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Experiments Against Reality: The Fate of Culture in the Postmodern Age

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Most critics of American culture are able to see broad causes for contemporary problems. Their insight is almost oversight. Roger Kimball has an amazing ability to see the spawning wisp of the thread that weaves through the matrix of our cultural decline. These series of essays look back over the last century at the critics, novelists, and philosophers who stood on either side of the question, "Is reality real or can I make it what I wish?" Those ascribing to the latter, tended to be cultural heroes for their encouragement of a new kind of freedom which Kimball shows is really a decaying licentiousness. Most of these experimenters against reality were celebrated by the intelligentsia of the time for discovering a new kind of happiness. The only problem, as Kimball points out, is that their suggested liberations have led to misery both personally and culturally. There are also excellent essays describing the stalwarts who stood astride the decline of society yelling "Stop". Primary amongst these is Mr Kimball himself whose essay, "The Trivialization of Outrage" will be a classic as he decries the lack of beauty in today's "art". This is a book that needs to be studied to be appreciated. A little effort brings great rewards. Hopefully we will learn as Kimball so rightly puts it that "the liberations we crave have served chiefly to compound the depth of our loss."

This is one of my favorite books and a person could hardly do better than to purchase the two for one Amazon deal that includes "The Long March." I thought of reviewing "Experiments..." today because upon reading the latest issue of The New Criterion (the journal Kimball edits) the author includes, in an essay concerning shame, a reference to Robert Musil. This reference immediately reminded me of the superlative essay this book contains regarding Musil and his masterpiece, "The Man without Qualities."
"Experiments..." is highly similar to "Lives of the Mind" in its ecletic choice of subject matter. Unlike "The Long March," it is not uniformly guided by a single theme but this does not decrease its educational merit.
I should also state that this is not a partisan book. It's for intellectuals of all stripes but is particularly valuable to those who cherish our culture and western civilization. Enjoy, I wish I could read these essays for the first time all over again.

Kimball is a very learned voice in the culture wars, an insightful art critic who's breadth of reading harkens to a bygone era. As a matter of fact, the book sometimes feels as though it's from another era celebrating the myriad views of Hulme,T.S. Eliot, Muriel Sparks and once again ravaging the birth and ascent of deconstructionism/moral relativism. All the essays are well written if somewhat unsuprising at this stage, with the real gems being the attack on Cioran and the retrospective view of the novels of Robert Musil. There's also a fun bashing of Foucault who I find to be so tiresome you wouldn't think he'd needed to be bashed again except you'll still find his name in campus catalogs.

On the whole my reading experience was satisfactory, due more to Kimball's style than content. I've been moved to check out anew some of the author's he speaks about in the reviews, and I'm all for supporting an author who's done so much to bring the reading public's attention to David Stove. I might even suggest that someone jump right to Stove's work, especially the stunning volume edited by Kimball.

Contrasting Stove to Kimball is useful in illustrating why Kimball is not quite as enjoyable to read. Both are cultural warriors, with an obvious axe to grind from the right. While Kimball is easier to digest (he never reaches Stove's scathing pitch), you can't help but suspect that's partly because he has more sacred cows to protect. Stove doesn't leave anything worth skewering off the barbecue, not even religious inanery. Interestingly, Kimball liberally utilizes Stove arguments in his attacks, but ignores those that might land unfavorably on his own shoulders.

But very high shoulders they are, the writing is first rate, and his understanding can sometimes awe you. He's a proper heir to much of modernisms archness. If he isn't a British citizen, perhaps he should be made an honorary one.

I've read Kimball's essays in other places and enjoyed them, so I was a little disappointed with much of the content of this collection. Many of these pieces read more like personal lambastes than scholarly criticism. The essay on Foucault was especially distasteful. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to despise Michel Foucault, both as an intellectual and as a human being. Kimball, though, reserves his most caustic aspersion for Foucault's homosexuality in what amounts to a sneering, homophobic rant. The essay on Sartre is also a bit ridiculous. Light on actual analysis, it is replete with anecdotes intended to portray him as a bratty prima-donna. No doubt he was, but does it really matter? Admire him or not, Sartre, who declined a Nobel Prize, was one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of the twentieth century, and to judge him deserves much more than contemptuous mocking of his private habits. Oddly enough, in the Foucault essay, Being and Nothingness is rightly described as "important and original," but this is solely to belittle Foucault, Jacques Derrida, et al by way of comparison for having failed to produce anything of similar eminence.

Kimball does tend to come off as a reactionary curmudgeon, and his pontificating becomes obnoxious and seems too often irrelevant. This is sad because when Roger Kimball writes about art and culture in the New Criterion and elsewhere, he can be a trenchant voice. What is revealed in several of these pieces is a darker side.

All of this being said, several of the essays contained herein are must reads. "The Trivialization of Outrage" is important, concise, and persuasive. Anyone with the slightest interest in the state of our culture should read this. In a similar vein is an essay entitled "Does Shame Have a Future?," which isn't included in this collection but is available on the New Criterion's website. "A Craving for Reality: T.S. Eliot Today" is excellent, and so are the essays on John Stuart Mill and Nietzsche.

Experiments is worth reading. Frustrating at times, even offensive at its worst. But the important essays, the ones that are serious and avoid being cheap shots, are important enough and moving enough to buy the entire book.

I have read most of the essays in this volume in their earlier versions; yet they seem to me as fresh and intellectually invigorating as at my first go round. This is partly due to having read some of the works discussed since Kimball inspired an interest in them, but mostly because each essay encompasses a superabundance of insights and ideas reqquiring a second look. The author writes so clearly and forcefully that his pages generally go by a little too fast to catch all that they have to offer at one go.

The essays on T.E. Hulme Muriel Spark, Josef Pieper, James Fitzjames Stephen, and Robert Musil are outstanding among a uniformly excellent collection. I recommend them strongly for those who have no familiarity with these writers.

The examinations of Foucault and E.M. Cioran are of such quality that their admirers will remember his essays with violent emotions long after they have abandoned their subjects for even more flapdoodlious energumens. Kimball's style in dealing with such freaks is exactly right. He does not strain himself to tease some arcane significance out of their dramatic posturings. He does not treat them as PostMod Titans. He recognizes them as the pus and vomit of a sick culture and applies the antiseptic of wit, clarity, and logic.

In these essays, Kimball examines the influences that have shaped our 21st century culture, re-evaluating prominent authors and philosophers who have contributed to and commented on the culture. The lively writing is more concerned with literature and literary criticism than philosophy which plays a secondary role. Sixteen chapters subject sixteen figures to his balanced and measured scrutiny. Beginning with the poet T E Hulme, they include T S Eliot, Auden, Wallace Stevens, Robert Musil, Elias Canetti, Nietzsche, Foucault and Francis Fukuyama, in which essay Kimball defends traditional religion in a novel way.

In the erudite introduction, Kimball remarks that by sabotaging the notion of truth, the real aim of the deconstructionists was to undermine the idea of value. This explains postmodernism's appeal to mediocre academics unable to make a worthwhile contribution to knowledge. Declaring that truth is false and ignorance is knowledge, they embraced the perilous practice that the prophet Isaiah warned against: 'Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put bitter for sweet ...'

The assault on Western values intends to deny their universal validity and applicability. Thus the concept of "value" had to be stripped of meaning. The real aim was to replace Western values with the "truths" of the 1960s counterculture, Kimball asserts. If, as these nihilists claim, truth has no meaning, then their own views -- like those of the Khomeini fan Foucault who claimed that truth is merely a function of power - cannot be valid or meaningful either. Kimball's diagnosis of the latter is witty and lethal.

The author condemns our society's refusal to judge and rejects with contempt the linguistic codes of academia's humanities departments. He will not adopt the use of its assumptions, cynicism, redefinitions, inversion, neologisms, scare quotes, paradoxes, gullibility, sneering tone or total tolerance that means total impotence. The refusal to criticize results in moral paralysis, the practical results of which are visible in Europe where a sinister second society has sprung up. This hidden society of hatred and alienation where barbaric practices flourish due to the lack of law enforcement is revealed by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Bruce Bawer, Claire Berlinski and Chantal Delsol in her books Icarus Fallen and The Unlearned Lessons Of the Twentieth Century.

When he finally deals with philosophy, Kimball indicates how intellectuals like John Stuart Mill, Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and even the conservative Roger Scruton have side-stepped modernity's moral imperatives. Foucault's grotesque equivalence between slavery & freedom, Sartre's dehumanizing, impersonal concept of "The Other" and Hegel's rambling dialectics are all attempts to force reality into neat paradigms instead of boldly facing its often messy and inexplicable nature. Stephen Hicks provides illuminating insight into the aforementioned thinkers in his masterpiece Explaining Postmodernism.

In conclusion, Kimball discusses the implications of contemporary culture's trivialization of art and its sabotage of historical truth, reason and scientific rationality. His arguments shatter the theoretical foundations of the criticisms invented by relativist purveyors of deconstructionist, multiculturalist, structuralist, environmentalist and feminist theorizing. In doing so, Kimball demonstrates how postmodernist thinking has impoverished our culture, confused our epistemology and promoted a cluster of ideological mutants engaged in internecine warfare.

The pathology of collectivism is evident in its neverending effort to subvert the Word. Leftist thought derives from a primordial lie which places it in a parallel dimension, a lie which betrays the covenant between language and reality. Instead of being a vehicle to convey truth, language is dressed up for effect in order to gain power. Kimball's writings offer an arsenal of rhetoric to counteract this hijacking of language. His shield is the unassailable criterion of history whilst his weapons include the power of beauty, the force of reality and the antitoxin of common sense. What's more, he wields the shield and the sword of the Word with consummate skill to deadly effect.

Other books of interest that offer different perspectives on the theme of intellectual deception include The Reckless Mind by Mark Lilla, Intellectual Morons by Daniel Flynn and Last Exit to Utopia by Jean François Revel. Theodore Dalrymple's Our Culture, What's Left Of It confirms the west's cultural decay, whilst Why Truth Matters by Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom presents a compelling case for restoring and respecting truth.

Reality has a bad habit of sneaking up on its deniers and biting them on the rump. In EXPERIMENTS AGAINST REALITY, Roger Kimball traces a straight line progression of thought in this century as he attempts to explain how Western culture has come under continuous assault by those who refuse to admit the existence of the "real" part of reality. He subtitles his book as "The fate of culture in the postmodern age," but it is not the forward looking fate of culture that interests him. Rather, his vision is backward looking as he examines the often intertwining loops of thought in philosophers, some of whom are quite unknown even to the educated elite.

Kimball begins with "The Case of Walter Pater," who was one of the mildest of Victorian authors. It came as a great surprise to him and those who knew him that he was hailed as one who called for a universal trumpet to engage in the wildest of sexual and artistic excesses. It was only one brief line of his STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF THE RENAISSANCE that is remembered today: He urged his readers to "burn always with his hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy." Pater, then, is a pre-twentieth century harbinger of those who would soon follow to claim that the pursuit of self-aggrandizement must trump a search for Eternal Truth.

Other essays on T. E. Hulme, Wallace Stevens, Mauriel Spark, and Robert Musil follow. Their connection to Kimball's thesis is less clear than I could readily see. They were legitimate heavyweight writers whose influence on the next generation of reality bashers may have been felt more in their style than in their content. In Part II, Kimball's selection of authors is germane: John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sartre, Foucault, and Francis Fukuyama. These latter writer/philosophers had a collective and powerful impact on today's assorted motley collection of post-modernists. It was difficult, painful, but necessary for me to read of the scabby excesses of Sartre and Foucault. As I read, I was reminded of the old saw about the wisdom of playing the ostrich in a field of like-minded ostriches when a predator approached. The denial of reality in that case and in all cases is distinctly unwise. EXPERIMENTS AGAINST REALITY is a sobering wake up call for those who wish to know the linguistic roots of those others who cry out that there is no "inside" to any text, philosophy, or thought paradigm.