Customer Reviews

The Survival of Culture: Permanent Values in a Virtual Age

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So writes Roger Kimball in this book's final paragraph. This collection of ten essays seeks to stave off the latter through discussions of what is permanent in politics, art, law, medicine, education, and social values.

As a collection of essays, the book is naturally somewhat uneven; some of the pieces have a much broader range than others, and the tone varies widely from one to another.

Worth the price of the book is Mark Steyn's hilarious and brilliant polemic on "the West's anti-Westernism." In examples that might make one weep if they weren't so funny, he describes how a remarkable variety of people from the West have bent over backward and forward to apologize for all sorts of supposed crimes against an ever-increasing roster of victims.

Others to single out include the one by Robert Bork. If you're a recovering liberal, you'll read this essay at first with a touch of queasy fascination that will then become enthusiastic head-nodding, as Bork explains just how in the name of Hollywood we have, in a short generation, come to the point where pornography and obscenity are fully privileged (and thus everwhere visible and audible) and any expression of religious faith in the public square has become Verboten (and thus everywhere hidden and inaudible).

In addition, Keith Windschuttle, whose subject matter overlaps to some degree with Mark Steyn's, rebuts the views of Edward Said and his Orientalism; Roger Kimball, among many other things, illustrates why we should be re-reading Matthew Arnold and ignoring Susan Sontag; and Kenneth Minogue, in discussing what he calls "the new Epicureans," shows how the modern "avoidance of the burdensome" has led people to forgo the responsibilities of marriage and family.

Looking over the table of contents again, I can find only two essays that I found either hard to penetrate (in one case) or narrow in scope (in another).

Although there's no recipe in this book purporting to contain the magic ingredients needed for the survival of culture, the essays as a whole will help readers think through, and resist, the assault on permanent values.

4.5 stars.