On Literature & J.M. Keynes: Standing Upright Here

This is a guest post by Mark Hubbard from his Life Behind the IRon Drape blog. He reckons it’s his biggest, brightest, best and most important post ever – and these few words here are just a taste…

‘Resistance and change often begin in art, and
very often in our art – the art of words.'
- Ursula Le Guin

‘Not I, some child born in a marvellous year,
Will learn the trick of standing upright here.’
- from the Allen Curnow poem "The Skeleton of the
Great Moa in the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch"

From time to time on my blog I ramble through matters literary. In my long and latest ramble I explain my notion that western literature has been devolving down to an increasingly irrelevant social club where progressives sit in small rooms staring into inner space and reading to each other about their feelings.

In the process, we are surrendering the literature that once was to a literature of interiors, oblivious of the world and how it works, settling for its product being reinforcing comfort-food for the left-liberal world view.

Well, actually, that’s a little harsh. Just a little.

But I do answer the questions of why we see repeated in our fiction the distorted dystopias of Climategeddon, the atopic distortions of lumpen anti-capitalism – and, thus, why Ayn Rand wouldn’t find an agent in 2014, let alone a publisher.

I show how Marxist feminism in the humanities has been like unleashing the guillotine’s Terror on our language and literature. And I show that J.M. Keynes not only planted a lethal long-working virus into our economic systems, shredding the individual mind from the market place and replacing it with government, but destroyed a necessary individualism in the arts by almost single-handedly setting up the western model of public funding of the arts from 1946, and thus the worship of the state by the arts for alms.

I did say it was long (but I promise if you make it through, there’s a decent reward at the end).

To quote the premise of this latest piece:

State funding of the arts is leading to the stultification of western literature under the reactionary establishment of Left-Liberalism, also called Progressivism, which has largely captured the literary means of production via agents and publishers—and is now quietly indoctrinating authors toward a homogenised literature via ‘creative writing’ courses delivered in progressive-saturated tertiary institutions. Ours is no literature that will seed Ursula Le Guin's resistance and change, or that can be ‘disturbed by power,’ as Solzhenitsyn feared, because it’s a literature which fully embraces the ethic of that power, the supremacy of the state over the individual; and, incredibly for the arts, hugs to its breast collectivism over individualism. At its base is the tax take, funding a complacent publishing channel while eviscerating our private lives, our digital innards disembowelled and served up in the offices of government officials ...

It’s a big post with unusual connects, and as entertaining I hope as it is informative, so why not bookmark it now and make it your Christmas reading! (PS: Fear not: I’ll be catching up on the day job until the New Year, and it will remain the header post. I’ll even pop in to reply to comments)

Here it is, your link to the full post:

Literary Ramble IV: A Disquisition on Our Literature & JM Keynes – Standing Upright Here.