Sunday, May 12 , 2002		Books

Fighting for (western) civilisation
Review by Shelley Walia
Civilisation by Clive Bell. Rupa, Delhi. Pages 216. Rs. 95

THE Bloomsbury Group, consisting of Virginia Woolf, her husband Leonard Woolf, the critic and economist, the novelist E. M. Forster, the biographer Layton Strachey, the art critic Clive Bell, the painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and the economist John Maynard Keynes, was an informal association of English intellectuals who met frequently from 1907 to about 1940 debating serious questions of art, morality, philosophy, and religion.

Seeking truth through the use of reason was their slogan and, therefore, the members did not hesitate to censure one another's work. Devoted to experimentation, their painting and literature, perhaps best distinguished as modernist, and was primarily goaded by a sturdy rejoinder to the celebrated formalism and the barren realism of the late 19th century and the conventional Edwardian social norms.

Clive Bell, the writer of the book under review and a prominent member of the group, was a non-conformist, rebuffing all conventions of religion and politics, morality and gender. He looked at aesthetic and philosophical questions in a spirit of agnosticism indicating the influence of G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica and Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica which led him to seek definitions of the good, the true, and the stunning with a singular objective: grilling received ideas with a "comprehensive irreverence" for all kinds of pretence and deception.

Bell's interrogation of the word 'civilisation' in this book is considered in the light of these influences and in the context of World War I: was it a war for the sake of preserving a civilisation? Is a war preferable to an unavenged injustice? Or is it that the formidable doctrine, 'let justice be done though it bring the house down' arose only out of one concern and that was a deep-seated sense of insecurity? Bell asks whether it was not 'the Cross versus Krupps' that motivated the war. It could, undoubtedly, be interpreted as a religious war of Christ against Kaiser Wilhelm the Antichrist, or indeed a fight between the Allies and Nietzsche, the so-called prophet of German imperialism and the propelling force behind their military ambitions.

And yet, as Clive Bell writes, holding the fort against a man like Nietzsche whom not many had heard of, a man whose name was 'difficult to pronounce'; or fighting for Belgium which was too small for the attention of such 'great nations' were not particularly splendid motives for waging a war. The leaders and the people, the Liberals, Conservatives and Socialists, those who 'had always liked war and those who on principle detested it', all had to fight for something 'more elevating'. This could be nothing else but the preservation of a civilisation for which they were ready to make any sacrifice.

Going on to thrash out the definition of 'civilisation', Bell argues that a 'society can be perfectly civilised and yet fall short of the ideal'. Civilisation is, therefore not an absolute good, but a particular means to good, for Bell holds out against science too by comparing modern New York or Paris with Periclean Athens. 'It would be worse than stupid to hold that Germany, just before the war, was more highly civilised than France, yet in the application of science to industry the Germans surpassed all nations…' Gin and the Bible symbolise the civilised; yet it is a question of how far 'European traders and Missionaries are justified in calling what they carry into savage countries civilisation'.

Making a contrast between the 'civilised' and the 'uncivilised' cultures, Bell maintains that anthropologists are aware of the fact that unchastity was a 'deadly sin' among the natives of Kar Nicobar whereas the civilised epochs of Raphael, Titian, Napoleon, Voltaire or Diderot accepted this 'aberration' as integral to their developed culture. Again, primordial cultures have as discreet and intelligent sense of 'mine and thine' as an English magistrate. This was apparent in North American Indians who had no idea of theft till it was imported by the whites. And then, take the case of women's status in society; it was well known that women were accorded an equal status among the Bushmen and Andaman Islanders than it was by the Athenians or the notoriously civilised times of Tang and Sung in China where they were regarded little higher than livestock. Bell further builds his case by mentioning the truthfulness of savages that astonished the European travellers, as well as the hygienic sense of the inhabitants of Gold Coast to bathe three times a day whereas the English surprisingly had not more than one bath a year. Accordingly, it would be difficult to call all that we practice as integral to a civilised age.

Bell then goes on to underscore in this very significant book on human 'progress' and 'values' that the 18th century was less creative than the 17th, though more speculative. To be speculative or appreciative, and not necessarily creative, is the excellence of a developed civilisation for, indeed 'savages (can also) create furiously'. The exacting standards of the 18th century were based on reflection and education from which civilisations gain their inherent character: 'Civilisation, if I may risk a not easily defensible metaphor, is the flavour given to the self-expression of an age… by a mental attitude' and this most certainly comes from progressive individuals.

One wonders how Rupa selected this book for its current print after it was first published in 1928, but by bringing it within the easy reach of students of history, anthropology and literature, they have added greatly to the two existing studies of civilisation: one by Will Durrant and the other by Kenneth Clark which too are comprehensively absorbing.