Death of the Enlightenment?

Two recent editorials, today’s by Paul Johnson on Europe, and yesterday’s by David Brooks on the US, detail the decline of culture. Specifically, both detail the decline of culture in public discourse and the degeneration of a public educated in the best it has to offer.

Here’s Johnson on Europe (via Joseph Knippenberg):

Europe was essentially a creation of the marriage between Greco-Roman culture and Christianity. Brussels has, in effect, repudiated both. There was no mention of Europe’s Christian origins in the ill-fated Constitution, and Europe’s Strasbourg Parliament has insisted that a practicing Catholic cannot hold office as the EU Justice Commissioner.

Equally, what strikes the observer about the actual workings of Brussels is the stifling, insufferable materialism of their outlook. The last Continental statesman who grasped the historical and cultural context of European unity was Charles de Gaulle. He wanted “the Europe of the Fatherlands (L’Europe des patries)” and at one of his press conferences I recall him referring to “L’Europe de Dante, de Goethe et de Chateaubriand.” I interrupted: “Et de Shakespeare, mon General?” He agreed: “Oui! Shakespeare aussi!”

No leading member of the EU elite would use such language today. The EU has no intellectual content. Great writers have no role to play in it, even indirectly, nor have great thinkers or scientists. It is not the Europe of Aquinas, Luther or Calvin–or the Europe of Galileo, Newton and Einstein. Half a century ago, Robert Schumann, first of the founding fathers, often referred in his speeches to Kant and St. Thomas More, Dante and the poet Paul Valery. To him–he said explicitly–building Europe was a “great moral issue.” He spoke of “the Soul of Europe.” Such thoughts and expressions strike no chord in Brussels today.

Brooks on the US:

The sad thing is that this type of essay was not unusual in that era. If you read Time and Newsweek from the 1950’s and early 1960’s, you discover they were pitched at middle-class people across the country who aspired to have the same sorts of conversations as the New York and Boston elite.

The magazines would devote pages to the work of theologians like Abraham Joshua Heschel or Reinhold Niebuhr. They devoted as much space to opera as to movies because an educated person was expected to know something about opera, even if that person had no prospect of actually seeing one.

The newsweeklies would have six-page spreads on things like Abstract Expressionism. There was a long piece in 1956 in Time, for example, about the Kitchen Sink School of British painters, as well as analyses of painters who are not exactly household names, like Charles Burchfield and Stanton Macdonald-Wright.

That doesn’t happen today. And it’s not that the magazines themselves are dumber or more commercial (they were always commercial). It’s the whole culture that has changed.

Back in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, middlebrow culture, which is really high-toned popular culture, was thriving in America. There was still a sense that culture is good for your character, and that a respectable person should spend time absorbing the best that has been thought and said.

This is not to say that the overall IQ of Europeans and Americans (and Canadians) has declined. Rather, there has been a degeneration of the cultural literacy and common political and cultural symbols that these societies share. Lacking a knowledge or even appreciation of the higher things, culture necessarily looks for the lowest common denominator to communicate with itself. Everyone knows why “Baywatch” need not be translated to non-English speaking countries.

But “Baywatch” is not all that political. Johnson observes that European politicians can manipulate illiterate masses using anti-Americanism (example here). Increasingly, anti-Americanism has become the lingua franca of the culturally illiterate masses of the world. Knowing they’ve forgotten their own tradition, they attack the primary transmitter of images that make up their world of make-believe. Hollywood, Coca-Cola, and George Bush all get wrapped up into a single message that rulers use to play on the sense of non-existence that their masses feel. The US has its own legions of America-haters.

UPDATE: Joseph Knippenberg, referring to Brooks’s observation that as people age, the thoughts of the great authors recede, asks the $1million question: “Why, gentle readers, do you think this is the case? I have my thoughts. What are yours?”

Can I take the easy why out and say that I haven’t asked too many older people that? No? Ok. I suspect at least part of the answer is 2-fold:

1) once people are in that stage of life when their family and career take up all their time, they simply lack the leisure to ponder life’s great questions as they’re transmitted by the great authors who demand a lot of time and energy from us. Church plays that role for many, while I suppose reading the morning newspaper takes the place for many others (the secular-minded).

2) North America at any rate is very pragmatic, and I suspect that for many upper-middle-class people, life’s big questions have already been answered or that they’re not all that pressing for a good number of people (I’m always reminded of the Myth of Er in Book X of Plato’s Republic where souls that come from well-ordered cities choose the life of a tyrant for their next life).

Writing in the 19th century, Tocqueville observed that democrats read short books and ones that don’t demand much from them. Perhaps when Brooks looks to the 1950s and 60s, he’s looking at the high point of American civilization, at least in this regard. I throw that out more as a provocation, than as a serious hypothesis. Your comments are welcome.