Customer Reviews

The Future of the European Past

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This is a brilliant and compulsive book, though in its dissection of our cultural malaise far more terrifying than any escapade by Hannibal Lecter. Read it if you care about the future of civilization.

This is an elegantly written, totally absorbing antidote to much of the pretentious humbug that nowadays passes for profundity. I recommend it without reserve.

Now I have to read this work. Could it possibly be more "irritating" than the January fifth review?! We shall see. All in all, it sounds like the perfect antitode to today's unconscious and helpless relativism.

This collection of essays published in the New Criterion are not all bad. The late John Herrington saw signs of hope in reviving the classics. Ferdinand Mount takes a rather calm attitude to the problem of "dumbing down." But the rest of the essays show all the vices that make the New Criterion the intensely irritating journal that it is.

First off, there is the bullying, ostentatious anti-communism, as if the contributors were the only people in the world who recognized that Stalin was evil. David Pryce-Jones labels Stefan George a Nazi, where in fact he died in exile. He also dismisses Sartre and Brecht as Stalinist hacks, all in the name of liberal opposition to ideological judgments in literature. His essay ends in a hysterical comparison of the EEC to Vichy France. Anne Applebaum accuses unnamed scholars of saying Stalin killed only hundreds of people. Her own grasp of totalitarianism is not so good herself since she blurts out there is "no proof he [Hitler] knew about the Holocaust." Of course there is considerable proof; what is open to question is the existence of a specific written or verbal order starting the process.

Whatever one feels about the state of today's culture, one will be irritated about the shallow impressionism. John Gross and Mark Steyn complain popular songs no longer make historical or literary allusions. At the time they were writing their essays there was a number one hit in Britain called "Breakfeast at Tiffany's." And then there's Monty Python, Kate Bush, Sting, one could go on. Gross complains that pub names are becoming facetious, that shallower celebrities are being praised at Madame Tussaud's. The decline of the Anglican church, a phenomenon lasting centuries, is blamed on its new uninspired liturgy. Pryce-Jones, Gross, and Hilton Kramer wince or fume whenever anything nice is said about homosexuals.

Nor are is there much rigorous discussion of opposing arguments. Roger Kimball sneers at Jacques Derrida, while Keith Windschuttle reduces Fernand Braudel and the Annales to a shameful desire to escape the shame of Vichy. Hilton Kramer spends several pages attacking Sveltana Alpers for making a suggestion about homosexuality and ignores the rest of her work. For all the talk of the "European" past, the essayists belittle and ignore the rest of Europe, while defending Anglo-American elites from every slight.

I happen to think a great deal of good has been created by DWM (dead white males), and that they have much to say to us, despite the homogeneity of their ilk. But, these writers' prejudices about incidental matters (e.g., homosexuality) tend to throw the authors off subject into temperamental tangents of irritating, often infuriating, polemics. Indeed, this tendency among these so-called conservative illuminati make them seem borish, immature, and wildly inflammatory about all the wrong things. Rather than lead us to appreciate the "best" in human history, after the excellence of Matthew Arnold, they tend to approach the matter by eloquent straw man sophistry. It makes them appear collectively as myopic narcisists, whose only worldview is what they hate. I hate "jello," but what relevance does jello have with the excellence of a Berlioz composition? About as much as homosexuality has to the excellence of John Maynard Keynes' economics. Shooting the tree and getting lost in the forest is not a good sign for any critic; yet, nearly all are "victims" of this polemic. For individuals who despise victimhood, they fail to see their essays are filled with it; what they write often begets the very thing they profess to deplore. As articulate as these essays are, they are not very well-written. If looking to the past opens doors to the future, then reading Allen Tate, Isaiah Berlin, and Aldous Huxley are much better road maps to great ideas and fine literature, and much better critics than most of these amateurs.