The Lesson of Standardisation

The same clothes, the same swing music, the same technological thinking, the same standardised responses, the same dances, the same transport communications: in other words, the same standardisation all the world over. 'This uniformity is quite another thing than a structure of civilisation properly speaking, it is of an order not specifically human.' The Manichee, in his contradictory thinking, desired to attain to a univocal perfection, to be swallowed up in the principle of good like a Buddhist in his Nirvana, to negate his own body to the point of race-suicide, a Pharisee concerning matter and profoundly anti-social. Modern man is an inverted Manichee: again desiring a univocal perfection, in a dialectic not of spirit but of matter, regarding the spirit as nothing or hating it as evil, enslaving mind and responsibility to the evolution of technique, exalting his own blood in the interests of race purity, exploiting and commercialising intelligence, and profoundly anti-personal. How true that Marx is the obverse of Hegel. The outcome of such mass-education is anarchy of thinking and feeling, against which we childishly protect ourselves by the sameness of our clothes.Let us isolate one noteworthy aspect of this situation. To much modern thinking, the intelligence is a dangerous faculty, an anti-vital machine that skims the cream off things, that divides person from person and class from class, like the cathode rays that disintegrate alpha particles: it is the very principle of disintegration. The sub-human Utopia of the Communists, on the other hand, is the achievement of a material integration, it may be a leisure state to which technological progress will tend or an economic collectivity of the masses achieved in a strictly political field

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