Author: Tony Dalmyn

An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture (ISBN 1-890318-47-7) makes an argument for high culture and aesthetics as a civilizing force. The author, Roger Scruton, is a philosopher, a conservative writer, and a critic of postmodern ideas in philosophy, the humanities and the social sciences. His stated purpose, in the preface to the American edition was to explain what culture is and why it matters. That overstates his point, which is that the critical appreciation of the humanities is being displaced by a less critical, postmodern cultural studies of popular culture. The displacement has occurred in colleges and Universities, and in the arts and entertainment industries. It is manifested by the destruction of critical standards, the chaos of postmodern art and literature, and the fragmentation of culture. The core of the argument is that literature and the arts, like religion, express social emotions and play a vital part in maintaining an ethical culture.

Continue reading “Cultivating Culture”

Chrisopher Lasch said, in the acknowedgements in his book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1995, ISBN 0-393-03699-5) that it was written under trying circumstances. He had cancer and died before it was published. It was based on essays published in several intellectual magazines and journals. In The Gift of Christopher Lasch, James Seaton, writing in First Things, a conservative, religious, intellectual magazine, saw his work turning from fashionable radicalism to “the moral and spiritual depth that becomes possible when an intellectual disdains the consolations offered by the intellectuals’ view of themselves as morally and mentally superior to the rest of humanity.” The conservative critic Roger Kimball was less gracious, even condescending in “Christopher Lasch vs. the elites”, (1995, Vol. 13, New Criterion, p. 9). (Lasch praised Kimball’s book Tenured Radicals in one of his essays, and said little that Kimball would disagree with, except on capitalism and high culture).

Continue reading “Elites”

In the The Minimal Self, Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (1984, ISBN 0-393-01922-5), Christopher Lasch supplemented The Culture of Narcissism, and refined his analysis of cultural narcissism. The earlier book covered economic, political, educational, and social structures, and the psychological experience of living in a consumerist world of superficial exchanges. In that situation people don’t know how to value anything and cannot identify values worth having. The Minimal Self deals more with cultural and psychological issues, with some attention to the political and social movements that came out of the Counterculture of the 1960’s. (He addressed a few points about the Counterculture, the New Left and the New Age in the Afterword of the 1991 Norton paperback edition of The Culture of Narcissism). His method, again, is a review of the social and psychological effects of living in a late capitalist, postmodern society.

Continue reading “Staying alive”

Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations was a best-seller when it was first published in 1979, and it stands as one of the most distinctive works of social criticism and commentary of the last three decades. Lasch used the term narcissism, a psychological term based on a myth, “as a metaphor for the human condition”. Analyzing culture through a psychological, diagnostic metaphor is an experimental venture. Many writers fail. The bookstores and libraries are filled with half-baked social theories dressed up in medical jargon. And, of course, narcissism has become one of the catchphrases of popular psychology, with literally hundreds of self-help books mentioning narcissism in some way. Lasch’s ideas stand out from a mass of inferior material.

Continue reading “Culture of Narcissism”

Theodore Dalrymple has published a few couple interesting essays in City Journal over the last interval.
For soccer fans, especially Manchester United fans, Strange Hero-Worship, a slap at the mass grief over the death of soccer genius, playboy (alcoholic, promiscuous, and violent) and celebrity, George Best. This one goes into the strange mass grief demonstrated at the death of celebrities and the obtuse complicity of the media in the routines and rituals of celebrity worship.
For the theatre crowd, Truth vs. Theory, which looks at the long-running question of whether William Shakespeare of Stratford wrote all the plays credited to him, and uses that question to expose something about the cult of professionalism and technocracy. Almost every writer who believes that some of Shakespeare’s plays were written by Bacon or Marlowe find it impossible to believe that a man with an Elizabethan grammar school education was knowledgeable about so many things, frequently skeptical of learned opinion, and was able to speak wisely about the human condition. He points out that Shakespeare was aware of Galen’s theory of the humours, and apparently dismissed it although it was accepted by ancient, medieaval and Renaissance physicians. That brings him to Orwell and to Eliot at the end – read it.
I am starting to appreciate Dalrymple. (I have mentioned him in two early entries – search his name to follow up). Some writers say he is a hard-headed conservative who sees the decline of culture. Others say that he is a cranky conservative, pining for the mythic pastoral England, like Eliot, Tolkien, Lewis. Others say he is more like Orwell, a radical, cynical critic of the way modern capitalism traps people in an economy that turns us into robots, and a culture that entices us to value ourselves as hedonist consumers and unheralded celebrities. (This isn’t exactly what Geoffrey Wheatcroft wrote in a book review in the New Statesman, but his reading of Dalrymple goes in that direction).