Preparing for the Unexpected

When do "unexpected" things happen?

Walter Kirn is an author and theater guy who currently lives in Montana. He has been doing some things with Matt Taibbi lately because he is worried about the country.

What few people know about me: I drive around with supplies and gear sufficient not only to survive a terrible upheaval, but to endure for weeks afterwards and then restart civilization

No kidding: I carry an emergency library of essential world literature

In my car

Literally

There are questions and answers in the Twitter/X thread about what is included in his emergency supplies, but not much about what prompted him to decide to carry them with him.

Do you have any preparations along these lines? If you had a set of civilization restarting books, would they be different from his?

What conditions might lead people to think that they might have to restart civilization? I'm not a big fan of Ayn Rand's philosophy, but she was perceptive about certain things. This is the Old Books Guy:

Only Ayn Rand was smart enough to predict that incompetence and an ENVY for excellence will lead to dystopian social outcomes. Orwell thought we'd need total mind control, Huxley thought we'd need a permanently drugged populace, but Rand knew: all you need is resentment

From the thread:

Ayn Rand's villains are "second-handers" - they live not by truth but by consensus. They are the crabs of crab mentality. They look up only to see who they have to pull down. They love to do their evil from behind sweet sounding words like democracy and equality. . .

Ayn Rand's BIG intellectual achievement was embodying Nietzschean ideas. Atlas Shrugged is the story of how the world ends when slave morality becomes the dominant ethic of an era

What do you think?

The two links above remind me of Ed Driscoll's current post on modern art, Why Modern Art Isn't Right:

The strange new official portrait of Charles III is an occasion for conservatives to ask once more, "What's wrong with modern art?" And is there any alternative to it, if this painting is the best that even a king can get?

Portraiture and monarchy have little place in today's world--neither is extinct, though each has been largely deprived of function. The king reigns but does not rule. Portraits have prestige but are no longer necessary for memorializing or promoting anyone's appearance. Democracy and photography have taken over the work of the old forms.

So the king's portrait evokes dilution. . .

In his 2002 review of C.P. Snow's 1959 book, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, Orrin Judd of the Brothers Judd blog wrote:

As Snow notes, as late as say the 1850s, any reasonably well-educated, well-read, inquisitive man could speak knowledgeably about both science and the arts. . .

Like priests of some ancient cult, scientists were separated out from the mass of men, elevated above them by their access to secret knowledge. Even more annoying was the fact that even though they had moved beyond what the rest of us could readily understand, they could still listen to Bach or read Shakespeare and discuss it intelligently. The reaction of their peers in the arts, or those who had been their peers, was to make their own fields of expertise as obscure as possible. If Picasso couldn't understand particle physics, he sure as hell wasn't going to paint anything comprehensible, and if Joyce couldn't pick up a scientific journal and read it, then no one was going to be able to read his books either. And so grew the two cultures, the one real, the other manufactured, but both with elaborate and often counterintuitive theories, requiring years of study.

And thus we we end up with the formulation of Tom Wolfe's 1975 book, The Painted Word, where modern art exists almost solely to justify the theory behind it, and as Wolfe wrote, "In short: frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can't see a painting."

This probably explains a lot of the massive output of useless "peer reviewed literature" in our universities today, too. Can you identify other developments that might prompt Walter Kirn to carry a civilization-restarting kit in his car?

The End of Everything

One of the reasons Victor Davis Hanson is resented is that a lot of ordinary people understand what he says and writes. He has just released a new book.

I heard part of this interview with VDH about the book while driving. It starts at about two and a half minutes and ends at 18 minutes. The calmness with which VDH discusses how wars descend into annihilation is a reason to listen to him speak. A couple of lessons he took from putting this book together:

• Being "cultured" didn't keep destroyers from destroying. Alexander the Great was cultured (taught by Aristotle). That didn't keep him from taking Thebes to the ground.

  Culture didn't help Thebes much, either. A poet's home was saved, and I read and discussed Antigone in the 8th grade (or 9th?), but Thebes was destroyed.
  
  

• The civilizations targeted for destruction could not count on their allies.
  

Here's a more formal interview about the book, with some discussions about current conditions. He seems to see Greece and Armenia as possible targets for destruction. The discussion of the destruction of the Aztec empire is interesting. He hints at some things we might consider doing to keep our culture and civilization from falling apart, too.

Aren't you glad that it's the weekend?

Music

2024 is the two hundredth anniversary of the writing of Beethoven's Ode to Joy. To celebrate that and Leeds for Europe's visit to Dortmund over the weekend here is the original Ode to Joy flashmob, the Philharmonic Orchestra of Nuremberg and the Hans-Sachs-Choir in front of the St. Lorenz Church in Nuremberg, Germany.

Hope you have something nice planned for this weekend.

This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.

Last week's thread, May 11, Liberty Leading the People

Comments are closed so you won't ban yourself by trying to comment on a week-old thread. But don't try it anyway.

posted by K.T. at 11:16 AM

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