This is an essay from The Culture We Deserve by Jacques Barzun.#

As is apparent from the title, this essay discusses where Western Civilization and how bad the Decadence really is.#

Sooner or later, the sophisticated person who reads or hears that Western civilization is in decline reminds himself that to the living "the times" always seem bad. In most eras voices cry out against the visible decadence; for every generation-and especially for the aging-the world is going to the dogs. In 1493-note the date-a learned German named Schedel compiled and published with comments the Nuremberg Chronicle. It announced that the sixth of the seven ages was drawing to a close and it supplied several blank pages at the end of the book to record anything of importance that might occur in what was left of history. What was left, hiding around the corner, was the opening up of the New World and a few side effects of that inconsequential event. A glance at history, by showing that life continues and new energies may arise, is bound to inspire skepticism about the recurrent belief in decline. [pg. 161]

What is the Decadence of the Modern Era? Why is there so much disbelief in old institution and ideas?#

How deep goes the disbelief? For history shows both big and little decadences. Decadence means "falling off," and it is possible for a civilization to experience a lesser fall from trust in its own ways without wrecking the entire fabric. The passage from what we call the High Middle Ages to the Renaissance and Reformation was one such falling away and new beginning. The time just before the French Revolution was another. At these moments-roughly the end of the fourteenth century and the end of the eighteenth century-Europe saw old institutions crumble, long-accepted thoughts dissolve, feelings fade away, and new ones take their place. [pg. 163]

The idea of decline should not be assumed to mean revolution, devastation, a complete destruction of civilization, or a loss. It is simply a change caused by failings in the old regime. It is not necessarily sudden, it can just be a "falling off."

Jacques tours through things that are seeing their support fade, starting with Governments as personified by their enforcers and enforcements: police and prisons.#

The police are often considered a corrupt, ineffectual part of the body politic, just as that body itself is felt to be a domination by evil forces over simple human nature. These changes mark the end of the liberal ideal, which saw in universal suffrage the key to self-government and in the rule of law the promise of a good society. So far has this ideal sunk that the rightness of any minority has become an axiom, and more and more people feel themselves to be not sovereign, but shamefully oppressed-a desperate minority.

In the place of the former attitude toward the state stands what might be called for short the Marxist analysis. It does not stem from Marxist propaganda alone; but its spirit is that which informs the literature of Marx and his disciples, the spirit of exposure and revelation, the animus of a war against appearances, the search for a reality made up of conspiracies and their victims.

It is a democratic spirit insofar as the passion for equality naturally stimulates envy and suspicion; but it is alos a racist spirit in that it attriubtes virtues and violated rights to one group, wickedness and wrongful supremacy to another. In this sense, visibly, women are a race oppressed by the race of men; the old, the white, and the "bourgeois" are races unjustly dominant over the race of the young, the colored, the poor, and so on down a long list. [pg. 165]

Jacques notes that a sign of the distrust of government is the completely indistinguishable forms of governance that are put to practice in this past century.#

No new ones, no practical or utopian schemes of society, have emerged in the present century. This lack may have a bearing on the prospects of Western civilization. Besides being unoriginal, the ideals and doctrines now at war are also undisputed in the sense that they continue to exist without support from deep philosophical conviction. Just as all regimes are "for the people," so groups and classes are "for equality and justice" and "against poverty and discrimination." Imperialism (colonialism) has no proponents left; racism as an official policy is restricted to the southern tip of Africa; and capitalism has been so modified that it is at many points indistinguishable from communism, itself also hybridized. Nobody supports the view that the poor are necessary to society or that "inferiors" exist or have a role to play in some hierarchical order. Egalitarianism is affirmed as universally as pauperism is condemned. [pg. 169]

Jacques points out that those being blamed for the "evils of the age" are the victims of the paradox of Egalitarianism.#

This verdict which condemns the middle class as responsible for the evils of the age is not being uttered today for the first time. Nor was it first pronounced by the Marxians or their predecessors and successors in socialism. It is not a purely economic indictment in any case. When the anti-bourgeois commonplaces, now nearly two hundred years old, are repeated today, they imply something other than a call to rescue the proletariat from the oppression of the powerful. They imply guilt for failing to create a better world, the great, rational society. After all, the conception of the general welfare springs from liberal thought itself as it turned away from laissez faire in the nineties and followed the lead of Bismarck and the socialists toward a state affording complete social security. And liberal-socialist thought is a bourgeois invention. Similarly, the "rights of the people" are not in opposition to the "materialism" imputed to the bourgeois as a sin, for surely these "rights" include the people's material prosperity. [pg. 173-174]

Jacques writes that the defining characteristic that our current state of culture has is it's supreme self-consciousness.#

The civilized frame of mind is always self-conscious, but perhaps none before ours has attained such an extreme of self-consciousness. We owe this sensitivity to our long historical memory, even if buried; to the breadth of our information, which gives us no respite to enjoy the present, for it continually turns into something else; to the peculiarity of our literature and our psychology, alike introspective and ruthless in imputing bad motives, suspicious of the leas self-satisfaction; to the bleakness of our science, which shows a purposeless universe of not even harmonious design; and finally to the fears that our great cleverness has raised up-fear of atomic destruction, fear of overpopulation, fear of our massed enemies and, in daily life, fear of all the diseases, mishaps, and dangers that technology creates and incessantly warns about. [pg. 178]

In the closing of this essay, Jacques looks at another diagnostic of our culture: control.#

The next diagnostic point is the question of morals and religion. Morality, like religion, has the double aspect of satisfying an emotional need and serving a social purpose. Without morality-some inner restraint-society must assign two policemen to watch ever citizen day and night. And without a religion which organizes the facts of life and the cosmos, men seek in vain for the meaning of their existence. Not all can find in art or science a substitute justification; and pure, unreflecting ambition or calculated hedonism is rare and demands special gifts. [...]

On second thoughts, art and science seem to offer better grounds for complacency. In our time, both have gained enormously in prestige and support; their practitioners are the only admired leaders. Ostensibly, the, art and science are flourishing, which argues a "healthy society." The metaphor of health is misleading-a health malignancy kills the patient. The arts are not malignant, but they are either hostile or ambiguous. They mean to awaken the complacent and they succeed. [...]

Science too has little to say comprehensively. It is none too well integrated within itself. The proliferating specialties, each with its private language and its stream of discoveries, do not cohere and settle large subjects; it has become a matter of pride that science is never done. If that is so, science is not what is founders expected and promised: a solid edifice of knowledge soon to be completed. Rather it is for a few an absorbing activity whose results can never give its patron civilization a cosmos fit for contemplation [pg. 180-181]

This is an essay from The Culture We Deserve by Jacques Barzun.#

This essay talks mostly about the failure and ridiculous nature of "linguistics" and of the fallacy that everything can (and should) be "scientific," whatever that means.#

The source of the "Scientific Obsession"...#

In naming their work science, the linguists of that time or philologists, as they were called, meant that is was systematic and not fanciful. In every European tongue except English, the phrase "scientific work" still means just that. After all, the root meaning of science is simply knowledge. But by 1865, when Max Muller, the transplanted German lecturing at Oxford, offered a course on the "science of language," something had happened to the key word. Thanks to agitation about Darwinism, science and scientists had become objects of worship; the older terms naturalist, natural philosopher, went out of use, and the conviction spread that nothing was true or sure except the findings of physical science. The adjective scientific became a judgment of value and a source of pride. [pgs. 144-145]

Jacques refutes Professor Allen Walker Read's claim that "No native speaker can make a mistake" and that language is founded upon science-everything having a completely rational, consistent explanation.#

Language, like history, like the human mind, belongs not to science but to the realm of finesse. New words do not appear when needed; centuries pass without their creation. Existing words do drop out when still needed and clearly used. The success of new coinages depends on vogue, which is largely accidental, like the success of a play or a book. As with books, a popular novelty suddenly dies, with or without competition, with or without replacement.

It is this strictly human waywardness, in speaking as in writing, that makes it foolish to look upon language as a self-justifying oracle. Professor Read's maxim is refuted by the evidence of common practice. Native speakers do not believe him, for they frequently correct themselves and sometimes each other. Then, too, babies are native speakers and the plentiful mistakes they make are steadily corrected by their parents, by themselves, and by the rest of the community, until all parties decide that the infant (which means "nonspeaker") has at last learned to speak right. [pg. 149]

A complaint that Jacques has with linguistics, and indeed many forms of science, is that the teachings "leave out one essential: pedagogy, the art of teaching."#

Up-to-date-ness has tended to blot out the fact that beginners must begin at the beginning with what is simple; subjects must be artificially simplified-if need be, falsified. The refinements, the exceptions to rules, the depths discoverable by advanced analysis must come after a basis has been solidly laid. Anything else is like wanting to carve the ornament before the pillar is built-pre-posterism. [pg. 153]

So language is not science and is more like art.#

To put the case another way, unless language is regarded as a work of art and treated as we treat efforts to paint and compose music, there is no tenable reason for setting themes and demanding precise diction, correct idiom, economical syntax, varied rhythm, suitable tone, adroit linkage and transitions-in short, no reason for good writing. Some may object that it is hard enough to get plain, decent prose from average students without asking for "art." The rejoinder is that plain and decent, simple and direct are already "are"-and difficult. Since we teach Art in the usual sense-drawing and music-why should we cast the art of language and unequal role? [pgs. 156-157]

This is an essay from The Culture We Deserve, by Jacques Barzun.#

In this essay Jacques criticizes the notion that history can be explained by referencing a few "Single Causes" that enabled certain events to take place. This relates to what he wrote in another essay that human life is a net, where every string pulls every other. There is no epicenter for change, the whole system must be in the right state.#

Jacques continues another one of the themes of his writing, that life, and thus art, and thus history, are not scientific and cannot be explained completely in a scientific manner.#

The assumption of a sole cause, let me repeat, is a scientific idea-in particular, a principle of physics-which in the nineteenth century became an obsession in other fields than science. That is why Karl Marx, along with many other social theorists, looked for such a cause and all believed they had found it; that is why Darwin was celebrated as the discoverer of the single cause of evolution-and is still thought to have done so, although he himself acknowledge several causes. Darwin, it may be added, is one of the classic discoverers that Webb [a historian who Jacques admires for his form of history orthogonal to Jacques'] said he would wish to be ranked with.

The appeal of the single cause is linked with the conception of history as a vast process which overwhelms any individual will. The triumph of democracy in the last third of the nineteenth century certainly contributed to making that view prevail. It seemed self-evident when large anonymous masses migrated from Europe to American and within America to the West; it seemed confirmed when those same masses, by agitating and voting along geographical, regional, social, or economic lines, moved the nation in one direction or another. At such a spectacle historians gave up the earlier conception known as the Great Man theory of history, the idea which Emerson, for example, discussed in his esay on self-reliance and summed up in the dictum that "all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons." [pg. 132]

The biggest problem with single causes, Jacques says, is that they take the power of cultural changes out of the hands of the men and women who exist in it.#

Narrative history presupposes men and women whose motives lead to action ad result in event. But we no longer believe in the importance, even in the reality, of active men and women; we think they are moved by other forces, of which they are not conscious-by economic, dialectic, material determinism; by a thing called "their society"; by the unconscious, individual or collective; or, as Webb decided, by the environment. These accounts put the motive power behind history and unmistakably point to the single cause. For no matter how much the narrator hedges by admitting lesser or secondary causes, the one he calls principal or fundamental is the one that drives the human crowd and commands the march of events.

The scheme looks so plausible: in an age of politcal democracy and mass culture, of world trade and interlocking industries, how can one believe in the Great Man and his directing will? The answer is, no need to believe in him, even though one has actually seen a few rather recently: Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Gandhi, Churchill, De Gaulle (great does not mean good). But leave them aside and forget the label "great." The question is not that of supreme power, and not even of power, but of action. [pgs. 135-136]

The belief and desire for a single cause arises from a confusion of purpose on the shoulders of historians. Their quest is not for meanings and answers, it is for ideas that will help understand.#

For a philosophy, a meaning, is by definition a principle that does not accommodate exceptions. It is like a stencil laid over the map of events: only what shows through the holes can have significance, and unfortunately it is inevitable that what the stencil shuts out is often more important than what the philosopher needs in order to establish his principle or meaning. Does this imply that history is meaningless? If so, what about the "original idea" that helps to organize confusion? Well, an idea is not the same as the meaning. The organizing idea may serve well for a modest portion of the past, modest in geographical range or in timespan. There is then no need to suppress or belittle great chunks of reality. And the bearing of an idea need not be exclusive; it may be offered as highly suggestive, a pragmatic explanation in the technical sense of pragmatic. It is a view, a convenient pattern, a tenable interpretation, not a system or a stencil. [pgs. 138-139]

What then, is a great history to Jacques? One that is "thick with the deeds and aims of many individuals" and that does not attempt the impossible and try to tell the story of every person ever of a certain class. There must be Great Men.#

To sump up, the value of history does not consist in explaining by formula, in "revealing" some potent principle that governs one or twenty-one civilizations. The value lies in the spectacle itself. [...] [T]opics 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." When the late Philippe Aries wrote Centuries of Childhood, he supplied interesting vignettes of changing attitudes toward children, but he did not perform the impossible task of writing a "history of children," any more than he could have written a history of redheaded people. [...] 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. [pgs. 140-141]

Why would you not want to study and write history after this:#

[Knowing] history endows everything we see and touch with additional meanings-not a single overarching one, but a multitude of associations as real as the object or the scene itself. Life is made thicker, richer, of weightier import because other beings than ourselves-yet kindred-have passed where we walk. [pg. 142]

This is an essay from The Culture We Deserve, by Jacques Barzun.#

In this essay, Jacques tackles the assumption that there can never be too much Art, and that there was once a Golden Age of Art Financing.#

This year, in any year, the budgets of the federal and state agencies that support the arts are to be cut again. Meanwhile, costs in the arts are going up-rent, utilities, printing, and various incidental expenses. Yet one continues to read and hear of one more dance group being formed, yet another chamber orchestra making its debut, newborn theatre companies striving to lure audiences, festivals and exhibits being organized. Each new enterprise is self-assured of prestige, confident of deserving support, and hungry for subsidy from public and private funds.

This disparity between shrinking means and growing supply points to attitudes and assumptions about art that have not been examined for a long time. The most common assumption is that there cannot be too much art, and hence that the public has an obligation to support whatever qualifies under that name. If private funds fall short, let public money make up the difference. But since public money is not an elastic substance, some rethinking is in order, aimed at developing new standards of judgment and response. [pg. 120]

It is important to note that Jacques writes "has not been examined in a long time," not "has never been examined."#

Already in 1840, Balzac noted with dismay that there were two thousand painters in Paris. Degas, fifty years later, said: "we must discourage the arts." But the ever enlarging display of art cannot, of course, be cut or held back. We can pay farmers not to grow crops, but we cannot pay artists to stop making art. Yet something must be done. To lead people on when there is no chance they will ever fulfill their desire is immoral. And our training schools, art councils, endowments, and foundations are doing just that. They flatter the hope and belief that every good work and worker will be recognized and subsidized. When no such thing happens, anger and distress naturally follow.

Nor does the artist's anger refer solely to money. Government grants are awarded by persons (often themselves artists) who assume the role of bureaucrat. Their role cuts them off from the community of applicants. Subsidy, even by a private foundation, is an official act, and on this subject the French experience of three hundred years is conclusive. In France, the academic imitators got the commissions and subsidies; those who produced the works we admire today had to survive as best they could. The term official art means art that is competent and safe. As John Sloan said in urging government support: "Then we'll know who our enemy is." [pgs. 124-125]

The final pages of this essay are elegant in their expression of Jacques' opinion.#

These suggestions and possibilities have nothing to do with trying to reduce the role of government in society. Nor do they relate to money alone, or artistic ambition alone. When I urge this new soberness, I am thinking of high culture as whole and our relation to it. In the competition for cash, punctuated by elegant ballyhoo, in the overabundance of the offering and the fuss about it in print and on the airwaves, something has happened to the artistic experience itself. Its quality has been lowered by plethora. Great works too often seen or performed, too readily available in bits and pieces, become articles of consumption instead of objects of contemplation. They lose force and depth by being too familiar through too frequent or too hurried use. When I hear of someone's proudly "spending the day at the museum," I wonder at the effect: the intake is surely akin to that of an alcoholic. Music likewise is anesthetic when big does-symphony after symphony, opera on top of opera-are administered without respite. We should remember the Greeks' practice of exposing themselves to one tragic trilogy or one comedy on but a single day each year. High art is meant for rare festivals, where anticipation is followed by exhilaration and the aftermath is meditation and recollection in tranquillity. The glut has made us into gluttons, who gorge and do not digest. [pg. 127]

This is an essay from The Culture We Deserve, by Jacques Barzun.#

This essay talks about the Humanities, what they are, where they've been, and what happened to them. A central theme is the destruction of the original intent of universities and the near identicalness of vocational schools and colleges.#

My favourite part of the essay is when Jacques writes about "buffs" and the problem they represent.#

A more real danger than the imagined elite is our present combination of specialist and half-baked humanist education. The danger is that we shall become a nation of pedants. I use the word literally and democratically to refer to the millions of people who are moved by a certain kind of passion in their pastimes as well as in the vocations. In both parts of their lives this passion comes out in shoptalk. I have in mind the bird watchers and nature lovers; the young people who collect records and follow the lives of pop singers and movie stars; I mean the sort of knowledge posses by "buffs" and "fans" of all species -the baseball addicts and opera goers, the devotees of railroad trains and the collectors of objects, from first editions to netsuke.

They are pedants not just because they know and recite an enormous quantity of facts-if a school required them to learn as much they would scream against the tyranny. It is not the extent of their information that appalls; it is the absence of any reflection upon it, any sense of relation between it and them and the world. Nothing is brought in from outside to contrast or comparison; no perspective is gained from the top of their monstrous factual pile; no generalities emerge to lighten the sameness of their endeavor. Their hoard of learning is barren money-it bears no interest, because in the strictest sense it is not put to use. One might argue that this knowledge of facts is put to use when the time comes to buy more rare books or silver plate or postage stamps. But that is not using knowledge to adorn life and distill wisdom, as all knowledge can be made to do when it is held and used humanistically.

I do not offer these remarks as an outside who is scornful. I love baseball, opera, railroad trains, and crime stories, and I know something about them. But I am dismayed that others, who know much more, seem unable to do anything with it except foregather with their kind to match items of information. [pg. 118-119]

This is a common trend in Jacques' writing and in my mind: the desire and need for themes and general connections. Nothing can profitably exist inside a vacuum without any relation to anything else. More truthfully, nothing does exist in that manner, and any attempt to think about it that way will leave the thinker hungry for more substance. Our lives and ideas, like art, are form perfectly fused into function and content. Just like we cannot isolate components of painting or face and show how that piece makes it beautiful, one cannot truly enjoy and benefit from study without allowing oneself to connect it to the greater universe of previously studied subjects.#

This is an essay from The Culture We Deserve, by Jacques Barzun.#

Jacques will tackle the overuse and misuse of the word, "Relativism," in this essay...#

For several decades the world Relativism has served to explain whatever the user found morally reprehensible in the life around him. The term, both scapegoat and insult, has all the properties of a thought-cliche of the learned-sounding kind. It is in fact a gross perversion of a technical term, as well as irrelevant to the issues it professes to settle. [pg. 87]

Jacques describes how it is used and where it came from.#

Since the decay of religion, the western world has adopted the motto "Anything goes." Relativism has conquered all.

This bugbear cannot be sheer illusion. When the word is not a mindless echo, what people feel and fear arises from a confused impression that anything which varies with time and place, instead of remaining the same through all circumstances, is a menace: it shifts; it is shift. To hang anything of weight, you want a strong peg firmly held so that it may firmly hold. Thus Relativism is equated with general looseness, with unanchored judgment and unpredictable behavior. This is deemed bad, because, as Bacon said in his terse way about deceit, "It leaveth a Man without a Hold to take him, what he is." Society obviously needs such holds with which to challenge, reproach, condemn the transgressor. [pg. 88]

Continuing on this trend of explanation and examination he explains that morals cannot exist in a vacuum by definition of culture and thus any attempt to solidify them is like trying to fly without understanding the laws of gravity or lift.#

A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least. To find not a single cause but these converging conditions, we must therefore look first at the persistent desires of wester civilization for the past seven decades. We then see the worthiest endeavors-art, science, social science, education, human rights, criminal justice-like the least deliberate attitudes expressed in speech, manners, and dress, helping to do the work of looseness attributed to the quite innocent Relativism. [pg. 89]

To deny change is to deny life.

In any attempt to take this rather vapourous definition of Relativism (and its uses) back to Earth, Jacques lays out a scenario,#

The party of religion and the absolutist thinker posit the existence of "those great unchanging rules of life and conduct, eternally fixed and as old as the world itself." This code has one commandment for each offense, and the charged against relativists is that they vary the rule, depending on circumstances-"situational ethics." The charge rests on a distinction without a difference. For the absolutist ignores his perpetual predicament: his single rule will not cover all the actions it is supposed to govern. Make "Thou shalt not kill" an absolute, and at once conscience asks: What of self-defense? the death penalty? war to recover the Holy Land? [pgs. 90-91]

Jacques makes a point of showing that the "Golden Age of Morals" never was. From the times when "Thou shalt not kill" was bent to the Victorian age when honor and chivalry was not all they are cracked up to be.#

Throughout the Victorian, the very high and the very low easily evaded the sexual and other imperatives. Artists and members of the professions periodically escaped to Paris or the suburbs. Dickens kept a mistress and joined Wilkie Collins on his trips to France, and Samuel Butler visited an accommodating seamstress. All the while, London was reputed the world center of prostitution, and in the equally moral United States the age of consent in more than one jurisdiction was nine years. [pg. 96]

So there have always been hypocrites and morally magnificent boroughs with a hidden red light district.

Jacques continues to show that all forms of absolutism are baseless and lacking of all substance.#

First is irreverence, tt is a problem when individuals have absolutely no standards, life is a carte blanche free for all of pleasure and whim.

It is now accepted that intelligence agents who voluntarily swear perpetual secrecy will break their oath after retirement and tell tales to enliven their memoirs. There's freedom of speech, after all. And what if this old notion of self-respect were a mask for self-importance? "This I do not do" surely puts a pompous emphasis on I, with overtones of superiority. The very notion of "it isn't done" smacks of outworn convention. Anything may be done. Irreverence is a broad mandate. [pg. 101]

This paragraph is interesting in this section as well,

Moreover, the scoffing at formality partakes of a broader, more intellectual attitude, which has come to be held in high honor: irreverence. Celebrities are praised in print for this talent, which functions like an absolute. The possessor ridicules all things on principle, showing thereby that he is not guilty of any unfair discrimination. True, there is another, perhaps compensating absolute, which is compassion. If irreverence betrays a strong mind, compassion shows a deep heart, and neither entails a moral judgment: Pope John Paul II is described as "very committed and very compassionate." The question "committed to what? compassionate toward whom?" does not arise. We are left to suppose that nowadays everybody is an underdog in need of automatic compassion from committed souls. [pg. 99-100]

In closing, Jacques writes about our current moral state and its future.#

Of these [effects of societal shifts], the most disconcerting is that the desire for a better society has generated a neutralizing power in the form of high individual selfishness. Throughout our culture, the most visible trait is concentration on what is owed to the self. This characteristic appears in the proliferation of "rights" and the freedom of the artist to please only himself; in the demand for faultless performance by physicians and manufacturers; in the principle of consumerism promoted by the advertiser: since everybody deserves to have all the new enjoyable, life-enhancing articles, one owes it to oneself to get this one at once. And with the usual paradox of freedom proffered, the fit coerces: "Don't be left out of the parade of pleasure." [pg. 105]

This is an essay from The Culture We Deserve: A Critique of Disenlightenment by Jacques Barzun.#

In this essay, Jacques discusses problems with current historical research, criticism, and scholarship in general.#

The excuse that may be offered for the New Critics' misconception of history is that in the late nineteenth century, when academics who later taught literature were in their formative years, some historians did put forward the claim their their work was scientific. They were defending their domain against the aggressive self-conceit of the newly redefined "social sciences" and boasting to the world of their own "method" and "rigor." They repudiated those who wrote "literary" history and they eagerly gave up panoramic narratives for narrow "studies," microscopic in detail and free of ideas. In their place, "problems" became the sole justification of research. All the difficulties of life had turned into problems, from which it followed that the only worthy effort was to reach solutions. And nothing but science had solved or would ever solve a problem.

The paradox in the New Critics' assault is that under its pressure departments of ENglish in colleges and universities began to admit avowed critics into their ranks; and as soon as this surrender occurred, the New Criticism became a method; the study of literature was turned into problem-solving, while the creation of the work was also regarded as problem that the author had or had not successfully solved. The metaphors had to "work out," the structure to be tested at every joint; nothing flawed or excrescent could pass this engineering survey. [pg. 77]

A problem with methodology, is that when all you have is hammer, everything is a nail.#

Reinforced by the new interest in the metaphysical poets and the revived attention to Dante and Melville, the scrutinizing shortly transformed criticism into the decoding of ciphers. Every piece worth studying was found to contain "levels" of meanings; words and images meant anything but what they seemed to say. In short, the great writers of the world seemed to have worked in one genre only: allegory. [pg. 78]

Jacques begins to talk about a program of "Cultural Criticism" a colleague and he came up with.#

For cultural criticism presupposes the factitiousness of theory and the unsuitability of system when it comes to understanding art. One reads a poem as one reads a face-with a great deal of attention, knowledge, and experience of reading. There is only this difference, that one may stare at a poem. As for knowledge and experience, they can grow in regions apparently far from poems. Unexpectedly, long after, a fact or memory links itself with a verse or a rhythm to enrich a true reading. The great point is that none of the elements brought to bear is ever regarded as determinant, as a cause; it is only a condition, whose force is gauged, like everything in immediate experience, by the esprit de finesse. [pg. 84]

Jacques discusses the differences and similarities between a cultural critic and a cultural historian. The critic deals with contemporary works and thus cannot be as decided. But the historian is different,#

But, it may be asked, why should the historian venture to perform a task bound to be partial in both senses? The critic is need in order to sort out current production, but the historian can wait until we area ll dead and our full selves appear. This objection ignores the duty that goes with knowing something of the past. The cultural historian's motive is not the dubious pleasure of fault-finding. Rather, it is to reaffirm and perhaps strengthen what he thinks valuable in the activities of the culture makers, who are always subject to the distracting forces of fashion and competition. [pg. 85]

He closes by pointing out that criticism and historicism cannot predict the future of art, and thus life.#

It is useless to ask what the new art and culture will be like. The genuinely new comes only by concrete example. In any case, a critic deals only with the actual. On this principle, and in the present moment of dissolution, he can only say, like the Virgin in Chesterton's ballad: [pg. 86]

I tell you naught for your comfort,
Nay, tell you naught for your desire,
Save that the day grows darker yet.
And the sea rises higher.

A much more wholesome and beautiful way of asserting that only "Death and Taxes" are predictable.

This is an essay from The Culture We Deserve: A Critique of Disenlightenment by Jacques Barzun#

This paragraph introduces the idea of the essay...#

The artist's rejoinder to the question implied in the title above is absolute and consistent through the ages: critics are good for nothing. Swift long ago summed up the artist's case: "Critics are the drones of the learned world, who devour the honey, and will not work themselves." Other great artists have filled out the indictment: critics are ignorant; they corrupt public taste, attack and destroy genius; they are failed artists or they would not be critics; they belong (said Swift again) with the whores and the politicians. The only writer I have come across who had a good word for critics was Josh Billings. He was a humorist and may have been ironic: "To be a good critic," he said, "demands more brains and judgment than most men possess." A modest claim, but it leaves untouched the artist's grievance: What need for critics at all? [pg. 64]

In discussion the idea that the best, and essential, critics must be artists themselves, Jacques writes the following,#

Since artists and critics are a feature of our unexampled pluralism, the notion of an ideal critic, one who is not only certified perfectly balanced mentally, but also capable of judging art exclusively as art, is a mistaken ideal. It springs from that other mistaken notion, the autonomy of art, and its twin belief in something called the aesthetic experience. This last term is a t best a prideful synonym for the alert perception of art; for what is felt and perceived in art is not really separable from preexisting mental and emotional attachments. The intake does not cause a distilled state of mind cut off from the rest. As the pleasures art affords differ from the sensual while relying on the senses, they likewise partake of all other pleasures-intellectual, affectional, and spiritual. In short, the phrase "pure art" does not correspond to any reality. [pg. 69-70]

A complaint of Jacques is that the English language is being destroyed by misuse.#

As a result, the language of criticism sounds identical with the prose of the advertisers of fashions: vague images create the illusion of moving among luxurious things. The word metaphor itself typifies the vacancy of mind. It has been so debased as to qualify even what does not exist. Thus in a review of a singer whose upper register had faded we read: "She turned this to her advantage, using it as a metaphor for the uneasy yearnings of the Mahler songs."

Now, metaphor implies a comparison among four terms. If one says "the ship plows the sea," the meaning is that just as the plow in its forward motion divides the soil, so the ship moves and divides the sea. Without four terms, no metaphor. Hence there is no discoverable meaning in praising a sculptor for "his way with three-dimensional metaphors" or in saying that in literature the mention of food "serves up many metaphors.." We may wonder why critics, who are certainly educated people of uncommon ability, have adopted this reverse English, which destroys integrity and beauty at one stroke. They cannot all be simply perverse. Rather they have succumbed to certain widespread social attitudes. They have, on the one hand, aped what everybody now does with language, and, on the other, they have yielded to what everybody thinks criticism is. [pg 70-71]

What does Jacques think art really IS?#

I prefer to say that art is an extension of life. Art uses the physical materials of ordinary experience-words, pigment, sound, wood, stone or anything else-and puts them otgether in such a way that the sensations they set off arouse our memories of living, add to them, and thereby extend our life. [...]

If this is true, we can understand why criticism cannot capture the being and ultimate meaning of art, why there can be no consensus about art, artists, and works of art. For no agreement is conceivable about Being and the ultimate meaning of life. Art and life are kindred kaleidoscopes, shifting even as we look at them; they do impose a uniform pattern on all minds but may be "taken" in a myriad ways. In re-forming our view of experience through order and clarity, art brings out novelties and ambiguities no one suspected: it is a second life and extraordinary one. That common words, and patches of oil on canvas, and vibrating strings are able to do this is a mystery, and though we "cannot hope to know what art is," we know that it somehow captures and holds up to our gaze the mystery of existence. [pg. 74]

This is an essay from The Culture We Deserve: A Critique of Disenlightenment by Jacques Barzun.#

Jacques mentions all the historical societies, museums, antiques, and "preservations" of the modern culture and supposed that this means "our collective mind must be steeped in history and insatiable for more." [pg. 50]#

The conclusion is regrettably untrue. Our pastimes bespeak rather the collecting mania, antiquarian puttering, and the cultivation of nostalgia with bits and pieces of the past. None of these has anything to do with the uses and pleasures of history properly so called. This confusion of ideas was well illustrated when it was announced that the research vessel on which Marconi carried out his experiments with wireless and which had been destroyed in the last war, was to be "re-created." Marconi was said to have "lost a piece of his history." Somehow this absurdity passes muster; it is no longer obvious that Marconi's history cannot have been changed by any later event. The destruction affected only a memento whose "re-creation" is part of our history, not his. [pg. 50]

Barzun thinks that the idea of creating an extremely detailed "scientific" history is silly because history is about themes, events, and people not statistics.#

It was soon found that many kinds of document existed [of the statistical nature], so far untouched and worth exploiting-county archives, private contracts, children's books, record of matriculation at colleges and universities, the police blotter in big cities, gravestones in cemeteries-a whole world of commonplace papers and relics to be organized into meanings. Such documents told nothing important individually; they had to be classified and counted. Theirs was a mass meaning, and it brought one nearer to the life of the people; it satisfied democratic feelings. [pg. 51]

So one problem is that histories are no longer written a cohesive stories of plot and purpose, and another problem is that the public does not expect or admire true quality.#

Even if a fearless type should arise and produce a history for the public-a Prescott or Burckhardt, a Macaulay or John Richard Green, a Michelet or Mommsen-it is doubtful whether the public would greet the book with enthusiasm. Educated general readers have lost certain tastes and acquired others. In fiction, as in history, they no longer care for plot or even narrative. They want states of mine (mentalites), strange detail, analytic depth-which is why they relish psychobiography and biography in general, provided it bulges with "revealing details" and hostile opinions of the central figure. [pg. 54]

This begins in the way that history is presented in schools...#

In any case, school history is rarely taught attractively or thoroughly. It seem symptomatic that the excellent Landmark Series of history books for young people has been discontinued for lack of customers. And no wonder. Three years ago, as a consultant to a Commission on History Teaching subsidized by the National Endowment for the Humanities, I visited a number of elementary and high school classes in history in one New England state. The schools were clearly above average and history was given without dilution by "social studies." In both the seventh and the eleventh grades, the make-believe of "research" dominated. The thirteen-year-olds heard the teacher rattle off facts already written on the board about the Stamp Act and its sequel; then the class was loosed on a shelf of paperbacks, in which they were to find additional details to write down-but not in individual notebooks. This was team research, lying or sitting on the floor, one child serving as scribe and plying pencil over a scrap of paper flat on the carpet. [pg. 57]

And further...

Throughout, the principle seems to be: incoherence-bits and pieces, as in the outside world. Attention must be caught by the picturesque, and kept continually revived by some activity, even if that entails make-believe. When it is not filmstrips or field trips, the game of research is the standby. But even if the pupil can only fumble, is not research the way to learn what historians do? [pg. 58]

The problem of specialism leaks into history as well...#

In becoming specialists, historians have helped to breed specialist readers-people who read nothing but, say, Civil War military history or who go in for what is known as industrial archaeology-finding the sites of old foundries all over the county. The histories that sell are for these "buffs." In a book I once opened at random, my eye fell on a sentence that typifies the outlook: "The French Revolution was a disaster for dentistry." [pg. 59]

History needs to be recognized as an interesting and enlightening experience of fun.#

The nineteenth century took to history not for the good of the state, but for pleasure. We need to be reminded of this fact just as, in our study-ridden culture, we need to be reminded that works of art are for pleasure too. The pleasures of reading history are manifold: it exercises the imagination and furnishes it, discloses the nuances of the familiar within the unfamiliar, brings out the heroic in mankind side by side with the vile, tempers absolute partisanship by showing how few monsters of error there have been, and in all these ways induces a relative serenity. This composure is not to be taken for cynical indifference. Rather, it is a state of spirited pessimism like that generated by reading the great novels and epics. [pg. 61]

More on the goal of reading histories...#

Finally, it must be understood that "reading history" does not mean "covering" any particular region or period. To be sure, the wide the scope, the stronger the power of judgment becomes and the greater the sympathy and regard for what humanity has achieved in the teeth of its own defects. History is indeed what Ghibbon said it was-a long tale of crimes and follies. But it is more than that; it is also the the story of genius and daring and dumb, ox-like persistence-virtues without which mankind would not have got as far as discovering that living in caves was a good idea. Not just to know but to feel these truths is to confirm Burckhardt's dictum about the value of cultivating history: "not to be cleverer the next time, but wiser forever." [pg. 63]

This is an essay in The Culture We Deserve by Jacques Barzun. It is about our Alexandrian society, a term associated with "flexible morals, perfunctory religion, populist standards and cosmopolitan tastes, feminism, exotic cults, and the rapid turnover of high and low fads-in short, a falling away (which is all the decadence means) from the strictness of traditional rules, embodied in character and enforced from within." [pg. 37]#

Another primary sign of these times is reference books, and what they represent: fruitless information and an endless stack of meta-conversation about it.#

The old civilization has piled up works of the mind for centuries-the attic is crammed full-and direct access to the treasures grows less easy, less frequent, as the social revolution brings more and more of the untaught and the self-indulgent out of bondage. At that point the museum is born, and the research library. There, the inmates-scholars and specialists-begin to digest, organize, theorize, and publish reference books. [pg. 37]

This meta-conversation takes a life of its own and becomes the sole reason to read. This is shown when scholars, Jacques specifically mentions historians, write books for each other, not for the general populace.#

Studying text soon turns the searchlight from ideas to words, after which language as a whole seems to hold the secret of all the great questions. Many otherwise sober persons tell us that language is the shaping force of poems and plays; philosophers argue that usage analyzed will answer the riddles of Being; and even scientists turn verbalist when the speak of a genetic "code" or account for disease by supposing "information" to be carried hither and yon by cells or molecules. Information theory, not interested in message, but in the chances of getting its "shape" across, tries to dominate psychology, linguistics, and anything else in which meaning still lurks untouched by abstraction. The point of the game is what we all used to do as children-repeat a word over and over till its meaning is emptied out. [pg. 38]

Jacques points out the main problem is the loss of context and compulsion to ignore things that can be "looked up"...#

So much compiling and disseminating of data in small bundles is, among of things, an orgy of self-consciousness. We seem to live mainly in order to see how we live, and this habit brings on what might be called the externalizing of knowledge; with ever new manual there is less need for its internal, visceral presence. The owner or user feels confident that he possesses its contents-there they are, in handy form on the handy shelf. [...] To say this is also to say that the age of ready reference is one in which knowledge inevitable declines into information. [pg. 39]

Jacques goes on to talk about all the "efforts" made to subsidize language and give advice and guides to writing thoughtfully. This is only needed because people no longer retain context and it is an attempt to turn the side effect of knowledge into information. These guides are often incorrect and have little effect otherwise...#

The main reason why so much advice leads to so little bettering is that the cultural current flows not toward the simple and lucid but the other way, toward the novel and singular at any price. The democratic temper is not less pedantic than the Alexandrian. Modern poets and novelists, aided by advertisers, have shown everybody how to tamper with idiom and meaning and be original by rifling the learned vocabulary. When metaphor has come into daily use as a poor synonym for "its reminds me of," one is not surprised to hear that Senate committee reporting on the CIA thought synecdoche [ed-- n : substituting a more inclusive term for a less inclusive one or vice versa] would be an apt word for concealment. [pg. 44]

Jacques thinks trying to make a case that language mistreats women is very unfounded and weak. This is an example of meta-conversation on words rather than their meanings.#

When on learns that some feminists want to replace words such as history by herstory, one can compliment them on the odd pun but not on their knowledge or prudence. In any case, gender is not sex; the latter is natural, the former notional. In Latin, sailors and poets are feminine in declension; on the continent of Europe, the sun and moon switch gender from one language to another without implications of superior or inferior; in English, both are neuter. And in one African language a woman's breast is feminine if small, masculine if large: it would be foolish to draw political conclusions. Let us reach equity for the sexes on a firmer basis. [pg. 46]

Another result, and final comment, from Jacques is that all this research at the word level produces unreliable statistics that may be taken the wrong way and used as ammunition to murder the language.#

This mechanical reliance on a datum is mistaken for objectivity. One recalls the larger Webster, third edition, in which it is said that many educated Americans throughout the country use ain't in casual conversation. The evidence, when tracked down, was a research paper that found half-a-dozen such speakers somewhere in the Middle West. [pg 47-48]

This essay in The Culture We Deserve is about how the funding for art has come to be a cause of the problems surrounding the purity and sensibility of art.#

Jacques points out that art was not a special "thing", it was just something inherent in everything that was produced by the only organizations there were: the church and the state.#

For more than two thousand years, then, church and state-often indistinguishable from each other-were for the arts both impresario and purchaser. They were at times seconded by the wealthy who wanted pieces of art for private use, whether religious or secular, this demand being fulfilled by their social inferiors. To put it another way, all the arts were regarded as practical arts, produced for purposes universally understood. A new style of architecture was not so much an aesthetic innovation as a new feat of engineering.

A notable feature of this outlook and this mode of subsidy is that nobody was likely to enter protests. No middle-class Egyptian trader in figs was heard to say, "To my mind, the pyramid of Cheops is much too squat for beauty." When one of the spires of Chartres cathedral was rebuilt after a fire, its being made in a totally different style from the remaining spire elicited no editorial in the Chartres Evening Trumpet. There was no newspaper to assail the decision of the ecclesiastical authorities, no public opinion gathering to petition the mayor. The townsmen had few if any conscious aesthetic ideas; rather, they were proud to have a spire in the latest fashion, with a graceful, fretted outline. [pg. 25]

Another point of the past is when the artist as we know it finally emerged, with the emergence of nation-states and the decaying of old institutions.#

[...] Ad the decay of serfdom and of guilds, and you set the stage for the solitary artist, a new social species, who becomes an egotistical wanderer in search of a patron.

[...] The artists attach themselves to princes, to popes, to wealthy bourgeois patrons no longer bound by old ideas of just price. We begin to know artists by name, and learn of their tribulations, as we do not-or rarely-know the names and lives of medieval artists. [pg. 26]

The conflict between art and society "that has characterized the last 150 years" was rooted in the early days of egotistical art and artists.#

Two contrary movements made this conflict inevitable and permanent. One was the glorification of art as the highest spiritual expression of man's life on earth. The artist-genius thereby became a seer and a prophet. He knew and proclaimed the ultimate truths that condemned the materialism of everyday life; he denounced the world, flouted it rules of behavior, and also foretold the march of culture, because he was leading it-whence the term avant-garde. This view of society was confirmed by the hostile response of his contemporaries. They were the philistines, born enemies of everything fine and noble; for they were part of the opposite movement of the century, utilitarian, bent on material progress and social stability. War between the two was declared by the very act of creating unconventional art; no peace was possible, because the aims of the two sides were irreconcilable. It was the prophet and the saint against the compact majority of sinners. The contempt automatically attached today to the term bourgeois has its sources and its expression in the arts of the nineteenth century. [pg. 31]

Jacques writes that after World War I, art became the universal escape from the horrors of the world, and with this growth of observers it responded in a strange way.#

By 1920 art as such was the concern or pastime of a wider public than ever before, and, no matter how weird its latest forms, was accepted without protest. The past had shown that the public was always wrong, so wisdom and snobbery alike dictated humble submission to whatever came. For these philistines in reverse gear everything in a gallery or a book or on the stage was "interesting." It was experimental, and who would dare to challenge an experiment? Authority had passed from the customer-patron to the supplier-artist. [pg. 32]

In essence, the expansion of the audience of art turned it into a de facto religion...#

Colleges and universities created art departments, built theatres, captured revolving poets, stationary stage directors, and composers-in-residence; they turned the glee club into a chorus and orchestra, set up film units, attached a string quartet to the faculty-in short, became recruits of the world-wide sect of art-as-religion. Its influences after one generation could be read in the manifesto of the rioting students of Chicago in 1968; two of their demands were: the abolition of money and every man or woman an artist. [pg. 33]

Jacques concludes with the point that the "golden age" of art support never really was and that the "curse" of art is intrinsic..#

No earlier scheme, as we saw, has proved satisfactory either. And to redesign ours would mean a series of impossibilities that can summed up as deliberate discouragement: of the young artistic impulse, of the mature desire for a public career, of the competitive scramble t the great centers. It seems as if high art were from the beginning under a curse that grows more bitter as civilization spreads ever wide the demand for a good that it produces all too abundantly. [pg. 36]

In this essay, Jacques writes about the perversion of the word "culture" and gives has a brief look at the things the later essays will focuses much more upon.#

Pointing out that culture comes from agriculture, that is "to cultivate" a person. A cultured individual is an cultivated individual. Jacques writes that cultivation in a person these days goes against all odds,#

Since culture is no longer clear, why not simply say "the educated man or woman"? The answer is that the word educate has been just as badly tossed about as the other. No need to give a parallel account of its tribulations. Today anybody with a diploma from any institution calling itself educational is counted among the educated, while the disparate doings of our elementary and high schools are also called education. The difference between instruction and education has been forgotten, and it is usual, commonplace, to hear people say that in this or that school or college, students are given an education.

My concern, then, is with something other than culture and education as these terms are bandied about. Culture and education are qualities found in persons who have first been taught to read and write and then have managed, against heavy odds, to cultivate their minds, to educate themselves. [pg. 4]

Jacques suggests that perhaps the reason cultivation is increasingly difficult is that our obsessive with information, collection and management.#

The nineteenth century established both the cult of art and the passion for history. So we collect everything and, in the professional jargon, "make it available." [...]

Yet I venture to think that in the qualitative, honorific sense, culture-cultivation-is declining. It is doing so virtually in proportion as the various cultural endeavors-all this collecting and exhibiting and performing and encouraging-grow and spread with well-meant public and private support. The reason is not merely that very abundance tends to distract attention, to leave no time for digesting and meditating upon the experience, though that is an important drawback of the glut. [...] [pg. 5]

One problem that Jacques identifies is the professionalization and specialization of aspects of culture...#

What I am pointing to is something implicit in specialism but rarely noticed or expressed, namely, that through specialism culture is delegated to the experts; it is no longer the property of whoever wants to partake of it for the good of his soul. [...] The expert takes a little subject for his province-and remains provincial all his life. But there is worse. By this delegation of culture the importance of art and the humanities is shifted to a new ground. These good things are no longer valuable for their direct effect on the head-and-heart; they become valuable as professions, as means of livelihood, as badges of honor, as goods to be marketed, as components of the culture industry.

[...] The interest displayed is scarcely culture; it is not for self-cultivation; rather, it is, in sociological idiom, a leisure-time activity, like being a baseball fan. Both hobbies generate the same pedantic, miserlike heaping up of factual knowledge. One illustration tells the tale: there are said to be more than three hundred societies devoted each to a single author, [...] [pg. 6-7]

Jacques is dismay at the decline of good history,#

It used to be that unassuming readers cultivated their minds through history which feeds curiosity and furnishes the imagination. Good histories, moreover, are part of literature. Today that source of culture has dried up too: it has been delegated, and professional historians no longer write for the public but for one another. [pg. 9]

A major misconception is that scholarship is good for culture. What does Jacques have to say?#

We are mistaken when we believe that culture and the humanities are being served by scholarship. The truth is that art and culture do not belong in a university. It cannot be a home for them, because culture proper and scholarship proper are diametrically opposed. [..,] the original intention of scholarship persists, [...]: it is analysis; that is, the narrow scrutiny of an object for the purpose of drawing conclusions. [pg. 10]

As opposed to appreciation and a means of cultivation.

Scholarship attempts to turn art and culture into a science, something to be broken down and reasoned about.#

The magic spell of science is evident in these various procedures: scholarship has yielded to the irresistible pull that science exerts on our minds by its self-confidence and the promise of certified knowledge. But, to repeat, the objects of culture are not analyzable, not graspable by the geometrical mind. Great works of art are great by [virtue] of being syntheses of the world; they qualify as art by fusing form and contents into an indivisible whole; what they offer is not "discourse about," nor a cipher to be decoded, but a prolonged incitement to finesse. So it is paradoxical that our way of introducing young minds to such works should be the way of scholarship. [pg. 14]

When coming back to the idea of universities and why they may be good or bad, Jacques says something that can be applied with substitution to may institutions and projects.#

Schools and universities have never been efficient institutions and they should be judged by their aims and arrangements rather than by their results, which depend so much on the coincidence of a true teacher with an apt student. [pg. 16]

The Culture We Deserve: A Critique of Disenlightenment by Jacques Barzun is a collection of essays about the failings of contemporary culture. What I enjoyed most of them is that they do not have a doomsayer's feel, but instead they point of problems in a constructive way and mean to give guidance and a path for progress. The title should not invoke the feeling that man is a horrible race and deserves the doldrums it finds itself in, but instead the idea that we deserve better and it is within our power to grasp it.#