It’s tempting to damn this book with faint praise, to call it “well-intentioned,” displaying “broad sympathies” and so on. And it’s true that the most challenging books have had no truck with being all-inclusive and finding time for just about everyone and everything. They strike a bold line, and to hell with the consequences. Armstrong, by contrast, sees good in almost everyone involved with culture (the British artist Damien Hirst and a researcher at Florence’s Villa I Tatti looking into whether the camels in paintings of the Three Wise Men had crossed or uncrossed legs being two exceptions).
It’s only when you notice that one of this author’s jobs is Philosopher in Residence at the Melbourne Business School that you suddenly understand the motivation behind this book. What Armstrong wants to do is educate business executives of the future in the possibility of making money by engaging in activities that are culturally positive or socially beneficial, and preferably both.
It’s then, too, that you see the point of Armstrong’s endless boiling down of great moments in the history of culture into a few paragraphs — it’s basically so that his business students, with little time for such matters, can readily understand them.
Thus it is that he closes the book by citing the Roman writer Cicero. “Not an original thinker, he took seriously the idea that for philosophy to have an impact on life it had to be presented in a way that would engage with people who would never be scholars — but who would be generals, governors and senators.” This, with future businessmen rather than generals in his sights, is clearly John Armstrong thinks he too is doing.
One of his cultural heroes is especially significant. It’s the 12th-century Abbot Suger of St Denis, an administrator who saw that people could be persuaded to give money in return for the pleasure they got from the artistic monuments that resulted. He’s a clear precursor to the culturally-friendly businesspeople Armstrong is so anxious to help emerge.
“Could it really be that doing good could be profitable?” our author asks. That his answer to this question is a clear and unambiguous “Yes!” is at the heart of his position. And In Search of Civilization, an unoriginal but not uninteresting book, is, first and foremost, his means of promoting that belief beyond the confines of the Melbourne Business School.
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