Preface to Plato

((Must finish Havelock))

"Watching it now the programme is clearly of its time."

The Guardian, 20/01/11.

A statement which is, no doubt, also of its time!

This need to place everything in a particular category, to nullify the possibility of the timeless, when did it start?

"Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable."

I remember a friend reading this and saying: "But it's so unfair, it doesn't discuss Islamic civilisation." Well, it was a personal view of western civilisation after all. Not a very interesting point, though: all roads, obviously, do not lead back to Rome and the decline in confidence in the very notion of civilisation (and western civilisation in particular) can lead to, perversely, a kind of parochialism at best; a horrifying narrowness of vision and the setting up of ineradicable distinctions at worst: us and them, purity and danger follow closely.

Isn't one of the defining qualities of civilisation openness to other currents of thought, artistic creativity, stray influences with varying degrees of self-awareness of these connections? You'd like to think so. But might not the opposite hold true? Hasn't 'civilisation' gone hand in hand with significant practices of exclusion? Isn't it about genius-which means a relation to a specific place (if not time)?

Another uninteresting question: Is western civilisation drawing to an end?

1. All this talk of an imminent end is nothing new; in fact, it might be said that the Renaissance begins with an acute awareness of death (J. Kristeva and Holbein; Hans Jonas; Pocock and the contingency of civilisation (Machiavelli)).

1. b. All those who claim it is the end are bound to be right eventually!

2. It's somewhat ironic that those who are partial to such a view are often western-educated and make their arguments using western technology and languages!

3. Even if it is the end you can't see it being replaced by any other type (Chinese, Indian or Islamic, say). What will be distinctive about India and China-even if we assume that they become the next great powers (and it's not clear that they will)? Economically, politically, and culturally, they might produce a variation of the western model but not much else (democracy, capitalism, individualism, for starters). And if anything comes out of the so-called muslim world it is more likely to be barbarism and fanaticism than civilisation.