Bradbury's Book People and Eisenhower's Military-Industrial Complex: Dystopia Now
Thoughts on preserving cultural knowledge in a dark age
Ahead of the substantive text of today’s newsletter transmission, here are two pieces of book news:
First, I have signed a contract with Dilatando Mentes Editorial, the Spanish publisher of beautifully designed and illustrated books of weird and cosmic horror fiction, for a Spanish translation of my What the Daemon Said. In 2021 they published a translation of To Rouse Leviathan under the title Hizo de las tinieblas su escondite (“He Made Darkness His Hiding Place”). It proved to be a stunningly gorgeous piece of work, so I’m looking forward to seeing what they’ll do with Daemon.
Here’s their social media announcement:
(Translation: “It makes us very happy to inform you that @_MattCardin will once again be part of Dilatando Mentes Editorial. Next year we will publish his essay collection ‘What the Daemon Said: Essays on Horror Fiction, Film, and Philosophy,’ a work that we consider essential.”)
Second, Booklife from Publishers Weekly has given a positive review for volume 1 of my private journals, calling it “epic and intimate, a portrait of a mind and a milieu, with deep dives into the creative mind, the nature of the weird, and how to find one’s way in a world that’s sick.” In their estimation, “Lovers of weird fiction will relish Cardin’s insights, story ideas, unsettling dreams, and reports on his reading, game-playing, and his fascinating spiritual and philosophical development.”
Remember, you can read the introduction to my Journals, Volume 1: 1993-2001 right here.
Now on to the main feature:
Every time I revisit Dwight Eisenhower’s iconic farewell address from January 17, 1961, I’m struck again by A) how prophetic it was—in the same way that Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 was a warning that sadly emerged as prophecy, and B) how astounding it is that a US president—who was also one of the United States’ most celebrated military generals—ever uttered such words.
This was called to mind today by Benjamin Carlson's tweeting of a clip from Eisenhower's speech:
(Note that Carlson is here on Substack, too, at
.)Can you imagine hearing something like this coming from the lips of any U. S. president in Eisenhower's wake? Okay, maybe Kennedy or Carter. But after and aside from those two, nope.
As is now plainly evident, the leaders of the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower criticized in that address apparently took his words not as he intended—as a warning and condemnation—but as a playbook. Listening to him today is like reading a capsule summary of America’s economic, political, societal, and cultural trajectory over the past 60 years, if one takes care to mentally add in the phenomenon of modern digital tech-based corporate capitalism, with the accompanying thorough enmeshment of daily life in the desires and doings of mega-corporations, that has come to characterize both American and global society.
We will not hear the likes of Ike’s speech again. At least not from a sitting, or even a former, U.S. president. It’s game over on that front.
Currently and moving forward, we’re living more in the mode of the long descent laid out by Morris Berman in The Twilight of American Culture, the inevitable civilizational decline during which the most fruitful action for individuals caught within it is not to try and stave it off, since the ultimate degradation and collapse is inevitable, but to enact a personal version of what Berman called “the monastic option,” some meaningful approach to establishing a humane way of living and/or preserving a set of cultural knowledge that can be passed down to serve as the seed of a future cultural and civilizational rebirth.
In other words, to proceed in the mode imagined by Bradbury in the form of Fahrenheit 451’s “book people,” whose chosen mission in the face of a society-wide banning and burning of books is to commit entire books to memory, thus preserving them in a line of generational succession until the time rolls round again when they can be recommitted to paper.
I first read Berman’s stirring explication of such things in 2004. The question of what form the monastic option might take in my own life—what it might focus on, how it might be specifically enacted—has remained a live one ever since.
I wonder: What form might it take for you?