T.S. Eliot was one of the 20th century’s most significant and influential poets. Eliot was born in 1888 in St. Louis, Mo., and became a naturalized British citizen when he settled in London before the outbreak of the First World War.
Eliot, who died in 1965, gave voice to a range of modern themes, from existential despair to the search for meaning in life, when politics and science—fascism and the A-bomb—emptied it for many of belief in traditional faiths.
GREAT POETRY
Great poetry takes us past the gilded truths in which our contemporary media regularly drown us, and holds up for us a mirror to see how we go about deceiving ourselves with comforting half-lies.
In Gerontion, Eliot makes an old man reflect on a life that has seen much depravity to ask—as we might with daily suicide-bombings, genocides, and unimagined cruelty becoming stale news—“After such knowledge, what forgiveness?”
Ours is an age of instant communication in words and images, and of a 24/7 news cycle. We are the most informed generation electronically. Computer search machines at our fingertips can divulge data on any subject. But does instantly available information make us any wiser than our grandparents’ generation? Eliot asked: “Where is the life we have lost in living?/Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?/Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
We live paradoxically in an inverse relationship between information and knowledge. Particularly in the mainstream lib-left media, the inversion of information and knowledge is relentless.
Its pundits have done well in repackaging the message of al-Qaida’s bandits in the round-the-clock news cycle of CNN, CBC, BBC and other media outlets, which now preach that the “root cause” of terrorism, fanaticism, misogyny and suicide bombings emanating from within the Arab-Muslim world is readily explained by the nexus of oil, Halliburton, Israel and the Bush administration’s supposed callous disregard for the human rights of terrorists, from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay.
These same pundits inform our information-soaked generation that North Korea’s Kim Jong Il possessing nuclear capabilities, and Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad being not far behind with his nuclear death wish, are all the fault of the West for not accommodating their grievances.
Similarly, there is less wisdom in our world even as we have walked on the moon and deciphered the chemistry of our genes.
In Little Gidding from Four Quartets, Eliot counsels: “We shall not cease from exploration/ And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time.” But as instant information inundates us, our generation seeks escape in relativism. We window-shop aimlessly in crowded markets, not quite sure of what we want, since we are unsure of what we believe in anymore.
We take aspirins for barely recognizable pain, and we switch television channels instantly when some image unsettles our poll-driven sense of ease.
We assess knowledge acquired by monthly expenses incurred in purchasing the latest mass-market books and audiotapes on bestseller lists.
We hear Oprah tell us what to read, but we scarcely want to acknowledge how twisted are the minds of those who planned 9/11 and adhered to a society where women were not allowed even minimal literacy.
We confuse our opinions—formed by disconnected sound bites and pictures—and, in denying good and evil, believe we possess wisdom more profound than what Thucydides or Tocqueville offer us.
We have thus become, despite our hubris—it might be a fitting epitaph for our generation—a class of people like those Eliot imagined: “We are the hollow men/We are the stuffed men/Leaning together/Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!”
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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