I’ve previously cited a passage from the novel of ideas Citadelle (aka Wisdom of the Sands) by the French writer-aviator Antoine de St Exupery. Citadelle represents the musings of a fictional desert prince: on society, on government, and on humanity. Here are some excerpts from the passage I want to discuss:
“Nevertheless,” I mused, “these men live not by things but by the meaning of things, and thus it is needful that they should transmit the passwords to each other, generation by generation. That is why I see them, no sooner a child is born, making haste to inure him in the usage of their language; for truly it is the key to their treasure. So as to be able to transport him into this harvest of golden wonders they have reaped, they spare no toil in opening up within him the ways of portage. For hard to put into words, weighty yet subtle, are the harvests it behooves us to transmit from one generation to another.
“..But if the new generation lives in houses about which it knows nothing save their utility, what will it find to do in such a desert of a world? For even as your children must first be taught the art of music, if they are to take pleasure in playing a stringed instrument; even so, if you would have them, when they come to man’s estate, capable of the emotions worthiest of man, you must teach them to discern, behind the diversity of things, the true lineaments of your house, your domain, your empire.
“Else that new generation will but pitch camp therein, like a horde of savages in a town they have captured. And what joy would such barbarians get of your treasures? Lacking the key of your language, they would know not how to turn them to account….(the barbarian) throws down your walls and scatters your possessions to the winds. This he does to revenge himself on the instrument which he knows not how to play, and presently he sets the village on fire–which at least rewards him with a little light! But soon he loses interest, and yawns. For you must know what you are burning, if you are to find beauty in its light. Thus with the candle you burn before your god. But to the barbarian the flames of your house will say nothing, for they are not a sacrificial fire.
“..This, too, is why I bid you bring up your children to be like you. It is not the function of some petty officer to hand down to him their inheritance, for this is something not comprised in his manual of Regulations..You shall build your children in your image, lest in late days they come to drag their lives out joyously in a land which will seem to them but an empty camping place, and whose treasures they will allow to rot away uncared-for, because they have not been given its keys.”
Doesn’t this passage go a long way toward explaining what has been going on at places like Columbia University? We see a confluence of two categories of barbarians: American natives who never learned the passwords, having either never heard of them or been told to actively despise them…and foreign students / immigrants who come from cultures with entirely different passwords and, unlike previous generations of immigrants, have no interest in learning the American ones.
I’m also remembering something Hilaire Belloc wrote:
The Barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that civilization, should have offended him with priests and soldiers.
The Barbarian wonders what strange meaning may lurk in that ancient and solemn truth, “Sine Auctoritate nulla vita.” In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make: that he can befog and destroy but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true.
We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid.
We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.
My previous post referencing St-Exupery’s Citadelle are Transmitting the Passwords–or Not, When Sleep the Sentinels, and Of Springs and Cables.
Your thoughts?