December 21, 2002
A HANDFUL OF DUST:
-SPEECH: How the West Was Won and How It Will Be Lost (Oriana Fallaci, January/February 2002, American Enterprise)My small book is not tender with Islam. In certain passages, it is even ferocious. But it is much more ferocious with us: with us Italians, us Europeans, us Americans.I call my book a sermon-addressed to the Italians, to the Europeans, the Westerners. And along with the rage, this sermon unchains the pride for their culture, my culture. That culture that in spite of its mistakes, its faults, even monstrosities, has given so much to the world. It has moved us from the tents of the deserts and the huts of the woods to the dignity of civilization. It has given us the concept of beauty, of morals, of freedom, of equality. It has made the unique conquest in the social field, in the realm of science. It has wiped out diseases. It has invented all the tools that make life easier and more intelligent, those tools that our enemy can also use, for instance, to kill us. It has brought us to the moon and to Mars, and this cannot be said of the other culture. A culture, which has produced and produces only religion, which in every sense imprisons women inside the burkah or the chador, which is never accompanied by a drop of freedom, a drop of democracy, which subjugates its people under theocratical, oppressive regimes.
Socrates and Aristotle and Heraclitus were not mullahs. Jesus Christ, neither. Leonardo da Vinci and Michaelangelo, and Galileo, and Copernicus, and Newton and Pasteur and Einstein, the same.
My book is also a j'accuse. To accuse us of cowardice, hypocrisy, demagogy, laziness, moral misery, and of all that comes with that. The stupidity of the unbearable fad of political correctness, for instance. The paucity of our schools, our universities, our young people, people who often don't even know the story of their country, the names Jefferson, Franklin, Robespierre, Napoleon, Garibaldi. And no understanding that freedom cannot exist without discipline, self-discipline.
Jeffrey Hart, in his book, Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe, begins with a lovely description of the necessity for a culture to educate its citizens, borrowed from fellow Dartmouth professor, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy:
He would say, "History must be told." He explained in various ways that history is to a civiliztion what personal memory is to an individual: an essential part of identity and a source of meaning.He also said that the goal of education is the citizen. He defined the citizen in a radical and original way arising out of his own twentieth-century experience. He said that a citizen is a person who, if need be, can re-create his civilization.
What has happened in Europe and what we risk having happen here is the loss of this kind of citizenship. In the elevation of the individual--and the illusory "freeing" of Man from the "bonds" of history, morality, tradition, etc.--lies the loss of the civilization. The West is atomizing mankind, but the atom, unlike DNA, cannot replicate the whole. Posted by Orrin Judd at December 21, 2002 12:01 PM
The same argument, at great length, but with
more circumspection, is in Gress, "From Plato
to NATO."
I'm all for teaching our own history. I do not
believe that conservatives, as a group, are
willing to do so. I know I came out of a
deeply conservative tradition, and the history
I was taught was all lies.
The real story, as I learned on my own, was
equally, or even more, edifying and useful and
had the advantage of being as true as history
can get.
Yesterday, people here were talking about
Buckley. Nobody better represents history as
an extended lie.
The truth is out there.
Posted by: oj at December 21, 2002 4:57 PMHarry. Please define "conservative" as you use it in reference to your childhood.
Posted by: David Cohen at December 21, 2002 8:30 PMProbably apocryphal, but it is said that in the Dark Ages following the fall of Rome, people used Roman roads and aqueducts for centuries, but had no idea how to design and build same. Point being that civilization is fragile.
Posted by: F.A. Jacobsen at December 21, 2002 11:28 PMI was raised Roman Catholic in the Deep
South. Full-on neoPlatonist education,
social environment that assumed inequality.
Except for the fact that -- for reasons I do not
understand -- my parents were antiracist,
my background combined the most conservative
elements of Italian Catholicism and southern
agrarianism.
I don't think you can get much more conservative
than that.