EUGENE GOODHEART
255
truer to the claims and needs of the human spirit. Naipaul sees these
nostalgic myths as travesties of historical truth and as the expression
of psychological immaturity.
'
In Pakistan the fundamentalists believed that to follow the right
rules was to bring about again the purity of the early Islamic
way: the reorganization of the world would follow automatically
on the rediscovery of the true faith . Shafi' s grief and passion , in
multi-racial Malaysia was more immediate; and I felt that for
him the wish to re-establish the rules was also a wish to re-create
the security of his childhood, the Malay village life he had lost.
But it is not simply that the return to the past is regression: it is not
really a return, for there is only ignorance of the past. Sitor, an
Indonesian poet, is an illuminating case in point.
Sitor's tribal past was further away; he had lost touch with it;
and he had found that to write without an understanding of
what he had come from was to do no more than record a
sequence of events. That was why for some time he had put
aside the actual writing and had concentrated instead on
understanding his tribal background. He had gone back to his
village in North Sumatra with a young Canadian anthropolo–
gist. She had helped to give him back some of his tribal past.
To gain access to the tribal past requires the achieved knowledge of
advanced society.
Knowledge, power, possession : the plenitude that in the past
characterized aristocratic civilization or the class that dominated and
defined the civilization now characterizes modern society. Naipaul's
wisdom about modern society is unconventional. Conventional
humanist wisdom sees modern society as a democratic leveler, a
degrading standardizer of things , an emptier of values. Modern
society produces indistinguishable products, commodities . Both
views have truth, but the more interesting, perhaps deeper, truth is
Naipaul' s.
It
explains how even the fiercest antimodernism retains a
commitment to the achievements of modern civilization. In con–
trast, then, to fantasies of reversion, the actuality of advanced
technological society offers the possibility of growth and maturity
in which the virtues of mental clarity, intelligence, knowledge are
cultivated.
Not that Naipaul is a complaisant advocate of any society,
including technological society. That sense of separateness or
