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COMMENTARY
January 4, 2012
Hope, not optimism
My happy holy days have been spent, apart from church and family, in characteristic retreat. When there is an opportunity to read and think without distraction, it should be seized. I have been reliving what we might call the Civil War of 1776: My "Loyalist" ancestors versus those Tea-Party types who called themselves "Patriots" (more Sunday).But also, joining in the Counter-Reformation with Bernini, Rubens, and Cervantes. I have named these gentlemen in reverse chronological order; they were about one generation apart. Each was, in addition to a maker of high art and a participant in "events," a kind of amateur philosopher, creatively embodying a view of life while finding his way through a world of glorious wreckage. Reading through their times, one glimpses heroic flares against a background of encroaching human darkness. And then one returns to the world of Iowa caucuses, eurozone crises, mad mullahs straddling the Strait of Hormuz, a new psychotic Kim, and - so forth. Yet the background conditions have not changed, and man is still man. Regardless of our circumstances, we must still choose between faith and faithlessness; between good and evil acts; self-sacrifice and self-aggrandizement. And the struggle for power continues among the ruthless. In all the generations of which I am aware, through art and history, there has never been peace. Such peace as has been established, in any corner of communal life, has always, eventually, been wantonly disturbed. There have been no countries without contentions, and no centuries without wars. I signed off the old year with a column of not entirely serious prognostications, ending, "let us pray that in the coming months, not much will happen." Signing into the new, my hopes are slightly buoyed from visiting the past. Perhaps the most encouraging thing is to hear, in every generation, the most earnest minds declare that things were never so bad, that the world is morally decaying. (Which of course does not mean, logically, that things do not actually get worse and worse.) Hope is not optimism, as I have tried to argue from time to time. Worldly optimism can be a virtue, in some contexts, but Hope, with a capital, can only refer to a sequence of events passing beyond time. Within time, progress can be only towards our own dissolution. Hope vested in children is similarly misplaced: They, too, will grow to be fully human, and we can count on them to make a mess in their turn. But while I am sounding the bells for Ecclesiastes, let me add that the contentions, because inevitable, are worthwhile. And even if failure is certain in the end, something in us remains undaunted. This is why it is so important to turn our attention, whenever we can, from smaller things to larger, and beyond paltry accounting to high art. Even in politics, with which we are stuck through the mixed blessings of our representative democracy, our ambitions should rise higher. In the clash of parties, there are purposes above party to be served, and we need to review what they are. The cultivation of envy, and the sludging about of material resources to reward one constituency at the expense of another, cannot be the whole point. In returning to the Counter-Reformation, which from another angle is called the "Renaissance," one is brought up sharply against another view of communal life. For all the horrors and tyrannies of past times, we become aware of ambitions that go beyond our own. The aspiration to make of one's city and of one's country a thing of beauty, in the broadest sense, is mostly lost on us. The idea that we should each participate, in our own way and according to our own talents, in the creation of what amounts to a collective work of art, strikes our "ironicized" minds as irresponsible whimsicality. And we look almost groggily upon urban landscapes dominated by the spires of churches, instead of the faceless towers of our banks and bureaucracies. We look upon streets animated by human social life, in which the people are not enclosed within rolling metal boxes; upon rural landscapes everywhere tilled by a very personal human husbandry; upon vistas that lift, instead of depressing the heart. Yet the oppression of tyrants we still have, rendered the more frightening by the reach of a levelling technology which, four centuries ago, Cervantes was already damning. Familiar with war, he called attention to the horror of artillery, which cuts down the brave and the cowardly with indifference; which has "democratized" the battlefield in his time, and brought into view the prospect of mass, gratuitous slaughter. One need not be a Luddite to observe what has been lost: And along with the old hard labour, also the joy in things well-made, and in direct participation - as opposed to mass voting, on the analogy of contending artillery. How, from our very different circumstances, are we to recover that? David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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