Esolen on the permanent things

Anthony Esolen is even more gloomy-and-doomy than Your Working Boy. Excerpt:

I have had, in the last couple of days, a deeply disconcerting experience. I'm reading the book above by Russell Kirk, an erudite and tightly reasoned set of essays on what he calls the recurrent Gnostic heresy: the frankly fanatical belief, mingled with a hunger for power, that one can build a society from the abstract ideals spun out of one's own spidery mind. Kirk was writing in 1969, and at that time the principal threat to the west was the Soviet experiement against reality. He saw, however, that the hatred of traditions (and, by implication, of independent localities, of natural aristocracies, and of the Good which measures man, and which man of himself does not create and cannot attain) had infiltrated the humane letters, with pretty dreadful results. He quotes the old-fashioned liberal Lionel Trilling as wondering whether, in fact, the novel had already died. I don't think the novel is in any better shape now than it was then, but in 1969 Kirk could still write that professors of English had held the line against the politicization of literary studies, and their consequent flattening. English professors could still be relied on to foster the moral imagination of their students by introducing them, without swastikas or hymns to Five Year Plans, to Homer and Hesiod, Virgil and Cicero, Dante and Erasmus and Shakespeare and Milton and Dostoyevsky. That was then.

And now? You ought to read what Esolen thinks of the California gay marriage decision.It brings to mind the great argument in First Things about whether or not the abortion regime signaled "the end of democracy."