Venturing Provocative Judgments

...The upshot is floating hostility to things as they are: "The hope is that getting rid of what is will by itself generate the new life...

...Barzun is content to describe the contents of our overarching culture, noting with fastidious care the West's endless series of persisting opposites, in religion and art, politics and morals...

...Can there be, one wonders, another Luther waiting at the door...

...That sentence is typical of the graceful concision the author sustains for 800plus pages...

...Individualism, or the irrepressible urge to develop one's talents...

...The book is also leavened with apt boldface inserts—crisp snippets from songs, speeches and books, many unfamiliar, such as the astute prophecy of the British ambassador to Austria in 1913: "Serbia will someday set Europe by the ears and bring about a universal war on the Continent...

...But wait...

...From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life might at quick glance appear to be that soporific thing, a professorial "survey," an eye-glazing assemblage of names and dates plastered in place with platitudes...

...The term is not a slur...

...Despite the near-universal belief that Marx was the first to refer to "the dustbin of history," the coiner of the phrase was the British politician and writer Augustine Birrell...

...it is a technical label...

...The Victorian institutions, and their counterparts outside England, no longer commanded allegiance or respect...

...The thoughtful knew that a certain view of life must be given up, but not by revolution in the heroic mood— that had bred its own evils...

...And what is the final reckoning...

...Reviewed by Karl E. Meyer Co-author, with Shareen Blair Brysac, of "Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia" My spontaneous response upon learning of Jacques Barzun's hefty new work was delight and surprise that he is still with us and still scribbling...

...On more than one occasion he was a severe judge of his country...

...A decadent culture offers opportunities chiefly to the satirist, and the turn of the 15C had a good many, one of them a great one: Erasmus...

...His uttering that perception while the queen was being glorified was apt...

...Barzun wakes us up with the first of his 30-odd sketches of the West's geniuses and troublemakers...

...There follows a summary, seasoned with aphorisms, of the unreformed Church of Rome, its gluttonous monks, its corrupt but art-loving Popes, its practice of ordaining boys of 12 as bishops, their wealthy families having provided early for their future happiness...

...When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent...

...Not all "facts," however, are what they seem...

...Louis XIV was much too clever to have said, 'The State...

...they rest on a solid base of facts that nobody disputes"—something common sense also tells us...

...Impressively, Barzun keeps a complex narrative flowing as it moves from century to century, from the arts and sciences to politics and plumbing, its themes encapsulated in the lives of the famous, the infamous or the scarcely known (e.g...

...He is old-fashioned in the best sense of that phrase, irradiating From Dawn to Decadence with the scholarship of figures whose names one rarely sees nowadays, like Preserved Smith, Alfred Jay Nock, José Ortega y Gasset, Joseph Wood Krutch, and Sir Norman Angeli, a reminder of the untapped riches in forgotten volumes...

...Another strategy is the use of "cross-sections" to suggest how the world looked from Madrid in 1540, Venice in 1650,Londonin 1715, Weimar in 1790, Paris in 1830, and Chicago in 1895—altogether a nice flourish, with a suitable cadenza: New York around 1995...

...Barzun's erudition and enormous range have earned him the right to plunge his oars into the deepest seas...

...That introduces us to Luther's counterpoise in the battle of ideas, a tolerant Christian reformer who did not experience faith as a passion...

...Boredom and fatigue are unavoidable, hence the proliferation of religious cults and the impulse of primitivism...

...Born in France in 1907, formerly a professor of history and provost at Columbia University, author of Berlioz and the Romantic Century (1950) and other important books, Barzun is seemingly the sole survivor of that once celebrated constellation on Momingside Heights: Lionel Trilling and Meyer Schapiro, Richard Hofstadter and Margaret Mead, C. Wright Mills and Ivan Morris, among others...

...Our age is Decadent, though not in the sense of total ruin, or the loss of energy and talent...

...Since there are no preconceived 'ends' that things must 'reach,' anything is possible...

...Kipling is too often regarded as a jingo imperialist...

...I am the State.'" "A movement in thought or art produces its best work during the uphill fight to oust the enemy, that is previous thought or art...

...These themes mingle andjostle, inspiring visions of Utopia, religious insurrections, demands for social and economic equality, but also contending brands of political extremism, Right and Left...

...The ethos could be overturned in the literal sense— turned upside down—by ridicule, by doing in all things the exact opposite...

...Secularism, stemming from classic works that depict the world in a man-centered way...

...On the living canvas of experience we have indeed explored the outer limits of extremism: nationalist, militarist, Marxist, capitalist, theocratic and racist...

...Yet of human skills, the predictive is perhaps the most fallible...

...On the contrary," he writes, "it is a very active time, full of deep concerns, but peculiarly restless, for it sees no clear line of advance...

...Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result...

...At 92, on the evidence of this bravura performance, Barzun remembers more than most of us have learned...

...And who lost out...

...Within each, he traces thematic currents, identified as Emancipation, "the modern theme par excellence...

...and Primitivism, or the restless quest for a simpler, fairer natural order...

...On this Barzun is calmly categorical...

...Institutions function painfully...

...Or: "It is a notable feature of 20C culture that for the first time in over a thousand years its educated class is not expected to be at least bilingual...

...This had been said over and over, yet the old bulk was immovable...

...evidently aware of portents of change, of some risen wind that could overturn and destroy...

...But what truly confounds narcolepsy is Barzun's unfashionable willingness to venture provocative judgments...

...the feminist Christine di Pisan, the medical innovators Paracelsus and Thomas Beddoes, the military engineer Vauban, the financial adventurer John Law, the gifted educator Marsilio Ficino, the English critic James Agate...

...In any such Moby Dick of a book there is the risk that the great white whale will take over and run amok...

...In the West at least, victory has seemingly gone to a flawed system of welfare capitalism that gives us wealth at the expense of fairness, and to a consensual democracy that enthrones focus groups...

...Taken in all," he writes, "Venice [in 1650] was the nearest approach ever made to Plato's system of rulers by duty and dedication who govern soberly...

...Mercifully, Barzun is not captive to any historical System...

...The forms of life as of art seem exhausted, the stages of development have been run through...

...He freely acknowledges what common sense tells us, that history offers a vision and not a transcript of the past, but that good visions "are not merely plausible...

...The great advantage for science of an aimless universe is that it frees the imagination...

...About Martin Luther, he begins: "When the miner's son from Saxony, Luther, Lhuder, Lutter, or Lotharius as he was variously known, posted his 95 propositions on the door of All Saints' Church at Wittenberg on October 31, 1517, the last thing he wanted to do was to break up his church, the Catholic (= 'universal'), and divide his world into warring camps...

...Victory brings on imitation and ultimately Boredom...

...The system was rotten," the author asserts in a passage that helps explain his title...

...Barzun maintains control, on the whole I think successfully, by defining what he is about and sticking to his design...

...Gilbert and Sullivan's topsy-turvydom was to be enacted in social thought and real life...

...His focus is on the modern era, which he dates from the Reformation, and the great revolutions that have shaped our minds and behavior —the monarchical, liberal and social, roughly a century apart...

...who in 1900 got the 20th century right...