Jacques Barzun: From Dawn to Decadence

Jacques Barzun: From Dawn to Decadence, 1500 to the Present, 500 years of Western Cultural Life.

Finally made it through my first reading of this magnificent tome -- done intermittently over the past year -- a chapter here -- a chapter there -- as opportunity presented -- in between the Asian material I've been reading.

It's details are my delight -- all the introductions to authors of whom I'd never heard -- or known just barely.

But it's overall theme still eludes me -- it's concluding chapter is a disaster -- and it just seems to be the rant of a fussy pedant -- who's been scolding students for too many decades -- and seems unaware of the culture that lives and prospers outside of books -- and outside the fads of either popular entertainment or professional academia.

Take, for example, his slam on the internet:

"The last 20C report on the "World Wide Web" was that its popularity was causing traffic jams on the roads to access and the unregulated freedom to contribute to its words, numbers, ideas, pictures, and foolishness was creating chaos - in other words, duplicating the world in electronic form. The remaining advantage of the real world was that its contents were scattered over a wide territory and one need not be aware of more than one's mind had room for."


Is that all this cultural savant can say about this extraordinary phenomenon that has made so much knowledge immediately accessible on demand ? Is he just irritated because he's had difficulty getting connected ? (he must have been using AOL as his service provider!)

More serious -- his slam on what he calls "Demotic life" -- where society caters to individual wants, rather than individuals accepting the lead of an authoritative social order -- what he sees as the culmination of a 500-year process of emancipation.

So now we have the welfare state -- responsible to everyone's needs -- instead of the welfare family/clan -- only effective among those families that can afford it. Is this transformation really a sign of decadence ?

I question his vision -- or rather -- I question it when he looks beyond his world of academia -- where I think he's seeing quite clearly -- and is somewhat prophetic to call his profession back from its scientistic specialization -- and leading it back, through his own heroic example, towards generalism.

Here's a man who reads across all the specialties -- in sciences as well as history, literature, philosophy, theology -- and attends to all the arts - including music and painting (though I don't remember his giving much attention to poetry -- perhaps because he's aiming at a pan-European viewpoint -- and poetry is so language specific.)

But he's also a scholar who seems to be exclusively Eurocentric. Oh - I'm sure he would consider such a criticism to be yet another example of the collapse of Western Civilization -- but, to quote a Chinese proverb : "the mountain cannot see itself" -- and I'm really doubting that anyone who never steps outside our narrow, Occidental corner of the world will ever be able to write about it very well.

The fact is - we Occidentals have had our day in the sun --- over running the rest of the planet and bringing our culture to it. But the sun of that day is setting -- and our leading scholars should probably become as familiar with the other great world civilizations -- as their leading scholars have become familiar with us.