Roger Kimball: A Voice in the Cultural Wilderness
In some 21 essays, Roger Kimball — author of seminal books like Tenured Radicals and The Long March, editor of the The New Criterion, and publisher of Encounter Books — lays out a general indictment of what we might loosely call “modernism” in the West. By that term, Kimball means the rejection of over two millennia of classical values that accelerated following the horrors of World War I, and which came to full fruition in Europe and the United States after the catastrophe of World War II, before crystallizing in the 1960s amid the social upheavals sparked by the Vietnam War.
To understand what had been lost in the 20th century West, a critic would have to be a literary scholar. He should be intimately familiar with art and attuned to popular culture. He would also have to be knowledgeable about classical music and the reactions to it, conversant with European tastes, and acquainted with subjects as diverse as economics, political science, and architecture. Few observers other than Kimball are, so his multifaceted and deeply learned lamentation deserves a wide readership — not just for his accurate diagnoses, but also for the singularly learned manner in which he offers antidotes and prognoses.
For Kimball, the culprits for our decline are obvious and fall roughly into a few categories: cultural relativism, or the all-encompassing idea that there are no longer any permanent or absolute criteria by which we might assess anything as either excellent or poor; multiculturalism, the doctrine that non-Western cultures cannot be judged by Western values and therefore are exempt from the sort of censure that is routinely employed by Western critics in reference to their own societies; utopianism, the notion that man is perfectible with proper training, plenty of money, and a coercive enough government run by enlightened elites; and liberal elitism that results when large numbers of well-off Westerners are able to divorce themselves from, and thus are ignorant about, the grubby mechanisms that account for their wealth, and so can indulge in ideas whose pernicious cargoes have no direct consequences to themselves.
In all these pathologies, Kimball sees the common denominator of enforced radical egalitarianism, or the human impulse to make us all the same, which for many trumps the desire for liberty and individualism. To paraphrase Aristotle and Tocqueville, Kimball is appalled at a certain human weakness that expresses itself in a willingness to become enslaved as the price of ensuring equality — as if by nature we value egalitarianism far more than liberty.
Given that the first four years of the administration of Barack Obama can be fairly summarized as a quest for an enforced equality of result, Kimball’s essays take on an urgency not usually associated with cultural and literary criticism. In Kimball’s essays, one can see how the pernicious work of a writer, social critic, artist, or philosopher provides the intellectual means to a political end and ultimately distills into state policies: like implementing the Dream Act by executive fiat; dissimulating about the actual circumstances of the murders in Libya; or misrepresenting the nature and cost of federalized health care to force its passage through Congress on a narrow partisan vote.
Thanks for a very incisive review.
It is also self evident – at least it should be – that multicultural psychosis has driven a stake into the heart of the west. Rational folks should be able to discern this truth.
IF not, how did the following come to pass? – http://adinakutnicki.com/2012/08/21/the-paradox-pitfalls-of-liberal-democracies-in-a-time-of-immoral-relativism-the-havoc-wrought-by-leftist-academia-commentary-by-adina-kutnicki/
The questions hanging in the air are always the same – is there a clash of civilizations? And,if not for the immoral relativism of the left, would the west’s decline have been so precipitous?
You decide.
Adina, thanks for your research and comments. They are valued.
I am very distressed that the conversation here about “cultural relativism” is so ahallow and quick to level bullets at the achievements of the modern world. I tried to explain where cultural relativism came from here, in the context of Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the United Nations. He had no doubt about the sources of civilization, but like other Enlightened statesmen was not shy about assigning moral superiority to the West, which he sees as derived from ancient Jewish prophets. See http://clarespark.com/2012/09/28/bibi-and-the-human-nature-debate/.
“For Kimball, the culprits for our decline are obvious and fall roughly into a few categories: cultural relativism, or the all-encompassing idea that there are no longer any permanent or absolute criteria by which we might assess anything as either excellent or poor.”
In the current cultural wasteland, there is one absolute standard for judging excellence — my own opinion. My opinion is always correct as long as I acknowledge that every other opinion is relative. This is called the Criterion of Narcissus and is well entrenched in our universities.
Periclean Athens has always been a bit of a puzzle for me. In many ways I find it difficult to merge the lofty rhetoric of republicanism with the treatment of the allies and the theft of the treasury of Delos. Another thing is in how the war machine built to keep out the Persians was completely inadequate against a bunch of slave-holding but well-organized farmers. I’ve often wondered how I would have felt if I was one of those proud Athenians who was told that the proper way to fight the Spartans was to hide behind a wall. And I often wonder if we are like them.
“I’ve often wondered how I would have felt if I was one of those proud Athenians who was told that the proper way to fight the Spartans was to hide behind a wall. And I often wonder if we are like them.”
Periclean had a hard political time getting them there. He must be one hell of an orator. Plus no one thought the war would carry on that long as the Spartans could harldy afford it. I actually read Kagan’s book, “The Peloponnesian War,” last year and he did broach that when all the Athenians were packed behind the walls the plague broke out and killed quite a few of them. Had an economic impact as well as a demoralizing effect on the soldiers and sailors.
I’m not up to speed on the ancients, but in my opinion things have not seemed to change from the days of old. You have those who want to govern others if not by force, but by persuading them they they do not know how to govern their own lives. That the answer lies in those who know more than they do, who are the elites and unelected bureaucrats. Also I see that we have embraced a sugar coated, empty “pop” culture, brought to us by the illusionists of Hollywood. And we have abandoned true culture which gave us all we have now. I see a citizenry just lost in the deserts of “pop” culture, unaware that the source of water to take care of their thirst is right in front of them. In the writings of classical cultures. I feel we will never recover from this. We may get rid of Obama and his gang of thieves, but the problem is still there.
Brilliant… I am off to Amazon!
“To understand what had been lost in the 20th century West, a critic would have to be a literary scholar. He should be intimately familiar with art and attuned to popular culture etc.”
Or he could simply be someone born before WW2 (1939 in my case) who keeps his eyes open during a 50 year working life (and after). And whose close friends are old friends. Not a divorce among them, happy well adjusted kids doing productive things. And who just had another elitist self identify. Even if he’s right.
Just a quibble with regard to:
The fault is not entirely the immigrant’s, but the elite hosts who established an educational system more designed to alleviating their own sense of guilt
There many examples where authors try to explain away a person’s or people’s behaviour as alleviating their sense of guilt. This in many cases I feel is wrong as no consideration is given to the fact that there exists a malicious streak in people who do their utmost to alleviate their rage/hate by sabotaging the system they are required by social consensus to conform to.
I deeply loved this book and recommend reading it on a Kindle if only for the built in dictionary that helpfully explains the many esoteric terms employed by Mr. Kimball.
There are also delightful insights like his description of writer James Burnham as, “Subtle, passionate, and irritatingly well-read…” my Kindle note was, “Et tu?”
“To paraphrase Aristotle and Tocqueville, Kimball is appalled at a certain human weakness that expresses itself in a willingness to become enslaved as the price of ensuring equality — as if by nature we value egalitarianism far more than liberty.”
Yes, they are both still here, the Masters and their Fodder. “Progressive”, eh?
Many thanks for your thoughts, VDH!
Norman O. Brown had a brief celebrity during the period in which Victor Hanson took his seminar. Unlike his intellectual contempory, Marshall McCluhan, he did not coin a catchy phrase—”The medium is the message”—that would keep his name in lights, and today he is largely forgotten. I was a professor at UC Santa Cruz during this period. My only recollection of Brown was taking part in a poker game with him and a few others. Being thoroughly familiar with his lurid reputation, I was struck by his utterly conventional and uninteresting demeanor.
I am not prepared to write off Chesterton’s anti-Semitism as irrational. He may have found them to be profoundly immune to argument–brilliantly so–and just as profoundly determined to undermine permanence of the sort Chesterton, and Kimball, valued. All the Mark Levin’s aside, things will have changed not a whit on Nov. 6.
Everything stated in this review is well and good, but I am surprised (or maybe I should not be) that there is one massive, over-riding factor for the apparent collapse of Western culture and civilization that the reviewer fails to mention.
This factor is the major part played, deliberately, by the Soviet Union.
As an old student of Soviet history, and especially as it pertains to the history of military science and technology, the tenets of Marxism/Leninism, as enforced by Stalin, played a major role in the deliberate destruction of Western culture. The one reason for this is because Soviet-style Communism cannot survive along with a free capitalistic society. One or the other must die. The old Soviet Union died first due to internal corruption and gross incompetence among its top leadership, but its agents (especially alive and well in the Peoples Republic of California), just took over the Soviet aim of destruction of Western culture.
Stalin realized that the West, exlemplified by the United States, could not be destroyed militarily by outside aggression. Outside attempts to overthrow the post-WW-I German government failed after the bloody Communist revolution ca.1919 failed to turn Germany into a Soviet republic. Stalin then failed again militarily to conquer South Korea when Mao’s Chinese armies failed to defeat US-led forces during the Korean War 1950-53.
At that point, shortly before his death, Stalin gave up attempting to destroy the US by outside military force and gave deliberate orders that the US, and indeed all that the US stood for, must be destroyed by internal subversion. Using the Vietnam War as pretext, the Kremlin set out to first subvert Western higher education in order to gain a new internal army of traitors as “True Believers”, and then KGB agents placed them in important positions in Western academe and industry.
Communists are very patient, and frequently use time to gain their ends. This has now happened, and the center of Marxism/Leninism/Stalinism has simply moved from the old Soviet Union into the West itself.
Therefore the bottom line is that the US and Western culture did not fall apart all by itself, or by some sort of “cultural awakening”, or angst over “racism”, it happened because of decades of deliberate internal subversion due to orders from Stalin and then his successors in the old Soviet Union. The new center of Marxism/Leninism/Stalinism is now within the West itself, and there will be hell-to-pay trying to root it out.
Thanks for posting that here.
I’ve been saying roughly the same thing about our contemporary penetrations and subversions (plural) being very effectively accomplished right before our eyes by our Muslim enemy….which we refuse to admit publicly is, in fact, our enemy. The euphemisms for Muslim terrorism batted about in th’ media are masking a very real diffidence on the part of our current “leaders” which is the start of de facto dhimmitude.
The Muslims are gradually smiling, and that will broaden into wide grins if we Americans don’t step into this Muslim wilderness and state openly, publicly, that “this is enough”. Go back to wherever you came from.
Muslim “proselytizers” in America are unwelcome. Mosque construction (Cf Middle Tennessee) in anticipation of further Muslim growth is our physical evidence. Lawfare being very effectively applied by these Muslims where needed…..zoning….building permits…exploiting swiftly all possible openings.
So, the strategy and tactics of our resident contemporary encroaching Muslims are strikingly parallel to those of the Soviets. They’re very patient, and are adept at using our freedoms and our legal system against us….which, grudgingly, we’re slowly coming around to term as “lawfare”.
It’s past time for us to wake up to our Muslim existential threats.
aka, peaceful jihad.
500 corroborations
Thanks for this review of a thought-provoking work. I’ve finished reading the Czech Republic’s president’s collection of speech transcripts published as “The Road to Democracy” published in 2003. To anyone who is trying to understand what happened to Europe and the US, his profound belief in freedom and his critiques of what we’ve been trending toward are valuable. He lived through 40 years of Soviet rule and was tasked with finding a way when the USSR collapsed. He warns us of encroaching statism under various guises including environmentalism, the EU suprastate, power centralization in Washington, etc. Individual freedom must be re-fought for every generation to keep it alive, as it is fragile and has been non-existent throughout most of human history.
It’s helpful to look at the Book of Daniel and that particular prophet’s unusual visions. The takeaway message from them is that kingdoms have and will rise and fall throughout the course of history, but only God’s kingdom is invincible and without end. This gives us hope while living in the corrupt, declining culture we find ourselves in.
God laughs at the machinations of today’s leaders who think utopia is only a matter of a few tweaks, a little more authoritarianism, or maybe even the subtle or violent elimination of those perceived to be “in the way”.
“In all these pathologies, Kimball sees the common denominator of enforced radical egalitarianism, or the human impulse to make us all the same, which for many trumps the desire for liberty and individualism. To paraphrase Aristotle and Tocqueville, Kimball is appalled at a certain human weakness that expresses itself in a willingness to become enslaved as the price of ensuring equality — as if by nature we value egalitarianism far more than liberty.”
Actually, the common denominator is nihilism, the desire for self-extinction and death, for the destruction of that which is. Egalitarianism is merely one of the nihilist’s tools: their usual strategy is to level that which should be hierarchical and stratify that which should be equal. Similarly, in language they unite concepts which are opposite and divide concepts which are unified, until the concepts themselves become devoid of meaning. Hence, the nihilist can begin by attacking the concept of art, challenging the critic to regard objects as art that are clearly not art, then having opened the door to this artistic relativism, moves to moral relativism by destroying the concept of quality in art, and then the notion of objective values in general.
The foundation of this worldview is based in materialist atheism, which voids man of free will and results in his becoming a machine, to be reprogrammed at the hands of those deemed “more expert”. The end result in the political arena, therefore, of materialist atheism is totalitarian utopianism. If the sources of a person’s actions are metaphysically external to the person–indeed, if the metaphysically external is all that exists–then mankind is perfectible via either social or genetic engineering. Since moral causes are external, and hence manipulable, it therefore becomes a moral imperative that they be eliminated. The materialistic atheist is a totalitarian and a utopian out of his moral sense, but his sociopolitical schemes for the betterment of mankind are doomed to failure, since he too lacks free will and is merely a product of either his environment or his genes. The end result is a corrupt system that brutalizes its population even as it seeks to reform them into New Men. In short, the attempt is nothing more or less than the blind leading the blind, a whole society vacated of meaning attempting to lift itself up by its bootstraps which, unfortunately for everyone involved, do not exist.
Moses said:
“See, I place before you today the Life and the Good versus the Death and the Evil” . . .
“And I make heaven and earth witness to you today – I set before you the Life and the Death, the blessing and the curse. Choose the Life that you may live – you and your seed.” (Deut 30. 15, 19)
Moses would not have placed that choice before the Israelites had there not been a contemporary culture of death.
As Moses said, when you choose life you look to the future, you plan for your children and their children, you build, you prepare. And this cultural choice of life is one of the reasons the Jews are the only culture to have survived since ancient times. Because no matter what horrors history has thrown at us, there was always the command to go on, to perservere, to choose life and not despair. A generation may have been wiped out but there was always a remnant to carry on.
I have thought that for us the contemporary culture of death was the Muslim cult of martyrology – the suicide bombers with the concommitment indocrination of children in hate and intolerance.
But you have opened my eyes to another kind of culture of death. It is the culture of the walking dead – not zombies, but people with no future. They are people who promote abortion and non-sustainable birth rates as though life has no meaning; people who reject marriage and a safe home in which to raise children, to oversee their proper education, and to teach them to have respect for themselves and for others; anarchists who maraud down main streets breaking windows in total disrespect of personal property; people who use vulgar language and corrupt the meaning of words in an attempt to break down communication; materialists who say that all is chance and that there is no intrinsic meaning to existence and that there is no God who has established criteria of what is acceptable behavior.
The people who choose the Death hate and fear those who choose the Life – because they know they cannot control them. The people who choose the Life do not hate – they have too many more important things to do and interesting matters on their minds, but when push comes to shove the people who choose Life will show inordinte energy in defending themselves and their way of life. Maybe the victims of the Holocaust walked silently to the gas chambers, but the next generation looked to the success of the Jews against Haman, the Maccabbees against the Hellenic Greeks and Bar Kochba against the Romans.
I thank you for informing me that the choice of death can take more than one form.
If the heart of man is “deceitful above all things and desperately wicked,” does it matter if it is an individual heart, or a ruler’s/guvment’s heart? Is the key that the control on one’s wicked individuality comes from a religious code, rather than a government’s code? Generally, one has to accede to the rule of law, but it all seems to boil down to who writes and enforces the law. To what degree should the rule of law reflect western values, (and western in some way which blends Greek, Roman, Christian, and Enlightenment thought) as opposed to some Eastern version of an Emperor, whose edicts must be followed?
I would postulate that despite all the grumbling, there is still an amazing amount of individual freedom available in our culture. If one is judicious, one has tremendous freedom, although tea party folks and their ilk have made it a point to howl about the freedom we no longer have. We do have an odd mix in our culture where we ARE free, even if there is a lot of politically correct blather about.
Seriously, who has ever been more free than we are RIGHT NOW? If some one tells your parents that you have to take many vaccines early in life, which will coincidentally? free you up to live, on average an extra ten years, are you more or less free than if your parents had a right to say, hell no, you can’t make us vaccinate our children because we are Christian Scientists, they might get autism, or I just don’t believe in it? Yes, there are a lot of absurd words out there which create an aura of limiting our freedom, but with half (ok, maybe 3/4) of a brain, one still has overall freedom surpassing any culture ever, as long as you include freedom from dying of random diseases and other factors as part of our freedom.
Of course. if I can make a living writing about how we no longer have freedom, and I don’t have better options, well, I suppose I could do that too.
Er, not anonymous, but me.
There are two major events that propel USA towards its demise;
The Western world put a gun to its head in 1971 by installing Petro dollar system, and placed Saudi Arabia’s finger on the trigger. The eventual result is collapse of US dollar. The only recourse left to USA is invade Saudi Arabia and take over its petroleum fields at some point in the future, or to watch its economy continue withering slowly and collapse.
This is the Trojan horse that Kissinger, Nixon and the US congress placed into the American economy.
The Banking world was unleashed in 1999 by repealing Glass Steagal, resulting in upheaval we witnessed the last few years as banks and corporate world were bailed out and then governments, $16 Trillion and counting.
It all happened before in the 1930′s and reason glass steagal was passed in 1934 to restrict the banking industry. We experienced global calm in Banking system because it was regulated from mid 1930′s-1999. After glass steagal was repealed in 1999, banks were once again free to issue credit to themselves as during the 1920′s and the result was another global depression.
This is the crux of evolving economic collapse in the western world
It is ignorant to believe we are at the mercy of imaginary terrible forces with complex labels, we are not. We are at the mercy of our own greed and ignorance, corruption and laziness. The enemy is not a communist or socialist, they have always been there, long before the USA existed socialism was offered as utopia. It was rejected, will always be rejected as long as leadership does not encourage ignorance among the citizens. Unfortunately the last few decades we have seen ignorance promoted, and great lies told as truth, and from there it is easy to promote any ideal to those willing to believe greater and greater lies.
We have met the enemy, and they are us.
I have my copy! Just in time for cold weather reading. Thanks Roger!
‘To understand what had been lost in the 20th century West, a critic would have to be a literary scholar.’
So starts the second paragraph. A paragraph worthy of someone no less that L.Ron Hubbard. Is he really dead?
Thank you Dr. Hanson, for your perseverance in your journey of”…….effort to elevate us above our savage natures.”
Reading your essays is like experiencing a tasting of an aged, mellow cognac.
(But, I have to say; The typo’s are like lint in the chalice).
Your mention of Norman O. Brown brings back a memory. Brown’s daughter Rebbecca was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago during the late 1960s. I don’t recall how or where I meet her, but I did. She was a sweet little dumpling of a girl and she was visibly embarrassed by her father’s famous book, “Love’s Body” which had featured the the phrase “polymorphous perversity”.
They are perfectly willing to set off stink bombs, but they always make sure to be well upwind.