The Workshops Of Identity

by Bill Whittle

Part 1: The Heartbeat:

Step back with me for a minute. Back out of Hollywood, out of America, out of the Western Tradition. Sit in the middle of a darkened crater at the south pole of the Moon. Sit back, look down and back into time, and watch the rise and fall of Civilizations on the Big Blue Ball.

If you could see human activity and genius, if you could watch poetry and medicine as points of golden light in the darkness of fear and superstition, you would soon detect a rhythm: a pulse, a heartbeat – the Heartbeat of Civilization.

It would begin in the Land Between the Rivers – a place known only in the last instant by the inhabitants down there as “Iraq,” but for almost the entire beating EKG before that it was called “Babylon” and then “Mesopotamia.”

That culture grew brighter, flourished and then suddenly winked out. Then, a little to the west, the Nile delta slowly blossomed, peaked, and fell. Then Greece. Rome. Constantinople. Arabia. Italy. Spain. France. Britain – and with Britain, that spark of medicine and architecture and government married to science and steam literally remade the world.

And from your perch on the frozen, bone-dry lunar sand you would see the same pattern, the same pulse, the same heartbeat: a slow, steady rise, followed by a precipitous, shockingly quick fall… and then centuries, or even millennia of darkness, fear, superstition, disease and ignorance before the spark took hold again elsewhere.

One thing in common these patterns bear: the rise slow, the fall seemingly precipitous, and in every case we find the loss of nerve and strength and will comes not from the bottom, not from the common people at all, but from the rulers, the philosophers, the most affluent and educated who, in their comfort and Narcissism, abandon duty for self-absorption and self-gratification and who in boredom or self-loathing decide to fling open the gates of the city to the barbarians beyond, while the common man still stands at the walls prepared to die for the people in his charge.

And now here stands America...

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