voices to share their concerns here. Already a number of incisive commentaries have been penned, and I offer here some of the best of their thinking on this worrying situation. One of the earliest and best pieces was by Jewish commentator Melanie Phillips. Her short but penetrating piece is worth citing in total:
“As London descends into anarchy this evening, with disturbances, arson, looting and other criminality breaking out in one borough after another for the third night running, it is clear that this is organised disorder, with thugs being dispatched to provoke and escalate hooliganism and rioting from area to area through use of social media and apparently now, the more secure BlackBerries.
“It also seems clear that this follows in a direct line from the disorders in recent years, such as we have seen at the G20 demonstrations or the storming of Conservative party headquarters over student fees, which again seemed to owe their violence to organised anarchist (if that’s not a contradiction in terms) and revolutionary leftist groups. This is almost certainly because of the near-delirious belief among such groups that, with the western economy in meltdown and the political class and the police discredited and disdained, Britain is on the cusp of a revolutionary moment. So they hijack specific protests or demonstrations in order to smash up property, police officers and anything or anyone deemed to represent the established order in order to bring about the End of Capitalism As We Know It.
“What we are seeing, in the sluggish and unprepared reaction of the police and political class to these events, compounded by their serial failure to grasp from previous such disturbances just what is going on here, is a catastrophic combination of professional inertia and incompetence, serial eyes off the ball, paralysing political correctness, an apparent reluctance to identify, name and deal with subversive activity, a capital’s police force in systemic disarray, a criminal justice system that has become an insulting joke, a refusal from the top to draw clear lines in the sand and to exercise moral and political leadership, a pandering instead to mob rule, tyro politicians who have never had a grown-up job and couldn’t run the proverbial whelk-stall let alone get a grip on a culture teetering on the edge of the cliff, a third-rate civil service machine that no longer can be relied on to keep the show on the road, a culture of narcissistic selfishness on an epic scale and a general breakdown in education, morality and elementary codes of civilised behaviour, much of it deliberately willed on for the past three decades by a grossly irresponsible and politically motivated intelligentsia that set out to smash the west. And now London is being smashed as a result.”
Arnold Ahlert speaks to family breakdown and the debilitating effects of the welfare state: “Perhaps just as important is the destruction of the nuclear family. Fully 40 percent of all American children are now born out of wedlock, a figure which rises to approximately 70 percent among black Americans. In the UK, out-of-wedlock births now account for nearly 50% of all births, on track to becoming the majority of births (and in some areas, 75% by 2014). The societal wreckage this produces has been well-documented and will not be reiterated here, save for the fact that a wholesale breakdown in morality, like the technology that facilitates it, enables greater criminal activity….
“But there is a bigger consequence that arises from the expectations for, and the inevitable failure of, welfare-statism. Whether they realize it or not, many Americans, as well as their British counterparts, are undermining the social integrity of their own societies. Little incentive remains for providing for oneself — or for that matter, one’s offspring — when the grotesqueness of the ‘social safety net’ renders this virtue irrelevant. When society has removed all negative consequences to poor life choices, which keep people and their progeny nestled in the underclass (child abandonment, disdain for education, glorification of thug culture, etc.), it effectively rewards them. It is thus absurd to expect these behavioral trends to disappear rather than the reverse.
“The situation is all the more exacerbated by a culture that shields the very segments of society that perpetuate these trends from any scrutiny and responsibility — primarily due to cowardice over racial matters. Hence the sweeping media silence on the disturbing trend of minority-perpetrated mob violence, evident in most of the reportage on these incidents. Here again, on even this most rudimentary level, negative consequences for self-destructive behavior are lifted. We cannot even identify the source of such criminality, nor demand change on the part of the offenders.”
Leftist commentator Brendan O’Neill says it is “less political rebellion, more mollycoddled mob”. He explains: “The political context is not the [education] cuts or racist policing, it is the welfare state, which has nurtured a generation that has no sense of community spirit or social solidarity.
“What we have on the streets of London and elsewhere are welfare-state mobs. The youth who are shattering their own communities represent a generation that has been suckled by the state more than any generation before it. They live in urban territories where the sharp-elbowed intrusion of the welfare state during the past 30 years has pushed aside older ideals of self-reliance and community spirit. The march of the welfare state into every aspect of urban, less well-off people’s existences, from their financial wellbeing to their child-rearing habits and even into their emotional lives, with the rise of therapeutic welfarism designed to ensure that the poor remain ‘mentally fit’, has undermined individual resourcefulness and social bonding. The antisocial youthful rioters are the end-product of this antisocial system of state intervention.
“The most striking thing about the rioters is how little they care for their own communities. You don’t have to be a right-winger with helmet hair and a niggling discomfort with black or chavvy yoof (I am the opposite of that) to recognise that this violence is not political, just criminal. It is entertaining to watch the political contortions of commentators who claim the riots are an uprising against the evils of capitalism, as they struggle to explain why the targets have been Foot Locker sports shops and why the only ‘gains’ made by the rioters have been to get a new pair of trainers or an Apple laptop. In the Brixton race riots of 1981, looting and the destruction of local infrastructure were largely incidental to the broader expression of political anger, by-products of the main show, which was a clash between a community and the forces of the state. But in these riots, looting and smashing stuff up is all there is. It is childish nihilism.”
He also speaks to the seeming inability for the English authorities to even offer effective crowd control and workable policing: “There is one more important part to this rioting story: the reaction of the cops. Their inability to handle the riots effectively reveals the extent to which the British police are adapted to consensual rather than conflictual policing. It also demonstrates how far they have been paralysed by the politics of victimhood, where virtually every police activity gets followed up by a complaint or a legal case. Their kid-glove approach to the rioters only fuels the riots because, as one observer put it, when the rioters ‘see that the police cannot control the situation, [that] leads to sort of adrenalin-fuelled euphoria’. So this street violence was largely ignited by the excesses of the welfare state and intensified by the discombobulation of the police state. The riots tell a very interesting story about modern Britain.”
Michael Ausli also comments on this disturbing feature of the riots: “As England is wracked by spreading mobs of anarchist youth, Britain’s Home Secretary reveals the rot at the core of the modern entitlement state. Responding to calls for a firmer response to yobs attacking private property and innocent citizens, Theresa May intoned, ‘The way we police in Britain is not through use of water cannon,’ she told Sky News. ‘The way we police in Britain is through consent of communities.’
“She may not have noticed that major communities in Britain are under attack, and not just undergoing an Anglo version of Spring Break in Dayton Beach. May’s statement is nonsensical, for either she is talking about the very rioters themselves or assuming that private citizens too afraid to come out of their homes expect some type of dialogue with the Metropolitan Police. Worse, it sends the very strongest signal to Britons that their leaders no longer have the will to maintain public order, which is the very fundament of civil society.”
Short term issues can be addressed here, such as getting the police force to start acting like a police force. But the bigger, more entrenched problems which I spoke to earlier – the welfare state, the failure of multiculturalism, the de-Christianisation of England – will of course require much longer and deeper solutions.
melaniephillips.com/london-descends-into-anarchy
frontpagemag.com/2011/08/10/weapons-of-mob-destruction-2/
www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/less-political-rebellion-more-mollycoddled-mob/story-e6frg6zo-1226111939883
www.nationalreview.com/corner/274069/how-societies-surrender-british-version-michael-auslin
"What we have seen so far is not soft policing, and although I understand the enthusiasm of politicians and communities for robust measures, excessive force will destroy our model of policing in the long term. What we must hang on to in all of this is the British model of policing, premised on human rights and the minimum use of force. We police with consent and must be professional, proportionate, fair and justifiable to the public at all times."Likewise British Home Secretary, Theresa May, has stated: ‘The way we police in Britain is not through use of water cannon,’ she told Sky News. ‘The way we police in Britain is through consent of communities.’
Pride in the 'British' way shines through here. But what happens when consent breaks down?
Below is Bill Muehlenberg's post on the riots:
On the British Riots
With five days of anarchy on the streets, buildings burning, streets unsafe, looters running amok, and already a billion pounds in damages, it is not too soon to start asking a few hard questions concerning the riots in Britain. Why are the streets of London aflame? How do we account for all this in a modern, prosperous Western nation?There are a number of features which have contributed to this madness. They include: the abject failure of multiculturalism; the rise of the welfare state and the incessant demand for entitlements; the meltdown of family and community; the secularisation of society; the relativisation of morality; and the stranglehold of political correctness.
But it might be wisest to allow some English and international voices to share their concerns here. Already a number of incisive commentaries have been penned, and I offer here some of the best of their thinking on this worrying situation. One of the earliest and best pieces was by Jewish commentator Melanie Phillips. Her short but penetrating piece is worth citing in total:
“As London descends into anarchy this evening, with disturbances, arson, looting and other criminality breaking out in one borough after another for the third night running, it is clear that this is organised disorder, with thugs being dispatched to provoke and escalate hooliganism and rioting from area to area through use of social media and apparently now, the more secure BlackBerries.
“It also seems clear that this follows in a direct line from the disorders in recent years, such as we have seen at the G20 demonstrations or the storming of Conservative party headquarters over student fees, which again seemed to owe their violence to organised anarchist (if that’s not a contradiction in terms) and revolutionary leftist groups. This is almost certainly because of the near-delirious belief among such groups that, with the western economy in meltdown and the political class and the police discredited and disdained, Britain is on the cusp of a revolutionary moment. So they hijack specific protests or demonstrations in order to smash up property, police officers and anything or anyone deemed to represent the established order in order to bring about the End of Capitalism As We Know It.
“What we are seeing, in the sluggish and unprepared reaction of the police and political class to these events, compounded by their serial failure to grasp from previous such disturbances just what is going on here, is a catastrophic combination of professional inertia and incompetence, serial eyes off the ball, paralysing political correctness, an apparent reluctance to identify, name and deal with subversive activity, a capital’s police force in systemic disarray, a criminal justice system that has become an insulting joke, a refusal from the top to draw clear lines in the sand and to exercise moral and political leadership, a pandering instead to mob rule, tyro politicians who have never had a grown-up job and couldn’t run the proverbial whelk-stall let alone get a grip on a culture teetering on the edge of the cliff, a third-rate civil service machine that no longer can be relied on to keep the show on the road, a culture of narcissistic selfishness on an epic scale and a general breakdown in education, morality and elementary codes of civilised behaviour, much of it deliberately willed on for the past three decades by a grossly irresponsible and politically motivated intelligentsia that set out to smash the west. And now London is being smashed as a result.”
Arnold Ahlert speaks to family breakdown and the debilitating effects of the welfare state: “Perhaps just as important is the destruction of the nuclear family. Fully 40 percent of all American children are now born out of wedlock, a figure which rises to approximately 70 percent among black Americans. In the UK, out-of-wedlock births now account for nearly 50% of all births, on track to becoming the majority of births (and in some areas, 75% by 2014). The societal wreckage this produces has been well-documented and will not be reiterated here, save for the fact that a wholesale breakdown in morality, like the technology that facilitates it, enables greater criminal activity….
“But there is a bigger consequence that arises from the expectations for, and the inevitable failure of, welfare-statism. Whether they realize it or not, many Americans, as well as their British counterparts, are undermining the social integrity of their own societies. Little incentive remains for providing for oneself — or for that matter, one’s offspring — when the grotesqueness of the ‘social safety net’ renders this virtue irrelevant. When society has removed all negative consequences to poor life choices, which keep people and their progeny nestled in the underclass (child abandonment, disdain for education, glorification of thug culture, etc.), it effectively rewards them. It is thus absurd to expect these behavioral trends to disappear rather than the reverse.
“The situation is all the more exacerbated by a culture that shields the very segments of society that perpetuate these trends from any scrutiny and responsibility — primarily due to cowardice over racial matters. Hence the sweeping media silence on the disturbing trend of minority-perpetrated mob violence, evident in most of the reportage on these incidents. Here again, on even this most rudimentary level, negative consequences for self-destructive behavior are lifted. We cannot even identify the source of such criminality, nor demand change on the part of the offenders.”
Leftist commentator Brendan O’Neill says it is “less political rebellion, more mollycoddled mob”. He explains: “The political context is not the [education] cuts or racist policing, it is the welfare state, which has nurtured a generation that has no sense of community spirit or social solidarity.
“What we have on the streets of London and elsewhere are welfare-state mobs. The youth who are shattering their own communities represent a generation that has been suckled by the state more than any generation before it. They live in urban territories where the sharp-elbowed intrusion of the welfare state during the past 30 years has pushed aside older ideals of self-reliance and community spirit. The march of the welfare state into every aspect of urban, less well-off people’s existences, from their financial wellbeing to their child-rearing habits and even into their emotional lives, with the rise of therapeutic welfarism designed to ensure that the poor remain ‘mentally fit’, has undermined individual resourcefulness and social bonding. The antisocial youthful rioters are the end-product of this antisocial system of state intervention.
“The most striking thing about the rioters is how little they care for their own communities. You don’t have to be a right-winger with helmet hair and a niggling discomfort with black or chavvy yoof (I am the opposite of that) to recognise that this violence is not political, just criminal. It is entertaining to watch the political contortions of commentators who claim the riots are an uprising against the evils of capitalism, as they struggle to explain why the targets have been Foot Locker sports shops and why the only ‘gains’ made by the rioters have been to get a new pair of trainers or an Apple laptop. In the Brixton race riots of 1981, looting and the destruction of local infrastructure were largely incidental to the broader expression of political anger, by-products of the main show, which was a clash between a community and the forces of the state. But in these riots, looting and smashing stuff up is all there is. It is childish nihilism.”
He also speaks to the seeming inability for the English authorities to even offer effective crowd control and workable policing: “There is one more important part to this rioting story: the reaction of the cops. Their inability to handle the riots effectively reveals the extent to which the British police are adapted to consensual rather than conflictual policing. It also demonstrates how far they have been paralysed by the politics of victimhood, where virtually every police activity gets followed up by a complaint or a legal case. Their kid-glove approach to the rioters only fuels the riots because, as one observer put it, when the rioters ‘see that the police cannot control the situation, [that] leads to sort of adrenalin-fuelled euphoria’. So this street violence was largely ignited by the excesses of the welfare state and intensified by the discombobulation of the police state. The riots tell a very interesting story about modern Britain.”
Michael Ausli also comments on this disturbing feature of the riots: “As England is wracked by spreading mobs of anarchist youth, Britain’s Home Secretary reveals the rot at the core of the modern entitlement state. Responding to calls for a firmer response to yobs attacking private property and innocent citizens, Theresa May intoned, ‘The way we police in Britain is not through use of water cannon,’ she told Sky News. ‘The way we police in Britain is through consent of communities.’
“She may not have noticed that major communities in Britain are under attack, and not just undergoing an Anglo version of Spring Break in Dayton Beach. May’s statement is nonsensical, for either she is talking about the very rioters themselves or assuming that private citizens too afraid to come out of their homes expect some type of dialogue with the Metropolitan Police. Worse, it sends the very strongest signal to Britons that their leaders no longer have the will to maintain public order, which is the very fundament of civil society.”
Short term issues can be addressed here, such as getting the police force to start acting like a police force. But the bigger, more entrenched problems which I spoke to earlier – the welfare state, the failure of multiculturalism, the de-Christianisation of England – will of course require much longer and deeper solutions.
melaniephillips.com/london-descends-into-anarchy
frontpagemag.com/2011/08/10/weapons-of-mob-destruction-2/
www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/less-political-rebellion-more-mollycoddled-mob/story-e6frg6zo-1226111939883
www.nationalreview.com/corner/274069/how-societies-surrender-british-version-michael-auslin
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