I shall content myself with merely referring to these internal defects and dangers. They are not insignificant, although in peaceful times they would not come anywhere near imperiling our existence. But as it happens, we Castalians are dependent not only on our own morality and rationality. We depend vitally on the condition of the country and the will of the people. We eat our bread, use our libraries, expand our schools and archives — but if the nation no longer wants to authorize this, or if it should be struck by impoverishment, war, and so on, then our life and studying would be over in a minute. Some day our country might decide that its Castalia and our culture are a luxury it can no longer afford. Instead of being genially proud of us, it may come round to regarding us as noxious parasites, tricksters, and enemies. Those are the external dangers that threaten us.
To portray these dangers in any graphic form, I would probably have to draw upon examples from history. And if I were talking to the average Castalian, I would surely encounter a measure of passive resistance, an almost childish ignorance and indifference. As you know, among Castalians interest in world history is extremely weak. Most of us, in fact, not only lack interest but also respect for history. We fail to do it justice, I might say. Over the years I have done considerable searching into the sources of this feeling — this mixture of indifference and arrogance toward world history — and I have found that it derives from two causes. First, the content of history strikes us as rather inferior — I am not speaking of intellectual and cultural history, which is of course within our purview. Insofar as we have any notions at all about world history, we see it as consisting in brutal struggle for power, goods, lands, raw materials, money — in short, for those material and quantitative things which we regard as far from the realm of Mind and rather contemptible. For us the seventeenth century is the age of Descartes, Pascal, Froberger, not of Cromwell or Louis XIV.
The second reason we fight shy of history is our traditional and I would say valid distrust of a certain kind of history writing which was very popular in the age of decadence before the founding of our Order. A priori we have not the slightest confidence in that so-called philosophy of history of which Hegel is the most brilliant and also most dangerous representative. In the following century it led to the most repulsive distortion of history and destruction of all feeling for truth. To us, a bias for this sham philosophy of history is one of the principal features of that era of intellectual debasement and vast political power struggles which we occasionally call the Century of Wars, but more often the Age of the Feuilleton. Our present culture, the Order and Castalia, arose out of the ruins of that age, out of the struggle with and eventual defeat of its mentality — or insanity.
But it is part of our intellectual arrogance that we confront world history, especially in modern times, in much the same spirit that the hermits and ascetics of early Christianity confronted the theatrum mundi, the great theater of the world. History seems to us an arena of instincts and fashions, of appetite, avarice, and craving for power, of blood lust, violence, destruction, and wars, of ambitious ministers, venal generals, bombarded cities, and we too easily forget that this is only one of its many aspects. Above all we forget that we ourselves are a part of history, that we are the product of growth and are condemned to perish if we lose the capacity for further growth and change. We are ourselves history and share the responsibility for world history and our position in it. But we gravely lack awareness of this responsibility.
Let us glance at our own history, at the periods in which the present pedagogic provinces arose, in our own country and in so many others. Let us glance at the origins of the various Orders and hierarchies of which our Order is one. We see immediately that our hierarchy and our homeland, our beloved Castalia, was certainly not founded by people who held so proudly detached an attitude toward world history as we do. Our predecessors and founders began their work in a shattered world at the end of the Age of Wars. Our official explanation of that age, which began approximately with the so-called First World War, is all too one-sided. The trouble was, we say, that the things of the mind did not count in those days; that the powerful rulers considered intellect itself merely a weapon of inferior quality, and meant only for occasional use. This attitude, we say, was a consequence of “feuilletonistic” corruption.
Very well — the anti-intellectuality and brutality of that period are all too visible to us. When I call it anti-intellectual, I do not mean to deny its imposing achievements in intelligence and methodology. But we in Castalia are taught to consider intellect primarily in terms of striving for truth, and the kind of intellect manifested in those days seems to have had nothing in common with striving for truth. It was the misfortune of that age that there was no firm moral order to counter the restiveness and upheaval engendered by the tremendously rapid increase in the human population. What remnants there were of such a moral order were suppressed by the contemporary sloganizing. And those struggles produced their own strange and terrible conflicts. Much like the era of Church schism introduced by Luther four centuries earlier, the entire world was gripped by an immense unrest. Everywhere lines of battle formed; everywhere bitter enmity sprang up between old and young, between fatherland and humanity, between Red and White. We in our day can no longer reconstruct, let alone comprehend and sympathize with the impetus and power of such labels as Red and White, let alone the real meanings of all those battle cries. Much as in Luther’s time, we find all over Europe, and indeed over half the world, believers and heretics, youths and old men, advocates of the past and advocates of the future, desperately flailing at each other. Often the battlefronts cut across frontiers, nations, and families. We may no longer doubt that for the majority of the fighters themselves, or at least for their leaders, all this was highly significant, just as we cannot deny many of the spokesmen in those conflicts a measure of robust good faith, a measure of idealism, as it was called at the time. Fighting, killing, and destroying went on everywhere, and everywhere both sides believed they were fighting for God against the devil.