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