Culture is often a bearer of such practical wisdom. Indeed, the reason we listen to the experienced and wise, despite their lack of formal education, is that their experience has imparted practical wisdom. Theoretical wisdom is implicit in this down to earth practicality. Although the village elder might not be able to say why a certain behaviour is virtuous, her account, being correct, could be elaborated to reveal a true and natural principle. Extending this to an entire culture, we have one basis for social conservatism. The accumulated experience of ages has a sort of implicit wisdom to it, which can be potentially made into a theory, even though nobody may have yet done so. However, this isn’t enough, lest we be agnostic pragmatists like David Hume. For the one clinging to classical ideas, all practical wisdom has a theory behind it whose objective springs we can discover through reason.
One such cultural heirloom that is greatly misunderstood these days is aristocracy. Most cultures in human history have had aristocracies of some type. A noble class existed in ancient Mesopotamia, Persia, Mesoamerica, the Andes, Egypt, China, Japan, Greece, Rome, among the Celts, as well as mediaeval and early modern Europe. Indeed, aristocracy of some type has been one of the most common institutions of humanity across history. Yet in the last three hundred years, aristocracies have shrunk, from the predominant ruling elites of the world to disempowered and mocked cliques, clinging to privileges regarded as archaic.
Britain is one of the few countries that still has an institutional aristocracy. But its influence is ever diminishing, its numbers ever depleting, and its ideals waned to nothing. I doubt many would contradict me if I said its public image is far from positive. I believe the cause of this decline is that it is a remnant of a previous ethical outlook, one rooted in ancient Greek and Roman thought, and Christianised in the Middle Ages. This outlook collapsed in Britain during the eighteenth century (before it did in most of Europe). Whig liberal philosophers like John Locke chipped at its foundations. The aristocracy as a result became an institution without a purpose, embedded in a new society totally hostile to it.
So, what are these foundations? I think three: human goodness as function, a communitarian spirit, and a family-centred life. Really, it’s only the first, functional goodness, the latter two being elaborations of it.
Goodness as a function is simple. To be good is to function properly according to a species’ ideal. In the same way a good hammer is good at banging nails, and a good oven at baking bread, so a good human being is good at “human-ing” to coin a verb. The question ‘what is goodness?’ for ancient and mediaeval thinkers is almost invariably ‘what’s the function of humans?’ Yet because humans have reason, unlike animals who merely follow their instincts, our function involves more than survival and reproduction. We make art and science, and can appreciate the value of things through understanding. We are the animal that is happy with a garden and a library, as Cicero says.
This is an excerpt from “Mayday! Mayday!”. To continue reading, visit The Mallard’s Shopify.
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A Romantic Case for Anime
We’ve all felt it—the mixed excitement and dread at hearing a beloved book is set to be made into a movie. They might do it right, capturing not only key plot events but also (and more importantly) how it feels to be swept up in the work as a whole; 2020’s Emma with Anya Taylor-Joy comes to my mind, most of all for the way it captures how someone who understands and loves Austen’s ubiquitous irony might feel when reading her work. However, they also might do it poorly; despite both 1974 and 2013 attempts’ being worth watching, I’ve yet to see a rendition of The Great Gatsby that captures the book’s plot and narrative tone in the right proportion (in my opinion, the 1974 version emphasizes the former but misses some of the latter, while parts of the 2013 version exagerrate the latter just to the border of parody). My readers have, no doubt, already imagined examples of works they’ve always wished could be faithfully put onto the screen and others they’d rather not be risked to the vicissitudes of translating from one medium to another.
The last decade has thankfully seen a growth in long-form, box-office quality productions that makes it more possible than ever to imagine longer works being produced without curtailing their lengthy plotlines—example, the BBC’s 2016 rendition of War and Peace. However, this leaves another, perhaps more important, hurdle to hazard: while live-action media can now faithfully follow the plots of the originals, there still remains the difficulty of conveying the tone and feel of the works, especially when different media necessarily have different capacities and limitations of representation. Though I’ve enjoyed productions that have been made, I don’t know that I would expect live-action renditions to reproduce the aesthetic impression of, say, Paradise Lost, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, or Crime and Punishment, and I worry that attempts to do so might mar more than measure up. The problem lies in the difficulty of translating characters’ inner experience—which is usually conveyed by a stylizing narrator—via the essentially externalistic medium of the camera eye.
While a live action movie or series might remain faithful to the selective events in a plot, the lack of an interpretive narrator removes a key element of what defines epic poems and novels. Paradoxically, the narrowing of perspective through a stylizing narrator allows story to move from the limits of natural events into the limitlessness of human perception and interpretation. Voiceover narrators can provide thematic stylization in film, as well as essential plot coherence, but it is still primarily the camera that replaces the literary narrator as the means of conveyance. Furthermore, if too ubiquitous, voiceovers can separate the audience from the action, which is the focus of film. Film’s power inheres in its ability to place the audience in the midst of a plot, removing as many frames between the watcher and the story’s events as possible. However, this is also why books are so difficult to translate: motion pictures focus on events when the aesthetic experience of literature inheres in how characters and narrator experience said events.
The literary movement that focused most on the character’s experience (and, vicariously, ours) as the purpose of art was Romanticism. Romantic literature and poetry were less concerned about the subject matter than about their effect on the character’s emotions—in the sense that, from the generally Platonic metaphysics of the Romantics, the incidental reaches its fullest meaning by provoking an aesthetic experience far beyond it. From Hawthorne’s rose bush growing outside Salem’s prison, to Shelley’s secondhand rumination on the ruined feet of Ozymandias, to Keats’s apostrophe to the Grecian urn, the Romantics showed how part of the reality of an object involves its significance to the observer, and it was the role of the Romantic narrator and speaker to draw out that effect for the reader.
It is this essential influence of the narrator and characters’ inner lives on the great works’ aesthetic experience that makes me skeptical of even the best acting, camera work, and post-production effects to sufficiently replace them. It may be possible, and, again, I have very much enjoyed some renditions. Furthermore, not wanting to be the audience member who misses the Shakespeare performance for the open copy of the play on their lap, I tend to watch movie adaptations as distinct works rather than in strict relation to the originals. However, this, itself, may be a concession to my hesitance to trust film to live up to the aesthetic experience of certain books. I would, however, trust anime to do so.
While a history of Japanese manga and anime is beyond the scope of this piece (or my expertise), since choosing to explore the artform as a post-grad-school reward (or recovery—one can only stare at the sun that is Paradise Lost for so long) I’ve watched plenty of anime over the past ten years, and I have become convinced that it might serve as, at least, a middle ground when seeking to capture plot, narrative tone, and inner character experience in a motion medium. Anime is capable of handling virtually every story genre, and while it contains many of the same ridiculous hi-jinks and satire of Western cartoons and CG animation, it can also capture tragic pathos and sublime catharsis in ways that would be out of place in the vast majority of Western animation. This makes sense: originating in early 20th-century Japan, manga and anime were not subject to the same skepticism about artistic representations of transcendent value that characterized Western art after the move from 19th-century Romanticism and Realism to 20th-century modernism and post-modernism.
Of course, there have been exceptions; 20th-century Disney animation, or Marvel and DC Comics, were iconic because they attempted to be iconic—they unironically tried to depict in images those values and stories that are transcendent. However, even these were created predominantly with the child (or the childlike adult) in mind. Furthermore, while anime certainly has deserved elements of ambivalence, if not cynicism, and while there are many incredibly satirical and humorous series, anime as an artform is not implicitly dismissive of narrative trustworthiness and characters’ experience of the transcendent in the same way that much of Western motion art is. Rather, anime conventionally allows for the sublime heights and deepest horrors that previously characterized Romanticism, all of which it presents through the stylization of animation. This stylization is able to act as an interpretive medium just like a novel’s narrator, contextualizing events through the experience of those involved in a way often eschewed by, if not unavailable to, film.
For an example, I submit Kaguya-sama: Love is War (Japanese Kaguya-sama wa Kokurasetai – Tensai-tachi no Ren’ai Zunōsen, “Kaguya Wants to Make Them Confess: The Geniuses’ War of Hearts and Minds”). Though a romantic comedy in the Slice-of-Life genre, it exemplifies anime’s ability to convey the heights and depths of inner experience of the characters—here Kaguya and Miyuki, a pair of high school teenagers who, as student council president and vice president, compete to be top of their class while being secretly in love with each other and too proud to admit it. As the English title conveys, a running metaphor through the show is the bellicose subtext of their attempts to maneuver each other into confessing their love first and, thus, losing the war; think Beatrice and Benedick with the extremizing effect of teenage hormones and motifs of heavy artillery.
Plot-wise, Love is War follows a standard rom-com formula, with tropes recognizable to Western audiences: the pride and prejudices of the characters, the much ado about things that end up being really nothing, the presence of a mutual friend who acts as an oblivious catalist and go-between in the relationship, etc. However, the show reinvigorates these tropes by portraying via hyperbolic narrator the deuteragonists’ experience of the episodes’ conflicts, bringing audience members into the all-consuming tension of how a teenager might see something as minor as whether to share an item from their lunch. The combination of chess and military metaphors conveys the inner conflicts of the initially cold but gradually warming characters (the “tsundere” character type common in such animes), and the consistency of such motifs creates a unified aesthetic that, due in large part to the disconnect between the over-the-top tone and, in reality, low-stakes subject matter, is hysterical. Another unique aspect about Love is War is that, due to its focus on the characters’ experience of the plot (all the better for being trivially mundane), it’s a technically Romantic romantic comedy.
Love is War is, of course, a low-stakes example of what modern anime can do, though it did score three awards, including Best Comedy, at the 2020 Crunchyroll Anime Awards. A more serious example, Death Note, similarly conveys much of its gravitas through voiceover—this time the first-person narration of protagonist Light Yagami, a high schooler who with the help of a book from the realm of the dead is able to kill anyone whose name and face he knows, and L, a mysterious and reclusive detective charged by Interpol to find him. Throughout the series—which employs similar, if non-parodic, attempts by characters to outwit each other as Love is War—Light and L articulate their planned maneuvers and the implications thereof through inner voiceover. Not only does the narration lay out elements of their battle of wits that the audience might have missed, but it conveys the growing tension the two experience—especially Light, who, as he amasses fame as both a menace and cult hero experiences a growing egotism and subsequent paranoia around the possibility of being found out.
Just as Love is War is, in many ways, a parallel of Pride and Prejudice (Elizabeth and Darcy, themselves, both being tsundere characters), Death Note’s focus on a young man who wishes to achieve greatness by killing those deserving of death and who subsequently develops a maddening neurosis is virtually the same as Crime and Punishment—however enormously their plots and endings differ (Crime and Punishment lacks an explicit demonic presence like Death Note’s Shinigami Ryuk, the Death Note’s otherworldly owner; Dostoevsky would not employ the spectre of a conversant devil until The Brothers Karamazov—yet another point of consanguinity between anime like Death Note and his writing). Regardless of their differing plots, the anime’s inclusion of the characters’ inner thoughts and imaginations convey an increasingly tense tone similar to how Dostoevsky steadily shows Raskalnikov’s moral unmooring, and the explanations and attempted self-justifications by both Light and L convey more than I think even the best cinema would be capable of showing.
I am not advocating that every narrative motif or figuration be included in page-to-screen renditions, nor that we cease trying to actively reinvigorate great works of art through judicious adaptations into new media. Yet, if the inner lives of teenagers—which are often exaggerated, if at times unnecessarily, to Romantic proportions—can be portrayed by anime to such comic and tragic effect, with the figuration and tone of the characters’ perceptions seamlessly paralleling the literal events without obscuring them, then I’d be interested to see what an anime Jane Eyre, The Alchemist, or Sula might look like. Based on the above examples, as well as anime heavyweights like Fullmetal Alchemist, Cowboy Bebop, and, if one is not faint of heart, Berserk, all of which present events in some measure through the background and perspective of the main characters, I could imagine the works of Milton, Hugo, Austen, Dostoevsky, and others in anime form, with the aesthetic experience of the original narration intact.
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Flying Cars are a Terrible Idea
Last month, former President Donald Trump made a video announcement about his plans to implement a ‘quantum leap forward’ policy to increase the standard of living in America. He boldly harkened back to the days of Manifest Destiny, of an America that once tamed a continent and built incredible cities from coast-to-coast.
In a video address detailing this policy, the plan is to build new “Freedom Cities” that would be built on pre-existing government-owned land. A way for the American Machine to be restarted once again, to help revitalise the economy through domestic infrastructure projects, bringing back large-scale industrial manufacturing to the United States, and hopefully drawing citizens who are struggling in their own states with rental traps and shoddy housing opportunities to start anew in these proposed cities.
“Reigniting American imagination” as Trump himself puts it.
Personally, I think this is a great idea. It is high time that the United States needs a project such as this to really kick things into gear and realise just what Americans are capable of building when they are not distracted by foreign wars, social malaise, and being at each other’s throats.
Trump’s plan could act as a foundation to creating classically-designed, bold and truly great examples of American civil engineering and architecture. Not only this, but by perhaps emphasising walkable cities, with a second-to-none public transport network (my formerly proposed Great American Hyper-Rail) – it could serve as an inspiration for other American cities to change for the better.
An American city that could be free from needless congestion, have architecture that challenges the glass-and-steel shitboxes for dominance, and creates real job opportunities and a sense of community for the younger generations would be a very welcome change indeed.
Moreso, if conservatives and reactionaries populate these cities primarily (if not exclusively), they could act as much needed metropolitan safe-zones free from the common strife as well as the severe and petty crime that infects most of urban America today.
While we may not have control of the cities today, it doesn’t mean that we can’t create our own cities tomorrow to act as a powerbase for us to focus our efforts and project them onto rival cities.
All in all, a great and visionary proposal from President Trump.
However there is one thing that was tacked-on to this announcement which has me confused, if not completely mortified by.
Trump proposed that the United States should become the leader in developing ‘vertical take-off and landing’ vehicles – VTOLs, for short. He mentioned that currently “Chy-na!” is spearheading current developments of this technology, for both military and civilian use.
Now, while I get excited by the idea of Jetson-style vehicles as much as the next bloke, tutting along in big glass-domed vehicles. But I can’t help but think that having VTOLs becoming widely available for public and government use is, simply put, a fucking terrible idea.
I may sound like a luddite here, but I ask you to reflect on the changing nature of personal transport in just the last 100 years.
The car and combustion-engine, great inventions as they are (and one that I am demonstrably pro), have completely reshaped the way we get around. From the way our cities are laid out, to the way we travel across the country. We have reshaped entire landmasses to be more suited to automobiles – detonating mountains, building massive highways and turnpikes over natural landscapes. It has completely and possibly irreversibly changed both the aesthetic and function of the natural landscape that human-beings inhabit forever.
There are few areas now in nature where you can look over an unspoiled landscape that hasn’t been in some way corrupted by roads, highways, or massive bridges. The places that are few and far between, and they are hard to reach by design.
The whole point of going on massive hikes like the Appalachian Trail for example, is to get away from these reminders of modernity and industry. If we had VTOLs readily available for anyone to use, these final frontiers of natural escape would be corrupted by the sounds of engines, and the sights of zooming aerial vehicles overhead.
It’s bad enough already when you see hordes of foreign tourists powering up their obnoxious drones drowning out the songs of the birds or the sound of the wind through the trees, or teenagers with loudspeakers blasting grime or whatever unpleasant trap shit that comes onto their Spotify.
Imagine that same annoyance, amplified, en masse and inescapable. To look over a landscape, and to see lines of VTOL traffic from one end of the horizon to the other.
I’d be inclined to shoot these aerial vehicles down in whatever way I could, fully embracing the primal nature that has long been cornered and dormant, finally being unleashed when all sense of greenery and the peace of nature has been corrupted.
Not only this, but aerial vehicles means aerial billboards.
Hell, it’s already starting to happen across the world – massive drone light displays sponsored by our corporate overlords carpeting the sky and blocking our view of the stars. The sky, long-untouched other than by those who are able to navigate it by plane, will simply become another piece of real-estate to be bought up.
Who has the rights to the sky? Those who can afford it, of course.
I can’t think of anything worse than being forced into a scenario where I also have to purchase the real-estate over my house in order to avoid being pestered with unwanted ads, VTOL trespassing, and eyes in the sky.
Perhaps that last example is a little dramatic, but I find it easier to rule nothing out these days, no matter how ridiculous.
The final aspect of why personal VTOLs are such a terrible idea is that it’s completely impractical. With aerial traffic already incredibly congested by planes (look on a free online plane-tracker if you don’t believe me) how does anyone sensibly propose the idea that giving everyone access to the sky won’t lead almost inevitably to disaster?
Car accidents are frequent enough as it is – I can only imagine how much worse, and deadly, they’d be in the sky.
Well to avoid all these issues there would have to be certain controls. Limitations on altitude, certain lanes that aerial vehicles must stick to to avoid collisions, speed limitations, etc, etc. Congratulations, you’re doing all the things that you would’ve been doing in a car anyway, except you are doing them 30-40 metres in the air instead. Such a revolutionary change!
Not to mention, what are these vehicles supposed to look like?
Will they be jet-powered? Say goodbye to little Timmy’s face after he accidentally was standing under one that was flying too low coming in for a landing, and say hello to a frequency of forest-fires!
Will they be powered by rotary propellers? Incredible! You’ve reinvented the helicopter! True leaps and bounds in technology!
Compared to “flying cars”, even personal jetpacks look like more sensible and well thought-out solutions to our current transport problems. Realistically, the only practical implementation of VTOL technology would be usage through military application – and, practically speaking, it already exists through helicopters.
The idea is silly – so how Trump has seriously considered it to the point of outlining it in a policy video makes me laugh. I do sincerely hope that it will remain a mere gimmick of the “futurist” dream, rather than become a reality that will make the world a considerably worse place.
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Madness and Spectacle: The Yellow Vest Suite (Magazine Excerpt)
At the time my personal motivation in doing a whole suite of works was the aesthetic superseding the political. I was captivated by the sensuous images of darkness and colour shades that I tried to capture in these paintings and drawings. Multitudes of people wearing a loose uniform of greenish yellow starkly contrasted with the burning embers of street fires, and thick black smoke from various car chemicals and building materials being immolated, darkening the sky. So many monuments to France’s history are contrasted by a new revolutionary fervour. I was attempting to create a sort of protest impressionism, colour swatches in the darkness of smoke and the light of fire.
But perhaps this is too a sort of romanticism, an aesthetic expression of a yearning for political possibilities outside of the confines of Globo-liberalism, because the political-aesthetic picture of current times produced by Globo-liberalism is so bland, Kitschy, its regime-approved protest art so vulgar and dehumanising, from flat design humans to Banksy. In other words, it sells you empty left-liberal sentimentalism. But my paintings are not meant to create a new counter political-aesthetic. In hindsight, these works are merely cartographic, depictions of a historical moment done as faithfully as I could. Art as a dramatic record of events, a window into vivid scenes that didn’t quite seem real.
Since the petering out of the Yellow Vests, and the periodic riots and public demonstrations in France, over everything from climate change to changes in pension law, there seems to be a jadedness and morose character to the “active politics” of the French. Each one seems to devolve into a public dance party, a more spectacle-driven and violent form of the same cynical and exhausted symbolic politics that lurches forth in most of the Western world. The same people smashing windows and lighting cars on fire went right back and voted for Macron again.
This calls into question the nature of a true syncretism between fringe left and right political coalitions that meet in the middle of society through public political rituals of demonstration and protest. Perhaps it is true that these sorts of protests and public events are merely vanities, and real politics in globalised liberalism is far away and above the direct means of resistance ordinary citizens have. In other words, managerialism, more than tyranny and ideological millenarianism could ever dream of, did away with the concerns and whims of the crowd.
But in the end, the Yellow Vests provided striking images, and for a time, provided an aesthetic politics which could provide a template for further populist movements which cross-cuts ideological and cultural boundaries. The Yellow Vests were very much of the times we are living in now, because it is the image, the aesthetic more than anything, especially in the online world, which informs and contorts the political.
This is an excerpt from “Blast!”. To continue reading, visit The Mallard’s Shopify.
