Two different views of the past

Dan R. forwards a promotional postcard that Oberlin College sent to his son, a high school senior. It reads in part:

To create a better
future we must be
willing to confront
the past.

Now compare that with these lines, from W.B. Yeats’s farewell poem, “Under Ben Bulben,” written four months before his death in January 1939:

Cast your mind on other days
That we in coming days may be
Still the indomitable Irishry.

The liberal sees the past of his civilization as something shameful and disgusting to be confronted and eradicated. The traditionalist (though in this case the traditionalist was also a great modernist) sees the past of his civilization as the enduring source of new creativity and the wellspring of culture and peoplehood. The liberal, forever yanking his own roots out of the ground, lives in a nihilistic void. The traditionalist lives in fruitful communion between the past and the present.

Yeats says in the same poem:

Many times man lives and dies
Between his two eternities,
That of race and that of soul.
And ancient Ireland knew it all.

- end of initial entry -

James P. writes:

The snippet of doggerel from Oberlin—

To create a better
future we must be
willing to confront
the past—

is actually true, but in precisely the opposite way from what Oberlin intends. We cannot create a better future unless we confront the past with an eye for the truth and a mind unclouded by leftist dogma.

Malcolm Pollack writes:

You wrote:

The liberal, forever yanking his own roots out of the ground, lives in a nihilistic void. The traditionalist lives in fruitful communion between the past and the present.

Very, very well said. The juxtaposition of those two quotes perfectly distills and condenses the ideological toxin, the lethal mind-virus, that has sent our culture to its deathbed.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 30, 2012 03:19 PM | Send