Momus and the Jews

2. i see france as an upright haughty country, i think it suffers from the problems
of brutishness as much as england.

3. the neville headlines on the backpages would be a daily occurence in italy

4. blair out graffiti is noticeable by its absence, i agree. i attribute this to wearyness
and disillusionment with possibility, (and the fact that we have our supposed good guy in power)

5. the thing about schneider was very british. prurient/salacious redtop coverage, either/or playing out in ink. depressing

that france that is more like america than britain?

I have broad sympathy for Momus's vision of Britain (although the claim that Jewish broadcasters are telling us to enjoy life because they feel responsible for imported "Jewish ideolology" is provocative silliness). But living in France now as I do, I do think Momus's take on the French borders on fantasy.

I like the idea that the Jews are making amends for giving us silly commandments about graven idols by teaching us to cook. But Suzy tells me that Rick Stein is not a Jew, so I'll have to settle for the theory that people who went to public school and are the uncle of Radio 1 DJs (Judge Jules, apparently) are feeling guilty and making amends by teaching us to cook.

How about we teach you a few other things, like Yiddish? Here's a good start: Momus, you are a schmuck.

:)

Yes, but the Israelis didn't give us the Ten Commandments, and the monotheistic tradition didn't give us Freud. But there is something that links Moses and Freud. If only I were allowed to name it, I might be able to think.

haha! More lemon juice, less yapping.

I really wish I could reply to this (what are you saying? "Oh you silly Hebrews with your ten commandments and your penis envies"? That's, er, kind of a reductive view innit?), but I have to get to my job. (at a bank! No, not the Jewish one that controls everything, sorry.)

PS: I demand you find some way to make up for bagpipes and that last Supergrass album

(I'm sorry, I'll stop now)

It wasn't so much the idea of Jews 'making amends' as the idea that, if Judeo-Christianity is a kind of guilt-machine devised by Jews, who better than Jews to dismantle it? Who better than the people who told us not to eat shrimp to tell us how to cook it? And what wine to drink with it?

How about Mollie Katzen, treasured by hippie chefs everywhere?

(cue Jess calling me an adolescent for continually hating on Da Christian Posse)

I'd like to see the British Isles donning a hair shirt. Perhaps Christo could do it, and Mel Gibson could film it as 'The Passion of The Christo', with a lot of gratuitous flagellation to the Home Counties.

I don't know who invented it, but it was big in 12th century Canterbury:

'Before his murder the monks had been divided in their loyalty to Thomas Becket, but after his martyrdom for the church, they proclaimed him a saint. Their esteem for him was heightened when under his Archbishop's robes they found him to be wearing a Benedictine monks' hair shirt, evidence that he beat himself as penances and the sight of thousands of vermin infesting his garments, showing his true piety at denouncing any pleasures of the flesh... In 1174 Henry II came to Canterbury to pay penance for causing Becket's death, so as to avert the wrath of heaven. At St. Dunstan's church he stripped down to a hair shirt, drenched with the wet weather, and walked barefoot to the Cathedral. At the tomb he knelt and wept, he was then whipped by monastic rod and knelt there in prayer until morning.'

Oh, Debbie Harry wore one of those when Blondie last toured, but you get my drift.

He he - whipped by a monastical rod. It was just all twelfth century bondage gear.

Speaking of good music, what did you make of 'Oskar Tennis Champion', then, J0hn?

(Nick is not an anti-Semite BTW, just a man with a klutzy hypothesis)

My pro-semitism is often confused with anti-semitism, so I will forgive the last remark. I will be even more clement if you don a hair hairband.

now stop making a cleverly-disguised list of "Jews Momus Likes," it's like the racist guy at the cocktail party reciting his list of "black folks I know who're just good guys, irregardless!" and so on

Momus and the Jess?

(Sings): 'I Am Hated For Loving'.

Outrageous!

(nothing wrong with my reading comprehension, mate, get a grip)

I have broad sympathy for Momus's vision of Britain (although the claim that Jewish broadcasters are telling us to enjoy life because they feel responsible for imported "Jewish ideolology" is provocative silliness). But living in France now as I do, I do think Momus's take on the French borders on fantasy

I really only said that France protects its small farmers and grocers, its paysans artisanales, just as the Japanese do. Camembert cheese-makers, wasabi mustard-makers. The governments of France and Japan subsidise and protect these people because food is seen as part of the cultural heritage of the land.

What interests me is the idea of pleasure as a duty of the state. America has the pursuit of happiness built into its constitution, but not pleasure. Bhutan's king has declared GNH -- gross national happiness -- more important to Bhutan than gross national product. I wish he'd gone a step further and said gross national pleasure.

It gets even more interesting when pleasure is simultaneously a refusal of all metaphysics and a new metaphysic: the immanence or thisness of things-in-themselves replaces religion, and what we have in front of us contains all the heaven and hell we can conceive. Suddenly all the hierarchies which give power to people the more they deal with the abstract and intangible (money, law, God) are inverted, and power and respect goes to the 'peasant' or 'artisan' who knows and loves the thing he works with.

I call this 'anti-metaphysical metaphysics' superflat, adopting Takashi Murakami's phrase. It is basically a Japanese idea, and when I listen to John Lennon singing 'Imagine', the ultimate superflat anthem, I can't help but think that he couldn't have written the song without Yoko Ono.

In this cosmology, Judeo-Christianity is on the wrong side, as is monopoly capitalism. People on the right side are peasants, infants, women, perverts, fetishists, gays. Plato is on the wrong side, Aristotle is on the right. Some of this is well-expressed by philosopher Michel Onfray.

Yet another example of French academics playing with their dicks.
Momus if you want to waste your time with this you go ahead.
You're a silly billy.

y'see, people often accuse momus of reductionism, but what they don't know is that he actually likes reducing things to essentials!

Momus I'd advise you to investigate the primary texts in this question before you go proposing/quoting ridiculous binaries like that.

Nope. The Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution.

J0hn, the Plato / Aristotle binary is so far from ridiculous that it's a bit of a commonplace to repeat it. Rafael sums it up in his painting 'The School of Athens', where he has Plato pointing up to the heavens and Aristotle pointing down to the earth. Choosing between Plato and Aristotle is not a strange thing to do either. What gets slightly strange is relating it all to the Superflat philosophy of Takashi Murakami, but even that is not incredibly strange.

(also Nick, didn't you have to read these in the original at school or something, though not when you lived in Athens?)

I don't understand suzy's joke.

If it itches you're *definitely* not doing it right.

(Oh to have been here hours ago when that would've been funny)

In the Declaration of Independence, the Founders pronounced the self-evident truth that all men are created equal -- not equally intelligent, equally beautiful, equally English, or equally white, but equally endowed by their Creator with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They also proclaimed that "to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." In 1787 and 1789, they wrote and then ratified a Constitution; a constitution ratified by, and with the consent of, the people of the United States -- "We the people of the United States." It was a constitution designed to secure the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is about the last of these, the right to pursue happiness, that I intend to speak today.

The Constitution does not mention a specific "right to pusue happiness."

As for the rest of the thread, you're starting to sound a little bit like my dad.

Which makes reading him an uncomfortable experience for me;
I violently disagree with most of his conclusions, yet his
arguments remain so clear and persuasive.

Aristotle isn't pointing down in Raphael's painting -- he stretches out his hands with all five fingers sort of parallel to the ground, a slightly more ambiguous action.

There are only readings of Plato and Aristotle, not set truths. I clearly can't win an argument with you lot on this, because if I say it's widely accepted that Plato is more metaphysical in outlook than Aristotle, you'll say my view is 'conventional' or 'deeply conservative'. If I then point out that a philosopher as radical as Michel Onfray says the same thing, you'll say 'Oh but he's French...' If someone wants to argue seriously that Plato is not pointing off to an abstract and absent realm of ideas, fine. Lay it out and bring it on. But you're going to need more than slander, invective, and smug warnings about 'reading the text'.

Uh...wait a minute.

Here is the standard view, from the Radical Academy website:

'For Plato, the degrees of knowledge are four:

(1) apprehension of pure images;
(2) perception of sensible objects;
(3) mathematical knowledge;
(4) knowledge of Ideas.

The three inferior degrees of knowledge tend to the knowledge of Ideas, which is the most perfect knowledge. Plato argued that if knowledge is derived from sense-perception then the Sophists are right that there can be no genuine knowledge. He condemns the Sophists for confusing appearance and reality. True knowledge comes from contemplation of the truth which, in turn, impels dialectics...

Aristotle does not accept Plato's doctrine because the world of separate Ideas does not explain the reality of this visible world, which is in continuous movement. Since Ideas are themselves immutable and unchangeable, they cannot be the cause of motion and change in sensible things. The cause of motion and change must be sought in the thing itself as an immanent element of the reality. Only when an understanding of the factors of motion is had can we have a true knowledge of things, for these factors of motion are the key to understanding the real meaning of the concept of Socrates. Hence every investigation must start from the reality which we actually have to face.

http://radicalacademy.com/adiphilmetaphysical2.htm

Aristotle's insistence on immanence, on the mutability and 'thisness' of things, is exactly what I've been talking about and why I align with him rather than Plato. And it doesn't really make much sense either to say that I'm wrong in my interpretation of Aristotle (when it's a pretty standard one), or that I have no right to like what he says (when that's clearly my right).

I don't think Momus ever relies on anything else, though. His Dionysus vs Apollo schtick is a hoary old cliché by now. And he buys into the stalest myths about Paris and Tokyo.

I am still waiting for the deus ex machina of Mr Darnielle's revelations about Plato and Aristotle, without which all this is mere sniping and timewasting.

The happy life is thought to be virtuous; now a virtuous life requires exertion, and does not consist in amusement. And we say that serious things are better than laughable things and those connected with amusement, and that the activity of the better of any two things - whether it be two elements of our being or two men - is the more serious; but the activity of the better is ipso facto superior and more of the nature of happiness.

Your nom de guerre, and much of your general approach to things, seems rather at odds with Aristotle here - much less so with old Plato, whose perceived anitpathy toward art (vide the Ion dialogue, for example) may well mask/reveal wonder at its very existence, and perhaps mimic the very thing presumed under attack! I myself won't take sides in Plato v. Aristotle - don't think it's profitable to do so, and don't think they present as stark a contrast as you do. Your sudden introduction of the question of whether you have a right to like Aristotle or not is the red herring to end all red herrings; nobody ever questioned your right to your opinion, only whether said opinion actually had much to do with the Aristotelian corpus.

x-post: Aristotle isn't talking about "liking to be serious," M. He's talking about the inherent value of seriousness as an approach to life, and particularly as a necessary predecessor to the contemplative life, to which life he assigns the greatest value. For a person whose work champions (and whose postings frequently echo that work's concern with) play in the sense that Barthes might take the word to have, an alignment with Aristotle is as surprising (not to say "suspect") as, say, if you were to suddenly come in and announce that of all the Biblical writings, you found Paul's letters to most closely mirror you own philosophical outlook.

These are slogans born of a structuralism that hasn't been current for 40 years.

the somewhat sinister, extraterrestrial, fascinating allure of the Ku Klux Klan

AHHHHHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHhahahahahahahaha [chokes on own vomit]

The most interesting bit though is the tortured defense of elitism - this insistence on "specialness" - this notion that if none of us is really special, then that may mean none of us can do special things, which is not a necessary consequence. The bad news, Momus, the awful news, is that you're not special - neither am I - neither is anyone. This is also the good news, however, as it is the only path that leads us away from oppression, which you claim to decry.

In more important news, I decided against Wells and went with Trollope's Barchester Towers, thereby taking most of the wind out of my anti-elitist stance

see what's funny is i have this weird reserve of respect for momus's intellect and confidence in same, which i was able to retain for quite some time but has been eroding rather quickly of late, as he descends even further into (unconstructive) self-parody

naturally I have plenty of respect for Momus, else I would not spend so much time & energy explaining to him where he errs

http://www.connectotel.com/rennes/serpnote/serptail.jpg

The milquetoast ideology of our times has a problem with this idea of specialness. We do not like distinction, because our ideology is an egalitarian one, even while our society has, as a structural necessity, the widest array of differences in status of any society there has ever been. We resolve this contradiction by talking only of equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. We tell people 'You're special! Everybody is special! (So you're not special).'

What I am defending -- although I'm also very conflicted on this -- is not elitism. It makes no sense to talk of an elite without power. I'm defending pretension. The people we elect become an elite. But the people who consider themselves 'the elect' (such as 'God's chosen people', the Jews) are merely pretentious. I admire their nerve, I admire their preservation of difference in the face of an ever-encroaching conformism and convergence by what I'm calling 'pretentious universalism', and what others have called 'repressive tolerance'. I admire their lack of evangelism. At the same time, I am scared for them. To cling to difference in times like these is dangerous.

The quote about the KKK also mentioned Papua tribes. I am not trying to be controversial evoking either of them. Those who are truly different from the liberal orthodoxy (and their 'special' acts cannot be separated from their 'special' thinking) must by definition be in some way noxious and unpalatable to those of us in the monoculture. They are our untouchables. We desperately need their difference, and yet we cannot accept it. Their strangeness is both deeply attractive and deeply repulsive. We need this 'pretension' and this 'orthodoxy' to reveal our own pretension and orthodoxy. And yet we also need to destroy 'the other' utterly.

What's interesting about orthodox Jews is that they are not, like most 'others', under threat from the liberal monoculture. Thanks to an odd cultural quirk, they are protected by it, and threatened only by its enemies.

By the way, I would say exactly the same about Calvinists if it was possible to spot them on the street. We Calvinists have rather lost our otherness of late.

1. "Everyone is special" does not equal "no-one is special" - vide snowflakes
2. this liberal monoculture, again, is a strawman with vocal exponents: more of them in oppostion than in favor, I think!
3. I would argue that, in American culture at least, the "other" (this term needs retired, it is old & has much baggage) is not only not under threat: it's romanticized, treasured (even in a sort of whipping-boy way: but only sometimes), championed constsantly, almost the defining characteristic of our ideology! the "other" self-perceived wrongly (or cunningly) insists that s/he is threatened when in fact s/he is a protected species!

hungry

Heh -- I think you just described nearly every conservative Protestant Christian in America.

The tallest, bushiest strawman of all time is actually the Wicker Man in the film of the same name. We island folk use him to burn Christian policemen from the mainland in. They're trying to make us just like them, you see.

It is a dangerous thing to do though, to label all Jews under this banner. After all, Jew-haters of the past and present (anti-semitic attacks are up over 100 per cent in the (worsening) UK and even blessed, liberal France) rarely if ever stoped to decide what kind of Jew they were going to kill.

My sentiments are not unique at all - I am as Jewish as anyone can be, yet feel no kinship whatsoever with orthodox Jews. Perhaps Momus cannot see how that can be, I don't know.

"But the people who consider themselves 'the elect' (such as 'God's chosen people', the Jews) are merely pretentious"

which to me, though it may not imply that ALL Jews consider themselves to be the chosen, it suggests that the man in the street with the peyot, the pale face and the black togs is cut from the same ethnic and ideological cloth as liberal, cosmopolitan indie schmucks like me.

Because ideas are irrelevant if they can't make you cool!

What I am defending -- although I'm also very conflicted on this -- is not elitism. It makes no sense to talk of an elite without power. I'm defending pretension. The people we elect become an elite. But the people who consider themselves 'the elect' (such as 'God's chosen people', the Jews) are merely pretentious. I admire their nerve, I admire their preservation of difference in the face of an ever-encroaching conformism and convergence by what I'm calling 'pretentious universalism', and what others have called 'repressive tolerance'. I admire their lack of evangelism. At the same time, I am scared for them. To cling to difference in times like these is dangerous.

I appreciate your condescension about as much as that of Rapture-fetishists. How many Jews do you know that consider themselves "God's chosen people"? What do you think that means? Do you believe that it has cultural significance? What do you understand of its religious significance?

Not only can I see how it can be done, I wrote a blogssay (horrible neolo-jism) about someone doing it, Yael Bartana! The fact that all Jews do not say they are the chosen people, however, does not stop orthodox Jews from saying that all Jews are the chosen people. When I lived on the Lower East Side I used to get stopped quite a lot outside my house by hassidim who asked 'Are you Jewish?' I would lie and say 'Partly,' hoping to get to the next stage and hear the spiel they were going to give me about how I shouldn't turn my back on the religion, etc. But of course 'partly' was a stupid thing to say. 'You either are Jewish or you aren't. If your mother is Jewish, you are.' At that point I backed down. But if I'd said yes they would no doubt have tried to shame me 'back' to orthodoxy.

It's one of the Orkney Islands.

...however, owing to your fear of dialogue with people whose views are unlike your own, you'll never know for sure!

m-m-momus and the jews

(/ elton john voice)

I really don't intend to re-invent the wheel here, so I'll just point to a couple of much bigger Don Quixotes than me:

Benjamin Barber

Kenneth Keniston

This is a silly level of argument to be stuck on. I really think you're just being obtuse and wasting time. Try doing me the honour of actually making an argument that -- despite the success and dominance of Microsoft, McDonald's, the English language, Hollywood etc worldwide -- we have no reason to fear a reduction in cultural diversity. If you can't formulate that argument, stop this petty sniping.

Yet, I've had this nagging thought that it feeds in so readily with (what you might call) the counter-conspiracy theories going around. The kind which prompted the ICA to hold a talk entitled 'Are the opponents of anti-semitism the new McCarthyites'?

I feel sometimes that Momus could be asked to defend anything and he'd do it so eloquently that it would sound persuasive. This time he appears to have been set the task of defending the Jewish conspiracy theory. This is not a reductivist reading of the piece. I'm not gong to bother quoting more chunks of it. I'm bothered for many reasons, not least because I've risen to the bait.

cultural diversity perpetuates itself, Nick! Honestly.

Monopoly perpetuates itself. Have you heard the buzzword 'synergies' at all? That's what owners call the savings that result when they buy two vast companies, fire half the staff and merge the operations. Companies are getting bigger and bigger, and fewer and fewer right now. You may have noticed this in the music industry. Ever larger companies taking ever smaller risks, with their ownership concentrated in ever fewer hands. Meanwhile governments like Blair's and Bush's continue to slacken ownership restrictions, giving more power to people like Murdoch. No alarm bells ringing, at all? You're okay on 4AD, right? They'll always let you make risky records, just like Mute, right? Oh, but Mute is owned by EMI now... And all those artists Daniel Millar said he'd never drop, EMI will.

Cultural diversity, at the end of the day, relies wholly on individual diversity, which cannot ever be in peril because individuals are the irreducible constant!

If I may say so, that's very American of you. The individual, of course! Why didn't I think of that! There may be no cinema where I can see a film produced in my home land, but at least I can watch American films in an individual way...

It's not the McDonaldses, the cinemas, the Wal-Marts that matter: it's what people do in them, which will always be entirely individual.

So I've got the McDonald's and I'm eating the American-style crud which is all they have there, but I'm doing it my way? That's a tremendous consolation for the disappearance of two little restaurants on the corner. (My local McDonald's, by the way, occupies a building built by communists, part of a socialist state which no longer exists. One less alternative system, one less way of thinking about and living life, to trouble us.)

This is going to be a bit jumbled, as I'm tired, but ...

I've come to the conclusion, that ceteris paribus, if I didn't know the writer any better, I'd be worried about a man cloaking some serious anti-semitism and reductive generalisations in his thought-provoking devil's advocacy.

Momus - to me, you make beautifully explained generalisations which manage to leave far too much unexplained.

So how does this fit in with any of us here who may risk generalising in other ways about other national or ethnic groups ? You habitually make sweeping statements comparing (f/ex) the Japanese positively with the British/Americans, but invariably fail to even acknowledge anything that may run contrary to your arguments: viz: lauding the sheer femininity to be sensed by staying in France and Japan - which I too see, I love both countries - but pretending to ignore both countries' inherent masculinity and intolerance in terms of, f/ex, a nationalism and a sexism that I feel doesn't exist in, say, London, a place Momus appears to despise with all his soul.

*thinks what's down on the corner of Randolph and Bristol, notes it's Memphis and Mitae Ramen, both of which are popular standalone non-franchise spots*

the problem now, j0hn (& ned & others), is that yr gonna have to fight the argument on two fronts: 1. mcmonoculture isn't really stamping out/squashing/refusing much of anything and 2. even if it is, it don't matter. (if you reduce yr argument to "diversity appears to those who seek it", then cue momus "well, there's a lot less of it now than when i last looked around").

other question that i'm a little suprised didn't spin off something gareth said way upthread: the invisibility of judaism in britain

I will say, to bring a chink of light into my argument, that it's strange how Germany and Britain have switched places in the last 20 years. In the 80s Germany felt like an American colony, with all the military bases, endless dubbed American gunk on TV, and David Hasselhof claiming to have singlehandedly undermined communism with his MOR songs. Now it's Britain which feels like the 51st state. Proof, I suppose, that 'difference' can return with surprising speed. There can be post-American diversity, just as there can be post-Microsoft computing.

You always seem to bring up France. This seems ironic, because France really is obsessed with preserving a monoculture, it just happens to be an officially-approved version of its own. It is hard to think of a more ridiculous body than the Academie Francaise, save maybe those uber-creationists who still believe in a geocentric universe.

the problem is that for you it's this idea of the "monoculture" that's most present and bothersome, and by extension any expression of "difference" is valued to the extend that any other aspects become downgraded and blurred, which is to say, momus, round 1421

can you elaborate on this?

You're right that it's the monoculture -- my own culture and its pretensions to neutrality and inevitability and universality -- which infuriates me the most. If there's one thing I'd like people to acknowledge, it's that our culture is not 'freedom' or 'the international community' or 'unity' or whatever pretentiously bland and universalist titles we give it. Our culture has a colour, a texture, a smell, a shape, quirks, neuroses, a history. It is not 'for all humanity'. We are not 'ahead'.

I don't understand what you mean about 1421.

also why don't you just decide for yourself if killing and eating dogs is wrong?

I wasn't viscerally revolted when I saw it. I was interested in my own ambivalence. I wanted to say 'It's a racist cliche that Chinese eat dogs. It slurs them.' But that PC stance was clearly absurd and reductive, a refusal to accept their difference. They do eat dogs in Canton... and cats. To say that what they actually do is a slur is itself a slur. It implies that they are only honourable to the extent that they are inoffensive to us and our local values. We eat cows, but not dogs. Imagine an Indian, told by another that Scots eat cows, replying: 'Don't bandy racist stereotypes around, Scots are not savages you know! They've come on a bit since their cow-eating days. These days they are just like us.'

"I saw it most clearly in France "

can you elaborate on this?

France has a clear sense of its difference from American culture. It is totally unapologetic about its cultural protectionism, and I'm sympathetic to that stance. I linked from the word 'France' to an EC website laying out the case for protection of the film and AV industries. I have cable TV and 90% of the channels are unwatchable rubbish filled with dubbed products of the American AV industries all basically touting the same view of life, the same idea of what a 'woman' is, the same idea of what 'comedy' is, what 'night' looks like, what 'pop music' sounds like, etc etc... except one, Arte, the French-German public network, which is entirely government-funded and which works on a different principle: with 'Thema' nights all devoted to depth coverage of one particular issue. The other day it was 'Russian women', for instance. Three hours of documentaries about Russian women. Great stuff, and possible only because of cultural protectionism.

I'm not sure French-style cultural protectionism is really the answer though. They take a very dirigiste, top-down approach to something that is essentially bottom-up. Banning the use of English words in the civil service and inventing French equivalents, for example, is neither good nor practical (and ignores the fact that when the French adopt an English word, they usually put their own twist on it and use it in different ways to Anglo-Saxons). It also means you somehow have to define what your "culture" in order to protect it. Does French culture now also include rai music (or even the hijab) in the same way that it includes folk music from Brittany or Basque berets? The slips and slides of culture are so hard to define in any institutionalised way. As "Pulp Fiction" pointed out, even McDonalds in France is not the same as it is in the U.S.

An awful lot of crap gets subsidised in France as well. Shedloads of dire middlebrow films that never make it out of France; a million dismal, poorly thought-out "experimental" theatre pieces etc. etc. My girlfriend works at Radio France Internationale and the waste there is phenomenal. I'm sympathetic to the aim of "protecting" culture, but I'm not sure the French method is the way forward. I don't know what the answer is, though.

the russian women thing was very interesting indeed, some docs were better than others. but last night it was some stupid show on sons of musicians making music, like aretha franklin's kid or something. they interviewed the editor of 'rolling stone'--it was dumb.

she always has the coolest dresses