By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

If you live in Cambridge, dear Reader, or even in Boston, you may think the word Philistine is necessarily a term of reproach. It is, you may say, a synonym for the not-ourselves. Yet if this were so, and the word meant nothing but what is disliked by the speaker, the vast majority that lives elsewhere, in Seattle or in New York, would use it in turn to designate us, the eccentric minority. But it is notorious that they do not. They may call us dilettanti, Anglomaniacs, snobs, Unitarians, or “damn literary fellowsâ€?; they never call us Philistines. This term is not, then, like the word foreign, which means whatever is strange and unintelligible to us, whoever we are; it is rather like the word Irish or Mugwump, which signifies what is opposed or distasteful only to a certain tribe or fellowship of men. Such terms are essentially merely descriptive and geographical. No one who leads the simple life of the senses and the affections can be called a Philistine. To reach that condition there must supervene a certain sophistication, and the mind must lose its perception of primitive facts in its attention to conventional maxims. Philistinism is life at second hand….Nothing, for instance, is so Philistine as the habit of asking the money value of everything, and of talking, as our newspapers do, of a thousand-dollar diamond and a ten-thousand-dollar fire. A man whose eye was single would tell you how much the one sparkled and the other blazed. But the Philistine’s senses are muffled by his intellect and by his habit of abbreviated thinking. His mental process is all algebra, a reckoning that loses sight of its original values and is over without reaching any concrete result. Now the price of an object is an algebraic symbol; it is an abstract term, invented to facilitate our operations, which remains arid and unmeaning if we stop with it and forget to translate it again at the end into its concrete equivalent. It is vulgar to esteem things for their cost, but not vulgar to esteem them for the qualities which make them costly. I believe the economists count among the elements of the value of an object the rarity of its material, the labor of its manufacture, and the distance of the country from which it is brought. Now all these qualities, if attended to in themselves, appeal greatly to the imagination. We have a natural interest in what is rare and affects us with unusual sensations. What comes from a far country carries our thoughts there, and gains by the wealth and picturesqueness of its associations. And that on which human labor has been spent, especially if it was a labor of love and is apparent in the product, has one of the deepest possible claims to admiration. So that the standard of cost, the most vulgar and Philistine of all standards, is such only when it remains empty and abstract. Let the thoughts wander back and consider the elements of value, and our appreciation, from being verbal and commercial, becomes real and poetic.

One characteristic of the Philistine mind, then, is its resting in the merely conventional. It is in a hurry and deals in abbreviations. Dexterity in the use of symbols and respect for the instruments of calculation make it forget the vision of the real world and the primitive source of all value in the senses and the affections. It used to be a doctrine of philosophers that the world was made for man and everything in it designed for his comfort and salvation. That belief is now impugned, and people think that the universe may have other purposes, if it has any purpose at all, than one which is so disproportionate to its extent and which it is so slow in accomplishing. But I know not whether it is on account of this new philosophy, or on account of ancient habits and practical impulses, that we have got into a way of living as if not only the aim of Nature, but also the aim of man and of society, lay beyond man himself. We have multiplied our instruments, and forgotten our purposes; and, what is still worse, we have made of ourselves instruments for the production of changes in Nature, and consented to regard our consciousness as a device for the better making and doing of things. We have forgotten that there is nothing valuable or worthy in the motion, however rapid, of masses, however great, nor in the accumulation of objects, however numerous and complicated, nor in the organization of societies, however great and powerful, unless the inward happiness of men is thereby increased or their misery diminished. This idolatry, that subordinates the life of man, his thoughts and his actions, to the production of external effects in the world, is the religion of Philistia; and nothing so much arouses the inspired rage of the true prophet; witness the cry of Leopardi:

Age in which I was born,
Thou fool that, heaping treasure for the morrow,
Unto each sad today but addest sorrow,
I hold thy pride in scorn!

But if blindness to the elemental and immediate is one condition of Philistinism, indifference to the supreme and ultimate is another. Our Indian woman not only perceives the intrinsic sufficiency of simple joys, she also conceives of a highest duty and consolation, she forms an idea of her place in the universe, and has a religion. Now a Philistine may be very religious in his gregarious way, his faith may be orthodox and his conduct irreproachable. But he would cease to be a Philistine if he had instinctive piety and an inward, imaginative appreciation of his faith. For these things require a certain wealth of emotion and scope of imagination; they involve what we call unworldliness. To be unworldly is to look upon the judgment of society, its prizes and its pleasures, with the serenity and sadness of one whose treasure is elsewhere and whose eyes have beheld the vision of better things. It is to live in the sight of the ideal,

Ayant devant les yeux, sans cesse, nuit et jour,
Ou quelque saint labeur ou quelque grand amour.1

It matters not what the sacred passion or what the work of love may be: the infinite surrounds us in every direction, and all who at any time have caught a glimpse of it have something in common. They have for a moment escaped convention and felt the relativity and possible indifference of all earthly goods. That is what the Philistine has never done. He has never shaken off his vulgar passions nor felt the weight of original sin; his life, like that of a beast of burden, has not been either a revel or a sacrifice, but a stolid response to successive stimulations.

If this be the sad condition of the Philistine, we need hardly ask why he has another quality, which many people may think the most essential to him, namely, indifference to the beauties of art. For art appeals to the vividness of sensation and to the sweep of fancy; it charms by clearness of form and by infinity of suggestion. But we have seen how the Philistine can never repose in sense, since every sensation is to him merely a sign and symbol, a signal that something is to be done. And he is equally incapable of attaining to imagination, for what he sees and hears suggests to him facts, and facts in turn suggest to him nothing. So that if you set a Philistine before a picture, he will be inevitably bored. He can do nothing to the picture except buy it, and that is soon accomplished. He is too active and industrious a man to stand gaping at it, pretending he enjoys the harmony of its color, the balance of its design, or the richness of its light and shade. And he is too honest to say that the picture represents anything more than a man’s face, or a pretty view, or whatever else the subject may be. If the reproduction is accurate, as far as his perception goes, he will be pleased to notice the fact. But how the image of a face can represent anything besides, or the copy of a landscape be more beautiful than the original, he can never conceive. The comprehension of that depends on the awakening of many dim and profound suggestions, on the creation in the beholder’s mind of some ideal of beauty or of happiness, on the quick passing of some infinitely tragic and lovely vision. And such things are not engendered in the Philistine brain.

With this, dear Reader, I take my leave. If by my description you have found that you are a Philistine yourself, do not be too much troubled. I have said hard things of you, and I cannot retract them, for I believe them to be true. But I may add another, no less true, which may serve for your consolation. The time will come, astronomers and geologists assure us, when life will be extinct upon this weary planet. All the delights of sense and imagination of which I have been speaking will then be over. But the masses of matter which you have transformed with your machinery, and carried from one place to another, will remain to bear witness of you. The collocation of atoms will never be what it would have been if your feet had less continually beaten the earth. You have the happiness of knowing that, when nothing I value endures, the earth may still sometimes, because of you, cast a slightly different shadow across the craters of the moon.

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from Wikipedia: 

David Brooks

Published: November 24, 2005

And so in the year of our Lord 1620, the Pilgrims did depart from all kith and kin in the town of Leiden and ventured forth across the ocean to seek a new Jerusalem and a new Eden.

The voyage was hard and long, for the Pilgrims could find passage only on The Nation magazine’s summer cruise and Gore Vidal hogged the Jacuzzi. Yet onward they ventured, across the vastness of the ocean until finally the infinite wonder of the New World came into view, and the passengers of the Mayflower realized here they could raise their children and their children’s children to be snooty and the subjects of John Cheever stories.

They were greeted at the shore by a tribe of native peoples, led by chief Massasoit and his lobbyist Abramoff. The Pilgrim leader William Bradford spoke first: “Behold! We have come to drive you from your land and fill it with sexually frigid white people!”

And it came to pass that Massasoit was relieved by this declaration, for at least the strangers had not come promising to spread democracy. In exchange, all he asked was that he and his people be allowed to open casinos where David Brenner’s career would never end and where Celine Dion would play Saturday nights.

Being thus arrived in a good harbor and brought to a safe land, the Pilgrims did proceed to build a shining city on a hill, though it made their legs tired and the driveway was hard to shovel in the wintertime. Declaring themselves the first Americans, they set out to become mortgage brokers and conference facilitators, and each began refinancing with the other.

But the Lord did not smile upon their endeavors, and by midwinter the food had run short and there was starvation across the congregation, especially for those on low-corn diets. The Pilgrims found they did not have enough to eat, and even when there was food, they couldn’t get seated at a good table.

But what was most sad and lamentable was that in two or three months’ time, half the company had died, Internet service was slow, and the Lord’s favorability ratings began to decline. In the midst of these hardships, many did find spiritual succor by returning their attention to the Holy Book (even though parts of it were now behind a firewall as part of ScriptureSelect).

Others reacted to these difficult beginnings with murmurings of mutiny and discontent. It was said that Miles Standish had brought the flock to the New World on the basis of faulty intelligence, while others claimed the pilgrimage had been ruined by the religious right.

But as winter turned into spring, the forests came alive with animals and meat. There were deer in plenitude, as well as geese and turkeys, all of it free range. The ponds and rivers yielded forth clams, oysters and other trayf, and the mischievous little cabernet they had brought from Europe was finally ready to uncork. And so a great feast of Thanksgiving was announced (dress code: frilly but puritanical). The great Indian chief Massasoit, who was by this time really into kabbalah, brought 90 warriors to the feast, each bearing scented candles and dim sum.

As it turned out, the first Thanksgiving was a little anticlimactic because it followed five days after the first bat mitzvah, with guest singers Ashanti, Ja Rule and the Backstreet Boys. Nonetheless, there was great merriment amongst the gathering, as well as several surprise winners of the Pilgrims’ Choice Awards.

The dinner was delicious, no matter what some people wrote later in Zagat, and after the football game, Miles Standish brought forth Jonathan Edwards, Puritanism’s leading motivational speaker, who energized the crowd with his famous talk, “Cower Before God’s Wrath, Ye Slimy Pusballs of Sin!”

And Governor Bradford reminded his flock that all honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, which must be overcome with answerable courages, and all ignored him because “CSI: Salem” was on. But all Americans owe much to those brave folk who supped that day.

For it is from those Pilgrims, the last WASP’s to truly look good in black, that we have inherited the essential elements of the American character – our ability to look honestly at ourselves and find other people less intelligent; our ability to endure moments of amazing hardship before resorting to litigation; our ability to build this nation, so broad and strong, which the Chinese will one day be proud to own.