Nearer to the Dust
TS Eliot and Hilaire Belloc against Barbarism
TS Eliot, the Rock (1934)
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowlege brings us near to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death, no nearer to God.
Where the the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.
I will never not find Eliot’s “the Rock” haunting.
It so presciently and eerily captures the delusions of our modern and post-modern claims of Progress. Our age is one that fetishizes information, data, facts, empirical studies; because it is through these things that contemporary man is able to justify his course toward individual emancipation from both the perceived oppressions from the past, as well as the restraints of the natural world.
He has no use for wisdom, or the virtue of stillness and reflection, because such things impede his potential of constant titillation. He instead pursues only those things, such as “knowledge of facts,” that can aid him in his quest down the path toward pure sensation, toward pure consumption. All our discoveries, all our innovations, all our material creations have only brought us “farther from God and nearer to the Dust.” Why is this?
Richard Weaver, in his critique of the Modern Age, expresses something similar:
Barbarism and Philistinism cannot see that knowledge of material reality is a knowledge of death. The desire to get ever closer to the source of physical sensation—this is the downward pull which puts an end to ideational life.
No education is worthy of the name which fails to make the point that the world is best understood from a certain distance or that the most elementary understanding requires a degree of abstraction. To insist on less is to merge ourselves with the exterior reality or to capitulate to the endless induction of empiricism.
Take as well the great English Catholic and proponent of Distributism Hillaire Belloc. He recognized before even the First World War that a tide of New Men were coming that would serve to re-orient the world away from the old European forms and toward a spirit of consumption and material obsession. The word consumption, used here, is deeper than just a reference to the masses that buy things as a matter of addiction (and boredom).
Rather, the spirit of Consumption lies in the fact that the new Mass Man does not see his existence within the social order as constituting a duty to build his civilization (Christendom); rather, he has the “right” to expend it. He sees himself as just passing through, the entire structure of European civilization that preceded him is a mere ghost, something that can be utilized, as it is found, to benefit his own subjective style, priorities, preferences, and way of life.
Belloc writes:
The Barbarian hopes—and that is the very mark of him—that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilisation has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort but he will not be at the pains to replace such goods nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being.
Far from being some sort of free market observation that people need to produce before they consume, Belloc rather has in mind something far larger: the replacement of civilizational goods can only be achieved when the spirit of the age has been adequately integrated with the civilizational heritage of Christian Europe. To the extent that our present cultural spirit stands in fierce opposition to our civilizational past, to that extent our activity serves to tear down Christian civilization.
The Barbarian is all around us, celebrating his total unfamiliarity with things that came before, his ignorance of the great order of the cosmos. Full of information, he adorns himself with the products and innovations and leisures that distract him from the reality of his actual proximity to Dust. I remain unconvinced that Man, as a whole, has the strength to overcome the spiritual ravages of prosperity.
The Barbarian was once embodied in the revolutionary spirit, standing as an outlier against society, ready to join the French revolutionaries, the anarchists in central Europe, or perhaps the Bolsheviks. But Barbarianism has, since Belloc, integrated its spirit into the mainstream of the West. It is here that Weaver calls them Philistines: Barbarians living amongst culture. Here lies the character not of the ascendent Left, but of the Western liberal middle class.
Such is the state of our entertainment, our advertisers, the “goods and services” of our economy. We laugh, we consume, we indulge the spirit of Barbarism that exists in total throughout every aspect of our modern lives. Barbarism amuses us and serves to absorb our attention as it wreaks havoc on the Old Culture on whose ruins Barbarism parades itself. And why shouldn’t we be amused and indulge? All is well. The past has been defeated. The superstitions and constraints and duties subdued.
The Barbarian, having by now integrated himself into the mainstream society, cannot see that he is a mere symptom of something deeper, something darker. Belloc observes that he is an actor behind whom lies a spirit that observes, that surveys the burning of Christendom.
We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid.
We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us: we laugh.But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile.
Farther away from God, indeed.
And nearer to the Dust.