This morning’s Times conveyed a strong impression that summer has come to an end with a bang. That’s an illusion, of course: Ferguson was very much an August affair. So it must be the lousy weather. It might even be the case that, after a series of delicious postponements, the dog days of summer are finally with us. Something has certainly bedeviled the editors of the newspaper. Los Angeles streets are collapsing as water mains rupture. White English girls are sold into sexual slavery by Pakistani gangs (a story that ought to give color to Britain’s “severe” terrorist alert). President Obama thinks out loud, with results so perniciously embarrassing that perhaps thinking out loud ought to be an impeachable offense. The only people with any zest in today’s world, David Brooks sighs, are the ones who want to tear things down. Even Frank Bruni can’t tell us what the president ought to have said.

On days like this — dispiriting news, stifling humidity — I have a very hard time carrying on. The Pakistani gangs in Britain and the zealots of ISIS probably see eye to eye about very little, but one thing I’ll bet they can agree on is the subordination of women to the will of men. They are by no means alone in this. All the so-called Abrahamic religions are unambiguously rooted in absolute sexism. As fundamentally practiced, these religions are deeply opposed to the cosmopolitan spirit of what we call Western Civilization, and what is Western Civilization but a world view that evolved from the Abrahamic religions — and then left them behind? You don’t need to wander into Mesopotamia to encounter stiff resistance to this evolution. Pope Francis is, by all accounts, a very good man, but he is still the chief of a confraternity of celibate males that regards non-members as lesser Catholics while denying entry to females altogether. We may excuse Francis from the charge of tearing things down, however, because his organization has consistently refused to participate in the building of Western Civilization.

It is tough, in the age of reality television and twittering media, to argue for glory of Western Civilization, because its principal feature is the high-functioning autonomy of men and women in a safe and democratic society that harmonizes high levels of dissonance. People agree to disagree. This is not to be confused with indifference; it is, rather, a sign of active respect. As well as a sign of trust. The civilized human being truly understands that civilization is the byproduct of chaotically different ways of life jogging along together, united by no more than a regard for the health and safety of neighbors, especially as affected by one’s own behavior.

In our cynical, mediacentric age, trust and respect can seem almost foolish. This is certainly true wherever it has been forgotten that the wellspring of respect for others is self-respect. Among the saddest things that I’ve seen in the course of lifetime is the degeneration of self-respect into entitlement. Self-respect calls for a lot of hard work — a lot of laundry and shoe-shining, proper eating and, for those gifted with exceptional brains, plenty of mental exercise. Self-respect is not self-sacrifice: the point is not the hard work itself but the satisfaction of taking an unembarrassed part in public life. We don’t invent our own private ideas of self-respect — they’re to a great extent culturally determined. But we clear our own path, and that path leads not to inner clarity but to outer engagement.

For me, this outer engagement is a very quiet business, and might easily be mistaken by an observer for the disengagement of a hermit. I spend most of my day alone. I keep my small talk with neighbors and shopkeepers very small. I avoid the telephone. But this is all for the sake of maximizing my engagement with other writers, especially writers who have taken up the questions of humanity in history. I want to know more about human beings. Because I want to know about them in their human totality, my curiosity is not scientific; indeed, I’ve lately come to understand that analysis of any kind is detrimental to the pursuit of humane learning. Breaking problems down into manageable parts may be vital to engineers, but it is fatal to humanists, because to regard a human being as a problem is to kill it — or, which comes near to the same thing, to wish it were dead. At any rate, for me, the best days are the ones on which nothing obliges me to think very much about myself.

“The humanities” is a term with many meanings. When the word began to attract my interest, about ten years ago, I was vexed to discover two mutually antipathetic camps of humanists, divided by the question of faith in God. One camp was, not surprisingly, very enthusiastic about God, but the other was, I thought, rather disproportionally engaged in discrediting God. For me, the humanities begin when all questions of deity have been set aside.

In other words, the humanities as I understand them date to the emergence of Western Civilization.

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Unfortunately, humanists have been very slow to recognize the importance of economics as a specialized field of the study of human beings. As a result, economics, despite its roots in the moral philosophy of the Enlightenment, was abandoned to the analysts, the thinkers who break things down into problems and whose solutions are expressed in terms of engineered mechanism. If, then. Statistical studies suggest what most people will or will not do, but they can’t tell us what any particular individual will do. So, individual action, like friction in physics, gets discounted. Analytic economists are good at dismissing questions — especially little questions about little people — that their analytical equipment doesn’t process very well. The centerpiece of analytic economics is the idea of the free market society, in which all benefits and burdens are negotiable, not just the things for sale in shops.

It is no wonder that the triumph of the free market society model in Western politics has coincided with the recrudescence of religious fundamentalism. The one, with its endlessly tradable values, is totally free of true principle, while the other absolutely refuses to negotiate questions of principle. The two are made for each other! What used to be society becomes an empty market place.  What used to be personal engagement with society is now a private relationship with God. The earth may be a vale of tears, but this is a coalition of ideas that puts nothing in the way of piling up huge material fortunes.

Western Civilization cannot survive the coalition of free market economics and religious fundamentalism.

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Daily Blague news update: Echoes.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2014 at 9:49 am.