He has permission to break the rules of western civilisation in order to save it – and through the books and movies, so, vicariously, do we.
Due process, the rule of law, civilisation: all are sorely tested at times like this.
Of course, cities have social problems, income inequality and cultural fault lines, but whatever the outcome of the presidential election, America's metropolitan areas will firmly reject Trump, just as the UK's large cities rejected Brexit. 2 Because they are well regulated … Cities pioneered planning and the social and economic rules of conduct that make civilisation possible.
Five years later, at the Independence celebrations in 1960, it's a crassly patronising speech by the King of Belgium about how colonial rule brought "the great gift of civilisation" that stings Lumumba into an unscheduled, soaringly impassioned diatribe against the brutal slavery which that regime imposed.
Instead, British liberalism in the empire – with its alleged spread of civilisation, progress, liberty and rule of law justifying any coercive actions – has been irreversibly exposed.
In the early 1990s he described himself as an "advocate of civilisation, definer of civilisation, teacher of the rules of civilisation…leader (possibly) of the civilising forces".
Maritain envisages a political society under the rule of law — and he distinguishes four types of law: the eternal, the natural, the 'common law of civilisation' (droit des gens or jus gentium), and the positive (droit positif).
Surely, the end of civilisation.
