Kontextmaschine

4th September 2014

Link reblogged from Slate Star Scratchpad with 194 notes

Polytheism as a guide to Morality →

drethelin:
There are a lot of theories of morality, and many of them are fairly compatible in execution if not in theory. Right now I’d like to talk about my intuitive feelings about it, which are not rigorously defined but which help illustrate how I feel somewhat about morality. I’m an…
I think that there used to be a bit of that in American society. I see that polytheistic sensibility you talk about in the heyday of Art Deco— an aesthetic that turned everything it touched into a Greek God.
I’d like to assume (and in some sentimental way, genuinely hope) that the art of Rockefeller Center was a reflection of the spirit of its age, because taken as a whole it’s a gigantic Humanist Cosmogram, depicting all aspects of civilization emanating from the central figures of Wisdom and Prometheus.
Surrounding those central figures there are allegories of various industries…
A mural depicting Abraham Lincoln as symbol of men of action and Ralph Waldo Emerson as a symbol of philosophers….
Factory workers and Farmers….
Journalists…
transportation technology of all kinds (this was the Golden Age of Aviation after all)….
Elsewhere in the complex there’s a mural that depicts an Allegory of Thought, an androgynous, godlike figure sending out angels to carry knowledge into the world. The angels have labeled: News, Politics, Poetry, Physics, Biology, Hygiene, Philosophy, Music, Art— a cross section of the sciences and humanities.
And on the Dionysian side, the outer walls of Radio City display roundels symbolizing Song, Dance, and Music.
There it was: Machine Age Polytheism. Radio City, Rockefeller Center, and right across the street, St. Peter’s Cathedral: Dionysus, Apollo, and Christ.
In those old Art Deco building, facades announced the names of aspects of society like some kind of archetypal roll-call: “Art! Science! Law! Commerce! Religion! With your powers combined, I am Captain Civilization!“ And these aspects were depicted as a kind of pantheon. To put it bluntly, the message was “Look at this really wide variety of things that are all important!” It wasn’t exactly a guide of virtues to emulate, but a guide of valuable things to participate in. And while all those ‘valuable things’ were different from each other, they were not utterly alien to each other. Multiple expressions of the same spirit— I guess you could call it the Western Humanist spirit.
I can’t exactly trace any specific path from then to now, but it seems like nowadays that Polytheistic sensibility has split apart into various Monotheisms in conflict with one another. Instead of seeing different archetypes as expressions of the same unifying spirit, each one stands completely alone. There’s the Cult of the Activist, the Cult of the Entrepreneur, the Cult of the Celebrity, the Cult of the Soldier, the Cult of the Scientist/Engineer, etc. , each of them insisting that their own precious little archetype is the only one that matters. Each one of them vying for the title of “The Guy Everybody Else Depends On” —- perhaps, in some ways, each one betting that it will be what is optimized for when all other values are wiped out.
A pantheon requires a mythology— sensibility that unites the conflicting gods into a single overarching paradigm. The way the Western Humanist spirit united all the gods of Rockefeller center, the way the institution of Hogwarts unites the four houses— hell, even the way that in Bioshock Infinite, the mythos of the founding fathers unites George Washington as Archetypal Soldier, Ben Franklin as Archetypal Entrepreneur and Thomas Jefferson as Archetypal Scholar. if polytheism-flavored virtue ethics is ever going to make a comeback, we’re going to need a paradigm like that.

Corporatism. You are thinking of corporatism. Referring to corporations not in the sense of "chartered enterprises on the limited liability model” but in the Italian sense of para-tribes or -castes based not on genetic descent but on economic and social function, and enchanted each with their own symbology and rituals, as pioneered by Gabriele d'Annunzio at Fiume in the Charter of Carnaro.

These are the corporations Mussolini referred to when he said “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.” And an issue with that is that if you take and mythologize aspects of society, and embody them as humans, and posit a need for a “single overarching paradigm”, you end up mythologizing that force of unity, and embodying it as a human, a Leader.

Or, as translated into other languages, Duce (grok that “Tenth Corporation” then cf. Ledeen’s d'Annunzio biography, “The First Duce”), or Führer.

Tagged: corporatism charter of carnaro polytheism