Here’s an old weird incomprehensible drawing I did some time ago. It accompanied an old post (below) on Portland’s blog.
Advocates of Western civilization increasingly suffer bewilderment. It is the type of bewilderment described in a nightmare of Malcolm Muggerridge. The setting is backstage in a theater. As he waits in the wings for his cue, he hears the play bumbling along. Suddenly he realizes that the play he hears is not the play to which he has a script. “Panic seizes me; I wonder frenziedly what I should do. Then I get my cue. Stumbling, falling over the unfamiliar scenery, I make my way onto the stage, and there look for guidance to the prompter, whose head I can just see rising out of the floor boards. Alas, he only signals helplessly to me, and I realise that of course his script is different from mine. I begin to speak my lines, but they are incomprehensible to the other actors and abhorrent to the audience who begin to hiss and shout: ‘Get off the stage!’ ‘Let the play go on!’ ‘You’re interrupting!’ I am paralysed and can think of nothing to do but to go on standing there and speaking my lines that don’t fit. The only lines I know.”
This happened to Mark Helprin when he clashed with an audience from a university town in Massachusetts. “By some quirk which I hope never to see reproduced, and before I knew what was happening, I found myself debating my entire audience on the subjects of human sacrifice and cannibalism. These well-educated and polite people — only a few of whom would actually have murdered or eaten one another — who had sons and daughters, Ph.D.s, and BMWs, were defending the Mayan and Aztec practice of human sacrifice — that is, in the main, of children — and the South Sea custom of cannibalism.” Helprin suggests that when faced with the option to defend Western Civilization or cannibalism, it is more fashionable to defend cannibalism.
The legendary American literary critic Leslie Fielder once wrote:
“We continue to insist that change is progress, self-indulgence is freedom and novelty is originality. In these circumstances it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that Western man has decided to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brings the walls of his city crumbling down.”
Leslie Fielder wrote this well before Jesse Jackson led Stanford University students in the chant: “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Western Civ Has Got to Go.” Fielder also wrote it before the University of Chicago ignored its student council, both of its student papers, it’s alumni (including Nobel Prize winning novelist Saul Bellow), the National Association of Scholars, and decided to phase out its popular and celebrated History of Western Civilization class. University of Chicago president Don Randel seemed to believe that an appreciation for our culture was a 19th century phenomena that we’ve moved beyond.
Sometimes one can find a fellow cast member who possesses the same script. I feel that Mark Helprin, the previously mentioned novelist, is such a fellow. In a 2002 commencement speech, he expanded Clarence Darrow’s charge to the class of 1918. Darrow commanded, “Get out of here, and go swimming.” Helprin lengthened this by a third: “Get out of here, go swimming, and save Western Civilization.”
Here’s an excerpt from his beautiful speech:
If civilization can be attacked on many fronts, it can also be defended on many fronts, and to do so you need not necessarily drop into Afghanistan by parachute or found a political party. Last summer, in Venice, I was walking from room to room in the Accademia, which, unlike timid American museums, throws its windows wide open to the light and air of day. As if to bring even further alive the greatness and truth of the Bellinis and the Giorgiones on the walls, the galleries were flooded with music. As is most everything in Italy, it was unofficial. It came from a guitarist and a soprano on a side street. He played while she sang — gloriously — Bach, Handel, Mozart, and anonymous folk songs of the 18th Century. Because it was music, I cannot properly convey to you how beautiful it was, but it was accomplished, precise, and infused with the ineffable quality that lifts great art above that which merely aspires to or pretends to be great art. I could not see them from the windows, but when, several hours later, I went outside, they had neither ceased, nor skipped a beat, nor produced a single false note.
They were impoverished Poles, who appeared to be in their late twenties. She was thin, sharp-featured, and hauntingly beautiful. Most people simply passed them by, some dropped a few coins in a basket at her feet, and the visitors to the Accademia had no idea who they were, but she sang as if she were bathed in the footlights of La Scala, where she should have been, and where someday she may be. It did not matter that they were unrecognized, that they sang on the street, or that they were desperately poor, because that day in Venice they rose above everyone else, except perhaps the saints. In this they shared a brotherhood with the American soldier who made the first parachute jump, in the dark, into Afghanistan. For they and he were defending the civilization of the West, and they and he are inextricably linked. Without the soldier, they could not exist except in subjugation, and without them, he would not have enough to fight for.
I ask you to join this brotherhood, and, in your own way, whatever that may be, to defend and champion the sanctity of the individual, free and objective inquiry, government by consent of the governed, freedom of conscience, and the pursuit — rather than the degradation and denial — of truth and of beauty.
