Civilization Not Monuments

Maintaining a legacy demands effort proportional to the scale of the legacy. When community moves on the legacy decays. Monuments are seashells of civilization. Evidence that life has been here, but not the life itself. Dr. Kim H. Veltman: When I was thirteen I had a dream. I saw clearly a machine that allowed one, not just me but everyone, to go through the world's culture and knowledge systematically. The year was 1961. In 1981 I was invited on a ninety day tour of the Mediterranean. page

As I reflected on the magnitude of what I had experienced I was overwhelmed by a sense of sadness and near despair. I had just had an incredible trip. I had seen more culture and civilization in three months than many persons in a lifetime. I had seen the great centres of Greek, Roman, and Hittite civilization. They were all in ruins. It wasn't as if there were just one or two sites that had fallen into a slight state of disrepair. They were ruins in the truest sense. My sadness and despair came from thinking: if this is how civilization treats its highlights, the best it has to offer, what hope is there for civilization?

Spirit

It took me a decade to find a tentative answer. The highlights of civilization which I had seen, the temples at Selinunte, Agrigento, Ephesus; the colosseums at Arles and El-Djem; the theatres at Epidaurus, Segesta, Taormina and Aspendos were all physical manifestations of social customs and spiritual ideals. There is the spirit and the flesh. There is the human spirit and there are objects, which are expressions of this spirit. As the spirit evolves, the expressions change and the earlier expressions are reduced to being merely objects and are thus neglected and forgotten. The Roman custom of combat made colosseums necessary. But there was something fairly primitive in a custom that included feeding Christians and slaves to lions. So when the customs improved, the buildings of the old customs were neglected. Ultimately they became ruins because the ideas, the ideals, the spirit behind them was no more. And while they continue to have an historical value in reminding us of what once was, the real challenge lies elsewhere, focussing on the spirit rather than its expression, the soul of culture not its skin, the dreams. If the dreams are right, if the spirit has a true vision then the buildings, the monuments will follow. The monuments are not the civilization. They are merely expressions of a spirit and will crumble the moment the spirit moves on. Gradually the quest became to find the spirit of civilization, or rather to cultivate a spirit that could lead civilization in new directions.

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Learning is one of the most fascinating aspects of culture and civilization. There is inevitably a tendency to learn about ourselves but not about others. Anyone who was not a Greek was a barbarian. The Romans built Hadrian’s wall to keep the so-called barbarians from Scotland at bay. The Chinese built a wall around their culture for similar reasons. Yet the memorable civilizations have been precisely those which transcended that limitation. Aristotle became one of the greatest persons of all time because he commissioned his best student, Alexander the Great, to help him learn about things in Persia, India and wherever he went. The library at Alexandria tried to collect learning from all known cultures. Arabic culture became great when a caliph at Gundishapur sent emissaries to the west to collect Greek and Roman culture. Today, the Vatican, Herzog August Bibliothek, British Library, Bibliothèque Nationale de la France, and Library of Congress are the greatest libraries of the world precisely because they did not limit themselves to learning only about their own culture.