But I always recognized, in England in the 1950s, that as someone with a writing vocation, there was nowhere else for me to go. And if I have to describe the universal civilization, I would say that it is the civilization that both gave the prompting and the idea of the literary vocation; and also gave the means to fulfill that prompting; the civilization that enables me to make that journey from the periphery to the center; the civilization that links me not only to this audience but also that now not-so-young man in Java whose background was as ritualized as my own, and on whom—as on me—the outer world had worked, and given the ambition to write.It is likely that City Journal reprinted this in response to the multicultural imperative taught in our schools, assumed among the majority of our journalists, and extolled by the entertainment industry (but I repeat myself). Naipul focuses in particular on his journeys in Muslim countries. He does not reject other cultures as valueless, with nothing to teach us, but neither does he think they are equal.
There is also a short essay on him by Theodore Dalrymple in this issue of City Journal.
3 comments:
I admired the man, but I am deeply suspicious of the idea of 'the universal civilization.' Indeed, I think that its advocates have forgotten what is really meant in the distinction between the universal and the particular. You don't meet the universal in the street. Even the most embracing society, as Britain to its honor once achieved, is in an important sense just another particular.
That was 1950. That civilization, especially in London is dead. Its literature and art are no longer taught in our elite schools, in fact it is openly despised. The multicults have run amok, control the Democrat party, and have imposed identitarian politics on all of us.
It's 2018.
Yet many of us, even worldwide, were formed by that culture and that is still who we are. Academics and elites are prone to fads. Those who hold to the idea of Western civilisation will be influenced by them, and not always in a negative way. I doubt we will like the next fads either, and they will also be regnant for a time. We were made to learn this William Faulkner quote in school.
"I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help a man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."
One can see that he thinks Naipul's idea is universal as well. Yet it is not, not yet. It occurs first in an Athens-Jerusalem-Rome culture that flowered when it crashed into a northern one in Europe. Others have picked up some of these ideas of individuality and individual rights, and the "compassion and sacrifice and endurance" he mentions above. All of those other cultures seemed to have some pieces of it already, but not societies that lived that way.
The fads seem to be always suicidal, destroying that London 1950, yet they have not succeeded. Perhaps they will, but i think there are simply too many of us still.
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