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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
May 26, 2002
Truth, not justice
I am going to write today on a subject about which I'm in complete confusion. The reader who is convinced that I am so at all other times may thus take this for comparison. The subject is the end of the world or more precisely the end of civilization as we know it . It will not help that while I have read the book I shall discuss -- At the End of an Age by John Lukacs -- I have read it but once and am not yet confident I have the hang of it even though I have read several of the author's previous books touching the same theme. The reason is that although the book is written in plain and accessible English and may be superficially a glide it is full of depths to be paused over and sounded. But let me take a deep breath and say that at the book's heart Mr. Lukacs is expounding a most remarkable achievement of this "Modern Age" (say 1492--1968) the development of the historical sense -- what it is and what it's not. And he is pairing this with the other great achievement the development of something loosely called "scientific method". Both have come to be not so much abandoned as inverted in our decay. In combination they should have led to a renewed sense of our own place in the cosmos and thus a better understanding of our human role. Instead they have emptied into the swamp of a lazy evolutionist relativism. Yet the achievement should stand: we are now in a position to see not only our own decline as a civilization but the tiny speck of historical time that we occupy -- the last few thousand years of human "history" -- against the background immensity of space and time. And we should see that this speck is the meaning of the thing the point of it. (In some sense we nailed ourselves with the "idea of progress" optimistically assuming that with a million years behind us there must be a million years ahead.) A million books spew from the presses but the number of authors worth one's full attention is now a small and diminishing handful. Mr. Lukacs is one of them an American historian of Hungarian origin who has retired. I have mentioned him before in these columns as I have mentioned his good friend Jacques Barzun whose recent "survey" of this subject Dawn to Decadence: 1500--2000 I seem to remember reviewing. I am in no confusion about the fact that we are at the end of an age that the Western the post-Mediaeval civilization that we might date from about the discoveries of Columbus is now more-or-less entirely behind us. It survives I think in a few reactionary people -- people like me determined to be "the last Roman" -- though I feel in myself so much of the "post-Modern" darkness and decadence and haplessness. I am utterly at sea in the details and parts of Mr. Lukacs's book have gone over my head. The reader who comes to this book for a pub argument -- who wants to know why Lukacs & Co. think "Western Civ" is over and wants "proof" -- has already missed the point. He would anyway better start with The End of the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modern Age which Mr. Lukacs published a decade ago. The present book takes "the end" as its beginning and is more a direct stab into the content of that departing or departed civilization of its significance in the larger history of the world. It is at ease in its pessimism; it does not -- but then John Lukacs never did -- offer some glib programme for revival. What has died is dead. The confusion is that everything may seem outwardly okay. In my own glib expression I never expected the collapse of Western Civilization would be good for the economy. It is when we go beneath the contemporary veneer of technology and commerce that we enter into emptiness. My own example: we have no great living artists. And what is so telling is that we can look back to the first half of the 20th century and find many of them giants -- Picasso Braque Matisse Chagall Giacometti Nicholson -- all with marks of the end of a line essentially backward-looking and self-referential. All very much in the Western tradition and yet each had to create for his times his own "private mythic universe" and paint his way out of that. It was a century in which there was no room for minor artists; because the "public mythic universe" was evaporating. And now there is no room even for great artists there is no individual so large that he can supply from out of his own being conger from his own imagination a whole civilization ; the task is just too large. "A civilization disappears with the kind of man the type of humanity that has issued from it." John Lukacs is quoting Georges Bernanos the profound French catholic thinker of nearly a century ago. In A Thread of Years Mr. Lukacs had written with ludicrous precision a series of fictionalized representative anecdotes for the period 1901--1969 chronicling the decline fall and final disappearance throughout the West of "the idea of a gentleman". In the course of which he was at pains to show it was not a shallow idea. We don't exactly have Alaric storming our gates -- only Islamists and we're rather better armed and organized than the Romans of the early 5th century. I would say that America is the big non sequitur in the argument the extraordinary vibrancy and life of American culture and the Americans' willingness to defend themselves. Yet it is a popular culture almost strictly (genuine folk art for the masses but only fraudulent high art); and the mind of America as expressed in its universities and other institutions of high culture seems to have succumbed to the "political correctness" that is among the symptoms of our post-Modern barbarism. For here is a key. If I could pick one line out of the whole of Mr. Lukacs's book that seems to tell "the whole story" it is in parenthesis on page 73: "All of the parables of Christ taught us to believe in truth not in justice." And we now live for justice alone. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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