PLANETARY HUMANITIES
Novak, Michael
PLANETARY HUMANITIES MICHAEL NOVAK We hear a great deal today about the prospect of mass starvation, the costs of energy and fertilizer, the fuse of population growth. Sophisticated persons...
...Still, so careful is Predmore not to speculate beyond demonstrable facts, so dependent is his whole conception on those facts, so free of intuition, that a rather bloodless portrait of his hero emerges...
...On the other hand, a great deal of what we know about ourselves is known only by way of comparison...
...If I am to add some observations: 1 ) With regard to Catholic Bavaria, in 1925 the Bavarian voters rendered possible Hindenburg's election, the prelude of the seizure of power by Hitler, who only in the Catholic Bavaria (today the Bavaria of Franz Joseph Straus) could find his base of operations...
...neither is wholly expressed by the other...
...Zahn...
...Yet the deepest crisis on this planet lies in the humanities...
...They have been in situations in which techniques for technical solutions were available--but were not used, or were used to odd effect...
...Secondly, humanists need to recognize the new dimensions of their profession...
...REV,) DANIEL A. DEGNAN, S.J...
...a light rounded by two sleeps...
...The humanities are wisdom hard-won through the ages, as constant and continuous as the appearance, evolution, and possible extinction of the species...
...Westerners cannot pretend to be everyman, universal, encompassing in ourselves the experience of all others in every other culture...
...And the large question that takes one to a biography of Cervantes in the first place remains unanswered: why did that gaunt knight Don Quixote ever choose him to chronicle his own uncertain fortunes...
...Few feel the authority of the past, achievement won at the cost of blood...
...nor, again (even if one is black) like being a Nigerian...
...TheVatican intheAge of the Dictators (1922-1945) ANTHONY RHODES "Remarkable for its balance and detachment...
...The creation of a worldwide, planetary conception and practice of the humanities is a major task of humanists of this generation...
...Our culture is one of history's sub-plots...
...no way of perceiving, the same for all...
...The federal system was not designed to make Congress dominant over the Presidency...
...Literature is not solely English literature, or American literature...
...Or of a hundred other cultures...
...It is not likely that many persons will do so in respect to a culture not their own...
...According to my knowledge of the situation, he has hit the right nail on the head...
...It is difficult enough to appreciate the classics of one's own culture, or to grasp the true meaning of the social institutions in one's own land...
...Under the grand title "humanities," signifying every human being and every cultural tradition, we commonly mean something ethnocentric, even ideological...
...We are not in the axial center of world history...
...In the Near East, in Ireland, in Southeast Asia, between Latin America and the United States, suffering is deepened by ancient cultural disharmonies: by quite different images of what is human, good, true, beautiful...
...There is no set of books all citizens of the planet are nurtured by, know, recognize...
...Each one of these other cultures illumines parts of the American experience not illumined by the others...
...22] with bated breath...
...no system of meaning flashed recognizably from culture to culture...
...What position do we Americans actually occupy in the human race...
...The humanity of one culture is denied by another...
...so also are sympathies, antipathies, and the like...
...We are who we are...
...How shall we accomplish it...
...In feeling (as it were) the lining of the belly in which we are carried, we can perhaps come to see others, different from us, more distinctly...
...Most live in the thin and distracting present...
...3) Today, e.g., the abortion theme for the Catholic political group is less a serious moral problem than a means to overthrow the hateful Social-Democratic government...
...What do we know, we who 'have studied the humanities, about the humanity of the Vietnamese...
...WPASHINGTON POST/ BOOK f f ' O R l . l ) "[The author's] purpose is to examine motives and expose facts: and this he does with discernment and clarity, drawing on material newly available" -- C03iMONWEAL "Careful and utterly dispassionate . . . . with [a] marvelous sense of fairness...
...ALFON$ BElL 0 0 0 0 0 0000 Mtchael Novak (Cont...
...At present we lack systematic plans for the exchange of students and teachers, the translation of classical and contemporary materials, the mutual experience of a larger range of one another's arts, rituals, ceremonies, and disciplines...
...2) The fateful and humiliating part of the Zentrum, the predecessor of the CDU/CSU, in granting Hitler his totalitarian "emergency" powers, is duly characterized by Mr...
...We need to learn the limits of our own cultural histories, and the full shape of the cultural histories of others, if we do not wish to contribute to the Babel of politics...
...5) The state of things becomes very well illustrated by the difference between the German and the French bishops, if it refers, e.g., to helping the Chileans suffering under suppression...
...In the first place, many technicians and experts--in family planning, in agriculture, in economics--have come face-to-face with cultural resistance...
...The force of cultural reality is sometimes far better known to non-humanists than to humanists...
...But neither is it like being a Japanese...
...The humanities ought to demystify pretensions...
...What sophisticated American of your acquaintance, after a decade of bloodshed and psychic wastage, has read a single Vietnamese philosopher, can quote a line of Vietnamese poetry, or hum a traditional Vietnamese lullaby...
...How can there be peace, if methods of transcultural perception do not even exist...
...more often, they are the working out of cultural antagonisms...
...a darkness, between two lights...
...4) The existence of so-called Christian political parties is generally, in Germany especially, most discrediting to the Christian and particularly Catholic position...
...Learning to see another culture truly is no easy task...
...Sophisticated persons know enough to reject the "technological fix" as a solution to the problems of humankind...
...Questions might well be raised for the humanities by those from other disciplines whose international experience has .been intelligent, sensitive, and detailed...
...Today our full identity is grasped only when all the relations of all human cultures are known...
...There are other actors...
...Although Cervantes is "popular" biography, more or less, Predmore is meticulous in his scholarship and on certain important points he does set the record straight: Cervantes never had a university education, and he was not jailed in Seville in 1601'or 1602 for what would have been the second time there...
...MARK TAYLOR 000 000 000 CORRESPONDENCE (Continued ]rom page 251) mentary system, creates separate and competing branches of government, deliberately building a balance of conflict and cooperation into the system so no branch may dominate another (as Hamilton said, in the quote misused by Reuss...
...classics" require to be approached multi-culturally -- Homer compared not only to modern American experience but to Near Eastern and Far Eastern and other materials...
...For humans, to know oneself is to know oneself as part of one branch of a family tree...
...Tentative efforts have begun, especially in religious studies...
...Being an American is not quite like being a Frenchman...
...The former cannot be understood apart from the latter...
...Ignorant armies clash by night...
...The two careers--along with several more pedestrian ones like commissary and tax collector--give Cervantes, like Byron, a natural fascination for biographers, and so in a profusely and handsomely illustrated book Richard Predmore (author of a superb critical study, The World o~ Don Quixote) tells once again the sad story of Cervantes' five years in prison in Algiers, his frequent and prolonged separation from his family, the final and total rejection by his daughter, the struggle for patronage and recognition, and the periods of great poverty alternating with periods of yet greater poverty...
...I do not wish to minimize the power, the authority, or the splendor of Western traditions...
...Thirdly, it is above all in the humanities that Westerners might learn from other cultures...
...THE NEW REPUBLIC $12.50 at all bookstores OlD Holt, Rinehart & Winsto~IW Commonweal: 271...
...Of these, too, even many who are college-educated are embarrassingly innocent...
...Perceptions are rooted in cultural histories...
...The great conflicts of the present are not always due to competition over scarce resources...
...of others a step more accurately, we see the way our earlier habits of perception had been too limited--we learn something about our own deficiencies or limits...
...Each time we penetrate the identity (Continued on page 271) 17 May 1974:254 de Cervantes, though, who followed long service as a warrior with his literary vocation, and who was patriotically or perversely proud, till the end, of the crippled hand that he had earned in the battle of Lepanto...
...What we in American universities call "the humanities" is still mainly (although changes are occurring) "Western eivilization"--and mostly derived from the culture of upperclass, Northern European civilization, at that...
...As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., points out, the response to the "imperial Presidency" of recent times is not Congressional sovereignty...
...Religion in Germany Heidelberg, Germany To the Editors: I have read Gordon C. Zahn's article, "Religion and Politics in Germany" [Feb...
...The President, for instance, is elected by the nation, not by Congress, and the Presidency is to be subject to law, not to Congress...
...World mythologists often anticipate beginning, middle, and end--an apocalyptic close...
...but few actually go beyond technology...
...REV...
...One must learn to accept its good and its bad together: both the power of its classics but also the daily reality of its institutions...
...There cannot be humanities without roots...
...As to his objecting to the Munich pastoral, I think he is very right...
...philosophy does not begin and end with Oxford...
...We do not have an international humanities...
...Now Reuss would create what amounts to a recall petition and referendum for the President, with the power of petition vested not in the people, but in Congress, a separate and often competing and even hostile branch of government...
Vol. 100 • May 1974 • No. 11
