Ode
By Arthur O’Shaughnessy
We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams; —
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world’s great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire’s glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song’s measure
Can trample a kingdom down.
We, in the ages lying,
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself in our mirth;
And o’erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world’s worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.
A breath of our inspiration
Is the life of each generation;
A wondrous thing of our dreaming
Unearthly, impossible seeming —
The soldier, the king, and the peasant
Are working together in one,
Till our dream shall become their present,
And their work in the world be done.
They had no vision amazing
Of the goodly house they are raising;
They had no divine foreshowing
Of the land to which they are going:
But on one man’s soul it hath broken,
A light that doth not depart;
And his look, or a word he hath spoken,
Wrought flame in another man’s heart.
And therefore to-day is thrilling
With a past day’s late fulfilling;
And the multitudes are enlisted
In the faith that their fathers resisted,
And, scorning the dream of to-morrow,
Are bringing to pass, as they may,
In the world, for its joy or its sorrow,
The dream that was scorned yesterday.
But we, with our dreaming and singing,
Ceaseless and sorrowless we!
The glory about us clinging
Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing:
O men! it must ever be
That we dwell, in our dreaming and singing,
A little apart from ye.
For we are afar with the dawning
And the suns that are not yet high,
And out of the infinite morning
Intrepid you hear us cry —
How, spite of your human scorning,
Once more God’s future draws nigh,
And already goes forth the warning
That ye of the past must die.
Great hail! we cry to the comers
From the dazzling unknown shore;
Bring us hither your sun and your summers;
And renew our world as of yore;
You shall teach us your song’s new numbers,
And things that we dreamed not before:
Yea, in spite of a dreamer who slumbers,
And a singer who sings no more.
I don’t agree with Durant though. Sometimes an individual dies and no one takes his place. Likewise with a civilization. I think a culture will exist any time you have more than one person, but “civilization” implies order, both organizational and moral. I don’t know; maybe the word “culture” carries that implication too, but not to me. I can look at China and recognize that it has a great culture, but I see it falling short of the standards of civilization. So, like, after Rome fell there were still people and they behaved and spoke in their ways, but there wasn’t a replacement for a couple hundred years.
The barbarian states were ephemeral successor states of Rome. Eventually monarchies were established in Spain and France, with the Franks ultimately starting a new line of Emperors courtesy of Pope Leo. Usually when a polity is ended a successor state arises, but sometimes it is an entity like Rome that erases over centuries pre-existing states. The Arabs are the prime example of this in many of their conquests.
I’d also disagree with Durant. Christianity produced a civilization in the West that has been unique in its commitment to human liberty and dignity. Prior to the rise of the Christian West, for example, slavery was an institution almost universally accepted— and even with Christian morality arguing against that barbarism, it took a great effort for the West to eradicate that ‘peculiar institution’. If the civilization of the Christian West (or what remains of it today) were to utterly collapse, I don’t see much reason to think that what replaces it would have any interest in maintaining the rights we believe are God-given.
The only cultures I can see succeeding the West should it collapse would
be either China, the Islamic Mideast, or our own homegrown totalitarian wannabes— or some ghastly hybrid of some or all of the above.
And with the advent of social media, social credit systems like what we see in China today, and especially AI—the tools available to totalitarians is unlike anything the world has ever seen. Couple that tech with a civilization unconstrained by any belief in God-given human rights… it would make nazi Germany or Stalin’s Russia look like child’s play.
I’m not sure that’s a hole humanity could crawl out of.
Unfortunately, “civilization”, while useful as a sort of placeholder term, has no universally accepted meaning. I have seen archaeologists grow quite heated debating what is or isn’t civilization. Basically, it boils down to what one Supreme Court Justice said about pornography, “I know it when I see it.” That being said, however, I can offer no truly functional alternative to the term at this time. Neologisms could be forged, but by whose authority? Just one old anthro major’s contribution to the discussion.
BTW, just as a bit if info, the entirety of the Durants’ 11 volume “Story of Civilization” is available as a free download online. Oneathesedays I am going to buy a vast amount of paper and printer ink and print my copy out, to be placed in binders.
A social science major? You’ve seen some stuff.
I remember Buckley saying that Christianity is the pinnacle of civilization. That’s the way I think of the word “civilization”. Plato probably had a great word for it.
I remember Buckley saying that Christianity is the pinnacle of civilization.
I would agree but for the supernatural element. Christianity when viewed as supernatural transcends civilization.
I can look at China and recognize that it has a great culture, but I see it falling short of the standards of civilization.
Civilization refers to division of labor, the establishment of towns and cities, and the advent of written language. That appeared in stages in the Yellow River valley between 1900 bc and 1100 bc.
The conventional delineation of world civilizations – China, India, the Muslim world, and the West isn’t lacking for boundary conditions.
Going big here, there was something that Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle “got”, each of them moreso. I’d describe it as the proper conception of the relationship between truth and freedom, but that’s a description rather than a definition. The word “proper” is doing a lot of work there. Societies that have also “gotten it” have been what I’d call civilized.
There’s another thing, revelation, which contains a lot of truth that we wouldn’t have discovered without it being revealed.
I look at the Golden Age of Islam, and they were doing a better job at civilization than the West for a while, thanks to Aristotle. When Islamic culture threw away Aristotle, we picked him up, and we got our own Golden Age, and did a better job of it because we also had the truth of revelation.
The truth of revelation is a really practical thing. You can advance a civilization pretty far without it, but never beyond certain barriers. To clear those barriers, you need to believe in a God who is good.
Art:
You are correct: civilization is a material, and not an ethical state. Moderns who call the Nazis “barbarians” have to ignore certain facts, such as that 1920s Germany had world-class universities, more people with college degrees even than France (according to Paul Johnson), leadership in science, technology, philosophy, music (the last stretching back to the 17th century), even in film and photography. Yet enthusiasm for Aryan racial superiority was growing in the universities even before WWI. No: Nazism was a civilized horror, such as modern liberalism has become with its support of abortion, perversion, statism and its own brands of racial politicking. And let’s not get started on Communism.
Tom B., to go old school and use Ruth Benedict’s categories, the most madness of Germany was Apollonian. Which, in mine own opinion, is a grester horror than the Dionysian. The rational mind gone gone bad can plunge the human soul into depths the ecstatic cannot begin to approach.