You Don’t Know What You’ve Got Till It’s Gone

Ross Douthat published a wistful column at the New York Times the other day, lamenting the death in academia of the Western canon of literature. At the heart of the problem — and the problem itself is, as Chiang Kai-shek once said in an analogous context, a “disease of the heart” — is the death of our civilization’s belief in objective truth and beauty, in God, and ultimately in its own value.

We read:

[I]f there’s any lesson that the decline of Christianity holds for the painful death of the English department, it’s that if you aspire to keep your faith alive even in a reduced, non-hegemonic form, you need more than attenuated belief and socially-useful applications.

A thousand different forces are killing student interest in the humanities and cultural interest in high culture, and both preservation and recovery depend on more than just a belief in truth and beauty, a belief that “the best that has been thought and said” is not an empty phrase. But they depend at least on that belief, at least on the ideas that certain books and arts and forms are superior, transcendent, at least on the belief that students should learn to value these texts and forms before attempting their critical dissection.

This is the late, perhaps terminal, stage in the progression of the European Enlightenment. The radical skepticism introduced in that era has revealed itself to a universal acid that dissolves, sooner or later, anything that tries to contain it. Into that vessel first went Christian faith — but faith was followed in due course by truth, beauty, and at last the idea of any worthwhile distinctions and discriminations at all, or belief in an objectively existing reality.

It is the triumph of entropy: of rust, of decomposition, of the tireless disintegration that reduces mountains to rubble and great civilizations to roofless churches and forgotten graves. The West has built its great tower of modernity with the stones it has pulled from its foundations.

One Comment

  1. JMSmith says

    Our society is shot through with an incredible amount of intelligence, but a great deal of it seems to work in service of things that are low and stupid. Think of someone snap-chatting selfies using a smartphone and the internet. The end of their act is low and stupid but the means are awe-inspiring. I think Thoreau called this “improved means to unimproved ends,” but must say that I think he was probably too generous about the ends. How about “improved means” to degraded ends”?

    I’m not exempting myself here. Countless engineers have strained every fiber of their being to construct a world in which I can do low and stupid things almost effortlessly (but not, of course, without complaint).

    Plato said that the lower should serve the higher, but our thinkers take the opposite view. The bruits were not placed on earth to serve men; men were placed on earth to serve the bruits. Lowly men do not owe honor and service to noble men; noble men owe honor and service to lowly men. A good deal of modern Christianity seems to be saying that God worships us.

    Posted January 17, 2020 at 6:49 am | Permalink

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