The Twilight of American Culture
Pg 40
It’s not that through her influence students learn to scoff at a non-utilitarian notion of a liberal education; rather, they never get to learn that such a notion even exists.
Pg 43
Even beyond this postmodern claptrap, the college/university situation in the United States has finally wound up in the position of the Church of the late Middle Ages, which sold people indulgences (read diplomas) so that they could get into heaven (read well-paying job).
I found that to be an astute observation. Emphasis his.
The university’s relationship with its ‘customers,” he says, is “nearly servile.”
Pg 54
Joseph Campbell whose understanding of mythology was woefully inadequate from an anthropological standpoint, tells TV viewers to “follow your bliss,” and this becomes their life theme, as they remain blissfully unaware of the fact that real spirituality is most often a working against the grain.
Pg 87-89
Nor do I think that institutionalization would be the best vehicle for cultural transmission today, because finally we are talking about individual habits of mind that cannot and should not be channeled by means of ’structures.’ If this is going to work, it must be spontaneous and natural, part of the air we eventually come to breathe.
In terms of future renewal, much of it will depend on a commitment to individualism, something that has been much maligned in recent years. We hear so much trendy, tedious talk today of how bad individualism is, and how we need to think in terms of ‘the group.’ the problem is that the group usually offers conformity, not genuine community.
I think the above quote is hugely important. For the longest time now I have been feeling guilty because I have never quite been able to see the complete evil of individualism but I have been very much aware of the evils of groupthink and have seen it at work in many places including home school utopianism and anti-home school utopianism. It seems the safer way to look at it is that the community is made up of individuals. I know I am going to have to haggle this one out with some of you but for now I think this is an important distinction and safeguard.
In The Dark Side of the Left , Richard Ellis shows how avant-garde political movements, including environmentalism and feminism, become Utopian, Manichaean, and finally tyrannical; but he admits that this is a right-wing tendency as well. The point is the group tendency.
Not that like-minded souls shouldn’t make connections, but the key is to keep these links informal. As Kenneth Minogue rightly notes, Western individualists have a capacity for joint action that exceeds that of communally organized individuals.
The above 3 quotes are probably the heart of why I found the book compelling apart from his emphasis on small acts.
The problem with antiscientific critiques of modern society is that they typically tend to be irrational/romantic, caught up in a rejection of scientism - which, in my view, is justified, but which is also, and perhaps inevitably, a rejection of empirical methodology as well.
Exactly where I find myself often.
As for us, says Kaplan, we shall ’sell’ democracy to hybrid regimes that will for economic reasons, take on democratic trappings, while the political reality is something else; and in the process of doing that, we too shall become -are becoming - a hybrid regime. For a zoned-out, stupefied poulace, “democracy” will be nothing more than the right to shop, or to choose between Wendy’s and Burger King, or to stare at CNN and think that this manged infotainment is actually the news. As I have said, corporate hegemony, the triumph of global democracy/consumerism based on an American model, is the collapse of American civilization. So a large-scale transformation is indeed going on, but it is one that makes triumph indistinguishable from disintegration.
After a long, excellent paragraph on page 122 Mr Berman quotes Russell Jacoby in Dogmatic Wisdom:
Thinking, reading and art require a cultural space, a zone free from the angst of moneymaking and practicality. Without a certain repose or leisure. a liberal education shrivels.
Pg 123
The university may look like an institution of advancement of higher culture, in other words, but its content and organization are corporate, and the result is that the coinage of education is severely debased.
Multiculturalism-another safe, politically correct position-was worshiped to the point of pathology, and I once witnessed a kind of Moscow trial ritual, in which various faculty members publickly confessed their racist “sins” ; some even wept. ( “The worst,” wrote ?* “are full of passionate intensity.”)
*20 points for the correct answer. Ok, it was easy and I am a one-trick pony.
The above paragraph comes on the heels of a long description of an online university that hired Mr Berman. The anecdotes he tells about this university are interesting and telling.
I have to stop now. I will do a separate entry for the last 3 chapters the next time I have bit of time on the computer.
I still have to ask the purse holder of the family if I can have one. Can I? Can I?