By JUDE DOUGHERTY
I did not realize how addicted I was to euphemisms distinctly American until one of my books was being translated into German. The translator had a difficult time rendering into German some of my colloquial expressions.
Readers of the American press are used to terms like “bandwagon,” “landslide,” “dead duck,” “breathing room,” and “strident,” particularly in an election year. Most readers will have some idea of what is meant by “Silicon Valley,” “Rust Belt,” and “ivory tower.”
Yet many may be puzzled by headlines such as “Russia’s Agenda in Syria a Tight-Rope Act,” or reports of a “hybrid war that fits into Mr. Putin’s comfort zone.”
Confronted with such reporting, informed readers will recognize at work the editorial policy of the newspaper in question. It doesn’t take much experience to know that reporting of scientific achievement can be grossly misleading as a journalist attempts to explain to an uneducated public a discovery of some import.
If it is difficult to determine truth in the present, how much more difficult it is to interpret the past. Philosophers in the 20th century such as Benedetto Croce, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer have wrestled with the scientific status of historical research. A worthy topic to be sure. As Heidegger puts it, “How can the historical factum have a transcendent value?”
A narrative is of the particular; science is of the universal. Yet the ancients, no less intelligent than we, have much to tell us much about nature and human nature. We read Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, Thucydides and Plutarch, and Homer’s Odyssey for what they can tell us about human propensities. Plutarch’s Parallel Lives is a case in point. The Lives, a series of biographies of famous Greeks and Romans, arranged in pairs, was explicitly written to illuminate their common moral virtues and vices.
The past is past, but it can tell us something about the present because human nature is a constant. The historical event can become meaningful in other places than its own and in no way compromise its concrete status as factual.
Russell Kirk tells us that he was once the guest of Basil Smith, at York Minster, also known as St. Peter’s Church, the Metropolitan Cathedral of the York region. Seated in the parlor of a medieval mansion within the York close, Canon Smith said, “We linger at the end of an era. Soon the culture we have known will be swept into the dustbin of history.”
Kirk, writing about 20 years later in an essay published in Modern Age, adds, “At the time he said that in 1990, I thought him too gloomy, but already a great deal of what he foresaw has come to pass.” Smith, given his knowledge of history and theology, was equipped to make the judgment. “About us as we talked, loomed Smith’s tall bookcase lined with handsome volumes, his doxological clock chimed the half-hour musically, flames flared up in his fireplace.” Were all these symbols of a cultured life destined to vanish?
T.S. Eliot, no less pessimistic than Canon Smith, Kirk reminds us, is convinced that we are stumbling into a new Dark Age, inhumane, merciless, a totalistic political domination in which the life of the spirit will be denounced, harassed, and propagandized against. Kirk then asks, “Is a reinvigoration of our culture possible? Is the course of nations inevitable? Is there some fixed destiny for great states?”
Clearly ideas have consequences. Not only in logic but in the annals of a nation or a people. Obviously history is written from a point of view. Reliable historians admit as much, yet labor to be objective. Johannes Fried, in the introduction to his authoritative work The Middle Ages, admits to a peculiar interest insofar as he attempts to understand the role of religion in promoting civic unity, that is, from Gregory the Great (reigned from 590 to 604) onward. That interest in no way mitigates the objectivity of his magnificent chronicle of events.
Kirk, in the company of T.S. Eliot, anticipated what Fried was later to document in his subsequently published history, namely, that throughout history religion, that is, people worshiping together, contributes to the indispensable civic unification of a community or nation.
In further drawing upon Eliot, he called attention to the fact that man is the only creature who possesses culture, as distinguished from instinct, and if his culture is effaced, so is the distinction between man and the brute. With consequences you can imagine. Kirk confides that he once recommended T.S. Eliot’s Notes Towards the Definition of Culture to President Richard Nixon, a 1948 volume that remains relevant.
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