Lawrence Auster

TODAY is the 70th birthday of  the writer Lawrence Auster, who died in 2013 of pancreatic cancer and whose writings on modern America are still avidly followed. This blog would not have been possible without his encouragement. Here is an excerpt from his entry, “The Breakdown of Western Form:”

In today’s New York City … you will walk into a retail store or a hair-cutting salon, and not only will there be loud black funk music blasting from speakers in the ceiling from morn till night, with its interminable, melody-less, rhythmless, lyric-less (and identical in every song), “oh ooo ohh, ooh, hoh baby, woohoo, uhh, uhh, Woohoo WoohuahAHahAAA, yeah-huh, baby oh yeah”, but the radio reception is so bad it’s all static. I’m talking about loud static, filling the establishment from powerful speakers. When you ask the employees to adjust the tuning of the radio station or to turn the volume down, they will do so, but there seems to be absolutely no consciousness on their part that there was anything inappropriate about this horrible noise. There is a shocking insensibility in young people today, a complete acceptance of noise and disorder in one’s environment.

It reminds me of India, where villagers love to have all-night festivals with electronic speakers turned up to the max, where people in cities are surrounded by unbelievable, all-encompassing noise and disorder and are not disturbed by it at all. In one sense, this is an impressive quality, expressing the spiritual dimension of the Eastern civilization and the idea of the soul unaffected by matter. But it also means that people—calmly accepting a disordered unpleasant environment—will not do anything to improve their environment. I was once shopping in a small department store in Ahmednagar, a medium- size city in western India a couple of hundred miles east of Bombay. The city consisted of one crowded, dusty street after another, with not a single pleasant prospect or anything uplifting to the senses and the mind. As a young salesman was helping me I said: “Where are the nice places in Ahmednagar?” He answered matter-of-factly: “There are no nice places in Ahmednagar.”

That’s the sort of environment that the Third-World acceptance of disorder leads to. And Americans, even short of a total, literal Third-World takeover of America, have already become Third-Worldized in their own souls, and thus will present no resistance to further Third-Worldization.

Of course, the comparison is imperfect and unfair—to Third Worlders. The disorder of today’s America is a distinctly Western or post-Western pop phenomenon betokening total social and moral breakdown and the release of the self from any larger cultural and moral wholes. It is thus far more destructive than the traditional Third-World cultures, though many of them are also moving in the direction of moral and cultural breakdown.

Nevertheless, there is an underlying similarity: It is the absence of the idea of a transcendent truth higher than self and tribe, the absence of the idea of the individual as a separate entity, the absence of the love of form, the absence of the expectation that the infrastructure of our social existence—buildings, streets, sound systems—will be made well and attractively. It is the passive, nonjudgmental acceptance of nature, or of one’s environment. The West first arose in ancient Israel and Greece in a conscious resistance to the surrounding cultures based on the acceptance of the mere cycles of nature. Western man imposed on nature a form and transcendent meaning above the cosmos and its gods. And Western man now seems to be rapidly losing those very qualities that made him what he was.

Rest in peace, Lawrence Auster!

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