Got civilization?

Wednesday, 20th January 2010

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

Further, one of the most important ideas that Armstrong’s book serves as a synecdoche for, but does not attain, is whether or not the massing of good, beautiful and true things is itself civilized and civilizing. Armstrong discusses Cicero, the Phaedrus, Chardin, Wren, Bildung, Gluck, Tolstoy, the Villa I Tatti, T.S. Eliot on tradition, alongside a host of other magnificent things, but, like with the Abbot Suger, one is left wondering if Armstrong’s ‘hero[es] of civilization’ are not in fact slaves to the same. Surely, Suger’s writings were wonderful, kind and wise, but he was no saint. At least sometimes, then, the cure for too much material progress must be total renunciation. In fact, at times, true cultivation — noble simplicity — might actually require a radical material and spiritual poverty.

These are not crushing criticisms. Armstrong’s is not a complete work. It does not claim to be. There is no index, for example. Indeed, while the conceptual dissonance at the heart of the book suggests ways to account for some of its least successful passages, it also helps throw Armstrong’s solution into high relief.

Certainly, if colonialism is part of what ‘tarnishes’ the idea of civilization, if it stops up access to flourishing, we do need a solution and preferably a plain one. That civilization has become wrapped up in cultural and imperial nonsense is probably a ‘historical and psychological problem’. One solution might be to integrate Kultur and Kant (i.e. to specialise), but the better route — at the moment, after Wittgenstein, after the last century in English-speaking philosophy — is very likely this book.

John Heard’s thesis under Armstrong at the University of Melbourne was awarded first class honours in 2008.