This world has gone crazy. Please tell me I’m wrong. Over the past half century we have allowed ourselves to be fooled as much by the Emperor’s tailors as all, except for the little boy, did in Hans Christian Andersen’s original fairy tale. It took a child to speak the truth. The majority these days are still denying it, taking it apart, recreating and redefining it, and believing their own fantasies and falsehoods. As a result our culture extols, exalts and celebrates what is disordered, chaotic, unreal, irrational, immoral and ugly. This is the age of subversion… the age of undermining, pulling down, ripping apart, and cobbling back together random mis-matched parts into any new form, a partiche that exemplifies the senselessness and meaningless that results from the process.

To the left are two sculptures you will find in Wellington, NZ’s picturesque capital city. The first is named “Doo Doos” and is a pile of boulders erected by Peter Kundycki back in 1998, to be found at Moa Point. The second is a steel construction by Guy Ngan, made originally in 1974 and reinstalled in Wakefield Street in 2006. It is named “Geometric Growth”. It appears to defy gravity by not toppling down.

The pile of boulders is simply constructed… just a pile of boulders. Coming upon this on Wellington’s rugged coastline, it does not seem particularly out of place. It is really all rather ordinary. Clearly they were not put there by the forces of Nature, resembling more the tell-tale sign that Man has been there. They are quite a neat and tidy pile of big stones. But the fact that someone put them there could be considered intriguing. Why do that? Being human, we like to look for a meaning. Without knowing the name of this pile of stones our imagination is free to wander. But knowing the name brings one up with a jolt… a dive into the distasteful. This is the developmental level of 2 year olds, but why cause us to focus on excrement? What is the point of that? This is the subversion of normal decency in human expression. Yuk!

Does geometric growth have a way of defying gravity against all appearances? I don’t know that it does. But the second sculpture was created over twenty years earlier than the first so is perhaps less evolved in the ongoing march of postmodernism. It brings home a certain reality. Why doesn’t it simply topple over? It looks as though it ought. But of course we know the real truth… that besides all visual appearances there is an adherence to engineering principles and their solid basis in absolutes. Gravity exists to demonstrate the hypocrisy and lies of postmodernism. One cannot subvert gravity and be immune to the universal effect of it. As an absolute it applies regardless. Engineers know this even when artists try to tell us something different.

Personally I have more antipathy towards the pile of boulders, knowing the “meaning” given them by the sculptor, than I do for the almost toppling boxes. But that is because I am not doing what postmodernists do… interpret all meaning for themselves. Moving on from these two (admittedly rather mild when considering craziness) examples of material culture, what else makes me think this world is crazy? There is much more, and more serious at that.

In music composition there is a preoccupation with sound that is atonal, that is dissociative and jarring, that could be called polystylist as it takes ingredients from simply everywhere, and has a quality of randomness. There is disorder and chaos, unpredictability and unpleasantness. The lyrics of songs are often pointless, repetitious, inane or simply vulgar. Or their themes are of meaninglessness and despair. In theatre and cinema, plays and movies have no point, or the point is subversive, the characters specializing in not relating, or their relationships are dysfunctional, immoral, and the language becomes foul. Note the censor’s warning “contains explicit sex scenes, violence, offensive language” attached to nearly every movie these days.

I find this ugly. There is enough already in this world that is ugly… such as man’s inhumanity to man, the horrors that people must live through under tyrannical governments, in war, in poverty and deprivation, and without aid and relief, in despair without hope. But in our own crazy society of today we seek liberation by throwing ourselves straight into the arms of bondage to falsehood, freedom through the deconstruction of truth, salvation by the transgression and abandonment of moral absolutes. This is absolutely crazy. When are we going to get real - and I mean real? When are we going to accept that this form of social Marxism (for that is what it is) does not work for us? Truth is not socially constructed, defined by “what feels good” or “what works for me”. It is that which corresponds to reality, is universal and absolute, eternal and fixed, revealed not made. I certainly prefer that kind of truth when my life depends on it… such as 35,000 feet above the ground in an aircraft built on sound engineering principles, not those beliefs that simply made the designers feel good at the time, or somehow fulfilled as in the building of a pile of stony doo-doos. Heaven help us!