I have been asked to expand on my use of the phrase “a great civilisation” in the context of my remarks on Babylon in my April letter from Paris. I must admit that in using this phrase my intention was to be provocative. In our technologically advanced society, it is commonplace to denigrate the past and to believe implicitly in “progress”. “What have we to learn from ancient savages?” seems to be the dominant assumption behind our attitude to the past.
The site of Babylon today – a military base.
Of course those (such as me) who have undergone training in literature cannot easily entertain such naïve notions about what has come down to us. Together with the undeniable progress resulting from the technological application of scientific discoveries there have been other, no less portentous, losses on the level of essential human relations and values.
If one takes the notion of “culture” to include a whole way of life providing vital perspectives to individuals as they confront the eternal, unanswerable, questions which life poses, there can be no “progress”. Yet these questions are themselves essential to any fully human life: “Who am I? Why am I here? What, ultimately, is my life for?” What I am suggesting then, is a scale of values by which it is possible to discriminate between earlier cultures and our own.
To give a concrete example, not so remote from us – Shakespeare’s England. On one level it was undoubtedly a brutal and violent world: political and religious oppression was rife; cruelty, torture and harsh punishment commonplace. It was a world in which the “rights” of women, children and the needy were not even considered worthy of debate. Inequalities on every level were assumed, and public health and hygiene were rudimentary at best. Our thoughts about such a world cannot be coloured by nostalgia or sentimentality. However, in the context of the questions I set out earlier, can one be entirely confident that Shakespeare’s England emerges as less developed than our own?
The question is at least worth posing. The culture that made Shakespeare’s theatre possible addressed those questions, and not just for an educated elite. I do not want to evade the manifest deficiencies of Shakespeare’s England in terms of “enlightenment”, but I would like to suggest that by ignoring those deep, unanswerable question about the meaning and significance of life, our own culture seems, to say the least, less than fully human, and lacking in depth: “outwardly cock-a-hoop, inwardly despairing” to use D.H. Lawrence’s formulation.
The need for significance is a fundamental one which, if unadressed, can only lead to human misery. (I recommend in this context The Need for Roots by Simone Weil). I say “unadressed” advisedly, because answers are not even to be envisaged. (The value of a question does not necessarily reside in its answer). What I want to suggest here is that a civilisation is “great” insofar as it is able to provide forms in which individuals can search for meaning and significance in their lives.
So, to return to Babylon, given the fragmentary nature of the surviving records – and above all my own ignorance – it is of course wise to be circumspect. There is a good deal of evidence of practices which offend current enlightened values: no one (I hope) would argue for the immolation of wives, servants and others when the master of the house dies. However, when one sees evidence of a highly developed cosmology and mythology; a sophisticated literature that clearly emerged from a vital oral tradition; sculpture and architecture that gave monumental and public expression to these cosmological epics and the rhythms of life on various scales; I think that the expression “great civilisation” – however provocative to contemporary assumptions – can be justified.
Julian Arloff-see also his April Letter from Paris
Artists' impresions of ancient Babylon and the Hanging Gardens
