The Culture We Deserve
Barzun, Jacques
THE CULTURE WE DESERVE Jacques Barzun, edited by Arthur Krystal Wesleyan University Press/185 pp. $19.95 John Simon T t is very hard for a reviewer to do 1 justice to a book so fertile in ideas,...
...why should I do it to a work in a different genre but just as suspenseful...
...Grenada, El Salvador, and support for the contras...
...the concepts "dilettante" and "amateur" must be rehabilitated...
...if here and there they recognize some of their own ideas, no matter: Barzun offers the obverse of Pope's maxim—what oft was expressed, but ne'er so well thought through...
...We clamor for "communication," but should demand "conversation," which is "the key out of the prison cells of our professions, our vocations, and our hobbies, and no less, of our fine arts and our scholarship...
...He holds up the Greek ideal, where one dramatic trilogy and one satyr play seen at a festival constituted the citizens' annual quota of high art...
...Pastora's decision to join the Sandinistas calmed most Nicaraguans and allowed Daniel Ortega to say, we are a nationalist faction, not a Marxist one," says Cruz...
...He made me believe that one could be a dissident without being a Somocista or a National Guardsman...
...Yet was this call to thought as quixotic as all that...
...offers a third...
...He warns against certain types of new "art" that imitate "not nature but the critics...
...The Culture We Deserve is a self-interview responding to all your queries, even the ones you were not clever enough to ask and would have kicked yourself the next morning for not having thought of...
...universal approval is bestowed on every spark of talent...
...some were cackling at the prospect of themselves and their 43 MEMOIRS OF A COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY: LIFE WITH THE CONTRAS, THE SANDINISTAS, AND THE CIA Arturo Cruz, Jr./Doubleday/288 pp...
...In the first, there is that "took to history," so much more vital than, say, "turned to" or "approached" or "espoused" or whatever a lesser writer might have chosen...
...For when summoned to think, people laxly or pedantically carting about their minds can respond neither laxly, because the thought now has to be deliberate, nor pedantically, because no topic has been assigned...
...The contras were mired in their inherent Nicaraguan anarchical political culture," writes Cruz...
...Some were incensed by the implication that on the other days they weren't thinking...
...So European reporters ignored it...
...For Cruz, the epitome was an appearance at a dinner in Miami in 1987 by Elliott Abrams, the assistant secretary of state for Latin America...
...Pastora was reluctant to go to war," says Cruz...
...Castro's name itself was a drug to Latin revolutionaries and nationalists," says Cruz...
...His father, Arturo Cruz, was an opponent of Anastasio Somoza who joined the Sandinista government in 1979, serving as ambassador to the United States, among other posts...
...Let us reach equity for the sexes on a firmer basis...
...What is worth noting . . . is that forty years later, in a second edition of Nicolson's book, the poor author had to defend himself against the charge of "cruel bias" against Tennyson...
...I ain't...
...Instead of trying to summarize the multifarious discussion, let me quote a typical juicy passage: After T. S. Eliot had certified that Kipling was a poet, it was no longer permissible to despise him as a journalist whose day had passed...
...44 walk...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1989 BOOK REVIEWS 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...
...He traces the many forms of general purposelessness: while there is no morality or religion to organize the world, arts and sciences are not available to all, and mere ambition or hedonism is likewise beyond the universal grasp...
...So we are obliged to rediscover the pleasures of ratiocination, or—as Susan Sontag might say, though Barzun wouldn't—the erotics of thinking...
...They know seizing the government is everything...
...Pastora was no George Washington...
...The old attitude toward the arts changes with the Renaissance—rank and degree are now assigned to individual artists and their works...
...the folly of continuous reassessment—of what...
...and so on...
...A history could be written of the weather in Mann County between any two dates, but not a history of the thunderstorms...
...But he refuses to turn into a mere laudator temporis acti or into a prophet of doom...
...The problem is that this essay tries to cover too much ground...
...Pastora's declaration had an enormous impact on me," says Cruz...
...Sud- no matter: Barzun offers the obverse o denly thinking becomes as arduous as Pope's maxim—what oft was expressed walking when we are watching ourselves but ne'er so well thought through...
...That was held by Marxist-Leninists...
...For must not language then be pruned like THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1989 a tree, tamed and gelded like a horse, forcibly modified to yield superior hybrids, doctored to put off its death...
...The artist goes from domestic and courtier to dealer-manageradvertiser of his own wares...
...art centers spring up everywhere...
...In forty-eight hours of nonstop meetings, he cajoled the Sandinistas into setting up a nine-member directorate representing the factions...
...I know I can't do it, and the only reason I took it on is to prevent its falling into the hands of someone even less qualified—someone, for example, not even aware of the daunting magnitude of the task—and so making a complete botch of it...
...It is an "orgy of self-consciousness...
...In the next, we find "furnishes," which is the mot juste, and "relative serenity," which is a smart piece of understatement...
...Second, the world press was against the contras, largely for ideological reasons...
...The linguist in particular is seen as playing two roles: as a would-be scientist, he is against value judgments...
...The first is obvious: the wavering support and ultimate opposition of the House of Representatives...
...A more serious flaw is its assumption that as a work of humanism it does not threaten the laity...
...Nicolson argued his case on the principle that ethical poetry antedates Victorianism and forms the bulk of all poetry ever written...
...This composure is not to be taken for cynical indifference...
...Or take this: "In keeping with [the] headlong march of freedom, linguistics has proclaimed a new absolute: There is no right or wrong in language...
...What is interesting to the theoretical scholar lacks universal interest...
...was a Sandinista turned contra, too...
...Suddenly thinking becomes as arduous as walking when we are watching ourselves onsidering their advantages, the contras_really should have won in Nicaragua...
...When he came to office a year later, President Bush figured that trying to undo it was futile (By then, it was...
...Their cause was just, which counts for something...
...The third she smiles and she has no teeth...
...19.95 John Simon T t is very hard for a reviewer to do 1 justice to a book so fertile in ideas, so challenging, so crowded with unexpected yet relevant details as Jacques Barzun's The Culture We Deserve...
...In Europe, reporters were enthralled with the Sandinistas as the latest thing in revolutionary chic...
...pleasure and meditation are pretty well excluded, yet if the humanities become "so many social and other sciences, no humanizing effect can be expected from the transaction...
...specialism following specialization...
...Fidel Castro and the nature of their revolution helped them overcome it...
...Most importantly, I felt liberated from the revolutionary myth...
...We are all familiar with that superior type of interview—the lost wax method of interviewing—where the interviewer's questions are removed and the interviewee's answers form a smoothly consecutive whole addressing all your questions (which the smart interlocutor anticipated...
...Every page of the book is a provocation to thought, but in the form of dialectical maieutics that would have gladdened the midwifely heart of old Socrates...
...But he doesn't completely absolve them either...
...And in the last one there is the oxymoron "spirited pessimism," which is worth pondering...
...Others wanted Abrams with them...
...they want democracy...
...Who says that critics have things all their own way...
...Linguists, however, boggle at such prescriptiveness, then turn around and prescribe that others should not prescribe...
...blunders are a natural phenomenon to be respected like the tides...
...Jacques Barzun is able to conduct such a conversation single-handed...
...but what breathtaking points it does make as it hurtles past us breathlessly, e.g.,: ". . . Every liberation increases the sense of oppression . . . the laws enacted to secure the rights of every person and group, by creating protective boundaries, create new barriers...
...criticism is of use only insofar as it doesn't pretend to being a system, a science...
...Though victory was far from assured, the leaders began positioning themselves for the presidential election that would take place once they triumphed...
...But there is also the sensuously unifying assonance of i 's in "mankind side by side with the vile...
...Yet the contras lost...
...In "Reckoning With Time and Place," Barzun, leaning on an essay by Lionel Trilling, defends the historical method as a necessary tool in literary and art criticism...
...Such was the condition of the contra army during the battle over the seating arrangements for Elliott Abrams...
...Once Eden Pastora proved to be an egomaniacal flake, they also didn't have a charismatic leader...
...Meanwhile the public, out of reverse snobbery, humbly submits to the new...
...In the next sentence, consider "study-ridden," so vastly superior to "scholarly" or "academic" or "research-oriented" or the like...
...it is at once stiff and pliable...
...I met few others who did not fall for his seduction...
...at anyone else who wants to introduce concepts of right and wrong into language...
...Genius" is no longer ingenuity, but some sort of superhuman power...
...In higher education we give degrees that supposedly certify excellence and then require stacks of letters of recommendation in order to distinguish real merit from the rest...
...However, when President Eliot of Harvard, a chemist himself, instituted the elective system, whereby students were able to dabble in this and that branch of the humanities, the building of a vigorous humanistic edifice was forgotten, with equally disastrous results...
...As Woodrow Wilson perceived, the business of higher education became "to re-generalize each generation...
...This brings us to the last, longest, most suggestively complex essay, "Toward the Twenty-First Century," in which many of the book's themes are further elaborated, refined, and extended to concepts of justice, morality, manners, politics...
...A Surfeit of Fine Arts" is a cogently argued case against a tabu topic: oversupply in the arts...
...And again: "Plastic, the ubiquitous material, seems the perfect symbol of our state...
...The fourth night you notice she has no legs...
...But unity with the contras was impossible to achieve while he railed against his own allies...
...Check It Out...
...The next essay defines itself succinctly by its title, "The Impossible Problem: Supporting the Arts...
...And the contras had a generous ally in Washington, President Reagan and his entire administration...
...They might as well have told us to stop breathing," says Cruz...
...It contains, among many other things, the useful definition of culture 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...
...Everyone, Barzun says, has become a researcher "by necessity, accident or choice...
...I see in it the reticent melancholy of a wise old man...
...I will say, though, that it is an open ending that will seem too pessimistic to some, too fuzzily hopeful to others...
...An essay such as this (but really the entire book) thrives on the incidental illustrative detail, gleaned from the most astounding byways, and finished off with a witty pointe that fixes it inextricably in our awareness...
...This return to favor was achieved by Harold Nicolson in behalf of Tennyson...
...But my first night with Pastora lasted a full year...
...the attempts to define culture in scientific terms, by measurement, analysis, etc...
...Thus: "One recalls the large Webster, third edition, in which it is said that many educated Americans throughout the country use ain't in casual conversation...
...The House vote in February 1988 against military aid to the contras was the final blow...
...How come...
...The argument proved convincing, and in due course T. S. Eliot turned his solemn gaze on Tennyson and nodded approval...
...The pleasures of reading history are manifold: it exercises the imagination and furnishes it, discloses the nuances of the John Simon is the movie critic for National Review and the theater critic for New York magazine...
...At a meeting called by ten contras to discuss the urgency and necessity of independence from the CIA, all ten present would hurry to call the CIA as soon as the meeting was over to inform on one another...
...By 1920, Tennyson had lost his immense fame...
...And still not content, we also ask for figures based on so-called objective tests...
...Barzun, by the way, is for this usage...
...It does—by asking people to think...
...In any case, he stuck with the contras until 1988...
...The nineteenth century took to history not for the good of the state, but for pleasure...
...In early 1979, Castro summoned leaders of the three Sandinista factions to Havana...
...They aren't Somocistas...
...The intrigues over the seating lasted two weeks," says Cruz...
...But great criticism is finally "Impressionist," and Barzun makes delicious fun of its trendy enemies...
...Cruz grew disillusioned...
...He quit in disgust, then ran for president of Nicaragua in 1984 as Daniel Ortega's foe and later served on the civilian troika of the United Nicaraguan Opposition, UNO, that nominally ran the contras...
...There are many points here heart-warming for a critic, the thrust of the piece affirming the need for critics to defend one side and the other against cultural totalitarianism...
...Once a week would have been overoptimistic...
...For democratic revolutionaries, all they're fighting for is the right to run for office...
...Language must be viewed as "a work of art, a collective work of art, a work of collective art...
...Someone is thinking out loud in print for the benefit of those he cannot reach with the spoken voice...
...In 1982, Pastora defected...
...To say they lacked unity is putting it mildly...
...Reporters just didn't like Reagan and his policies, particularly those involving the use of force (Lebanon, Fred Barnes is a senior editor of the New Republic...
...Cruz doesn't blame them for losing the war with the Sandinistas...
...Tennyson was back in the pantheon...
...The evidence, when tracked down, was a research paper that found half a dozen such speakers somewhere in the Middle West...
...F or years, the Sandinistas were plagued with the Nicaraguan disease, political disunity...
...Politics enters into the picture: the idiocies of the National Council of Teachers of English were sixties-inspired pandering by sentimental liberalism to militant minorities...
...Oliver North and the CIA ordered the leaders to stop scheming, but to no avail...
...Rioting students proclaim themselves artists...
...The generation of the sixties had found in Tennyson "spiritual unrest" and other endearing traits, such as his father's alcoholism, and these Nicolson had not valued properly...
...Licence to Corrupt" is one of the richest essays in the book and hence harder to summarize...
...Spare parts for all vehicles were running out...
...No one has yet explained why language alone of all human handiwork should not be tended and kept in good repair," something impossible if "the linguists, who boast of having 'no respect for words' " will have their own way: urging corruption on the masses "while they themselves continue to write in standard prose remarkable chiefly for its would-be scientific vocabulary and its inadequacy when teaching grammar to the young...
...Note how these sentences, good and informative as they are, all manage also to add to the sheer pleasure of reading...
...The real danger to humanism "is our present combination of specialist and half-baked humanist education," Barzun argues...
...the historian in him knows that there is hope, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1989 but the mortal in him knows that he will not be around to see its fruition...
...The Culture We Deserve comprises twelve essays on history, education, the arts, language, and what, somewhat vaguely, we are forced to call culture, even though it is these days more likely to be a turning away from it, the blatant absence of it...
...Culture, in short, is for meditation and conversation...
...Especially lopsided is the quasi- zoological, quasi-botanical notion that language is a living thing, which in truth is only a frail metaphor...
...The intent of the essay is to demolish the improper uses of the concept "Relativism," which gets blamed for anything and everything these days...
...Cruz argues that the role of Pastora, the heroic Commander Zero who took the entire Nicaraguan parliament hostage in the waning days of Somoza, was critical...
...The humanistic disciplines attempt to be "scientific" because of the success of the sciences, which they envy, and lose the sense of free play they require...
...N ow let me try to summarize, however inadequately, the contents of each of the twelve essays...
...So we are obliged to rediscove heads in the clouds and their feet in the pleasures of ratiocination, or—a dog excrement...
...Instead of bringing unity to the contras, [it] created more chaos," writes Cruz...
...The Catholic Church, a powerful influence in Nicaragua, opposed the Sandinistas, too...
...as a professional, he shouts "Hands off...
...on the other hand, "whoever wants the 42 total reality must first gain access to the mind of God...
...Theory is crippling the arts...
...Yet "language, like history, like the human mind, belongs not to science but to the realm of finesse...
...During his tenure as Provost of Columbia University, Barzun once managed to elicit the ire or mockery of many of his colleagues by sending out a directive requesting the members of the faculty to set off a day for thinking—once a month, I think, it was...
...fine encouragement for removing illiteracy," Barzun counters...
...Again and again Barzun demonstrates that the contemporary world has not one new idea on how to live together...
...Of course, there's always another incentive for temporary unity among Communists...
...He notes that the latest studies in literature and the arts are purely technical...
...Barzun distinguishes between what he calls domestic art and public art and sees no need for supporting the former with public monies...
...Pastora is like the gypsy whom, on your first night together, you cannot help but love more than anything on earth," he writes...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1989 colleagues wandering about with their walk...
...in other words, an essay...
...Barzun applauds this notion, as he does William James's apothegm that the aim of a college education should be, as James told some students, "to help you to know a good man when you see him...
...scholarship ineptly trying to introduce young minds to the arts...
...Pastora dissembled...
...But the conversation of good minds, quick wits, lively inquirers, sharp observers, and graceful stylists in the company of their peers...
...Reading The Culture We Deserve is an encouragement for those willing and able to address the more troubling questions of our time to do so...
...So the best thing the essay can do is to combine the voice of enlightenment with a truly conversational tone...
...Barzun is chiefly concerned with showing that in our century no new schemes of society have emerged other than separatism of various kinds, which does not solve the overarching problems...
...I wouldn't do that to a novel, or to a play or a movie...
...Not the kind of conversation you hear in locker rooms, at the restaurant table next to yours, or while waiting in line for a movie...
...I've met many of them, and they are courageous and dedicated to overthrowing the Sandinistas...
...The literati cowed by Eliot very likely did not go back to reading Kipling with fervor, but another rehabilitation did attract a new public...
...Cruz's book is brimming with tales of mindless bickering among the contra leaders...
...But the justification for critics' being "vanishes if [critics] abandon maieutics—midwifery...
...What happens in an essay...
...Nicaragua was Castro's special project...
...Nor should he...
...But it repeats itself less than most such volumes, and when it does, it does so with a difference: fresh examples, new contexts, a widening perspective...
...Culture High and Dry" concerns the ways in which our culture has become useless: the decline of philosophy...
...But too much creative freedom is self-defeating because novelty can be felt only in relation to a perceived norm...
...I don't mean to blame the victim, the contras, for the crime, which is the continuation of Communist rule in Nicaragua...
...concerns the new Alexandrianism, the preponderance of libraries, dictionaries, data banks—the whole fustiness of our intellectual atmosphere...
...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...
...Look It Up...
...This is quintessential Barzun: informed, concise, elegantly understated, gloriously ironic, and not to be argued away...
...What this comes down to," Barzun comments, "is the thing we today keep bleating about as 'the search for excellence.' If the motto is not hypocritical, it is certainly ineffectual...
...In short, we cannot tell a good man when we see him...
...The cultural historian must not bewail the past or advocate a return to anything whatever, but he must "compare pretension with performance so as to preserve whole and clear certain words, meanings, and standards...
...Not a good thing...
...Like other democrats in Nicaragua, he had a title but no power...
...Even if elected, they won't have absolute power, or anything close to it...
...Rather, it is a state of spirited pessimism like that generated by reading the great novels and epics...
...Let me give you as an example a paragraph from "Where Is History Now...
...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...
...There were plenty of them—as many as 15,000 actual soldiers at one point...
...In the United States, the press wasn't beguiled by the Sandinistas...
...He was one of the Victorians, and Lytton Strachey had just shown what frauds they all were...
...Thus subsidy of the arts becomes even more unaffordable...
...In today's critical schools "method conquers all, and for want of it, past ages must have been lost" in bafflement...
...Pedantry and pretentiousness must be driven from the republic of letters...
...He soon became "the center of the CIA's Pygmalion-like strategy to mold a man into the Che Guevara of the right...
...I decided I could be critical of the Sandinistas but faithful to Nicaragua...
...The southern front, which Pastora led, made no headway...
...Now he's sympathetic but cynical...
...18.95 Fred Barnes colleagues wandering about with their heads in the clouds and their feet in dog excrement...
...I do not, however, wish to give away the ending of the book with its speculations about the future...
...phe Culture We Deserve may suffer from the besetting problem of such collections: inevitable overlapping, a slight repetitiveness...
...ith "Exeunt the Humanities," Barzun is forced to wonder whether we are sure we know which are the humanities...
...fr he absence of a charismatic leader 1 heightened the petty maneuvering among the contra leaders...
...Adolfo Calero couldn't stand Arturo Cruz the elder, and vice versa...
...Where Is History Now...
...I could go on...
...And all this in a style that is conversational but not chatty, lucid but not dry, civilized but not highfalutin...
...Arturo Jr...
...For when summoned to ing The Culture We Deserve is an en think, people laxly or pedantically cart- couragement for those willing and ably ing about their minds can respond nei- to address the more troubling question ther laxly, because the thought now has of our time to do so...
...Great care and sensitivity must be used in correcting anyone in any circumstances," the descriptive grammarians declare...
...In "The Fallacy of the Single Cause," he argues against the oversimplification of history as well as of philosophy, and presents the multiple causes whose interaction is what we call history, which is a process, not a set of isolatable phenomena...
...once a year, too undemanding...
...The third reason is the contras themselves...
...W e come next to "What Critics Are Good For," a question that probably would not be raised outside America, though I remember creating a mild stir at the Tehran Film Festival when I assured someone who couldn't believe it that I actually got paid for writing film criticism...
...We seem to live mainly in order to see how we live...
...A poet, moreover, must be judged by his best work...
...They badly needed one...
...Given the power and prestige of that calling, everyone wants to set himself up as an artist...
...The few working helicopters were needed to pick up wounded soldiers from inside Nicaragua...
...His personality was erratic...
...Read is as all that...
...Sure, a few Stinger missiles would have helped...
...There follows one of the longest pieces, "The Bugbear of Relativism," the only one that has, apparently, not been previously published in some similar form, and the only one that strikes me as unfocused, though not uninteresting for all that...
...It worked...
...As it was, the folks in charge of the contras spent much of their time currying favor with Washington officials, not Nicaraguans...
...One way or another, they managed to stay fed, clothed, and reasonably well armed...
...Meanwhile, "the planes used by the contras to make supply drops were in lamentable shape...
...So he didn't try...
...livo reasons come to mind, and Arturo Cruz, Jr...
...In this respect, he shows the failure of both the social sciences and the arts, and also, of course, of education...
...Today's college freshman is, accordingly, a tabula rasa about history...
...The fact that the Sandinistas were armed to the teeth by the world's greatest imperialist power, the Soviet Union, detracted from the Sandinistas' image...
...The formation of UNO, the civilian leadership of the contras, spurred this...
...So the critic who single-handed had rehabilitated the poet was now counted among his detractors...
...Cruz was in an unusually good position to understand why the shortcomings of the contras were so destructive...
...Once their enemy, the Sandinistas, revealed themselves as a Marxist-Leninist variant of the typical Latin American junta, the Nicaraguan people became anti-Sandinista...
...Or, better yet, take this—and note the use of the epithet firmer "In one African language a woman's breast is feminine if small, masculine if large: it would be foolish to draw political conclusions...
...Susan Sontag might say, though Barzui Yet was this call to thought as quixot- wouldn't—the erotics of thinking...
...The second night you notice she is blind...
...it does not fit smoothly, but force it and it will stretch and hold—until it breaks...
...Calero insisted Abrams sit with him...
...the only thing that would help would be deliberate discouragement, but that too is impossible...
...It is a more detailed examination of how our education, and particularly linguistic education, has failed...
...It has to be assumed, too, that among the letters there will be a truthful one to help us reach a sound judgment...
...The next sentence is perfectly straightforward, which, even without lagniappes, is not to be spurned...
...But Pastora, like the elder Cruz, was given no authority once the Sandinistas took over...
...But he's probably more well known for his love affair with Fawn Hall...
...Conspiracy is the ancient legacy of Nicaraguan political culture...
...We are overrun by fans and buffs, the new breed of pedants, with their barren form of knowledge...
...deals with 41 the uses and abuses of the teaching of history (a subject that, Barzun says, can only be read, not taught, even though he did teach it) and with the total ignorance of history, the teaching of which has been discontinued in thirty states without an outcry...
...if here and ther to be deliberate, nor pedantically, be- they recognize some of their own ideas cause no topic has been assigned...
...Once they win, they'll have absolute power, or at least a shot at it...
Vol. 22 • October 1989 • No. 10
