Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe: Toward the Revival of Higher Education

Rating:
Summary: A treasure!
Review: As an autodidact who is often beguiled, misled, and exasperated by where my search for knowledge takes me, as well as by the poorly thought out and more poorly written books I often begin to read; I was quickly pleased upon starting Hart's fine treatise to realize that I was holding a treasure. Hart can write, and his detailed overview of the salient works in the Western Tradition sparkles with insight and knowledge, and manifests a fine mind and much careful research and deliberation on his subject. Buy it and read it; you'll be thrilled by what you learn!

Rating:
Summary: Back to Basics
Review: Like Harold Bloom's HOW TO READ AND WHY, this book is mistitled. It does not take on the "cultural catastrophe" or deal with the "revival of higher education." Hart has his favorite works of Western thought and literature and discusses them intelligently and entertainingly but does not relate them to what is now going on in college classrooms, as his title suggests. What he does is relate religious thought and texts to secular thought and texts throughout the centuries. He compares and contrasts the religious ideas of the Judeo-Christian tradition to the secular ideas of the Enlightenment and modern works as embodied in Homer, Moses, Socrates, Jesus, St. Paul, Augustine, Dante, Hamlet, Moliere, Voltaire, Dostoevsky, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. If you're interested in the ideas of these people and their works, you should enjoy the book.

Of course, the title Hart chose (or maybe his publisher chose it) is more likely to sell books than a more accurate title would.

Hart's only reference to cultural catastrophe is this line in his afterword: "multiculturalism is an ideological academic fantasy maintained in obvious bad faith."

Rating:
Summary: defending the permanent things
Review: Well known for his eccentric behavior at Dartmouth (such as sporting raccoon coats, using walking canes, sipping alcohol from a flask at football games, driving gas-guzzling cars, as well as for a wooden grabbing contraption used to great effect at faculty meetings), Jeffrey Hart here offers an eloquent defense of what others have called the permanent things. And the greatest defender of those things is education, which provides citizens the tools to recreate civilization if necessary.

Hart argues, quite convincingly, that the motive force of Western civilization is the tension between Athens and Jerusalem, between secularism and faith. He devotes the first part of his book to the background of this idea and exploring it in early literary works. He compares Homer's epics, particularly The Iliad, to the early books of the Bible, which could properly be called The Mosead; Homer depicts the pursuit of warrior heroism and arete (excellence), while Moses represents the triumph of monotheism. In Socrates and Jesus (the latter of whom is given a literary reading), Hart locates shifts within the respective spheres. Socrates takes the Homeric pursuit of excellence and turns it into the pursuit of philosophy and truth. On the Jerusalem side, Jesus marks a movement from the outwardly oriented Mosaic Law toward a more internal sense of holiness. This first section--the explication of the Great Narrative--concludes with Paul, who represents a sort of synthesis between Athens and Jerusalem, bringing together Greek philosphy and Judeo-Christian religion.

In the second section ("Explorations"), Hart traces these tensions throughout various works of literature, beginning with Augustine's Confessions, a work of interior exploration. Hart also treats Dante and Shakespeare, as well as the Enlightenment authors Moliere and Voltaire, who attempted to bring about a Jerusalem-to-Athens shift. Voltaire fairs exceedingly well in the analysis of this conservative writer. Hart admires in the Frenchman his wit and his energy and, indeed, acknowledges that the Englightment, whatever its flaws and ill consequences, is "indispensable." He concludes with a juxtaposed analysis of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. He offers a not entirely original argument of Raskolnikov as Hamlet ("Hamlet in St. Petersburg"), but his reading of Gatsby ("Faust in Great Neck") is both interesting and fascinating--Gatsby is a sort of magician and the work as a whole embodies magical transformation as the essence of modernity.

In the Afterword, Hart presents a delightful and delicious skewering of multiculturalism and finishes on a note of optimism: that we are slowly returning to cognition rather than ideology in our institutions of learning. For that reason, and for Hart's book, we can smile through the cultural catastrophe.