From Dawn to Decadence
Dear Judith,
PRINT
DISCUSS
E-MAIL
RSS
RECOMMEND...
Facebook
MySpace
Mixx
Digg
Reddit
del.icio.us
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Sphere
StumbleUponYour first two sentences fooled me into thinking that maybe I had managed to provoke you into indignation or a spasm of outrage--but by your third sentence you make me feel ashamed at the thought. You're right that Barzun's haughty quirkiness is worth a hundred ponderous "survey" books; but since they're usually worth next to nothing, I'm still not sure the multiplication comes up to $36.00. I'd say to Tim Noah, "wait for the paperback." How's that for fence-sitting?
Look--it's a book full of delicious stuff. I loved learning that a descendant of Amerigo Vespucci (Signora America Vespucci) petitioned Congress for payment for the use of her name, that the Spanish used the codpiece for "carrying odds and ends," and that the condom was named for one Colonel Cundom. But I really have trouble with the presumption that charm translates easily into wisdom. At the beginning of the book, Barzun declares that the "characteristic purposes" of the West have now been "carried out to their utmost possibility," and thereby announces that we live at a time when intellectual energy has run out and we've got nowhere to go except deeper into some kind of Sartrean hell, ruled by Boredom--doomed to stay there until a new tribe of philosophes and aesthetes comes to the rescue. So who's he talking to when he says, 800 pages after his opening pronouncement, that "the shape and coloring of the next era is beyond anyone's power to define"? Himself, I hope.
What's happened to me? I'm usually accused of excessive filiopiety, of looking to the past and preaching jeremiads--but Barzun has turned me into a defender of the present! Strange work, this "Book Club" business. Which prompts me to digress. In his discussion of Moliere's Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Barzun makes a marvelous comment about the nature of prose. "Prose," he says, "is the written form of deliberate expression. ... Whereas speech is halting, comes in fragments, puts qualifiers after the idea, and often leaves it half-expressed, prose aims at organized thought in complete units." By way of saying how much I've enjoyed our exchange, I have a confession: I was reluctant to do it because I'm a finicky writer, prone to revise a lot--and the idea of a flurry of e-mails going out to the world gave me pause. But Barzun's definition helps me see that what I'm writing here (I speak only for myself) is not exactly prose. It's something different and new, at least for me, and maybe will have some good effects on my normal writing rhythm. We'll see.
Anyway, here I am rambling haphazardly in just the way that Barzun would expect from a creature come of age in the late 20th century. So let me try to sum up before I get really narcissistic.
I think this book constitutes a variation on the "End of History" theme we got a few years ago from Francis Fukuyama, who got it from Hegel, who got it from a long tradition of apocalyptic thinking in the West. If you think history has in some sense stopped--as Barzun seems to think when he argues that the intellectual capital of the West has run out--you can be either happy or appalled. A lot of what disturbs Barzun about modern life is worthy of his contempt--and, yes, there is wisdom in his analysis, as when he says, about the sexual revolution, with its strangely earnest and joyless pursuit of the perpetual orgasm, "It was apparently not known that desire must be dammed up to be self-renewing." He's on target when he talks about our culture of instant gratification. But I think he is not finally a trustworthy guide to the present. He fails to notice that the impulse toward separatism in its various forms is subsiding, and he fails to take seriously the arrival of globalism--doubtless an oversold and oversimplified term, but surely an inescapable one for a world linked by technology, language (English--the Esperanto of the future), and by a growing awareness that there are no merely national problems and therefore no merely national policies.
Toward the end of the book, Barzun remarks, retrospectively, that "the main merit of the nation-state was that over its large territory violence had been reduced." Isn't it just possible, now that an incipient global politics is beginning to take form, that the 50-plus years since World War II that have passed without a war between major powers could be an augury of good things to come? Isn't it possible that war and the worst kinds of fanaticism have become obsolete in the West precisely because certain ideas (I mentioned individualism yesterday) have triumphed rather than expired? I don't know. I do know that the power of science and technology is terrifying as well as promising, and means, among other things, that we need leaders with perspective and foresight more than ever before. So Barzun is deeply right to warn us against philistinism. But I'd like his book better if it had moved not toward a dismissive conclusion about the shallowness of contemporary culture, but had tried instead to evoke the complexity, contradictoriness, and unpredictability of the outlook for mankind.
Maybe we'll meet again--
Andrew
This week, a discussion of Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence (click here to buy it.) Andrew Delbanco teaches at Columbia. His most recent book is The Real American Dream (click here to buy it). Judith Shulevitz writes Slate's "Culturebox" column. 
Hitchens: How Iraqi Oil Could Change Everything in the Middle East
The Perfect Gift for the Policy Wonk in Your Life
Wait, the Whig Party Is Making a Comeback?
The Copenhagen Climate Conference Is Really Freaking Out My 9-Year-Old
Is Health Care Reform Without a Public Option Better Than Nothing?
The Unspeakably Raunchy English Sex Clubs of the 18th Century
Reader Response from The Fray (to be read after the final entry):
Am I supposed to take any more seriously a "Great Books" seminar than I am a survey course? A handful of us have had four intensive years of study of these "Great Books" themselves, not someone's criticism of them, and it is clear to most of us that any decent study of Western Culture which would actualize the comprehension to which so many pretend is a lifelong activity--not an undergraduate education, not a graduate education, and certainly not even remotely what one finds in most humanities departments or on the besteller lists.
Certainly there are trends and lines of thought that thread their way through this cultural history; and whatever this culture is, it's identifiable as something somewhat organically distinct. Yet, there is a much greater interdependance with other cultural ideas and traditions than most recognize--perhaps simply because most are partisans in some perceived conflict. As is pointed out in "Book Club", Barzun is quite right in being critical of large, simplistic explanations. And, as is also pointed out, he seems then to go on and offer one to the reader. Odd.
I would like to have seen Mr Delbanco expand on his assertion that Barzun also misunderstands science--an estimation I gather I would agree with.
--Keith M. Ellis
(To reply, click here.)
The trouble with books such as Barzun's (or Macaulay, or Marx, or even Kenneth Clark's Civilization) is that, for all their wit, insight, and being enormously learned, they are not broad enough in scope. It is highly implausible that the approximately 5 billion people outside the Western Civilization have had no ideas in the last 500 years that are central or necessary to any discourse about the human condition or culture. To hold that this is the case would be ignorant at best, and more likely, bigoted and dismissive--far from a humanist perspective, in other words.
Of course, these books in recent times avoid the central problem of their authors being completely ignorant of the history of ideas outside the Western world, by being titled Western This and Western That. Conversely, even the most common or garden variety Indian or Kenyan intellectual (or even just educated person), to pluck examples out of thin air, will demonstrate a cross-cultural knowledge and facility with ideas and language that a Jacques Barzun simply cannot match. The phenomenon of books such as Barzun's, and of Westerners thrilling to them, is a prime example of the half-blind admiring the half-ignorant.
--Marty Ginzberg
(To reply, click here.)
[This post produced a long thread of argument and debate in the Fray. For other views, click here and here, and read on:]
It would be better to view Western Civilization in the context of all of the civilizations it influenced and was influenced by. Where would Spain have been without the New World, or Portugal without India? Despite the horrors of colonialism, new ideas were inculcated in each successive generation from chinoiserie to anime. I wonder if perhaps the "falling off" mentioned in all of this discussion isn't perhaps a way of sighing, of communicating that post-post-modernism has been with us way too long.
--Charles Roule
(To reply, click here.)
I bought a copy of From Dawn to Decadence almost immediately after it came out, full of expectation that here was a scholarly text to offer the turn of this century the insights that Henry Adams offered the turn of the last century. While the text certainly has some great moments, it is also at turns overblown and too drawn out. Tracing 500 years of cultural history is an ominous task, and one I am sorry to say Barzun failed at. It is not that Barzun's text is a collection of errors, just that the title and the premise seem to have come from different sources. Henry Adams did a much better job of tracing the diffusion of humanity and culture almost 100 years ago, and interestingly makes only a cameo role in a book which certainly seems to be at least partially inspired by Adams. While Barzun's text is certainly worth reading it is ultimately disappointing.
--R.Lee
(To reply, click here.)
[Notes from the Fray Editor: Sandy, here, says the book does contain errors, and takes issue with Mr Barzun on the topics of secularism, music and syntax. Christopher J. Henrich defends Dorothy L.Sayers--who must be turning in her grave-- from the claim that she was Catholic. And who isn't mentioned in the book? Janacek, Larkin, Pynchon, Pasternak, Jean Renoir and Little Richard were amongst the omissions noticed in The Fray.]