The Truth of Things

The Truth of Things: Liberal Arts and the Recovery of Reality by Marion Montgomery, 295 pages

In this book, collecting essays spanning four decades, Marion Montgomery argues that the modern world's rejection of transcendence has resulted in a wholesale flight from the Real into unreal abstraction.  In his view, the effects of this amputation of the spirit, brought about by an unholy alliance of pragmatism and narcissism, have been exacerbated by the decline of the academy as the result of its alienation from the community, brought about by the growth of specialization and a rootless cosmopolitanism all the more provincial because it is blind to its own provincialism.  This has led in turn to a "justice" divorced from truth and thereby distorted into injustice, with all human interaction reduced to postmodern power politics, the natural particularity of gifts denounced in favor of a artificial consumerist egalitarianism, the existing person displaced by the abstract individual, the actual community by the fictitious society.

Without proposing a definite program for reform, Montgomery does offer some hope for those who continue to see the value of ordered thought in relation to truth, and who therefore feel keenly the modern spiritual disease as a source of unease.  At the heart of his proposed recovery of reality is a cultivation of personhood through a reconnection with the human experience as distilled in the thought, literature, and art of the past, but ultimately predicated on a reverence for Being.  To carry out this vital task, Montgomery insists that the postmodern multiversity, shattered by specialization, ought to be reunited by a commitment to higher education - "higher" not because more difficult but because more profound, taught by teachers rather than technicians.