Straight from my daily Journal to you
I’m not a fan of Susan Sontag but she is a brilliant writer writing pithy phrases like this one:
The purpose of Art is to create reconciliations on a different level of democratic compromises. There’s a lot of intellectual meat on those bones. Blake Smith, the literary critic writing for Tablet who loves Sontag, comments on her novel, The Volcano Lover with this observation on how she thinks:
Censorship, like civil war, is an outbreak of seriousness—and tolerance the virtue we make of our not caring enough to get things right. Blake is delving into the deeper layers of Sontag’s psyche and arguing against the assertion by other critics that she was one the one hand a brilliant thinker and on the other, a querulous bitch. Now that she is safely dead, this can be said. Reading this truly brilliant analysis of Sontag, I came to this conclusion: She never knew the word woke, but in some ways, she was one of its psychological architects. If you love Sontag, here is the link to the Tablet article, written on a high intellectual plane that I’ve never aspired to:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/sexy-funny-sad-sontag
However, the phrase an outbreak of seriousness struck me because it points straight at all the Wokery we’re currently enduring. What is that but too much seriousness altogether as well as a total lack of humour. Of genuine laughter, or if you prefer, authenticity. Of endless self-righteous posing, virtue signaling and moral posturing. For a movie that explores our strange woke times without getting all preachy and woke about wokery, look no further than The Curse, currently available on Paramount.
https://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/18lqr1y/the_curse_is_a_carnival_of_misery_but_where_is_it/?rdt=54835
This series is about a young wealthy couple pretending to themselves as well as the world that they are ‘saving’ it by expropriating an entire, poor neighborhood in Santa Fe, building new, expensive homes, and then putting the whole self-congratulatory show on HGTV. All because they love everyone, of course. It’s never about money or fame, oh no. There are only ten episodes, thank God, because the level of self-deception, lying and bad faith on view here is painful to watch. But it catches the Woke Zeitgeist perfectly. And it gave me hope that as a culture, we’re beginning to tire of it all because we can now see it for what it is: a secular fake religion, replete with torture, inquisition, and expulsion.
While musing on all of this, it suddenly struck me that the acronym DEI is the Latin word for God. OMG! A perfect illustration of how ironic life is. Because if the woke mantra of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is a call to arms, it is also a call to a new, if fake, religion with its own new, fake God—DEI, as in Opus DEI. This is an infamous global and somewhat secretive ‘church within the Catholic church’, 100,000 members strong, whose members aspire to apply the word of God to the everyday life of jobs and family. That doesn’t sound bad, does it. However, they are also known to have the exact same seriousness that the Woke Cult suffers from. Once again, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Save us from those fake saviours, please.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Opus-Dei
One of their favourite activities is to wind a cilice, a band of spiked steel, around their thighs in order to draw blood. So they can feel better about their sinful state. Yes, they are deadly serious indeed. And I fear that the Wokesters, this neo Opus DEI, is made of the same mentality. Which is why it is more powerful and harder to get rid of than we might have hoped. It has done a great deal of damage already and the war isn’t won yet. Speaking of which, I recently visited the Woke infested Royal BC Museum, just to have a look at what they have done to the once best loved exhibits, showing the settlers living their hard lives in an untamed wilderness. Guess what: all those exhibits have been swept clean and what is left are large, echoing galleries of nothing. It should be a warning to us: if we allow this fake religion to take over, we will be left with nothing but emptiness. A hollow hall where our culture once thrived.
I got so inspired thinking about all this that a poem is in the ground already. When it will emerge into the Substack light is not clear yet, but since spring is not far away, it shouldn’t be too long.
Thank you for this interesting commentary, Monika! By the way, I never liked Susan Sonntag, and in fact, what she does here is simply draping the philosophy of totalitarian regimes in a pseudo-witty bon mot. To prevent those "well-meaning" people from reigning the world we have "Gewaltenteilung", jurisdiction and democratic elections, and we can only hope that this may prevent a new totalitarian world of wokeness and climate change absolutism.
Reading your introduction and two paragraphs transported me to your link leading to Blake Smith's Review of "The Volcano Lover" which kept me spellbound to the end. "I’m tormented by feelings of scorn, indignation, rage for those who don’t pay attention, don’t care about getting it right, don’t make an effort, don’t honor the better, the best." < me too. And "The greatness of The Volcano Lover" is that, more deeply than any of Sontag’s previous emaciated pseudo-fictions, it is riven (split apart) by the violence of thinking that alternately rejoices in the richness of the world and condemns its inadequacy." < Blake Smith is a master of the English Language and Philosophy: > "Revisiting Philip Roth’s novel "Sabbath’s Theater", he insists that it teaches us how to love its unlovable protagonist. Learning to sympathize with such figures is a moral and political task:
for finding another intolerable and at the same time cherishing their existence, is deeply uncomfortable and urgently necessary. Because, at least in part: what’s the alternative? What do we do with people who refuse to act in accordance with our standards, our sense of decency, who have no interest in being reformed? Lock them all up? Exterminate them?
To which one must say, yes, of course, you fool — that’s what we do with such people! Politics is what we call killing them.
Luckily, not everything is politics, at least to that fatal degree. Most of the people we claim to find “intolerable” are merely annoying, just as much of the “violence” wokes complain of is merely verbal unpleasantness. We do not take our everyday dislike of other people seriously enough to make it political — that is, generating a deadly degree of enmity. Even when we speak of minor slights as “microaggressions” and pretend to invest them with political significance, we (or most of us) hardly mean to have each other jailed or killed for them (although it is telling that Greenwell imagines we do, that there is little gap between finding someone personally unbearable and beginning a campaign of extermination)." I was spellbound and could not stop reading until the end - so much food for thought! Thank you for sharing his work.
Tomorrow I will need to set aside time for reading your subsequent paragraphs.