Well, I can't tell you exactly what lets me come out
with that "wonderful" but I can tell you what, after living through most
of the century regarded as history's least wonderful (20 million killed in
World War I, 60 million in World War II), makes it easier: lying on the floor
with my feet up on the couch giving my back a treatment and falling asleep to
whatever comes up on the random play of 74 pieces recorded on five CDs by the
best musicians in the world. One day
the New Leipzig Bach Collegium doing
Pachelbel, another day the Orchestre National de France doing Bizet.
In the past only nobles and the richest merchants
could be soothed as I am. Think
what it took: musicians trained and on call and supported between calls, calls
to a special chamber, worked in by the palace architect to be close to the
ailing king, but not too close, so that he could sleep while the musicians
played on, piece after practiced piece until assured that the king was indeed
asleep, then off to their stations awaiting the next call. Me, I push a button and get the
Budapest Strings and drift off. If
I wake there's Chopin, and on and on.
The CDs cost about $12 each and the player $32.95.
The historian Steven Radelet, in The Great Surge: The Ascent of the
Developing World (Simon and Schuster, 2015) "reckons that the past
quarter century has seen the greatest advances in material well-being in the
history of mankind," according to Richard N. Cooper, reviewing the book in
the latest Foreign Affairs
(1/2-16). And my wife and I,
adding all that we have seen since our childhood in the thirties — the great
surge after World War II, the steady climb through the seventies and eighties,
the tremendous surge since — would certainly testify to that reckoning. Wealth passed from having a long
automobile in the garage to having a second boat in the Caribbean.
But that's not the right measure. The right measure is the advance in
medicine that lets you see the ceiling fixture as you listen to Brahms on your
back twenty years after the age at which you would have once gone blind and
become unable to read your periodicals and share your thoughts instantly with
your colleagues — and, along with pictures and funnies, your children and
grandchildren. Children and
grandchildren, I might add, able to work in travels to different parts of the
world within days of each other — South Africa, Languedoc, China, Central
America, Viet Nam, anywhere in Europe or North America — and text their
reactions, with photos and sometimes their own live faces, at any time. None will die of small pox or be wasted
by tuberculosis or be crippled by polio.
That lets me say "wonderful" and then
Socrates makes me say "Western" since without him I don't think we'd
have the scientific method — the step by step testing and building of reliable belief —
that distinguishes this civilization from others. And gives us our kind of universities, "academies." (More on this in post 246, a little more in 154 and 245.)
No, imperialism and racism and genocides and
arrogance don't (except in the eyes of those ignorant of world history) distinguish
us. Crimes (except in the eyes of
those playing for the guilt advantage) don't distinguish us. Cruelty to the weak doesn't
distinguish us. (Cruelty to the
weak is a mark of the strong (us) and it may become criminal but it doesn't become
a distinction until the weak display what they are capable of when they become
strong.)
What's distinctive in us is our development of the
instruments of criminality, or, I should say, our development of instruments
among which those of criminality will necessarily be included. Instruments are morally neutral, but
that's so hard to remember when you're looking at the effect of cluster bombs,
or nuclear weapons, or gas chambers.
These may have some culpability as temptations, and suggest a Satanic
presence, but if they do it's the same one that cuts out cancers.
This is not to say that there's no difference
between the admiral lying off shore sending six-pounders through a native
village and Albert Schweitzer bending over an operating table. It's to say that instruments, cannon or
scalpel, are not the proper objects of moral judgment. Purposes are, choices are. Which is to say that the African chief
unable to use cannon or scalpel cannot (yet) be used for purposes of moral
comparison, nor can his civilization.
All right, the admiral is happily taking part in a
rapacious colonial takeover.
Though we cannot, looking at a world history full of such crimes, make a
confident moral comparison, we can pronounce a confident moral judgment. That stinks.
But, maybe because we are Westerners, we have to
submit to questioning by Socrates.
"Exactly what
stinks? The takeover? Totally?" We're off examining what Socrates is
always forcing examination of, two-valued moral judgment. It stinks or it doesn't. Here one whiff and you've got it. Ah yes, imperialism. At
other times it will be a whiff of racism, or communism, or sexism. Nazism fixed whiff-judgment for our
century. Oh ho, collaboration! Adolf Hitler probably did more to
encourage two-valued moral judgment than anybody in history.
But back to Socrates. He's just asked, "Does the government set up by those engaged in the rapacious colonial takeover
stink?" And, looking at the
British, we can't say Yes, stinks. Not without saying Yes about the native "governments" their
government replaced and most of those that would replace it. Not without saying that efficiency, and
order, and effort for the common good stink. So yes, Socrates, the British had a superior ability to
organize a government. And the
fact that they cited that ability to justify their takeovers does not negate the
government's superiority or reduce its benefits.
And there, exhibited by the British example, is something
that I think will hold up as a distinction of Western civilization: superior
ability to organize a government, with a superior infrastructure following. You know, a government that will work and keep on working as other governments,
rising in other civilizations, do not. A recent OpEd in the Times ("Why the Post Office Makes America Great," 1-3-16)
by an immigrant from Turkey makes me think we've got something here. One feature of her new society sums it
all up for her: reliable mail service. She marvels.
Imagine, standardized rates! "You could just slap a stamp on your letter, drop it in
a mailbox, and it would go to its destination." Add packages and you see how Amazon and eBay are enabled. "Dependable infrastructure,"
says Zeynep Tufekci, "is
magical not just because it works, but also because it allows innovation to
thrive, including much of the Internet-based economy that has grown in the last
decade." I, looking at my
grandchildren, one working out a dance, another composing music for an
orchestra, would add that it allows creativity to thrive.
The thing about good, working infrastructure,
Tufekci reminds us, is that it's boring.
"We get used to it and forget what a gift it truly is." As, I would add, we get used to the
other gifts of science and Socrates (oh so many posts here — 84, 103, 107, 110, 120, 154), worked
out over time. You have to pinch
yourself to see it or, like Tufekci, be newly arrived.
I don't have to pinch myself because, looking at the
ceiling fixture with this great sense of well-being, I am well aware of the
gifts of science and rationality.
Without them no such well-being.
Why have I even bothered to make something of them, and argue for their
importance? Why haven't I just
gone to sleep?
Because I have heard so many voices — of the Plato
who made Socrates his mouthpiece, of world-scorning Christian saints, of German
Idealists, of American Transcendentalists, of the great Emerson, of, oh, my own
Sunday School teacher — cautioning me.
All delivering one message: your well-being, old man, is only material
well-being. The greater well-being
is spiritual. Your ceiling is very
low.
In my chastened state I turn my head away from the
fixture. There at the side is the CD player, and further on the laptop. Now I hear the most cutting voices of
all, from the philosophers of my own century: “It is the preoccupation with
possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly"
(Bertrand Russell), and "Everywhere we remain unfree
and chained to technology" (Martin Heidegger).
By now,
though, I've learned to do some chastising myself. "Hold on, you philosophers. How sure are you of that word 'spiritual'? Are you confident that it does not apply
to the state my fourteen-year-old grandson is in when he hears the notes he dreamed coming out, on his composer's app, in
the harmony he hoped for? Oh,
that's esthetic, you say. Are you
sure, sirs, that you can distinguish the esthetic from the spiritual? Are you sure the word 'heavenly' is all
wrong for that harmony? If you are
not, then maybe we can go on to your words 'free' and 'noble.'"
Note:
The words "spirit" and "spiritual" are discussed in
Post 89.
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