| The Triumph of Civilization |
Norman D. Livergood
| The Triumph of Civilization |
In essence, culture is the sum of all technology and values that make up human life. The definition of culture changes relative to how we interpret human life and human values. If we define human life as mere physical existence and if we base our value system on nothing more than ego-satisfaction, our culture is materialistic regardless of how technologically
advanced we might be. "Our present civilization quite obviously lacks any unifying principle. The degree of unity which the vague term 'modern civilization' implies is in many ways a 'unity of disunity', the peoples involved being given a superficial coherence by the spread of technology and by common acceptance of certain ways of thought whose very nature is to create further disintegration." |
A leading German anthropologist, Rudolf Virchow, characterized Bismarck's struggle with the Catholic Church as a Kulturkampf--a fight for culture--by which Virchow meant a fight for liberal, rational principles against the dead weight of medieval traditionalism, obscurantism, and authoritarianism.
Contemporary nations use the language of culture to manipulate their people's thoughts and behavior. China's recent "Spiritual Civilization" propaganda campaign was merely for the purpose of controlling the Chinese and Tibetan people.
but I challenge you to look honestly at the facts and then describe them in any other way. We all wish this destruction weren't going on, but we can't make it disappear just by burying our head in the sand of ignorance.
The destruction of American culture by this barbaric horde started in the early part of the twentieth century and has continued at a faster pace ever since."Civilizations can only be understood by those who are civilized." |
Democracy requires an electorate that understands what is actually happening in the world, beyond what the ruler-owned media tell us is happening. If American citizens receive an effective education, we learn to inform ourselves and can see through the propaganda, the dictatorial actions, and the outcomes of the non-constitutional acts of our rulers.
The "High Cabal" wanted a working class that was merely trained to do a particular job, not think about social or political issues. They created an educational system focused on training instead of learning. So today we have an American citizenry that can't even see that Bush II has lied to them repeatedly and has committed unspeakable acts of moral depravity: 
From the imposition of an unconstitutional Patriot Act to deny Americans their civil liberties, to lying about weapons of mass destruction as an excuse for a war he had planned even before becoming President, to condoning the torture of Iraqi prisoners, to nominating rabidly reactionary judges, Bush II commits abominations and then re-defines reality for the uneducated, gullible American public merely by asserting that black is white.
"In history the way of annihilation is invariably prepared by inward degeneration . . . Only then can a shock from outside put an end to the whole." |
2. The second group of essential elements of our American culture that are being destroyed are the financial, political, economic, social structures.
| It may seem that barbarism is currently winning in its attempts to destroy civilization, so we must utilize a wider perspective in understanding how the principles of civilized behavior are ultimately triumphant. It is absolutely essential that we re-examine the principles of civilization as bequeathed by Plato and other teachers within the Perennial Tradition to discern the veiled pattern in world history. Over many centuries mankind has seen varied types of imperialism attempt to seize world dominance, only to result in their own self-destruction.
Civilization is the maintenance of social order through persuasion, not force. The ideals of civilization are the heritage of both the East and the West. |
"Only he can be regarded as a true philosopher who is never tired of acquiring new knowledge, who always thinks very lightly of what he knows already, reckoning that, strictly speaking, he does not know for absolutely certain anything at all, and who is ready to admire all people in whom he can find accomplishments of which he feels that he cannot boast himself."Hermann Gauss, Plato's Conception of Philosophy
"The creation of the world is the victory of persuasion over force." |
enlightened consciousness, we must examine the essence of the historical struggle for understanding and freedom, simplifying historical processes so they become easily comprehensible.
"Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort." |
"The Dark Ages were stark in every dimension. Famines and plagues, culminating in the Black Death and its recurring pandemics, repeatedly thinned the population. Rickets affected the survivors. Extraordinary climatic changes brought storms and floods, which turned into major disasters because the empire's drainage system, like most of the imperial infrastructure, was no longer functioning. It says much about the Middle Ages that in the year 1500, after a thousand years of neglect, the roads built by the Romans were still the best on the continent. Most of the others were in such a state of disrepair that they were unusable; so were all European harbours until the eighteenth century, when commerce again began to stir. Among the lost arts was bricklaying; in all of Germany, England, Holland, and Scandinavia, virtually no stone buildings, except cathedrals, were raised for ten centuries. The serfs' basic agricultural tools were picks, forks, rakes, scythes, and balanced sickles. Because there was very little iron, there were no wheeled ploughshares with moldboards.
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The outstanding ingredient which the Greeks contributed to human cultural evolution was the concept of democracy: the rule of citizens. The idea now became a part of human thought: that common people could and should govern themselves, without having to bow to a military, political, economic, or religious ruler. This concept was to play an important role throughout modern history, as people returned to the idea that they could rule themselves.
As we shall see, this ideal of citizen self-rule is still unrealized, even in twenty-first century America. However, the ideal continues to have a powerful influence over human thought and serves as a goal toward which we aspire. |  |
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Over several centuries of barbarian incursion, the Roman Senate lost all real power and authority. Julius Caesar had installed a Gaul as a member of the senate, outraging public opinion. It is claimed by some that the mad emperor Caligula made his horse a senator; a clear sign of the demise of the culture."Personal liberty is the noblest achievement of Western civilization. That people are free to do as they please within limits set only by the personal freedom of others; that legally all persons are equal before the law; that philosophically the individual’s separate existence is inviolable; that psychologically the ultimate human condition is to be liberated from all internal and external constraints in one’s desire to realize one’s self…freedom is undeniably the source of Western intellectual mastery, the engine of its extraordinary creativity, and the open secret of the triumph of Western culture." |
dominance allowed a new movement to develop called the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was in essence a re-discovery of the knowledge and values preserved by Perennialist seers. "Enlightenment liberalism set the individual free politically, intellectually, and economically. The political universe was demystified, as the magical power of thrones, scepters, and crowns was replaced by rational acts of consent. The individual (understood, of course, in the Enlightenment as male and property-owning) did not receive government and authority from a God who had given his secular sword to princes and magistrates to rule by his divine right. Nor did the individual keep any longer to his subordinate place in a divinely inspired hierarchy, in which kings and noblemen had been placed above him as 'your highness' who were society's natural governors. Government was voluntarily established by free individuals through a willful act of contract. Individuals rationally consented to limit their own freedom and to obey civil authority in order to have public protection of their natural rights. Government's purpose was to serve self-interest, to enable individuals to enjoy peacefully their rights to life, liberty, and property, not to serve the glory of God or dynasties, and certainly not to dictate moral or religious truth."
The Portable Enlightenment Reader |
There are always preservers and custodians of the hidden Perennial Wisdom. As humankind advances in terrestrial and spiritual understanding, realized savants make available "prescriptions" for personal transformation. Only those humans who prepare themselves through self-awareness and self-discipline are initiated into these Mysteries."It is possible for any man or woman to enter into that ancient fellowship of those who seek to become the servants of the great preservers of the secret records of antiquity. Krishna taught Arjuna in the fourth chapter of the Bhagavad Gita that after the greatest – now forgotten – civilizations of long ago came and went, 'the mighty spiritual art' was lost.
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In eras of cultural destruction, such as we are now experiencing, humankind's fate often seems hopeless. The low level of culture to which America has now devolved is revealed by the proliferation of mindless human savages who not only cannot understand an author such as Shakespeare, but have lost even the desire to understand transformative art or literature. Such a statement is not meant to defame humankind, but to provide a straightforward, honest appraisal of our present decadent state."There never was a time, even at the blackest nadir of a Western Dark Age, when the Western Christian society did not physically possess the works of Virgil--and did not retain sufficient knowledge of Latin to construe his sentences. Yet there were at least eight centuries, from the seventh to the fourteenth
inclusive, during which Virgil's poetry was beyond the comprehension
of the most gifted Western Christian students, if we take as our
standard of understanding an ability to grasp the meaning which
Virgil had intended to convey and which had been duly comprehended by his like-minded contemporaries and by posterity
down to, let us say, the generation of Saint Augustine. Even Dante,
on whose spirit the first glimmer of an Italian renaissance of
Hellenism was beginning to dawn, saw in Virgil a figure which the
historical Virgil would have taken, not for his own human self, but
for some augustly mythical personage such as Orpheus. |
World citizens are presently facing the ravages of deliberate cultural destruction by politicians and their corporate controllers.We are entering a period when much of the Perennialist wisdom will have to go underground, to protect it from destruction by savages and barbarians--now called "compassionate conservatives.""Not through any one, or two, or even dozens of brilliant generations, but through age-long struggle has man attained the simple things of the spirit, what we call the homely virtues. The sacredness of a promise; the sense of moral obligation; common ordinary veracity; personal integrity; individual liberty; elementary justice. . . to mention only a few. And in the end--when all else in the world crashes about our lives--they are the things to which we turn; the things that count. The 'homely' virtues. Spiritual values." |
The lack of ploughs was not a major problem in the south, where farmers could pulverize the light Mediterranean soils, but the heavier earth in northern Europe had to be sliced, moved and turned by hand. Although horses and oxen were available, they were of limited use. The horse collar, harness, and stirrup did not exist until about 900 AD. Therefore tandem hitching was impossible. Peasants laboured harder, sweated more, and collapsed from exhaustion more often than their animals."
Patriotism declined as people lost their allegiance to the state
Though it was lost, collectively speaking, it was never lost to all because these hierophants assiduously preserved it. It has been called the Wisdom-Religion. It is the divine wisdom maintained by those few who embody it, who are its self-conscious custodians, tribeless and raceless, genuinely free men proud to belong to the family of man. They differ from the exhaustless potentiality of the Divine Mind only as divine thought differs from divine ideation. It is the difference between a library and men who in using the library and in reflecting and ideating upon its books, magically bring them to life. . . The faculty of self-conscious awareness in the human being never seems to be exhausted, even by the whole catalogue of abuse of that power."
"Similarly, there was never a time at which the Western society
did not possess the philosophical works of Aristotle, competently
translated into Latin by the Late Hellenic man of letters, Boethius
(A.D- 480-524); yet there were six centuries, reckoning from the
date of Boethius's death, during which his translations were beyond
the comprehension of the most acute Western Christian thinkers.
When, at last, the Western Christians were ready for Aristotle, they
got him, by a roundabout route, through Arabic translations. In
offering to a sixth-century Western Christendom his Latin
translations of Aristotle, Boethius was like a benevolent but
ill-judging uncle who presents, let us say, the poems of Mr. T. S.
Eliot to his nephew on his thirteenth birthday. The nephew, after
a brief inspection, places the book in the darkest corner of his
small library and, quite sensibly, forgets all about it. Six years
later-the equivalent of centuries on the reduced time-span of an
individual adolescence-the nephew encounters these poems again
as an Oxford undergraduate, falls under their spell, purchases them
from Messrs. B. H. Blackwell, and is unfeignedly surprised to
discover, on returning home for the vacation, that the book had been
standing on his shelves all the time.