Got civilization?

Wednesday, 20th January 2010

In Search of Civilization: Remaking a Tarnished Idea, by John Armstrong
Allen Lane, $35, pp. 210,
ISBN 9781846140037

People worry about ‘getting’ philosophy. ‘I still don’t get Kant,’ students will say in first year, or some boob at a party will claim to ‘get’ Nietzsche. Helpfully, the purpose of this book is in the subtitle, which makes it easy to understand John Armstrong’s latest effort. The central agony, the idea over which he frets and philosophises, is available in the title too.

This is quite remarkable, given the thorny ideas and weighty material parsed. It also makes sense. When I was an honours student under Armstrong, he suggested I hone my thesis topic by trying to explain it to non-philosophers, preferably to people I met in a pub.

Preparing readers to think about Thomas More’s Utopia, then, about halfway through this book, Armstrong writes baldly that an ‘account of civilization is a view about human flourishing’. He has written ‘is’, not ‘like’. That is either radical concision in a philosopher and admirable plain speaking, or sloppiness. Some of his Australian colleagues, indeed, presumably piqued by his popularity and sore at his publishing success, have been known to grumble about this feature of Armstrong’s work. They worry about his rigour. They can relax. Armstrong knows precisely where he is going philosophically. He just means to get there in a manner that can be digested by ordinary, non-specialist readers. That is good news for this short, clever book.

Not for Armstrong, then, are minutiae and arcana. Like his friend Alain de Botton, he is interested in the big ideas: art, love, work, money and intimacy. He is not afraid to write about beauty, truth, and goodness — all of which are beautifully treated here, but simply.

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