The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of
Amnesia
By Roger Kimball
(St. Augustine’s Press, 347 pages, $35)
WILLIAM GIRALDI’S recent thrashing of Alix Ohlin’s first two
novels in the New York Times caused more than a small stir
in the American literati. Among other things, Giraldi panned
Ohlin’s weak plots and “appalling lack of register.” “Mitch’s heart
sang,” Giraldi writes, quoting a few choice phrases from
Inside, and then Mitch’s “heart sank”; poor Mitch “felt
his heart cracking like ice cubes in warm water.” Annie “had
touched Grace’s heart” but had also “gotten under her skin.” Grace
feels “marooned on her own private island” and then “her nerves
were singing.” In just 13 pages you will be asked to endure eyes
“fluttering,” then “shining,” then “fluttering” again. Mitch’s
girlfriend is “brilliantly smart”—imagine for a second the special
brand of languor required to connect those two terms—and also blows
her nose “goose-honkingly hard.”
“Every mind,” Giraldi concludes, “lives or dies by its ideas;
every book lives or dies by its language.”
While some critics were supportive of Giraldi’s review, he was
mostly chastised, not for being wrong, mind you, but for being
“mean.” Not too long ago, it was considered not just the critic’s
prerogative but his duty to criticize poor writing. Truth and
beauty were the standards by which good writing was to be judged,
even if critics and writers disagreed about what truth was and what
counted as beautiful.
As D.G. Myers has pointed out, such a view has gone the way of
so many other ideas, displaced by “a heartfelt relativism which
holds that every judgment is a personal preference anyway.”
“Literature,” he writes, “needs fewer nice people and more
loyalists.”
One of those “loyalists,” not only of literature but of music
and art, is Roger Kimball, and his new book, The Fortunes of
Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia, contains
all the wit and intellect readers of the New Criterion have come to
expect.
Like Myers, Kimball sees relativism as the culprit in the West’s
cultural decline. The idea that “all cultures are equally valuable
and, therefore, that preferring one culture, intellectual heritage,
or moral and social order to another is to be guilty of
ethnocentrism” is the mantra of our time. It’s an idea that has
spoiled rather than refi ned “our powers of discrimination,” and
one that in practice is rather unegalitarian: “for,” Kimball
writes, “you soon realize that the doctrine of cultural relativism
is always a weighted relativism: Preferring Western culture or
intellectual heritage is culpable in a way that preferring other
traditions is not.”
The corrective, in part, is to put paid to bad ideas and bad
art, and Kimball often does exactly that. In “Art in Crisis” and
“Why the Art World Is a Disaster,” for example, he skewers the
replacement of craft with ideology that has led to the posturing of
today’s art world. On a supposedly “subversive” art show at Bard
College, Kimball writes: “The ‘arts’ at Bard are notable not
because they are unusual but because they are so grindingly
ordinary.” And on the idea of “fun” in architecture, he writes:
“Fun is nice. I like fun. But fun remains most fun when it keeps to
its appropriate place. The ambition to transform all of life into a
playground is a prescription for the ruin of fun.
KIMBALL IS THE MASTER of the paragraph. He rarely lands a
rhetorical knock-out, but the combined effect of his sentences can
do a lot of damage. Consider this from a review of Martha
Nussbaum’s book on disgust:
So maybe many of the things that the inherited moral wisdom of
millennia have taught us to fi nd disgusting—and to which society
has responded with various legal prohibitions—need to be
reevaluated? What do you think? Take necrophilia. Professor
Nussbaum fi nds this a thorny problem. Who, after all, is harmed in
the transaction? Professor Nussbaum wonders “whether necrophilia
ought, in fact, to be illegal.” She acknowledges that there is
“something unpleasant” about a person who rapes a corpse, but it is
“unclear” to her whether such conduct Should be “criminal.”
Possibly, since a corpse is generally the property of its family,
there should be “some criminal penalties” where “property
violations” are involved, but otherwise not.Think about that for a
moment…
Or there is this on the status of benevolence in the modern
world:
The intoxicating effects of benevolence help to explain the
growing appeal of politically correct attitudes about everything
from “the environment” to the fate of the Third World. Why does the
consistent failure of statist policies not disabuse their advocates
of the statist agenda? One reason is that statist policies have the
sanction of benevolence. They are “against poverty,” “against war,”
“against oppression,” “for the environment.” And why shouldn’t they
be? Where else are the pleasures of smug self-righteousness to be
had at so little cost?
Kimball never insults our intelligence. The coy rhetorical
question here, the ellipses there, invite us to share in his
good-natured amusement at our culture’s unfortunately frequent
absurdities.
Yet, as Kimball knows, this can sometimes be an easy game to
play. More difficult is to point to alternatives to a feel-good but
stupefying egalitarianism. This, to my mind, is what sets Kimball
apart. In The Fortunes of Permanence, we have wonderful
essays on James Burnham, Richard Weaver, Malcolm Muggeridge, and a
partial defense of Rudyard Kipling. Whether or not you agree with
Kimball’s take on these figures, you always learn something new
that is worth pondering.
As the selection above indicates, these essays are as much
political as they are cultural. Right or wrong, an occasional
charge against the New Criterion under Kimball’s
leadership is that it has become too political. For Kimball,
however, one cannot easily disentangle “the realms of culture.”
“Ultimately,” he writes, “they exist symbiotically, nurturing,
supplementing, contending with each other.”
Yet, while they are connected, politics and art do exist
separately. Conservatives are skilled at engaging the former, but
have unfortunately shown too little interest in the latter.
Kimball’s Fortunes of Permanence is a timely reminder that
the arts do matter, and that any attempt to regain the best of the
Western tradition politically that ignores the arts is only half a
victory.
