Toward a civilization of love: “We live in a broken world”
On October 13, 2001, Professor Bainard Cowan of Louisiana State University spoke at Thomas More College in New Hampshire on what literature has to say to us after the terrible events of last year. While some of his talk goes over my head, I find the whole thing evocative.
Aristotle taught that poetry is more universal than history. Poetry – and by poetry I mean any good work of imaginative literature – is not only therapy for media-bruised souls; it reconnects us with the deep experience of the human race, which has lived through so many wars yet kept the dream of peace and freedom alive.
Surprisingly, however, we turn to our trusted poets and find that the resonance of their words has changed. And this in turn is a reconfirmation that something significant has taken place. I was giving a lecture to my core curriculum freshmen at LSU on the day after the attacks, speaking to them of the recurrent characteristics of epic in all traditions, and I came to the point that the epic often contains at its beginning – the image of a burning city – the ruin of the old order out of which the call to a new and unknown destiny arises. I was stunned at the unwished-for aptness of this observation for our moment; and I think the students were stunned, too; they did at least seem to be awakened. This image of the burning city is a poetic image and so a reflective one, and I want to get back to it later as a possible interpretant for our time.
The West is awaking, says Cowan, from the complacent slumber of the post-Cold War era and the dot-com age.
Since the late 1980s and the significant changes in the world then, it has seemed the world was being freed up to become what it is meant to be in the new human dispensation. Francis Fukuyama announced the “end of history” in a much-discussed book. As we look around at the changed world of October 2001 we realize that that view was lacking in drama. A new role for danger, for antagonism, for “evil,” as it is being called, had not yet been envisioned until the larger moral canvas was unrolled on us by force.
Yeats writes in the poem titled “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”:We too had many pretty toys when young:
A law indifferent to blame or praise,
To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong
Melt down, as it were wax in the sun’s rays;
Public opinion ripening for so long
We thought it would outlive all future days.
O what fine thought we had because we thought
That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.Yeats speaks here of his own historical moment of emergence from the late Victorian era, when it had been believed that civilization and gentle ways had triumphed. Yet more deeply he is speaking of that acedia, that numbness of the soul born of a narcissistic fascination with one’s own vision of utopia.
And, more telling, in the poem “Meditations in Time of Civil War” he speaks of the false romantic hopes at the start of wars:We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare;
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
[That is, the empty nest of the starling.]
Troubling indeed if that line “More substance in our enmities / Than in our love” should apply to our time. Before September it seemed unquestionably true, but in a game with smaller stakes. Now the times try our hearts as to which will dominate, with immense consequences….
The brutal blows of September constitute a violent awaking out of a decade of self-absorption…. It does remind us, however, of that profound truth that we live in a broken world. The last decade has produced too much forgetfulness of the world, the awareness of which could scarcely interrupt our dizzy fascination with electronic technology and the wealth it brings, and our self-absorption in petty quarrels[….] America can no longer feign boredom at the state of the world that is in shadow while we are in sunlight.
There is more in Dr. Cowan’s address: communications technology has transformed the world of thought, bringing the vision of a united world – about which Teilhard waxed so optimistic – ever closer to reality. Will man make this world united in something more than merely economic relationships?
Violence and suffering are the crude tools that history uses to refine the vision that is sheltered in the hearts of the just. For the vision is not a brief dream that will dissipate. We encounter it as soon as we turn to anything real that our new conflict has forced upon us. Not the chessboard of counterterrorism, but the faces of Afghan refugees. Faces of the world’s poor that have flooded our TV screens for a decade but that we have not known what to do with, how to make those images square with the vision of bright interconnection of every happy consumer. The vision has needed a leap of imagination. It needs a realist phase, tightening and toughening.
There is a time when a vision must be held to in the darkness. In the bright day of its early celebration, the vision may imperceptibly become the worship of a golden calf. Vision is tested by the pitch black of real historical contingency, the incontrovertible reality of the other, the recalcitrance of the real world whose resistance is not so much made of matter as it is of mind – the minds of others who do not think like us. In these times the vision is held on to by holding on to its opposite: not seeing – not knowing what the plan is, not having a plan for a peaceful new world order, but holding on to the old verities in the new encounters we are forced into: courage, justice tempered with mercy, compassion, understanding.
America must take the lead in this work.
