Experiments Against Reality: The Fate of Culture in the Postmodern Age

In these essays, Kimball examines the influences that have shaped our 21st century culture, re-evaluating prominent authors and philosophers who have contributed to and commented on the culture. The lively writing is more concerned with literature and literary criticism than philosophy which plays a secondary role. Sixteen chapters subject sixteen figures to his balanced and measured scrutiny. Beginning with the poet T E Hulme, they include T S Eliot, Auden, Wallace Stevens, Robert Musil, Elias Canetti, Nietzsche, Foucault and Francis Fukuyama, in which essay Kimball defends traditional religion in a novel way. In the erudite introduction, Kimball remarks that by sabotaging the notion of truth, the real aim of the deconstructionists was to undermine the idea of value. This explains postmodernism's appeal to mediocre academics unable to make a worthwhile contribution to knowledge. Declaring that truth is false and ignorance is knowledge, they embraced the perilous practice that the prophet Isaiah warned against: 'Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put bitter for sweet ...' The assault on Western values intends to deny their universal validity and applicability. Thus the concept of "value" had to be stripped of meaning. The real aim was to replace Western values with the "truths" of the 1960s counterculture, Kimball asserts. If, as these nihilists claim, truth has no meaning, then their own views -- like those of the Khomeini fan Foucault who claimed that truth is merely a function of power - cannot be valid or meaningful either. Kimball's diagnosis of the latter is witty and lethal. The author condemns our society's refusal to judge and rejects with contempt the linguistic codes of academia's humanities departments. He will not adopt the use of its assumptions, cynicism, redefinitions, inversion, neologisms, scare quotes, paradoxes, gullibility, sneering tone or total tolerance that means total impotence. The refusal to criticize results in moral paralysis, the practical results of which are visible in Europe where a sinister second society has sprung up. This hidden society of hatred and alienation where barbaric practices flourish due to the lack of law enforcement is revealed by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Bruce Bawer, Claire Berlinski and Chantal Delsol in her books Icarus Fallen and The Unlearned Lessons Of the Twentieth Century. When he finally deals with philosophy, Kimball indicates how intellectuals like John Stuart Mill, Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and even the conservative Roger Scruton have side-stepped modernity's moral imperatives. Foucault's grotesque equivalence between slavery & freedom, Sartre's dehumanizing, impersonal concept of "The Other" and Hegel's rambling dialectics are all attempts to force reality into neat paradigms instead of boldly facing its often messy and inexplicable nature. Stephen Hicks provides illuminating insight into the aforementioned thinkers in his masterpiece Explai

Reality has a bad habit of sneaking up on its deniers and biting them on the rump. In EXPERIMENTS AGAINST REALITY, Roger Kimball traces a straight line progression of thought in this century as he attempts to explain how Western culture has come under continuous assault by those who refuse to admit the existence of the "real" part of reality. He subtitles his book as "The fate of culture in the postmodern age," but it is not the forward looking fate of culture that interests him. Rather, his vision is backward looking as he examines the often intertwining loops of thought in philosophers, some of whom are quite unknown even to the educated elite. Kimball begins with "The Case of Walter Pater," who was one of the mildest of Victorian authors. It came as a great surprise to him and those who knew him that he was hailed as one who called for a universal trumpet to engage in the wildest of sexual and artistic excesses. It was only one brief line of his STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF THE RENAISSANCE that is remembered today: He urged his readers to "burn always with his hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy." Pater, then, is a pre-twentieth century harbinger of those who would soon follow to claim that the pursuit of self-aggrandizement must trump a search for Eternal Truth. Other essays on T. E. Hulme, Wallace Stevens, Mauriel Spark, and Robert Musil follow. Their connection to Kimball's thesis is less clear than I could readily see. They were legitimate heavyweight writers whose influence on the next generation of reality bashers may have been felt more in their style than in their content. In Part II, Kimball's selection of authors is germane: John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sartre, Foucault, and Francis Fukuyama. These latter writer/philosophers had a collective and powerful impact on today's assorted motley collection of post-modernists. It was difficult, painful, but necessary for me to read of the scabby excesses of Sartre and Foucault. As I read, I was reminded of the old saw about the wisdom of playing the ostrich in a field of like-minded ostriches when a predator approached. The denial of reality in that case and in all cases is distinctly unwise. EXPERIMENTS AGAINST REALITY is a sobering wake up call for those who wish to know the linguistic roots of those others who cry out that there is no "inside" to any text, philosophy, or thought paradigm.

Most critics of American culture are able to see broad causes for contemporary problems. Their insight is almost oversight. Roger Kimball has an amazing ability to see the spawning wisp of the thread that weaves through the matrix of our cultural decline. These series of essays look back over the last century at the critics, novelists, and philosophers who stood on either side of the question, "Is reality real or can I make it what I wish?" Those ascribing to the latter, tended to be cultural heroes for their encouragement of a new kind of freedom which Kimball shows is really a decaying licentiousness. Most of these experimenters against reality were celebrated by the intelligentsia of the time for discovering a new kind of happiness. The only problem, as Kimball points out, is that their suggested liberations have led to misery both personally and culturally. There are also excellent essays describing the stalwarts who stood astride the decline of society yelling "Stop". Primary amongst these is Mr Kimball himself whose essay, "The Trivialization of Outrage" will be a classic as he decries the lack of beauty in today's "art". This is a book that needs to be studied to be appreciated. A little effort brings great rewards. Hopefully we will learn as Kimball so rightly puts it that "the liberations we crave have served chiefly to compound the depth of our loss."

I have read most of the essays in this volume in their earlier versions; yet they seem to me as fresh and intellectually invigorating as at my first go round. This is partly due to having read some of the works discussed since Kimball inspired an interest in them, but mostly because each essay encompasses a superabundance of insights and ideas reqquiring a second look. The author writes so clearly and forcefully that his pages generally go by a little too fast to catch all that they have to offer at one go. The essays on T.E. Hulme Muriel Spark, Josef Pieper, James Fitzjames Stephen, and Robert Musil are outstanding among a uniformly excellent collection. I recommend them strongly for those who have no familiarity with these writers. The examinations of Foucault and E.M. Cioran are of such quality that their admirers will remember his essays with violent emotions long after they have abandoned their subjects for even more flapdoodlious energumens. Kimball's style in dealing with such freaks is exactly right. He does not strain himself to tease some arcane significance out of their dramatic posturings. He does not treat them as PostMod Titans. He recognizes them as the pus and vomit of a sick culture and applies the antiseptic of wit, clarity, and logic.