The Blackberry Walk

"The meek do inherit the earth; but the modern sceptics are too meek even to claim their inheritance", Chesterton quips in his essay 'The Suicide of Thought'. And although he wrote in a time when their were authors still claiming to have grand ideas, he knew where the shift in academic currents would lead us: towards a meek intelligentsia. The Victorian era, and eras gone by, have academics who proclaim grand ideas - ideas which reimagine metaphysics, see the psyche in a new light, change our understanding of nature's operation - but what have we now? Meek academics looking at particulars. The historian of yonder wanted to re-frame all of history from a new angle - the new historian aims to burrow into small niches of history, not linking it to other events to craft a grand narrative. And it's this timidity in the face story telling which is the issue. In our Hiroshima/Holocaust-induced post-modern disdain for grand narratives, we are unable to tell stories about our pasts. Stories are what orient people - they are what unify people - and the modern academic in their timidity can no longer tell stories. Those that dare are rare, and often seen as outcasts by establishment figures. Revisionist historians, like one who I am a fan of like Tom Holland, are ostracised and branded as bending the facts, however many sources they may cite. But all facts must flexible; the drawing of the story of history cannot be done with straight lines alone. And the straight and narrow 'literal' or 'orthodox' interpretation through either a modern or a contemptuous-of-the-past lens will draw you no closer to the truth - only towards your own naval. Mediaeval man is mocked for thinking the Romans dressed, ate, and lived just like them, but we are just as guilty of seeing classical civilsation through a coloured lens. Somehow the fact that the marble statues were painted destroys everyone's conception of Rome; many like to repeat the fact as an act of iconoclasm. But what story of the past do we have to replace it? If not through Winckelmann's lens, how are we to understand the classical world? Without a story, we chase after but threads and fluff: not the grand tapestry of the past. The modern intellectual in his timidity is ripping apart the fabric of nationhood. It may be noted that this article is opposite to the previous article I posted, named 'The Scourge of German Idealism'. Whilst it may appear as if I'm contradicting myself, I am merely pointing out two extremes: on the one hand, there's the extreme of reduction into a single vital principle or sole set of ideas which determines all happenings in the world; and on the other, the extreme of reducing all of mankind into individual disparate tid-bits of information and happenings, made sure to be disconnected from one another. We have the dichotomy between reduction into universalism and reduction into individualism; between the interconnection of everything, and the isolation of everything; between the one-ness of all things, and the none-ness of all things. Both sin from the truth, because both miss the colour and texture of reality. Reduction when cooking is a kind of evaporation. When reducing (evaporating) milk, you're left we sweet sludge, whilst when reducing water you're left with hardly anything: reduction keeps some aspects of some things whilst utterly annihilating others. What must be striven for is to see the world as it is, not blinded by ideology, but in of itself. We will witness great patterns which pervade reality, but also miracles, and exceptions which like to break the rules - for often they are not rules, but rather guidelines. The golden mean, or middle way, between these two excesses is the balance between the pride of the German idealist and the timidity of the modern academic. The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is humility: humility is endless. But the limitlessness of humility should never be confused with the prison of timidity. As Chesterton writes, humility ought to be "a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on" - humility is to doubt one's efforts, never one's aims, he goes on. But timidity is, in a misunderstanding of humility, to not move forth and pursue one's aims; or, worse yet, to lower one's aims, making them easier to approach. Whilst the scourge of pride in one's achievements is not a force to be trifled with, to shrink beneath the white flag of timidity is to not even take battle against pride in the pursuit of lady virtue. The pursuit of Christian virtues is not the wish to retreat, like a trad, into parochial family life: it is to pursue that which is highest and that which is greatest for the right reasons in the right way. Humility does not necessitate timidity - only cowardice necessitates timidity. Humility requires the greatest bravery and eyes pointed at Heaven. And without knights of the pen to write the past and present, the fate of the future remains pre-scripted.