Inspired by Life

A summary prepared by Mrs. Aghni al-Dibs of the valuable lecture she delivered at the "Lebanese Cénacle."

Man was favored above the animals with the gift of speech — that is, with mind and thought — and he has gone on perfecting this growing essence ever since he was blessed with life, striving after knowledge, eager to bring the unknown to light, deducing one truth from another and linking ring to ring, advancing in his evolution generation after generation, and taking from his age whatever seat his awareness fits him for and his activity secures him.

The fact is that the human race has differed in its understanding of life, and the measures by which it profits from the examples life sets before it and the lessons it teaches have varied; so men raised some of their number above others by degrees, divided themselves into strong and weak, and sorted themselves into masters and slaves.

Living creatures are formed by nature to love conquest and superiority, and life at its roots rests upon force and might; among the strong there is no place for the weak, nor do they hold with them any standing or account. And here is Western civilization, having reached its zenith at the middle of this century: before force, every logic and consideration of hers shrinks away, and in her actual world unarmed right goes down before mighty falsehood. The two powers that today wrestle and contend for the rule of the world and mastery over it rely in their combat upon force — the force of the individual, the force of the machine, the force of production, the force of exploitation — and they harness to their purposes every means and possibility that comes into their hands, no spiritual values or human considerations restraining them from their aim. However the principles that each of these two blocs proclaims and invokes may differ, rule is the goal and conquest is the purpose, and everything short of that is means, pretext, and varnish.

And just as life runs in successive phases, and knowledge by consecutive degrees, and nature through alternating seasons, so social progressivism has its successive stages: the primitive stage, the middle stage, and the high stage.

In the primitive stage man lived on dependence and submission, accepting nature's gifts, contented and resigned. His activity went no further than a morsel to swallow and a garment to put on. He did not run after knowledge, nor did he master the forces of nature; so the waters of the rivers rushed out over the land in harm and havoc, the fortunes of the crops were mortgaged to whatever rain and mercy the sky might grant, the treasures of the earth stayed in its depths, neither reached nor brought forth, and pestilences went on slaughtering and killing the living, neither understood nor exposed. Veils were drawn over men's inner sight; thought froze and mind stagnated, and man lived an animal though he spoke — poor however rich he grew, mean however high he climbed, blind even though he saw.

In the middle stage this man shook the dust of torpor and stupor from his shoulders and tore the film of ignorance and dullness from his eye and his thought. He communed with nature, made her speak, and imitated her. He saw motion, and found bodies driven with force and running in balance; he beheld the flash of lightning, and was guided to a light that neither steals the reason nor snatches away the sight; he watched the birds swimming in space and the fish diving in the water, and he copied them, outstripped them, and defied them. He tracked down crimes and uncovered them, and diseases and fought them. Then he looked at his needs and defined them, and at his aims and fixed them; and he lived honored, knowing no abasement — strong, overtaken by no weakness.

As for the high progressive stage, there are nations pressing deep into it today, taking the lead of the human race and imposing upon it thereby a will, a policy, and an interest. It is not in our power to set a term to their course, nor to draw limits to their progress, nor to declare that they have reached the summit; this high progressivism may yet prove primitive and elementary beside what the creative human mind may attain after centuries upon centuries.

Those are the stages of coherent social progressivism. And I declare — while sorrow saws at my breast — that the Arab nation in this age of ours has not yet crossed the bounds of the primitive stage. The Arab people, by virtue of its former share in human civilization, could not be blotted from the register of peoples; yet it has remained groups bearing the name of a nation without possessing its constituents, organized into governments that have the form and the appearance without the means and the instruments. And here it is, now that the first half of the twentieth century has closed, resigned to primitive progressivism, savoring the memories of the past, asleep upon the glories of yesterday — while nations on the face of the earth split the atom, converse with the heavenly spheres, and pierce the seven stacked heavens.

The catastrophe of Palestine, with its shame and humiliation and the disintegration and mutual recrimination that went with it, came as confirmation of what I say, and as a clear sign that the conscious Arab mentality has not yet been formed in this age.

The glories and boasts of the Arabs will remain splendid tales for their children and their young, and an effective narcotic for their minds and brains; and their long gleaming lances and their keen Indian swords will remain bewitching phantoms for their imagination and entertaining subjects for their banter.

Israel will harden and grow strong so long as it is conscious, united, and mutually supporting; and the Arabs will wither and weaken because they are a heedless people who do not understand... a people among whose greatest men the enemy's intrigues found their way, corrupting their consciences and counterfeiting their weapons, so that they celebrated defeat as a manifest victory from God... and supplied the enemy with food and clothing as though it were an enormous material gain... They saw the bellies of their fathers ripped open, the eyes of their children put out, and their sanctities violated and made a public show... and then they went on enjoying the delights of thrones as kings... relishing the enticements of power as presidents... and savoring life as communities and as individuals... These, by the life of God, are the losers.

Some may trace this painful reality back to causes that do not lack plausibility, and to factors containing much truth; but we are not now explaining matters or tracing them to their causes — we are only recording present conditions and setting down actual events, without incrimination and without apportioning blame. It is no freak of natural constitution, no overpowering regional climate, that holds the Arabs back today from movement, evolution, and progress; the Arabs today are afflicted with flabbiness, deprived of the blessing of perception and the power of discernment. Hence the horn of danger has risen against us, and the appetites of the strong states have fastened upon the virgin soil we live on and the natural resources lying unexploited.

The creative human mind is the axis of order and the source of illumination. Its creative powers, whatever their innate readiness and hereditary endowments, are affected to a far-reaching degree by what surrounds them as they grow and what they are trained on in their youth. To free them from illusion and caprice, and to clear them of weakness and distortion, is therefore a pressing necessity and an indispensable condition, so as to spur them toward the unknown and embolden them to storm it and bring it to light. Would that I knew — can the mind be freed, grow, and create in the narrowness of horizons and their darkness?? Can its powers harden, order themselves, and produce amid the gloom and turbulence of the atmosphere?? Can the faculty of thought reveal itself and shine amid the scheming and intrigue of the scene?? Can the personality of a nation grow strong and its potentialities work upon one another between the racing of scientific mandates and the jostling of cultural colonialism?? Can a people grow great in capacity and in being while its vital constituents are entrusted to other men, torn at by their aims and parceled out among their interests?? Science in its pure essence and its authentic, positive tradition is progressive by nature, and its progressivism is marked by aspiration, liberation, continuity, and order. Where, then, beside our dependent slackness as communities and peoples, are the applied scientific principles which the understanding peoples never cease revising and improving, to develop conceptions and enrich minds, that by them they may prevail, grow strong, and hold sway??? Where is the unification of culture in our world? Where is constructive discipline in our teaching curricula? Is it a reality in our society, carrying its authentic meaning among our classes? Has culture been unified in our arenas, and rallied around raising the level of the environment, warding off collapse, and clarifying sound scientific aims? Has learning brought woman to the discovery of those delicate spiritual regions required for the harmony of married life and the building up of the Arab home? Has the educating of our young men led them to a feeling for the public duty and a gladness in undertaking and performing it?

The true measure of any society's progress is the amount of reforming cultural purpose its activity has absorbed. Every learning borrowed from abroad and drawn from others remains an outward trait and an external varnish; it does not work for the nation's good and does not become a national heritage purely its own. The peoples who have advanced by long strides in the field of this understanding and perception did not secure true learning for themselves, or enjoy its ripe fruits, until they had fulfilled its essential condition and original motive: the search for the essential truth latent in the method of instruction — that method which is disciplined in its contents and disciplines the one who imparts it.

Our teaching curriculum has rested upon memory and the stuffing of the mind, without any regard for the kernel of personality, any concern for strengthening the sense of public duty, or any polishing of the substance of character. The student memorizes his subjects to pass the examination; and once he has performed this duty and obtained the certificate, he goes out into the world with the stuffing already fading from his memory before a few months have passed. So, for all the high diplomas he carries, he does not know how to lay one brick in the building of this society, nor how to serve the nation except through a mechanical, money-earning post that supports him and his kin; as for zeal for the public good, for the spreading of benefit — nothing of that ever attached to his learning. So too with the Saxon curriculum, which gave the young free rein in a country whose liberty is newly won and whose start is stumbling: the young returned to society strangers to it, disowning its customs, mocking its traditions, haughty toward it and weary of it; and there came of it a disorder that should never have been, and there was lost an effort and an expenditure that deserved to endure.

And here woman bursts in forcefully and thrusts herself upon the discussion with insistence; we can only pause, and we can do nothing but respond.

Woman, gentlemen, is of high worth in society, and of grave consequence to it. On her hands the rising generation is reared; in her arms its first traits and its abiding inclinations take shape; from her personality its personality springs, and from her soul its buds unfold. She therefore not only exacts from society care and attention: beyond this natural right, she deserves a special direction and a definite preparation, which will secure her the awareness and good judgment her function requires and the art and specialization her mission demands.

Whoever has known the Arab woman in our present evolution — the desertion of duty and responsibility with which she has been afflicted, the frivolity and sophistry in which she has sunk, the imitative refinement and outward civilization of which she has boasted — will grasp the measure of effort that must be spent and the greatness of the vigilance that must be mustered to rescue her from the talons of trifling and the claws of helplessness; so that she may give us men who will never be great in life and strong in its arenas unless her upbringing enfolds them as a mother, her inspiration as a friend, and her support as a conscious, generous wife...

There is no doubt that programs drawn from the educational missions, concerned with stuffing understandings and piling up memorized matter, without preparing the man for his national duty and the woman for her social and national mission, are failed, truncated programs which promise no good, treat no ills, and will yield no cure.

It is of the nature of true learning to strengthen personality and develop the faculties; its sign is invention and creation, and its mission is building and reform. To guarantee these effective scientific results it is not enough to carry ranks and diplomas: the lofty ends toward which academic degrees are directed must be made plain. And when learning in its pure essence reaches the understanding of the young, and they are trained upon it and their conceptions are saturated with it, the individual personality is formed, and in consequence the general personality is set in order and upright popular principles are realized. Then no man will lord it over another by virtue of office or birth or inheritance or any other accidental distinction, for all are equal in essence... in their humanity... in their rights and their duties as working citizens.

Society is the sum of the qualities of the individuals who compose it; and in the measure that free, ordered personalities abound in it, in that measure will the society be orderly in its progress and deep-rooted in its progressivism. Our greatest duty today, therefore — the heaviest burden laid upon our shoulders — is to form these liberated, ordered personalities and to multiply them by the unified, national, scientific and educational curricula we prepare for them; so that the hoped-for Arab progressivism may spring from the lights of true learning and the radiance of creative thought, rather than from arbitrary borrowing and offhand outward imitation...

That is the elementary reform required to lift us from our stumblings. To what extent is it spreading in our society? To what depth has it sunk into the souls of our leaders, and how far do they strive in their leadership to bring it about? How long will the echoes of learning remain faint and sickly on our horizons, so that we regard the weak citizen — the peasant, the workman, the functionary, the employee, the poor man — as a means to be exploited, instead of regarding him as an end in himself, a personality that commands respect and calls for development and enrichment?

And once we have taken this foundation step — the step of national scientific pruning — and held fast to this living, progressive reform, and made our conduct a truthful expression of it and our life an embodiment of our faith in it and in the truth to which it leads, we shall be freed within and then without, and shall achieve a real, independent progressivism, our profit from which will be measured by the inviolability and dignity it secures us, and by the eminence and strength it gives us.