/lit/ - Literature

Just read throught it on Google.
Very interesting theory. How does that work in an environment that is already tamed?
Where is the new frontier?

On that note, any good books about the frontier?
Everyday life on the oregon trail, essays about nature, fiction about adventure, whatever...

Had to read this at uni. The actual thesis is racist nonsense for the most part, but so influential. Very important for understanding how white America views itself, how that mythology developed.

>>13949983
What's racist about that?

>>13949943
>Where is the new frontier?
Silicon valley, abortion of unborn children, genital mutilation, smart ai

>>13950034
I've just started reading about the Frontier Thesis, and I like the idea of these practical pioneer tasks dissolving away old world values and forging something distinct. I'm reading the Pale King at the moment, so I can't help but feel practical contributions to society seem like a required ingredient for an American life to have meaning, or our philosophies to make sense. Shopping and being data have become the modes of life for the distant inheritors to those pioneers. But it's fascinating to think that perhaps even we could be saved and remade just like those former Europeans, we just need the frontier to baptize us.

>>13949943
The lack of the genuine frontier is the cause of the two world wars, cold war (arms/space race) and modernity. Memes grace at it.

>>13950034
It suggests 'the west' was some undeveloped wilderness compared to the 'civilized' white society. The usual justification of genocide of native Americans. The USA did not expand into some empty space populated by savages, the very idea of a frontier is racist to the core.

>>13950149
Native Americans weren’t genocide.

>>13950149
That pic didn't even mention natives, you did.

>>13950133
Is this what he says? I have a similar theory, or that's one part of it.

The Faustian Spirit of Western culture was already identified by Spengler.

>>13950149
Hey, Tall Feather, you'd be better off mashing and distilling that Strawman into some firewater. The New World is massive and permitted many less bloody experiments than your implications.

>>13951070
Seems like the theories are compatible from a glance; the Faustian will to conquer is what drove Manifest Destiny.

>>13950149
You’re being completely obtuse, Siberia could rightly be described as a wilderness today even though there are millions of (white) people there. And the western us had people in it yes but that doesn’t mean that both east and west were equally developed, I don’t know how you can even begin to contend that

>>13951402
The measure of development does seem a shitty basis to condemn people to destruction

Test

>>13950149

>>13951402
>You’re being completely obtuse
How? He's pointing out that imperialism and colonialism always rely on narratives of 'civilizing' and 'taming' supposedly savage places, and the invasion of the north American continent was a classic example.
The frontier thesis is particularly egregious as it supposes American genocidal colonialism somehow separated white Americans in a moral and political sense from white Europeans doing exactly the same thing in Asia and Africa.

>>13950947
no that's today's reapplication of his thought.

>>13951725
2/10 b8 m8

>>13951725
Because your argument against his thesis seemed to be based around denying the “wildernnessness”, which I see as ridiculous and a poor strategy anyways as >>13951689 seems to be saying. And anyways, the *need* to justify imperialism only adumbrates an emergent empathy in the culture. In other times the imperialists would have just seen their conquest as a natural outcome of their strength, making justifications unnecessary. Unless you are one of those who thinks that imperialism=When the White People Attacked, because if you are just disregard all of this