#Baroque: Distorted Delusions | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

rude-harmonixer · 1 year

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I was originally going to write on Twitter but character limits are too much of a bother so here I am. This will probably be very messy but I'm dealing with media that probably 10 people are familiar with, so... Whatever!

I've recently found this site: https://nervetower.neocities.org/analysis.html

It has a bunch of translations and essays on the game Baroque, originally released on the Sega Saturn.

This specific bit of info has made me OBSESSED with thinking about the game.

Sure the game was literally written in burst of inspiration by drawing tarot cards because the writers had a deadline and writer's block at the same time, and the protagonist being canonically trans was only in a draft for the prequel material, but the game is surprisingly consistent with its themes and the symbolism can still be read through a trans lens.

And because it's not confirmed and ambiguous, the protagonist can be read through multiple gender povs.

But like, why is this such a big deal? Well, Baroque and its prequel material just so happens to have one of the most incredible anti-bigotry narratives I've ever seen in a game. Specifically anti-ableism and anti-eugenics, among probably some questioning of organized religion and how corporations use it to further alienate the public into a cycle of oppression towards marginalized people. etc.

The protagonist is mass produced and manipulated by the Archangel to "purify" whatever he deems should be "purified", using guilt (the Christians/Catholics favorite thing) to do so as the protagonist is made to not remember anything besides their immense guilt over something.

For the game to progress the protag must regain their memories and find out they're a copy of who knows how many other copies, a human made into a product basically, made to feel special because they won't be distorted by their desperate delusions to escape a world destroyed by corporate greed like all the rest and have the power to "purify" things, when in reality they're just emotionally and genetically manipulated into being that.

A perfect pawn.

Now where is the trans symbolism? Well, aside from how little bodily autonomy the protagonist has, here's where things really get interesting:

In Baroque, God is presented as a woman. Before the Great Heat (aka apocalypse), God's Sense Spheres (her omnipresence, transferring data like the world is a body) assured that no great distortion would come to the reality humanity lived in, God would feel pain and know there was a wound to heal. Then the Archangel, who's really just some scientist, started fucking with the population's mental health on purpose because he wanted to kill God and create his own perfect little world. That's the short summary anyway.

At one point, with a lot of brainwashing using God's screams of pain, he created the Order of Malkuth to help him. But later the members woke up from the brainwashing and organized a desperate attempt to stop the Archangel: they would fuse Koriel number 12 (presented as a boy) with God so she could communicate in data that humans could understand. What they didn't expect however is that Koriel 12 had their own problems, and with Archangel interrupting the fusion, those problems were very amplified.

Koriel 12's guilt over being alive and God's suffering made shit hit the fan for good with the Great Heat.

And that's how the protagonist becomes mute and receives the power of God and anim- I mean, "purification".

The game begins and despite Koriel and God being now two parts of the same being, the Archangel tells Koriel to go to the bottom of the Nerve Tower, where the "Mad God" is basically imprisoned, and "purify" her with a rifle (with ammo made from the embodiment of her pain hormones).

The Archangel is literally making Koriel kill a part of themselves that's already literally buried deep into a mind tower that goes down instead of up but still has the image of a tower instead of a hole. He's basically forcing Koriel to bury the closet with them inside it because the closet isn't enough apparently.

Koriel also can't speak for themselves anymore but their thoughts can be read by the Horned Woman, which she just says out loud without explaining anything and unless you're thinking about it you won't even recognize those are "your" thoughts being spoken by another person.

Jumping ahead, when Koriel gets to the bottom of the tower, you can either do what the Archangel tells you or can just walk towards God and unite with her.

When you do this after some dying and finding out, you'll receive the true ending, in which it is made clear that while it is in a state at which it's harming everyone, the "distortion" is actually the natural way of the world, everyone needs to cope at least a little to survive, the Archangel's eugenicist campaign was the greater problem here, not the people "distorted" into representations of their suffering and coping mechanisms by his actions.

This is primarily focused on ableism and particularly the stigma around mental health.

With a trans reading, it forms a bridge so it can also just mean bigotry in general too.

Why? Well, since the 70s or something, trans people basically have to be diagnosed with a disorder to be granted legal access to transition, that's even truer for Japan, which literally puts it on paper as a disorder. And overall, transphobia and ableism go very hand in hand.

This game is now the closest I've come across to finding a game that's secretly about trans people too like The Matrix.

And this has greatly developed the brain worms 👍

#baroque game #my gaming ramblings #if you're insane enough please try the game #not the ps2 or wii versions tho they're terrible and even if you don't care about most changes you'll most likely care about-#it more than doubling the amount of floors from the psx version which already was bigger than the original and like #please don't do that to yourself the game is already not that fun don't subject yourself to those versions #spoilers i guess but really who even cares #it's not like the surprise really does anything in-game really #you'd just be very confused playing it 100% blind trust me #also there's a whole lot I didn't talk about this is just an incoherent rambling which some might decipher maybe #if you've read all this you're very based and I'm so sorry ahsbsjenzbx

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kaushibael · 2 years

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hi everyone!! so for the past 2 weeks i’ve been helping to playtest an english patch for PS1′s baroque - distorted delusions! it’s finally done so you can try it yourself :~D

baroque is a dungeon crawler where you kill god. you play the amnesiac mute koriel 12, sent on a quest to purify a mad world in the aftermath of an apocalyptic heat event, plagued by a guilt you can’t place. people have become distorted, retreating into themselves to cope with what’s become of the world, and monsters roam the nerve tower, getting stronger and stranger the lower you go. the only way to survive is to keep your feelings alive.

hold Baroque inside yourself.

https://twitter.com/Plissken___/status/1547601925880745986 <- the very talented person who hacked the english translation into the game. and as always a special thank you to nervetower on neocities for translating the game’s text in the first place :~)

linkz:

https://mega.nz/file/0NUFnCAR#Cc35QA1s3tNwaED0Lz6VBI_5w6zZlJh45uBPbxb6xno (patcher for if you have a jpn copy already)

https://cdromance.com/psx-iso/baroque-jpn/ (prepatched)

check it out!!! and you can join the discord here: https://discord.gg/n9vp4yhs5r

(also if you’re using epsxe like me, give it a minute to load. it works just fine but takes a hot second to kick into gear)

#baroque #baroque game #baroque syndrome #ps1 #psx #this was my exciting post.. hope you all think its cool hehe

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ourladyofperpetualnaptime · 2 years

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wrote a little about a game i love

#me #baroque #baroque: yuganda mousou #kazunori yonemitsu #sting #st!ng

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mnogogrannik · 2 years

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Sorry to be controversial but patho2 haruspex really wishes it was Baroque wrt the death mechanics... a big scary wood-bone structure in the theatre square has NOTHING on the nerve tower basement crushing in on itself and swallowing/trapping npcs and degrading as you die continually. has NOTHING on people giving into their delusions more and more as you cause the world to distort..

#I do enjoy what mark has to say when you die but #archangel trying to give you tips and becoming more annoyed with you as you fail in your task #because he's literally stuck immobile with nothing to do but watch your endless clones get hacked to bits.#i know they serve different functions and have different roles but like.#Also to be fair baroque is designed around you dying a whole lot unlike pathologic 2 where trying to die as little as possible is better #but like still it's so much more tangible here.

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ifuckinglovestvincent · 5 years

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Stereogum:

ACTOR TURNS 10

Ryan Leas May 3, 2019 1:59 pm

When revisiting the major albums of 2009, the year begins to look like an inflection point. A simultaneous culmination of a burgeoning scene while still only a prologue of the unforeseen dominance some of these artists would later achieve. Whether in revisiting the ’09 albums that hold up, crucial moments like the compilation Dark Was The Night, or albums that seemed to be instant classics in their time, you get a portrait of artists rising and establishing their scene, but in hindsight also glimpses of artists who had only just begun. Artists who would transcend those circumstances, go beyond being an indie luminary and become of the definitive names of their time. There are only a couple in that latter category. St. Vincent is one of them.

Ten years ago this Sunday, Annie Clark released her second album under the moniker. Actor was, in many ways, very much of its time and place, the late ‘00s stretch of baroque-pop Brooklyn indie. Clark excelled within that milieu, and the album solidified her as one of the emergent names at the tail end of last decade. And within its DNA, you can already see the blueprints for where St. Vincent would go. It’s a moment that both represents Clark’s talent crystallizing and still feels rooted in another era, prefiguring how far behind she would leave those origins.

Just under two years beforehand, St. Vincent had debuted with Marry Me. When Clark first started making a name for herself, people would mention how she cut her teeth touring with the Polyphonic Spree. They’d talk about her playing in Sufjan Stevens’ band. It is disorienting, foreign, to look back on those times and recall this is how people used to introduce St. Vincent’s backstory.

And in turn, the Annie Clark that appeared in those interviews, discussing the making of Actor, comes across as a totally different version of herself. The press, already growing fervent about this artist, dug into the album’s conception with her, and she often answered straightforwardly enough. Ten years later, she’s on the far side of an arc that begins here, removed and steely and inscrutable, trolling the press, almost directly throwing back all the things that were written about her in those Actor days, when people would go on and on about this “demure brunette guitar genius.”

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Of course, even with the initial embrace of St. Vincent’s work, few could have predicted how her star would ascend and morph — likely herself included. As would be the case with many of these late ‘00s indie artists on the cusp of some kind of mainstream penetration, Actor first came from humbler circumstances. Before teaming with producer John Congleton, Clark worked on it in her New York apartment, recording into a computer, the gentle vocals partially a byproduct of noise complaints from neighbors.

The whole nature of the album was also rooted in being at home, trying to reset after a lengthy spate of touring. Clark began revisiting old movies, favorites from earlier in her life, and writing music along to them as they unfolded on mute. The ones most often-cited in Actor’s rollout were of a particular nature — childhood fairytales with just a bit of eeriness or something sinister lurking underneath. Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs informed the orchestration and tonal shifts of opener “The Strangers,” while “Marrow” resulted from The Wizard Of Oz.

“I felt like I wanted to create something that was Technicolor, was visual as much as musical,” Clark told NPR at the time, speaking specifically about “Marrow.” “And also lyrically — this person wishing they had a spine made of iron — it’s sort of along the thematic lines of The Wizard Of Oz.”

From the unnerving placidity of Actor’s cover to its lush and bright instrumentation, you can still hear what Clark was setting out to achieve. Written to those old movies, Actor is burst after burst of primary colors. But that’s not to say it sounds, or ever sounded, like a happy or precious affair the way some of her peers’ work might have when tackling the same concept. That brightness suggested something sickly, something haunting festering just below the surface.

That, too, was by design. “I wanted to make something that had the whimsy and the sweet of something very pure, like the Disney films, but also something that was kind of bloody and gory and disgusting,” Clark told The New York Times. “I tried to combine those two things, both things that I love in equal parts, and see what happened.”

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This is what made Actor seem special in its moment. By 2009, it wasn’t uncommon for the young generation of indie artists to be experimenting with chamber-pop affectations or with layers of strings and woodwinds. And while a lot of that material seems fussy all these years removed, Clark had somewhat insulated herself from the same criticisms. Actor shares a prettiness, an immaculate and composed veneer, with what was happening at the time. But it had a darkness growing, threatening to overtake it.

It was a juxtaposition Clark had toyed with previously, on Marry Me, where poppy indie confections like “Now Now” and “Jesus Saves, I Spend” were countered with freakouts like “Your Lips Are Red” and “Paris Is Burning.” And there were still songs on Actor — perhaps the ones that don’t loom as large, that feel more 2009 when you hear them today — that don’t represent the tension Clark was baking into the album overall. As memorable as “The Party” is, it feels like refuse from a less-complicated St. Vincent, one that would soon disappear entirely. (Ironically, as a counter-argument, you could see the feint of “New York” being MASSEDUCTION’s lead single working partially because it almost hearkened back to early St. Vincent, a misleading intro to an album that represented her biggest departure yet.)

Perhaps one reason Actor garnered Clark so much positive buzz was in how it improved upon Marry Me in every way — the songwriting sharpened and focused throughout, and that conflict of dark and light woven tighter together, so that you never knew when individual songs might rupture. “Black Rainbow” begins pillowy, then pulls you inexorably into the shadows its name suggests; “The Bed” swings jarringly from lullabies to strings that sound like dying birds falling from the sky. The whole thing begins with “The Strangers,” featuring a lilting melody in which Clark keeps promising to “Paint the black hole blacker” until distorted guitars raze the seeming calm that preceded.

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The album’s success was in its cohesion, the way it kept these themes going to provide some kind of skewed, poisonous interpretation, an early example of Clark taking what surrounded her and bending and twisting it into her own funhouse vision of the world. This tendency set up a fruitful career, and here it also resulted in some songs that still rank amongst her best. “Actor Out Of Work,” the pseudo-title-track, is throbbing, caustic, and infectious — a gliding melody atop frothing distortion. Perhaps the album’s most gorgeous song is called, of all things, “Laughing With A Mouth Full Of Blood.” One of her more underrated compositions, “Just The Same But Brand New” is a striking dreamscape of semi-renewal at the album’s conclusion. “Marrow,” as clear-cut a St. Vincent classic as anything here, made the polarities the most severe, fluttering woodwinds and airy-but-foreboding verses and an off-kilter chorus of fear and guitars warped almost beyond recognition.

There was a specificity to what Clark was doing on Actor, but it also set up what would prove to be a career in contrasts. Back then, it was the tranquility vs. violence, the quiet and peaceful vs. eruptions of rage. This is what defined St. Vincent’s earlier work: She would build pristine architecture, then set fire to it. Later on, it would take different forms: earnestness and blood vs. artifice and manipulated images. In its way, Actor is the conclusion to the first era of St. Vincent, that indie singer-songwriter who used to play with Sufjan, at the same time as it’s the prologue for the journey that would unfold over the next 10 years and three albums. Anything that could loosely be described as twee or whimsical from those early records, anything that could signify Clark’s roots in a particular era of New York indie music, would soon be burned away entirely.

In that same 2009 New York Times interview, Clark explains the meaning behind the title Actor. “It’s about just the general sense of feeling like a fraud, because I think anyone who is creative or self-aware in any way, there’s like a humility to it, or I should say a humiliation to it,” she explained. “But there’s also a self-delusion … The self-delusion is the thing that makes you go, ‘Oh you know what, all the music I’ve ever loved in the world, I want to be a part of that — hey, listen to what I have to say, it’s really important, it’s going to matter.’”

On some level, Clark was talking about the very endeavor and anxiety of creation; that fraudulence, the fake it until you make it, proving to people you deserve to be there. But on some other level, you know her ideas were good. That they were better than a lot of other people’s. In that sense, her follow-up quote is more prescient: “You can’t apologize your way into people’s hearts. You have to go full force.” Soon after Actor, that fear of self-delusion, that trepidation, seemed to evaporate from the work of St. Vincent. The name and concept behind her sophomore album became less an existential musing and more of a key into her following chapters.

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This idea of St. Vincent we saw on Marry Me and Actor is almost quaint, primitive despite its intricacy, in comparison to what came next: the pharmaceutical fog and synthetics of 2011’s Strange Mercy, leaning directly into a retro-futuristic space age queen aesthetic in the coronation of 2014’s self-titled, the dense entanglement of heartache and lust and vivid Pop Art on 2017’s MASSEDUCTION. As the years went on, Clark continued to modulate her identity and push her instrument into its outer limits. She had gone as far as she could within the original context of her career and sound, and instead took a thesis, not sonic cues, from Actor forward. There, it was the gore and whimsy against one another. Afterward, it was constant transformation, the entire project of St. Vincent becoming an exercise in different tensions musically and thematically, the entire persona of St. Vincent becoming a war in which what was performance and what was reality could often be questioned.

Consider the Annie Clark we now know. The one who had a high-profile relationship with Cara Delevingne. The one who worked with David Byrne, and the one who worked with Jack Antonoff. The one who has perfected a distance from the usual machinery of indie star interviews, trying to provoke reactions out of those who speak with her or producing videos mocking the whole enterprise. The one who performs with Dua Lipa at the Grammys. When was the last time you thought about the Polyphonic Spree at all, let alone could imagine it being listed as some kind of pivotal resume builder in Annie Clark’s career? That was still the case when Actor came out 10 years ago. Now, she’s eclipsed almost everything about where she came from. She has become an art-rock star capable of sliding between worlds, dancing towards pop to then turn and produce a Sleater-Kinney album.

Without the rest of the story, Actor might feel like more of a relic of last decade; you could imagine an alternate history in which Annie Clark continued on in a similar vein and was a respected if not visionary force. But after crafting the perfect realization of one version of herself on her sophomore album, she imploded it on her third. The forces fighting within Actor, those hints of stranger shapes and pathways, would drive her career forward. After the first implosion, there was another, and then another — each time, destruction of the old St. Vincent yielding some vibrant new creation. Actor lives on as an innovative indie album from an era littered with them, a lingering document of who St. Vincent was and a harbinger of who she would be. She had already changed here, and would do it again and again. This was just the beginning of Annie Clark proving herself the David Bowie for a new era of rock music, able to shed skin after skin, sliding into new ones repeatedly and with ease. It was the beginning of her remaking herself constantly — just like an actor.

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#st vincent #annie clark #actor #currently listening to album from beginning to end #with actual decent headphones (that haley got me for xmas) and holy fucking shit #i guess i just need to relisten to all of her records since apparently i have been hearing like 85% of the sounds #this whole time #its like listening to the record for the first time #FRISSON ON EVERY SONG #fuckin genius #🙏#ugh

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teshknowledgenotes · 3 years

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THE LESSONS OF HISTORY – WILL & ARIEL DURANT NOTES

THE LESSONS OF HISTORY – WILL & ARIEL DURANT NOTES WHY? Ray Dalio always recommends this book and I do enjoy reading about History a lot. NOTES 1) Hesitations To begin with, do we really know what the past was, what actually happened, or is history “a fable” not quite “agreed upon”? Our knowledge of any past event is always incomplete, probably inaccurate, beclouded by ambivalent evidence and biased historians, and distorted by our own patriotic or religious partisanship. “Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice” Even the historian who thinks to rise above partiality for his country, race, creed or class betrays his secret predilection in his choice of materials, and in the nuances of his adjectives. “The historian always oversimplifies and hastily selects a manageable minority of facts and faces out of a crowd of souls and events whose multitudinous complexity he can never quite embrace or comprehend.” Again, our conclusion from the past to the future are made more hazardous than ever by the acceleration of change.

Every year sometimes, in war, every month some new invention, method, or situation compels a fresh adjustment of behaviour and ideas. Furthermore, an element of chance, perhaps of freedom, seems to enter into the conduct of metals and men. We are no longer confident that atoms, much less organisms, will respond in the future as we think they have responded in the past.

Obviously historiography cannot be a science. It can only be an industry, an art, and a philosophy, an industry by ferreting out the facts, an art by establishing a meaningful order in the chaos of materials, a philosophy by seeking perspective and enlightenment. The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding. In philosophy we try to see the part in the light of the whole, in “the philosophy of history” we try to see this moment in the light of the past. We know that in both cases this is a counsel of perfection, total perspective is an optical illusion. We do not know the whole of man’s history, there were probably many civilizations before the Sumerian or the Egyptian, we have just begun to dig! We must operate with partial knowledge and be provisionally content with probabilities in history, as in science and politics, relativity rules, and all formulas should be suspect. History smiles at all attempts to force its flow into theoretical patters or logical grooves, it plays havoc with our generalizations, breaks all our rules, history is baroque. Perhaps within these limits we can learn enough from history to bear reality patiently, and to respect one another’s delusions.

Since man is a moment in astronomic time, a transient guest of the earth, a spore of his species, a scion of his race, a composite of body, character, and mind, a member of a family and a community, a believer or doubter of a faith, a unit in an economy, perhaps a citizen in a state or a soldier in an army, we may ask under the corresponding heads – astronomy, geology, geography, biology, ethnology, psychology, morality, religion, economics, politics, and war. What history has to say about the nature, conduct and prospects of man. It is a precarious enterprise, and only a fool would try to compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions. We proceed.

2) History & The Earth Geography is the matrix of history, its nourishing mother and disciplining home. Its rivers, lakes, oases, and oceans draw settlers to their shores, for water is the life of organisms and towns, and offers inexpensive roads for transport and trade. Egypt was “the gift of the Nile”, and Mesopotamia built successive civilizations “between the rivers” and along their effluent canals. India was the daughter of the Indus, the Brahmaputra and the Ganges, China owed it’s life and sorrows to the great rivers that (like ourselves) often wandered from their proper beds and fertilized the neighbourhood with their overflow. Italy adorned the valleys of the Tiber, the Arno, and the Po. Austria grew along the Danube, Germany along the Elbe and the Rhine.

The development of the airplane will again alter the map of civilization. Trade routes will follow less and less the rivers and seas, men and goods will be flown more and more directly to their goal. Countries like England & France will lose the commercial advantage of abundant coast lines conveniently indented, countries like Russia, China, and Brazil which were hampered by the excess of their land mass over their coasts, will cancel part of that handicap by taking to the air. Coastal cities will derive less of their wealth from the clumsy business of transferring goods from ship to train or from train to ship. When sea power finally gives place to air power in transport and war, we shall have seen one of the basic revolutions in history.

The influence of geographic factors diminishes as technology grows. The character and contour of a terrain may offer opportunities for agriculture, mining, or trade but only the imagination and initiative of leaders, and the hardy industry of followers, can transform the possibilities into fact, and only a similar combination can make a culture take form over a thousand natural obstacles. Man, not the earth, makes civilization.

3) Biology & History History is a fragment of biology: the life of man is a portion of the vicissitudes of organisms on land and sea. Sometimes, wandering alone in the woods on a summer day, we hear or see the movement of a hundred species of flying, leaping, creeping, crawling, burrowing things. The startled animals scurry away at our coming, the birds scatter, the fish disperse in the brook. Suddenly we perceive to what a perilous minority we belong on this impartial planet, and for a moment we feel, as these varied denizens clearly do, that we are passing interlopers in their natural habitat. Then all the chronicles and achievements of man fall humbly into the history and perspective of polymorphous life, all our economic competition, our strife for mates, our hunger and love and grief and war, are akin the the seeking, mating, striving and suffering that hide under these fallen trees or leaves, or in the waters, or on the boughs.

Therefore the laws of biology are the fundamental lessons of history. We are subject to the processes and trials of evolution, to the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest to survive. If some of us seem to escape the strife or the trials it is because our group protects us, but that group itself must meet the tests of survival.

So the first biological lesson of history is that life is competition. Competition is not only the life of trade, it is the trade of life, peaceful when food abounds, violent when the mouths outrun the food. Animals eat on another without qualm, civilized men consume one another by due process of law. Co-operation is real, and increases with social development, but mostly because it is a tool and form of competition, we co-operate in our group, our family, our community, club, church, party, “race”, or nation, in order to strengthen our group in its competition with other groups. Competing groups have the qualities of competing individuals, acquisitiveness, pugnacity, partisanship, pride. Our states being ourselves multiplied, are what we are, they write our natures in bolder type, and do our good and evil on an elephantine scale. We are acquisitive, greedy, and pugnacious because our blood remembers millenniums through which our forebears had to chase and fight and kill in order to survive, and had to eat to their gastric capacity for fear they should not soon capture another feast. War is a nation’s way of eating. It promotes co-operation because it is the ultimate form of competition. Until our states become members of a large and effectively protective group they will continue to act like individuals and families in the hunting stage.

The second biological lesson of history is that life is selection. In the competition for food or mates or power some organisms succeed and some fail. In the struggle for existence some individuals are better equipped than others to meet the tests of survival.

The third biological lesson of history is that life must breed. Nature has no use for organisms, variations, or groups that cannot reproduce abundantly. She has a passion for quantity as prerequisite to the selection of quality, she likes large litters, and relishes the struggle that picks the surviving few, doubtless she looks on approvingly at the upstream race of a thousand sperms to fertilize on ovum. She is more interested in the species than in the individual, and makes little difference between civilization and barbarism. She does not care that a high birth rate has usually accompanied a culturally low civilization, and a low birth rate of civilization culturally high and Natures sees to it that a nation with a low birth rate shall be periodically chastened by some more virile and fertile group. Gaul survived against the Germans through the help of Roman legions in Caesar’s days, and through the help of British and American legions in our time. When Rome fell the Franks rushed in from Germany and made Gaul France, if England and America should fall, France, whose population remained almost stationary through the nineteenth century, might again be overrun.

There is a limit to the fertility of the soil, every advance in agricultural technology is sooner or later cancelled by the excess of births over deaths, and meanwhile medicine, sanitation, and charity nullify selection y keeping the unfit alive to multiply their like. To which hope replies: the advances of industry, urbanization, education, and standards of living, in countries that now endanger the world by their fertility, will probably have the same effect there , in reducing the birth rate, as they have had in Europe and North America. Until that equilibrium of production and reproduction comes it will be a counsel of humanity to disseminate the knowledge and means of contraception. Ideally parentage should be a privilege of health, not a by-product of sexual agitation.

In the United States the lower birth rate of the Anglo-Saxons has lessened their economic and political power, and the higher birth rate of Roman Catholic families suggests that by the year 2000 the Roman Catholic Church will be the dominant force in national as well as in municipal or state governments.

4) Race & History

5) Character & History

Evolution in man during recorded time has been social rather than biological, it has proceeded not by heritable variations in the species but mostly by economic, political, intellectual and moral innovation transmitted to individuals and generations by imitation, custom or education. Custom and tradition within a group correspond to type and heredity in the species and to instincts in the individual, they are ready adjustments to typical and frequently repeated situations. New situations however do arise, requiring novel, unstereotyped responses, hence development in the higher organisms, requires a capacity for experiment and innovation, the social correlates of variation and mutation. Social evolution is an interplay of custom with organization.

Intellect is a vital force in history, but it can also be a dissolvent and destructive power. Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history. A youth boiling with hormones will wonder why he should not give full freedom to his sexual desires, and if he is unchecked by custom, morals, or laws, he may ruin his life before he matures sufficiently to understand that sex is a river of fire that must be banked and cooled by a hundred restraints if it is not to consume in chaos both the individual and the group.

So the conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it, perhaps as much more valuable as roots are more vital than grafts. It is good that new ideas should be heard, for the sake of the few that can be used, but it is also good that new ideas should be compelled to go though the mill of objection, opposition, and contumely, this is the trial heat which innovations must survive before being allowed to enter the human race. It is good that the old should resist the young, and that the young should prod the old, out of this tension, as out of the strife of the sexes and the classes, comes a creative tensile strength, a stimulated development, a secret and basic unity and movement of the whole.

6) Morals & History

Morals are the rules by which a society exhorts (as laws are the rules by which it seeks to compel) its members and associations to behaviour consistent with its order, security and growth.

Moral codes differ because they adjust themselves to historical and environmental conditions. If we divide economic history in to three stages – hunting, agriculture, industry – we may expect that the moral code of one stage will be changed in the next. In the hunting stage a man had to be ready to chase and fight and kill. When he had caught his prey he ate to the cubic capacity of his stomach, being uncertain when he might eat again, insecurity is the mother of greed, as cruelty is the memory, if only in the blood, of a time when the test of survival (as now between states) was the ability to kill. Presumably the death rate in men so often risking their lives in the hunt, was higher than in women, some men had to take several women, and every man was expected to help women to frequent pregnancy. Pugnacity, brutality, greed, and sexual readiness were once a virtue, i.e. A quality making for the survival of the individual, the family, or the group. Man’s sins may be the relics of his rise rather than the stigmata of his fall.

History does not tell us just when men passed from hunting to agriculture, perhaps in the Neolithic Age, and through the discovery that grain could be sown to add to the spontaneous growth of wild wheat. We may reasonably assume that the new regime demanded new virtues, and changed some old virtues into vices. Industriousness became more vital than bravery, regularity and thrift more profitable than violence, peace more victorious than war. Children were economic assets, birth control was made immoral. On the farm the family was the unit of production under the discipline of the father and the seasons, and paternal authority had a firm economic base. Each normal son matured soon in mind and self-support, at fifteen he understood the physical tasks of life as well as he would understand them at forty, all that he needed was land, a plow, and a willing arm. So he married early, almost as soon as nature wished, he did not fret long under the restraints placed upon premarital relations by the new order of permanent settlements and homes. As for young women, chastity was indispensable, for its loss might bring unprotected motherhood. Monogamy was demanded by the approximate numerical equality of the sexes. For fifteen hundred years this agricultural moral code of continence, early marriage, divorceless monogamy, and the multiple maternity maintained itself in Christian Europe and it’s white colonies. It was a stern code, which produced some of the strongest characters in history.

Gradually then rapidly and ever more widely, the Industrial Revolution changed the economic form and moral superstructure of European and American life. Men, women, and children left home and family, authority and unity, to work as individuals, individually paid, in factories built to house no men but machines. Every decade the machines multiplied and became more complex, economic maturity (the capacity to support a family) came later, children no longer were economic assets, marriage was delayed, premarital continence became more difficult to maintain. The city offered every discouragement to marriage, but it provided every stimulus and facility for sex. Women were “emancipated” i.e, industrialized, and contraceptives enabled them to separate intercourse from pregnancy. The authority of father and mother lost its economic base through the growing individualism of industry. The rebellious youth was no longer constrained by the surveillance of the village, he could hid his sins in the protective anonymity of the city crowd. The progress of science raised the authority of the test tube over that of the crosier, the mechanization of economic production suggests mechanistic materialistic philosophies, education spread religious doubts, morality lost more and more of its supernatural supports. The old agricultural moral code began to die.

Perhaps discipline will be restored in our civilization through the military training required by the challenges of war. The freedom of the part varies with the security of the whole, individualism will diminish in America and England as geographical protection ceases. Sexual license may cure itself through its own excess, our unmoored children may live to see order and modesty become fashionable, clothing will be more stimulating then nudity. Meanwhile much of our moral freedom is good, it is pleasant to be relieved of theological terrors, to enjoy without qualm the pleasures that harm neither others nor ourselves, and to feel the tang of the open air upon our liberated flesh.

7) Religion & History

Even the skeptical historian develops a humble respect for religion, since he sees it functioning, and seemingly indispensable, in every land and age. To the unhappy, the suffering, the bereaved, the old, it has brought supernatural comforts valued by millions of souls as more precious than any natural aid. It has helped parents and teachers to discipline the young. It has conferred meaning and dignity upon the lowliest existence, and through its sacraments has made for stability by transforming human covenants into solemn relationships with God. It has kept the poor (said Napoleon) from murdering the rich.. For since the natural inequality of men dooms many of us to poverty or defeat, some supernatural hope may be the sole alternative to despair. Destroy that hope and class was intensified. Heaven and utopia are buckets in a well, when one goes down the other goes up, when religion declines Communism grows.

Religion does not seem at first to have had any connection with morals. Apparently (for we are merely guessing, or echoing Petronius, who echoed Lucretius) “it was fear that first made the gods” fear of hidden forces in the earth, rivers, oceans, trees, wins, and sky. Religion became the propitiatory worship of these forces through offerings, sacrifice, incantation, and prayer. Only when priests used these fears and rituals to support morality and law did religion become a force vital and rival to the state. It told the people that the local code of morals and laws had been dictated by the gods.

Some recusants have doubted that religion ever promoted morality, since immorality has flourished even in ages of religious domination. Certainly sensuality, drunkenness, coarseness, greed, dishonesty, robbery, and violence existed in the Middle Ages, but probably the moral disorder born of half a millennium of barbarian invasion, war, economic devastation, and political disorganization would have been much worse without the moderating effect of the Christian ethic, priestly exhortations, saintly examples, and a calming, unifying ritual. The Roman Catholic Church laboured to reduce slavery, family feuds, and national strife, to extend the intervals of truce and peace, and to replace trial by combat or ordeal with the judgments of established courts. It softened the penalties exacted by Roman or barbarian law, and vastly expanded the scope and organization of charity.

Though the Church served the state, it claimed to stand above all states, as morality should stand above power. It taught en that patriotism unchecked by a higher loyalty can be a tool of greed and crime. Over all the competing governments of Christendom it promulgated one moral law. Claiming divine origin and spiritual hegemony, the Church offered itself as an international court to which all rulers were to be morally responsible. The Emperor Henry IV recognized this claim by submitting to Pope Gregory VII at Canossa and century later Innocent III raised the authority and prestige of the papacy to a height where it seemed that Gregory’s ideal of a moral superstate had come to fulfillment.

The majestic dream broke under the attacks of nationalism, skepticism and human frailty. The Church was manned with men, who often proved biased, venal or extortionate. France grew in welath and power, and made the papacy her political tool. Kings became strong enough to compel a pope to dissolve the Jesut order which had so devotedly supported the popes. The Church stooped to fraud, as with pious legends, bogus relics, and dubious miracles.

8) Economics & History

History according to Karl Marx is economics in action the contest, among individuals, groups, classes, and states, for food, fuel, materials, and economic power. Political forms, religious insitutions, cultural creations, are all rooted in economic power. Political forms, religious institutions, cultural creations, are all rooted in economic realities. So the Industrial Revolution brought with it democracy, feminism, birth control, socialism, the decline of religion, the loosening of morals, the liberation of literature from dependence upon aristocratic patronage, the replacement of romanticism by realism in fiction and the economic interpretation of history. The outstanding personalities in these movements were effects, not causes. Agamemnon, Achilles and Hector would never have been heard of had not the Greeks sought commercial control of the Dardanelles, economic ambition and the face of Helen "fairer than the evening air clad in the beauty of a thousand stars" launched a thousand ships in Ilium, those subtle Greeks knew how to cover naked economic truth with the fig leaf of a phrase.

At the other end of the scale history reports that "the men who can manage money manage all" So the bankers watching the trends in agriculture, industry, and trade, inviting and directing the flow of capital, putting our money doubly and trebly to work, controlling loans and interest and enterprise, running great risks to make great gains, rise to the top of the economic pyramid. From the Medici of Florence and the Fuggers of Augsburg to the Rothschilds of Paris and London and the Morgans of New York, bankers have sat in the councils of governments, financing wars and popes, and occasionally sparking a revolution. Perhaps is is one secret of their power that, having studied the fluctuations of prices, they know that history is inflationary, and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard.

The concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or paceable partial redistribution. In the view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation.

9) Socialism & History

The struggle of socialism against capitalism is part of the historic ryhthm in the concentration and dispersion of wealth. The capitalist, of couse, has fulfilled a creative function in history, he has gathered the savings of the people into productive captial by the promise of dividends or interest, he has financed the mechnization of industry and agriculture, and the reationalization of distribution and the result has been such a flow of goods from producer to consumer as history has never seen before. He has put the liberal gospel of liberty to his use by arguing that business men left relatively free from transportation tolls and legislative regulation can give the public a greater aubndance of food, homes, comfort and leisure that has ever come from industries managed by politicians, manned by governmental employees, and supposedly immune to the laws of supply and demand. In free enterprise the spur of competition and the zeal and the zest of owernship arouse the productiveness and inventiveness of men, nearly every economic ability sooner or later finds its niche and reward in the shuffle of talents and the natural selection of skills, and a basic democracy rules the process insofar as most of the articles to be produced and the services to be rendered are determined by public demand rather than by governmental decree. Meanwhile compeition compels the capitalist to exhaustive labor, and his products to ever rising excellence.

In Egypt under the Ptolemies the state owned the soil and managed agriculture: the peasent was told what land to till, what crops to grow, his harvest was measured and registered by government scribes, was threshed on royal threshing floors, and was conveyed by a living chain of fellaheen into the granaries of the king. The government owned the mines and appropriated the ore. It nationalized the production and sale of oil, salt, papyrus, and textiles. All commerce was controlled and regulated by the state, most retail trade was in the hands of state agents selling state produced goods. Banking was a government monopoly, but its operation might be delegated to private firms. Taxes were laid upon every person, industry, process, product, sale, and legal document. To keep track of taxable transactions and income, the government maintained a swarm of scribes and a complex system of personal and property registration. The revenue of this system made the Ptolemaic the richest state of the time. Great engineering enterprises were completed, agriculture was improved, and a large proportion of the profits went to developer and adorn the country to finance its cultural life.

China has had several attempts at state socialism. Szuma Ch'ien informs us that to prevent private individuals from "reserving to their sole use the riches of the mountains and the sea in order to gain a fortune, and from putting th lower classes into subjection to themselves." The Emporeror Wu Ti nationalized the resources of the soil, extended governmental direction over transport and trade, laid a tax upon incomes, and established public works, including canals that ound the rivers together and irrigated the fields. The state accumulated stockpiles of goods, sole these when prices were rising, bought more when prices were falling thus says Szuma Ch'ien, "the rich merchants and large shopkeepers would be prevented from making big profits, and prices would be regulated in the Empire." For a time we are told China prospered as never before. A combination of "acts of God" with human deviltry put an end to the experiement after the death of the Emperor. Floods alternated with droughts, created tragic shortages, and raised prices beyond control. Businessmen protested that taxes were making them support the lazy and the incompetent. Harrassed by the high cost of living, the poor joined the rich in clamoring for a return to the old ways, and some proposed that the inventor of the new system to be boiled alive. The reforms were one by one rescinded and were almost forgotten when they were revived by a Chinese philosopher king.

Wang Mang was an accomplished scholar a patro of literature, a millionaire who scattered his riches among his friends and the poor. Having seized the throne, he surrounded himself with men trained in letters, science and philosophy. He nationalized the land, divided it into equal tracts among the peasents, and put an end to slavery. Like Wu Ti, he tried to control prices by the accumulation or release of stockpiles. He made loans at low interest to private enterprise. The groups whose profits had been clipped by his legislation unite to plot his fall, they were helped by drought and flood and foreign invasion. The rich Liu family put itself at the head of a general rebellion, slew Wang Mang and repealed his legislation. Everything was as before.

A thousand years later Wang An-shih as premier undertook a pervasive governmental domination of the Chinese economy, "The state should take the entire management of commerce, industry, and agriculture into its own hands, with a view to succoring the working classes and preventing them from being ground into the dust by the rich" he said. He rescued the peasents from the money lenders by loans at low interest. He encouraged new settlers by advancing them seed and other aid, to be repaid out of hte later yield of their land. He organized great engineering works to control floods and check unemployment. Boards were appointed in every district to regulate wages and prices. Commerce was nationalized. Pensions were provided for the aged, the unemployed and the poor. Education and the examination system (by which admission to governmental office was determined) were reformed. "Pupils three away their textbooks of rhetoric and began to study primers of history, geography and political economy" says a Chinese Historian.

What undermined the experiement? First high taxes, laid upon all to finance a swelling band of governmental employees. Second, conscription of a male in every family to man the armies made necessary by barbarian invasions. Third corruption in the bureaucracy, China like other nations, was faced with a choice between private plunder and public graft. Conservatives led by Wang An-shih's brother argued that human corruptability and incompetence make governmental control of industry impractable, and that the best economy is a liaissez-faire system that relies on the natural impulses of men. The rich, stung by the high taxation of their fortunes and the monopoly of commerce by the government, poured out their resources in a campaign to discredit the new system, to obstruct its enforcement, and bring it to an end. This movement, well organized exerted constant pressure upon the Emperor. When another period of drought and flood was capped by the appearance of a terrifying comet, the Son of Heaven dismissed Wang An-shih, revoked his decrees and called the opposition to power.

10) Government & History 11) History & War 12) Growth & Decay 13) Is Progress Real?

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