Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by this author are their own and do not represent the official position of the Barbados Today.
by Adrian Sobers
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” – (L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between)
In Incerto, Nassim Nicholas Taleb defines neomania as an incurable and untreatable love of the modern for its own sake.
It is usually accompanied by an absence of a literary culture which doubles as a “marker for future blindness because it is usually accompanied by a denigration of history, a byproduct of unconditional neomania. … Just by setting foot into a museum, the aesthetically minded person is connecting with the elders.”
Museums are a good place to start this connection, and old books a conduit to continue. But neomania recoils, or at the very least is suspicious of, all things ancient: both people and texts.
In The Problem of the Old Testament, Duane Garett writes, “Theologians and laypeople alike can find the Old Testament hard to apply, hard to reconcile with the gospel, and far removed from their religious practice.” With each passing day, old texts become increasingly distant from our present realities.
It is akin to the “straightforward interpretation of Hubble’s redshifts” that physicist Frank Wilczek mentions in Fundamentals: “This means that the distant galaxies are moving away with speeds proportional to their distance.” Wilczek then imagines “reversing the galaxies’ motions to reconstruct the past”, a time when “everything comes together at the same time.”
This also serves as a reminder of why we need to read old books. To reconstruct the past. In a word: remember.
In Breaking Bread with the Dead, Alan Jacobs invites us partake in the act of remembrance by reading old books. But it is increasingly hard these days.
“All history hitherto”, writes Jacobs, “is at best a sewer of racism, sexism, homophobia, and general social injustice, at worst an abattoir which no reasonable person would even want to peek at.”
Robinson Crusoe is a “document of racist, sexist colonialism; a librarian grieves at the space books by dead white men occupy on the shelves of her library” (you know how it goes).
In the essay, On Man: Heir of All the Ages, G. K. Chesterton peered through time to describe 21st century neomaniacs, “If the modern man is indeed the heir of all the ages, he is often the kind of heir who tells the family solicitor to sell the whole damned estate, lock, stock, and barrel, and give him a little ready money to throw away at the races or the nightclubs.” And as such, is no worthy heir.
To be clear, this is not an argument for suspending our moral judgements when we read old texts.
It is a reminder that when we (selectively) sever ties with the past, we sever part of our memory. And our humanity.
The danger here is that we, especially those in sophisticated circles, forget what it means to be human. Neomania remembers to recoil, and when it does look at the past it is usually with condescension and condemnation.
In typical Pharisee (Luke 18:11) fashion, neomaniacs take comfort in the false assurance that they are not like the ancients: barbarians, racists, and slave traders.
A tweet from @TheBabylonBee sums up the absurdity of this sentiment: “Nation That Kills 3,000 Babies A Day Feels Morally Superior To Slaveowners From 200 Years Ago.” The jurisprudence of abortion, and its accompanying anthropology, is deeply flawed. (But now is not the time.)
“One reason to read old books” says Jacobs, “is to get in touch with those elements of our constitution that we’re least likely to notice otherwise.”
Like our ancestors, we too are blinded by thickets of convention. What to do? Jacobs offers Frederick Douglass’s speech, The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro (July 4, 1852), as “a model for reckoning with the past, to sift, to assess, to return and reflect again.”
The twin-headed monster of idealization and demonization regarding the past simply will not do.
Douglass’s speech serves as a counter to this simplicity and is “a model of negotiating with the past in a way that gives charity and honesty equal weight.”
Like all things worth doing, it is no easy task (or even one that can be finished). But, it is a task to which we must attend.
As Reinhold Niebuhr (Irony of American History) put it, “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.” Read old books and see.
Adrian Sobers is a social commentator and prolific writer. This column was offered as a Letter to the Editor.
