Democracy and Poetry by Robert Penn Warren

Author:Robert Penn Warren
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780674196261
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 1975-06-03T06:00:00+00:00

If history, as J. H. Plumb grimly speculated in The Death of the Past, cannot survive as a study, then its role “as the interpreter of men’s destiny will be taken by the social sciences.”[40] Which is to say that the ideal of understanding men and telling their story, noble or vicious, will be replaced by the study of statistics or non-ideographic units of an infinite series, and computers will dictate how such units, which do breathe and move, can best be manipulated for their own good. We may not be there yet, but we are on the way, for the contempt of the past inevitably means that the self we have is more and more a fictive self, the self of a non-ideographic unit, for any true self is not only the result of a vital relation with a community but is also a development in time, and if there is no past there can be no self.

Furthermore, a society with no sense of the past, with no sense of the human role as significant not merely in experiencing history but in creating it can have no sense of destiny. And what kind of society is it that has no sense of destiny and no sense of self? That has no need or will to measure itself by the record of human achievement and the range of the human endowment? And here we may pause to ask what our society measures itself by. Is it only by the ability to gratify immediate appetites, capacity for consumption, and the GNP?

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