DANIEL HANNAN: A REVIEW OF ROGER KIMBALL’S “THE FORTUNES OF PERMANENCE-CULTURE AND ANARCHY IN AN AGE OF AMNESIA”
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100175368/the-fortunes-of-permanence-culture-and-anarchy-in-an-age-of-amnesia
PLEASE ALSO SEE: A REVIEW BY BRUCE THORNTON http://www.city-journal.org/2012/bc0803bt.html
RUTH KING: A REVIEW AND INTERVIEW: ROGER KIMBALL: “THE FORTUNES OF PERMANENCE-CULTURE AND ANARCHY IN AN AGE OF AMNESIA”http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-fortunes-of-permanence-culture-and-anarchy-in-an-age-of-amnesia
Daniel Hannan is a writer and journalist, and has been Conservative MEP for South East England since 1999. He speaks French and Spanish and loves Europe, but believes that the European Union is making its constituent nations poorer, less democratic and less free.
In one of his Cicero novels, Robert Harris has the slave narrator, Tiro, wonder why anyone wants to build empires or raze cities when they might instead be sitting in the sunshine with a good book.
I can’t remember when I last sat in the sunshine with such a pleasant feeling of anticipation as when carrying Roger Kimball’s wonderful book,The Fortunes of Permanence.
Kimball is one of the cleverest men alive, and has interesting things to say about almost everything: art, architecture, rhetoric, statecraft, theology, music, poetry, history. His prose style is a joy: erudite but never recondite, witty but never precious. He carries large chunks of the Western canon in his head, and can find an apt quotation for every situation without coming across as contrived. He is a master of the art (so clumsy in the wrong hands) of parenthesis.
The only reason that Kimball, editor of the cultural review The New Criterion, and publisher of Encounter Books, is not acknowledged as one of the great intellectuals of our age is that he is on the Right, and so occupies a place beyond the mental horizons of the commissioning editors who set the tone of our public discourse. Since there are as yet few signs of the cultural shift he would like to see, I’m afraid his recognition will be largely posthumous. Something similar might be said of his British equivalent, Roger Scruton, but that’s another story.
The Fortunes of Permanence is a collation of linked essays. Some centre on literary and philosophical figures: William Godwin, Rudyard Kipling, G.K. Chesterton, Malcolm Muggeridge. (Kimball, educated in Maine and at Yale, is the most penetrating Anglophile I know: he sees us as we are, with all our faults, and likes us anyway.) Others look at the major political currents of the past hundred years.
Kimball has three chief aims. First, to rescue the notion of high culture in an age where the sheer proliferation of outlets has prejudiced the idea of a canon of knowledge: ‘Data, data everywhere, but no one knows a thing’. Second, to destroy the notion that unfocused benevolence is a sound basis for a political programme. Third, to entertain.
This he does, beautifully. His piece on John Buchan, for example, is as fine as anything you’ll have come across. If, like me, you thought of Buchan mainly as a thriller writer, think again: he was a non-fiction author of outstanding quality. How refreshing to read an analysis which considers him on his merits rather than backdating modern notions of what constitutes an acceptable attitude to colonialism and blah blah fishcakes.
Kimball approvingly quotes a Chestertonian aperçu: ‘Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which you are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked. It may be that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal, and that you are a paralytic’.
Quite so. Next to its many other recommendations, this work is a glittering hoard of unfamiliar quotations. Here, for example, is a passage from Edmund Burke’s Appeal from the New Whigs (1791) which might serve as a theme for the entire book:
> An ignorant man who is not fool enough to meddle with his clock, is however sufficiently confident to think he can safely take to pieces, and put together at his pleasure, a moral machine of another guise, importance and complexity, composed of far other wheels, and springs, and balances, and counteracting and co-operating powers. Men little think how immorally they act in rashly meddling with what they do not understand. Their delusive good intention is no sort of excuse for their presumption. They who truly mean well must be fearful of acting ill.
Such a brilliant insight profits from elaboration, and Kimball provides it, with a clarity of thinking that will have future generations reaching for him as we do for Burke. For example:
Multiculturalism is a moral intoxicant; its thrill centres around the emotion of superior virtue; its hangover subsists on a diet of nescience and blighted ‘good intentions’.
Spot on. A great deal of Leftism is based around the elevation of vaguely wanting the world to be nicer into a political philosophy. Not actually making the world nicer – quite the opposite, usually – but wanting it. It is the ultimate political narcissism, privileging the moralistic (holding the correct opinions) over the moral (doing the right thing).
Looking back, I realise that I am making Kimball’s book sound far worthier and stodgier than it is. Kimball is every bit as entertaining on Hayek as he is on The Dangerous Book for Boys. There is even – joy of joys – a beautiful little coda about the Anglosphere.
Like Horace, Kimball sets out to amuse as well as to inform. It is true, but incidental, that you will finish this book a better conservative and a more rounded human being than when you began. The real delight is in the reading.
Tags: conservatism, Edmund Burke, G K Chesterton, John Buchan, New Criterion, Robert Harris, Roger Kimball, Roger Scruton, Rudyard Kipling,Tocqueville
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