Saturday, December 29, 2012

Entartung im Zauberberg

In Thomas Mann’s great novel, we see a microcosm of decaying European culture  on the eve of the Great War, depicted in an elite mountain-top sanatorium.   There a particular self-generating and self-coddling culture  grows as though in a petri dish.

And now the virus has descended zum Flachland:

Quand l'université diplôme les malades

Après Paris, l'université d'Aix-Marseille va créer une formation diplômante en santé pour les patients qui s'impliquent autour de leur maladie.
Les patients sont devenus des acteurs de santé à part entière. Fort de ce constat, le président de l'Université d'Aix-Marseille, le Pr Yvon Berland, a annoncé le 14 décembre, lors du 4ème colloque Médias & santé, la création à la rentrée 2013 d'une «Université des patients» ouverte exclusivement aux malades chroniques.


Such are the honors of our post-Arrowsmith age,  where we celebrate as heroes (or more usually, heroines) not the physician, but the valetudinarian.  (The article is accompanied by a photograph of invalids in mortarboards.)
An American counterpart of such sensiblerie would be the cult of Henrietta Lacks, crossed with the para-academic “credit for life experience” movement.


The broader phenomenon is nicely analyzed by Pamela Haag, here:
http://theamericanscholar.org/death-by-treacle/


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Superficially, the antics in Marseille and Paris might seem heart-warming, or, at worst, just the sort of goofy things people do, like dressing up dogs in little outfits, or electing a kitty-cat “King for a Day”.  (“For a day-y …?!%!#!”)  But like blood in the urine (an apt metonomy for this sort of glurge) it is pathognomonic of a deeper malaise.

To cull stray citations almost at random from current reading:

From a noted historian:
These days, my discipline and our culture  like to deny the historic importance of individuals.  … Ours is an age of denigration. … The denial of greatness traduces experience  and diminishes our collective lives.
-- Fritz Stern, Einstein’s German World (1999), p. 250-1

A caveat against a lax misreading:
 “Individuals” are indeed central to contemporary PC-thinking;  but these are essentially individuals ohne Eigenschaften, save such as they inherit automatically by virtue of their membership in some identity-group.   And crucially, these individuals are without historical importance since, across a broad socio-political spectrum, the trend of the Zeitgeist is the denial of history.


Likewise  someone might stick at “an age of denigration”.  There is also exaltation -- but of a self-undermining kind.  When the likes of Lady Di or Lindsay Lohan can become celebrities, it makes a mockery of any genuine achievement.

Within my lifetime, there arose in America, the practice of applying the word genius  not to rocket-scientists (or mad scientists -- our colonial relation to the essentially European notion of genius  has ever been rocky), but to, um, baseball-players, footballers, like that.   Those, that is, of a certain cast.  This -- along with the gleeful self-flagellating pouncing upon the entity bordering the Kaap die Goeie Hoop -- was part of the reparational self-abasement of the cowed and right-thinking, a peace offering toward those who, truth to tell, mostly just wanted jobs.  It seemed a quintessentially late-American moment.  Yet, what was my surprise, upon encountering this passage, in chapter 13 of the first book of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1930), referring to Austria in the years immediately following the Great War:

Es hatte damals schon die Zeit begonnen, wo man von Genies des Fußballrasens  oder des Boxrings  zu sprechen  anhub.




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