The Fortunes of Permanence

The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia. Roger Kimball. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2012.

The Fortunes of Permanence explores a frequent theme of contemporary conservatism: relativism. For Kimball, relativists do not believe in either value or truth. The common concern of the twenty wide-ranging essays in this book is the loss of criteria for assigning meaning and value in the contemporary world.

Kimball’s argument is that without such criteria there exist no means of making distinctions between superior and inferior, what should last and what will fade. Instead, relativism leads to “ignorance, the habit of intellectual conformity, and the systematic subjection of cultural achievement to political criteria” (13).

Ultimately, he believes, relativism leads to tyranny. In exploring his theme, Kimball travels the worlds of art, politics, social and political philosophy, and economics. Each essay contributes to his overall argument that western civilization and art, free market economics, and American power provide true and permanent values and provide the foundation for a meaningful life.

In this work, Roger Kimball undertakes an important task. The contemporary world is in danger of confusing value pluralism with value relativism. Our world is fascinated by the idea that anything that can be done should be done. Our hyper-modern era often does seem to forget that freedom and responsibility go hand in hand and that some things should remain private. Unfortunately, The Fortunes of Permanence, although thought-provoking, ultimately fails as a thoughtful examination of these important issues.

In Part One, Kimball’s focus is the contemporary United States. His argument is simple and heard often. America is losing its sense of self, its soul, because multiculturalism has resulted in the loss of any permanent objective criteria for assessing quality in literature, architecture, music, moral and political values, and the fine arts.

He looks to Matthew Arnold for the features of culture that he considers most important: (1) relevance to the deepest human concerns; (2) independence; and (3) reliance on first-hand experience. These features require constant nurture and renewal if they are to survive. The American Anglo-Protestant identity, he argues, is rooted in these essential cultural features. Kimball believes that multiculturalism and affirmative action are threats to all three features of that identity, and pursuing these two contemporary fetishes puts America on a suicide course.

Instead of viewing democracy (as does Kimball) as a belief that the many are capable of excellence and motivated toward achievement, the vision of democracy put forth by the multiculturalists asserts that all must be treated equally without concern for their talents, work ethic, or accomplishments.

For Kimball, Pericles’s funeral oration remains a legacy because it exhorted Athenians to re-dedicate themselves to the freedom to excel and to maintaining the standards of the past. Because in Kimball’s opinion the world does not love freedom, the exercise of American power in the world becomes a moral imperative essential to maintaining freedom.

In Part Two Kimball takes on literature, privacy, art, and architecture. He favors the focus on individuality and toughness in the works of John Buchan, the teachings on courage and manliness in The Dangerous Book for Boys, and Rudyard Kipling’s consistent defense of civilization under siege.

Kimball lauds, although he may misunderstand, G.K. Chesterton’s Christian faith and sense of childlike wonder, but disapproves of Chesterton’s criticisms of capitalism. On the other hand, Kimball completely dismisses Martha Nussbaum’s writing on shame and the law in which she argues that shaming people is an affront to human dignity and an impediment to moral progress. Kimball equates this view with the separation of law from sin.

The essay wants to make a principled argument that shaming those who violate the dignity of another human being reinforces the ideal that human dignity embodies. There may be something to this argument. However, this essay is more diatribe and ad hominem attack than a reasoned defense of the idea of stigmatizing an individual who has harmed one of her fellow citizens.

In what is probably the most interesting and nuanced essay in the book, Kimball produces a thoughtful reading of Richard Weaver and his most famous work, The Southern Tradition at Bay. Kimball finds much to admire in Weaver’s defense of an “interlocking hierarchy of duties, filiations, and privileges,” the code of chivalry, the concept of the gentleman, and the importance of religion to order in society.

However, Kimball finds problematic Weaver’s rejection of modernity–particularly his rejection of capitalism, science, and technology. Weaver believed that modernity destroys our humanity by seducing us to materialism. Kimball argues that although he warns us about the “disastrous results of Prometheanism,” Weaver seems unwilling to acknowledge that freedom has two aspects. Freedom increases human choice; it also produces human dislocation. Kimball maintains that Weaver’s dislike of human dislocation induced in him the willingness to give up human choice.

The final three essays in Part Two revolve around art and architecture. He uses Hans Sedlmayr’s Art in Crisis, an art exhibit at Bard College, and an architecture exhibition at Yale to illustrate his contempt for contemporary art and architecture. The critical insight found in Sedlmayr’s work is that the idea of art as an independent and autonomous activity divorced from religion emerged from modernity.

Kimball agrees with the author of Art in Crisis that this emphasis on total autonomy, in which Man sets himself up as God, is the product of pride and has produced disastrous existential and aesthetic results. Art may not need to be grounded in God, Kimball tells the reader, but it must be “grounded in a measure beyond art (197).”

In the final section of The Fortunes of Permanence, Kimball addresses social and political ideas. The section begins with an essay on William Godwin that introduces the basic theme of the final hundred pages of the book. Throughout the section Kimball will use essays on James Burnham, Macolm Muggeridge, Lezak Kolakowski, and Friedrich Hayek to support his claim that idealists, “friends of humanity”–one of whom is William Godwin–are misguided in their belief that human beings are benevolent and that education and the abolition of private property will result in the demise of evil and selfishness in the world. In reality, Kimball argues, that friends of humanity who think like Godwin inevitably end up as the tyrants over and jailers of humanity–that is, as a Lenin or a Pol Pot. Kimball disagrees with those who believe that communism is dead and socialism is discredited. For Kimball, the central tenet of those he dubs “friends of humanity” is an ideal of equality that is impossible to achieve without force and the repression of value and excellence.

Because Kimball understands human nature in the same way as did Thomas Hobbes, he believes that free societies must be run by minorities that are dedicated to excellence, the freedom of the individual to achieve, and commitment to maintaining substantive values–“to an ideal of the good and (just as important) an acknowledgment of evil” (315). Kimball, like Hayek, finds the greatest danger to these values in liberal intellectuals because of their assumption that reason and science will allow humanity to eliminate ignorance, poverty, and disease and still maintain human liberty.

Roger Kimball’s The Fortunes of Permanence demonstrates an understanding of the pneumopathology of our time. However, his reaction to that pneumopathology is doctrinaire and unlikely to assist us in dealing with the problems of modernity. There are several reasons why.

One reason is the nature of the myth Kimball creates. Recently my husband and I attended a University of Notre Dame football game. Notre Dame always has been a place of myth and legend, and the university has carefully honed that myth in recent years. In fact, watching the behavior of some Notre Dame fans led me to think the myth of Notre Dame had become a cult for some individuals and families.

One HAD to begin the day at the bookstore. One HAD to watch the Irish Guard march, the Glee Club concert in front of “Touchdown Jesus,” and the players’ walk. One had to visit the gym to watch the video history of football at Notre Dame and go to the Grotto to say a prayer.

The two days spent on campus were a fascinating example of Voegelin’s insight that it is not a question of whether human beings believe in myth; rather, it is a question of what myth human beings live. Some choose to live the Myth of Notre Dame; others choose among the myths of science, liberal democracy, capitalism, socialist man, the State, or some other.

The important distinction is the distinction between partial myths and myths of the whole. Partial myths, Voegelin suggested, attempt to explain all reality based on one part of it. They are ideologies. Myths of the whole, on the other hand, offer a complete vision of the whole that is not final or totalizing. Myths of the whole accept changes in existential conditions that further unveil the mystery of existence.

The most basic problem with The Fortunes of Permanence is that Kimball describes a partial myth–an ideology–but believes his ideology is the final unveiling of the mystery of existence. As a result, he sets up Straw Men to knock down and then congratulates himself on their destruction. He would not agree that every society faces the task, “under its concrete conditions, of creating an order that will endow the fact of its existence with meaning in terms of ends divine and human.” For Kimball permanence is finality. In the end, he opposes one ideology with another ideology and gives his readers no genuine insight into why, beyond mere preference or blind prejudice, they should prefer the Myth of Permanence and American Exceptionalism to the Myth of Multiculturalism.

Further, there are few new insights in this book. Many of the topics visited have been better done elsewhere. Quoting those with whom one agrees does not necessarily provide the most convincing support for an argument; it merely shows how many books one has read. Donald Kagan and Clifford Orwin, for example, have written more rigorously and persuasively in support of the realist interpretation of Pericles’ funeral oration than does Kimball. There are far better short pieces on multiculturalism, pieces that take multiculturalism’s arguments seriously even when opposing them.

Because the essays in The Fortunes of Permanence are not tightly written, they often remain unpersuasive. To understand G.K. Chesterton one would do better to read Neil Gaiman’s and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens than to read Kimball’s scattered and ideologically driven essay. There are more thoughtful and rigorously written essays on the very real problem of what Gertrude Himmelfarb called the “repeal of reticence.” Her book is one of them, but there are others. It was good to read about James Burnham again; it was sad to see his work turned into a rhetorical tool rather than the subject of genuine analysis.

A final issue is a sort of intellectual confusion that pervades The Fortunes of Permanence. Kimball both supports and rejects modernity. Although apprehensive of the problems resulting from modernity’s emphasis on reason and science, he generally is supportive of these aspects of the modern world because he believes they enhance freedom, particularly economic freedom. Kimball appears to remain unaware that there are some contradictions between his rejections of great swaths of contemporary culture on the grounds of permanence and the freedom of choice and the experimentation that he lauds in free market economics.

And, while supportive of religion as the foundation of civic virtue and Anglo-Protestant ideals, Kimball’s religion is a lifeless following of form seemingly unconnected to faith. He definitely lacks a sense that the world of existent things is part of a larger comprehensive reality. In the end the messages with which he leaves a reader are to support a certain kind of religion because it is part of a tradition that he favors and to support free market economics because it enhances freedom–but not the freedom to explore new mediums and ideas in the arts because he does not like them or finds them shameful.

In the end, this book is a fairly entertaining read, but it is an exercise in self-indulgence on the part of the author that demonstrates little respect for the analytical skills of his audience.

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