put them up; they were not data-processing machines forty stories hi gh. Things were so ineffi cient that there was-above all-work. And out of work came selfrespect. It was the breed at a happier point in time. Since then we have done a better job of abating pain, and there is now an electronic screen with entertainme nt for invalid and shut-in s. We have extended life but thrown the old people out of the hou se. We have instituted so me measure of soc ial security, but spoiled it with the movement to the cities. We have done some wondrous scientific thinking with the comparatively paltry net benefit me ntioned above. The deficit side of our science (the capacity for mass destruction) we all know. In addition to scientific thinking, we have done other kinds of thinking. Philosophy, which used to be the highest mani fes tation of thi s other kind of thinking, is in disrepute, which in itself says so mething. We have li ghtened the work load (and that probably should be added to my li st of two achieveme nts), but, characteristically, have let the li ghtening process run on until there is a whole stratum of society whocan'tgetany work at all. They frighten the rest of us-and they should . That part of the daily grist that gives a lift to life is increased at almost all levels in western society, ranging from the arts to TV to consumer goods. But thi s has taken a course somewhat like the li ghtening of work; it has gone on until there is too much and we are di soriented. The craftsman with a single skill and strong purpose to follow is a conte mporary hero. My great-great-grandfather, who knew how to make snowshoes and made them from oxbows , and sent hi s daughters over Donner Pass on the snowshoes to get help for the stranded wagon train , meets the dictionary's definition of that presently popular word organic: he was "not secondary, or accidentaJ. " The affl uent citizen, practicing hi s hobby today, would be in seventh heaven if hi s special knowledge could count that much-if he could count that much.
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I read somewhere that hope is a ki nd of religion , and may be that is so. Hope bubbles in some of us-the lucky ones. I am not ultimately di sco uraged or I wouldn ' t bother to save all thi s fin e stuff 30
around here or be a museum man. I just say that we are at the bottom of a downswing. The massive structure of organized religion doesn ' t seem to make much difference, although I a m sure we would be worse off without it. One thing is certain : only God' s indulgence-up to now-lets this fa ulty crew stumble on. There is hope in the fact that we have knowledge of what is wrong as never before ... and methods to communicate that knowledge as never before. KARL K ORTUM, Director San Francisco Maritime Museum
its capital without regard for the form , affection fo r the matrix, or devotion to the divine seed. It is a small co mmunity, those who concern themselves with the mu seums-arti stic, archaeological, and philosophical-ofthis world, and they need to spend much of their time, as Ortega would have predicted, begging the despoilers for help. But even in doing so, they kindle an interest in Clio, and it is what maintains such civilization as we have.
Refreshing the Wells from Which We Drink
We have turned our backs on hi story on the premi se that it no longer has anything to teach us-now that we have jets and television and modern medicine. What could we learn from the Greeks, Romans, Elizabethans or America's founding fathers that could possibly be of any use? But technology has only superficially changed our condition. The basic nature and needs of man as indi vidual and social animal continue through changing times. Our fragile veneer of civilization covers a genetic makeup unchanged since we started painting lovely outlines of animals on cave walls. It is an arrogant ass umption that we cannot learn from those living in conditions less developed than ours, whether they live today or lived 3000 years ago. How people handle problems common to us all is of uni versal interest to manki nd . Clio has endless information for us gathered over the mille nnia-a long record of successes and failures in the human experiment. She can show us cities that worked, while many of ours are failing; people who had less of everything, but had more joy and stability and produced art and music of lasting beauty. Clio can show us all the splendor and wickedness of humanity as she reveals the long struggle over the centuries that brought us our freedoms and our advances. By understanding that long process we should be better able to protect what has been achieved and to take our next steps with more wisdom.
WM. F. B UCKLEY, JR.
New York, New York
We Have Met Clio and She Is Us Ortega y Gasset, in his resonant little book Revolt of the Masses , discovered (that is a good word fo r it: he di scovered this as surely as Columbus discovered America) that the sali ent characteristic of modern man is hi s ahistorical selfconfidence. It is more nearl y fat uity than self-confidence, if self-confidence connotes self-reliance. Ortega 's intuition was profoundl y conservationist. He felt that modern man uses up hi s patrimony without any thought to refresh the wells from which he drinks so voluptuously. But how can one refresh wells di scovered for us by the divine dowsers of the past? How does one repay one' s obligati on to Aristotle, or to Shakespeare, or to Fleming? The answer is as simple as it is satisfying: by reverence. Piety is the coin of appreciation . It is what hi story asks of us, and what we owe to it. Ortega's Revolt of the Masses was as explosive a book in the thirties as The Treason of the Clerks: and , in the end, it justified its own thesis by being practically ignored. It is said about Ghandi that he became the idol of Indi a in proportion as he was ignored by Indi ans. When he was lonely and unobserved, except by a few disciples, there were those few who sought to live by a Ghandian philosophy. The nerve Ortega struck was that of a community that saw the terrible truth of indictment: modern man, the swaggerer, unconscious of his dependence on what went before, insouciant toward the blessings others contrived for him, ignorant of any sense of obligation to reach out and extend the great circuit to another generation. The vi ndication of Ortega's thesis was in the heedl essness of those he addressed. By and large, they-we, perhaps?-ignore history, chewing away at
NORMA STANFORD
Yorktown Heights, New York
SEA HIISTORY 100, SPRING 2002