UPDATED: The ‘Moronizing’ Of Modern Culture

“The French Revolution did not generate only a new politics … Along with the new politics there came a new concept of personhood, a self-caressing egotism … a moral and aesthetic theory based upon sentiment” (p. 122). And relativism too (p. 146). In my experience, this malady affects conservatives and liberals alike in the US. Hierarchy, so essential to ordered liberty, is no longer. Lost is the distinction between men and women of character, and those without it; between adults and youth (the latter are usually elevated and worshiped by ever-errant adults); between experience and a lack of it; between quality in intellectual and cultural products, and its absence. Faction has replaced the fellow-feelings that ought to accompany a shared purpose. Talk to me about what you’ve dubbed the Zeitgeist’s ‘moronizing dialectic.’

This was one of the questions I posed to Prof. Dennis O’Keeffe in the second part of our WND.COM interview, “The ‘Moronizing’ Of Modern Culture.” (Last week’s Part I was entitled “Thomas Paine: 18th–century Che Guevara.”)

Still on the topic of the remarkable “Edmund Burke,” my conversation with Dennis O’Keeffe continues this week on WND.COM. O’Keeffe is Professor of Sociology at the University of Buckingham, and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs, “the UK’s original free-market think-tank, founded in 1955.”

The column is “The ‘Moronizing’ Of Modern Culture.”

UPDATE (Oct. 29): Writes Ron S.:

To: imercer@wnd.com
Subject: Please, no more tantalizing via..

…Edmund Burke by Dennis O’Keeffe when it costs $130 at Amazon. Best, Ron S.”

This is why I have resisted a request from an academic press to view my completed manuscript, Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For The West From Post-Apartheid South Africa. With 800 end-notes, and a considerable level of abstraction and originality that do not compromise its readability—my book more than meets the requirements. However, as Ron has discovered, an academic press prints a few hundred copies and sells them to libraries at prohibitive costs.

I am lucky: the academic friends I approve send me their books; I get them free. I say “approve” because I never bother with boring second-handers, writing unoriginal stuff; with topics I do not care for. Nor do I bore myself with the works of people I have no time for. I have a passion for Burke. I have no time for “clever” smarmy comments about the man—comments which may or may not be correct. Burke is too important and too neglected in American public life to mess with.

Dennis’s little gem of a book conveys just this sentiment.