Milky Eggs

The West could not have created NieR: Automata

The rot of Western culture is well summarized in a single observation: it could not have created NieR: Automata.

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Dear readerーwhen was the last time that you were deeply moved, at a primal level, by a work of Western art? I don’t just mean a little twinge of excitement at the latest-and-greatest CGI in the latest Marvel superhero movie or mild frustration at the engineered cliffhangers in the HBO series-of-the-month, but something closer to the awed tones with which great works of Renaissance art are described. Take, for example, Giorgio Vasari’s praise for the Sistine Chapel:

It is not possible to attain to a more perfect excellence in art than is shown in these works, unless it be to be able to do what is impossible.

When was the last time that you felt yourself moved anywhere even close to this level by a product of modern Western culture? I suspect that it has been quite a while. Perhaps, oh, the Lord of the Rings movies, directed… two full decades ago. What works of greatnessーno, let us weaken the question, what works aspiring to greatness at allーhave come since then?

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Let’s now ask a different question. When was the last time you were moved to this extent by a non-Western work of art?

Naturally, different people will have different answers to this question. Right? Perhaps you, dear reader, are more of an anime fan. Or perhaps you take great interest in Japanese orchestral music… or modern video games… and so on.

But notice something interesting here. Think about how you reacted to that question. Didn’t it seem like a more reasonable question than the first one? For some reason, isn’t it simply more plausible to imagine someone deeply moved by a work of Oriental provenance than by a creation of the modern West?

I’m sure that as you read the question, you had your own specific example in mind. At the same time, I suspect that your internal reaction betrays an even deeper observation: not just that you can supply a solitary example of great Eastern art, but that, for whatever reason, the underlying culture which produced that art is fundamentally more conducive to the creation of aesthetic masterworks than the milieu of progressive Western modernity.

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Okay. No more beating around the bush. The mask comes off!

I’ll give it to you straightーfor me, it’s NieR: Automata. There are many masterpieces in the Japanese oeuvre of the 21st century, but for me, it’s good be NieR: Automata.

Well, not just me. I’m pretty sure every single one of my friends who has played this game considers it nothing short of a major aesthetic accomplishment in mankind’s history. Lookーwhen I talk to people about this game, when I link them pieces from the soundtrack, they say things like: “When I listen to this song, I feel like I’m going to start tearing up.”

That’s not the sort of reaction you get from playing a generic hack-n-slash with pretty colors. That’s not a reaction you get from any Marvel movie, no matter how many superheroes appear in the climatic battle. In fact, that’s not a reaction you get from anything that isn’t on the level of Michelangelo et al.

It is a real masterpiece. There is no denying it. Playing through NieR: Automata is just as respectable of an aesthetic experience as sitting through all four acts of Wagner’s Ring cycle or listening to Beethoven’s Ninth (if not more). When was the last time someone told you they were moved to tears by a piece of music? Seriously? The musicーthe artーthe narrativeーthe actual interactive gameーall these elements come together beautifully in an amalgamation of passionate elegance standing on par with the performances of the Gilels Trio.

I’m not here, primarily, to convince you of the greatness of NieR: Automata. If you haven’t played it, you should go do so, but in the end, art is something that must be experienced firsthand. No amount of reading my breathless praise could ever substitute for even a single minute of actual lived experience!

What I am here to convince you of is that it is, in some sense, theoretically impossible for the modern West to have produced a masterwork like NieR: Automata.

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It may help to first consider what art the West does produce. I mean, books are getting written, television series are getting aired, movies are getting shown… It’s not as though the West has zero cultural output. Far from it!

I will advance a simple hypothesis. The modern West (to be precise, let us consider the last 2 decades or so here) cannot produce greatness because it has no recognition of greatness, of ambition, or of transcendent purpose. Just like it is impossible to aim for a target if you don’t even know what the concept of a “target” or a “bulls-eye” is in the first place, Western culture has simply forgotten what it means to aspire to the creation of a masterwork.

Instead, if you seriously consider the products of Western aesthetic drive in recent years, you will find that the dominant theme which connects them is a sort of neurotic psychodrama. Recently a paper by philosopher Liam Kofi Bright titled White Psychodrama has been making the rounds; by and large, I would say that racialized psychodrama is merely one component of a grander and more disturbing devolution into internally-focused psychodrama in all aspects of the Western cultural psyche.

The meaning of psychodrama here may become clearer as we consider specific examples. What are the great television shows of the last decade? Let’s seeーwe have Breaking Bad, maybe Game of Thrones, and I guess there was Mad Men… if we’re being generous, Better Call Saul, I suppose.

Are these shows “masterpieces?”

Sure, they might have you on the edge of your seat, waiting for the next development to unfold. Maybe you even end up really frustrated now and then about some particularly stupid development in George R. R. Martin’s fantasy world. Did Daenerys really have to act like that? I’m not saying that these provoke no emotional responseーfar from it! At the end of the day, however, your emotional reaction is, in some sense, confined to the internal psychological dramas of the fantasy worlds themselves. In almost no way do these works even attempt to reach beyond themselves, to attain a higher level of aesthetic greatness such that the viewer remains affected by them for the rest of their life.

What about literature? I mean, the very existence of the New Sincerity movement largely proves my point here; in some sense, there wouldn’t be any need for David Foster Wallace if we had been trending toward a rich literary world of transcendent aesthetics. Instead, though, we’ve instead devolved far enough that the “modern literary world” is now dominated by reams of MFA-produced “autofiction.” Autofiction can be funny, and indeed it can even arguably be good literature once in a blue moon, but I think it’s no coincidence that Tao Lin is now some sort of antivaxxer paleo hippie who posts about eating uncooked steak on Twitter.

Classical music? Well… compare for yourself, on one hand, the Bach Collegium Japan’s performance of the St. John Passion versus, on the other hand, whatever in the name of our loving God “modern classical music” is supposed to be. Movies? Literally nothing since Peter Jackson adapted Lord of the Rings, where of course the source material was written nearly a full century ago.

Do we have any evidence of “greatness?” Worse, can we even claim that anyone is trying to be great? Like, is there even any sort of attempt being made here?

The Chinese talk about a sort of “involutive” tendency in the modern world. Funnily enough, to them, “involution” seems to more or less be the equivalent of our “sigma grindset,” but I think the word is really much better suited to describe the inwardly spiraling psychodrama which characterizes the modern West.

This psychodrama consumes the Westーand I really do mean consumes in the most gruesome, physical way possibleーrendering it a culture incapable of creating masterpieces like NieR: Automata. It is simply not conceivable.

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The pursuit of transcendent aesthetics is the pursuit of the metaphysically good.

A culture which has forgotten how to pursue aesthetic greatnessーwhat is this culture missing? What do its people lack? What inferences can you make here?

I mean, at some level, “we’re all human.” We all descend, more or less, from the same genetic heritage, and so on and so forth. It’s not as though the West is a literal hellscape or as though the East is the manifestation of heavenly paradise on Earth. I choose to live in the West, after all! It’s surprisingly good in more ways than people give it credit for at times.

But I worry that a culture which has lost touch with the drive for transcendence is a culture which has forsaken something at the same time both very primitive and very deeply important. This kind of beauty is not purely abstract; instead it has a sort of raw physicality which one can immediately apprehend. NieR: Automata is no Rothko. You don’t need to be a scholar of modern intertextuality to laugh along with its characters or to cry as you listen to the soundtrack five years later. You simply feel it deep in your soul.

To me, this kind of aesthetic drive is an important source of incontrovertible ethical intuition. Some things are good and some things are badーand no amount of abstract theorizing will ever change that, because I simply know it to be so, in my capacity as a human being. This is probably the reason why San Francisco is a piss-stinking trash dump of 800k people while the 15 million residents of the Tokyo metropolitan area achieve a level of human coordination which pushes the upward boundary of the definition of human civilization itself.