The Rejection of the Ancients

I am currently reading through Jacques Barzun's magnum on Western culture, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life. Barzun, the polymath who passed away in October just shy of his 105th birthday wrote this bestselling history in 2000, at the age of 93. After hearing about him on NPR following his death I bought the book from Amazon and starting listening to his favorite composer, Hector Berlioz, the nineteenth century French Romantic.

The book is great. I could try to come up with a more laudatory adjective, but great covers it. It is hard to imagine a mind reared in contemporary academia writing a book like this, so broad ranging and comprehensive. And Barzun refuses to buy into all of the prejudices of current thought. For example, on Christopher Columbus, the now universally loathed explorer, Barzun has this to say:

"The Spanish colonists committed atrocities from greed and racist contempt that nothing can palliate or excuse. But to blame Columbus is a piece of retrospective lynching; he was not the master criminal inspiring all the rest. It is moreover a mistake to think that because the native peoples were the sufferers, all of them were peaceable innocents. The Caribs whom Columbus first encountered had fought and displaced the Anawaks who occupied the islands. . . In short, what happened on the newfound hemisphere in early modern times continued the practice of the old. . . Everywhere the story is one of invasion, killing, rape, and plunder and occupation of the land that belonged to the vanquished. Today, this fusion or dispersion of peoples and cultures by means of death and destruction is abhorred in principle but flourishing in fact. Africa, the Middle and Far East, and South Central Europe are still theaters of conquest and massacre. And Columbus is not the responsible party." (100-101)

Columbus or white Europeans or Catholicism or Christianity more broadly or plain old avarice are nice to have as convenient scapegoats, transcending, as we imagine ourselves to be, all of these old shackles currently, but Barzun notes that the same things we blame on the evils we are casting aside are propagated by non-white, non-Christians all over this planet at this very moment. It reminds me of that great episode of South Park where Cartman goes to the future and witnesses the interstellar war between various atheist alliances, fighting it out over who best understands unbelief.

There is a sort of fatalism to Barzun's observations that call to mind the chastened Milton at the end of his career in the dark days of the Restoration, blind and worldly defeated, when he voices through the archangel Michael the following: "So shall the world go on/ To good malignant, to bad men benign/ Under her own weight groaning, till the day/ Appear of respiration to the just/ And vengeance to the wicked." Milton's vision had an apocalyptic bent to it, but his point is largely the same as Barzun's, namely that we aren't getting better. It may look like it for a time, but then the hope fails and the vision dies.

What our demonizing of figures from the past underscores, and the subject of Barzun's next chapter on the rise of utopian fantasy in the sixteenth century, is the way in which we have inherited from this Renaissance era a sort of disdain for the past, the curious belief that somehow as a species we have made dramatic improvements in all metrics and are now free to banish our ancestors. I would argue that this progressivity applies to both right and left, though each would cite different data to prove their claim.

Barzun and Milton both recognize the fallacy of progressive thought. History is cyclical, in a number of important ways, not linear. A culture develops through barbarism to a level of gentility, imagines itself enlightened, and then sloughs into decay to be either defeated by an opposing civilization or to rot from within (or both). Such was the fate for great cultures of the past; such is the fate of the West. So shall the world go on.