Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe: Toward the Revival of Higher Education.(Review)

Jeffrey Hart Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe: Toward the Revival of Higher Education. Yale University Press, 261 pages, $26.95

To grasp the purpose and scope of Jeffrey Harts new book, which is designed to serve as a refresher course in a close reading of the ideas to be found in the literary classics that have shaped the intellectual and spiritual character of Western culture, it will be useful to turn first to the author's afterword. For while the main body of the text in Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe makes only passing reference to the "catastrophe" alluded to in its title, the afterword succinctly summarizes the nature of the political assault on the humanities that has prompted Mr. Harts own spirited defense of the Western canon in this book.

"Needless to say," he writes, "the villain [in this assault] always turns out to be variously white, male, Western, racist, imperialist, sexist, or homophobic--or, with luck, all of them together." Of the so-called "multicultural" imperative that is central to the assault, he correctly observes that it is

 
   an ideological academic fantasy maintained in obvious bad faith. It really 
   amounts to a form of anti-Westernism. That is, all cultures are to be 
   respected and valued except the civilization of the West, to which, not 
   surprisingly, the actual inhabitants of those other cultures are trying to 
   migrate in large numbers. 

It is Mr. Hart's optimistic belief that the cultural catastrophe that has resulted from this assault is now, as he says, "coming to an end, though with agonizing slowness" In the face of the anti-Western bias that has now been codified in significant segments of the academy, the media, the arts, and the entertainment industry, opinion will inevitably differ about an impending "end" to the Kulturkampf that has been raging now, with devastating consequences, for a quarter of a century. But that is a disagreement about the future, not about the tremendous losses we have suffered in the recent past.

It is in the hope of reversing these losses and recovering a true understanding of the West as a civilization that Mr. Hart has written this engaging survey of its essential texts and tenets, and done so with a clarity, conviction, and elan that give the entire exposition a primer-like authority. This is a book that the parents of all college-age students ought to equip them with as a defense against the ideological blather they are likely to encounter in their classes. Parents, too, would do well to pay the book close attention as a measure of what their kids are getting--or not getting--from their expensive and often wasteful classroom instruction. Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe is, in this respect, a reliable consumers' guide to what is really meant by a liberal education.

Appropriately, Mr. Hart begins his account of what he calls "the narrative of Western civilization" with a close look at both the Iliad and the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. "So far as the chronology is concerned" he writes, "we could start the narrative of Western civilization either with Homer's epics or with the Hebrew Bible. They are the primary documents" It is thus in Athens and Jerusalem, the subject of Mr. Harts first chapter, that the fundamental dialectic--or, if you like, the fundamental tensions--of Western civilization is found to have been firmly established.