In search of living ideals

I was not planning on posting again today, but the exchange between Our Learned Proprietor and Neil Welton on the World War Two remembrance post interested me so much, I think I will.

Brevity is a virtue I have never mastered.

In any case, here it is, excerpted below:

Neil Welton said:

My grandfather would say it is time to move on. For as you point out - this is 2009, not 1939.Trouble with monarchists and, to a point The Royal Family, is this permanent "ration books mentality". We appear increasingly retarded as every year goes by. No wonder republicanism is getting popular - we have yet to get past 1955.

To which The Monarchist replied:

Yes, Remembrance should be about Forgetting. Seventy years ago, 70 million people (or some other obscene number) lost their lives (or were soon to lose it) in the ugliest episode to ravage the four corners of the planet. Nothing to see here, nothing to remember. Time to move on...

To be entirely frank (and frankness is one virtue Dr. Swift does have) I have some sympathy with both points of view. I have no wish to intrude on the conversations of my betters, but it appears to me hugely important that someone makes the point I am about to.

Remembrance is a virtue in itself - I am with The Monarchist on that, for the reasons he outlines. But on the other hand, Neil Welton is right too - that is, we cannot continue talking as if virtue died in 1955, or expired (to adapt Philip Larkin) when sex began in 1968.

My generation is too young to remember the 1960's. We have imbibed much poison from that wretched decade, but have no Baby Boomer excitement which comes from throwing off The Man.

What we do have (and I speak for myself primarily), I think, is what Papa Benedict calls "a crisis of hope"--that is, we are utterly desperate to see that the values testified to by the Greatest Generation in the War (honour, duty, responsibility, selflessness, compassion, justice, sacrifice, service etc.) are not extinct--that they are possible, and relevant.

Of course, those virtues are eternal--they are expressed in every age, and every place, even when the wider culture may not value them. To pick several examples at random:

Here by the young Dominicans

Here by new cops on the beat.

Here combatting alcohol and drug abuse

Here teaching duty and service.

And, of course, here:

What we need is not simply remembrance of ideals, as if they were dead (although that helps), but commitment to them, in new and modern contexts, demonstration that they work, and the courage to defend them. Her Majesty put it this way, in 1957--Take it away, Ma'am:

Today, we need a special kind of courage. Not the kind needed in battle, but the kind that makes us stand up for everything we know is right. Everything that is true and honest. We need the kind of courage that can withstand the subtle corruption of the cynics, so that we can show the world that we are not afraid of the future.

What she said.