NRO Weekend, July 15-16, 2000
Catacomb Culture
An important new book explains what's wrong with the world.

Edward Feser teaches philosophy at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles

An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture, by Roger Scruton (St. Augustine's Press, 173 pp., $25)

n increasingly vocal but (one hopes) still small contingent among those on the Right — including David Brooks, Fareed Zakaria, and libertarians of the Reason magazine stripe — believe that conservatives are losing the so-called culture wars. Their proposed response is neither continued defiance, nor grim capitulation to the enemy, but serene acceptance of the defeat. We cannot beat the forces of cultural decline, because the public at large has joined them; but that, we are assured, is not quite a catastrophe.

Brooks, in a marketable simulacrum of panache and insight, has fixed the label "bourgeois bohemians" ("Bobos") on a new class of citizen, one in whose rise to prominence conservatives should take comfort. The Bobo New Man has taken up the ways of the counterculture, to be sure, but has also moderated them, in good middle-class fashion. He is depraved (Brooks cheerfully catalogues the rise of such phenomena as suburban sadomasochist support groups), but in a mild, lighthearted, and "responsible" manner: A mélange of de Sade and Disney, he can, to our great relief, be trusted to indulge in his meaningless sexual liaisons in "serially monogamous" mode, to pay for his partners' abortions promptly and in cash, and dutifully to return his pornographic videos to the local rental establishment well ahead of the due date. Moreover, his openness to alternatives looked down upon by the traditionalist is — is it not? — of a piece with the conservative celebration of the cornucopia of the market. He is (as Reason's Nick Gillespie has put it with exuberant philistinism) a "consumer of culture," unafraid to sample the whole range of curiosities modern life offers us, inclusive of "Mozart, Mingus, and Marilyn Manson."

The Bobo is, undeniably, a pretty vapid, uninspiring type — being, of course, none other than Nietzsche's Last Man — but he is us (or most of us, or those of us who count, anyway), and we'd better get used to it. For above all, he is the future. And if you think otherwise, and seek to call your fellow citizens away from their easygoing decadence to a more genteel, elevated form of life, you are not likely to gain converts, win elections, or get published in The New Yorker. Better to triangulate, and opt for a cultural "Third Way" between the more aggressive libertinism of the Left and the traditionalism of the neoconservative and religious Right.

This is shrewd advice, perhaps, if one's interest is in short-term electoral strategy or trend-setting political commentary. Still, no one interested in serious thinking about the long-term prospects of our civilization can fail to regard it as foolish and frivolous, and the "analysis" it rests on as superficial. The cultural Third Way of Brooks, Zakaria, and Gillespie is as vacuous as the economic Third Way of Clinton, Blair, and Schroeder, and (though it is not his explicit target) English philosopher Roger Scruton's new book, just released in America in an edition which expands on the controversial British first edition, shows us why.

Far from yet another breezy compilation of the innumerable signs of our culture's decline, Scruton's essay is a philosophically rich and moving account of what culture is and why it matters. It is impossible to do its argument justice in a brief compass, but in outline, it is this: The idea of a culture is, among other things, the idea of a common culture, the core of which is a set of beliefs and practices which bind a community together and orient it to the task of caring for the next generation and thus reproducing itself. Above all, it involves the observance and perpetuation of various rites of passage that both carry the young over the barrier separating adolescence and adulthood and shore up that barrier, enforcing the sense that youth is merely preparatory to a higher, uniquely rewarding stage of life — one that carries with it the responsibilities entailed by the task of social reproduction.

Necessarily, this process has required that restrictions be placed on the appetites; and universally, such restrictions have been legitimated by a religious conception of the world. Sexual desire in particular has been hedged in and molded by rules whose function is to raise it from the level of coarse, self-regarding animality to a passion which can find its fulfillment only in an absolute commitment to another, enshrined in a vow before God — in, that is, that institution on which the well-being of the next generation, and thus the continuation of the community as a whole, depends. In endowing its citizens with the moral wherewithal to sustain themselves, a common culture also produces creatures whose lives are ennobled, suffused with meaning, and — because informed by a sense of the divine — distinctly human.

The religious vision that sustained the common culture of Western civilization was undermined by the Enlightenment; and that culture was, as a result, itself put in jeopardy. But there is another sort of culture: high culture, the sort represented by the great artistic and intellectual tradition of the West. That tradition was also generated and nurtured by the religious world view shattered by the Enlightenment. Rather than die out, however, that tradition incorporated the Enlightenment into itself, and sought to revive by aesthetic means what was no longer possible through religion: a vision of man as an ennobled being, a vision that could sustain a common culture and the civilization that rests on it in the face of the death of God.

This, Scruton argues, is the true meaning of the great works of the Romantic and Modernist movements, of Wagner's Ring and Eliot's Waste Land: We can no longer see ourselves as at home in the universe, as the centerpiece of a divine order; but we can live as if we were, and we can embolden ourselves in so doing via the education of the emotions afforded by high art.

All culture thus has a religious meaning and a religious function, and we cannot, in Scruton's view, appreciate our present situation if we fail to recognize this. But the religious meaning of modern culture — both high and low — is not the same as that of its post-Enlightenment predecessors. For the Modernist experiment, like the Romantic one before it, has failed. The quasi-religious higher vision of man it sought to preserve has given way to an anti-humanistic nihilism, actively hostile to that vision and bent on undermining it. The abstract forms the Modernists adopted so as to save that higher vision from a collapse into cliché and kitsch have been turned against it and degenerated into the monotonous cycle of cynical, self-mocking pseudo-artworks Scruton describes as the "pre-emptive kitsch" of postmodernism; and the postmodern academy of Foucault and Derrida has belittled truth, beauty, and goodness as fictions serving to mask the will to power of an oppressive traditional culture that must be overthrown at all costs.

The popular culture has followed suit. It is self-consciously and militantly a culture of youth, celebrating perpetual adolescence as a new human ideal. In its incessant anti-authoritarian flippancy, it seeks to rub out of existence the notion of the dignity and honor of responsible adulthood as the highest end of human life, and in its brutal, joyless sexuality it aims, once and for all, to divorce the sexual passions from the spiritual meaning that ennobles them and fuses them to a commitment to the well-being of the next generation. And in doing so it robs human society of all that guarantees its continuance and gives meaning to the lives of its citizens.

The youth culture, and the decadent high culture that seeks increasingly to flatter and emulate it, thus amount in Scruton's view to a "culture of repudiation," whose religious meaning is precisely the reverse of that of the culture it has replaced: Man, it says, is nothing more than a dying animal, a trivial bundle of infirmities whose pointless existence cannot be better spent than in the pursuit of power and pleasure. It is, in Scruton's view, a religion of Nothingness, the closest approximation possible in a world devoid of supernatural forces to "the Devil's Work." Nor is this lost on pop culture's enthusiasts; on the contrary, it is embraced: Consider the hymns to meaninglessness, the morbid self-absorption, of Kurt Cobain — and the absurd, quasi-religious martyr's status they have conferred on him. (Scruton has, no doubt, better things to do than to travel to Las Vegas, but should he ever make the trek he might find of sociological interest the inspiring quote from Cobain, affixed reverently and in bold letters beneath his portrait, that greets the young visitor to the Hard Rock Casino: "I hate myself and I want to die." The unspoken commandment to the faithful is clear: a "hard saying" fully obeyed, thankfully, by none but the most devout.)

As inherently dysfunctional as it is, this is not a culture even Brooks's "Bobos" are capable of assimilating without suffering grave long-term penalties. But if Scruton is right, it is this culture which rules over us. For all that, he is not entirely pessimistic. We live, he writes, in a "spiritual limbo," in a desert of barbarism where there nevertheless exist small, scattered oases of civility, decency, and beauty. And if these can be preserved, there is yet hope for our civilization. That Scruton is thinking very much in terms of the long run, however, is made evident by the examples he looks to for inspiration — for example, the "catacomb culture" of the early church.

What, then, of us — the catacomb dwellers of the present, who labor in darkness, who may well not live to see our efforts bear fruit, and who, as the rise of Bobo conservatism makes evident, cannot rely for fortification even on all of our purported allies? Scruton says little to comfort us in the short term. But perhaps there are, paradoxically, spiritual advantages to be gained from living past the death of God. For the most dutiful of sons and daughters are precisely those who obey their Father even in His absence, without hope or desire for recompense. They, more clearly than anyone else, can see the eternal truth in the old saw that virtue is its own reward. There is consolation in that.