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Counterpoints: 25 Years of The New Criterion on Culture and the Arts

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COUNTERPOINTS: The New Criterion celebrates its 25th anniversary with this collection of essays by some of the most influential critics in the English language.
The mere fact that a conservative journal of cultural criticism not only survives but thrives after 25 years should earn The New Criterion first place in the pantheon of great achievements. After all, TS Eliot's Criterion survived only 17 years in a much friendlier cultural milieu. Separating beauty from dross, right from wrong, good from evil has been the forte of TNC. This is not an easy accomplishment in a culture where "anything goes".
The monthly arrival of the journal brings anticipation, excitement, and obligation. It is not possible to read these articles without a sense that something has been amiss in one's education. Regular readers know the responsibility felt after a new edition introduces them to authors and artists and controversies which, if not unknown to the reader, were at least unappreciated. Thus the obligation...to read more, to learn more and thus savor life more fully.
Above all, this sort of criticism requires judgement...a philosophy that some things are indeed better than others and it is the former that should be promoted and the latter identified and decried. The contributors are the kind of people with whom one would want to share a glass of port: Mark Steyn, Robert Bork, David Pryce Jones, Roger Scruton, Heather MacDonald. Joseph Epstein, Theodore Dalrymple, Gertrude Himmelfarb. The best and the brightest of our time. Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball are to be congratulated for their editorship of this excellent journal. And all of us should buy this book, pull a chair up to the fire, and sip that port.

The New Criterion, Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball's journal of culture and the arts, is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. To commemorate the occasion, Kramer and Kimball have put out a new anthology of essays from the magazine, Counterpoints. This is not a work of poetry, but in fulfilling Horace's dictum it is both delightful and instructive.

The aim of The New Criterion, the editors tell us in their short introduction, paraphrasing Eliot, is to "foster common concern for the highest standards of both thought and expression" and to "discharge `our common responsibility...to preserve our common culture uncontaminated by political influences.'" In an era when Western culture is constantly under attack from within by relativists and from without by recidivists, and art has descended to little more than political propaganda by other means, this mission is more important than ever. The essays chosen for inclusion in this volume distill TNC's work splendidly.

Most of the great political issues of the past quarter century are discussed in Counterpoints. Are you concerned about Islamic jihadists? Read Mark Steyn on demography and David Fromkin on Turkey. Has immigration got your goat? Roger Scruton examines Enoch Powell, the British politician whose career was lost when he riled up an early PC mob. Care to revisit the Cold War? Roger Kimball and David Prcye-Jones discuss the gulag and the West's useful idiots, respectively. Keith Windschuttle battles anti-Americanism by exposing the hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky and Mordecai Richler shows us the rest of the world's warts with Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad. The academic left is excoriated in Heather Mac Donald's examination of the Smithsonian institution and James Franklin's essay on scientific irrationalism, while Robert Bork decries the judicial power-grab in this country. And there's more.

Much more than just politics is discussed, however. The New Criterion's culture warriors also do battle on the artistic plains. The poetry of Frost, Eliot, and the New York School is considered, as well as the criticism of Yvor Winters and F.R. Leavis. The writing of Simon Raven, Paul Valery and Lord Acton is lauded while Ralph Waldo Emerson and French writer Michel Houellebecq come in for some harsh treatment. There are essays on art (though not as many as you might expect from a New Criterion anthology), music, the theater, dance, and even architecture. Theodore Dalrymple's examination of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and its possible effect on our society is a particular pleasure.

I found this collection enormously edifying, and the only very small quibble I might make is that none of James Bowman's excellent media criticism or Jay Nordlinger's writing on music found its way into the volume. Still, Counterpoints has a little something for everyone. It can be enjoyed in its entirety or taken off the bookshelf to lightly read an essay or two. Recommended.

The New Criterion is the most highbrow of conservative publications and one of the most intellectually rewarding and in these pages only the best of their best is on display; for the mind this is an inspiring feast. A myriad of themes are developed but the one most ubiquitous is that western civilization is in serious decline and it is impossible to know how much further it will deteriorate. In 2007, the radicals are no longer at the gates; they have melted them down and turned them into loud speakers. They have tainted the west's intellectual inheritance with one of their many interlocking isms, and the young have been persuaded that war, slavery, and dehumanization are our main cultural achievements.

It is here, upon a blistering and torrid battlefield, that The New Criterion asserts itself. Their purpose is in keeping the immortal words of George Santayana that "the best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive." A standard motif of every issue is to rehabilitate verboten cerebrals or those who do not fit into the sound byte parameters of our society. This volume resurrects a great many figures. The title of a composition by Brooke Allen asks "Who Was Simon Raven?" but readers will no cause to echo her after once they are finished. The same can be said of other unfashionable personages like John Buchan, Leigh Fermor, Milton Avery, F.R. Leavis, and Donald Francis Tovey.

Every person and idea that the journal places into our consciousness acts as a partial antidote to the neurotoxin of political correctness, and builds an infrastructure upon which we can better understand our world. Nowadays, unfortunately, truth exists almost entirely outside the purview of the race, class, and sex Commissars infesting our universities.The New Criterion does more than commemorate and enshrine. It also counterattacks which it does in an entertaining and lethal fashion. Its artful and erudite tone does not diminish its impact. This should not surprise us as Evander Holyfield also fought like a gentleman, but woe to the fool who stepped into one of his combinations.

In these days of insane educational inflation, the most important question to ask in regards to this book is how many college courses is it worth? Five? Ten? Fifteen? I guess the answer depends on the particular university and how "engaged" their professors happen to be. When the search for truth has been abandoned and truth itself has been demoted to one of many competing "perspectives," the fruit of this journal is one of the few ways in which the young can discern veritas.

Twenty-five years ago The New Criterion set out to challenge the orthodoxies current among the gibbering classes. Counterpoints is a collection of the journal's choicest essays and reviews dedicated to that end.

Fifty years from now this volume will be read as an indispensable primary source for the cultural history of our times. My hope is that some future historian will compile a companion volume of the most drivelsome reviews and essays published in the leading orthodox organs of the same period. To be done properly, this companion work would have to stretch back at least far enough to incorporates such forgotten capi di lavoro as The Greening of America, since the imbecilities of the last twenty-five years evolved well before The New Criterion began its work.

The editor of the proposed compilation will have to burrow laboriously into a huge midden heap of discarded intellectual trash. Happily we can dispense with such grimy and sordid sifting. This collection provides a more than adequate overview of the cultural pathologies of our times, and does so elegantly. There is not one awkward or obscure sentence in its 484 pages, and a good many gems of critical panache and wit.

Its most satisfying feature is the way it combines demolition and affirmation.

This book represents a very nice summation of a fine, vital magazine's first twenty-five years of existence. I would reccomend it highly to anyone concerned about culture, the arts, and politics of the United States. Some of the essays herein are so good that you will want to read them several times. Re-reading pays off (as with all good art).