“Carelessly we have abandoned the stabilizing values of our forebears, from the simplest traditions and values to the most complex strategies that survive over generations, since we believe we no longer need them. Enduring values that transcend the individual have been set aside, and at the center of the world we have placed the individual, around whom everything revolves and with whom everything ends. By giving the appearance of pushing back disease, famine, and war and leading longer lives in general, we believe in our own immortality during the best years of life. But that isn’t true, no matter how much we gloss over the decline of the body and banish the process of dying from our everyday lives and consciousness. The cathedrals of faith and prayer have been replaced with clinics of health and science. But clinics are not cathedrals. They can only treat physical ailments. We have replaced the spires of churches with towers of books in university libraries. But all this rational knowledge is not the same as wisdom.”
From volume IX of the file · Book · 20th century
Themes: death & mortality · liberalism & modernity · tradition & conservatism
More from Arthur E. Imhof
“The everyday worlds of our ancestors may have been smaller in terms of space and shorter in time, their horizons narrower than our own. Their lives could end at any moment. But these physical limits—the next hill and the edge of a great and dense forest, as well as death and dying—weren’t the same as real boundaries and the end of life. In terms of space and time their worlds reached much further than this. For they did not always have to keep their eyes on the ground or their gaze on the next mountain or the edge of the forest. They could also turn their gaze boldly (or perhaps anxiously) upward to the Sun and the Moon, the stars and the planets, the rain clouds and storms that were approaching. For present life in a peasant world, all of this was certainly of greater importance than the question of who lived on the other side of the next mountain or forest. Likewise, death and dying were accepted as a natural and understandable break, as a passage, but this in no way distracted the view of what was to come: continuation of life everlasting.”
“There were a multitude of these little worlds in the past… It should be obvious at this point that there was no typical single farm or community. In the same way that every life course was unique and colorful, different from any other at the time in ways that are not the case today, so it was with every piece of property, every farm, and every community. What was typical was the colorful mosaic-like quality of life: the richness and multiplicity of possibilities, the lack of uniformity.”
“Today we have largely done away with such customs and like to make fun of what seem to us to be pointless traditions. But the question is whether instead of the supposed freedom we have gained (in this case, the choice of wedding days), we have lost in the bargain a framework for life that these customs provided. At the very least we have created more problems for our-selves.”