Always opposition between culture and ignorance. But is this opposition still applicable today and if so, in what direction is it valid?
Well, indeed it is still valid today but let us start once not in medias res but from afar.
As in our non-Manifesto, and also according to Aristotle, a man is Zoon Politikon that is, in a nutshell, man is an animal that lives and tends to centralize things and people around him. This is to create stability for his own survival. Even in the early days of the human race, man created mini-tribes that were, de facto, his own family: in fact, to progress (in the sense of being a species), the only way Darwinianly possible was for man and woman to support each other and for the man to protect the woman and the offspring from threats and provide for their sustenance: if the man had broken his leg in hunting, the woman and the offspring would probably have already been skewered by a saber-toothed tiger. If the woman was not nurtured enough by the man, she would have given birth to not-so-strong offspring and thus the extinction of that genetic branch would have been inescapable. Period, no fuss and no frills, no romantic sunsets at a pleistocene lake.
Suppose there had been no natural tendency to merge two different tribes; just by natural selection alone at some point some of the families, initially consisting of only a few elements, would expand: the first genite(s) would help the father hunt and support the mother in her pregnancies, the second genite(s) so onward. So the social tendency to help each other was necessary for the very survival of the species, and those who did not implement it were selected out (genetic branch deleted, extinct, no sunsets). Surely then mini family tribes (thus an alpha father-mother and a troop of offspring) would certainly have met, the possibilities were: annihilation (mutual inconvenience), merging of the two tribes (necessity of compromise and pacts to arrive at mutual convenience), partial separation and partial merging (we can imagine that one of the boys from family A ran off with the girl from family B effectively creating a third group that, if solid, would have become another tribe). In fact, the second possibility listed is actually the one that has certainly been most successful. Again speaking Darwinianly, those who annihilated themselves did not survive by definition and therefore did not succeed. So we see that mutual convenience naturally led humans to gather in groups to be stronger against other tribes but first of all to survive natural events. Aggregation led to the creation of nomadic living centers, which then allowed the creation of culture. The center then of culture becomes human community aggregation where there are those who hunt, there are those who tend skins, there are those who clean them, and there are those who better split stones to make spearheads and arrowheads. Imagine, for example, the discovery of the elasticity of wood and the creation of the bow: perhaps a child, held by a nursemaid, was playing to hurt his little friends by stretching a rod, and an old man (perhaps a 35-year-old) got a brilliant idea in his head upon seeing this. We remember that the “survival” of the elder is assured only by support from the tribe where indeed the elder man is a key resource of knowledge and judgment. The elder man is wise because he has seen it all and to maintain the totem of the elder is to prolong that knowledge and wisdom. So then from the nomadic tribes to the discovery of bronze and in parallel with the creation of real cities we moved on to blooming of agriculture.
In our view, it is the aggregation into larger and larger assemblages that led to the “invention” of agriculture and animal husbandry and not vice versa. Then clearly this technology unlocked the further growth of cities and then civilization.
So in cities effectively culture and knowledge are created through the mutual convenience of specialization, aggregating not of human mass only but also opportunities to create art, knowledge, new discoveries. The countryside was for the ignorant to hoe, the forest worse, wild animals or at best a den for thieves. We could say this lightheartedly, without bringing evidence to prove it until at least the time of the Industrial Revolution when things actually began to change (industrial revolution understood locally, that is, England of 1800 it was not Spain of the same period). The industrial systems of the time began to centralize masses of people in cities not for the cultural purposes valid until the late Renaissance but for the shift in parameters from agricultural to purely industrial society. So the peasant migrating to the cities to seek wealth does indeed find a wage but he uproots himself: he loses his roots, he loses that family-tribal essence proper to rural environments. The wage earner is the atom that cannot make it without the rest of society. He has a specific job, covers a specific field, conforms to the needs offered by the city, gives up personal freedoms in the name of the system.
At this point then the city appears as a swarming of ants rather than a center of culture and art. It is no coincidence that when businesses stop for the vacations, the swarm of grasshoppers leave the horridly efficient apartments stacked on top of each other and flee to their families in the old country houses (for those who still belong to that generation) otherwise they find themselves queuing up at the beaches under the sunshade (industrialization of leisure, or, in other words: entertainment!).
In this industrial order of labor utilization, is the city still considered that center of aggregation of culture and art? We would say no in an effective sense, but, contradictorily, in a broad sense it still is, especially at the time when that art has a market and sells. So it becomes a show the display of the art of nothing, the art of the aperitif, the art of bars that have modern appearances, the theatrical art (not theater!!) that becomes of the highest class, functional to the show or real life. We could say that everything becomes superfluous as well as modern archery, which, very precise, uses counterweights, aiming systems, shock-absorbing arms or very complicated levers to increase power. That is, the difference between “sport” made for sport, technical solipsism of target achievement compared to the original activity. The bow is the basis of hunting, but urban sporting activity has denatured the original activity and turned it into something unusable for practical purposes. The influence of the city, therefore, tends to transform practical activities, aimed at accomplishing an action perhaps not perfectly per se but with the necessary completeness, into hyperspecialized activities that are fundamentally useless.
The complete man, who is not enslaved to the system, will see the inconsistencies and contradictions of the mass behaviors that occur when excessive assemblage of human material happens. The natural tendency, excluding the schizoid self-elimination, is to return to a genuinely warm and human hearth, away from the damp and fetid city. The perspective is reversed from the medieval city; the countryside represents that human escape route that brings back the order of needs and the functionality of activities. The employee, who works for an inscrutable and unknown purpose, rediscovers the meaning of his existence by touching the wood to be split that will be the one to keep him warm, by choosing and picking the mushrooms that can feed him or poison him, the contact between action and consequences, the idea of a salary fades away while still remaining the idea of efficiency, especially in temporal terms (which activities to prioritize over others).
At the extremes is clearly the Waldgang, the epilogue of this feeling and the rational consequence of a sane person.
Can there be an alternative way to that of the current wild city centralism? Is there a middle way that creates a marriage between hyper-technological futurism and an agricultural reality? We think there is. This can be achieved only by eliminating the caste of legalizing thermo-bureaucrats who decide a priori what is right and what is wrong and by reforming the regulatory system by simplifying, that is: cutting back. At the same time, state activity should protect central and strategic activities by reducing the cost of energy. In Roman times slaves were “cheap energy” for complex activities, otherwise there were oxen, donkeys and horses. In the industrial age, energy has slowly moved from brute labor power to raw material, electrical and/or kinetic motor power. The only way from this historical point forward is to minimize the cost of energy in order for strategic basic activities (from steel mills to hospitals, wheat fields to copper mines) to flourish as much as derivative and complex ones such as cathedral construction, aircraft factories or shipyards. Without low energy costs, there is no deviation from using humans as slaves in labor power.Robotic systems performing repetitive, energy-intensive tasks are but a bigger arm, a longer lever of human activity, the art lies in the craftsman who can hand TIG weld and then transfer that knowledge to machines but has the ability to use his experience by experimenting and researching in that art. But it requires cheap energy!
Art, the real kind, can flourish right in those inner cities where basic resources are easy to come by (you don’t have to grow your own land to get a bunch of turnips) but not in the buzz of the sewers. Or is it? Can someone be found to surf the sewer wave of Kali Yuga and smash this viewpoint of ours? Yes of course, we are not those aprioristic legalizers who decide things at the table also because we know very well that practical reality consists of individuals who also act outside any statistically plausible pattern. Nevertheless…statistics is not an exact science, and we know that, but it should be used to understand trends and plausibilities.
Long live the forest, long live futurism, long live knowledge!