Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
No bio...
User ID: 732
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
I think his House VI is quite lovely, although admittedly that's largely due to the juxtaposition of the structure with the environs rather than due to the intrinsic properties of the structure itself.
This is genuinely hideous.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
I mean the idea of democracy is that the people have input on matters that will affect their lives. Someone living in the UK is affected only in the most tangential way by political goings-on in the United States. Why, then, should such a person need to weigh in on those matters?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Why do they need to be allowed to vote at all?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
but if you telling me I'm talking in circles, then it starts to sound a lot like the hair-splitting progressives do, with questions like "what is white".
Good! Progressives are correct to demand precision! Categories should be deconstructed as a sanity check, to make sure they’re actually coherent. I am instinctively a splitter rather than a lumper - I want to understand fine-grained distinctions.
My contention here is that “racist” is an overloaded category. It’s combining too many disparate phenomena, and adding an unjustified layer of pathologization on top. We need to throw the word out entirely. It was never useful or valid as anything other than a tool in the anti-white progressive tool kit.
You have combined at least three disparate phenomena:
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Belief that some races are “inherently inferior” to others. This is describing an internal, epistemological phenomenon.
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Wanting to effect or enforce separate social/professional/political spheres for different racial groups. This is an active, practical policy decision. It might be motivated by the internal beliefs featured at in Phenomenon #1, but certainly doesn’t have to be. (Do you think the only reason some individuals might establish or join a Jewish Student Union is that they believe non-Jews are inferior to Jews?)
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Failing to update one’s assessment of an individual based on receiving new and specific information. I’m imagining a situation like this:
My white daughter tells me, “I’ve been seeing this guy and I really like him. His name is DeShawn.” I’m angry and suspicious. “He’s an astrophysicist, has never even gotten a traffic ticket and volunteers at the soup kitchen every weekend.” I’m still equally angry and suspicious.
Now, leave aside that there are still perfectly legitimate reasons for me to prefer my daughter to date someone who is culturally similar to our family, has similar customs, isn’t going to introduce in-laws into our family dynamic who have very different cultural norms than ours, etc. I agree with you that failing to update priors when confronted with trustworthy new evidence is indeed an epistemic failure! I don’t know if it’s a moral failure, although certainly I’d have a lot of sympathy for DeShawn in this scenario. (You do everything right, defy every negative stereotype, and still get treated like a nigger?) I just don’t see any necessary connection between this phenomenon and the other two.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Like I said it's not even strictly speaking about inferiority.
Then what is it about? You’re talking in circles. I asked you what racism is, and you said it’s about believing in broad racial inferiority, except actually it’s not really about inferiority. Is it just about treating everyone as an atomized individual and consciously avoiding making probabilistic judgments about people given limited information?
If you want a "no blacks allowed, no matter what other hoops you jump through" club (which, by the sound of it, you do) that seems pretty straight-forwardly racist to me as well.
Can you articulate why?
It doesn't matter if you believe it's only 3% of blacks that are an exception to the rule, if you're against "race norming" you're not racist. It similarly doesn't matter if you think it's the 97% that are the exception to the rule (I know this is non-sense mathematically speaking, just go with it rethorically), if you're for "rece norming", you're still racist.
Your original comment said that noticing racial differences isn’t racist. Now you appear to be saying that actually it is.
I don’t think you’ve thought very deeply about this word, where it comes from, and why we should or shouldn’t use it.
A tough-on-crime approach put so many murderers in jail that the murder rate fell by nearly 50%. Many major cities like New York saw even larger gains with a corresponding urban renewal that (temporarily) stemmed the white flight to the suburbs.
Had the policies of the 1990s been allowed to persist until today, the U.S. would have the lowest murder rate in 100 years, maybe ever.
Right, I don’t disagree with any of this, I’m just trying to understand what you think are the reasons for why America stopped pursuing those policies. You refer to “race baiting” and “fanning the flames”. Okay, yes, obviously fuck Al Sharpton and Cornel West. But why do you think so many people (both black and white) were susceptible to their messaging? How do we get people to stop taking them seriously?
My basic theory is that blacks in this country are always going to go through cycles of militancy and complacency, and whites are always going to react with their own cycles of hardness and softness. I’m seeing early signs that whites might be ready to shift to a period of hardness, but this will inevitably soften once the proximate causes (Floyd-style race riots, racial grifters overplaying their hand, etc.) fade from memory.
In other words, like I said, the 90’s colorblindness wasn’t bad - I’d be perfectly fine living in it indefinitely, even if it would require me to really hold my tongue at times, especially since I have been on the receiving end of black criminality multiple times in my life - but it was not built to last. The inherent tensions and historical wounds between blacks and whites will continue to recur until either real parity is achieved - perhaps through serious and targeted eugenics and gene therapy - or separation is achieved.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
But in the 1990s, it felt like the damage caused by these people was more contained.
You mean the decade of the Rodney King riots, “superpredator” discourse, and OJ Simpson?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
This seems like it’s designed to exclude basically every modern instantiation of what every racially-aware person today believes. Like, if you’re not a Madison Grant level “Africa begins at Calais” Nordicist TND advocate, you’re not a racist? What does “inferiority” mean in this context? What percentage of blacks do I need to believe are “exceptions to the rule” before I’m no longer a racist? (W.E.B. Dubois, one of the great black thought leaders in American history, spoke of “the talented tenth” of blacks needing to paternalistically care for the other 90% of them who are not cognitively capable of measuring up to Western civilization. Was Dubois racist against black people?)
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
What do you think racism is?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
What about option 4: Political and geographic separation?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
No, the problem with DR3 is that “racism” isn’t a bad thing. Being aware of racial differences, and acting on that awareness, is an entirely healthy behavior within reason. If the Democrats were “the real racists” - meaning they were willing to openly acknowledge HBD and outline ways to address it - I’d be way more likely to vote for them.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
The 1990s race blind society was a good Schelling point. I think we can and should go back there.
As I’ve pointed out a million times before, it was not a good Schelling point, because it was inherently unstable. It required a massive, society-wide coordinated effort to pretend not to notice something that’s obvious. And more specifically, it required black people to participate in that coordination, and to sacrifice a huge amount psychologically as a result. This is a culture with multigenerational stories of (what they consider) grievous mistreatment that has never been made right, and which (as they see it) is directly responsible for the profound differences in achievement and prestige between themselves and other racial groups.
In their minds, white people spent 400 years playing the racial identity politics game and cheating egregiously at it, and then the second blacks had a window where they could have attained parity (let alone the upper hand) whites decided that it was no longer okay to see race, that game is over with, we should just let bygones be bygones.
A plurality of blacks were willing to temporarily accept this new paradigm because they earnestly believed that, given a procedurally (if not materially) level playing field, blacks would inevitably start to move toward parity with whites. Thirty years later that absolutely has not happened, and shows no signs of even getting closer to happening. Why on earth would blacks accept the same “return to colorblindness” when it manifestly did not produce tangible results for them? It was built on a lie. HBD-aware whites disagree with blacks about what exactly that lie was, but neither side fails to recognize that it was indeed a lie.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
The blood type stuff doesn’t actually strike me as absurd at all. Blood type is hereditary, so it wouldn’t surprise me at all if blood type had some sort of non-zero correlation with personality. Now, I’m aware that no correlation has been established with any rigor. I’m just saying it’s not at all absurd to believe that there would be such a correlation, given that there’s at least a material/genetic factor that could be identified as causative.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
I would think that “swingers party” would be the closest model.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
My post from last year sparked some discussion of this.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
The truly committed wokes do despise the body and material reality. What do you think transgender stuff is? The critical fat studies people are the same - you see a lot of talk about “life in a fat, marginalized body.” Like yeah, there’s some tension there with the “fat acceptance”/“healthy at any size” stuff, but the latter is basically the short-term stopgap solution (reducing/eliminating feelings of shame and otherness as a result of living in a disfavored corporeal form) but the transhumanism is the long-term vision. The abolishment of unchosen bonds includes unchosen bodies.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Right, yesterday I referenced James Lindsay, who goes into great depth pointing out the explicit parallels between modern post-Marxism/“woke”/critical theory on the one hand, and Gnosticism on the other. I think the influences and similarities are unimpeachably obvious. Wokes very much do treat “society” as a demiurge to be defeated by an initiated majority of ensouled, elected individuals who have achieved varying levels of gnosis. The end goal being to reclaim Eden - an anarchoprimitivist, purely-egalitarian utopia.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Let me put it this way: can someone subscribe to a typical woke agenda (trans surgeries for minors, mandatory racial diversity quotas, the need to overthrow the patriarchy and empower women, etc) and not be a Marxist?
Oh, certainly! The trans surgeries for minors things seems more driven by the medical establishment’s desire to make huge amounts of money off of trans people - and to a lesser extent by transhumanists using trans surgeries as a foot in the door to different types of alterations of the human form - than it does by Marxism. Racial diversity quotas are isomorphic to the kinds of ethnic spoils systems that have existed in tons of multiethnic/multiracial empires throughout history. And the shattering of patriarchy and empowerment of women has been a recurring strain of thought in several religious traditions - for example, Baha’i - and liberal philosophical movements. However, I would say that the specific framing that sees sex relations as an explicit dialectical class conflict between two competing groups is distinctly Marxist.
Or has (what is alleged to be) the historical provenance of those ideas made them intrinsically and permanently Marxist?
I think it’s plainly true that the vast majority of the people who actually achieved the real-world implementation of these ideas, whether in the U.S., Europe, Latin America, or Asia, were Marxists and were doing so because they were Marxist. It’s true that they also could have arrived at these ideas by other paths - they just didn’t. Martin Luther King was a closeted communist, and his speeches were likely ghostwritten by Stanley Levison, his handler and fundraiser, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. These activists were overwhelmingly motivated by an explicit commitment to Marxism. That doesn’t even mean all of their ideas were wrong! I don’t think Marxists are wrong about everything! It’s just an accurate description of the provenance of their ideas.
I believe that the right's preoccupation with "cultural Marxism" carries with it an implicit assumption that without Karl Marx, none of this would be happening.
Right, so to a large extent I agree with this whole paragraph. If it hadn’t been Karl Marx developing these ideas, it would have been someone else. Hell, Marx was only one of a number of commentators writing about similar ideas at the time, reacting to the same influences and in discussion with each other. MLK and the other major figures behind the Civil Rights movement were communists, but they clearly won by appealing to pre-existing moral sentiments and vulnerabilities present among liberal Christians. Magnus Hirschfeld, one of the seminal figures in early gay right activism and the man who founded the medical institute that performed the first sex-reassignment surgeries in history, was a socialist, and Harry Hay, a very influential American gay rights activist, was a long-time member of the Communist Party. However, these men were building on, and in ongoing dialogue with, thinkers who were coming from totally different and non-Marxist philosophical backgrounds. Many of these movements are natural extensions of ideas contained within the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution.
I think it’s important to tease out the provenance of these ideas very carefully and to find a way to rescue what’s good about them while discarding all of the Marxist class-struggle garbage that accumulated around them. That requires being very honest about not only the fact that it was Marxists leading the way on most of them, but also why that was the case and how to wrest control of them away from Marxists moving forward.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
No matter how ruthlessly the contemporary SJW criticizes all that is, if they're not fundamentally invested in the notion of a workers' class struggle to overcome capitalism, then I think it's inappropriate to classify them as Marxist.
Their counterargument is: Marx was a fallible man who was susceptible to the biases and perceptual limitations of his time and place. He lived in Germany in the gnarliest part of the Industrial Revolution, so of course the relationship between workers and factory owners seemed like the most important conflict in the world to him. He was surrounded by it every day! However, at the exact same time as Marx was writing, millions of people were literally enslaved in the New World (and in many part of the Old), and women were in a sort of bondage that Marx, being a man of his time, just couldn’t bring himself to grapple with. We, with the benefit of two hundred extra years of learning and dialogue and hearing other perspectives, can now clearly recognize the limitations in Marx’s framework, while still recognizing that his key insights - his analytical approach, his relentless and sincere belief in justice and the shattering of unjust hierarchies, his keen observation of the dialectical nature of power relations, his recognition of historical progress as a result of the resolution of societal contradictions - are centrally valuable to the achievement of our goals even today.
If Marxism has an advantage over Christianity, it’s that Marxists have no obligation to treat any particular thing Marx said as some sacred final word on the subject. Marx was just a man, and other men have been able to take the things he said that are useful, and discard or correct (or, in a Hegelian sense, sublate) the things that were shortsighted. I understand what you mean about there being a sort of Ship of Theseus problem, but Marxism has long been a sort of extended branching dialogue between academics, juxtaposed against but learning from, real-world concrete praxis by committed activists. It’s a sort of evolving religion - which is appropriate, given its roots in Hermeticism and Gnosticism, which believe that humanity is slowing rebuilding God by progressively discovering His nature and becoming more like him over time.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
What I find really hilarious about a lot of replies to both this thread and the original one is how many people seem determined to defend the honor of Karl Marx, as if it pains them to see people “misrepresent” his views.
You have me and FC and Arjin pointing out very specific quotes by people who are deeply immersed in Marxist discourse, who have studied the massive corpus of theory and commentary and praxis that have sprung up in the two centuries since Marx was writing (the kind of stuff you can find on marxists.org, for example), and who lay out very sophisticated explanations for why their work is a valid and important extension of Marx’s work, and people here are basically just saying, “Nope, you’re wrong, you don’t know what you’re doing. I know what Marx wanted better than you do.” It’s very reminiscent of the New Atheist era, where atheists would quote scripture at Christians and say, “I know your Bible better than you do. Jesus would hate you.”
Marxism has been an evolving umbrella of thought for a long time. Marxists, for all of their flaws, really do think very deeply about this stuff and talk about it, out in the open. I compared it to Christianity earlier, with the many splits and theological developments and infighting that has taken place within Christian thought, and nobody seems to have a good explanation for why this is not a valid comparison. There are plenty of individuals today who see themselves as church authorities, and who believe they are qualified to interpret, expand upon, and even advance Christ’s statements. It’s very possible that if Jesus were here right now to speak to us, he would set the record straight that some or all of those guys are wrong! But he’s not, so we’re stuck doing the best we can to figure out how to apply his ideas to a modern world that is profoundly different from the one in which Jesus lived. (What would Jesus say about artificial intelligence, or nuclear weaponry? We can only try our best to reason it out.) Marxists are doing the same thing with applying Marx’s ideas to a very different paradigm. Why is this so difficult for some people to accept? Why is it so important to you to maintain the belief that Marx only cared about economics?
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Right, I’m in favor of developing and utilizing remote-controlled arrest robots in the short term to see how well that goes; I agree that it would significantly reduce a number of risks and make the arrest process far more efficient and effective. If that goes well enough, we might not even need to progress to autonomous robocops! My general point is that policing right now is severely hampered by the fallibility and vulnerability of flesh-and-blood beat cops, and that a move toward more automation and robotics in policing strikes me as a highly promising development.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
I didn’t reply to you, unless you are also @Blunicorn, so I’m not sure what you mean.
No, the robot in OP’s post did not shoot anyone. What I’m saying is that I am not necessarily afraid of the replacement of human cops by robot cops, if it means an improvement in the competence and decisionmaking of police.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
Let’s compare this to the police-abolitionist left’s latest martyr. On September 15th, the NYPD shot and wounded a man named Derrell Mickles. Two bystanders were also wounded by gunfire, as was one of the officers on scene. (Apparently by a ricocheting bullet.) In stark contrast to the standard complaint about trigger-happy American cops, this scenario is an example of a very common problem, which is police officers being too reluctant to shoot.
The narrative being circulated is that the NYPD “killed a man over a $2.90 subway ticket.” Well, leaving aside the fact that nobody actually died, this is also a lie, because Mickles was shot for repeatedly charging at police officers with a knife. Mickles had jumped the turnstile at a subway station twice in the span of ten minutes. The first time he did so, police followed him and asked him to leave, which he did. Nobody was shot during this encounter, but Mickles brandished a large knife before departing the station. When he then returned and jumped the turnstile a second time, police followed him onto the platform, where the shooting occurred.
As early as 2:28 into the video, Mickles says to an officer, “I’m gonna make you kill me.” He then repeatedly shouts, “Shoot me!” as the officers ask him probably twenty times to drop the knife. 3:25 is the first time that Mickles moves toward police aggressively; at this point in the encounter it would unquestionably be justified to deploy a taser, and probably ruled justified to use deadly force. Instead, they hesitate, and seconds later the subway train enters the station and Mickles gets on an occupied Subway train with a knife in his hand. The police’s reluctance to shoot Mickens has now created a situation that is far more dangerous to the public. At this point the officers deploy tasers multiple times, striking Mickles at least once; he was almost certainly on drugs during the encounter, because he shrugs off the taser. Only at this point, with Mickles now having departed the train and re-entered the platform, do the officers pull the trigger, with their backstop being the subway train, rather than the empty platform it would have been had they shot him when they first had the chance. Their indecision - their reluctance to shoot another person even when that person is armed, dangerous, and actively goading them into shooting him - endangered their own lives and the lives of others.
Can you understand why I might look toward the decisiveness, the cold competence of a robot cop who’s not afraid of libelous press coverage or administrative leave or criminal charges by an anti-cop DA, and think, “Hell yeah, let’s get some more of that.” I want men like Derrell Mickles to be dispatched quickly and without fanfare, rather than allowed to put the public at risk. Police officers are nervous, pumped up on adrenaline, and can easily forget their training under stress. A robot would have done what needed to be done, and all the people on that train could have been on their way.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
There apparently existed some group of people who used that term once upon a time, and maybe you can still find one or another stray adherent, but it's not clear why it would even still be popular given that the typical SJW is hustling for a seat at the table of the megacorps and passive-income fatcats.
As I said in my reply to OP, the term “cultural Marxist” refers to a specific umbrella of ideas, originated and promulgated by individuals who explicitly self-identified as Marxists, and who applied Marxist analysis and praxis to issues of cultural/social inequality. These people mostly called, and still do call, themselves critical theorists. Do you agree that this is a discrete and identifiable phenomenon or not? If you do, what is the point of quibbling about the term “Cultural Marxism”? Your concern clearly isn’t that you don’t want to use an exonym for this group, because you yourself call them “SJWs” and “the Social Justice crowd” - terms that these people clearly do not use amongst themselves.
but it's not clear why it would even still be popular given that the typical SJW is hustling for a seat at the table of the megacorps and passive-income fatcats.
Marx himself made it very clear that he believed that capitalism was a necessary step on the way to communism. One of the first major wrinkles in Marxism that caused a lot of consternation and soul-searching in the movement is the fact that the only country where communism had securely taken hold before WWII was Russia - at the time a non-industrialized semi-feudal state that had not yet undergone most of the preliminary steps that would have allowed capitalism to first take root and then expose its own contradictions. Marx himself expected communism to flourish first in countries like the UK and Germany, where the Industrial Revolution was the most pervasive and capitalism strongest.
Modern Marxists have developed corporatist theories of how 21st-century Marxism will necessarily be achieved. They’ve given up on the short-term goal of expropriating industrialists and shifted their focus to working within the existing framework of monopoly capitalism; many of them welcome a paradigm in which megacorps crush smaller companies and centralize the means of production among an ever-smaller group of nearly state-adjacent entities, because it makes it that much easier to infiltrate those organizations and direct them toward ideological ends. Public-private partnerships are the new Marxist paradigm.
Someone who doesn't identify as a Marxist can't be a Cultural Marxist, any more than a folk music fan who is not into metal music or culture can be a folk metal fan. What you are doing amounts to relabelling all folk music fans as folk metallers, because you hate both metal and folk music and during the most recent resurgence of folk music there happened to be a group of metalheads who got into it.
Again, have you actually read any of the works of the figures I and others are identifying as Cultural Marxists? If you were to read their works and see that they do actually identify as Marxists, and offer sophisticated explanations of how their work furthers Marxist ends, would that change your mind?
It’s interesting, because I can see a lot of myself in both of these guys.
Although I’m retired from performing, at various points I have been a musician, an actor, and dabbled in playwriting. And having gone to school with other artists, I’ve been a part of numerous conversations about art - what is art, is art inherently transgressive, what is the nature of the tension between art and entertainment, is it an artist’s responsibility to expand consumer’s horizons, etc. - and I’ve always found myself somewhere in between the two extremes. The dispute between Alexander and Eisenman mirrors the tension within myself. (“Inside you there are two wolves. One is Christopher Alexander, the other is Peter Eisenman…”)
I love pop music. Even the most cloyingly generic, harmonically predictable, lyrically lowbrow, etc. However, I also listen to metal, although far less often than I used to in high school and college. Now, even within the framework of “heavy metal” (which is actually a pretty wide umbrella term encompassing a large variety of sub-genres) I generally prefer music that is slickly-produced, with tightly-controlled and non-dissonant vocals, whether clean or unclean. Listening to metal is a good outlet for feelings of frustration and disharmony, but it is best when it provides catharsis and resolution of those feelings, rather than exacerbating them.
I’ve had arguments with friends who are into far more intentionally-bizarre-and-alienating music than I am, and I find myself taking the Christopher Alexander position: Why is bad for music to make people feel good? Why would you listen to something that’s designed to be grating? What is the point of Merzbow and Melt Banana? Theres some mental block within me, as there is in Christopher Alexander, that renders it impossible for me to even comprehend or model the mental state of someone who enjoys that stuff. Yet conversely, when I talk to someone who hates metal music, I find myself in more of the Eisenman stance, explaining why some level of dissonance can actually act as a sort of beauty in itself, by providing contrast to more harmonious and pleasant feelings. A more nuanced and varied palate is good for everyone, right? The world can’t all be sunshine and rainbows all the time. Where’s your outlet for negativity?
When it comes to movies, I’m far far closer to the Eisenman stance. I just get almost nothing out of the predictable Dashing Virtuous Hero Defeats Evil Villain and Saves the Princess story, unless it is executed absolutely masterfully. I have said multiple times (with only a bit of exaggeration) that I never want to watch another movie with a happy ending. Not that I don’t think such movies should be made! I believe that the common people need and crave that style of entertainment, and I don’t want such things taken from them. But I’m very happy that some filmmakers still throw a bone to people like me who like our films challenging, ambivalent, stimulating, and nihilistic.
This sometimes gets me into fights with smart people of a more conservative bent, who lament the very existence of non-didactic art. They seem to believe that all art exists (or should exist) to promulgate pro-social narratives about virtue. But where does that leave people like me, who are more comfortable inhabiting mental states full of tension and anxiety and alienation? They can’t understand what anyone would get out of watching Seinfeld (a show about nothing!) or the films of Woody Allen. They can’t comprehend why someone would want to watch Requiem For A Dream. Well, they can stick to watching the ninety-fifth installment of The Fast And The Furious, but I’m happy that they haven’t yet succeeded in stamping out all art that doesn’t comport with their preferences.
So then we get to the question of: is architecture an art in the same way? Does it contain philosophical and discursive content, such that an architect who merely gives the unwashed masses what they claim to want is the equivalent of a musician who writes nothing but (as John Lennon accused Paul McCartney of doing) “writing silly love songs.” Clearly there’s nothing wrong with a musician who writes abrasive or unhappy or disharmonious music, so long as he doesn’t force everyone to listen to it. A building is different, though, because everyone who passes by it is forced to look at it. And when it’s a building that people are forced to look at every day, because it’s in a busy area, or it’s a government building that people have to interact with against their will, there is absolutely an element of forceful psychic harm being done to people. Like strapping them to a chair and blasting Dying Fetus at them all day.
But then, what does that mean for a man like Peter Eisenman? His chosen art form is architecture, and that’s what matters to him. Should he be forced to live in a city where there are no buildings that suit his tastes? Where all buildings are harmonious (and all music is David Guetta, and every film is a Disney movie) and he is treated like a villain for wishing to introduce some element of his own tastes into it?
In the debate, Eisenman says he’s very happy to be able to live in New York City, where there are eight million people who feel the same way as he does. This is interesting to me because I nearly moved to NYC, I had an overall great experience when I spent a week there in 2016, but it had never occurred to me that the thing people actually like about the city is all of the disorder and disharmony. Those seemed like things everyone agreed were unfortunate downsides that one must suffer through in order to access all the better things about the city. I never thought there was any serious number of people who embraced the chaos and disorder - the graffiti, the cacophony of car horns and unintelligible conversations, the mishmash of architectural eras, the homeless zombies and the occasional smell of human urine and shit - as a positive good! And it occurred to me, hearing Eisenman say that, that there are probably people who have the power to make NYC less disharmonious, but choose not to because they want the city to be a refuge for those like them who have disordered internal lives and who want their external world to mirror that disorder.
I think that people like Eisenman - and people like me, when I’m in one of my more disagreeable moods - need and deserve to have the opportunity to indulge their own tastes and to see them reflected in at least some small corner of the world. The problem is giving them immense power to force their tastes onto the great mass of people who will be harmed by them against their will. If people want to seek out novelty and disharmony, it should be there for them to find. It shouldn’t be the first thing people see every day when they exit their front doors. It shouldn’t be shoved down their throats every day. And if Eisenman feels that he is having treacly vapid harmony shoved down his throat every day, then he needs to suck it up and come to grips with the responsibility that a minority has to the majority around it.
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