PERSPECTIVEnThe Loser in a Lawn ChairnWe are often accused of looking on the dark side ofneverything. One editorialist even found it amusingnthat we occasionally compared contemporary America withnthe Byzantine Empire, as if such a comparison were not anninsult to the Christian civilization of Constantinople. Despitenour reputation, we like to think of ourselves asnhardheaded optimists, and we thought it would be amusingnto play Pollyanna for a change. For my own part, what I havento offer resembles, at least in tone, The Consolation ofnPhilosophy more than The Power of Positive Thinking.nIt is not always easy to discern the line of demarcation thatndivides one era from another, but whatever else it mightnmean, this century has been the painful weaning process innwhich European and American man has cut himself offnfrom the civilization that gave him birth. The ancientnclassics, the faiths rooted in the Scriptures, the artistic andnintellectual methods that took shape in the Renaissance —nall of these survive now only here and there in little monasticnpockets of specialized learning or sectarian commitment.nBut for the most part the Christian and classical culture sonardently defended in the earlier years of this century bynCarducci, Belloc, and Eliot now are reduced to so muchn12/CHRONICLESnby Thomas Flemingnnnbric-a-brac in museums and fine-print type in a guidebooknto Europe.nWhat is the bright side of cultural dissolution? Simplynthis. Such things have happened before, and they willnhappen again. There are lives worth living to be lead now asnmuch as any time before, and those of us who put their faithnin the maker of all things must realize that if things must getnmuch worse before they get better, they will, nonetheless,nget better. Since so much that good men have labored for isnnow out of our hands as individuals, we can concentrate onnthe only things that have ever really mattered.nThis is a hard lesson for European man, who has alwaysnfound it difficult to take life as it comes. It was a HellenizednPhoenician — not a Greek — who founded Stoicism, and itnwas no accident that such a creed of resignation becamenpopular during an era in which the old world of the Greeknpolis was breaking down, to be replaced by kingdoms,ncosmopolitan empires, and bureaucracy. A typical AlexandriannGreek might have come from Gyrene or Rhodes andncould spend his life in the service of Macedonian kings andnin the company of strangers. The old political life of thenassembly, marketplace, and council was now as much ann