Yet there is another truth, embodied in Robert Lowell’s phrase about ‘man’s lovely, peculiar power to choose life and die’. While the individual has no right to demand the death of others, he has the right to choose for himself what he is willing to die for. The meaning of life is created outside himself, even at the cost of death. In destroying the Kabul museum, the late President Amin destroyed not only the life work of the curators and archaeologists – many of them French – who had built and catalogued the collections, but also the meanings of the lives of those who had made the artefacts in ages past. This destruction in turn denies present and future generations access to these meanings.

The museum in Kabul contained both relatively recent artefacts from the pagan cultures which existed in Afghanistan until the last century, and objects excavated from the sites of trading centres which have existed in the region for at least 3000 years. Through these exhibits, even the casual visitor could come into contact with the classical civilisations of China, India and Greece, and trace the movement of ideas, perceptions and technologies between them. In a real sense, the museum was a centre which drew together the past and present, the east, the west and the south of Eurasian culture, and even brought these into some contact with pre-civilised cultures that had extended almost into living memory.

The exhibits in the museum provided a clue to ways of life which have now vanished, but which in many ways continue to influence the way we, or people in other societies, perceive ourselves and the world. They represented meanings, ways of seeing, by which we can extend and partially correct our own ways of seeing. According to reports, the museum keepers saved the collection when the military moved in to commandeer their building as a barracks, but at the cost of stowing everything in bags and removing them to a private residence. Here, not only is their continued existence jeopardized, but the work of identifying and cataloguing has been lost, and there are few people in the world who can reconstruct it. In the course of time, even this knowledge will disappear, and the collection, even if physically preserved, might as well be re-interred in the original excavations, for without use it can have no meaning for us.

Just as the museum in Kabul preserved for us meanings from the past, so the people of Afghanistan maintained the continuity of a culture far older than ours. The things which were used were also decorated in a manner which made them an extension of the life of their users. The trucks which maintained the national transport system were decorated with intricate designs which owed something to tradition and much to modern pop culture, but which constituted a unique blending of past and present, individual and social. Similarly, the harnesses on their horses, and the equipage of the camels used by the still-nomadic peoples of the country, were decorated with their own meanings.

In the Pathan south of the country, the meaning of the landscape is given by the mud-dwellings which dominate it from the hilltops, much as the castles of mediaeval Europe or, more relevantly, the tribal fortresses of the Scottish highlands before Culloden. The meaning of the individual male life here is given by the possession of a rifle, which may range from a flint-lock to a perfect reproduction of a modern Lee­Enfield. No doubt now even more sophisticated weaponry is available.

It is difficult for the westerner to evaluate these cultures. From the vantage of our liberal education we are likely to emphasise the material poverty and the disease, the apparent oppression of women, the possibility that slavery still exists, the inequalities, the harsh conditions of labour in the country. These things certainly exist, and should be changed, but at what cost? When the change is imposed in the name of an ideology, or carried through by the pressures of technological commercialism, it is likely in the interest of removing evils to destroy also the continuity with the past from which people have derived the meaning of their existence.

We are now starting to realise the perils to human existence which arise from the destruction of any natural species, and the consequent impoverishment of the world’s genetic pool and of our understanding of the processes of natural adaptation. We are beginning to realise that the destruction of particular natural environments, even ones we may never visit, is an absolute loss of human potentiality. But the loss of a language or a culture - as opposed to its natural evolution - is equally a loss of potential and of understanding, of meaning, and, in an age when technology presents a threat to the survival of any kind of humane society, may be a direct threat to our future.

The history of western society during the twentieth century has been dominated by mass destruction, yet its culture is dominated by a loss of belief even in meaning. Intellectuals and artists have looked inside themselves and have found nothing. The astonishing thing about the life of Hitler, as we now know it from documents and memoirs, and even home movies, or of the personality of Stalin as imaginatively recreated by Solzhenitsyn in The First Circle, the utter hollowness at the centre. A similar hollowness is the characteristic of assassins like Lee Harvey Oswald or of murderers like Charles Manson, whose only escape from their own reality is to destroy others. For the suburban housewife our culture offers escape only through soap-opera, and for the unemployed teenager only through increasingly mindless and violent music. The same hollowness at the heart of our politics drives people like Ronald Reagan to translate global politics into a B-grade movie plot, and drives our own Prime Minister into ecstasy at the possibility of a renewal of the certainties of the cold war.

In this situation, the destruction of the museum collection at Kabul is not merely a regrettable incident, but an integral part of the malaise of our times. We can afford no opportunity to learn again how to create meanings, and until we begin to do so the rest of the world will no doubt continue to suffer from the hollowness at the heart of our industrial civilisation.