It has rained so much these past few days that I’ve been forced to close the blinds or else risk sitting here all day, like an idiot, watching the raindrops streak down the windows. Judging from what scraps of news I’ve pieced together, it is just as well the blinds are down.
The Tower of Babylon
As I have said before, we live in an ahistorical age, where people live as though the world begins anew each morning. One byproduct of this is the belief that no one told a lie prior to the 2016 election. Since then, we have been subjected to endless exaltations of the “truth,” news organizations have expended countless hours fact-checking every little thing, tech companies have come under enormous pressure to crackdown on “fake news,” and philosophers have started appearing on television again.
There is, of course, no greater way to spread falsehoods and lies than to turn the pursuit of the truth into a pogrom. Take this recent example:
Now, I have not laughed in over one thousand years. I have no idea if the Babylon Bee is even remotely funny. Somehow, I doubt it. Like the Onion, “the Bee” is probably nothing more than generic political talking points deep fried in sarcasm. But to quibble over the humour is to miss the point.
Snopes has, if their website is to be believed, been on the prowl for fake news since 1994. We can at least give them credit for “fact checking” long before falsehoods were invented by Russian scientists in 2016. Still, to waste one’s time dissecting jokes, like a mad scientist, peeling back each layer in search of errors and falsehoods, is the most pointless activity I can think of. It makes ringing church bells to disrupt thunderstorms seem like a worthwhile activity.
The trouble is that people do not waste their lives in a vacuum. We all have to hear about it, especially when their Sisyphean boulder rolling happens to jive with the fads of the day. And in the case of the Babylon Bee, they not only have to hear about it, they risk losing a vital source of income.
The fact-checkers might argue, as John Stuart Mill did, that it is better to be Socrates in shit than a pig in shit. But why must we be in shit at all?
The Mythologizing of Hermann Hesse
If Hermann Hesse holds any particular relevance today, it is for being a symbol of American counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s. Those turbulent decades saw assassinations, wars, and profound shifts in cultural attitudes. In other words, they saw the same things every other decade in human history has seen. But, for whatever reason, we venerate this period of time for being particularly chaotic.
Over the last few days, I’ve been reading Ralph Freedman’s excellent biography of Hesse. Freedman says that Hesse’s fame in America can be traced to the publication of Colin Wilson’s book The Outsider, which established Hesse as a man “outside the system,” operating as a part of a “new ‘subterranean’ culture.” As opposed to Central Europe, where he was read mostly as a middle class writer, American counterculture enthusiasts “mythologized” Hesse as a “writer of man’s interior, psychological life, and as a mystic of the East,” ultimately transforming him into a “mixture of Jesus and Buddha.”
Hesse’s popularity amongst the counterculture led, as one might expect, to t-shirts, mugs, commemorative plates, comic books, and “other expressions of the mass culture that Hesse so despised.” In other words, the “counterculture” soon lost whatever grasp they had of him.
This just shows you how versatile America is. Even in times of social unrest, the “counterculture” movement is the culture. It’s not separate from the established culture, it just markets itself that way. What begins as a movement to overturn the established order soon becomes a means of selling t-shirts.
It is not, to paraphrase Obi-Wan Kenobi, a case of the counterculture becoming the very thing it swore to destroy. Culture and counterculture have always been one in the same. All the counterculturalists did was spruce things up around the edges. Instead of selling t-shirts of Bing Crosby, they sold t-shirts of Hermann Hesse. It’s amazing what a fresh set of clothes can do.
Of course, if Hesse were writing today, the descendants of the “counterculture” that so happily embraced him would want nothing to do with him. For one thing, writing Siddhartha would got him shot for cultural appropriation.
At least all the Hermann Hesse swag is now on sale. Do you think I would look cute in a crop top?