What Hope for Western Civilisation?

Mahatma Gandhi once quipped, when asked what he thought of Western civilisation, “I think it would be a good idea!” Gandhi’s remark generally prompts a good-natured laugh, because it plays on the various meanings of the word civilisation. That is a reminder that we need to define our terms with some care. I’ll do that shortly, defining the words civilisation, Western and hope in ways that I hope will assist this discussion.

First, some personal background which might explain my interest in the broad topic of the future of Western civilisation. I was born in the year that television came to Australia; I started at Catholic primary school in the year that the Second Vatican Council convened and the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred; I completed primary school the year that the Vietnam War peaked with the Tet Offensive, and Martin Luther King Jr and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, Pope Paul VI condemned artificial contraception in Humanae Vitae, students hit the barricades across the world and Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring; I read Stuart Schram’s life of Mao Zedong, Isaac Deutscher’s life of Stalin and William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich before the age of thirteen; my secondary school years concluded as Indo-China was overrun by the communists; my undergraduate studies coincided with the presidency of Jimmy Carter and concluded the year Ronald Reagan became president of the United States; my PhD was an attempt to get to the root of why there was a Cold War; and I started work as an intelligence analyst of East Asia in the immediate wake of the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the crushing of the democracy movement in Deng Xiaoping’s China. And all that, you might say, was just the beginning.

It’s been quite a half-century through which to live. Somehow, from a very young age, I was gripped by not only the drama but also the gravity of all this. I wanted to understand world history and the deep past from which all this had sprung. As I grew into my teens and then in my twenties, I could not settle into ordinary life or a profession, because there were too many doubts and concerns, too many unanswered questions that insistently detained me. No ideological or religious answer that was ready to hand seemed satisfactory and, in any case, it was not a matter of simply having an abstract answer and then getting on with life. I needed, if I may put it this way, to be able to live my answer. What would be the point, I thought, of professing some belief or other and then simply doing pretty much as others did and being carried along in the stream rushing to who knew where? I did not find a credible answer in any form of Christianity, or in Marxism, or in cynicism, or hippie-dom, nor in what its critics deride as bourgeois liberalism. So I kept reading and searching and thinking and my life became a quest for a way to live, instead of a committed way of living.

I trust my meaning will be clear if I say that, throughout these years, I wanted to write poetry and songs, but not as affectations and not as commodities; I wanted to understand history in depth, but not as a boffin or as if it was a mere eccentricity; I wanted to live a life of what might be called active contemplation, neither sheltering in a cloister or an ivory tower, nor sett-ling for a practical life largely devoid of cultural richness. In all this, I suppose, I was wildly ambitious and unrealistic. But I was inspired, more than anything else, by a story which had suggested to me, at the age of ten, that one might grasp the whole world and find a meaningful place in it. The story was J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Neither the Bible, nor Homer and the Greek myths, nor Shakespeare, nor Marx or Freud or Toynbee ever displaced Tolkien’s influence on my imagination in terms of what it might be like to comprehend the whole world in space and time, in culture and history, in song and in action. This was, perhaps, because Tolkien’s fable had the paradoxical advantage of not purporting to be true; but above all because it integrated everything seamlessly: myth and history, present challenges and the deep past, different languages and cultures, politics and poetry, high nobility and common life, the fate of the West and the problem of evil.

Yet, quite naturally, and almost from the start, since I was a serious reader of the history and politics of the real world even when first enchanted by The Lord of the Rings, I knew that I had somehow to graft onto the imaginative root of Tolkien’s fable the far more complex and tangible realities that formed the real Earth as distinct from Middle-Earth. Like the great French historian Fernand Braudel, I was interested in what he called la longue durée—seeing the present and the microcosm of my own life in the context of the entire human past. As it happens, Braudel coined the term la longue durée in the great journal of historiography Annales in 1958 and wrote of this vision of the entire human past in the preface to his book The Mediterranean in the Ancient World in 1969, the very years in which The Lord of the Rings was first being read around the world. And so much of what we can now say we know about the deep past has only been discerned over the past forty years, as the archaeological and palaeobiological sciences have gone ahead by leaps and bounds. You might say, therefore, that my adult education consisted of a gradual shift from Tolkien’s fable of la longue durée of Middle-Earth to Braudel’s vision of la longue durée of human actuality.

Against this background, it will, perhaps, make sense at more than one level if I say that the trilogy I am writing consists of successive meditations on Western civilisation in the context of what it means to be human. The first volume in the set, Sonnets to a Promiscuous Beauty: A Homage to the Western Canon, is, fundamentally, a work of nostalgia for the beauties of the Western tradition from the classical world of Catullus and Ovid to Shakespeare and the Romantics. It was strongly influenced by Robert Graves’s The White Goddess and James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Its central argument is that Graves was in error in many points of detail, but correct in his underlying intuition that the life of the human psyche is bound up with the gifts of the muses in ways that go back long, long before writing, critical reason and science. But whereas he saw these things as cutting us off from the muses, I argue that they have greatly increased our possibilities for access to them.

The second volume in the set, The West in a Nutshell: Foundations, Fragilities, Futures, is a work of enquiry into what is true about our humanity, Western civilisation and our modern dilemmas. It is a work of prose and critical reason, but it shows, among other things, how our modern sciences have thrown open the world of the deep past in a way that myth and religion have never done and cannot do. It is not conservative with regard to the specific beliefs and practices that have characterised Western civilisation over time, but quite sweepingly radical, in the sense of going to the root of them. The keynote to The West in a Nutshell is perhaps my remark in Chapter Two, that “Our history is ultimately that of life on earth; our story that of the entirety of humanity, including pre-sapiens hominids. We need to share that history and that story globally.” With this, you might say, I signify my transition from Tolkien to Braudel.

The West in a Nutshell has three parts, each with ten essays. The first part is titled “The Roots of our Humanity”; the second “The Classical Tradition”; and the third “Contempo-rary Concerns”. The preface sets the tone, however, in explaining that I see Plutarch, Montaigne and Emerson as my models in the art of essay writing. None was a political activist, but each was deeply concerned with civilisation and the role of human character and beliefs in shaping and preserving, or extending it.

Plutarch studied at Plato’s Academy in Athens as a young man, during the reign of Nero. He had the good fortune to live out the last three decades of his life under Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian, the first of the five great emperors who made the century from the death of Domitian to the death of Marcus Aurelius a golden age of Roman peace in the Mediterranean basin. During those years, he lived on a country estate at Chaeronea, not far from Athens. There he would be visited by admirers from all over the Roman world and would sit in what became a famous marble chair, presiding over conversations about truth, virtue, history and politics.

The third volume in my trilogy, Darkness Over Love: Letters to my Muse, is currently about three-quarters written. It embodies the quest for meaning and hope in the world as it is, seen over la longue durée. It is a reflective work both literary and analytical, including reflections that take the reader to every continent, through millennia of history, into many cities past and present and back through the evolution of life and the cognitive development of the genus Homo. Along with the prose, it will include forty-two original poems and songs in every kind of rhyme and metre; in many different moods and covering a huge variety of subject matter. In some ways, Chapter Four is the pivotal chapter. It is called “In Bluebeard’s Castle”. The story told in this chapter is inspired by Bartok’s great and sombre opera Bluebeard’s Castle, George Steiner’s 1971 book In Bluebeard’s Castle and Judit Frigyesi’s superb 1998 study Bela Bartok and Turn of the Century Budapest. It is a meditation on depression, solitude and the condition of a mind all but overwhelmed by the darkness of the world, especially that of the twentieth century. Its energy derives from the idea that love of the muse, personified in this chapter by Judith, can turn the Blue-beard legend away from its fateful denouement.

I first read Steiner’s book when I was just out of secondary school. Steiner is a survivor from the rich Central European Jewish cultural milieu that was gutted by the Nazis. In his book, he contemplated the possibility that the world of modern industrialism and science, germinating in the West, might be taking humanity relentlessly over the edge and that we might need to rethink la longue durée in terms of this terrifying scenario. It is worth quoting a little from his concluding pages, since they lead directly into what I want to reflect on here:

We seem to stand, in regard to a theory of culture, where Bartok’s Judith stands, when she asks to open the last door on the night … The real question is whether certain major lines of inquiry ought to be pursued at all, whether society and the human intellect at their present level of evolution can survive the next truths. It may be—and the mere possibility presents dilemmas beyond any which have arisen in history—that the coming door opens onto realities ontologically opposed to our sanity and limited moral reserves … The notion that abstract truth, and the morally neutral truths of the sciences in particular, might come to paralyze or destroy Western man, is foreshadowed in Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences (1934–37) … But … We cannot turn back. We cannot choose the dream of unknowing. We shall, I expect, open the last door in the castle even if it leads, perhaps because it leads, on to realities which are beyond the reach of human comprehension and control. We shall do so with that desolate clairvoyance, so marvelously rendered in Bartok’s music, because opening doors is the tragic merit of our identity …

Steiner went on to exclaim that “it is enormously interesting to be alive at this cruel, late stage in Western affairs”, but he did, at least in 1971, believe that that is where we stood. His judgment on Western civilisation and, it seems, on mankind as a species, was sombre to say the least. His final lines read:

At most, one can try to get certain perplexities into focus. Hope may lie in that small exercise. “A blown husk that is finished”, says Ezra Pound of man and of himself as he, the master-voyager of our age, nears a home-coming:

A blown husk that is finished

But the light sings eternal

A pale flare over marshes

Where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change

Steiner’s stance here was, of course, somewhat incoherent, if you think about it. Hope cannot lie simply in getting certain perplexities into focus, if the danger springs from a relentless human quest to open the last door on the night. And, in any case, getting our perplexities into focus was and is scarcely a small exercise. Besides, Ezra Pound was surely not the master-voyager of our age. He was a confused and anarchic romantic, who flirted with fascism. He was more of a shipwrecked literary Robinson Crusoe than a master-voyager. Steiner, I suggest, ended up with this incoherent conclusion because he had not got the key perplexities into focus. But he was right about this much: if we are to find hope we must get these perplexities into focus. The West in a Nutshell is part of my own attempt to do so. Darkness Over Love will complement it.

Against that background of life as quest and work in progress, let me now define my terms and talk with you about hope for Western civilisation. I shall define the three key terms—hope, Western and civilisation—in reverse order, because that is actually the natural order in the circumstances.

Broadly speaking, it is customary to think of civilisation as being synonymous with settled agrarian and, more particularly, urban societies and with the development of writing. Thus, the Chinese like to boast of their “5000 years of civilisation”, dating back to the earliest urban settlements on the Yellow River; and we think of the origins of the unified monarchy of Egypt or of the cities of Mesopotamia as dating back, also, some 5000 years. Archaeological investigations over the past decade or so have now established that agrarian, urban and literate societies also emerged in the Americas at the same time and quite independently. Indeed, the Olmecs invented the concept of zero centuries before anyone in Eurasia—in the first century BC. There is also the case of the Indus Valley cities of that epoch, which flourished for a millennium, before succumbing to a combination of internal crisis and Indo-European invasion.

This is a rough, working definition of civilisation, but a moment’s reflection suggests that such a definition plainly was not what Gandhi had in mind when he quipped that Western civilisation “would be a good idea”. By the definition in question, there had been Western civilisation of a very robust kind for a very long time, when Gandhi made his remark. Nor, it might be added, does such a definition enable us to make very much sense of the question of whether there is “hope” for Western civilisation, unless by that we simply mean hope for the continued growth of agriculture and cities of a Western kind. Many of our concerns at present have to do with the actual nature of our agriculture and our cities, rather than with whether they exist. And we have seen, starkly, in the past century, that human beings living in the largest and most sophisticated cities can behave in what we regard as a stunningly “barbarous” manner. So, what is going on in such concerns as Gandhi’s and our own that might point to a better or more complete definition of civilisation?

I want to suggest that the crucial considerations are cognitive and moral, not material, technological or infrastructural. And I want to suggest that, by these criteria, no one is civilised at birth or merely by virtue of the society in which they grow up. The civilising process, I am suggesting, is one of the cultivation and development of human potential or possibility, not something achieved once and for all by virtue of the fact that one lives in a place and time, or speaks a particular language, or wears a certain kind of clothing. Through the opening of doors into the past, we have quite recently gained access to an appreciation of la longue durée that is without precedent: the evolution of our own genus over the past several million years, the prehistory of our own species over the past 100,000 years and the archaeology of human history all over the world. We can now look at our cognitive and moral nature and possibilities from a far better informed and richer perspective than anyone anywhere was able to do before the present generation—if we take full advantage of the knowledge that has been accumulating.

By placing our emphasis on the cognitive and moral dimensions of human life, we achieve several things. To begin with, we are able then to see human potential as existing on a temporal plane that extends back indefinitely into the animal kingdom from which we have sprung. We can, therefore, trace the development of specifically hominid potentialities from the neural correlates of the earliest tool making, via the harnessing of fire to the emergence of fully articulate speech and symbolic thought, all long before what we customarily think of as civilisation. We can see that all human beings are born with the attributes that make cognitive and moral development possible. Indeed, there is a good deal of evidence that in this respect, human beings are born sufficiently plastic that they will acquire the language and moral values of the culture in which they are raised from birth, regardless of their skin colour, ethnic origin or the material culture of their blood kin. This is the foundation of what I call universal cognitive humanism.

Two further things follow from this fundamental insight. The first is that, while it can be neglected, squandered or stunted, human development is open-ended, unlike that of any other species, precisely because of the plastic capacity for language, symbolic thought and moral reflection. Not only have our technologies sprung from these open-ended capacities; our very ideas of what it means to be human have developed in many different ways, indeed in a profusion of ways, from the same base. It follows from this that we must see what we call civilised behaviour as a continuum of possibilities for human beings, not as something peculiar to farmers or city dwellers, literate priests or masters of information science. And by a continuum of possibilities, I do not mean that there is a clear order of ascent from the primitive to the post-industrial. At any order of material development, human beings can, as we have learned even in the past few generations, fail to develop past a very rudimentary point cognitively or morally, or engage in ruthless and appalling behaviour in an instrumentally ingenious manner—for example, by organising genocide on an industrial scale or preparing to deliver nuclear Armageddon.

The second is that both toleration and innovation are grounded in this continuum of human possibilities, not in some fixed, self-evident set of verities or some fatalistic view of things or others being merely as they are and having to be accepted on their own terms. And we need to see that continuum as linking us with the very earliest hominids, in terms of intentionality and creativity. The first clear cognitive evidence we have of our emerging humanity is the knapping of stone tools as far back as 2.5 million years ago to make edges sharper than were found naturally and to utilise these edges in intentional ways for cracking open hard-shelled fruits and digging out roots and then slaying and butchering animals to get access to high-quality protein. A striking transition occurs around 1.5 million years ago—long before our own species appeared—when hominids began to carve elaborate hand axes in leaf, tear and almond shapes. Creative intentionality was here being exhibited in a remarkable manner and its further development was to become the hallmark of our kind. It finally exploded in a cascade of inventions and cultural developments from the end of the last ice age, about 15,000 years ago: agriculture, cities, writing, metals, dyes, fabrics, sanitary engineering, temple building, engines of war and instruments of torture, mathematics, medicine, astronomy and philosophy.

I would define civilisation, then, as the refinement of the cognitive and moral potential of human beings, individually and collectively, on a continuum that is far from simple or unilinear, can disintegrate or recoil on itself, is constantly being tested by the changes human beings engineer in the world, and depends on imagination, reflection, learning and creativity. If we define it this way, we are able to appreciate what Gandhi was wryly suggesting. We can see why individuals from so-called primitive cultures have often struck curious and magnanimous members of so-called advanced cultures as being intelligent, dignified, interesting and even noble. We can appreciate why critical reflection on the state of the “civilised” world is itself an indispensable part of being “civilised” and that civilisation, in the grosser sense of the common definition—agriculture, cities, writing and such—has for thousands of years been marred by all manner of anomalies, superstitions, stupidities, moral confusions and barbarisms—from tyranny, class and caste domination, slavery and torture, to blood sports, human sacrifice, genocide, religious bigotry, racial prejudice, cruelty to animals and reckless abuse of the natural environment.

Those general remarks are true of human “civilisation” in general, of course, not of Western civilisation alone. And they show why it is nonsense to define civilisation merely in the grosser sense. Yet we cannot simply put all these things to one side and claim that the rest is civilisation. What we need to see is that civilisation is the cognitive and moral continuum on which all these things, as well as the more inspiring achievements of human beings, co-exist in an uneasy and dynamic equilibrium. Nowhere has this been more so than in the case of Western civilisation. But now we must define it.

Western denotes “to the west of” somewhere, but west of where? West of when, as it were? I shall, provisionally, define it, geographically speaking, as the civilisation, in the broad sense I have just described, which developed west of the Euphrates and across the Mediterranean basin and throughout Europe—that little jutting out promontory of Asia, as Nietzsche once dubbed it—between the fourth millennium BC and the sixteenth century AD, then spread out to largely take over the globe. I say west of the Euphrates because Abraham left Ur of the Chaldees, because beyond the Euphrates for many centuries lay the Iranian empires that stood apart from Greco-Roman civilisation, even though Alexander briefly overran the Persian empire in the late fourth century BC. I say up until the sixteenth century, because that was the century in which the Western Europeans conquered the Americas and entered the Indian and Pacific Oceans via the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn.

This is, of course, a geographical approximation, plainly geared to the classical history of the Mediterranean world. But, as you will have guessed, I do not intend to anchor the idea of Western civilisation to a geographic area, any more than I have defined civilisation in terms of material accumulation or technologies. Properly understood—and arising along the continuum I have described—Western civilisation must be defined as those cognitive and moral ideas that arose in that geographic arena and constitute the critical reflection of the inhabitants of that area on what it means to be human and how to transform the human condition. In this long period of time, much has been borrowed from elsewhere and there have been many changes, by no means always for the good. And even at the highest points of Western history, civilisation has been notably thin on the ground among Westerners and vulnerable to both cognitive and moral setbacks.

The epicentre of Western civilisation, its true seed-bed, was the Greek world between the seventh and third centuries BC. The Greek adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet, the Greek invention of freedom of speech, public rhetoric and the open polity, the Greek creation of tragic drama, the Greek invention of speculative natural science, the elements of geometry, proto-scientific medicine, critical rationality, comparative political philosophy and analytical history, the Greek achievement in lyric poetry and sculpture and the Greek development of perspective in painting—all accomplished in small city-states, not vast empires or self-aggrandising monarchies—laid the foundation of Western civilisation.

There is room for considerable discussion here, of course, but let me make a few observations about why we must define Western civilisation principally in terms of the Greeks. First, the freedom and creativity of the Greeks, their expressiveness, boldness and originality were unprecedented in the ancient world. Second, they were conquered by the Romans at the end of the Hellenistic epoch, but as Horace famously remarked, “captive Greece led captive her Latin conqueror” in terms of what it meant to be civilised—cognitively and morally—and aesthetically, I might add.

Third, the classical world collapsed west of the Adriatic with the disintegration of the western Roman empire and seven centuries of relative poverty and ignorance ensued, because the Latin west was cut off from the Greek world of ideas. The so-called Dark Ages came to an end chiefly because Greek books were translated from the Arabic into Latin in Moorish Spain and sparked a revival of critical rationality and moral thought in Western Europe that culminated in what we call the Renaissance.

Fourth, it was primarily Greek poets and tragedians, Greek philosophers and natural scientists, Greek sculptors and artists, Greek historians, political philosophers and statesmen who inspired what became the breakthrough to modern Western theatre, science, art, abstract thought, natural science and political theory. Fifth and finally, it was in wrestling with the limitations of Greek thought that the thinkers of the Enlightenment invented the world of modern mathematics, physics and astronomy, representative government, medicine, analytical philosophy and political economy.

You might ask, where is the place of what people call the Judeo-Christian tradition in all this? More tangentially, you might ask, what about the adoption of Arabic numerals in place of the cumbersome old Greco-Roman numerals? And what about picking up the revolutionary concept of zero from India, via the Middle East? These are all good questions. Let me briefly address them.

The Hebrew and Christian Bible basically replaced the Greek epics and myths during the first centuries of the Christian era because it had a cognitive and moral dimension that they lacked. This lack was already apparent to Xenophanes, Plato and Aristotle. The Bible began with creation as a cognitive act, intentional and verbal, on the part of the deity; not a sexual or chaotic one, as in many pagan cosmogonical myths. It then showed history unfolding as a moral and ontological struggle of human beings to define themselves in relation to the demands of the deity. History became eschatological and soteriological—the believers looked for a just and glorious resolution of a complex tension working itself out over time. Blended with Neo-Platonic philosophy in the third century AD, this offered a rich new set of ideas to the Western imagination. In the writings of St Augustine, we see them being turned into the basis for a renovation of Western civilisation.

The single most fruitful contribution of this Judeo-Christian element to Western civilisation has been in the field of music. Whatever one makes of Jewish monotheism, Christian asceticism, eschatological beliefs, dogmas or what have you, the development of musical notation, choral polyphony, liturgical music, and orchestration in the millennium and more after the downfall of the western Roman empire is a remarkable phenomenon. It cannot easily be separated from the cognitive and moral culture the new religion superimposed on the old Grecian musical modes and Roman ritual practices. From Gregorian chant to the madrigals of Palestrina, the fugues and cantatas of J.S. Bach, the choral works of Handel such as Israel in Egypt and Messiah, and the liturgies, requiems and mariological works of countless composers down to Brahms, Dvorak and Rachmaninoff, the music of the Christian West is an immense treasure of civilisation. I want to suggest that this enormously rich musical impulse derives in considerable measure from the eschatological tension that is the foundation of the biblical religions. There is intense cognitive and moral energy at work, generating felt meaning and expecting resolution. Opera, of course, inherited the musical genius of the Christian centuries, but was essentially, from Monteverdi to Stravinsky, a revival of Greek tragic drama.

As regards mathematics and number systems, the crucial consideration is that the West borrowed the symbols in the present millennium, just as the Greeks borrowed the Phoenician alphabet 2000 years earlier. It’s what was then done with the symbols that is stunning. The economy, flexibility and expressive potential of the alphabet, compared with older systems of writing, facilitated the flourishing of Greek literature and philosophy; but it was the Greeks who did this flourishing, not, for example, the Phoenicians themselves, or their colonists in the Western Mediterranean, at Carthage and elsewhere. Peter Bernstein, in his book Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, provides a marvellous account of how modern mathematics developed in the West and how the Hindu-Arabic sunya or cifr—zero—was at the heart of it. As he points out, zero was a counter-intuitive concept, but one which “blew out the limits to ideas and progress” by making “the whole structure of the numbering system immediately visible and clear”.

Bernstein quotes the great early twentieth-century philosopher and collaborator of Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, as writing:

The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operations of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish. It is in a way the most civilised of all the cardinals, and its use is only forced on us by the needs of cultivated modes of thought.

You will appreciate at once why I think this remark of Whitehead’s is especially germane to our theme here. Whitehead was plainly concerned with human cognitive development, in distinguishing the operations of daily life from more cultivated modes of thought. We can add a whole new dimension to his remark, however; for zero has given us computing—a technology with vast potential, but one which has also raised questions that in some ways take us to the heart of Steiner’s concerns. In one of the essays in The West in a Nutshell, “On Technology and Moral Accountability”, I discuss the sale by IBM of early computers called Hollerith machines to the Nazis, who used them to facilitate their genocide and their continental war. The most civilised of all the cardinals? Only forced on us by the needs of cultivated modes of thought?

This brings us to the third of our terms: hope. The events of the 1930s and 1940s, more than anything else, triggered the concerns that Steiner and many others felt by 1971 about the future of Western civilisation. The pre-1914 hopes for secular progress were dealt a savage blow by the Great War, the Great Depression and the rise of totalitarianism. The hopes of a radical socialist revolution were dealt a shattering blow by the brutality and grimness of Stalin’s Russia and the catastrophes of Mao’s rule in China. The hopes of the romantic Right were dealt a dreadful blow by the monstrous crimes of the Nazis and the grotesqueries of Italian and Spanish fascism. The idea of technological progress bringing some kind of human utopia was thrown into radical confusion by the terrifying development of nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles. The hopes of humanist visionaries were buffeted by the crasser aspects of mass popular culture in the age of television and rock-and-roll. Youth across the Western world and well beyond its bounds were in open revolt in the name of a mish-mash of dubious ideas, from enthusiasm for Marx to enthusiasm for marijuana. What was a thoughtful person reasonably to hope for by 1971—and on what grounds? And what about now?

I think we should put aside both religious and secular versions of eschatological hope: the hope that a dramatic, final resolution and transformation will occur. I not only do not recommend hope in the coming of a messiah or of a revolution that will usher in utopia; I would argue very seriously that in the interests of civilisation we must actively discourage such hopes. Moreover, I do not believe that the idea of indefinite material progress is a coherent one, or one that inspires much hope any more. There is too much evidence of waste, depression amid plenty, alienation and workaholism that count against such a thoughtless notion. In any case, we have in the past generation begun to realise that our collective ingenuity has brought us to the point where we are pressing against every known biological boundary within the ecosphere of the Earth. This realisation has itself become a pressing cognitive and moral challenge to our material and technological civilisation.

Finally, I do not believe that there is anything very much to be gained by adopting some kind of hope for what might be dubbed a transformation of the “consciousness” of the human species. The cognitive and moral capacities of human beings are generalised ones which evolved long ago and their development varies enormously from individual to individual and sub-culture to sub-culture and will always require education and be at risk of stunting or regression, as far as I can foresee. No once-for-all transformation will occur.

Note that I have said nothing here of Western civilisation specifically, but it must be and is commonly acknowledged, even if grudgingly, that the global scientific, economic and material civilisation in which we are all now implicated and by which we appear to be getting swept along to an uncertain future is Western in its fundamental dynamics. The question before us, then, is what hope we can see for the world so understood. My definition of civilisation refines that background question into the question: What hope do the cognitive and moral resources of Western civilisation provide that the challenges confronting a largely Western-derived global economy and mode of living can be met short of catastrophe?

In recent decades, it has become unfashionable to be openly pro-Western as regards the cognitive and moral principles needed to sustain and renew human civilisation. Rebellion against Western colonialism, against the real or perceived inequities of Western capitalism, against the dogmatic traditionalism of Western Christianity, against the real or imagined desecration of the natural world by Western acquisitiveness and applied physical science; against the inroads of Western secularism on traditional non-Western religions; against the perceived vulgarity and even barbarity of many aspects of Western consumerism and self-indulgence, have all fed a widespread scepticism about the merits of Western civilisation. Am I, then, suggesting that hope is to be found in the very things so many people have been recoiling from?

My answer, of course, is that I certainly do not see all these things as a source of hope and I empathise with those who recoil from them. On the other hand, I do not see much that is done in the name of anti-Western activism as a source of much hope for a more civilised humanity either. I would add that, in many ways, as I remarked in my opening reflections, I have spent my life trying to sort out the perplexities George Steiner referred to in 1971, without a great deal of hope most of the time. I think it would be morally obtuse to urge hope as a matter of principle, or with a gambler’s recklessness and stupidity. Nonetheless, I do believe there are grounds for a fully mature and responsible, dare I say it, a civilised hope, despite all the apparently complex and daunting challenges we face and despite the frequent brutality, stupidity and coarseness of human beings. And, crucially, my hope is grounded chiefly on the modern sciences, open politics and ideas of philosophical enquiry pioneered in the West. Let me conclude, therefore, by setting out what I think these grounds to be.

The first is what I call the horizon of possibility. Hope, Dante wrote, ends when the door to the future is shut. Notice that here I am juxtaposing Dante’s shut door, as a sign of the end of hope, with Steiner’s foreboding that the opening of the last door in Bluebeard’s castle will possibly lead to the doom of our species, or at least of Western civilisation. I am with Dante in this contest of metaphors. Here is why: the future is not a single door and we can see, right now, that there are many doors into possible futures. Consequently, there are abundant grounds for hope, even if there is also plenty of reason for foreboding. After all, it is the future that lies through those doors, not paradise. And there are many doors open because the cognitive energies unleashed by Western civilisation, initially with the Greeks and then in the modern world, but above all in just the past century, have thrown open the horizon of humanity in utterly astonishing ways.

Exclusively because of modern cognitive endeavours, exploiting the latent cognitive capacities of the human mind, we can now, in a manner of speaking, see back through history to the very foundations of civilisation everywhere and far beyond them into the origins of our species and beyond those again to the immense course of complex life on the Earth since the Cambrian and beyond that again to the very beginnings of life on the Earth and back and back. We can see out into the cosmos to a depth and with a refinement of vision that would stagger not only Copernicus but also Einstein. It was Edwin Hubble, after all, who demonstrated to Einstein that the Milky Way, far from being the whole of the universe, was but one little galaxy in an inconceivably vast cosmic tapestry. We have also begun to look into the micro-cosmos of genes and cells, neurons and neurotransmitters, atoms, sub-atomic particles and irreducible uncertainties. All this is miraculous and has exploded our horizons outward and inward in every direction. We must grow into seeing this not simply as an overwhelming factual reality, but as an astonishing discovery of what it means to be human and, therefore, of what is possible for human beings.

This brings me to the second ground for hope, what I call the plasticity of individual human potential. You will often hear people say somewhat wearily or cynically that human nature does not change. A successful banker said this to me over lunch recently, adding that human beings are and always have been driven by greed and fear. Now it is, in an important sense, true that human nature does not change and we need to understand that nature profoundly if we are to carry forward the work of civilisation with any realistic hope. But consider that human nature is a point of departure only for human cognitive and moral potential.

As I remarked earlier, the natural endowment of an individual human being includes the capacities for language, symbolic thought and moral reflection; which can be stunted or cultivated in myriad ways. Hope, I suggest, lies not in changing human nature, but in cultivating human potential, with an increasingly clear eye on what extraordinary things are possible and how dreadfully and tragically things can go wrong. Civilisation, from of old, consists in enlightened and caring instruction, the cultivation of creativity, responsibility and love in the human being—a matter for families, schools, universities, cultural institutions and ever-recursive reflection.

The third ground of hope is what I call the stormiest contradiction induction. The term derives from the remark by Robert Ardrey in his best-selling book of popular anthropology African Genesis, almost fifty years ago, that a creature that has weathered millions of years of African savannah and ice ages and reinvented its technologies to colonise every nook and cranny of the Earth “has a future beyond the stormiest contradiction”. It does seem a reasonable wager that, as a species, we will demonstrate resilience in the face of new challenges. I call this an induction, not a deduction, because the record of the past does not amount to a proof that we will go on to future triumphs. Induction, in that sense, is a kind of logical fallacy. But that is why I speak of hope, not proof.

There are those who have become so alarmed by certain aspects of humanity’s collective behaviour that they hope the species will be humbled or even exterminated by Gaia. Let’s call that one possible future, or class of futures, but this is not, I have to say, a vision I can regard as particularly hopeful. It constitutes a definitive despair of humanity and would actually mean the end of hope as such, since hope is constituted by the specifically human capacity for conceiving alternative possible futures. Other animals do not hope. They simply flourish and persist—until Gaia wipes them out for reasons best known to herself.

These three grounds for hope—the horizon of possibility, the plasticity of individual human potential, and the stormiest contradiction induction—are all, I suggest, consistent with the most insightful and liberating beliefs from many civilisations over time. They are, however, especially bound up with the speculative, religious and scientific impulses that have characterised Western civilisation in its most energetic centuries. They are most firmly grounded now in the understanding of reality opened up by modern science, an overwhelmingly Western project which has become the common possibility of all mankind in the past half-century or so. They are fully consistent with the most rigorous critical reflection on and institutional renovation of our material civilisation, our consumer habits, our moral flaws and our proclivities to violence and pillage. Indeed, I want to conclude by suggesting that, properly understood, they offer the philosophical basis for a twenty-first-century renaissance which could be every bit as remarkable as the Ionian and Athenian beginnings or the early modern revitalisation of the Western epic—and which could now tap into the inherited wisdom and awakened energies of the whole species. There lies our hope and it is, surely, a powerful hope in the midst of all our doubts, confusions and challenges.

I grew up as a Catholic and a citizen of this far-flung outpost of Western civilisation and, as I wrestled with all of the tumultuous events of our time and sought perspective in la longue durée, I revised my beliefs and outlook considerably and many times. In the second chapter of The West in a Nutshell, which has the title “On Religion and Evolution”, I wrote that I cannot profess to believe the Christian creed on which I was raised, but that there is a creed I can profess and which I believe to be one human beings in general could profess. I make so bold as to call this the Creed of the Apogee:

I believe that all deities are idols of the mind,

That blood sacrifices to them are an abomination,

That dogmas are obstacles to enlightenment.

I believe in the plurality of worlds,

But know of none that can compare with ours

In its abundance of life;

Of a kind that has arisen,

Through countless changes and catastrophes,

Out of the primal waters of the Earth.

I acknowledge that I am of this world,

Though a brief sojourner in it.

I have sprung from it and will pass back into it.

I recognise that my existence,

Both sentient body and sapient mind,

Is possible only within the natural order of things.

Capable of mimesis, metaphor and music,

Of reason and responsibility,

I believe that I am neither fated nor predestined,

But am able to live for possibilities

And move intentionally toward a horizon that is open.

Paul Monk’s books Sonnets to a Promiscuous Beauty and The West in a Nutshell are published by and available from the Canberra publisher Barrallier Books (www.barrallierbooks.com). This is the text of an address Dr Monk gave to the Australian Institute for International Affairs in November.