Modern Culture
by Roger Scruton
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Book Summary Information
Author: Roger ScrutonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-11-24
ISBN: 0826494447
Number of pages: 192
Publisher: Continuum
Book Reviews of Modern Culture
Book Review: Nice try, but not quite ....
Summary: 3 Stars
I like Scruton's books, but this is the weakest one I've read. He's conservative in the manner of the British philosopher he is, so in a very reasoned way and quite different from much the term implies for Americans in the context of our virtually content-free and logically-challenged contemporary excuse for political discourse. The book takes TS Eliot's Notes on the Definition of Culture as its point of departure, ranges through concepts and definitions of culture since the term came into use during the Enlightenment, agrees with Eliot that all cultures are fundamentally based on religion, and attempts to deal with the problems of common and high culture in a society that's lost its faith.
He tries to replace the sacred things of the once-faithful with high culture but admits he fails, consoling himself that no one else has succeeded at this and insisting the attempt is important as otherwise the common culture disappears while society needs what it provides. It gives people both purpose and a reassuring context into which their lives fit, therefore a basis for a cohesive society. High culture is the closest thing available to the sacramental or transcendental in a faithless society, but in the end it's not really an adequate substitute.
Scruton makes many insightful arguments and observations, including a lucid critique of pop music based partly on aesthetic and music theories, also on anthropological and sociological analyses. He makes fairly convincing cases that modernist art was a last gasp of Western culture trying to maintain a distinction between high and low, even maintaining a troubled engagement with the religious foundations of Western culture; post-modernist culture has simply given up and lazily merged the serious with the trivial; deconstructionism is essentially nihilistic; and contemporary pop culture is basically one of permanent rebellion without cause, sexuality without purpose or promise, ungrounded youth-orientation without rites of passage to maturity within structured society; blind, unhealthy and counterproductive idolization of pop stars; and of course pop's endless vapidity and its corrosive ubiquity.
The most interesting aspect of this book is that it reveals what was obliquely hinted at in Conservatism but never made express: without making reference to it, Scruton clearly subscribes to the noble lie concept in Plato's Republic - people have to believe something which isn't true for a society to get on. It was the central flaw in the state discussed in Republic, and it's the central flaw here. I sympathize with Scruton, and he's made a noble attempt, but I'm glad I'm able to join Eliot in returning to the faith that's been largely abandoned by the cognoscenti.
To non-believers that faith's a noble (or ignoble) lie, but for me it's truth and possibly the only effective basis for a sustainable, cohesive and coherent society in a post-Enlightenment world. Noble lies can work on duped populations but not on relatively free and educated ones. And as much as I love Beethoven's late string quartets, as Scruton does, and much as they may be the last, best hope of secular humanity to reach the transcendent, in the end they only appear to come close, and only temporarily.
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