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Title: The Culture We Deserve : A Critique of Disenlightenment by Jacques Barzun, Arthur Krystal ISBN: 0-8195-6237-8 Publisher: Wesleyan Univ Pr Pub. Date: 15 May, 1989 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.2 (5 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A glimpse into wht education is really about
Comment: Oh, I've had my disagreements with Jacques Barzun - some of what he has written about Darwin was as wrong-headed as anything I've ever read - but I've never viewed him as other than an exemplary teacher, an adherent to the highest and best values education has to offer. The one-star rating here by one reviewer is about the worst review I have read at Amazon. He has a right to his opinion; but with all due respect, he has also a right to be wrong and he is fully exercising this right here in his dismissal of this VERY fine book.
Read this book, evaluate it for yourself - it is worth the trouble.
Rating: 5
Summary: People just don't get it
Comment: This book deserves six stars, and mainly because of people like the one-star reviewer before me. For me, a non-reader who, it turns out, was that exactly because of all those post-modern "egalitarians" of our day who write the most boring books on earth (*thinking* they can write because they can quote other, equally boring and useless "scholars" in a million footnotes).
To me these essays by Barzun were nothing new. The tune was similar to that of "Begin Here" and "From Dawn to Decadence," which is, he said it as it really is. College has deteriorated to some hippie gathering; the government tries its best to dumb down everyone to achieve some perverted condition of equality by imposing more stupid legislation while refusing to rely on reason; and there are all the trainspotters out there who think that by specialising in one "extracurricular" thing they deserve to be called intellectuals and Renaissance men.
One does not have to agree with everything Barzun says, but he clearly espouses the use of rational mind in this age of TV and anti-everything protests. He speaks of enjoying things because they are good and deservedly so. He advises on thinking as a pleasure, reading as a pleasure, savouring creations of art because it is good, not "original." He approves of earned inequality: if one is more skilful, experienced, learned, or simply more intelligent, it is only natural for these individuals to be respected for what they have achieved. Democratising everything is a crime against humanity because it holds back the best of the best. No wonder he had to call the book "The Culture We Deserve"--because of this deliberate and myopic levelling.
If my esteemed opponent had read these essays with more care rather than his bias by default (I'm sure you hated the book before opening it), he would have noticed that Barzun does not approve of racism or imperialism. Barzun is a historian first and foremost, and he is simply recording the story of the Western civilisation. Simply because he is not being ideological, prescriptive, and normative but rather a man of strong and well-founded opinions, who can also write exquisitely, it does not mean he is wrong. Just because you were of the Gore- or Nader-voting herd with little critical ability and esteem for individual talent, there is no need to compare him to George W. Bush.
Barzun is right in his view of this age as decadent (and he does not make a judgement of this state of affairs, please note), and in that the cause for that is the massive drive to emancipate and to return to primitivism. This century has produced few great figures in history except for populist and militant dictators who have been able to manipulate faceless masses. There is no incentive to set oneself apart because it is regarded so scornfully by the "democratised" majority as showing off or "unfair." In our day, there is little respect for any great achievement, which I think Barzun's work is. Barzun is a tremendous inspiration.
Rating: 1
Summary: Let's Go Back to the 1880's - Things Were So Much Better
Comment: An attack on the modern intellectual world by a leading light of the conservative "fifties" - that ghastly era that lasted from about 1946 to about 1963. Barzun is upset that the lower orders are no longer deferential to their social superiors, that women and minorities don't settle for crumbs, that students question what their professors say, that universities are not reserved for a small minority of WASP spoiled brats, and that everyone doesn't agree that imperialism is a great project. This is a man who wrote about half a century ago that, walking through the streets of New York City, he was distressed at having to listen to the "Bronx whine" and the "Alabama bleating" of the lower classes. I wonder what groups he could have been thinking about? Thank God that time has passed Barzun and his like by; they were still running American universities, or at least many of them, as recently as the early 1970's. This book is unlikely to appeal to anyone whose thinking is more advanced than that of G.W. Bush. For everyone else it is useful only as a historical document showing what the United States used to be like.
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Title: From Dawn to Decadence : 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present by Jacques Barzun ISBN: 0060928832 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 15 May, 2001 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: Simple & Direct by Jacques Barzun ISBN: 0060937238 Publisher: Quill Pub. Date: 18 December, 2001 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: A Jacques Barzun Reader : Selections from His Works by Jacques Barzun ISBN: 0060935421 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 08 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning by Jacques Barzun, Morris Philipson ISBN: 0226038475 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: May, 1992 List Price(USD): $21.00 |
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Title: The House of Intellect by Jacques Barzun ISBN: 0313200718 Publisher: A Greenwood Press Reprint Pub. Date: 21 March, 1978 List Price(USD): $73.95 |
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