Death to the soul

The historical background of life is a part of its substance and the ideal can never grow independently of its spreading roots. A sanctity hangs about the sources of our being, whether physical, social, or imaginative. The ancients who kissed the earth on returning to their native country expressed nobly and passionately what every man feels for those regions and those traditions whence the sap of his own life has been sucked in.

There is a profound friendliness in whatever revives primordial habits, however they may have been overlaid with later sophistications. For this reason the homelier words of a mother tongue, the more familiar assurances of an ancestral religion, and the very savour of childhood’s dishes, remain always a potent means to awaken emotion. Such ingrained influences, in their vague totality, make a man’s true nationality.

A government, in order to represent the general interests of its subjects, must move in sympathy with their habits and memories; it must respect their idiosyncrasy for the same reason that it protects their lives. If parting from a single object of love be, as it is, true dying, how much more would a shifting of all the affections be death to the soul.

George Santayana - The Life of Reason  (1905-1906)

Santayana’s view seems old-fashioned in a modern world of mass transport, shifting global populations and cosmopolitan assurance. In our world a sanctity cannot hang about the sources of our being because those sources are being melted down and politically recast. In part this profound change is deliberate, in part a matter of sheer carelessness.

We need anchors, reference points without which we cannot think clearly because nothing tells us what clarity might look like. To acquire that clarity we need some extremely basic reference points such as good and bad, harmful and benign, weird and wonderful but most important and most basic are familiar and unfamiliar.

Familiar - Noun

Origin

Middle English (in the sense ‘intimate’, ‘on a family footing’): from Old French familier, from Latin familiaris, from familia ‘household servants, family’, from famulus ‘servant’.

This is what we are losing. The familiar is not as intimate as it was, not part of the family, not as easily known, not as thoroughly known, not as easily trusted. The familiar is no longer well rooted in the practical realities of daily life. This matters but ironically we have become less familiar with what matters as opposed to what doesn’t.

We have unwittingly become familiar with Facebook, the EU, feminism, multiculturalism, Amazon, celebrities, human rights, hate speech, racism, islamophobia, homophobia, sustainability, recycling, multiculturalism, social justice and so on and so on.

Unfortunately these things tend to nudge aside closer and more intimate realities such as important and unimportant, honest and dishonest, good and bad, harmful and benign, weird and wonderful. They do not supplant these older realities but they shout much more loudly and their shrill familiarity gives them a secure place in our personal reality. Perhaps unwelcome in many cases but still secure. There is no practical way to become unfamiliar with them.

Political and commercial manipulation of what is familiar and what is unfamiliar has created a strange world which still seems familiar but in a different, more political and more remote and much less personal sense than before.

As we grew up and learned the ways of the world it was once possible to be familiar with our own limitations and even our own ignorance. Now we are becoming less familiar with our ignorance in a world of sassy pseudo-certainties. Unfortunately so are our leaders.