308. Where's the Payoff, English Teacher?

"No student is going to keep making a troublesome new distinction unless he sees a payoff.  So where's the payoff on your distinction between the senses of 'civilized' (Post 306)?"

I think there's a payoff right away, in the review immediately following the one that raised the need for a distinction (on Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman, in The New York Times Book Review, 8-2-15).  In it Ian Buruma says, of our destruction of Nagasaki,  "it's hard to refute [the argument that] that killing a massive number of civilians with a radiating bomb is an act of barbarism."  There we are,  "barbaric" in only one sense of "uncivilized."  (The two senses of "civilized" were "highly developed" and "humane.")

 The sense in which Buruma takes it makes the Greeks and the Romans and all the "advanced" people of the ancient world barbarians.  After becoming aware of the two meanings I don't want to do that so I say, "Wait a minute, Mr. Buruma,  I'm not going along with your 'hard to refute.'"  The payoff is in what you avoid, going along with something you can't agree with when you think about it.

"But all your thought does for you is change 'barbarism' to 'cruelty,' the accurate word you'd have to accept.  A pretty small payoff, I'd say."

I don't think it's small.  With 'cruelty' you become an adult, able to assess how much inhumane behavior is necessary to build and maintain your civilization and how much isn't.  A necessary moral calculation.

"And how do you distinguish necessary cruelty from unnecessary cruelty?"

Not easily, but it can be managed. Looking back we can say that the inhumane killing of the Cimbri at Vercellae was probably necessary to build and preserve the Roman civilization we know and have benefited from.  Whereas the killing of the inhabitants of Mycalessus was not at all necessary to preserve Athenian civilization. 

"I see the difference, but for those who withhold 'civilized' from the inhumane the Romans and the Athenians are both disqualified.  They each were committing 'acts of barbarism' — though I've learned that there were extenuating circumstances at Mycalessus."

You've made my point, letting me make the larger one (this is English-teacher salesmanship now): close attention to words pays off.  Take this word in just one sense and you're standing there accepting the benefits of civilization while calling the givers of those benefits 'barbarians,' indistinguishable from those who would take them away.  You look like — forgive me — a dope.

"Whereas those who see both senses look like what?  Geniuses?"

No, simply adults experiencing the embarrassment they have just privileged themselves to.  "Me, the beneficiary of inhumanity?  Just as I thought I had purged myself of it, civilized myself."

"You don't have to explain the embarrassment to me.  I'm a Christian.  I'm always purging myself, or supposed to be purging myself, of inhumanity."

But you're not always able to do it under the name of civilization.  And before the Age of Enlightenment, the age of the Man of Feeling, you didn't need to.  You could be "civilized" in the classical sense, which carried no "humanity" clause.  The Eighteenth Century, with its expansion of sensibility — and, don't forget, of wealth, which allowed such luxuries — gave us the clause, giving us a new compliment and a new source of embarrassment.

"And gave Christianity it's great chance for a breakthrough.  I have to exult.  All those years hemmed in by the need for survival, victory in worldly competition, with the testosterone necessary to achieve it, finally ended by enough affluence to afford a few Christian feelings.  Oh blessed Enlightenment!"

But not blessed if you let it replace the first meaning of "civilized."  Do that and you forget the givers of this great expansion of humane feeling, the ones who toiled and fought, inhumanely, simply for development — without which you'll have a hard time accounting for the expansion in sensibility.  Forget the givers and you look like an ungrateful child.

"Ah, the Man of Feeling unaware that he stands on the backs of thousands of unfeeling men.  A dope."

No, "child" is the right word.  You've regressed into one-meaning simplicity.  Cut off your education in historical (and moral) complexity.

"It's so hard not to do that.  Life must have been a lot easier before we had these two senses."

Before Christianity came along, you want to say.  I do too.   But I'm not so sure.  I picture pagans happy in their inhumane development of a society, an empire, and then I read Virgil.

"You mean the great celebrator of Rome's bloody victories?"

Yes.  When he looks back on them in the Fourth Eclogue (42 BC) he apparently feels some guilt, what the coming Golden Age will "remove the last traces" of.  He's feeling what "civilized" in sense two would make him feel.  Where did that feeling come from?  It's one sense muscling in on the other, before chronology allows it.

"Ah, but human nature would allow it.  If it's down in there, waiting its time, whatever the religion."

Well, we'll certainly have to allow for the possibility.

71. "Bleeding heart"

 

For centuries a bleeding heart was a good thing — Christ's sacred heart bleeding for humanity, Mary's immaculate heart bleeding for her son, human hearts (in the "imitation of Christ") bleeding for their fellows. Catholic painters gave it to you — the actual heart, there, blood streaming — and Protestant authors reminded you of it. Some of Dickens' most sympathetic characters were found in Bleeding Heart Yard. A bleeding heart meant compassion.

Now a "bleeding heart" means "liberal sap." Are you downtrodden? Are you being called imprudent? Is your favorite species in danger? Here's an organ that will bleed for you.

The opposite of a bleeding heart would be a callused heart. "Callused heart" is not used as a comeback in the put-down contest but if it were I suppose liberals would apply it to Ron Paul, who just objected (Fox News, 8/30/11) to FEMA's enlarged part in aid to disaster victims.

Care has to be taken in identifying either kind of heart, though. The callused heart must be distinguished from the tough heart, which can be loving, and the bleeding heart must be distinguished from the compassionate heart, which is … different how? There's a problem. A compassionate heart bleeds, doesn't it?

Yes, but not publicly. The difference is in the display. The person the conservatives identify is saying, "Look at me. Am I not a good Christian? Am I not sensitive to suffering?" It's more than compassion. "Bleeding heart" distinguishes a recognizable type, the heart displayer.

And "callused heart" (in the Bible the "hardened heart") distinguishes a recognizable type, the heart dismisser. The dismissal comes across in the way victims are spoken of. “The bleeding heart will say, well, we have to take care of them,” said Ron Paul of the flood victims. He's betrayed by his indifferent tone. And also, I should say, by his word-choice. Callused hearts often give themselves away by their use of "bleeding heart."

Which isn't to say that heart-display is good or bad. That's very much in dispute, especially since T. E. Hulme complained about it in the Romantic poets. "I object," he said, "to the sloppiness which doesn’t consider that a poem is a poem unless it is moaning or whining about something or other." I think he must have had Shelley in mind. "Wail, for the world's wrong."

Shelley. Would you like to see, or be reminded of, some real sappiness? Follow him through "The Indian Serenade." A dream of his lady wakes him up and a "spirit in his feet," he says, leads him to her chamber window where he's so overcome by love that he passes out.

Oh lift me from the grass!

I die! I faint! I fail!

Let thy love in kisses rain

On my lips and eyelids pale.

My cheek is cold and white, alas!

My heart beats loud and fast —

Oh! Press it to thine own again,

Where it will break at last.

It doesn't help to say that Shelley was writing for a public which at that time admired sensitive male responses. So much the worse for the public and poets who cater to it.

And so much the worse for our definition of "bleeding heart." We've added cynicism to it. When Shelley, at the end of a very serious poem, "Ode to the West Wind," says, "I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed," we see a play to the public. We take him less seriously.

Are Christian hearts more prone to bleeding than others? You'd expect them to be, considering where sin is located for Christians: not in the deed, not in the consequence, but in the motive. Wish to kill your brother and you have killed him. "Whosoever looketh after a woman to lust hath committed adultery in his heart." Locate sin in the heart and you're going to have a lot of looking into it. And oh what temptation to display what you have found, or would like people to think you have found.

Some have wondered whether Christian democracies are more prone to well-intentioned blunders than other nations.   I'd say yes, you'd expect them to be. Their voters will worry more about wanting good ends, having their hearts in the right place, than good means, having their armies in the right place.

42. "Patrimoine"

 

Oh Americans, if only you could borrow this word from the French for a while. It would solve so many of your problems.

Are you offended by the Ten Commandments on government property? Do you have trouble with "In God we trust" on our coins? Think of it not as Christianity forced on non-believers, people free not to believe, but as an honoring of our heritage. And if you don't want to use our word "heritage," if you think that's going to suggest too much that's white, or European, or male, use the French word. "Oh, we're just doing that because it's part of the 'patrimoine.'"

Use the word the French use for "heritage" and then look at how much they cram into it. They're the least-believing, most non-churchgoing people in the world and how do they behave toward their churches? With the greatest reverence. They pour more money into their preservation than we spend on Interstate bridges. "Bien sur, c'est le patrimoine."

I'm reminded of what our young guide said as she excused taking us to view Lenin's living quarters, preserved in Pskov: "It's our history, part of us." Christianity and the English character formed by Christianity are not just part of us, they are the center of us. Without those Protestant constituencies who in the seventeenth century elected the squires who showed us what made parliaments work we'd have never made it in the eighteenth century. And I'm not referring to the production of a constitution. I'm referring to the character that makes a constitution work. I'm referring to what the African statesman saw lacking in his own country when he asked the New York Times writer (memory tells me it was Jeffrey Goldberg) "Why do you obey judges' rulings?"

A constitution, laws, rules, contracts, all can be done in by people who don't work within them in good faith, people who use them for their own purposes. In the end democracy, as we've learned in its fall in so many countries with constitutions, depends on a certain character. And character is developed over time, in a tradition. Ours is indicated on our coins and in our choice of holidays.

The trick of course these days is to honor our coin-holiday tradition without offending Americans bringing the benefits of other, more recent traditions.  Or, I should say, part of the trick. The other part is to keep the vocabulary of offense ("marginalization," "prejudice," "centrism") under control. We best do that, I think, by keeping our eyes on history. History shows us that the Christian Protestant English tradition is accurately called "central" and that other traditions, if you have to say it, are accurately called "marginal." If we speak otherwise we go out of control, linguistically, and — I was about to say "endanger democracy," but I see that's only a remote possibility. So let me just say we make ourselves vulnerable to language satirists like George Orwell. We're doing the equivalent of a Stalinist re-write.