V.S. Naipaul’s ‘Universal Civilization’ The ‘curmudgeon’ author and Nobelist believed that the pursuit of happiness will outlast all its rivals.By Tunku Varadarajan
https://www.wsj.com/articles/v-s-naipauls-universal-civilization-1534200168
V.S. Naipaul, who died Saturday at 85, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature on Oct. 11, 2001, a month after al Qaeda’s attack on the American homeland. As many in the West were still struggling to fathom what drove Islamist fanatics to commit mass murder, it was reassuring to see the Nobel go to Naipaul, who had unapologetically insisted on the universality of Western beliefs.
In the days after 9/11, when a sense of spiritual decapitation briefly prevailed, a lecture Naipaul had delivered in 1990 at New York’s Manhattan Institute leapt back to life from the archives. I received it by email from a friend, read it hungrily, and passed it on to others I thought would be healed by it.
The lecture was titled “Our Universal Civilization,” and in it Naipaul tried to answer what he called some “very serious questions”: “Are we—are communities—only as strong as our beliefs? Is it enough for beliefs or an ethical view to be passionately held? Does the passion give validity to the ethics? Are beliefs or ethical views arbitrary, or do they represent something essential in the cultures where they flourish?”
In response, Naipaul extolled some of the social values al Qaeda had seemingly just attacked, among them “the pursuit of happiness” and “the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement.”
Naipaul, prescient in 1990, distinguished societies with such values from the Islamist world’s “philosophical hysteria” that would incubate the 9/11 attackers. Moreover, in describing essentially Western values as “universal,” he made clear that he had no truck with those who would later cast the war against fanaticism in apocalyptic terms. These values—our values—are teachable and transformative. The pursuit of happiness, he held, is “an immense human idea” that “cannot generate fanaticism.” But it is “known to exist” even in repressed, far-flung lands. “Because of that,” he concluded, “other more rigid systems in the end blow away.”
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