Motus Mentis

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.