a south pointe sign of excremental culture

FROM A SIGN OF MADNESS IN PROGRESS

A SOUTH POINTE SIGN OF EXCREMENTAL CULTUREBy David Arthur Walters

I beg your pardon, ladies and gentlemen, for this note on our excremental culture is long overdue.

Few people read signs anymore except to disobey them unless they are punished for ignoring their warnings. For example, dogs run loose in South Pointe Park while their excrement piles up around the signs that warn dog owners that the dog leash and dog waste ordinances are strictly enforced. The Code Compliance officer parks his car in the middle of the violations, goofs off on his cell phone for an half-hour, then files a Dog Patrol Report, swearing that he saw 17 dogs on leashes and no violations. For reasons unknown, since he saw no violations, he also reported that he indoctrinated several visitors on the dog ordinances. Perhaps he felt it would have been proper to preach since it was Sunday.

His featherbedding had gone unnoticed by administrators busy feathering their beds. Little does he know that his misprision and mendacity is a sign that Spengler was right about the decline of

of 5


our so-called civilization, and that doom is impending in South Florida as hurricane season approaches to culminate in an extra-extra high water event.

This Sunday, after reading a chapter from Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, as is my custom when visiting South Pointe Park, I opined that a vigilant busybody association must be formed to reform our excremental culture.

The man without qualities, named Ulrich, did not hesitate to recommend that people organize associations based on their common interests. For example, there was the stamp collector who believed collecting stamps fostered friendship between nations and satisfied the aesthetic sense as well as desire for owning property of substantial commercial value. And there was a man who was inordinately fond of shorthand. He had already set himself up the great patriotic Ohl Shorthand System Association, which he wanted Ulrich to bring to the attention of Secretary Leinsdorf as a device far better than the established shorthand system. The Ohl System would surely save time and mental effort, and rid writing of asinine longhand, so-called because of its long-eared script.

However, while engaged in conversation with a government official named Count Leinsdorf, Ulrich protested that the tendency for people to form associations had become more than just busybodyness in the highly organized state, where, “With all its law and order, everyone still belongs to some band of highwaymen…”

But Count Leinsdorf confessed a weakness for associations, which were essential to the progress of the state, or at least to the politicians responsible for it. A statesman, he said, must attend to its parties, institutions, and so on, that is, to its associations, in order to set a nation on its feet so it could walk of its own accord. Therefore, not only democrats but aristocrats must be as nice as they can be to people who come to them for help with their causes whatever those causes might be.

“You see,” he told Ulrich, “with these things you can never tell whether they are nonsense or not. But the point is, my dear fellow, something important regularly results from the sheer fact that one attaches importance to something…. We must be up-to-date, don’t we? And when a great many people are in favor of something, one can be sure that something will come of it.”

As for political associations, the Count knew that struggles for the realization of limited ideologies would do a great deal of damage to society-at-large, for an ideology represents the

of 5


tooth and claw of a political beast striving to be king at best. And the Count obviously had in mind Kant’s observation, that the only unconditional good or good without qualification is a good will, regardless of its hypothetical consequences. To have a good will is the indispensable condition to happiness, and, for that will to be good for all, one should act according to a universal law or categorical imperative; to wit: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." At issue is that, if one does unto others as one would have done to himself, he must sacrifice goods that he wants for himself.

“You must bear in mind that no good has ever yet come of ideological politics. What we must go in for is practical politics…. Practical politics means not doing the very thing one would like to do. On the other hand, one can win people over by granting some of their minor wishes…. Everybody, of course, would like to make all the beautiful ideas come true. That goes without saying. And so one must not do the very thing one would like to do! Kant himself said so.”

Musil aptly observed, elsewhere, that “it is only criminals who presume to damage other people nowadays without the aid of philosophy."

This discourse against idealism led me to Ortega y Gasset’s ‘The Theme of Our Times,’ in What Is Philosophy, a copy of which I had on my tablet. “The ancient idealist,” he said, “believed that ideals were the only reality. The facts of experience long with the spread of modern scientific education eventually destroyed faith in immutable ideals. People were stripped of mass delusions and left alone with themselves, alienated, much to their chagrin.”

“Idealism has been a rough and tenacious march against the grain of life, an insistent pedagogue trying to make it quite clear to us that to live spontaneously was to suffer an error, an optical illusion…. Even the miser could not enjoy the pleasure of continuing to be a miser if he thought that the piece of gold was only the image of a piece of gold, that is, a counterfeit coin….

“Once we are convinced that the beloved woman is not what we think her to be, but only an image that we ourselves generously made, the catastrophe of disillusion overcomes us.”

So what is the theme of our times? “The Modern Age is melancholic, and the whole of it is more or less romantic.” Romantics turned away from the ancient, presumably objective ideals. They became self-absorbed, self-tormented, concerned with the “I”, one’s innermost being, until it became an I-god or god unto itself. But that subjective “I” must have an outer or objective world to be and act in.

Emil Ludwig in The Germans – Double History of a Nation (1941) described German Romanticism: “Here we see, not mere individualism, but utter anarchy, and the more one senses its magic spell, the more dangerous does the influence of such hearts upon the life of the State appear. Indeed, here again are the two worlds pluck and imagination into which the German character generally splits, either oppressing with cold brutality the people at home and as many neighbors as possible to boot, or turning away from this life to dwell in heaven but that too must be a private heaven, furnished solely in accordance with its dreams. True, the German Romanticists felt compassion for their nation; but since they failed to find it acceptable in their lifetime, they fled into the ‘magic moonlit night’ of the German Middle Ages, preparing commentaries on the Nibelungenlied, collecting the loveliest German fairy tales, rediscovering Shakespeare in Germany, for the sake of his romance, in a translation such as no other nation can

of 5


boast, or reveling in lyric song, to which Novalis and Eichendorff made immortal contributions. While changing, under pressure of enemy conquest, from citizens of the world into nationalist thinkers, many of them turned to Catholicism, as though to an international board of underwriters. Subtle and analytical of mind, they all sought to escape the trials and tribulations of all-too-conscious man by attaining what they called conscious-subconscious.”

But not to worry: “We are no longer fortunately, under the reign of romanticism, which led on exaggeration and impropriety,” pronounces Ortega y Gasset “You see, modern man, no matter how romantic he might be in terms of his thoughts and feelings about himself, would manipulate his environment scientifically for his own good. He is a practical, or pragmatic. He experiments methodically, and his practice is based on experience.”

Still, whom are we in love with in this allegedly neoteric age if not ourselves? When we say we love someone or something, whom do we love most of all? Would it be the category-of-one, the individual, our essentially infantile, narcissistic selves?

Returning to The Man Without Qualities, I was delighted to read about the man who had taken to examining signs while on the tram or walking the streets, and counting the number of strokes in the block letters of signs.

The letter A had three strokes, for example, and M had four. After dividing total strokes by total letters, he discovered that the average number of strokes was two and a half. Of course there were variations from the average. He found that divisibility by three was a “wonderful and rare exception” so that the rest of the signs imparted a feeling of disharmony except for the group with letters made up of four strokes, such a M, E, and W, and those four-stroked signs caused a “quite particular happiness” in the observer.

of 5


Therefore he recommended that the Ministry of Health be induced to generally suppress the number of one-stroke letters like O, S, I and G, to raise the degree of happiness in the sign-reading population. Statistics had already revealed profound relations among things long before they were explained, he offered. His theory would be proved true by anyone who counted the letters as he did, and that would improve their ability at mental arithmetic and ameliorate the damage done by excessive bookish education.

# #

of 5

a south pointe sign of excremental culture

Documents