Whitehead

I came across a volume of Alfred North Whitehead's essays written while in North America.

In the first place it is remarkable the range and seriousness of the opinions he presumes to set forth. He talks about the flow of civilization for the last 6,000 years, comments on the turning point of the Greeks, compares the civilized to the uncivilized. He is a mathematician--what mathematician in an academic chair would dare to make such vast judgments today from a university chair. This is a different age already. His was an age of the liberal arts, an age which expected an educated man to be able to speak about anything and bring to bare all streams of human knowledge on whatever were the great political questions of the day.

But even more striking is what opinions. He was writing after the end of the Second World War, but already this well respected liberal's opinions on such things as civilization versus what he understands as savages is already beyond the realm of polite dinner conversation today. He makes as if it were unexceptionable the observation that the discovery of North America was a great expansion in the opportunity for fulfillment for mankind. No throat clearing about the Indians. The discovery of, "a half-empty continent," is celebrated for opening up opportunity for mankind's fulfillment and those subgroups within mankind that didn't do so well out of the deal are expected to sit tight and not spoil the proceedings. In his two paragraph treatment of the discovery of the New World there is not a hint of the prevaricating language that at least hints at some sort of guilt about the displacement and ruin of native peoples. "The problem of existence was not solved, but hope entered into human life as never before."

All this from Whitehead's essay on postwar reconstruction written in 1942.