Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. I'm sure that almost everyone in this so-called postmodern era that we live through knows these few lines from Yeats's poem The Second Coming. Either you had one terrific English Lit teacher in your youth or you've seen it quoted in Oliver Stone's movie on Nixon. Strangely enough, this poem from one century ago can still haunt us because we're actually still restless, if only we allow yourselves to be totally honest about it, because of what happens all around of us. In the past I've tried to cope with this apparent unease and sense of disconnect by a constant look for a reason but not an actual cause. Perhaps I've found the reason at last and I wanted to share it with you.
During the 'birthing decades' for our present predicament (otherwise a said period called The Age of Enlightenment), there were many conflicts fought between what one could endeavour to call 'reason and romanticism'. Moreover, at the same time there was also the sudden and almost total disappearance of Christianity as the major creative force on this planet. Personally, I always remember the words of Kenneth Clark ending his tv-series on Civilization here: "I hold a number of beliefs that have been repudiated by the liveliest intellects of our time. I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must try to learn from history.”
The said dark, hollow feeling of certain unease arising from the actual denial of many of those well-stated, in essence highly civilized, beliefs for a society that was then and that we're still living today, or perhaps even the total elimination of value aminating from the lessons taught by Jesus Christ in what is better known as The Sermon on the Mount, is utterly devastating. There's no point in denying it because it is, and high forms of human expression are telltales for it. Once we've started to consider the actual culture of the Viking (in effect only marauding bands of thugs) more highly (or even holier) than the ever reaffirming and constructive civilisation of medieval monastic life, well, there's a definite problem hanging over our existance. Moreover, something like the late 19th Century's Heroic Materialism has shown in spades that it's indeed not (dare I say) good enough to substain us in the last century.
In Clark's episode on the protestant reformation he lays out four requisites for a civilisation of true worth: intellectual energy; freedom of mind; a sense of beauty; and a craving for immortality. He adds, in speaking of Shakespeare: “one of the first ways in which I would justify civilisation is that it can produce genius on this scale.” This leads to our ultimate obligation to accept the argument that the source for the three human faculties of having rationality, morality and sensibility is indeed the same: there's a certain inherent and benign order to the universe that integrates human beings, society, and nature, and that we're capable of detecting and using this order to fully live our lives and realize our full potential.
