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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
June 2, 2002
New beginnings
It was the week in which the last fragment from the ruin of the World Trade Centre in New York was removed. One last black empty stretcher was taken away a flag folded upon it. (There were 2 843 dead.) Soft marching bagpipers and muffled drums. There was the clang of a single fire department bell 343 times. The clean-up supposed to take a year was completed in less than nine months. Last September a Serbian friend shared with listeners to CBC his knowing European observation that the death toll here was "no big deal". (It was an odd moment to be clever but then CBC radio at the time was choked with guests choosing odd moments to sneer at New York and America.) Where he comes from you may lose 10 000 without reading great significance into it. I gave it as my opinion that if that were so my taking his life would be a matter of no consequence at all. We don't think like that here yet and it is to our credit as well as to our luck that such thoughts would not immediately occur to us. Our counters are calibrated to zero we think a single murder worth investigating. Yet like all the other peoples of the world we can be blind to the suffering of others and we begin by and return to counting our own. I was writing last week about a new book by John Lukacs At the End of an Age one which puts the present time in a context of centuries a scale at which the loss of thousands truly may not merit a footnote. And it is an intellectual history or reflection upon our history looking inside not outside the Western mind. It was a book written by a Western man late in the day of Western civilization if not after its eclipse -- that planetary "north-west European" order that began to emerge 500 years ago. Let what I wrote stand as preface to this; Mr. Lukacs book is worth reading attentively by everyone with an active mind especially as a critique of what we call the "historical sense" at the centre of this post-Renaissance Western civilization. But I should leave him out of my own much shallower reflections. It is probably silly to write in a daily newspaper about such grand things as the rise and fall of civilizations. And yet the core questions of what we are and therefore what we must do are questions that arise every day and govern our judgements on minor events. As Mr. Lukacs himself writes of his youth in Hungary I must have been very young when I learned -- no, recognized -- that the competence of a man, important though it might be in particular situations, is secondary, indeed, subordinated to the inclinations of his mind. The Greeks understood this perfectly. At the crux of things it is not what we can do but what we do it for. It is not what we know but what we do with what we know. Not what we are given but what we make of what we're given. For the Greek the genius was not a man who was very smart but a man who made extraordinary use of the brain God gave him no matter how humble it was. A typical argument of the present day that our high technology "proves" our advancement over previous civilizations would be taken by any intelligent Greek as self-satirical as an attempt to be droll. Has the invention of sound recording improved our music? Did the computer screen improve our art? Were cheap printing and then the compact disk breakthroughs for the quality of our literature? Do jet airplanes take us closer to God? What kind of progress was achieved by all the technical advances that went into video games? Nothing against any of these inventions but what is the "inclination of mind" they reveal taken together as the most impressive products of our society? The firemen at the World Trade Centre by contrast made the best possible use of the equipment they were carrying and showed entirely admirable "inclinations of mind" in the course of getting themselves killed by the hundred. They stood out as among the most civilized of our contemporaries as do the soldiers who go into holes in Afghanistan never quite sure even with their technology what they may find inside. By contrast among the most barbaric creatures I have met at the present day are professors in our universities (in particular professors of law). Men and women devoted in their vanity and through the fashions of the times to demolishing fine and subtle principles revealed by patient thought over many hundred if not several thousand years. Many of them very smart indeed and the smarts used in the cause of corrosion. To repeat what I said last week we find in what is casually called "political correctness" the impulse to elevate justice over truth which is at the heart of the decadent attack on all civilized values. ("What is truth?" asked the over-civilized Pontius Pilate.) And by the time the world is turned upside down there is no justice either. And for us today dangerously freed from all the reinforcements to behaviour and "inclinations of mind" that existed as recently as the 1950s there is no alternative to reinforcing ourselves. I would say not only inclinations of mind but more crucially inclinations of heart as in the prayer book phrase Lord have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law. Several readers wrote to express something like amazement at last week's article at the "disconnect" between my pessimism over the future of Western civilization and the apparent optimism of my articles day to day. I think the simplest answer to them is that optimism and pessimism don't come into this; and that the disconnexion is apparent not real. I do believe we have gone round the circuit of what was "Western" since about the year 1500; that as Mr. Lukacs and Jacques Barzun and others have said this is the decadent phase. But there is a longer time series involving the Greeks and the traditions we call "Judaeo-Christian". It is a stream that has passed through many landscapes and has previously seemed to disappear and I do not doubt it will resurface. Perhaps it even begins to spring again from the hole in the ground at Manhattan. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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