The desk I have used for a few months now is a very typical modern desk. Varnished wood, very square and angled. Convenient drawers all around, with a built-in, overhead fluorescent lamp. Sterile white light flickered and fell uneasily on my hands. A million other desks just like it were out there in various dim offices and lonely studies. A capitalist’s pride. A socialist’s dream. My lame desk.
After just a week I was compelled to alter the gloriously efficient surfaces of my desk. I placed a blue sticky-note with my address on it to my right, for convenience primarily, I admit, but also because it reminded me of where I was. I travel a lot; the reminder grounded me.
After a week and a half, I felt rather homesick. With selotape I fastened a little European banner off to the side of my desk. Here its stripes and coats-of-arms might remind me why I do whatever I do. Were I ever to feel despondent and discouraged, the deep colors shimmering in the corner of my eye might ease the sinking feeling.
After two weeks, I got tired of the manicured desert around my computer screen, and, with pen and paper, stuck up texts of all kinds onto my desk. Folk songs, aphorisms, dear sayings and song lyrics, and wise quotes from the Ancients. In an empty spot dead-center above my computer screen, I taped a 40-year-old photograph of the Santa Maria del Fiore. Beside it, a family photo. I piled favorite reads and old tomes into the corners and shelves of my desk, books that laid previously on a shelf on the other end of the room. I bought a new lamp. An incandescent one. Warm orange light bounced up from the wooden surface to illuminate my newly-arranged mementos. As a newborn I received gold crosses and chains from the extended rural family. I hung one of them on the flag.
It was still a lame-ass desk. But at least it’d make a socialist shudder now.
And to be honest, it was much better.
If the first casualty of war is truth, the first casualty of economics is humanity. In the modern drive for efficiency, equality and uniformity, human refinement is the first thing to be shaved off. There is no room for German desks or Russian desks, or Catholic desks or Hindu desks, or stone desks, or bamboo desks, or desks of the islands or of the mountains or of the forests or the deserts. There is only room for desks, for one and for all. The lowest common denominator is identified, and subsequently multiplied endlessly, held back only by the limits of capital. All suffer but the merchant, and even his children will too, eventually.
It is not just desks that become brutalized. The more obvious examples would be modern “art” and “architecture.” Where once divine masterpieces were celebrated, great works that were legendary from afar but through their fractal Mandelbrot sets of beauty could be appreciated from one hundred meters, ten, one and even one-tenth of a meter away, now sit monstrosities of plastic, glass, concrete and steel, invented for equality, selected for inhumanity, and fashioned by machines. From afar they inspire terror, from a near standpoint, only disappointment and disgust. Ironic deconstructionism is less entertaining when you have to live in it. When it, like with the mad Le Corbusier, inspires plans to demolish history in the name of utility and equality, it becomes evil.
Le Corbusier was a Swiss-French modernist architect who developed a plan — Plan Voisin — in the 1920s to demolish a significant portion of downtown Paris. From the rubble would arise a complex of eighteen cross-shaped glass office towers, neatly arranged on a rectangular grid.
Plan Voisin thankfully never arose, but its spirit certainly did, and in far more places than just Paris. Take a long drive anywhere from San Diego to Sevastopol and you’re more than likely to get your fill.
Who loves these modern horrors? Who feels comfortable in them, around them? Who were they built for? In ye olden times, we built our own desks and chairs, our own forks and plates, our own homes and churches and workplaces. We painted our own art, sculpted our own people. We made it for us and imbued with our own history, religion, beliefs, mores, habits, tics, customs, jokes, language, script, folkways, values, likenesses, hopes, dreams and culture. I took the same things and taped them to my drab desk, but I would’ve been better off with a desk made by my people in the first place. I would’ve been better off in a room without blank white walls. I would’ve been better off in a building built with my forefathers’ blood instead of concrete. Frankly, I think I, and everyone else, would be better off with the Marais and the Beaubourg instead of Plan Voisin.
Enough about efficiency. Let’s talk about beauty.
We just might make the world a better place.
Mark Yuray is verified on Gab. Follow him there and on Twitter.
Excellent piece.
In my experience Americans who visit European cities are always drawn to the older architecture. The newer buildings are sterile, and not too different from the ones back home. The beauty of the older architecture draws people in. Even moderns instinctively grasp the appeal of that beauty, despite how they look down on the people of the past who made it. As to why society has shifted to prizing efficiency over beauty, it’s in part due to democracy.
Democracy is plutocracy. Money wins elections. There’s incentive for elites to keep their enterprises as economically efficient as possible. It nets them more money they can use to buy off the political system. That’s how you get and hold political power in a democracy.
Our rulers are a merchant class. They don’t value manly honor, or noble dignity, or aesthetic beauty. They primarily value wealth, and showing that you can make wealth, and professing progressivism (itself a path to political power, and so more wealth).
The values of a society’s rulers dictate their subordinate’s incentives. Power is like a castle, and the rulers control the door. Who gets to live in the castle is decided by the rulers. And the rulers have their own ideas about what kind of people they want inside.
People have goals. We don’t want to be with people that are going to hinder our seeking them. We want to be with people that are going to help us achieve our goals. What goals we seek are determined by our values.
So the rulers let into the castle people who share their values. They prohibit, or eject, those who don’t. There’s incentive, then, for anyone who wants to get in and stay in, to bring his own values into line with the rulers’, or to at least pretend (virtue signal) he has.
The preferences of the elite have a tendency to trickle down. Their immediate subordinates try to emulate their superiors in every way, for the hopes of being let into the castle. Their immediate subordinates’ subordinates try to emulate their superiors. And so on.
Consumerism, meanwhile, convinces people that accumulating lots of junk is the road to happiness. And egalitarianism convinces people to leave their traditional communities, “move on up”, buy some cheap prefab in suburbia.
Products, whether consumerist goods or houses, have to be sold. The best path to profit is to make sure your products are appealing to as wide a market as possible. This means in practice that everything has to be bland, impersonal, and inoffensive.
The idea that aesthetics have innate meaning is never grasped by these elites. That the meaning affects human minds seems to escape them, too.
As humans, we want to surround ourselves with shapes and symbols that speak to us, that reflect our own experiences, remind of the things we’re familiar with and the things we love. This is a natural desire we all have, and we need to fulfill it in order to stay regular. A fact which also escapes our secular Brahmins.
Great comment. The instinctual preference for older beauty is something to behold. As soon as an old building catches someone’s eye involuntarily — much like a pretty girl catches someone’s eye — 300 years of egalitarian dogma are refuted in the blink of an eye.
As someone who just started his first office job, I sympathize with the aesthetic of efficiency which you noticed. Thanks for this write up – I will have to emulate some of the actions you took to make my own office space a bit more reflective of me and the culture of my ancestors.
On a side note, I have a wonderful feeling that this piece is kicking off Aesthetics Week part II over here at Social Matter.
No Aesthetics Week Pt. II as far as I am aware, but we’ll definitely be posting more, and more aesthetics, poetry, prose and humor in the future, so stay tuned.