Fjordman: Music and the Rise and Decline of Western Civilization

Fjordman’s latest essay has been published at the Brussels Journal. Some excerpts are below:

This text overlaps with a few of my earlier essays like Why Muslims Like Hitler, but Not Mozart. I have had some interesting discussions with Ohmyrus, the essayist who runs the Democracy Reform blog. He is a Chinese man who appreciates aspects of Western civilization that many Westerners have forgotten or rejected. He is not unique in this regard. One of the best books about European culture is Defending the West by the former Muslim Ibn Warraq, who was born in the Indian subcontinent. As a native European it is strange to notice how some (non-Muslim) Asians apparently appreciate my civilization more than intellectuals in my own country do. The Iranian-born ex-Muslim Ali Sina denounces Western Multiculturalism in his book Understanding Muhammad, which I have reviewed online:

“If any culture needs to be preserved, it is the Western, Helleno-Christian culture. It is this culture that is facing extinction….We owe our freedom and modern civilization to Western culture. It is this culture that is now under attack and needs protection.”

Ohmyrus believes, like myself, that the West is in decline, not just in relative terms as a percentage of the global economy or population but in real terms.

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I am increasingly supporting the conclusion that the political and economic elites throughout the Western world are cooperating on dismantling their nation states in favor of a new, global world order. Swamping their countries with immigration is one step in this planned “creative destruction.” Author Bat Ye’or in her well-researched book Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis from 2005 documents how the European Union is actively collaborating with the Arabic-Islamic world on promoting Muslim immigration and culture in Europe. I myself wrote a book entitled Defeating Eurabia while going through her claims, and found them to be sound. A flaw frequently pointed out in the democratic system is that the “common man” is on average not smart enough to run a country, but when it comes to promoting Multiculturalism and mass immigration of alien and often hostile peoples it is in every single Western country the political, economic and academic elites who are pushing for this. Resistance to these suicidal policies comes from the common man. Another problem is that in the post-Enlightenment ideological environment, especially after Marxism, there is a tendency among some educated elites to view the common man as a guinea pig for their social experiments.

The West is a non-traditionalist civilization. We have unquestionably made great advances that no other civilization has done before us, but maybe the price we pay for this is that we also make mistakes that nobody has done before us. Organized science is a modern Western invention. Organized national suicide, too, is a modern Western invention. Our university system once represented a great comparative advantage for Europe vis-à-vis other civilizations. Today that same system is undermining the very civilization that gave birth to it.

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According to Spengler, “China has embraced the least Chinese, and the most explicitly Western, of all art forms. Even the best Chinese musicians still depend on Western mentors. [Pianist] Lang Lang may be a star, but in some respects he remains an apprentice in the pantheon of Western musicians. The Chinese, in some ways the most arrogant of peoples, can elicit a deadly kind of humility in matters of learning. Their eclecticism befits an empire that is determined to succeed, as opposed to a mere nation that needs to console itself by sticking to its supposed cultural roots. Great empires transcend national culture and naturalize the culture they require.” Albert Einstein received a thorough philosophical education by studying Kant, Schopenhauer, Hume and Spinoza in addition to mathematics and the physical theories of Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday and James Maxwell. This taught him how to think abstractly about space and time. He was also an enthusiastic amateur musician and would play his violin as a way of thinking through a difficult physics problem. His mother was an accomplished pianist and pushed for him to take violin lessons. At first he chafed at the mechanical discipline of the instruction, but after being exposed to Bach and to Mozart’s sonatas, music became magical to him. Author Walter Isaacson writes in his biography Einstein: His Life and Universe:

“‘Mozart’s music is so pure and beautiful that I see it as a reflection of the inner beauty of the universe itself,’ he later told a friend. ‘Of course,’ he added in a remark that reflected his view of math and physics as well as of Mozart, ‘like all great beauty, his music was pure simplicity.’ Music was no mere diversion. On the contrary, it helped him think. ‘Whenever he felt that he had come to the end of the road or faced a difficult challenge in his work,’ said his son Hans Albert, ‘he would take refuge in music and that would solve all his difficulties.’ The violin thus proved useful during the years he lived alone in Berlin, wrestling with general relativity. ‘He would often play his violin in his kitchen late at night, improvising melodies while he pondered complicated problems,’ a friend recalled. ‘Then, suddenly, in the middle of playing, he would announce excitedly, ‘I’ve got it!’ As if by inspiration, the answer to the problem would have come to him in the midst of music.’ His appreciation for music, and especially for Mozart, may have reflected his feel for the harmony of the universe.”

Einstein was not as fond of Ludwig van Beethoven as he was of Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Franz Schubert. According to Walter Isaacson, “What Einstein appreciated in Mozart and Bach was the clear architectural structure that made their music seem ‘deterministic’ and, like his own favorite scientific theories, plucked from the universe rather than composed. ‘Beethoven created his music,’ Einstein once said, but ‘Mozart’s music is so pure it seems to have been ever-present in the universe.’ He contrasted Beethoven with Bach: ‘I feel uncomfortable listening to Beethoven. I think he is too personal, almost naked. Give me Bach, rather, and then more Bach.’ He also admired Schubert for his ‘superlative ability to express emotion.’ But in a questionnaire he once filled out, he was critical about other composers in ways that reflect some of his scientific sentiments: Handel had ‘a certain shallowness’; Mendelssohn displayed ‘considerable talent but an indefinable lack of depth that often leads to banality’; Wagner had a ‘lack of architectural structure I see as decadence’; and Strauss was ‘gifted but without inner truth.’“

Read the rest at the Brussels Journal.