Okay, but I still just have⌠so much rage and grief and utter, bone-deep bafflement and exasperation and more rage and more heartbreak over this whole thing that I feel like I have to throw at ye olde blue hellsite before I try to sleep. Because half of me canât believe that this could have happened to Notre Dame of all places, and the other half of me absolutely can.
There are various well-meant posts in circulation trying to assure everyone that everythingâs not gone and can be rebuilt to some degree, and I appreciate the intent behind those, but⌠we donât even know the scale of the damage yet. The entire interior of the cathedral could be a loss, along with the roof, countless artworks unaccounted for, at least one of the major rose windows, and who knows what else. For all of us to discover that Notre Dame â one of the global cultural institutions that youâd figure was pretty much untouchable â had to literally beg for funding once actual pieces of it started falling on people â has made us wonder, or at least itâs certainly made me wonder, how much more of this we can possibly sustain. My earlier post pointed out that as a species, we have money for one $13 billion dollar warship (and for the 500 super-rich trillionaires wrecking the planet), but apparently we donât have a pennies-by-comparison âŹ6.8 million to save an 850-year-old icon of art, history, religion, science, literature, and culture. I know Notre Dame had been allowed to fall into disrepair before. I know other beautiful and important things have been destroyed or lost through sheer carelessness or unavoidable tragedy or simple accident. I know tragedies and senseless losses are part of every historical era. But the context in which this one happened is whatâs particularly upsetting.
First, this also happened last year with the National Museum of Brazil, which burned to the ground and lost centuries of irreplaceable artifacts after its funding was slashed to nothingness. That was possibly âeasierâ for people to disregard, because it happened in Latin America, in a non-Anglophone country, and not in what is generally recognised as the âWest.â But if the West had any remaining delusions about what itâs left for itself after years and years of defunding the arts, mocking humanities as âworthlessâ and asking why people donât get real jobs or degrees, and promoting a ludicrously fictionalised history that gets increasingly spouted as the Word of God by Twitter experts everywhere, itâŚ.well. Shouldnât have those anymore. Iâm sure it does, because its denial appears to be impermeable and irrecoverable. I recognise that nothing lasts, that beautiful things are destroyed, that the overall arc of human history is one of loss and rebuilding and resilience. There are beautiful messages to be had from all that. Theyâre important. And yet.
This did not have to happen.
We are, objectively, the richest and most prosperous and most technologically advanced we have ever been as a species, in any number of ways. We have never had as much information at our very fingertips as is available to anyone with a smartphone. And yet. The shared feeling of everyone in my generation (the 18-34-year-olds) is that this is a breaking point. We are facing essentially the make-or-break for Western civilization and the future of the planet in aboutâŚ. the next two decades. We have no money, no sense of what, if anything, awaits us, and an increasingly grim realisation of just how badly late-stage capitalism is failing right when weâre trying to start careers or find jobs. We all have anxiety, morbid-humor coping mechanisms, and the awareness that thereâs a less-than-zero chance that civilization collapses in our lifetimes. Many of us wonât have children because we canât countenance giving them this broken world to inherit. We are so worried about not having enough time. The knowledge that we could work as hard as we can and justâŚ.watch it all burn, as we watched Notre Dame burn tonight, is inescapable. Millennials know that feeling. We live it all the time.
As other commentators have pointed out, we have seen art and history destroyed and disregarded, the return of rampant nationalism and xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, facts that are tailored to what you want to believe about the world, misogyny, fake news, Actual Nazis, a cultural discourse of capitalism that values you solely by your earning potential, and so forth. The knowledge that not even a seemingly untouchable place like Notre Dame is safe is justâŚ. terrifying. If Notre Dame isnât important enough to be saved or to be uncontroversially funded, what is? If Notre Dame is regarded as acceptable collateral damage, thenâŚ. where does it stop? What goes next? What do we lose now?
I am obviously a medieval historian and someone who tries to teach people about the importance of the past (and somehow still hope I can actually get paid to do that, which seemsâŚ. increasingly absurd by the day?) I have bewailed the fact that kids come into my classes apparently pre-installed with beliefs about Ye Olde Bad Medieval Times ⢠and I just⌠do not know where they get them from. So I am heartbroken on a personal level to see Notre Dame destroyed, due to the irreparable loss to history (we donât even know how to make stained glass the same way they did!!!!) But when this plays into my struggle to make people understand where we came from and what weâve done and how modernity has so many comforting lies about itself that render it completely incapable of confronting humanityâs worst traits and most terrible habits, because of some smug belief in âprogressâ and âsuperiorityâ and so onâŚ
It just makes me wonder if anything Iâm doing matters, if anything that my colleagues are doing matters. I know we care. It might be easier if we didnât, but we do. But if itâs just us out on our island, shouting warnings at people who wonât listen to us, who sometimes take deliberate pride in not doing that, itâs hard to pick yourself up and do it all again. We will, and we need to do it, and I am deeply passionate about it, but IâmâŚ. pretty knocked for six right now.
Notre Dame is burning because we, collectively, decided it was not important enough to save. I havenât been there (and had always wanted to go), but I have been to other cathedrals in France and Europe. I donât have to agree with the institutional Catholic Church on anything (and I donât) to recognise the value and beauty and history of those places. If Notre Dame can fall victim to apathy, ignorance, derision, and the sheer staggering ability of humanity to not give a fuck about anything except its greediest impulses â anything can.
If youâre worried about what else could go next: Good. You should be.
