Anti-Climacus

Roger Kimball, one of America's resident geniuses on the subject of, well, everything, has a nice essay up on the New Criterion website.

Me likey:

"The attack on permanence comes in many guises. When trendy literary critics declare that 'there is no such thing as intrinsic meaning,' they are denying permanent values that transcend the prerogatives of their lucubrations. When a deconstructionist tells us that truth is relative to language, or to power, or to certain social arrangements, he seeks to trump the unanswerable claims of permanent realities with the vacillations of his ingenuity. When the multiculturalist celebrates the fundamental equality of all cultures--excepting, of course, the culture of the West, which he reflexively disparages--he substitutes ephemeral political passions for the recognition of objective cultural achievement. 'A pair of boots,' a nineteenth-century Russian slogan tells us, 'is worth more than Shakespeare.' We have here a process of leveling that turns out to be a revolution in values. The implication, as the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut observed, is that
the footballer and the choreographer, the painter and the couturier, the writer and the ad-man, the musician and the rock-and-roller, are all the same: creators. We must scrap the prejudice which restricts that title to certain people and regards others as sub-cultural. But what seems at first to be an effort to establish cultural parity turns out to be a campaign for cultural reversal. When Sir Elton John is put on the same level as Bach, the effect is not cultural equality but cultural insurrection. (If it seems farfetched to compare Elton John and Bach, recall the literary critic Richard Poirier's remark, in Partisan Review in 1967, that 'sometimes [the Beatles] are like Monteverdi and sometimes their songs are even better than Schumann's.') It might also be worth asking what had to happen in English society for there to be such a thing as 'Sir Elton John.' What does that tell us about the survival of culture? But some subjects are too painful. Let us draw a veil ?

'The history of philosophy,' Jean-François Revel observed in The Flight from Truth (1991), 'can be divided into two different periods. During the first, philosophers sought the truth; during the second, they fought against it.' That fight has escaped from the parlors of professional sceptics and has increasingly become the moral coin of the realm. As Anthony Daniels observed in his essay for this volume, it is now routine for academics and intellectuals to use 'all the instruments of an exaggerated scepticism -- not to find truth but to destroy traditions, customs, institutions, and confidence in the worth of civilization itself.' The most basic suppositions and distinctions suddenly crumble, like the acidic pages of a poorly made book, eaten away from within. 'A rebours' becomes the rallying cry of the anti-cultural cultural elite. Culture degenerates from being a cultura animi to a corruptio animi."