A Corrupção da Cultura e o Novo Livro de Roger Kimball

Uma resenha do novo livro de Roger Kimball, The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine’s Press, 360 pp., $35) “Culture,” Kimball tells us, is in fact the activity of “cultivating,” which is what education should do. To be successful, this cultura animi, the “cultivating of the mind,” requires “time and continuity,” the “tips, habits, prohibitions, and necessities that have been accumulated from time out of mind and passed down, generation after generation.” In short, education requires tradition, what Kimball calls the “aegis of permanence.” Yet we live in a time when so much militates against tradition: “instantaneity,” a mania for the new and a suspicion of the past; the two-bit nominalism that argues against any intrinsic meaning in cultural products or values; the claim that truth is only a construct of power or language; and the multiculturalist claim that no value judgments can be made about different cultures. All lead not to “cultural parity,” Kimball writes, but to “cultural reversal,” the process whereby “culture degenerates from being a cultura animi to a corruptio animi,” as the wisdom of the past is disparaged or forgotten. And this corruption spreads throughout the whole of social and personal life, from today’s “pansexual carnival” to the Internet’s glut of disconnected information: “Data, data everywhere, but no one knows a thing.” The result is that we “neglect the deep wisdom of tradition and time-sanctioned answers to the human predicament.”