đź‘Ą Karl Kraus
One of the first distinctions that occurs between Vienna as described here and my experience is the complete lack of intellectual structures for a young American to participate in. Rather than let this be benign complaint from an American suburbanite, I think an examination of what it was that intellectuals in Vienna were participating in, a model that young Americans often try to find, sometime even by going to a place like Vienna, and how the American simulacrum is lacking will be of value.
For a start, Vienna was probably the most multiethnic of the imperial capitals, humming with the vast variety of people from the imperial lands who gravitated there from the 1860s onwards. It was primarily a city of immigrants, often recently arrived.
This is an interesting notion to consider in juxtaposition with American immigration and the American system of imperialism, especially when the empire consists of a more or less contiguous landmass of conquered territories. I have to imagine that a critical mass of these immigrants were educated in an Austrian system, that they were therefore assimilated, and that their localities had a civil service that was partly staffed by the local ethnic or national population. America, and Europe, for that matter, having lost the appetite to install official political and bureaucratic orders in conquered or partly conquered territories, now allow in immigrants who are not as prepared to contribute to the cultural, intellectual, and economic conditions of the society they are entering. They are not unable to contribute. Considering Austria's special heterogeneity, and considering the West's global immigration problem, it is useful to analyze the success in Austria's case and the failure in today's immigration trends.
Unfortunately the lack of success of shopping malls typifies how mismatched my experience was in America to the architecture of its original inspiration.
In our way, the American sports podcast and the interactions of its hosts on social media has taken up this mantel. The general understanding of the game in Viennese cafes was likely no less petty than the current class of media members.
I have notes in my notebook about how America lacks a concept of bildung. Money supplanted the acquisition of other concepts. When fading economic outcomes become obvious to a generation, therefore, it is cause for panic, which is fuel for our contemporary cultishness.
Like much of America, our inability to promulgate consistent text books is based on federal competition amongst the states and their various ruling classes.
The numbers on higher education in America have become grotesque and uneconomic.
I cannot help but read this book with a sense of dread. Much of what they thought about humanity’s progress, potential, and special role in the order of nature is being challenged.
This remark, about the incommensurability of the Austrian empire is interesting in light of its contrast to the books I read recently about the Soviet Union, where commensurability was of paramount importance and enforced everywhere, even though there were tensions between Russian and Georgian ministers, or with Jewish populations.
Mach, Hegel, Kant
This put into mind the thought experiment of what it would look like if you could produce whatever content you liked with your technological devices, but only a priest could go through your media assets and post to an account associated with you. It would have a certain effect on the kind of content you produced. Here, we have a model where Mach acts in some sense as the organizer of what is produced and disseminated. It is a looser and very fertile dynamic. We have now a dynamic where there is truly no arbiter, save for censorship, and in the absence of enlightened atomized organization we cannot become a contemplative society.
Klimt’s statement of purpose stands in direct opposition to the imperative of generative ai. Although, similar to the WW, generative ai may also ultimately prove too expensive.
It makes for an interesting contrast to the ideological self-policing of universities today.
See also the St Scholastica Day riots.
Adler’s perspective seems more relevant to our times. We all suffer from mass psychological experiment as well as ecological and social degradation.
Chicago’s public pools are fairly rare. There are a few stunning examples, but it is not like New York where you happen upon pools regularly.
One of the books on my docket is about Chicago’s housing projects. The two cities, separated by roughly 40 years and half the world away, make for a Jeckel and Hyde approach to public housing policy. Despite the criticisms described here of Vienna’s approach, it did not produce the nightmare that public housing in Chicago did.