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标题：Kramer, Hilton, and Roger Kimball, editors. The Survival of Culture: Permanent Values in a Virtual Age.
作者：Lewis, V. Bradley
期刊名称：The Review of Metaphysics
印刷版ISSN：0034-6632
出版年度：2004
期号：March
语种：English
出版社：Philosophy Education Society, Inc.
摘要：The lead-off essay by Kenneth Minogue is an Oakeshottian reflection on the extent to which modern people have become passive spectators of action, detached from traditional loyalties and modes of identity and thus a kind of new Epicurean, shorn of the genuinely contemplative character of the originals. Eric Ormsby follows this with a judicious appraisal of the possibilities and perils for culture associated with the advent of the new information technology. Anthony Daniels provides a similarly sober account of the many consequences and dilemmas of medical technology (and the utilitarianism that typically accompanies it) for the noble Hippocratic art. David Pryce-Jones's essay recounts the antipolitical utopianism of the totalitarian ideologies that shadowed most of the twentieth century and worries about the potentially destructive utopian tendencies in the contemporary project of European integration. Keith Windschuttle surveys the range of ideologies currently deployed in the academy, most of which derive from vulgarizations of Nietzsche (often by way of Foucault). Edward Said's influential body of work comes in for particular scrutiny here. Mark Steyn contributes a discussion of the now all-too-familiar self-hatred of Western intellectuals with the blunt precision and wit so characteristic of his splendid newspaper columns. Martin Greenberg's essay on Burke manages to educe in brief compass the understanding of freedom that is the animating heart of that exemplary statesman's thought and practice. Diana Schaub makes a case for the importance of political philosophy to the practice of modern politics (and to the retrieval of its now obscured root principles) centered on the statesmanship of Lincoln. Robert Bork's chapter on the "adversary judiciary" limns the extent to which judges have gone from being the guarantors of the rule of law to the most effective antagonists of traditional institutions and values. Finally, Roger Kimball fittingly recalls the original Ciceronian understanding of culture as the development of the mind analogous to the cultivation of the earth, and connects it with the celebrated (and now largely abandoned) program of criticism proposed by Matthew Arnold.
关键词：Books

Kramer, Hilton, and Roger Kimball, editors. The Survival of Culture: Permanent Values in a Virtual Age.

Lewis, V. Bradley

KRAMER, Hilton, and Roger KIMBALL, editors. The Survival of Culture: Permanent Values in a Virtual Age. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002. xi + 258 pp. Cloth, $28.95--The essays collected in this volume, free of academic impedimenta and aimed at the educated general reader, are in the spirit of the sort of wide-ranging cultural criticism exemplified by the great reviews of the nineteenth century and still alive today in the New Criterion, the estimable journal in which they were originally published. Taken together they constitute a literate and insightful survey of the contemporary cultural scene, with a particular emphasis on the political dimensions and implications of each area treated.

The lead-off essay by Kenneth Minogue is an Oakeshottian reflection on the extent to which modern people have become passive spectators of action, detached from traditional loyalties and modes of identity and thus a kind of new Epicurean, shorn of the genuinely contemplative character of the originals. Eric Ormsby follows this with a judicious appraisal of the possibilities and perils for culture associated with the advent of the new information technology. Anthony Daniels provides a similarly sober account of the many consequences and dilemmas of medical technology (and the utilitarianism that typically accompanies it) for the noble Hippocratic art. David Pryce-Jones's essay recounts the antipolitical utopianism of the totalitarian ideologies that shadowed most of the twentieth century and worries about the potentially destructive utopian tendencies in the contemporary project of European integration. Keith Windschuttle surveys the range of ideologies currently deployed in the academy, most of which derive from vulgarizations of Nietzsche (often by way of Foucault). Edward Said's influential body of work comes in for particular scrutiny here. Mark Steyn contributes a discussion of the now all-too-familiar self-hatred of Western intellectuals with the blunt precision and wit so characteristic of his splendid newspaper columns. Martin Greenberg's essay on Burke manages to educe in brief compass the understanding of freedom that is the animating heart of that exemplary statesman's thought and practice. Diana Schaub makes a case for the importance of political philosophy to the practice of modern politics (and to the retrieval of its now obscured root principles) centered on the statesmanship of Lincoln. Robert Bork's chapter on the "adversary judiciary" limns the extent to which judges have gone from being the guarantors of the rule of law to the most effective antagonists of traditional institutions and values. Finally, Roger Kimball fittingly recalls the original Ciceronian understanding of culture as the development of the mind analogous to the cultivation of the earth, and connects it with the celebrated (and now largely abandoned) program of criticism proposed by Matthew Arnold.

If there is a dominant theme of the collection, it is the trahison des clercs that has had such a formative (or rather deformative) impact on contemporary culture. That theme is central to what I take to be the three anchoring essays by Minogue, Steyn, and Kimball. There is also another threat looming over these essays. Most were written soon after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and carry an urgency deriving from that terrible day. The loss of confidence that has come over the elites of the contemporary West becomes even more striking when not only the political and cultural order but the very physical existence of the West is under attack from an enemy explicitly dedicated to its destruction.

If there is a desideratum in the volume it perhaps is the lack of more treatment of the fine arts, music in particular. Still, much is covered between the covers of the Survival of Culture and one of its principle achievements is to show that, as bad as things may be, there are plenty of witnesses who know what the alternatives are and thus can serve as a source of preservation and renewal. Culture survives.--V. Bradley Lewis, The Catholic University of America.