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The Dead Peoples
Society
By Spengler
After the revival of the Welsh language,
can Faliscan be far behind? Europe's interest in
its 50 or so "minority languages" is growing, in
inverse proportion to its birthrate. One or two of
the 6,700 languages spoken on the planet go
extinct every fortnight, but not all of them will
go down without a fight. Peeking through the
perforations in the veneer of European
civilization are cultures that pre-date Rome. With
apologies to comedian Robin Williams, a more
fitting name for "Western civilization" might be
the "Dead Peoples Society".
The
17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrongly
qualified the pope as "the ghost of the deceased
Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the tomb
thereof". Hobbes was wrong about that (and wrong
about everything else, including the social
contract). Rome left no ghosts at all; Rome itself
was a casket in which the ghosts of extinct tribes
were interred. We still hear the undigested
remains of dead peoples banging on the inside of
the casket called Rome, demanding to get out. That
is the subject Italy's National Joke. Stop me if
you have heard this:
An Italian driver
misses a hairpin turn in an Apennine fog, and
finds himself hurtling toward the valley floor a
thousand meters below. "Save me, Sant' Antonio!"
he prays. An enormous hand catches the car in
midair. "Grazie, Sant' Antonio of Padua!"
says the driver." "Sorry, I am Sant' Antonio
Abate," a celestial voice replies, and the hand
drops the car.
In fact, the Church of
Sant' Antonio Abate appears in the January issue
of National Geographic magazine with this caption:
The walls of Sant' Antonio Abate
Church in Novoli in southern Italy blaze with
holiday lights during a Mass on January 16, the
eve of the feast day of the town's patron saint.
After the service the townspeople gather at a
giant bonfire of flaming grapevines - a ritual
passed down from the 1st millennium BC, when the
Italian peninsula was a patchwork of vibrant
cultures known today as the Italic peoples. Even
as the Romans began to consolidate their power
in 4th century BC, these different groups
retained their traditions, many of which are
still visible throughout Italy
today. Italy's fertility rate of 1.27%
is among the world's lowest, and portends the
disappearance of the modern Italian language along
with all its dialects, living or dead. As
mortality beckons to the Italians, their ghosts
have come out from amongst the old stones - the
Pentri, Caraceni, Caudini, Hirpini, Frentani,
Brutii, Messapii, Umbrians, Sabines, Faliscans.
Senescent Italy remembers its remote past better
than its recent history. The more keenly Italians
feel their mortality, the more prominent becomes
the old pagan identity. Italy never was a nation,
but rather a fractious collection of tribes held
in bondage by Rome. Rome ingested the Italic
tribes forcibly; force later made them Christians.
Local patron saints, of course, are their old
gods.
The ghosts of peoples extinct long
before Rome haunt the consciousness of Western
Europe. The European Union has awarded 25 million
euros (more than US$32 million) to assist the 50
or so "minority languages" still spoken in one
form or another in the region. There is clownish
Breton nationalism, independence movements in
Corsica and Galicia, and the bloodthirsty Basque
obsession with independence, not to mention the
revival of the Welsh and Gaelic languages.
Meanwhile the dwindling inhabitants of Italy wax
sentimental over the pre-Roman kingdom of the
Samnites. What applies to the Roman equivalent of
the Home Counties, namely the Italic peoples,
applies all the more so to the empire. After
thousands of years, after Roman Empire, Holy Roman
Empire, after Napoleon and Hitler, and after the
European Union, Europe still languishes in
nostalgia for the mud and stink of barbarian
tribes long since faded into obscurity.
One cannot assimilate peoples by force.
Empire and ideology are poor substitutes for blood
and culture. To be remembered, we require not only
progeny, but progeny who speak our language.
Globalization did not begin with McDonald's, but
with Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, and
later with Church and Empire. The nations
converted at swordpoint never reconciled
themselves to homogeneity of religion and ruler;
only the individuals who abandoned their culture
and set sail for America are free of the old
ghosts. The United States has nothing to do with
"Western civilization", that is, the Dead Peoples
Society. The founders of the US were radical
rejectionists who broke away from Western
civilization to found something quite different, a
throwback to the Hebraic notion of a Chosen
People.
I have acquaintances who have
embraced the Catholic faith on the premise that
the Church represents the continuity of European
high culture - the philosophy of Augustine and
Aquinas, the poetry of Petrarch and Dante, the
music of Palestrina and Mozart. I think they were
short-changed. The philosophers, poets and
musicians were for the most part mercenaries in
imperial employ, ready to betray their
ecclesiastical masters at first opportunity.
So-called Western philosophy is the softest
target. It takes a long-faced functionary with no
sense of humor to pass off Church dogma as the
successor to Greek philosophy. My reading of
Socrates, along with his great predecessors
Parmenides and Xeno, has more in common with Mel
Brooks' "standup philosopher" routine in
History of the World, Part I. In fact,
Plato's "Parmenides" dialogue is much funnier than
Brooks' "Caesar's Palace" routine in the cited
film:
Socrates, he said, I admire the bent
of your mind towards philosophy; tell me now,
was this your own distinction between ideas in
themselves and the things which partake of them?
...
I think that there are such ideas,
said Socrates.
Parmenides proceeded: And
would you also make absolute ideas of the just
and the beautiful and the good, and of all that
class?
Yes, he said, I should ...
And would you feel equally undecided,
Socrates, about things of which the mention may
provoke a smile? I mean such things as hair,
mud, dirt, or anything else which is vile and
paltry? ... Socrates avers
that a "universal idea" of hair, or dirt, leads
him into a "bottomless pit of nonsense". I do not
see Socrates as an apostle of reason but as an
ironist, following Soren Kierkegaard (Socrates the destroyer,
May 24, 2004).
Catholic culture of the
20th century was a junkyard dog, rooting up the
remnants of dead cultures. Its exemplar was T S
Eliot, the Nobel Prize winner in literature who
converted to Anglo-Catholicism late in life. Eliot did
more than any other individual of his generation
to marry the notion of High Culture to
Catholicism, which is odd.
What attracted
Eliot to Catholicism was not so much the religious
content, but the fact that Catholicism allows the
corpses of ancient pagan cultures to stare up
through the still waters of the Church. Nostalgia
for dead cultures, their songs, myths and legends,
was the raw material for the poetry of a
generation that already had seen the apocalypse of
Western culture in World War I. T S Eliot, W B
Yeats and Ezra Pound are the poets of pagan
nostalgia; the latter two also dipped into the
politics of nostalgia, namely fascism (Pound
deeply, Yeats superficially). As an artist,
though, T S Eliot loved the Catholic religion for
its openness to paganism.
In his notes to
"The Wasteland" (1922), Eliot wrote, "To another
work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one
which has influenced our generation profoundly; I
mean The Golden Bough" of James Frazer, a
thorough account of the pagan precedents for
Christian imagery and ritual. From Frazer we
derive the notion that the folk tale of the Fisher
King anticipated the story of Christ, as well as
the commonplace idea of a sacrificed god. It is a
favorite of free-thinking anthropologists who wish
to refute Christianity. The astonishing thing is
that it was Catholic poets who first embraced it,
as a tour guide to the Dead Peoples underlying the
Catholic past.
We cannot read "The
Wasteland" without footnotes, for the poem
consists of disjoined references to the whole of
Western (and some Eastern) literature, arrayed
like cadavers washed up on a beach after a
shipwreck. I find "Wasteland" indigestible as a
work of literature, but as a device for shifting
the viewpoint of the reader, it has a point. The
West can understand itself only through a past so
remote, so fractured than it cannot be recognized
without footnotes.
Despite his eventual
conversion, Eliot was a bad Catholic, for he could
not shake off a morbid fascination with what
stared up at him through the shallows of his
religion: the pagan ghosts imprisoned within the
tomb of the Roman Empire. As he wrote in "The
Wasteland":
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight
dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep
seas swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones
in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed
the stages of his age and youth
Entering the
whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who
turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider
Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as
you. Paranthetically, Eliot's
fascination with pagan antecedents helps explain
why he so hated Jews. Like the Jungian popularizer
Joseph Campbell, those who lust after the stories
of strange gods cannot bear the exclusivity of the
Hebrew story.
Voltaire said of the Holy
Roman Empire that it was neither holy, nor Roman,
nor an empire. Western civilization passes for a
synthesis of Hebrew ethics and Greek philosophy;
someone should point out that it was neither
Hebrew, nor ethical, nor Greek, nor philosophical.
Americans should stop worrying about the decline
of the West. The bad news is that the West has
long since declined right over the edge; the good
news is that the matter is hopeless, but not
serious.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for
information on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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