Revolt of the Public

The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium by Martin Gurri, 425 pages

In The Revolt of the Public, analyst Martin Gurri considers the possibilities and dangers that the information age presents to established institutions and ways of life.  The technological changes of the last few decades, he observes, have greatly facilitated the emergence of informal networks, energized by a passionate involvement with specific issues, out of a generally disinterested mass populace.  These have collided with technocratic institutions which have inherited their organization from the industrial age, their size and complexity justified by modernist utopian promises which are no longer rationally believed but are still emotionally expected.  It is precisely in this gap - between what we know to be the limits of expertise and what we believe we are owed - that the aroused public finds its angry home.  The negativity of postmodern protest, then - the inability of activist networks to advance positive solutions to the systemic problems they identify - is not just the result of their own lack of hierarchy, but an inescapable feature of the crisis of late modernity.  The danger, Gurri believes, is that the accelerating erosion of institutional authority is transforming the gap into a chasm, making the prospect of a wholesale rejection of democratic pluralism correspondingly more attractive to dissidents on both the left and the right.

Beyond Gurri's method and presentation, there is little here that would surprise anyone who has read, for example, MacIntyre, Postman, or Lasch.  That Gurri, deliberately or not, seems unaware of this is, on the whole, more a blessing than a defect, allowing him to approach the current crisis along his own path and therefore providing all that much more support when his conclusions overlap with those of deeper thinkers. It also gives him space to suggest his own solutions, as nebulous as those might be.  It helps, too, that his presentation is excellent, and will doubtless appeal to many reluctant to try older, more substantive works.

Art or Anarchy?

Art or Anarchy?  How the Extremists and Exploiters Have Reduced the Fine Arts to Chaos and Commercialism by Huntington Hartford, 196 pages

This 1964 book by the playboy founder of New York's Huntington Hartford Gallery of Modern Art presents a bleak view of an art world that has slid deep into solipsism and meaninglessness, a collapse Hartford attributes primarily to the abandonment of the subject.  As he saw it, this was enabled and exacerbated by the increasing commercialization of fine art in the first half of the twentieth century.  Although the result may be an art reflective of its time, it signally fails to transcend its time.

Hartford's book is a free-ranging polemic which includes extensive discussions of the peccadilloes of great artists and the subversive influence of the KGB in the Western art scene.  This has its advantages - Hartford is unafraid of making enemies - but these are far outweighed by the lack of focus and gossipy malodor.

Kingdom of Man

The Kingdom of Man: Genesis and Failure of the Modern Project by Remi Brague, translated by Paul Seaton, 216 pages

The third part of Remi Brague's grand history of ideas, following The Wisdom of the World, which was centered in the classical world, and The Law of God, which focused on the medieval world, The Kingdom of Man looks at the modern world, or, as the subtitle significantly puts it, the modern project.  For Brague, this is the distinctive characteristic of modernity - that it sees itself as a project. This was itself the result of a shift of attitudes towards work - where classically freedom from work was the privilege of nobility, in the Renaissance it became the expression of human dignity and power.  The valorization of "useful" work above "useless" contemplation, while it begins by promising worldly abundance, ultimately positions man as an object rather than a subject, like all nature an unsatisfactory thing that exists only to be mastered and overcome, and thus the project of modernist humanism ends in the sacrifice of humanity to the project.

Brague's approach is entirely descriptive.  He does not consider the views of critics of modernity, nor does he explore alternatives to it.  Instead, he follows the logical development of modernism from nominalism to posthumanism from within, carefully tracing the origins and consequences of each idea, and illuminating a great many things even outside of his focus.

All Things Shining

All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, 254 pages


The premise of this book is that in the Western world we lack meaning. According to the authors we live in an age of nihilism.

After the introduction, the authors examine this nihilism through David Foster Wallace and draw some links to Elizabeth Gilbert (of all people).

Next, they go back in time to the Greeks and move forward in time. They examine the Greeks' polytheism through Homer. As they move forward in time they look at the rise of monotheism via Aeschylus and Augustine. After that, they analyze Dante and Kant to show the attractions and dangers of autonomy. Their last stop is to consider Herman Melville. Mostly, they describe several aspects of Moby Dick including fanaticism and polytheism.

It isn't until the conclusion that they turn to how we find meaning. Unfortunately, while their answer may be valid it isn't well argued or elaborated.

I found some of their examinations of the Western classics to be insightful. I didn't enjoy the one of Moby Dick but I didn't like that book so that probably makes some difference. I think there is some value in what they authors have to say but I can't recommend this book.

Death of Christian Culture

The Death of Christian Culture by John Senior, 178 pages

According to John Senior, modernity's inward turn resulted in a solipsistic closed circle, and subsequent attempts to escape have only accelerated the death spiral into nihilistic madness.  Senior's argument is not that this is wicked, but that it is delusional, and it is destructive and wicked because it is delusional.  In this, the long demise of Christian Realism is both cause and effect, her resurrection a faint but not impossible hope.

Senior throws out ideas and references with machine gun rapidity.  For some readers this will be hopelessly confusing, while others will constantly find themselves asking him to expand upon an argument or observation.  Certainly he is never boring.

From Christendom to Americanism and Beyond

From Christendom to Americanism and Beyond: The Long Jagged Trail to the Postmodern Void by Thomas Storck, 207 pages

The central theme in this volume of Thomas Storck's collected essays is the exhaustion of the West as the consequence of the Western rejection of absolutes, beginning with the rise of nominalism in the 14th century.  This alienation of Western culture from its roots, he argues, has led to an increasingly narrow outlook divorced from reality, an antinomian utilitarianism which has conquered the intellectual, political, and economic worlds, combining usurious capitalism, social contract political theories, and sexual revolution antihumanism.  This is the essence of postmodern nihilism - a blanket rejection of intangible goods in pursuit of material wealth and pleasure, trading justice for avarice, solidarity for solipsism, genuine politics for tribalism, true virtue for moral preening.  The alternative he offers is the social reign of Christ, built on justice and solidarity, a true and therefore a moral community, the "civilization of love" of Bl Paul VI and the "culture of life" of St John Paul II.

The first thing that must be said about Storck's book is that it is not entirely, or even primarily, negative - Storck praises post-modernism for rejecting many of the errors of modernism, discerns signs of hope for renewal in leftist protest movements, and tends to blame the wrong turns of history, not on sinister cabals, but on Catholics not being sufficiently Catholic.  Throughout, he demonstrates the impact of two divergent views of the Church and the world, one of which represents the Church as one institution among many in the world, and the other which recognizes the truth of Chesterton's observation that the Church is bigger than the world.  The former, he demonstrates, produces apostasy and certain failure, the latter, faithfulness and the only hope of success.

Sleepwalkers

The Sleepwalkers: A Trilogy by Hermann Broch, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir, 648 pages

The Sleepwalkers consists of three interrelated novels spanning thirty years - The Romantic, set in 1888, The Anarchist, set in 1903, and The Realist, set in 1918.  Although featuring different characters, plots, and settings, the three form parts of a single work and are meant to be read together, the cycle tracing the disintegration of values from the delusions of fin de siecle Germany to the crass materialism of the Great War.  The Romantic is Joachim von Pasenow, a military officer struggling to understand the nature of love and honor, torn between his love for his Czech mistress and his idealized dream of a woman of his own social class.  The Anarchist is August Esch, an accountant who longs for freedom and justice but does not know where to even begin looking for either.  The Realist is Huguenau, an army deserter and hustler for whom everything has a price.  He is a wholly new kind of man, entirely different from Major von Pasenow and Herr Esch, who are utterly incapable of preventing his ascendancy.

The Romantic and The Anarchist are fine novels that, with their satirical take on the Romantic Bildungsroman, resemble nothing as much as the existential novels of Sartre and Camus.  The Realist, however, elevates the whole into a work of genius greater than anything the two Frenchmen ever managed to accomplish.  This is true not so much as a result of Broch's deft manipulation of diverse literary genres - the chapters in the final novel shift between poetry, prose, and drama - as the scope and unity of his vision.  The Sleepwalkers is not light reading, but it is a literary masterpiece.

Trainspotting

Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh, 344 pages

Welsh's signature plotless novel is composed entirely of brief vignettes, only tenuously connected by the common characters, that are sometimes humorous, sometimes hideous, sometimes horrifying, but most often some combination of the three.  The protagonists are a circle of lowlifes, petty criminals, drug abusers, and thugs, who survive if they do not thrive in the maze of Leith's streets where even the minister is a time-serving functionary at the crematory.  The total effect is that of a three dimensional portrait of life under "the law ay the dragon".  And when you're trapped in the dragon's den with no hope of escape, why not get comfortable as the dragon eats you, from the legs up even?

Crisis of Modernity

The Crisis of Modernity by Augusto del Noce, translated by Carlo Lancellotti, 306 pages

The first English translation of major essays by one of the most perceptive Italian philosophers of the "short twentieth century", The Crisis of Modernity focuses on the great moral struggle of that period - for and against Marxism and Fascism, revealed here as mirror images, revolutionary ideologies that happen to point in opposite directions.  For del Noce, each is an expression of modern gnosticism - the belief that the world as it exists is irredeemably wicked, and must be replaced with an entirely new creation belonging to some mythical future or past.  The consequence of the empty triumph of Marxism, he argues, is late modern nihilism, a soulless technocracy focused entirely on production and consumption.

Del Noce maintains that philosophy is implicit in all human activity, though it often requires a philosopher to give it voice.  The result is a concentration on the philosophical underpinnings of historical trends and movements.  He diagnoses the modern era as a continuous expression of the ideology of progress as liberation from every limitation, and therefore the abolition of tradition and elimination of community, and therefore the desecration of the sacred and the de-humanization of man.

A tale for the time being

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
422 Pages

"In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there's only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates' bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who's lived more than a century. A diary is Nao's only solace--and will touch lives in ways she can scarcely imagine. Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox--possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao's drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future."

 I enjoyed this novel although at times I was a little confused with the time analogies.  It was recommended by Ann Patchett on her blog for Parnassus books and like Ms. Patchett, I originally didn't choose to read this novel because the cover was a little off-putting.  So I did judge a book by its cover.  I am happy to have read it.