The Culture We Deserve : A Critique of Disenlightenment by Jacques Barzun

The Culture We Deserve : A Critique of Disenlightenment Reviews

• 
  Greg

  I had no intention for things to work out like this, but The Culture We Deserve happens to be a perfect antidote to Conspicuous Consumption. It's happened time and again that I'll be reading a book that has an interesting theme, and then the next book I'm reading will be dealing with a similar theme, but it won't be anything that I had intentionally picked either book for. If I had a time machine, I might use it to tell my younger self to document every time this happens. My younger self might fear for his future sanity though, and I'd probably still not have the documentation I'd like about this phenomena, but rather one more issue I could talk to my therapist about.
  Barzun believes that there are some problems in our society, and that there is a level of degeneracy going on all around us. In these short essays he points the finger quite a bit, and lets it be known that he isn't going to blame any of the usual culprits, but rather we've gotten what we deserved from our lax attitudes. I should mention that he's dealing with the very very important questions, like the state of art and literature , relativism, the humanities and stuff like that, which generally only a small portion of the world outside of academia give a shit about. Instead of railing against the corporations and (post)(late)-capitalism, and blaming the spectacle, or TV and say Michael Jackson (these essays are from the 80's, thus the MJ reference here), he squarely points the finger back on the edifice known as Academia. An Academia that has dumbed itself down through specialization, jargon ridden books and articles, that has nurtured students to think they all have a right to be talented artists (or writers, or actors or whatever), and who let students develop as they see fit with a hands off approach that has left the country with a bunch of whiny half-literate assholes crying that life isn't fair because they have to work and not just be an artist (ok, I went a little overboard here but this is covered in places in the book).
  His critique is coming from the same general vicinity as Adorno. But where Adorno would be lobbing critical hand grenades at anything in his path, Barzun takes a calmer and less radical approach. Both have an obvious dislike for the way the world is degenerating and both see something of the old cannon as the better way, but Barzun isn't writing with a particular political bent, and sadly most of the time he is much more polite about things he hates than Teddy is.
  An interesting book that my review does no justice to.
  
• 
  M. D. Hudson

  
  Jacques Barzun – The Culture We Deserve. I love Jacques Barzun. He’s 101 years old (I do not exaggerate – maybe he’s 102 by now) and just about the smartest, most humane person in the whole world. He’s written a slew of books over the years, From Dawn to Decadence being his master work (I read about 2/3rds of it, and got a bit bogged down—my own stupid fault entirely). The Culture We Deserve is a collection of essays from the ‘80s mostly, dealing with culture, of course. His prose is lucid, and intelligent and makes me happy. The following quote is from an essay he wrote about the awful state of scholarship in the humanities:
  
  How, then, can culture recover spontaneity, free itself from scholarship? The answer is simple but not agreeable to face. At some point the overexpansion of the present scheme will bring it to collapse from its own weight. It will begin to look as futile as it really is. The Alexandrian textualists came to grief; the scholastics of the Middle Ages faded away. Similarly, the forces of fatigue and boredom will do their work to bring on stagnation and decadence, as happened to the Great English universities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The idea of a university or of scholarship will not die; it will hibernate, and on reawaking will suggest to its renovators the plain duties they should take on. (from “Culture High and Dry” reprinted in The Culture We Deserve, p. 19)
  
• 
  Aaron

  Barzun begins to shape and describe his concept of the western world's decadence in these essays. He would go on to explore these concepts in "From Dawn to Decadence," but the reading of this book enlarges the insights available in that work (I can't wait to re-read it).
• 
  GigglingPanda

  Although written mostly in the 80s, all the topics of the twelve essays are still very relevant today and the opinions and observations are very much fresh and enlightening. Barzun's prose is elegant and sharp. His vast knowledge of historical experience and masterful recapitulation gives him an magisterial manner, but without any sense of condescension.
• 
  Jon-Carlo

  Kind of dragged toward the end but he made points
• 
  Rachel

  This is a collection of essays on the topic of culture. I read it while waiting for my students to complete their essay exams. The book was prelude to reading the student essays, and like a collection of student essays, some were more cogent than others. Among the gems was noting that the word "amateur" means "lover" and "dilettante" means "seeker of delight"--why have these become terms of derision? Barzun argues that culture must free itself from scholarship. On the surface, this assertion seems to harmful to the advancement of culture; however, Barzun is prophetic (published in 1987) of the jargon-laden 90s when literary criticism became more and more indecipherable to amateur and dilettante readers of literature. It is also important to remember to "experience" literature instead of simply analyze it. When scholars read tragedies: does it "purge and delight"? My response: Genuine scholarship should enhance, not diminish or disable our ability to experience literature. It is important, especially when teaching literature to make sure we, and our students, are experiencing literature instead of "waiting to talk".
  
  Other noteworthy essays address the charge of "relativism" in culture studies. Absolutists, Barzun notes, simply fail to recognize that everything is relative to something else, nor do they recognize their own shifting "eternal laws"--for example, in an oblique reference to religious fundamentalism (a particularly hurtful and aggressive type of absolutism), the sin of usury disappeared in the wake of unprecedented wealth that capitalism provided religious institutions.
  
  Finally, Barzun's defense of the humanities as necessary because "society needs mind and not merely tools" is still worth repeating to those who assail the liberal arts as being unnecessary part of higher education. The goal of humanities is modest: it should help you know a good person when you meet one. Modest, but a true.
  
  "Departments of English and philosophy and history are full of very learned and very able people, of whom only a minority would be capable of teaching the humanities as humanities."
• 
  Ari

  A collection of essays, loosely linked. Lacks the depth and novelty of Barzun at his best, but the prose is sparkling as always and some of the ideas are both striking and original.
  
  The essay I liked most was "License to Corrupt"; certainly the best and possibly the only thoroughgoing defense I have ever seen of grammatical prescriptivism. Barzun notes that a language is a large collaborative work of artistry, but one that has the practical function of enabling efficient communication with a large and indefinite audience, including with people long-since dead or who may not be born for centuries. Teaching care and precision in language -- keeping people aware of grammatical nuance and precise shades of meaning -- achieves that goal.
  
  The essay "The Fallacy of the Single Cause" also caught my attention. Barzun notes that a good history needs a cohesive subject, but that [academic] historians all too often ignore this. "Topics that lack a spatial and chronological unity such as "the history of the Irish in America" or "the history of Asia" do not yield books of history. The former subject has no continuity, the latter has no unity. On the same principle, there can be a history of feminism but not 'a history of women'....A History of the Idea of Progress is possible and has in fact been written, whereas a History of Human Stupidity cannot be, plentiful as the source material obviously is."
• 
  Tim

  Likable in is crankiness and disagreeableness. I appreciate Barzun's essays defending the humanities and the liberal arts against the advances of scientific analysis (including in literature) and specialization. Summarizing Woodrow Wilson he notes the intellectual and economic dangers of professional training without more wholistic education. It is "an intellectual danger, because the merely trained individual is a tool and not a mind; an economic danger, because society needs minds and not merely tools." He argues for new models of the university, the study of the humanities, and the arts. To the negative, he is passively dismissive of religion and more actively dismissive of social history, instead holding up a kind of 1950s political history, tied to dates and narrative, as ideal. So the essays are generally good, if uneven, but in each certain sentences do sing/crank, making all of them worthwhile.
• 
  Janice

  Once again Barzun does not disappoint. This centenarian has keen insight into our culture and shares it in 12 essays that deal with history, fine art, humanities and so much more. If you loved Dawn of Decadence you will love this book too.
• 
  Douglas Wilson

  Great.
• 
  Sam Berner

  A great judgement by a great, cultured man. We are dumb and dumb is where we are going.