Ad multos annos!(Counterpoints: 25 Years of The New Criterion on Culture and the Arts)(Book review)

Counterpoints: 25 Years of The New Criterion on Culture and the Arts, edited by Roger Kimball and Hilton Kramer (Ivan R. Dee, 512 pp., $35)

A QUARTER-CENTURY ago, Hilton Kramer, the former chief art critic of the New York Times, and the late Samuel Lipman, a distinguished pianist and critic, started a highbrow, small-circulation monthly review of the arts and intellectual life. The writer Roger Kimball, who joined The New Criterion a few years after its founding and is now co-editor and co-publisher, recently described the complacent, left-dominated cultural attitude that the magazine sought to explode. "Standards--aesthetic as well as intellectual--were low, but then so were expectations," he told FrontPage Magazine:

 
   Words like "transgressive" and "challenging" had just begun their 
   bizarre mutation into terms of critical commendation, while 
   traditional epithets such as "beautiful," "technically 
   accomplished," even "true" were drifting into desuetude. What the 
   historian Elie Kedourie called "the Chatham House Version"--that 
   toxic amalgam of smugness, moral relativism, and cherished feelings 
   of guilt about the achievements of Western civilization 
   --everywhere nurtured the catechism of established opinion. 

The Italian philosopher Rocco Buttiglione calls this ethos the "suicide of culture," and worries that, unless reversed, it spells real trouble for the West.

Since Day One back in 1982, The New Criterion has pursued a twofold critical vocation, seeking to do away with that still-pervasive worldview--and to replace it. Its first task has been relentlessly negative: "the gritty job of intellectual and cultural trash collector," as Kimball and Kramer put it in their introduction to this new anthology. A lengthy section of this book, "Contentions," collects essays that fall under this heading, and they're a joy to read (or re-read). Here's the opening of one, by David Pryce-Jones: "Eric Hobsbawm is no doubt intelligent and industrious, and he might well have made a notable contribution as a historian. Unfortunately, lifelong devotion to Communism destroyed him as a thinker or interpreter of events." No minced words there! In muscular prose, Pryce-Jones shows how Hobsbawm's intellectual failings--his see-only-the-bad-side view of democratic capitalism and his whitewashing of Communist atrocities--grow out of a deeper moral failure, an icy indifference to human suffering.

Hobsbawm's is just one inflated leftist reputation punctured. Other targets include Noam Chomsky, whose apologetics for the Khmer Rouge and al-Qaeda come under withering fire from Australian historian Keith Windschuttle; the bloodthirsty anti-colonialist Franz Fanon, who achieved "the Platonic form of human resentment," according to the brilliant Anthony Daniels (who also appears in Counterpoints as Theodore Dalrymple); liberal jurists, exposed by Judge Robert Bork in one of the sharpest essays on American constitutionalism you'll ever read; PC curators at the Smithsonian, mocked by City Journal's Heather Mac Donald; and many more. The book, like the magazine, features dose after dose of emperor-has-no-clothes truth-telling. The cumulative effect is bracing.

The New Criterion's intellectual mission has also been constructive: restoring Western civilization's greats to their proper status. In an era when the university and other elite institutions have refused to uphold "the best that is known and thought in the world" (Matthew Arnold)--worse, have relentlessly attacked it as racist or sexist or classist--Kimball and Kramer have offered an ongoing, ten-times-a-year, high-level education in the humanities. In the section called "Recuperations," readers will find some splendid examples. My favorite is Joseph Epstein's "The Intimate Abstraction of Paul Valery," which places the French poet and aphorist--"Everything changes but the avant-garde" is one of his ...