Satori

Francis Fukuyama dealt a blow to Hegelian dialectics when he wrote The End of History and the Last Man and before that the sociologist Daniel Bell had written The End of Ideology. Both of these tomes offered a form of historical revisionism that proposed its own millenarian view, to the extent that they forecasted the prospect of a society that wasn’t riven by conflict. Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order was a countervailing jeremiad that warned of the prospect of cultural conflicts that would replace the paradigm of the cold war conflict with something far more pernicious, a prophecy that, in fact, has come true (interestingly Fuyuyama was Huntington’s student.) The concept of the “paradigm shift” outlined in Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, has in fact made us wary of the perceptual apparatus that we employ to make decisions. But what about a tome entitled The End of Knowledge or The End of Wisdom, since the illusion of knowledge itself with the concomitant specter of ego raising its ugly head may be the villain? “The best lack all conviction” are Yeats over-used words, but there are some who would argue that one of the few redeeming aspects of age is the kind of satori or enlightenment that seems to derive as knowledge drains out of you. Unless you’re someone who’s living in the delusory universe of a tyrant, then you’re ready to admit that much of what you've held dear is merely a way of encapsulating reality and pretending that you understand what often confounds understanding. Einstein died without ever creating a unification theory (between gravity and electromagnetism) and perhaps the conclusion that will someday be reached is that there isn’t one—though to prove that the universe doesn’t make sense may turn out to be as exacting a task as showing that it does.

The End of History

In an interview with Foreign Affairs (“The Polish Model," May/June 2013), Radek Sikorski, Poland’s minister of foreign affairs, remarks, “The twentieth century was a roller coaster for Poland, regaining independence after World War I, then losing it and getting ethnically cleansed by Stalin and Hitler together and the 45 years of struggle for democracy. Hopefully, we’ll produce less history than in the past.” Back in the sixties the sociologist Daniel Bell wrote an influential tome called The End of Ideology and then in the 90’s Francis Fukuyama created a stir with his The End of History and the Last Man. Like Sikorski’s prediction about Poland, are the great powers at the threshold of a new Age of Aquarius? Despite the turbulence in the Mideast, is the modern world on the verge of a period of ideological calm, in which McCluhan’s Global Village will be a practical every day reality? Will terrorist ideologies go the way of colonialism, fascism and communism? Will connectivity become like the water that killed the Wicked Witch of the West? Sikorski’s locution is that of the modern European state united with contemporaries by common currencies and political objectives. Will the EU eventually become a world union or WU, with the Euro giving way to the Global? Will the information age and the internet create one union, without passports or borders, where publishers no longer produce histories, at least the kind which recount battles for  ethnic hegemony, economic domination and political control? 

de Kooning Retrospective

Capitalism and Marxism were the two predominant ideologies of the l9th and 20th centuries, and those who gloat over the fact that the fall of the Soviet Union made capitalism the winner might be counting their chickens before they’re hatched. The sociologist Daniel Bell wrote a book called The End of Ideology. Later came Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. In the world of art, the two great ideologies were of the l9th and 20th centuries were figuration and abstraction, and it would be nice to associate the more traditional form with the more traditional ideology. But, as we know, artistic and political avant-gardists chose different paths, and the art of the totalitarian state tended more towards traditional than non-representational or revolutionary forms. Clement Greenberg became the ideologist of abstract expressionism, doing for revolution in art what Marx did in politics, and showing that the work of Rothko, Pollock and others was the necessary product of history, at least from the point of view of what might be called evolutionary esthetics. Which brings us to the interesting case of de Kooning, whose works are now on display in a retrospective at MoMA. De Kooning is to art what Daniel Bell and Fukayama were to political philosophy. Here are some of his quotes, taken right off the walls the museum: “Art should not have to be a certain way;” figuration or abstraction “could simply be different options;” “I never was interested in how to make a good painting…but to see how far one could get;” “Being anti-traditional is just as corny as being traditional.” Of one of his most famous paintings, Excavation, he said, “I’m not interested in ‘abstracting’ or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more and more things in, drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space.” Whether de Kooning’s anti-doctrinaire views emanated from Picasso or not, the two artists shared an obsession—a love-hate relationship to women (to regress into psychobabblese). Picasso’s famous portraits of women were a hard act to follow. They had to be the monkey on de Kooning’s back. His Woman I (1950-2) is a kind of Mona Lisa in reverse. Did he adore or revile his creation, a vagina dententa (with the dententa part placed right back in the mouth) with glowering eyes? Picasso’s discarded women became his masterpieces, but de Kooning was far more faithful to his ambivalence.

Lives of Our Leaders: Daniel Bell and Bruce Gordon

Daniel Bell, who wrote The End of Ideology, which was a forerunner of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, and Bruce Gordon, who played crime boss Nitti on The Untouchables, both received obits that together took up a full page in Wednesday’s Times. Another Untouchables regular, Paul Picerni, who played Ness’s sidekick Lee Hobson, was also memorialized in the Times several days earlier ("Paul Picerni, Actor in ‘Untouchables,’ Dies at 88," NYT, 1/20/11). Curiously, the Times’s description of how Bruce Gordon played Nitti was also a fitting description of Bell, if you switch the criminal enterprises for intellectual journals such as The Public Interest and The New Leader. "As played by Mr. Gordon, Nitti was memorably in control, presiding over an illicit network of late-Prohibition era breweries, drug running, gambling and much else…. Yet because of Mr. Gordon’s essential warmth as an actor, his Nitti had tremendous rough-hewn charm" ("Bruce Gordon, TV Mobster, Dies at 94," NYT, 1/25/11). The Times describes Bell’s rise from City College, "where he had no trouble finding his way to Alcove No. 1 in the cafeteria, where, among the anti-Stalinist socialists who dominated that nook, he found a remarkable cohort that challenged and sustained him for much of his life as it helped to define America’s political spectrum over the last half of the 20th century" ("Daniel Bell, Ardent Appraiser of Politics, Economics and Culture, Dies at 91," NYT, 1/25/11). One man was born from immigrant stock (Bell’s original name was Bolotsky) and one man played an immigrant on the rise in America. One man rose through the ranks of New York intellectuals and one played a character who worked his way up in the Chicago Syndicate, becoming a crony of Al Capone’s. But the two personae had much in common, emerging as they did out of the blood politics of Depression-era America.