Philobarbarism: Porno-BoBos.

Pornography deals not with people but with images of peoples' bodies. Not even the true bodies themselves, (forget the minds of the clay,) but there is not even a body involved other than image in the mind. The image is of one who is no longer, and no attempt at mind is ever present. This outrageous dehumanisation and descent into solipsism should enrage us. Far from it in terms of our barbarians, our mental pets, our images of porno were-beings. The philobarbarist, the bobo who idealises the barbarian and to him attributes romantic traits, is a porno-wanker. It's dirty and disgusting; and yet it is a loved position in the theatre of the public mind. The Noble Savage is an idea of what one wants to see in the image of others for the sake of ones own gratification, however perverse. To be pornography one must not be oneself but must be an image of oneself in the mind; Pornography is not a state but an action. To make a person pornographic is a result of philobarbarism, a nasty practice of the bobo by and for himself alone.


News of the New World prompted Montaigne to pen tales of the Noble Savage. His was not to kill but to quill. Thank God for it. In the 16th century our modern standards did not have high influence in conquerors circles: we, the now-hated Europeans, were as brutal and immediate as any, and our sensitivities were blunt. Montaigne, in his genuine benevolence, wrote of the cannibals of the New World to suggest that they, though not us, were Human. He went so far, as we will read below, even better than we, the explorers and conquerors. We have no right, he writes, to exterminate them. Thank God for Montaigne.

And now, in 2006, let's come back to our reasonable senses.
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Michel de Montaigne... began a long tradition of using non-European peoples as a basis for engaging in a critique of his own culture, undoubtedly in the process romanticizing what Jean-Jacques Rousseau would later call "the noble savage." It is a theme which still appeals to many Westerners.

What reason does Montaigne give for judging cannibalistic Native Americans to be preferable to Europeans?

These nations seem to me, then, barbaric in that they have been little refashioned by the human mind and are still quite close to their original naiveté. They are still ruled by natural laws, only slightly corrupted by ours. They are in such a state of purity that I am sometimes saddened by the thought that we did not discover them earlier, when there were people who would have known how to judge them better than we. It displeases me that Lycurgus or Plato didn't know them, for it seems to me that these peoples surpass not only the portraits which poetry has made of the Golden Age and all the invented, imaginary notions of the ideal state of humanity, but even the conceptions and the very aims of philosophers themselves. They could not imagine such a pure and simple naiveté as we encounter in them; nor would they have been able to believe that our society might be maintained with so little artifice and social structure.

This is a people, I would say to Plato, among whom there is no commerce at all, no knowledge of letters, no knowledge of numbers, nor any judges, or political superiority, no habit of service, riches, or poverty, no contracts, no inheritance, no divisions of property, no occupations but easy ones, no respect for any relationship except ordinary family ones, no clothes, no agriculture, no metal, no use of wine or wheat. The very words which mean "lie," "treason," "deception," "greed," "envy," "slander" and "forgiveness" are unknown....

Michel de Montaigne, "On Cannibals." (1580)
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_2/montaigne.html#4
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It is a good thing that Montaigne did his best to protect by romanticising the cannibals. If not for his initial push to make them seem better than we, we might not have preserved them to the great extent we did. The comparison between the Aztecs and the Conquistadors is one of night and day; but with Montaigne's sensitivity we can think that even greater efforts were made over the long term to save not only the savages but their cultures. Yes, this is against the grain of p.c. ideologic but the facts are there for those who care to find them that the Spanish reconstructed with the aid of natives the artefacts lost where possible. It was the reviled conquerors who preserved and restored lost civilizations in the New World. We do so today. And yet our Left dhimmi fascists condemn us for it, condemn us for the nature of nature and its history. We are, in fact, among the finest; but the fascists refuse to accept it, preferring instead to condemn us and to extol the make-believe virtues of cannibals. That is philobarbarism. That has to end right now.


Turning people into porno images is a delight to our Left dhimmi fascists. Take this turn:

[T]he masses do not exist. The mass... is a metaphor for the unknowable and invisible.... Being essentially unknowable, the mass acquires definition through the imposition of imagined attributes. (Carey: p. 21.)

There are two groups dehumanised by the intellectual elitist philobarbarist: first there is the idealised barbarian, and there is next the devalued suburbanite. Neither is a real being; both are images of people filtered through the minds of the elitist to conform to his values for his solipsistic needs, in effect, made into pornography. The elitist, the intellectual, distances himself from the person and creates a false thing of imagery to give others a form he can accept according to his wants. He idealises the savage and defames the normal and decent. But both are images in the elitist's mind of pornography. The boring and mindless clerk and the noble and superior savage are both masturbatory phantasies for the elitist.

Trying to imagine what she calls 'that anonymous monster the Man in the Street,' Virginia Woolf finds herself visualizing a 'vast, featureless, almost shapeless jelly of human stuff...occasionally wobbling this way or that as some instinct of hate, revenge, or admiration bubbles up beneath it.' For Ezra Pound, humanity, apart from artists, is merely a 'mass of dolts,' a 'rabble,' representing 'the waste and the manure' from which grows 'the tree of the arts.' (Carey: p. 25.)

Can you hear, dear reader, the phrase so often in use today among our journalists, "the Arab street"? For those who have experienced an Arab street the following will resonate:

In Pound's Cantos the 'multitudes' and their leaders transmorgify into a torrent of human excrement-- 'Democaracies electing their sewage.' (ibid)

Democracy, the rule of the people for the people by the people, is an outrage to the gnostic elitist. To the intellectual artist, what can be more unnatural and foetid than life lived by those who are out of place? The solution? Back to the land with them. Or, since there are now too many suburbanites to live a life of harmony in a state of nature, exterminate many if not most or even all of them. Yes, we have seen the rants of Pianka, Darre, Heidegger. Here is H.G. Wells:

Freedom was all very well, but it choked the earth with bodies, Only by system could humanity's rampant growth be checked, so Wells began to work out programmes of world reform.... He feels for them, [urban working class men,] but does not quite treat them as men. They do not even have men's bodies. (Carey: pp. 147;144.)

Wells looks around his Kentish village and sees it overrun by clerks and workmen. He phantasizes:

London is a ghost city, full of skeletons, dogs, and rats. The few survivors of the English people live in rural peasant communities, subsisting by primitive agriculture. They have returned, Wells observes, from 'suburban parasitism' to what had been the life of European peasant since the dawn of history.... The old suburban life was not rooted in history or the earth.... The development of his fiction suggests that destruction lured him even more powerfully than progress. Reducing the world's population became an obsession. In fantasy he took-- again and again, and with mounting savagery-- a terrible vengeance on the suburban sprawl that had blighted Bromley. (Carey: pp. 132-34.)

Those who know Bromley, East London, today will know it as a charming and lovely and affluent place. It is full of clerks. But the point is not what clerks, i.e. the middle classes, do or how they live that is offensive to the elitist: it is their existence itself that offends. It is their existence as equals in a democracy and as autonomous beings that offends. That the mass is not different from the elite, that is more than maddening to the elitist: it is cause for violent rages and genocide. We'll look more closely at this hatred in coming posts. For now we will see more of philobarbarism as a coping stance among the elitists.

Behind all these recipes for supremacy we can observe the pressure of mass culture, driving intellectuals to invent new proof of their distinction in a world which increasingly found them redundant. (Carey: p. 72.)

Montaigne was a philobarbarist, and good for him. He didn't know barbarians and cannibals any better than today's elitists do. Montaigne didn't go so far as to urge that the barbarians eat us. Our Left dhimmi fascists do.

[There was a] widespead intellectual cult of the peasant... [a] fanciful pastoralism. ...England had no peasants left at the end of the nineteenth century, so English writers seeking a pastoral version of the mass had to invent them... or pretend to be peasants themselves. Carey: p. 36.)
[Gang attacks girl. Thanks, Tiberge.]

The cult of the peasant, philobarbarism, support for the suffering! of! the! Palestinian! Peoples! and so on, so long as they are authentic peasants, not Sudanese animists, is with us today at every level, and thickest in the realm of the elite. No, not real Palestinians, because those ones cut off our heads and blow themselves up with anyone unfortunate enough to be too close. The barbarians have to be romantic and know their places. They have to be pornographic depictions of people. Not the real people. They smell bad. Yes, the more adventurous among us actually go "live with them" is to cement our bona fides; for all but the most supremely stupid, it's a hobby. No one actually likes the Palestinians, and that is partly because there are too many of them to know. To like them is to reduce them all to a jelly-like mass of pornographic proportion and perspective. One can love the idea of the Palestinians, and one can make that love into a cultish ideal. One can get off on the porno-wank.

The demand among intellectuals for a cosmetic version of the mass, which prompted the quest of peasants and primitives in pastoral settings, also sanctioned political rewritings of the mass, whether as stalwart workers or as a the downtrodden and the oppressed.... By converting her [fictional beggar] into a peasant or super-peasant, timeless, immemorial, mixed up with the soil and tree roots, Woolf [Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway] deprives the woman of the distasteful social reality which she would possess as a member of the mass asking for money. The peasant disappears in a primitive cosmetic haze.(Carey: p. 38; 37.)
[Gang closes in. Thanks, Tiberge.]

Sentimentalised peasants, especially those who are far away, The! Palestinian! Peoples! and the French yoots, as examples, or perhaps even those closer to home, such as the figure-- not even a character-- in Phil Collins' pop tune of social awareness, "Another Day in Paradise"--

She calls out to the man on the street
"Sir, can you help me?
It's cold and I've nowhere to sleep,
Is there somewhere you can tell me?"

He walks on, doesn't look back
He pretends he can't hear her
Starts to whistle as he crosses the street
Seems embarrassed to be there

Oh think twice, it's another day for
You and me in paradise
Oh think twice, it's just another day for you,
You and me in paradise

-- the sentimentalised are far superior to those awful people who actually live around one, messing up the environment and raping Mother Nature in the pursuit of oil profits. Shall we take a moment here to weep loudly? I for one fell your pain.

Ah, but I'm a peasant by all reasonable indicators. I must live in a state of false consciousness, being too stupid to realise the conspiracy of capitalism has me believing I too can have part of the crumbs that fall from the piggies' tables. And I'm not the only fool who seems to think my false consciousness is a good thing, there's also my uncle, Uncle Tom:

An alternative to promoting the masses to peasanthood is to blame them for not being peasants, or to point out how much more attractive they would have been had they remained peasants. (Carey: p. 37.)

See what my uncle, Uncle Tom, misses:

[P]loughing near Taranto: 'His rude but gentle face, his gnarled hands, his rough and scanty vesture, moved me to deep respect.' The man is, of course, no more to Gissing [a forgotten novelist] than a glorified garden gnome. Like other intellectuals, Gissing preferred peasants to almost any other variety of human beings, since they were ecologically sound, and their traditional qualities of dour endurance, respect for their betters and illiteracy meant that the intellectual's superiority was in little danger from them. (Carey: p. 105.)

My uncle, Uncle Tom, he could have been a garden gnome, a resistance fighter, a cartoon pornographic phantasy for elitists.

We'll end here with some observations on Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.

The savages were not inhabitants of Brave New World.... John, the savage who is taken back to Brave New World from the reservation, is, we are shown, a pure and uncorrupted being, and he is disgusted by the New Worlders. He believes in human nobility, high art, sexual purity, conscience and morality, and he loves the works of Shakespeare, a copy of which he happened to find on the reserve.... He opts to live like a hermit in the countryside, growing his own food, and praying. That a savage who had grown up on an Indian reservation among practitioners of fertility cults should emerge, as John does, with the inhibitions and cultural preferences of a late nineteenth century public schoolboy could not be called a realistic development. (Carey: pp.: 88-89.)

Our very own, our repulsive Left dhimmi fascists. they do not care a whit for the people, the masses,, the downtrodden and the oppressed and exploited. Sorry, they care only for their own shoes, for their 'doos, for their cocktail party chatter. If the peasants die like bugs in filth, well, that's the fault of the Americans, the Zionists, of racism, of capitalism, of -- I'm sick of continuing with that line, thank you.

Our left dihimmi fascist philobarbarists, take that one in Pennsylvania, for example, Stuart, the Presbyterian, I might have lapsed into shrillness on occasion over him and his like and suggested in a humorous way that they should all be hanged from lamposts.

Excuse me, I lost my train of thought.

The Left dhimmi fascists, the philobarbarists who reduce people to garden gnomes of lawn delight, I don't like those people. I would be happy to mow them. That's just me, that ol' Dag humor coming out inappropriately again. Maybe we'll get luck y and the philobarbarists will slink back to the public toilets with their turtle necks and wank in a stall like any sensible guy would do. Can't do anything about their phantasies, but seeing them perform in public is kind of dirty. Go away, philobarbarist wankers, and take your porno-people with you. If you can stand them in the living flesh.