Richard Powers is such a brilliant writer he can get you arguing with his characters! In the novel Generosity, he describes the weltanschaung of the parents of Tonia Schiff:
“Both Vice-consul Schiff and his beloved doctor wife felt something hopelessly magnificent about the human adventure, its ability to channel the brute instinct of a few hard-pressed hunter-gatherers into creating Athens, Byzantium, Florence, Isfahan.”
As I read that sentence I found myself nodding with great enthusiasm. Yes! That’s very much the way I view the world! Three cheers for Vice Consul Schiff!
The next sentence reads: “But in Gilbert Schiff’s considered opinion, the project had been running in reverse for more than a century; the beasts of unlimited appetite were loose and weren’t going back into the kennel anytime soon.”
How droll and smart, I chimed. How spot on! Hey! You’ve only to read the New York Times on any given morning to find enough instances of brutal, feral nonsense to scald your sensibilities, send you drifting into a gloomy funk. Suicide bombers blowing up subway stations in Russia. Several dozen Haitian earthquake victims, some only recently rescued from the rubble, loaded onto a plane bound for America by a rescue party of Marines, straightaway finding themselves in prison because they arrived without visas! And one more in a continuing series of articles that remind you just how much our cherished privacy is crumbling. Soon, you realize, it will be gone for good.
I eagerly scan the next sentence: “Every individual being with any skill had to fight the fatuous, disposable present with everything of worth.”
This thought too I liked, for sure, but a small degree of doubt began gnawing at the entrance to my brain. A tendril sprouted. Where are we going with this? The paragraph continues: “Instead, his daughter—his polyglot, caryatid, harpist daughter, National Merit Finalist, queen of the debating society, captain of the chess club, choral society soloist—was partying with the barbarians.”
All this because his daughter managed to find a responsible job in television?
Suddenly my own thoughts veered off in a new direction. I realized I only half agreed with Vice Consul Schiff. In the first place, barbarians have been at the gates for much longer than a century. This past hundred years may have invented more efficient ways of killing others, but more fiendish? Weren’t bestial impulses on rather obvious display in all those centuries before ours? I see no reason to suspect they haven’t always been with us, even back beyond those horrors we’ve blissfully recorded. Meditate for a moment on Genghis Khan and his welcoming parties. Or the Church’s chosen way of dealing with heretics during the Counter Reformation. Think about the Byzantine Emperor, Basil the Bulgar-Killer, who gouged out the eyes of 10,000 men (just one eye each, so they could find their way back to their villages as a warning). Etc. Etc. I don’t think history supports the idea that the dark side of human nature is a modern invention. We’ve just refined our technologies.
Furthermore, I’m not even sure I’d go along with the idea that our age is more fatuous than ever. One can find numerous examples of the shallow and the silly lurking in past eras as well. And I’m not so sure that the creative impulse that yielded airplanes, electricity and the Internet are not the same ones that built the Parthenon and adorned the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. We need to think rationally and soberly, of course, but maybe a little silliness – and surely laughter – are necessary antidotes to the brooding and obsessive seriousness that can easily yield results unworthy of mankind’s better moments.
I’m not convinced, therefore, that past ages get higher marks for “the civilizing impulse” than our own. Which doesn’t make me any happier, of course. Because I live in this one.