Barbarians Such as the World Has Never Known?

     I hesitate to use the word "barbarian" to describe our current state of amnesia -- or, worse, our current pleasure in deriding our civic, intellectual, and spiritual forefathers.  That's because barbarians did not do that.  The change from nomadic tribesman to citizen does not mark the beginning of chronicles and memorials and feasts to honor the legendary heroes of one's people.  What changes is the form of the memorial -- in stone, perhaps, rather than merely in orally bequeathed poetry -- and the reasons for celebrating the virtue; no longer mere courage in the battlefield, but courage shown for the sake of one's country.  In other words, there is a fine continuity between celebrating the strength of Achilles and celebrating the bravery of Horatius at the bridge.

     So how should we describe this new thing in the world, a people without roots, tumbleweeds that flit and float from fad to fad, attracted by bright toys and flashy sleaze?  Postcultural, certainly, but also postbarbarian.  The barbarian has not been civilized yet; but what we have now are people who used to be civilized, and that seems to me to be a different thing entirely.  Right now I'm poking around in old schoolbooks, readers from the 1800's, for instance.  The literary quality of the pieces included in Holmes' Fifth Reader is impressive (selections by Shakespeare, Dickens, Macaulay, Browning, Henry Clay, John Marshall, for example).  Even the dated pieces by writers we no longer recognize are not all that bad.  What strikes me most powerfully, though, is the assumption by the anthologist that the young reader will be edified, literally "built up," by his encounter with the great writers of England and America.  The reader is expected to know, or to want to know, who General Anthony Wayne was, or what John Marshall was like in his personal habits, or how Henry Clay rose from penury and ignorance to his long career of service in the Senate.  More than one kind of memory is exercised by these pieces; and it is not true that the students were encouraged never to question the complete wisdom of all those who came before them.  That surely was not possible, two decades after the Civil War.  Honor is not the same thing as supine submission.

     In any case, by any standard I can think of -- erudition, taste, depth of thought, sheer humanity -- there is no way I can consider that reader as the same sort of thing as the typical textbook or movie or television show aimed at adolescents now.  It would be like comparing the Aphrodite of Melos to an old stone age steatopygic (there's the word of the day) fertility doll, except that that's not fair to the men and women of Bedrock.

     The barbarian's roots were few but deep.  We have pulled our roots up.  I don't know what that makes us.   I don't know, either, what others will say, but I had rather sit by the fire with a gang of hunters or marauders and sing about the courage of Sigemund or the skill of Weland, than slouch on a sofa to sautee my mind and soul with Sex and the City.  Which is as much as to say, I kind of like a fully human life, with memories and traditions extending far into the venerable past, and connecting me with the future.  I'd rather be a barbarian with thirty years of that kind of long life, than whatever in the name of the regions below we are now, skittering for ninety years from pointless moment to moment.

Comments

[Beth]

William Wordsworth:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

[David Gray]

Dr. Esolen so often takes what I think and feel and expresses it in ways that are remarkably well done.

[labrialumn]

I have been using the term savages and savagery for those with no moral compass and no aesthetics.

I wonder what one should call those with some aesthetics, but no moral compass, which resembles our 'blue counties', and those with no aesthetics, but with a moral compass, which resembles our 'red counties'?

Tribal peoples, such as the American and African indigenes were -not- savages (except perhaps, for the cannibalistic witch-kings of the North American and Central-American city-states.

[labrialumn]

As I think about it, after having posted, I wonder if we should categorize thusly?

Garish aesthetics, moral compass - barbarians.

No moral compass, some aesthetics - savages.

No moral compass, no aesthetics - ferals.

?

[Rev. Jerry Gernander]

With remarkable consistency I have noticed that events transpiring in the visible church as well as in the secular culture are similar to the "Cultural Revolution" under Chairman Mao. This throwing-off of the past, resistance to history, etc., appears to me to be the same thing taking place in America -- whether in the church, the home, the newspaper, the TV, the government, the public schools etc. -- which took place in communist China.

Rev. Jerry Gernander

[Robert]

The barbarian has not been civilized yet; but what we have now are people who used to be civilized, and that seems to me to be a different thing entirely...The barbarian's roots were few but deep. We have pulled our roots up. I don't know what that makes us.

Feral.

[DBP+]

Rather than savage or "post-barbarian, how about "lapsed?"

The culture described, like the citizenry involved, might be likened to the Lapsed Bear of Stormness. Like him, we've allowed ourselves to become dumb and savage. It's all the more tragic to have been granted the power of speech only to cast it away. If only Corin-Thunderfist could box us a few rounds, maybe he could knock some sense into us as well.

[JustALurker]

I was thinking "brazenly hubristic." Once God is gone, and then the gods are gone, and then even the ability to recognize beauty is gone, man is ready, with the approval of his neighbor, to ascend The Throne himself and to make himself the measure of all things.

We're the only ones left who remind the world of God's rights as our creator and his righteous judgment. Why else the desire to silence of the saints?

[Stuart Koehl]

Again, I warn against mistaking the inanities of the elite for the beliefs of the common people. The roots are not gone, but you won't find evidence of them reading the antinomian drivel of the academic and media establishment. History as an academic discipline is dead, yet history remains one of the most popular non-fiction genres in publishing--and moreover, good, old fashioned historical narrative, great men, kings, queens, generals and great battles narrative history. Someone is reading this stuff, or it wouldn't get published. We, in fact, are living in something of a golden age of popular history, the breadth and quality of which is higher than I have ever seen it.

People are deprived of knowledge of their roots through "official" sources, which want to deracinate national identity so as to foster racial and sexual "identities". But people need roots, and they go looking for them. Sometimes they get there through rather indirect paths. I commend to you the entire geneology movement, which has exploded as online access to state and national archives has expanded, together with the proliferation of online database management programs that make manipulation of that information much easier for non-specialists. Once people begin tracking down their ancestors, questions about why or how somebody did something begin to come forth, and that in turn leads people to the investigation of history. I know my wife, brilliant as she is, was not particularly interested in history generally (within her own specialty she picked it up as needed), and tended to indulge my penchant for the obscure as quaint but harmless. Now, hunting down her family tree (and mine--shudder!) she finds history has its uses, and refers to me and my extensive library to find out more about the sitz in leben of her recently discovered forebears. And as that happens, her appreciation of history--our history--deepens tremendously. At any rate, I get a bit more respect around the house, and my books are no longer viewed as an unnecessary waste of money.

[Alistair Morley]

How about the following classifier:

Aesthetics and Moral Compass - Athenians

Aesthetics but No Moral Compass - Parthians

Moral Compasss but No Aesthetics - Spartans

Neither Aesthetics nor Moral Compass - Barbarians

[tony o]

A call to arms.
The Holy Catholic Church,as the Body of Christ, is as always the first defender and last bastion of truth, goodness, and beauty in the God's world. Having preserved the Gospel of Christ in its fullness through the vagaries and depredations of countless heresies, the Church is now facing, quite possible, the most significant and far-reaching heresy since the Arian controversies - the widespread rejection of revealed Truth and apostolic authority by the majority of the world's population as well as millions of the so-called "faithful."
The gross libertinism of the elite; the vague ghosticism and casual self-ingulgence of the many, the willful indifference to the carnage of the innocent. It is the same old story.
So let us gird up our loins, welcome any allies who will join us in the rejection of evil, and armed with the assurance of ultimate victory, meet the enemy with the weapons of truth, courage, fidelity and love.
Thanks be to God for the joy of battle and the endurance of the Church Militant.

[tony o]

sorry for the typos

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>Aesthetics and Moral Compass - Athenians<<<

That would be better phrased as aesthetics and dubious ethics. The Greeks all admired double-dealing, and the Athenians excelled at it. Ask Alcibiades. Their duplicity continued down to the Roman era, when they sided with Mithradates (bad move!) and were conquered by L. Cornelius Sulla Felix, who spared the city from sack, remarking, "How many times will the glories of your ancestors spare you from your follies?"

>>>Aesthetics but No Moral Compass - Parthians<<<

Utterly unfair to the Parthians, who were moral according to their lights, living according to their own code of honor and the laws and customs of their land.

>>>Moral Compasss but No Aesthetics - Spartans<<<

Not at all fair to the Spartans, who were known in their day for their musical ability, poetry, sculpture, pottery and laconic wit. But those namby-pamby philosophers in Athens always had good press.

>>>Neither Aesthetics nor Moral Compass - Barbarians<<<

Misunderstands the meaning of barbarian, which, for the Greeks, essentially referred to "otherness"--"non-Hellene". For Herotodus (and those who followed him), the key element of barbarism was lack of freedom, which in his mind meant subject to the whim of a king, rather than to the rule of law. But that in itself raises a lot of questions: As Tacitus tells us, the Germans (definitely barbarians) had a complex corpus of tribal law, and were not subject to kings in the Oriental manner. As for the aesthetic aspect, the Germans and Celts, as well as the Scythians, and indeed, even the Philistines, had a highly developed aesthetic and produced magnificent works of art in various media.

I suggest, then, that this whole discussion of "civilization" vs. "barbarians" is too deeply fraught with value-laden vocabulary to be amenable to an objective discourse.

[Rob G]

I read a piece this morning where critic George Panichas called today's modernists "meta-barbarians who dance and fornicate in the streets."

[JB Chesser]

I am reminded of article I read a few years back written by a BBC documentary cinematographer. He had gone to Mongolia to film nomadic herders. The clan patriarch was interviewed by the cinematographer. The patriarch was very gracious during the interview and offered every hospitality and comfort available in his tent. At the end of the interview the patriarch looked intently at the filmaker and offered his condolences and sympathy.

Taken aback the filmaker asked "What are you talking about?"

The patriarch replied, "If you had your own clan and people you would be home tending to your own affairs and people instead of being here talking to me."

Now who is the barbarian the nomadic herder or the twentyfirst century filmaker?

[Nevil Stone Coos]

[identity changed to keep from getting my arse fired...]

The word that one uses to describe a society once civilized, now conditioned to spot everything growing in the soil as a weed and uproot it, a society whose social comfort derives solely from cultural capital built up over scores of generations, now rapidly being squandered--such a word should be of late development; a word which until recently, like the societal pathology it describes, would have had no cause to exist, having no referent. Such a word would capture the devilish irony of chasing the immediate pleasures of the flesh (broadly construed), whilst blithely ignoring the constraints both of patrimony and posterity. That word I think, with due respect to those who do so self-identify, is: "Gay".

[labrialumn]

Rev. Gernander, that is the written avowed intention of the NEA. You are quite correct.

Stuart, exactly, but you said it better.

[Stuart Koehl]

>>>That word I think, with due respect to those who do so self-identify, is: "Gay".<<<

As I was mentioning somewhere else, if you are eighteen or under, "gay" is merely a synonym for "lame".