OUR LOST CIVILIZATION

 

Our Lost Civilization

Michael Pakaluk

Friday, December 6, 2024

 

Note: Professor Pakaluk — who I’m happy to say will be with us at our January 25th anniversary gala next month (click here for tickets)  — explains today what has gone wrong with our whole educational system as well as the consequences for all of us as individuals and as a society. It’s going to take serious effort to repair that loss, but there’s no alternative, unless we’re willing to live in inhuman chaos. The Church is the only institution capable of leading such a recovery and here at The Catholic Thing we try to do our part daily, every day of the year. In fact, we’re stepping up our efforts with courses, seminars, podcasts, and more. I’m sure you know this. So if you haven’t already given during this end-of-year campaign, please do your part in this great work. There are many ways to send support. Pick one. Please. Today. – Robert Royal

 

Readers of Newman’s Idea of a University are perhaps so distracted by its two brilliant opening arguments that they fail to notice other arguments as important, such as his claim that a university must have colleges, or that a university education must be classical.

His first brilliant argument is that since a university is a place of universal learning, then a “secular” university, which excludes the discipline of theology, will not be a genuine university and will suffer various ill effects.  His second is that, as a university is different from a research institute, its main purpose is not “the production of knowledge,” but the formation of intellectual virtues in its students – what he describes as the distinctive beauty of the mind.

Newman could see that a new conception of a university was taking shape, as a knowledge factory dominated by STEM subjects (as we call them), in the service of industry and the military, disregarding the genuine intellectual good of the students, and not orientated to any sort of “wisdom.”  Anyone who accepted his two main brilliant arguments would reject this novel conception.

Yet his argument that a university education must be classical obviously cuts against this conception as well. (See the chapter in The Idea, “Christianity and Letters.”

The argument has similarities with Pope Benedict’s famous lecture at Regensburg, where the Holy Father taught that Christianity’s appropriation of Greek thought was providential, not accidental. And that theology therefore must lose its way if it becomes “de-Hellenized.”  Newman teaches similarly that higher education must lose its way if it turns from the Classics.

He begins by arguing that there is a such a thing as “Civilization.” His view is nuanced.  He acknowledges Chinese, Hindu, Aztec, and Saracen civilizations, but he says that each is isolated from the others and stands outside another distinct whole, which he contemplates:

I call then this commonwealth pre-eminently and emphatically Human Society, and its intellect the Human Mind, and its decisions the sense of mankind, and its disciplined and cultivated state Civilization in the abstract, and the territory on which it lies the orbis terrarum, or the World.

Readers will see immediately that all “woke” controversies hinge on this question whether there was and is this Civilization, as Newman asserts.

His next step is to say that Christianity once it arises becomes generally coincident with this Civilization: “on the whole, the two have occupied one and the same orbis terrarum. Often indeed they have even moved pari passu, and at all times there has been found the most intimate connexion between them.”

 

 

John Newman by Henry Joseph Whitlock (albumen carte-de-visite), 1860s [National Portrait Gallery, London]

 

Readers familiar with Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua know that the conception “what the world as a whole judges” was central, too, to his embrace of Catholicism.

From this intimate connection, Newman argues to a similarity of structure and inspiration: “the Classics, and the subjects of thought and the studies to which they give rise. . .have ever, on the whole, been the instruments of education which the civilized orbis terrarum has adopted; just as inspired works, and the lives of saints, and the articles of faith, and the catechism, have ever been the instrument of education in the case of Christianity.”

He interprets the instinct of the Roman Empire, to copy the Greeks, as a pattern set down for everyone thereafter to follow.  Alfred North Whitehead once quipped, that when people say we should imitate the Greeks, they mean that we should not imitate the Greeks, since the Greeks were not imitating anyone else.  But Newman’s point is superior: we ought to imitate, rather, the Romans, who did imitate the Greeks:

The world was to have certain intellectual teachers, and no others; Homer and Aristotle, with the poets and philosophers who circle round them, were to be the schoolmasters of all generations, and therefore the Latins, falling into the law on which the world’s education was to be carried on, so added to the classical library as not to reverse or interfere with what had already been determined.

The history of Civilization only confirmed this law, Newman observes, since Civilization was revived again and again precisely through devotion to the Classics.

And then he brings all of this to bear against the already rising form of STEM or “Baconian” universities:

And this experience of the past we may apply to the circumstances in which we find ourselves at present; for, as there was a movement against the Classics in the middle age, so has there been now. The truth of the Baconian method for the purposes for which it was created, and its inestimable services and inexhaustible applications in the interests of our material well-being, have dazzled the imaginations of men.

So far so good. But there’s a limit:

since that method does such wonders in its own province, it is not unfrequently supposed that it can do as much in any other province also. Now, Bacon himself never would have so argued; he would not have needed to be reminded that to advance the useful arts is one thing, and to cultivate the mind another. The simple question to be considered is, how best to strengthen, refine, and enrich the intellectual powers; the perusal of the poets, historians, and philosophers of Greece and Rome will accomplish this purpose, as long experience has shown; but that the study of the experimental sciences will do the like, is proved to us as yet by no experience whatever.

We might even urge, strongly, that experience since Newman’s time has proved the negative.  Now, almost a century since the rise of the modern STEM university, what do we see around us?  The line of tradition in the visual and musical arts has been lost.  Our “humanities” have declined into foolishness.  “Experts” trained narrowly in some particular science are bereft of prudence.  Our politicians, not understanding history, lack wisdom.  While public discourse is uninformed, uncivil, and debased.

In short, we have lost Civilization.

https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2024/12/06/our-lost-civilization/