Category Archives: civilization

To know the future you must know the past

civilization, Freedom to Read, Truth Seeking

 

Both libraries and archives have an inevitable leaning towards the future. They preserve the past for the benefit of the future. As Richard Ovenden said,

“Every collection, every library is actually about the future. Every archival institution is about the future. How can we know where we are going unless we know where we are from. How can we chart a path to the future without thinking of where we are from?”

 

We need the knowledge of the past in order to look at the past societies with fresh eyes and new ideas and to inspire the future and protect the path to the best future.

As John Stuart Mill so wisely told us, we cannot hold a valid opinion unless we allow it to be challenged. We must permit all ideas to be challenged. Even our most sacred beliefs must be challenged or those beliefs will wither. This is for our benefit and for the benefit of the future. We must consider  and reflect on opposing views. We must not hide them in closets. We do our children no favours if we protect them from contrary views. Their own views will become stunted and weak without challenge. Coddling them from uncomfortable views as so many conservatives, like those in Florida, now want to do, is doing a great disservice to the next generation. Few things help us challenge our own views better than reading the strongest of the challenges to those views.

Where better to go for that than a library?

 

A Champion for Freedom

civilization, Freedom to Read, Truth Seeking

 

John Stuart Mill was the author of On Liberty and a champion, perhaps the greatest champion, of freedom of thought and expression. Richard Ovenden in his lecture at the Toronto Library took note of one of his famous ideas: namely John Stuart Mill’s insistence in On Liberty, that only through the diversity of opinion is there in the existing state of human intellect the chance of fair play to all sides of the truth.”  Often this seems hopelessly optimistic in this day of increasing polarization and decreasing tolerance for a diversity of ideas, but it is still the main hope for lovers of freedom of thought and expression.  Frankly, I have found no better idea.

Societies have a hard time achieving this goal. How can libraries then do it too? Richard Ovenden thought they could be up to that task. He pointed out that it is a fundamental aspect of their role. Libraries work in collaboration with each other and work within networks with each other. They have allies in their momentous task. They can do it! Often if you need to read something they don’t have in their own collection they are quite willing to help you to find it elsewhere and bring it to you.

Libraries take very seriously their job of serving their communities, Ovenden said. And I know this from my own decade of serving on a local library board. The people their love to serve the needs of their reading public. And they are darn good at it.

As Ovenden said,

“What gives us pleasure at the end of the day is thinking that they have helped someone solve a problem or better understanding of some issue. That task is entirely possible and we need to support those institutions and the individuals who work in them and give them the freedom to do that job.”

And they are darn good at it. They can do it if we just give them a chance. And it is one of the most important jobs there is.

 

 

Are Libraries asked to do too much?

civilization, Freedom to Read

 

Around the world libraries are being asked to do things or provide services in many new and interesting ways. In some places they act as shelters for the homeless. In places they act as food banks. In some they dispense health services and professional advice. They act as knowledge resources, community spaces. In Indigenous terms they are like knowledge keepers.  They are expected to reflect the diversity of opinion and to be welcoming of one and all. We also expect them to be, as Nahlah Ayed said, “bastions of free expression.” And then, as if that is not enough, we ask them to uphold democracy for us. All of this leads to the important question: are we asking too much of libraries?

Richard Ovenden had a good answer to this question.  He said, “Society is asking too much of libraries if we don’t resource them adequately to do all of those tasks.”

Libraries that were able to help many a person to make life choices are increasingly under pressure to do less, or even disappear entirely. That is most unfortunate. Particularly when libraries are faced with immense challenges of dealing with an analogue past and digital present such libraries may be unable to do all that is demanded of them. Ovenden said,

“Libraries have become aware of their role as social infrastructure. The have been incredibly adaptive. They’ve been innovative. They have seen how they can make a difference for their communities. We should entrust them to do those things their communities need the most and resource them properly.”

Yet we always ask them to do more. And therefore we must do our part too.

 

Libraries as temples

civilization, Freedom to Read, Truth Seeking

 

 

Richard Ovenden talked about excavations in ancient communities in Iraq and Syria of which I was not aware. He said that in ancient places, librarians often worked in temples!  5,000 years ago, librarians catalogued books. They had clay tablets of course rather than paper bound books, but they worked  in temples. He said “the librarians and archivists were priests!”

 In the France during the Middle Ages, the French national archives, the Trésor des Chartre,  were located in Sainte Chapelle. Only sacred chapels or cathedrals were good enough for libraries. That is how important they were considered. The archives were considered so precious they had sacred connotations.  We have lost some of that reverence  for libraries, for sure since then. Perhaps this is a sign of the decay of civilization in fact.

In the digital age we are surrounded by facts or false facts but libraries are hardly considered precious or sacred. Those days are largely gone. What a shame.

Nowadays, knowledge is abundant but still, we must never forget, fragile and can be easily disrupted disturbed or even maligned. We see that all around us.

It wasn’t long ago that the idea of librarians spending time on going through long lists of books for potential banning or “correction,” as happened in Florida, would have been considered ludicrous. Today it is rather a sad reality. Sometimes, I think, we live in the age of barbarians, or at best, the age of fools.

We have taken ancient liberties—such as the freedom to read or the freedom to think—for granted. To see them besmirched as they have been is deeply disturbing. Is there any chance that there can be galvanizing forces to buck up our resistance to tyranny? Or are these incidents or premonitions of our civilizational decline?

Libraries are truly treasures whether national, regional or local. We must learn again to understand that.

Freedom to learn 

civilization, Freedom to Read

 

Libraries were always part of the centres of learning in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic worlds according to Richard Ovenden. As he said, they were “tools for education passing down knowledge from one generation to inform the next.”

 

The idea of public libraries began to emerge in the 17th century with the creation of the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It has been “a library of legal deposit for 400 years,” according to its own website. It has more than 13 million printed items. It was one of the first such libraries as it was opened to non-members of Oxford University. It was a public library. In the 18th century the idea that libraries could be tools of self-improvement arose.

 

Ovenden explained that “libraries became part of a movement to broaden education for the benefit of individuals but also society as a whole.  I remember with deep fondness the first library I even encountered. It was called the University of Manitoba Extension library which was designed for people from the sticks, like Steinbach, which did not have a public library. My mother drew it to my attention and I am forever grateful to her for that.

 

As a rural resident, I discovered that I could order books from a catalogue and within a couple of weeks of making an order, I would receive in a brown paper container the books ordered if available and if not a reasonable facsimile in the opinion of the library staff. Most astonishing to me was that I did not have to pay anything for the privilege. I did not even have to pay to send them back by mail. How was that possible? The provincial government which supported libraries in bigger centres around the province justifiably thought it should do something as well for the unwashed masses in the hinterland. What a delight!

 

I will never forget one time I ordered books including a spy novel. I loved spy novels as a lad, as I do as an aged man. To my disappointment I did not get the book I ordered. But the librarian, bless her soul sent an alternative. A book by a writer I had never heard of, Ian Fleming. It was Dr. No. It was the first in a series of James Bond novels that delighted me until he died.

I will never forget the thrill of opening those brown packets.  Life never got better than that. It was my personal introduction to civilization! My life was changed forever.

Librarians rescued Western Civilization in Vilnius

civilization, Truth Seeking

 

At the beginning of the 20th century Vilnius was a profound centre of Jewish life.  It was a city filled with learned rabbis and outstanding libraries and cultural life. Of course, that did not live on.  Like so much else of culture and civilization, it was destroyed, in the case of Vilnius by operation Barbarossa launched by the evil partnership of Stalin and Hitler.

 

As Oxford Librarian Richard Ovenden pointed out, the Jewish intellectual leaders of Vilnius were forced each day to cooperate with the axis leaders in the destruction of Jewish archives and historical records. Yet somehow, they managed to resist the occupation and save some of the historical records at substantial risk to their own lives. Civilization was literally hanging by a thread, if that. Those intellectual giants smuggled out books and records and hid them with friendly people in the ghetto, doing what they could to salvage some civilization.  They called themselves “the paper brigade.” We should call them heroes.

 

These intellectual warriors hoped that someone would come after them to retrieve those records and documents, and miraculously they did. How was that even possible? They literally rescued Jewish civilization from destruction at the hands of the Nazis and Communists.

The Communists discovered what was happening and once more sent the documents to the paper mill, but remarkably, they were rescued a second time by librarians who turned the trucks around and hid them until 1949 when it was again safe to release the.

Sometimes librarians are heroes.

An attack on civilization and knowledge

civilization, Freedom to Read, Truth Seeking

 

An attack on a library is an attack on civilization.

On August 25 1991 the library in Bosnia’s capital city of Sarajevo was shelled by the Serbian forces. No other buildings were attacked that day. Just their magnificent library. It was a deliberate barbarian attack on Bosnian civilization by brutes from Serbia. Serb snipers then picked off people who went to try to save the books in the building. One of them was killed. Few rare books were saved. It was too dangerous. Of course, the Serbian attacked people too.  It was the greatest assault in Europe since the Second World War.

According to Richard Ovenden, “the library was a target because it was both the symbol of a multi-cultural community that Bosnia and Herzegovina had managed to preserve and it contained the written culture and history of Muslims, Christians, and Jews all living together.” This really shows that the attack was an attack on civilization and knowledge. That is why I refer to the Serbs engaged in that attack as “brutes.”  It is a hard word, but I would suggest, not inappropriate in such circumstances.

Such an attack shows how the aggressors thought the Bosnians were not civilized, revealing, as such attacks inevitably do, that it is the aggressor who is uncivilized.

According to Ovenden,

“On the evening of August 25, 1992, shells began to rain down on a building in Bosnia’s capital city of Sarajevo. The shells were incendiaries, designed to raise fire rapidly on impact, especially when surrounded by combustible material. The building they hit was the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina. No other buildings were fired on this day — the library was the sole target for the shells.”

 

The National Library in Sarajevo reopened on May 9, 2014 — 22 years after the landmark building was destroyed during the Bosnian war, along with its nearly two million books and manuscripts.

Civilization and knowledge rose again from the ashes of Sarajevo.

 

The Big Ideas

Books, civilization, Classic Books, Philosophy/Ideas, Religious Quest in the Modern Age, Truth Seeking

 

The Brothers Karamazov is often called a book of ideas.  In some respect that is an apt description.

In the novel The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky asks big questions.  Does God exist?  If not, can we do whatever we want? And Ivan asks Alyosha the question that is so vital to him, does Alyosha love life more than the meaning of life? Alyosha’s answer is surprising but clear. “love should come before logic…Only then will man be able to understand the meaning of life.” So he tells his brother he should “bring back to life those dead of yours.” He was referring to the great thinkers and artists. And that brings him back to civilization and the eternal verities. The big questions, the big ideas that drive Ivan.

Ivan loves life and loves ideas. He is passionate about both, though usually we see only his love of ideas. Ideas excite him. Ideas drive his life. He doesn’t just want to chase  wine, women and song, but the big ideas, what he calls “the eternal verities.”

Ivan realizes that his younger brother Alyosha, is also driven by ideas, the spiritual ideas, for he too is on a religious quest. That is why he went to the monastery. That is why he has made Elder Zosima his mentor.  He wants to find the spiritual path. As Ivan says, “we callow youths, we have first of all to settle the eternal verities.” Usually, it is often thought, the big ideas must be settled by wise old men, but Ivan disagrees.

What are these big ideas?  He tells Alyosha

“those eternal verities such as the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. And those who do not believe in God will bring in socialism, anarchy, and the reorganization of society according to a new scheme…But it really boils down to the same damned thing—they’re all the same old questions, they’re just approached from a different angle. And there are many, many extremely original boys who spend their whole time nowadays debating these eternal questions.”

 

And Alyosha admits to Ivan that these are the most important problems, especially for Russians. But Ivan says what really surprises him is not that they say if God does not exist, they would have to invent God, which is what Voltaire said, but rather that such an idea would have ever occurred to “a vicious wild animal like man. For that concept is so holy, so touching, and so wise that it does man too much honour. For my part I’ve long since stopped worrying about who invented whom—-God  man or man God.” There’s a big question for you.

There is a lot to be passionate about in these ideas. And the Karmazov brothers, are passionate about those ideas and that makes for fascinating reading. And a fascinating life.

 

The Appetite for Life

Books, civilization, Classic Books, Nature, Religious Quest in the Modern Age

 

Ivan Karamazov in the novel Tthe Brothers Karamazov is the epitome of the man of reason, but this does not prevent him from knowing the joy of passion and love. He is also, presumably, the nihilist that does not believe in God, and hence can do anything he desires without moral consequences, but nonetheless he knows the importance of nature, life, love, and morality. He is the one who says if God does not exist, everything is permitted. But, As Ivan told his much more saintly brother, Alyosha,

 

“… even if I believed that life was pointless, lost faith in the woman I loved, lost faith in the order of things, or even became convinced that I was surrounded by a disorderly, evil, perhaps devil-made chaos, even if I were completely overcome by the horrors of human despair—I would still want to live on. Once I start drinking from this cup, I won’t put it down until I have emptied it to the last drop…many times I’ve asked myself  if there is anything in this world that would crush my frantic indecent appetite for life and have decided that nothing of the sort exists. This appetite for life is often branded as despicable by various  spluttering moralists and even more so by poets. It is of course the outstanding features of us Karamazovs.”

 

His appetite for life has overwhelmed his nihilism. Even though he is passionate about ideas, as Dostoevsky himself was, Ivan says,

“…so I want to live and go on living, even if its contrary to the rules of logic. Even if I do not believe in the divine order of things, the sticky young leaves emerging from their buds in the spring are dear to my heart; so is the blue sky and so are some human beings even though I often don’t know why I like them; I may still even admire an act of heroism with my whole heart, perhaps out of habit, although I may have long since stopped believing in heroism.”

 

Besides loving the world, including that world of nature he so glowingly described, the green world that emerges from its buds, he also loves the world of civilization—western civilization exemplified by Europe. It is where he finds meaning in a world that often seems meaningless. As Ivan said,

“I’ve been wanting to go to Western Europe and that’s where I’ll go from here. Oh  I know that going there is like going to a graveyard, I tell you!  The dead who lie under the stones there are dear to me, and every gravestone speaks of their ardent lives, of human achievements, of their passionate faith in the purpose of life, the truth they believed in, the learning they defended—and I know in advance that I’ll prostrate myself and kiss those stones and shed tears on them, although the whole time I’ll be fully aware that it’s only a graveyard and nothing more. And I’ll not be weeping out of despair, but simply because I’ll be happy shedding those tears. I’ll get drunk on my own emotion. I love those sticky little leaves in the spring and the blue sky, that’s what! You don’t love those things with reason, with logic, you love them with your innards, with your belly, and that’s how you love your own first youthful strength.”

 

After this magnificent speech in which he makes clear that he too is filled with passion, passion that includes the mind, includes intelligence, he asks Alyosha, his younger holy brother who has been preparing to become a priest, if this makes sense. And Alyosha says, “I understand only too well,” proving that he is also a Karamazov. All of them are filled with passion. All of them have this astonishing “appetite for life.” Even Alyosha, the near holy man, a near ascetic, says, “I’ve always thought that before anything else people should learn to love life in this world.”

He is no ascetic monk. He is a Karamazov.

 

 

Mesmerized by Lies

2024 Trip to South West United States, civilization, Death of Truth, Decline of the west, The Sleep of Reason

 

One of the interesting things that one of the panelists on the Critics at Large podcast mentioned was that we as a people are “mesmerized by the lies”. To some extent “we identify with the scammer!” Part of us wants the scammer to win! Yet, at the same time, another side of us wants fervently to see the scammer wallow in his well-earned punishment.  We also want to point fingers and hiss at the miscreant. It is a bit like Saint Jerome who said that heaven would not be complete unless the saved could see the sinners roasting in hell. Is that what we  want to see?

According to Naomi Fry one of the 3 New Yorker writers on the panel, the latest version of the George Santos story is his entrance into Cameos. She described Cameos as “the platform where so-called celebrities from B-list to Z-list hock their wares.” The customers pay the “celebrity” for personalized videos. Santos is now one of the stars thanks to his fame as a spectacular liar. Just what is needed in FantasyLand. For this audience sensational lies are an attraction!

Some of the customers are rather surprising. There were some young female law students who paid the current rate for a completely phony pep talk from Santos who happily told the young women they were about to become “rock-star lawyers” and how they were going to “slay” the legal world. He was quite willing to do that even though he obviously did not know anything about them. “Queens who were about to conquer the world” he called them. Yet this is what the law students wanted. Why did they8 want to listen to obvious lies from a celebrity?

Santos very smoothly fits into this Fantasy world. In fact, he is really good at it. It cost $500 for a brief talk by Santos that bears absolutely no resemblance to reality whatsoever. For $500 bucks you can hire Santos to praise you, or your no-good son, or daughter. Even though Santos does not know any of you. Why would people pay for that?

As Naomi Fry said, “he is taking the pop culture detritus that surrounds you and is wearing it like so many Mardi-Gras Beads. Santos told the women law students they were approaching “the end at the light of the tunnel.” Santos is definitely smooth. He was born to be a scam artist, though, no doubt his short time in politics greased the path to his current fame and fortune. That is where he practiced his lies before turning professional.

Life in FantasyLand keeps getting stranger. to me it looks more and more like the end of western civilization.