Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2003/03/23/survival_of_culture_rejecting_the_spurious.php
Sunday, March 23, 2003
In September 2001, not long after America's new day of infamy, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi made a statement that suggested he was in need of sensitivity training. 'We must be aware of the superiority of our civilization, a system that has guaranteed well-being, respect for human rights, and—in contrast with Islamic countries—respect for religious and political rights,' he said. The backlash was swift and brutal, and poor Silvio was forced to recant. Mille scuse!
That anyone really believes the 'Islamic countries' might be characterized by respect for human, religious, or political rights is, few would deny, absurd. (A possible exception is the United Nations, whose rotation scheme led to the surreal circumstance of Libya's nomination to head the Human Rights Commission.) The evidence isn't there. But contempt for reality is just one of the troubling symptoms of the postmodern age. It has for its bedfellows moral relativism and anti-Westernism (what Mark Steyn calls 'the slyer virus'), both of which disparage or simply deny the West's exemplary legacy.
The eleven writers and thinkers responsible for The Survival of Culture: Permanent Values in a Virtual Age argue this case with uncommon clarity, grace, and good humor. Edited by Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball (editor-in-chief and managing editor, respectively, of The New Criterion), and including essays by thinkers such as David Pryce-Jones, Robert Bork, and Anthony Daniels, the compilation takes an exacting look at the forces now threatening Western culture.
What, then, is Western culture? The Survival of Culture is partial to the definition set forth by Matthew Arnold in his eighteenth-century tract Culture and Anarchy: culture is 'the best that has been thought and said in the world.' In Roger Kimball's essay 'The Fortunes of Permanence' he calls this a 'hierarchical idea of culture—a vision of culture as a 'sacred order' whose majesty depends on its relevance to our deepest cares and concerns.' It is, furthermore, 'armed with a sixth sense against the seductions of the spurious, the attractions of the ersatz.' To put it simply, culture is that which stands the test of time—not by accident, but because it is the best.
Some will find this definition hopelessly retardaire. It is no longer fashionable—or even acceptable—to suggest that one culture is superior to another; that such value judgments can be made about anything; or that there is such a thing as objective truth. But the relativism that lies behind these unwritten laws doesn't just shortchange the West. It undermines it. It eats away at its traditions of education, medicine, law, politics, and thought.
Among the greatest threats to Western culture are so-called intellectuals (Susan Sontag, or the deceased Michel Foucault, for instance) who regard their own work as a form of 'play,' and so stubbornly refuse the acid test of practical application. What is most remarkable about the essays in The Survival of Culture is that, quite to the contrary, they describe the battlefield of the 'culture wars' in refreshingly specific terms.
In his essay 'A Malign Legacy,' David Pryce-Jones, a senior editor of The National Review, offers a sobering look at the workings of the European Union. 'In Europe the Sixties generation is attempting to consummate a process begun half a century ago, namely the construction of a transnational and ultimately federal union,' he writes. But the structure of the EU does not, he contends, represent a 'link between its institutions and the freedom they are supposed to protect.' Its commissioners are chosen without the input of the public, and as they are not elected, 'they cannot be dismissed...Here is the only legislative body in the democratic world that meets and deliberates in secret.'
Forcefully calling the EU a totalitarian system, Pryce-Jones decries its use of 'bland words about humanrights,' which 'cloak a formidable machinery for future coercion and repression.' Pryce-Jones notes that in spite of the fact that many who criticize the EU are ignored or penalized, a majority opposition to the EU is growing steadily.
Brewing trouble is by no means limited to Europe. In his piece, 'Adversary Jurisprudence,' Robert Bork describes disturbing trends in constitutional law. He discusses the 'judicial activism' that has replaced honest and reasoned interpretation of the Constitution: 'If the text, history, and structure of the Constitution no longer guide and confine the judge, he has nowhere to look but to his own ideas of justice, and these are likely to be formed by the assumptions of the intellectualized elites...whose approval he very much wants.'
In convincing detail, which is clear even to those with little background in law, Bork describes how this condition has resulted in gross misapplications of the First Amendment, both in protecting (or even encouraging) obscenity and in abridging political speech. The message is clear: our own Constitution, the touchstone of democracy, is being ignored—in effect, making it a weapon against democracy, law, and morality. It's an awful prospect, and Bork offers little room for skepticism.
In 'The Felicific Calculus of Modern Medicine,' physician and author Anthony Daniels contends that illogic and immorality in the medical community are degrading that once-revered Hippocratic dictum, 'First do no harm.' The medical doctor is now at the mercy of a new breed of patient, who believes that the doctor's first responsibility is to pander to the patient's desire.
He writes, 'Willing as many patients still are to surrender their autonomy to doctors, many others—an increasing proportion—demand complete sovereignty over their own body. The doctor thus becomes a mere technician whose job is to satisfy the whims of his client.' He cites the case of a British doctor who amputated his patient's healthy leg because the latter argued he should not have been born with two.
As the patient's desire was a symptom of some mental disturbance, so was the doctor's willingness to oblige him a symptom of moral decay and irresponsibility. Daniels makes quite plain his contempt for this trend, but he also ends his essay on a hopeful note. He believes that the majority of doctors carry on the Hippocratic tradition; he has not yet lost faith in 'the Western medical tradition...incomparably greater in achievement than that of the rest of mankind put together and quintupled.'
Daniels's faith in Western medicine is a testament to his faith in civilization. And it reminds the reader, though he may be outraged or disheartened by much of what these essays bring to light, that the book's title alludes to the survival of culture—not, say, its decline and fall. Indeed, an attitude of optimism prevails in most of the essays. As Roger Kimball remarks, closing his contribution, 'The survival of culture is never a sure thing. No more is its defeat. Our acknowledgement of those twin facts, to the extent that we manage it, is one important sign of our strength.'