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Roger Kimball on the Present Age
Monday, July 30, 2012, 9:47 AM
 | @rr_reno

The Catholic World Report has posted a wide-ranging interview with New Criterion editor Roger Kimball.

Kimball’s new book, The Fortunes of Permanence, collects his recent essays of literary, artistic, and cultural criticism. This interview reflects quite well what I’d call Kimball’s metaphysical concerns. He nicely diagnoses one of the consequences of moral relativism: boredom. I’m less and less convinced the “relativism” accurately describes the mentality that threatens us. Moral “minimalism” seems more accurate, because there remains a sense that some things are wrong and must be prohibited. But the robust view of morality as a system of honor and shame ordered toward disciplining our souls, and thus bringing our humanity to a richer, fuller perfection . . . well, that’s not just inoperative, it’s positively prohibited, because deemed “oppressive.”

And without this robust view, culture goes flat, and our souls go flat. Upshot: culture devolves into entertainment, distraction, and therapeutic policing of excesses and dysfunction.

In any event, read the interview and take in Kimball’s multifaceted take on our present age.

4 Comments

    Douglas Johnson
    July 30th, 2012 | 12:21 pm

    Reading Rusty Reno’s post I could not help of thinking of the following passage from Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man, and in particular the last sentence. I think moral minimalism sounds about right, but what’s the appeal of it? I have seen no evidence that moral minimalism delivers real happiness to anyone. But perhaps it doesn’t really need to deliver such happiness. Sometimes it seems all it offers is relief from having to do the work of manning the defenses.

    To take just a single example, the marriage debate, the victories by those who want to redefine marriage is most often seen in the weariness expressed by some of their opponents. Unmoored from the joy of marriage grounded in the creation of new life, this weariness leads to pessimism, resignation, and capitulation.

    Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy. It is when for some reason or other the good things in a society no longer work that the society begins to decline; when its food does not feed, when its cures do not cure, when its blessings refuse to bless. We might almost say that in a society without such good things we should hardly have any test by which to register a decline; that is why some of the static commercial oligarchies like Carthage have rather an air in history of standing and staring like mummies, so dried up and swathed and embalmed that no man knows when they are new or old. But Carthage at any rate was dead, and the worst assault ever made by the demons on mortal society had been defeated. But how much would it matter that the worst was dead if the best was dying?

    Chesterton, G. K. (2005-03-21). The Everlasting Man (p. 125). Old LandMark Publishing. Kindle Edition.

    Douglas Johnson
    July 30th, 2012 | 3:35 pm

    Roger Kimball points the finger at boredom here, and that brings to mind the NIV translation of Ephesians 4:19 that I’ve always found rather haunting:

    Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more.

    Felapton
    August 1st, 2012 | 8:52 am

    How awful, the boredom of modern, democratic, liberal society. It’s enough to make people long for the boredom of that wonderful, Catholic, feudal society which proceeded it, the boredom of being born a serf on some nobleman’s estate, which couldn’t produce enough food for the serfs to eat on non-feast days, even though they had to work seven-day weeks of sixteen-hour days at back-breaking (but exciting) tasks like plowing with a wooden ploughshare, all the while enjoying the thrill of bearing and raising fourteen children or so, only to watch them all die of starvation, typhus and fighting in the master’s crusades.

    Maybe somebody should have asked Chesterton’s scullery maid whether she wouldn’t have preferred a little post-modern boredom once in a while.

    Benighted Savage
    August 2nd, 2012 | 3:58 am

    Felapton,

    I think you’re on the right track. Kimball confuses the importance of transcendental moral principles, and their relationship, with hierarchy as it is embedded in a society and between societies. How this confusion is typically expressed can be summed up as follows:

    1.) within a society: “If there are no lower classes, everything is permitted.”

    2.) between societies: “If there are no benighted peoples, everything is permitted.” (AKA, the prejudice that “The wogs begin at Calais”).

    Thus, any serious attempt to address the scullery maid as a scullery maid can be dismissed as being a relativistic, nihilistic, utopian, etc. attack on the “social order.” Similarily, let’s suppose that this maid is an immigrant from Jamaica: any attempt to seriously come to terms with — or even to try to understand — her specific heritage as a Jamaican will be discounted as a relativistic, nihilistic attack on Civilization.

    From this position, it is often (and unfortunately) the case that looking down upon someone because she is a scullery maid or a Jamaican is confused with looking up to God. The mischief that arises from the original set of prejudices is thus compounded.

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