Page 2 of
2 National extinction and natural
law By Spengler
a majority of the world's cultures
simply will themselves out of existence, largely
through the individual decision of their members
not to rear offspring, and wondering why this
should be the case.
I cannot answer the
question, but I will offer another question: What
is it that makes human beings different from
animals? Unlike humans, healthy animals
universally show an instinct for self-preservation
and the propagation of their species. We do not
observe un-neutered cats deciding not to have
kittens the better to
pursue
their careers as mousers, nor do they abandon
their kittens at the church door. Nor is it quite
true that humans are the only species that is
sentient of death. Elephants evidently grieve for
their dead, and domestic animals grieve for dead
human companions.
Humans may not be the
only animals who are sentient of death, but they
are the only animals whose continuity depends on
culture as much as it does upon genes. I do not
mean to suggest that humans of different cultures
belong to different species - on the contrary, the
child of a Kalahari Bushman will thrive if raised
in the family of a Glaswegian ship's engineer. I
consider secondary, if not trivial, the genetic
differences among the races of Homo sapiens
sapiens.
But culture performs a role
among humans similar to the role species does
among animals. An adult Bushman never would make
sense of industrial society, any more than a
Glaswegian ship's engineer would last a fortnight
in the Kalahari. Individual human existence has no
meaning outside the culture that nurtures,
sustains, and transmits our contribution to future
generations. Culture is the stuff out of which we
weave the hope of immortality, not merely through
genetic transmission but through
inter-generational communication. That
communication, I hardly need add, ends with the
extinction of language.
That is why I keep
returning to Franz Rosenzweig's remarkable insight
that humans are sentient of the death of their
cultures as much as they are of their own physical
death:
Just as every individual must
reckon with his eventual death, the peoples of the
world foresee their eventual extinction, be it
however distant in time. Indeed, the love of the
peoples for their own nationhood is sweet and
pregnant with the presentiment of death. Love is
only surpassing sweet when it is directed toward a
mortal object, and the secret of this ultimate
sweetness only is defined by the bitterness of
death. Thus the peoples of the world foresee a
time when their land with its rivers and mountains
still lies under heaven as it does today, but
other people dwell there; when their language is
entombed in books, and their laws and customs have
lost their living power.
A sick cat or dog
will crawl into a hole to die. The members of sick
cultures do not do anything quite so dramatic, but
they cease to have children, dull their senses
with alcohol and drugs, become despondent, and too
frequently do away with themselves. This is not
due to an inborn death-drive, contrary to the
odious Freud, but rather a symptom of a culture's
mortal illness.
That is why pagans become
Christians. That is, individuals embrace
Christianity when their pre-Christian culture no
longer can transmit their memory as well as their
genes to future generations. Christianity, in that
sense, succeeds precisely where "natural law"
fails. Self-confident and secure pagans do not
seek life eternal through belief in Jesus Christ,
for they are quite happy to believe in themselves.
It is when they have reason to cease to believe in
themselves, when the depredations of the empires,
or the great tide of globalization, overrun their
defenses and expose their mortal fragility.
We observe two great and related phenomena
in the global South: the fastest rate of cultural
extinction in history, as well as the fastest rate
of Christian evangelization in history. I do not
mean to minimize the tragedy of declining
cultures, but it is only because of the terrible
depth of that tragedy that hundreds of millions of
souls turn in fear and trembling to a religion
that represents itself as standing above all human
cultures: the ekklesia of individuals
called out from amongst the nations to the Kingdom
of God.
Whence come the fear and
trembling? Christians are the adoptive children of
the Jewish patriarch Abraham, in the
interpretation of St Paul proposed by Michael
Wyschogrod. In an important sense, the new
Christians of the global South relive the life of
Abraham, who left behind clan and kindred at
divine command in the world of 4,000 years ago,
when clan and kindred were everything. Given a son
in old age, Abraham was told to sacrifice that
son, thereby destroying his links to the future.
Among peoples facing the erasure of their
links to the past and uncertainty about their
future, Abraham's frame of mind on Mount Moriah
must seem much less remote than it does to the
comfortable Christians of the North. The Hebrew
Bible has a personal meaning for the new
Christians of the South (as Philip Jenkins
reported in The New Faces of Christianity)
because in a sense they relive the experience of
the patriarch.
The linguists at National
Geographic have my sympathy. It is wise to
document the endangered languages before their
sounds die away forever. Even the meanest and
poorest form of human culture evokes grandeur
greater than that of any galaxy. Like the myriad
tribes of the Roman Empire and the barbarian
invasions of the Middle Ages, hundreds of peoples
will give up their tribal identity and in
compensation receive Christianity. Opinions will
remain divided as to whether this is a good thing
or a bad thing, but it very well may be the main
thing occurring in our present century.
Notes 1. Many Thomists
consider this simplified view to be a distortion
of the views of St Thomas Aquinas. 2. There is
a large class of paradoxes that follow the same
pattern. Another example is reported by Engelhard
Weigl of Adelaide University (in Messianism,
Apocalypse and Redemption in 20th Century German
Thought, editors Wayne Cristaudo and Wendy
Baker). The 17th-century philosopher G W Leibniz
in his Theodicy apologize for God's
goodness by attempting to show that we live in the
best possible world that God might have created.
But if this were the case, why would God ever
bring the world to an end through an Apocalypse
and Last Judgment?
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