He Looked so Handsome in his Uniform

I recently watched a video about Marsden Hartley, a painter who 'fit in' with his contemporaries in life style or art style rather rarely.  Many of his paintings use very dark palettes.  A major exception was his series sometimes called his German Paintings, or his Uniform Paintings. They were painted as Europe prepared for the War to End Wars.  Looking back on that war, we sometimes think about how it might have been avoided.  But for many of the folk of the early twentieth century, the search was for how it might begin.  It's odd that people so easily glorify war.  It's true that what we now call World War I was much more brutal, much more destructive of a whole generation, than any war that had come before it, but previous wars had not been kind and gentle.  (Perhaps had the America Civil War been televised in Germany and England and France, they might not have been so eager to fight.)

Why would so many young men be eager to join a war, one in which they could expect as high chance of being wounded or killed?  Hartley commented on the attraction of the drums.  Folk like to march to the beat of the drummer.  But he painted the uniforms.  At the beginning of the war, the uniforms of the great armies of Europe were colourful and attractive, especially as contrasted to the drab costumes of workers.  As the war wore on, the uniforms became more drab. The French resisted changing the design of their uniforms to something more camouflaged from the bright blue with which they began the war because such a change was considered a lack of valour.  Five years later, as many as 19 million valourous soldiers of all the nations shared the same uniform.

Hartley's Uniform Paintings prompted me to think about the allure of uniformity more generally, even though military uniforms are probably the most common use of the term.  I had a friend who was an ardent pacifist, who never missed an anti-war rally, but who was married to a Marine Captain.  She married him, she said, because 'he looked so handsome in his uniform."

Just as the (drums and) uniforms of the early twentieth century helped generate support for the Great War, the uniforms of the Nazis in Germany were an important tool in generating support for the Furhrer's struggle, from simple brown shirts to Hugo Boss's uniforms for the SS.

If wars were decided on style points (and if the Nazis had not driven the Jewish intellectuals out of the country), World War II might have ended very differently. 

But there are many forms of uniformity--I like that oxymoronic phrase, because if captures what often we deny in our claims to be 'individuals'.  I suspect that mine is the last generation for whom David Riesman's  The Lonely Crowd has any relevance.  I remember reading it and identifying strongly as an 'inner-directed' person.  I tried to register as a Conscientious Objector based on personal beliefs.  My claim was denied, but my draft board said they would grant that status if I would just choose an other-directed approach as a Methodist. 

We live in a time when the 'loner', the 'outsider' is automatically suspect. This is, in the long expanse of human history, almost certainly the normal situation.  Not even Henry David Thoreau was appreciated by many of his contemporaries, despite his veneration by literature teachers who themselves are a bit of outsiders. 

When I was applying for Conscientious Objector status, the most popular brand of nonconformity, of anti-uniformity, was the hippie movement, a brand that was carefully marketed by folks like Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary, although of course we hippie sorts considered ourselves superior to straight society that was influenced by Madison Avenue.  It's worth quoting Alvin Toffler on the hippie ad campaign:

'The successful "sale" of the hippie life style model to young people all over the techno-societies, is one of the classic merchandising stories of our time.

'Not all subcults are so aggressive and talented at flackery, yet their cumulative power in the society is enormous.  This power stems from our almost universal desperation to "belong."  The primitive tribesman feels a strong attachment to his tribe.  He knows that he "belongs" to it, and may even have difficulty imagining himself apart from it.  The techno-societies are so large, however, and their complexities so far beyond the comprehension of any individual, that it is only by plugging in to one or more of their subcults, that we maintain some sense of identity and contact with the whole.' (1970, p. 310)

The hippies are still alive, although whether their state is one of wellness I might doubt, and still making money.  They still hold rallies, even if they are not perhaps so stylishly orchestrated as those of Albert Speer.

Until recently, at least, an 'until' which I think is very important, few folks in techno-societies wanted to be considered sheeple, a desire which was a powerful marketing tool, one that Apple used to become the most valuable brand in the world.

Anyone knew that you were one of the crazy ones if you belonged to the Cult of Mac, right?

And it didn't hurt that if one belonged to the subcult of Apple, one found fellow cultists rallying at all the best coffee shops and universities, where everyone could think differently together in a safe space.

Now,I of course cling to the illusion that I am a individual, a visitor from the Gutenberg Galaxy.  Indeed when recently I attended design classes at the University of Arkansas, surrounded by kids with MacBooks and iPhones,  I used a Samsung Galaxy Note tablet for my work.  and sported my Galaxy phone without a case while the cool kids had to protect the premium materials of Jony Ive's latest masterpiece with a case, which to me seemed to moot the beauty of the design.

Funny, ain't it, how we define ourselves.  And as an obsessive compulsive bloke, I occasionally feel pulled to Cult of Apple because of the uniformity of the design language.  I am, it seems, firmly and happily in the cult of design nerds.

But, the times, they are a-changin', as the Nobel Prize wining bard sang in 1964, when I was graduating from high school, when I expressed my rebelliousness by refusing to go to pep rallies and by skipping the lunch room to sit under a tree and read.  And the times are a-changin' faster than ever. 

Apple cultists tend for the most part to be clean, well-groomed, gentle folks who don't want to force me to buy a MacBook by law.  They don't want to deny me a job because I wear an LG Style instead of an Apple Watch, although I haven't gone to a job interview for a while.  That quirk of mine might be a bigger handicap than I recognize, and I do sometimes take my iPad to the coffee shop just to show the sheeple that I am not too poor for premium design.

But there are a lot of cults who are not so gentle.  Identity politics seems to have taken over the US electoral process, making the tribal choices we have made seem to be moral imperatives that need to be forced on everyone else.  I find it one of the many ironies of contemporary politics that the groups who claim to be anti-imperialist are the most aggressively imperialist of all. 

I wish I knew some way to encourage us folk to consider our neo-tribalism as what it almost always is, a way we seek comfort in a world over over-whelming change, rather than trying to understand that change.  No matter what our world view, there are phenomena that just don't fit, that are at war with each other.  Ah, but a uniform world view would be so handsome.  Even I recognize how premium is the material, how uniform the design language, of the new iPhone and Pad Pro.