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This post was going to start a look into into American exceptionalism and fake nationhood with a graphical summary of the intellectual vacuity of Progress!, but that grew larger than planned. The representations do make it very clear that the Postmodern and occult themes that occupy the Band are just manifestations of the same fundamental deception. So the post turned into a good opportunity to sum up some basic realities and show the historical depth of the wizardry.
The dream of arcane knowledge is an attractive one and the basis of many fantasy novels. Nothing wrong with some escapism. The problem is when it crosses into real life.
In the last post we looked at some unpleasant patterns around World War I. In one way, the Marxists were right - the War drowned the credibility of the "old order" in a sea of blood. They just completely falsified what the nature of that order was. What we have seen over and over is the belief that "Progress!" is a metaphysical condition - that history has a telos, or or overarching movement towards some ideal state. The deception - the inversion - happens when you pretend that something taken on faith - Progress! - is knowable in the same way that objective, empirical observations are.
Oleg Shuplyak, Illusion
This is the pretense that opinions and circumstances are really universals, absolutes, and/or metaphysical truths commonly referred to as "Rationalism". The tragic irony is that actual empirical progress - the industrial prosperity that followed the Scientific Revolution - funded the grand illusion that some sort of moral metaphysical progress was unfolding. But the problem with fake things is that they are fake. Collective delusion and untapped resources can fend off the reckoning for a long time, but eventually they collide with reality.
Before taking an historical look at the American version of the nation-state, it is important to understand just how logically absurd and persistent - Progress! - the idea that the the human efforts can continually "improve" the human condition - really is. Sometimes graphical presentations can make relationships clearer. We can even give the standard narrative a handicap by accepting the conventional historical periods at face value. But look at the periods in these broad terms: the unacknowledged object of fake faith, the familiar pattern thread, and the historical legacy:
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Samson Gabriel, The Blind Leading the Blind, 2019, oil on canvas
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You can see the transformation of knowledge in the art of the period:
Aquinas was the most imposing theological mind of the Middle Ages and one of the greatest thinkers in history. In both paintings, he sits in a position of honor with a book symbolizing his achievements. But lets look more closely:
The Gozzoli is closer to the Medieval idea that Philosophy was the "Handmaiden of Theology", the highest field of knowledge. This makes sense, since absolutes were correctly recognized as belonging epistemologically to faith, meaning that theology is where man confronts fundamental questions of being and morality.
Philosophy was where the absolute truths that are beyond the clear comprehension of finite human beings - we see through the glass darkly - could be addressed. This is clearly symbolized here by the image of God (the Son) shining the light of truth onto Thomas.
Albert Henrichs put it like this in an old article called "Philosophy, the Handmaiden of Theology". The article is very detailed, but is informative if you are interested in Early Christian philology.
Now look at the Lippi. Only 20 years separate them, but this painting has gone all in on the classical humanist themes associated with the Renaissance. Thomas now sits above his defeated foes in a heavily decorated classical structure. But look at his inspiration:
Put them side by side:
The symbol of the divine has been replaced by a book with the opening lines of Thomas' Summa Contra Gentiles, (begun circa 1259). The text is a quote from Proverbs - in modern type: "Veritatem meditabitur guttur meum, et labia mea detestabuntur impium. Prov. 8-7."and in English: "“My mouth shall meditate truth, and my lips shall hate impiety”. Click for a translation of the Contra Gentiles. It may be a more accessible introduction to Aquinas than his more famous Summa Theologica.
Set aside the quality of Thomas' arguments. What is the basis of his authority?
The Enlightenment turns Renaissance potential into totalitarian fact:
The Industrial Revolution pitches the idealism for pure, material greed:
Over and over, the metaphysical progress fails to deliver - whether it be humanism, rationalism, materialism, or totalitarianism - but until recently, technological improvements could maintain an illusion of forward movement. What can seem hard to understand is how such obviously flawed notions were so compelling. Simplifying the terms makes this clearer:
The reference is to vanity in the deeper Biblical sense rather than as a reference to personal trifles, although they are related. The Book of Ecclesiastes is the most sustained meditation on the subject in the Bible - a series of superficially different scenarios expressing the same underlying pattern of misplaced attachment to ephemeral things. This picture captures the problem:
Antonio de Pereda, Allegory of Vanity, 1632-36, oil on canvas, Kunsthistorisches Museum
On the right: all glories of the world. On the left: where we all end up.
Ecclesiastes is a reminder that nothing we value lasts...
...because our stories all have the same conclusion.
Ecclesiastes shows the temporal aspect of vanity that can be easy to overlook when thinking of individual solipsists or hedonists: prioritizing of things that vanish in time over things that are of lasting meaning. If you are religious, lasting meaning refers to spiritual matters, but even materialists can distinguish between things that promote the long-term health of posterity and eating the seed corn.
Thomas Cole, The Return, 1837, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art
Pieter Boel, Large Vanitas Still-Life, 1663, oil on canvas, Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille
Audrey Flack, Marilyn (Vanitas), 1977, oil over acrylic on canvas, University of Arizona Museum of Art
The optimal course logically is to prioritize things of lasting significance over fleeting pleasure
Vanity inverts that by prioritizing fleeting pleasure over lasting significance
And once it is recognized that that vanity has a temporal dimension, a familiar pattern leaps out. Consider this comparative epistemology graphic from an earlier post:
This graphic represents the epistemological compatibility between Christianity and empirical knowledge, and the incompatibility of Postmodernism with either. The former two recognize that we have limited apprehension of the objective world around us and place absolutes outside empirical verification in the realm of faith. Postmodernism is a Satanic inversion that treats subjective feelings like articles of faith.
Let's simplify this three-tier structure for the sake of discussion:
The great thing about reality is that it is consistent. Changing the frame of reference has no bearing on truthful relationships. To say other is Postmodern talk.
Speaking of Postmodernism, Ecclesiastes has something to say about this as well:
The vanity of Ecclesiastes is the same error as the solipsism of Postmodernism.
That sounds familiar...
It's all connected.
The empirical reality is that without motivating purpose, this world devolves into a continual churn of soon-forgotten dopamine hits until the basic mechanisms of societal maintenance collapse. Christians know this, but if the Postmodern era is any indication, secular "values have failed utterly to replicate religious commitment. The modern West fetishizes the fleeting, the stylish, the hip. Aging vampires and lotus eaters cling to youth with increasing desperation rather than face the existential horror of old age after a life of empty pleasure seeking. Healthy, reality-facing societies warned against the wages of this banality...
Bernardo Strozzi, Vanitas (The Old Courtesan), circa 1637, 135 x 109 cm, oil on canvas, Pushkin Museum, Moscow
Simply Ageless ad campaign from Cover Girl (link from Vanity Fair - more on them in a moment).
"Simply Ageless"...
This gets clearer when you consider the Cover Girl motto:
Reality is an illusion.
Do what thou wilt.
We live in Vanity Fair.
The idea of Vanity Fair as a place first appeared in John Bunyan's A Pilgrim's Progress (click for link), an allegory of Christian life that was wildly popular in less debauched times. It describes the path of virtue as a fantastical journey along a perilous road to the Celestial City. The dangers are the same vanities of this world that are condemned in Ecclesiastes and are degrading the West today, and Vanity Fair is a marketplace of fleeting pleasure and a trap for those who lose sight of the longer journey. .
John Bunyan, A Plan of the Road From the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, Adapted to The Pilgrim's Progress, 1821, Cornell University Library
In and of itself, Vanity Fair is a fine metaphor, although not so rhetorically exceptional to merit a deeper look. That's what makes its afterlife interesting.
Prospectus for William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair serial, January 1847
English author Thackery took the name Vanity Fair for his wildly popular novel satirizing the meaningless rituals and social tribulations in and around elite society.
The continuity of the theme from Ecclesiastes through Bunyan makes sense from this perspective...
VIntage postcard.
It is hard to imagine something much less meaningful that the byzantine social banalities of a brick-sized Victorian novel.
The subsequent Vainty Fairs reveal familiar patterns. Rather than puncturing the pretensions of the social elite, it opened a voyeuristic window into their meaningless lives. It turned out that lots of people would like to live in Vanity Fair, Celestial City notwithstanding.
The recurrence of the title in the publishing world is odd. According to Infogalactic:
Why is Bunyan's allegory such an attractive choice for magazine titles? On the surface, there is little reason for this. The Band wrote an occult post on Satanic red shoes because of a discrepency between a phenomenon and the explanations given for it.
Maybe there's a pattern...
The first of these was a commentary on current events featuring some accomplished writers and cartoonists. It's John Bull! Those countries are such characters...
Carlo Pellegrini, Sir George Biddell Airy, chromolithograph from Vanity Fair, 1875, Wellcome Library, London
The second was consistent with Thackery's brand of social satire, but there is something voueuristic about this long-running attention for "celebrities", even if it is gentle caricature of the New York Review of Books variety.
The third was a short-lived pioneer of the "men's magazine", but represents an inverted attitude towards vanity. Here, fleeting pleasures aren't satirized, they're aspirational.
This magazine is weirdly prescient in it's fixation on "bifurcated girls" or women wearing pants. The Band hasn't considered it enough to comment beyond noting that there is a deeper history to the rhetorical inversion around sex that obsesses the left.
Libertinism, social inversions...
... ads for venerial disease treatments in "Vanity Fair" Magazine June 6 1903
"Late bloomer" is one term.
The final versions are essentially the same magazine - fetishistic celebrations of fashion and popular culture.
The first version was merged into Vogue in 1936 and revived in 1993. Fashion might be the perfect expression of vanity - a purely aesthetic add-on to a practical item that is designed to be obsolete in a season but is all-consuming in the moment.
There is a pattern:
Truthful patterns are consistent. See?..
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