Civilization for Dummies

There is no such book as Civilization for Dummies though it’s what a modern man might hope to find if, that is, he were aware of the nature or even existence of such a complex entity as a ‘civilization’. In fact, modern man has decayed into that barbarian child foreseen by Jose Ortega Y Gasset, a barbaric child living in the midst of a great city from which his parents and other adults have disappeared. The city is simply his natural environment rather than a great work of past generations. Until recently, it has seemed as if there were plenty of material goods for having a good time and generally living well, but we can fear what the rapidly approaching future might hold for us. I wouldn’t predict an apocalypse but I might predict a century of darkness, ignorance, and poverty such as that which followed the High Middle Ages, fooling Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers into believing that the entire Middle Ages had so dark.

I believe it likely that Western Civilization will eventually revive for it has been quite resilient, surviving not only internal economic and political crises but also barbarian invasions and near-conquest by the Turkish or North African empires. Moreover, major changes in human views of their world were adopted and integrated into an enlarged and enriched Western intellectual structure. This resiliency and adaptability was largely provided by a balanced respect for the abstract and the concrete, for speculative and empirical knowledge, which was grounded upon the the Christian philosophy of moderate realism summarized by the American historian Carrol Quigley in these words: “The truth unfolds in time through a communal process.” (See Ways of Thought in the Modern West.)

I’ll cut through a lot of complicated historical analysis and simply make the claim that books have played an essential role in Western Civilization because they allow us to take empirical data which is beyond the reach of any one mind and to abstract it into knowledge which can then be used in speculative efforts to attain greater understanding. Books allow the construction of complex networks of understanding of Creation which can then be disciplined to God’s revelations of His purposes as Creator. Books allow us to better explore and understand and properly use our world.

Nowadays, we of the West are increasingly illiterate. Even many of those in the shrinking pool of highly skilled readers don’t always have the attitudes of the literate. All things considered, many of our most highly educated citizens would no more choose to read a difficult book than would our citizens with only rudimentary reading skills. To be truly literate, you must have a great deal of respect for books and for bookish forms of knowledge. You must desire to entertain yourself and teach yourself in bookish ways. You must be as willing to exercise your visual and mental literary skills as a swimmer is to work his lungs and skeletal muscles. It’s not sufficient to have good reading skills to be deployed when necessary for immediate purposes. Those reading skills will have been lost just as a swimmer who doesn’t work out daily will soon lose his speed and endurance.

Real books, not books written for self-proclaimed dummies, are an ideal form for human beings to engage in a conversation over the centuries. That sort of sustained conversation is a running commentary upon human events, a commentary which forms a narrative too complex for any individual human mind to actually understand, though it’s understandable in principle to a human with a well-formed mind. Empirical knowledge from various sources can be bound together by speculation and the entire mess can be abstracted to a higher level which may well cut across cultures or even across phases of Creation.

It was the City of God and not some St. Augustine for Dummies which helped found Western Civilization. It was Shakespeare’s Henry V which gave voice to the English nation as truly such. A Cliff Notes version might be a useful study aid but it’s hard to imagine such stuff giving a strong sense of nationhood to a mob of Anglo-Normans and Saxons and Welshmen and Gaels and various and sundry other tribesmen.

The more complex a nation, and certainly a civilization enfolding multiple nations, the more complex the stories which bind the parts and the whole together. Inhabitants of a complex, well-ordered civilization need a correspondingly complex literacy that a correspondingly complex and well-ordered story, or set of stories, may be told and heard. We have particular problems in our age because our newer and richer understanding of the stuff of this world and how it acts and relates to other stuff is not going to be so easy to integrate into our thoughts as it was to integrate Euclidean geometry and Aristotelian physics nor is our current understanding of the origins and nature of the Bible going to be so easy to integrate as it was to integrate simpler views about Moses being literally the author of the Pentateuch which was seen as speaking literalistic truth about a variety of issues. It will also not be so easy to integrate our modern understanding of man as it was to integrate a simple view that man was created as a creature somehow endowed with something called a ‘mind’.

I’m oversimplifying, but, my point is that so many human beings, including many proclaimed as great thinkers, are convinced that man was given access to absolute truths about Creation and intellectual history was to be no more than filling in some details. We are instead confronted with a world which must be understood by shaping our own ways of thought to match with that sometimes disedifying reality, a reality which can’t be described by books which fit on the shelves of any one library.

The narrative of Creation I’m working on — though no one man or even generation could finish it — would consider our inherited knowledge from Jerusalem and Athens, our immense mountains of empirical knowledge, and plausible speculations which tie it all together so that it makes sense as stuff created by God and a story being told by God using that stuff. As I said above, this would be a very complex narrative, one certainly not reducible to any sort of Civilization for Dummies.

We had a vibrant civilization in the West when we had a substantial number of human beings in the West who had faith in the Biblical stories and some faith in the appropriate and tentative narratives told by their poets and philosophers and — more recently — their physicists and biologists and mathematicians. We have no such faith in the Bible, no narratives worthy of the vast accumulations of knowledge in our libraries and computers. Not surprisingly, we also have a decaying civilization. Despite the belief of some that science and other empirical fields of knowledge have somehow come to dominance over revealed knowledge and faith, I don’t even see evidence there are many scientists or historians who have a coherent view of science beyond the horizons of their own highly specialized fields. Not only has the center not held, the pieces have themselves fragmented.