>>28941187Barbarism and Civilization—It’s funny when Westerners defer to China or the old cities of the Near East and the Orient as the fountains of civilization, the standards of city life: “we’re latecomers, we were in loincloths in forest with painted face hunting boar while they had cities and writing.” This true, but Westerner forgets what civilization means. Less myopic than others, but still myopic, he thinks when he hears Chinamen lived in cities for five thousand years, that these must be like the cities in his own history. There are cities and cities. But what was writing? Most of it was for inventory or the most tedious kind of national or dynastic chronicles. Lists and lists: the kinds of passages that make the young bored even with the Bible. The oldest part of Greek literature is from the Iliad, the catalogue of ships: the heroes and their retinues are recounted with much flourish and poetry, so it’s not so boring, but is just barely saved by Homer’s artistry. But nearly every national “writing” is like this, and most “writing” stayed in that condition for a long time. Chinese have always lived in houses, yes, if that’s all you mean by “civilization”; but their history is marked by convulsions of annihilation. Just look in their history, the Cultural Revolution is the norm: mass extinction of millions of faceless peasants in the name of remaking a new society. They are no hive: they ignore the dead in the street and look away. I’ve known of ravens who have more consideration for one of their own. Everything for oneself, everything for personal utility: a pleasure in cruelty toward the weak and toward animals. This is the end-result of thousands of years of “civilization.” Don’t be fooled by the supposed historical self-conception of such people. Many periods of forgetfulness, when they erased and threw away their chronicles even and totally falsified their history (small example even today: they teach that Genghis Khan was a Chinese general…) This true for many other civilizations. Even religious texts: leaving aside the problem of translation, the Koran is, as Schopenhauer claimed, a tedious book of wretched, repetitive stupidity, with not a single new idea in it, “the poorest form of theism.” Unfortunately this is sufficient for the level of most people’s religious needs. Is not clear that writing is a great advance, for much of history…its value is questionable. Only quite late some productions of genius arise that redeem the skill of writing. In similar way, different societies mean quite different things by
“city.” In the Orient this has always referred to a steaming pile of humanity, with crowded, fetid eateries, close-packed throngs wading through shit and the filth of animals, rabbit and hen kept in cages, abused orphans, endless drone of yelling humangs hawking wares and spitting phlegm on street. You see this still in the cities of the Far East. Even in Japan, that all love for its supposed order, there is a terrible menace hanging on the streets of Tokyo that drives too many of the good people there to the mental asylum. The workplace is hell and transportation system is chaotic and suffocating, it reduces everyone again to the cipher he has always been in the Oriental city… a shadow even in his home where the woman inhabits all the terror of the ancient family deities. The Japanese man gets allowance from wife, who often physically depletes him, takes his phone allowance, his lunch money. The woman rules Vietnam, and the faceless clerk or merchant who claws his path in the antheap of this society is beholden to his hectoring wife like slave. Matriarchy and anonymity are the principles of these piles of biomass—never call them hives! The hive is noble: the hive can be a work of beauty and order, but the city, the city in its original form, is humanity reduced to a steaming ratpile. In the hive the ant or bee achieves the full development of its inborn nature as worker or warrior or queen, but who can say this of most cities in history—do you think man stamping papers, scheming to escape wrath of long-nailed office autocrat with spittoon, who hawks smoked fish out of newspapers with fingerless gloves or sells birds with clipped wings to jeering hueman macacas, do you think such creature is a specimen of wellturned out life? And the more depressing possibility that, for the vast majority, such life is the expression, the full expression of their inborn reach and wants, still it must be the case that they were selectively bred by their masters to this degraded and zombified form. But even the scared and huddled ash-and-sallowfaced schemer of Saigon or Chengdu was in his remote ancestry like the free Black Yi who terrorized the Han as recently as a hundred years ago, or the powerful-bodied, self-sufficient Tibetans who have made sport of them for centuries. Existence for such life is hell.
