Interview: Roger Kimball on The Fortunes of Permanence
“The history of philosophy can be divided into two different periods. During the first, philosophers sought the truth; during the second, they fought against it.”
– Jean-François Revel (1924-2006), French journalist and philosopher, as quoted in The Fortunes of Permanence.
Roger Kimball, my fellow PJ Media columnist and publisher of the New Criterion magazine and Encounter Books, stopped by recently to discuss his latest book, The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia. During our interview, Roger expounds on:
Present-Tense Culture: What happens to a culture that has not only submerged its past, but is doing its damndest to bury it permanently?- The left-wing etymology of the word “ideology.”
How postwar-American modern architecture was able to minimize its prewar socialist past. - How Rudyard Kipling and James Burnham became historical unpersons.
- The progressive paradox of colonialism.
- The future of socialism: Over 60 years ago, George Orwell responded to the horrors of socialism by asking, “where is the omelet?” Since, England, Greece and California are all in dire fiscal straits, and we know that there’s no omelet being cooked up, where does America go from here?
And much more. Click here to listen:
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(23 minutes long; 22 MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 6.9 MB lo-fi edition.)
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And from more from Roger, don’t miss his video interview with Glenn Reynolds on his new book.
Oh, I really enjoyed that. First I am so glad Roger brought Benda’s The Flight of The Intellectuals back into print. I use a quote from Benda as the epigraph on my blog. I think his work now is as apt as it was in 1927.
I hope we can avoid the kind of global catastrophe he and Revel feared. I too have a heavily marked copy of The Flight from Truth. The chapter in it on “The Betrayal of the Profs” fits the Common Core implementation agenda to a T. Probably because ultimately Revel’s nemesis, UNESCO, is still behind much of the ideology. I even have in my notes in margin how the other nemesis, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, was first translated into English in 1990. Just in time to create havoc in the West via education “reforms.”. He is now the best-selling sociologist in the world on the basis of being assigned in colleges of education around the world.
I think Revel’s work is invaluable because you get to see what unfiltered Marxism looks like and what its consequences have been. When you run into an idea or theory or practice in the US or Australia with a new name but the same function or consequences as what Revel described in France, it makes it so much easier to recognize what we are dealing with.
Which is, I suppose, why we are all being discouraged now from having our own set of facts. Instead we get prepackaged concepts and approved theories and models to have a dialogue about so we can reach a consensus.
How does one find this podcast on Apple’s iTunes store in podcasts? I could not locate the podcast there.
If it isn’t there WHY NOT?
Dan Kurt
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