Customer Reviews

The Wreck of Western Culture: Humanism Revisited

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There are lots of decline-of-Western-Civ books. This one is brilliant.

Carroll's basic point is that man needs a place to stand, and humanism--putting man at the center of things--can't give him one. So the book recounts 500 years' worth of attempts to fill the hole, either consistently with humanism or in opposition to it.

The analysis rings the changes on a very few themes, like reason and honor and death, which it traces in their various permutations throughout the 500-year humanist period.

The presentation is based on close analysis of literary and artistic works: Holbein's Ambassadors (on the cover) as a representation of the failure of Renaissance humanism, Vermeer's interiors as a depiction of Puritan domestic inwardness, Cezanne's landscapes as a last-ditch attempt to save natural order, and so on.

I found the interpretations--Velasquez's Las Meninas as radically subversive and so on--both startling and persuasive. Sometimes I had my doubts, though. Is Rembrandt's David and Uriah really David and Uriah? Someone's being sent his death, as the author says, but is he an innocent? And was Poussin really the Catholic Counter-Reformation prophet who, had we but followed him, would have saved us through the restoration of liturgical community?

Be those things as they may, the analysis is clear and cogent, and the examples are fascinating in themselves and the use made of them at least plausible and often strikingly illuminating. So read it.

One issue I should mention: the illustrations aren't up to the text, so you should read the book with a computer at hand so you can look up the images on the net.

I shall preface this review with the caveat that I find it difficult to rate this book. Interestingly, when I was half finished with the work, I was sufficiently impressed to order two other titles by the author, his Ego and Soul, and The Existential Jesus. Now, with my reading of Wreck complete, I question these purchases.

It is not simply his pseudo-journalistic presentation of a subject of such monumental importance as the collapse of western culture that I find questionable; I expect and overlook the limited intellectual capacities of those, like Mr. Carroll, who can describe the wounds and sores, explosions, and mortalities of others without proposing remedies for them. Of course, I find offensive the newspaperman's lurid descriptions and the sensationalism that motivates them; I'm sure you do, too. Mr. Carroll writes like a journalist. I am also repelled by the journalist's limited stylistic range of expression, his presumptions of ethical authority, the almost childish glee with which he aggravates his audience--and the output of Mr. Carroll expresses all these limitations. But this work uses these techniques with a much more culpable purpose driving them. This book presents a 275 page anti-eulogy over the death of reason; and it is a grave-song delivered by one dressed not in the robes of a pious or sympathetic man, but one got up in the shorts, sneakers, and, I suspect, man-thong of the hip-hop media star.

Not that Mr. Carroll is without his measure of brilliance, you understand, just that it is an intelligence one would expect of a theater critic, but without the decency to confine itself to the insignificant, where it belongs. The critic's brains are innately trivial, he literally cannot distinguish the judgment of his thumb from the drama he reports. Whatever his impression, however laughable and out of sync it is with the subject he discourse on, he will summon to the very last ounce the resources that his pride and a very smart prep school education has bequeathed him to validate his opinion. The critic will speak of Sloop-doggy-dog in the same glowing terms as he will Mozart: and remain completely unaware of the comedy he puts on in doing it. When Ebert echoes Siskel, I hardly recognize the movie in "the cinema" they describe. And I am completely comfortable in recommending the opposite taste to their's, I need only know that Fool has agreed with Folly, to be right nine of ten debates. It is for the same reasons that I take Mr. Carroll's judgments so suspiciously: not just that he sees in the great visual art of the Renaissance and the movies of John Ford (Rio Grande, for God's sake!) the same level of greatness, or comprehends Shakespeare and Henry James as qualitative literary identities. It is also that he places them all in the same docket for trial. They are reduced to a symptomatology: in the way that fever precedes sweat, and sweat, congestion of the lungs, they are understood as stages of a pneumococcus, one he labels humanism. That in this term he means objectivity is the gist of his book. He condemns objectivity and reason for producing the modern state of mind, one that is faithless, frenetic, and permanently dis-eased. He accuses Munch in the same breath with Caravaggio, for producing modernity, and with it, the "wreck" of the culture. Munch IS modernity, as you, reader of this, are a modern--in your flabby body, your weak, whining mentality, your moody unwillingness to battle your adversaries while they dismantle your world, your expectation that others grant what you have not earned--but Caravaggio IS the culture. Newton is a giant. Copernicus was a window opened upon the stale, frightened world of men living in fear of demons and hell after death. Those times and these times are not the same.

Mr. Carroll not only lacks historical perspective, he triumphs in the ignorance: he does not comprehend nor desire to comprehend, repetitions. The Greeks awoke, spoke, imagined, LIVED. The Romans DIED. The Greeks and Romans together are a history: Greece was REASON, the Greeks invented reason, a weak, uncertain flame that died in the instant it burst forth, but it was reason. The Latins re-established faith, re-founded birth as a condition of right, returned the citizen to slavery, and set up Christ as a king to justify it. 1200 years later, Caravaggio, Newton, Shakespeare denied the legitimacy of this death.

Encore:

And today, we have Mr. Carroll, him that damns reason, in a world that damns reason. Once again, the citizen is being enslaved to the state; once again, the flame of reason is being doused: and there's Mr. Carroll, happily assisting you in this "untergang des abendlandes", the fall of reason into this dark, hopeless, ugly world where light no longer abides, and men are blind.

The blindness of man is of a willful nature: he will not see until he cannot see. Mr. Carroll shuts his eyes and will not open them. Welcome to Mr. Carroll's world. Mr. Carroll lives in Melbourne, in a country crawling with illegal aliens, where his language is under attack, and his culture is crumbling, and the future of his sons is shaken. Still he will not act. The world treats his daughter as a whore, and Mr. Carroll? He denies reason, he has no brain, therefore, to comprehend these things.

So, still, he has no need to act.

tlt-