The worst affliction that can befall a country is “politicking” — that “politicking” which is all wrangling and idle babble, drowned in an abyss of emptiness; quibbling, factional, turned away from kernels toward husks; creating for itself idols out of hollow demagogic phrases; and weaving around the absolute values illusions of dull realism and artificial regimentation.
It is in the nature of this “politicking” to build only in order to destroy, and to destroy only to attain some end. As though life were a warp of mere body, with no breath of spirit entering it: and so, what harm to a man if he lose his own soul and gain the world — this world racing on the course of extinction, for the sake of the false theories it sets up about the path of truth.
It is likewise in the nature of this “politicking” to drag all matters, without exception, down to a political plane, passing judgment against them or for them on the strength of whatever ends of profit and gain it reads into them.
It is also in its nature to set about solving problems by resorting to their surfaces rather than their depths, so that these solutions of its turn out to be narcotics — or say rather, swamps in which quackery and hypocrisy spread. In such a state things are often thrown into utter confusion, and conditions are so overturned that earnestness becomes jest, faith folly, liberty chaos, and clinging to the fringes of truth stupidity and impotence.
It is ill fortune indeed that a country like Lebanon should be afflicted with “politicking” — the country that was created only to be a shore for truth, a plain for beauty, and a summit for goodness, knowledge, and liberty. Let it remain so; and let the “politickers” among its sons know that they commit a crime when they cast it into the clamorous current of their “politics.” For I do not know, by God, what a peaceable country like Lebanon can reap from it but collapse into the mire of sterility and corruption. And here we are today, witnessing the first signs of that collapse: in religion, an ignorant atheism or an odious fanaticism; in morals, dissolution or a loss of values and standards; in thought, vulgarity or a hanging onto the coattails of opinions in revolt against the true and authentic heritage.
How we wished that Lebanon might have been spared the plague of “politicking.” Then it would have turned, heart, soul, and mind, to firm constructive work: it would have built a model modern state to guard this white and faithful shore; cultivated every inch of its land, flowing with milk and honey; planted the bare mountains and hills with forests of pine and oak; established modern agricultural villages; replanned the cities anew on the principles of art and beauty; founded institutes in accordance with what the science of education has attained in the twentieth century; organized study missions to the great institutions of the West; unified dress in a single attire; breathed life into the language; settled accounts once and for all with our intellectual heritage, classifying the store of it, publishing it, and teaching it; and translated into Arabic the positive heritage of civilization, that we might return to it and live it. Or, to say it in a single sentence: it would have made of the sons of Lebanon living persons in a living society, dwelling, within history, in this modern age.
God confound politics — above all when it is mere “politicking,” as is the case with us — and may He forgive those of our countrymen who believe that this singular country will one day come, by way of politics alone, to occupy its rightful place under the sun.