Different Sensibilities Between the Ancients and Moderns

Conceit of the present is the most deadly bondage of the human spirit.
– Paul Elmer More

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Towards the beginning of his 1704 satire on the dispute between the moderns with the ancients, Jonathan Swift has the books in the library, who have been marshaling their forces for the impending Battle of the Books, pause distracted by hearing a debate between a spider and a bee.  The spider, taking offense at seeing a bee flying around his corner of the library, accuses the bee of being a vagabond: “Not to disparage my self, said he, by the comparison with such a rascal; what art though, but a vagabond without house or home …? Your livelihood is an universal plunder upon nature; a free-booter over fields and gardens; and for the sake of stealing, will rob a nettle as readily as a violet.  Whereas I am a domestick animal, furnisht with a native stock within my self. This large castle,” referring to his web, “(to shew my improvements in the mathematicks) is all built with my own hands, and the materials extracted altogether out of my own person.”

The bee, not intimidated in the least by the spider, cheerfully give back a reply: “I am glad, answered the bee, to hear you grant at least, that I am come honestly by my wings and my voice … I visit, indeed, all the flowers and blossoms of the field and the garden, but whatever I collect from thence, enriches my self, without the least injury to their beauty, their smell, or their taste … You boast, indeed, of being obliged to no other creature, but of drawing, and spinning out all from your self: that is to say, if we may judge of the liquor in the vessel by what issues out, you possess a good plentiful store of dirt and poison in your breast …”

It soon becomes obvious that each creature represents one of the factions of warring ancient vs. modern books in the library.  The bee concludes: “So that in short, the question comes all to this; whether is the nobler being of the two, that which by a lazy contemplation of four inches round; by an over-weening pride, which feeding and engendring on it self, turns all into excrement and venom; producing nothing at least, but fly-bane and a cobweb: or that, which, by an universal range, with long search, much study, true judgment, and distinction of things, brings home honey and wax.”

Back down on the floor of the library, Aesop is the most obvious of the ancient books to help explain this debate to the uncomprehending army of modern books.  Consequently, he makes a challenging oration to the moderns:

“For, pray gentlemen, was ever any thing so modern as the spider in his air, his turns, and his paradoxes?  He argues in the behalf of you his brethren, and himself, with many boastings of his native stock, and great genius; that he spins and spits wholly from himself, and scorns to own any obligation or assistance from without … To all this, the bee, as an advocate, retained by us the atients, thinks fit to answer; that if one may judge of the great genius or inventions of the moderns, by what they have produced, you will hardly have countenance to bear you out in boasting of either.  Erect your schemes with as much method and skill as you please; yet, if the materials be nothing but dirt, spun out of your own entrails (the guts of modern brains) the edifice will conclude at last in a cobweb: the duration of which, like that of other spiders webs, may be imputed to their being forgotten, or neglected, or hid in a corner …by feeding upon the insects and vermin of the age. As for us, the antients; we are content with the bee, to pretend to nothing of our own, beyond our wings and our voice: that is to say, our flights and our language; for the rest, whatever we have got, has been by infinite labor, and search, and ranging thro- every corner of nature …”

The moderns are of course highly offended by Aesop’s speech.  They make an angry uproar and the battle begins.

Thus, in Swift’s satire, the lines are drawn between the valuing of tradition and the past for the wisdom and truths that thousands of men and women have learned and collected in different ages and cultures across space and time and the discarding or neglecting tradition and the past for no better reason than that it is old, not contemporary, not thought by someone other than your own self.

This is the first of traditional conservative principles: recognizing the indispensable value of that which transcends time, the inestimable significance of that which is permanent, lasting and unchangeable.

Tradition and continuity are the forms in which the eternal and permanent things are passed down to us from previous generations. To ignore or to disparage tradition for being what it is abrogates your inheritance and destroys any conservative sensibility.  In a time when supposed “conservatives” are adopting radical populism and advocating for an all encompassing global economy, we should remember this.

Because of its reverence for that which transcends time, Richard Weaver writes that another word for this sensibility is “piety.”  Piety, he asserts, “credits the past with substance. One would think, from the frantic attempts made to cut ourselves off from history, that we aspire to a condition of collective amnesia.  Let us pause long enough to remember that in so far as we are creatures of reflection, we have only the past …” To dismiss or to forget the past, either intentionally or unintentionally, is the action of the impious and unreflective person – a person who is going to be subject to the errors, manipulations, and ever passing fashions that every self-absorbed atomized individual is subjected to.

It is to become an uncritical and reductionist thinker who limits his or her own intellectual, emotional, and spiritual resources to only a tiny little bit of limited and unreliable self experience.  If you dismiss tradition, then only the fads of your own time will influence you. Only the ideas of contemporary culture will cross your consciousness. Only the limited understanding of a single time period will influence how you choose to live.  Only the corroded state of modern education and mass media entertainment will help form the person that you become. “In the interest of knowledge, then,” declares Weaver, “we have every reason to remember the past as fully as we can and to realize that its continued existence in mind is positively a determinant of present actions.”