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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
December 30, 2007
MMVII
It is not possible to predict what happened in the year of grace, 2007. For that is the sort of thing for which we must always wait. The most important events generally escape the contemporary notice not only of journalists, but of everyone else.To take the obvious example, we will not know, for many years yet, what person of world-wide significance may have been born this year. Some president or prime minister who becomes a household name; some missionary or pope to be venerated in centuries to come; some artist who will change the way everyone sees; some scientist who changes everything we know; some philosopher who changes the way we know it. Some monster on the scale of Hitler or Mao, whose henchmen will slaughter millions. Or some historian who may come to show how the unlikely year, 2007 -- the year of his own birth, by some embarrassing coincidence -- was in fact a hinge-point in the history of the planet. We have no idea, and yet, that little baby is living and breathing as I write, and the road lies open before him. Or, her. We do not even have a reliable record of the important people who died this year. For many of the most impressive men and women of history were unknown when they died, except to a small circle, if even to them. They lived “before their time” -- if the life of fame is any life at all. Had there been newspapers many centuries ago, we would consult their archived pages in vain for their obituaries. We may often consult the archived pages of existing newspapers to find little or nothing about the events remembered in history -- as almost anyone presented with a copy of a newspaper printed on the day of his own birth can attest. The life of Christ Himself passed by, without anyone in Rome noticing. In Rome, mind: a city that would be Christ's for many centuries. Liberal pedagogues used to utter the “mute inglorious Milton” dogma: their belief that, but for the lack of an elementary education, a great genius like John Milton might be languishing in some obscure village, prevented from presenting his gifts to the world. It was the dogma behind the spread of public education, in the century before last. Countless billions have been spent in support of this dogma, and continue to be spent on what is now called the “no child left behind” principle. Like most liberal dogmas, it is probably the precise reverse of the truth. Those with real gifts invariably find ways to express them, unless they are shot or imprisoned. The most accomplished men and women, more often than not, had no formal schooling in their area of expertise. And the effort to assist all those “mute inglorious Miltons” only created the obsession with credentials that assists the mediocre in shutting genius down. For the world looks a gift horse in the mouth, and is, contrary to the general understanding, extremely suspicious (perhaps rightly) of voluble glorious Miltons. Which is why, often decades later, hardly anyone has heard of them. For just one example, consider an obscure Belgian priest, Monsignor Georges Lemaître, who died in 1966, having made no credible effort to call attention to himself. Has my reader ever heard of him? No? This is the man who, as a monastic hobbyist of physics and astronomy, anticipated Hubble's law and then tricked out from it the “hypothesis of the primaeval atom,” published in 1931. This is known today as the “Big Bang theory,” and remains at the heart of contemporary cosmology. I'm sure my reader has heard of that. We do not know for whom the bell tolls, we do not know to whom we owe so much that we take for granted. Not only journalists, but the readers they serve, are distracted by glitz. Einstein tipped his hat to Lemaître, but we tip our hats to Einstein, because he was a man who knew how to be a star. Not that he doesn't occupy an important place in the scientific firmament. But I have given this one example to illustrate how reality is more subtle than appearance. The journalist's prayer, at the end of each year, should be, “I don't know what happened in the year just passed, and I won't know what is happening next year. Lord preserve me from the smugness of those who think they know, and help me to see thy truth.” David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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