The quote below is taken from the chapter “Culture and Capital” in Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. I find it worth quoting because it contains within it the critical part of the prophetic imagination that establishes the paradigm in which the consciousness of power works. Musil may be writing about an imperial Austria on the brink of World War I, but what he describes is the paradigm of power with us now: the influence of capital being publically countered by the platitudes of an old religion whose hold over society has decayed, its decaying bridge having been replaced by middle class values under the unity of ‘culture’ which is no such unity at all.
From Thatcher through Blair to Cameron, all have displayed the same attitudes as Count Leinsdorf: 1) the willingness to lull the masses with eternal verities of a moribund Christian religiosity and 2) the desire to create ‘office’ for all in society under a Great British culture while letting capital get on with it beneath the veneer. The disconcerting thing is that even David Cameron, who stands in the breach left by the failure of both ‘capital’ and ‘culture’, is trying to play the same card trick of power. This is what the consciousness of power must do even in its own bankruptcy. Thus Jerusalem falls. And so the quote:
“But the State does not consist only of the Crown and the people, with the government machinery in between; there is yet something else in it: thought, morality, the idea…! However religious His Highness might be, he did not shut his eyes…to the recognition that nowadays the mind had in many respects freed itself from the tutelage of the Church. For he could not imagine how for instance a factory, or a Stock Exchange manoeuvre in grain or sugar, could be conducted according to religious principles, while on the other hand modernised large-scale landowning was rationally unthinkable without the Stock Exchange and industry. And when he listened to his business manager’s statement and it became clear to him that a certain deal could be done better in association with a foreign group of speculators than shoulder to shoulder with the landowning nobility of his own country, His Highness in most cases felt himself compelled to decide the former; for the practical relatedness of things has a mind of its own, which once can’t run counter to simply for sentimental reasons, when, as the head of a great estate, one is responsible not only for oneself but also for innumerable other people’s welfare. There is such a thing as the professional conscience, which in certain circumstances is antagonistic to the religious conscience; and Count Leinsdorf was convinced that even the Cardinal Archbishop in such a case could not act differently from the way he did himself. Admittedly, Count Leinsdorf was also always willing to deplore this in public sessions of the Upper House and to utter the hope that life would return to the simplicity, naturalness, supernaturalness, soundness and inevitability of Christian principles.
“[...]He, himself, recognised that a connection between the eternal verities and business, which is so involved in contrast with the beautiful simplicity of tradition, was a matter of the greatest importance; and he had also come to recognise that this connection was not likely to be found anywhere but in the essence of bourgeois culture, which, with its great ideas and ideals in the spheres of law, duty, morality and beauty, extended even into the struggles of the day and everyday antagonisms and seemed to him like a bridge consisting of entangled living plants. True, it did not offer as firm and solid a foothold as the dogmas of the Church, but it was no less necessary and laden with responsibility; and for this reason Count Leinsdorf was not only a religious idealist but also a passionate idealist in secular matters.
“[...]He held the view that every form of productivity–not only that of a civil servant, but equally that of a factory worker or a concert-singer–represented an ‘office’. [...]The idea of ‘office’ was for him the substitute for what Diotima referred to as that unity of religious feeling in all human activity that has been lost since the Middle Ages. And fundamentally, all such enforced sociability…if it is not utterly naive and uncouth, does spring from a need to create the illusion of a human unity embracing humanity’s extremely varied activities, a unity that in fact never exists. This illusion Diotima called ‘culture’, and usually, with a special amplification, ‘our old Austrian culture’.” (pp 112 – 113; 115)
Posted on July 1, 2011
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