WORLD CIVILISATIONS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 2 July 1938, Page 9

WORLD CIVILISATIONS

AMERICAN PHILOSOPHER’S VIEWS One of the most pathetic aspects of human history, writes Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr, the American philosopher, in his new book, “Beyond Tragedy,” is that every civilisation expresses itself more pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun. Plato projected the peculiar perspectives of the Greek city-state into a universally valid political ideal, partly to arrest the decay of Greek society. The Egyptian pyramids were built in a period in which Egyptian civilisation yas ripe to the point of over-ripeness. Perhaps it is too early to seek for similar symbols of doom amid the most characteristic expressions of our own civilisation. Yet it is significant that the Empire State building in New York, perfect symbol of the pride of a commercial civilisation, was completed just as the great depression came upon us; and it is fairly certain that this great building will never be fully occupied. If such a building expresses the pride and dynamic energy of our civilisation the League of Nations is the characteristic expression of the universalistic dream of bourgeois society. ■lt hoped for eternal peace upon the basis of mutuality of exchange and a rational and prudentital adjustment of conflicting national rights and interests. The new League of Nations building in Geneva was roofed in just in time to hear the Emperor of Abyssinia’s vain plea for justice from the League, inability to grant which involved the League in its final ruin. In every civilisation its most impressive period seems to precede death by only a moment. Like the woods of autumn, life defies death in a glorious pageantry of colour. But the riot of this colour has been distilled by an_ alchemy in which life has already been touched by death. Thus man claims immortality for his spiritual achievements just when their mortal fate becomes apparent; and death and mortality are strangely mixed into, and potent in, the very pretension of immortality.