`Before Me Nothing, Therefore'

For some of us, the present is an impertinence we tolerate only because it so quickly becomes the past. We are the sum of all pasts, and beware of those who stake a claim on the future. They probably are utopians – that is, barbarians willing to sacrifice anyone for the sake of their purified future. Theodore Dalrymple cites modern architecture, specifically the monstrosities of Le Corbusier, as his inspiration for similar thoughts in this week’s “Global Warning” column in The Spectator:

“Where did this hatred of the past come from? A large part of it is sheer egotism consequent upon the death of religion, an inability to contemplate with equanimity the supposedly humiliating fact that a civilisation is bigger than oneself or one’s own glorious part in it. Before me nothing, therefore; and after me nothing either.”

Such thoughts, of course, are nothing new. G.K. Chesterton has a chapter titled “The Fear of the Past” in What’s Wrong With the World (1910), in which he observes:

“But there is one feature in the past which more than all the rest defies and depresses the moderns and drives them towards this featureless future. I mean the presence in the past of huge ideals, unfulfilled and sometimes abandoned. The sight of these splendid failures is melancholy to a restless and rather morbid generation…”