Full Description
"Cultural instructions." Everyone who has handled a package of seedlings has encountered that enigmatic advisory. This much water and that much sun, certain tips about fertilizer, soil, and drainage. Planting one sort of flower nearby keeps the bugs away but proximity to another sort makes bad things happen. Young shoots might need stakes, and watch out for beetles, weeds, and unseasonable frosts. It's a complicated business.
But at least since Cicero introduced the term cultura animi ("cultivation of the mind or spirit"), such "cultural instructions" have applied as much to the realm of civilization as to horticulture. In this wide-ranging investigation into the vicissitudes of culture in the twenty-first century, the distinguished critic Roger Kimball traces the deep filiations between cultivation as a spiritual enterprise and the prerequisites of political freedom. Drawing on figures as various as James Burnham, Richard Weaver, G. K. Chesterton, Rudyard Kipling, John Buchan, Friedrich von Hayek, and Leszek Kolakowski, Kimball traces the interconnections between what he calls the fortunes of permanence and such ambassadors of anarchy as relativism, multiculturalism, and the socialist-utopian imperative.
With his signature blend of wit and erudition, Kimball deftly draws on the resources of art, literature, and political philosophy to illuminate some of the wrong turns and dead ends our culture has recently pursued, while also outlining some of the simple if overlooked alternatives to the various tyrannies masquerading as liberation we have again and again fallen prey to. This rich, rewarding, and intelligent volume bristles with insights into what the nineteenth-century novelist Anthony Trollope called "The Way We Live Now."
Partly an exercise in cultural pathology, The Fortunes of Permanence is also a forward-looking effort of cultural recuperation. It promises to be essential reading for anyone concerned about the direction of Western culture in an age of anti-Western animus and destructive multicultural fantasy.
Contents
ContentsAcknowledgmentsixPreface: Mostly About Relativism1Part OneThe Fortunes of Permanence17Institutionalizing Our Demise:America vs. Multiculturalism46Pericles and the Foreseeable Future:9 / 11 a Decade Later73Part TwoRereading John Buchan95A Dangerous Book for Boys120Rudyard Kipling Unburdened128G. K. Chesterton: Master of Rejuvenation140Does Shame Have a Future?158viiiThe Consequences of Richard Weaver171"Art in Crisis"185Why the Art World Is a Disaster198Architecture& Ideology 207Part ThreeFriends of Humanity231The Death of Socialism245The Power of James Burnham256What's Wrong with Benevolence276Malcolm Muggeridge's Journey284Leszek Kolakowski&the Anatomy of Totalitarianism298Hayek& the Intellectuals 316Coda: The Anglosphere& the Future of Liberty 330Index339The
