|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Historical Consciousness and the Preservation of Culture
| Article
# : |
15884 |
|
|
Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
|
| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1989 |
4,472 Words |
| Author
: |
Russell Kirk
Russell Kirk is the author of more than thirty books,
including The Conservative Mind, now available in its seventh
revised edition. |
Just forty years ago, T.S. Eliot published his slim book Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, which attracted much serious attention in 1948, and deserves discussion still. In his last chapter, Eliot touched upon the deterioration of European culture during the twentieth century.
We know, he wrote, "that whether education can foster and improve culture or not, it can surely adulterate and degrade it. For there is no doubt that in our headlong rush to educate everybody, we are lowering our standards, and more and more abandoning the study of those subjects by which the essentials of our culture--of that part of it which is transmissible by education--are transmitted; destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanized caravans."
Amen to that. Of "those subjects by which the essentials of our culture…are transmitted," Eliot found that historical study was the most important. As he had told a meeting of Anglo-Catholic sociologists in 1933, "Wisdom is only gained in two ways, and well gained only through both: a study of human nature through history, the actions of men in the past and the best that they have written and thought, and a study through observation and experience of the men and women about us as we live."
For all human knowledge is knowledge of the past--the personal past and the past of a people or a civilization. What we call the present is an evanescent film upon the deep well of the past: The paragraph of mine that you read a moment ago is now part of the past. And the future, despite the alleged discipline of "futurology," remains unknowable. Study of the past is called history. If we have no historical consciousness, we suffer from a dense ignorance of human nature, and our actions are almost random actions, frequently ruinous. This is as true in public affairs as in private.
It is historical consciousness that binds together and perpetuates our common culture, at all levels of that culture. If knowledge of the past is denied to the rising generation, a culture begins to fall apart; and human beings, in the phrase of Edmund Burke, become like "the fillies of a summer," generation failing to link with generation.
Lacking a knowledge of how we arrived where we stand today, lacking that deeper love of country that is nurtured by a knowledge of the past, lacking the apprehension that we all take part in a great historical
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
