Roger Kimball > Quotes

“The truth is that American universities are among the safest and most coddled environments ever devised by man. The idea that one should attend college to be protected from ideas one might find controversial or offensive could only occur to someone who had jettisoned any hope of acquiring an education.”
― Roger Kimball

“As with most revolutions, the counterculture's call for total freedom quickly turned into a demand for total control. The phenomenon of 'political correctness', with its speech codes and other efforts to enforce ideological conformity, was one predictable result of this transformation. What began at the University of California at Berkeley with the Free Speech Movement (called by some the 'Filthy Speech Movement'} soon degenerated into an effort to abridge freedom by dictating what could and could not be said about any number of politically sensitive issues.”
― Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America

“The true democrat wishes to share the great works of culture with all who are able to appreciate them; the egalitarian, recognizing that genuine excellence is rare, declares greatness a fraud and sets about obliterating distinctions.”
― Roger Kimball, The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia

“We -- the industrialized, technologized world -- have never been richer. And yet to an extraordinary extent we in the West continue to inhabit a moral and cultural universe shaped by the hedonistic imperatives and radical ideals of the Sixties. Culturally, morally the world we inhabit is increasingly a trash world: addicted to sensation, besieged everywhere by the cacophonous, mind-numbing din of rock music, saturated with pornography, in thrall to the lowest common denominator wherever questions of taste, manners or intellectual delicacy are concerned. Marwick was right: 'The cultural revolution, in short, had continuous, uninterrupted, and lasting consequences'.”
― Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America

“Civilization is an achievement not a gift; it is always besieged, must constantly be defended, and once lost, is immeasurably difficult to reclaim. We see the results of the assaults against freedom all around us.”
― Roger Kimball

“Ginsberg turned out to be depressingly prescient when, after a heated argument with Norman Podhoretz in 1958, he yelled, 'We'll get you through your children!' For countless American families, that turned out to be only too true.”
― Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America

“Beauty is a fragile and vulnerable quality, and moreover one that is difficult to achieve; ugliness, by contrast, is unbreakable and invulnerable, and very easy to achieve.”
― Roger Kimball

“The Beats are crucial to an understanding of America's cultural revolution not least because in their lives, their proclamations, and (for lack of a more accurate term) their 'work' they anticipated so many of the pathologies of the Sixties and Seventies. Their programmatic anti-Americanism, their avid celebration of drug abuse, their squalid, promiscuous sex lives, their pseudo-spirituality, their attack on rationality and their degradation of intellectual standards, their aggressive narcissism and juvenile political posturing: in all this and more, the Beats were every bit as 'advanced' as any Sixties radical.”
― Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America

“In a remarkable book called Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, the historian Modris Eksteins anatomizes the metabolism of the sentimentality that underwrites Keynes’s embrace of guilt as an instrument of policy. Eksteins shows how sentimentality and a species of extravagant mythmaking mark the points of contact between avant-garde culture and burgeoning totalitarianism. This was especially true in Germany, the country that had advanced the radical program of the avant-garde most enthusiastically. England, by contrast, was a conservative power. Where Germany started the war to transform the world, England fought the war to preserve a world and the culture that defined it.
A key difference lies in the aestheticization of life: treating life, that is to say, as if it were a work of art devoid of human reality. On the continent, as the historian Carl Schorske put it in his classic study offin-de-siècle Vienna, “the usual moralistic culture of the European bourgeoisie was . . . both overlaid and undermined by an amoral Gef ühlskultur [sentimental culture].” This revolution in sensibility amounted to a crisis of morality—what the novelist Hermann Broch called a “value vacuum”—that quickly precipitated a crisis in liberal cultural and political life. “Narcissism and a hypertrophy of the life of feeling were the consequence,” Schorske wrote.”
― Roger Kimball

“(Some people regard the astonishing collapse of manners and civility in our society as a superficial event. They are wrong. The fate of decorum expresses the fate of a culture’s dignity, its attitude toward its animating values.)”
― Roger Kimball, The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia

“It is often said that great works of art are “inexhaustible”—capable, as Stanley Olson put it, of “endless interpretation. But Lubin, the Charlotte C. Weber Professor of Art at Wake Forest University, demonstrates in painful if inadvertently hilarious detail that this does not mean that works of art are immune from - that they are not in fact often subject to—wild and perverse misinterpretation.”
― Roger Kimball, The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art

“Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac were all on the side of the savage. That their penny-ante gnosticism was not only perpetuated but mythologized and spread abroad as a gospel of emancipation is something for which we have the Sixties to thank -- or to blame.”
― Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America

“You cannot step a foot into the literature about the 1960s without being told how 'creative', 'idealistic', and 'loving' it was, especially in comparison to the 1950s. I fact, the counterculture of the Sixties represented the triumph of what the art critic Harold Rosenberg famously called the 'herd of the independent minds'. Its so-called creativity consisted in continually recirculating a small number of radical cliches; its idealism was little more than irresponsible utopianism; and its crusading for 'love' was largely a blind for hedonistic self-indulgence.”
― Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America

“Although aesthetically nugatory, "Beat Culture and the New America" was an exhibition of considerable significance -- but not in quite the way that Lisa Phillips, its curator, intended, Casting a retrospective glance at the sordid world of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Lawrence, Ferlinghetti, and other Beat icons, the exhibition unwittingly furnished a kind of pathologist's report on one of the most toxic cultural movements in American history.”
― Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America

“The Beats inaugurated the long march through the moral territory of American culture. Who knows how many lives were blighted along the way as a result of their proselytizing on behalf of drugs and promiscuous sex?”
― Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America

“In short order, the unconventional became the established convention; the perverse was embraced as normal; the unspeakable was broadcast everywhere; the outrageous was met with enthusiastic applause.”
― Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America

“One dominant response to the Great War was “disillusion” and a repudiation of principles named by such lofty abstractions as Honor, Patriotism, Virtue, and Beauty. It is easy to find examples of that solvent at work. But in another sense, the response to the war, especially on the continent, and most particularly in Germany, was just the opposite: it was what we might call the re-enchantment, the re-illusioning, of the world by means of a wholesale embrace of empty abstractions. The re-enchantment was malign, to be sure, but it was also thoroughgoing. Nazism was the most poisonous effort.It was, as [Modris] Eksteins puts it, “an attempt to lie beautifully to the German nation and to the world.” This is where kitsch comes in.”
― Roger Kimball

“Kitsch is a sentimentalization of reality in response to cultural failure. The greater the failure, the more malignant the sentimentalization.”
― Roger Kimball

“The romance that has surrounded the Beat generation since the mid-Sixties has acted as a kind of sentimental glaze, obscuring its fundamentally nihilistic impulse under a heap of bogus rhetoric about liberation, spontaneity, and 'startling oases of creativity', Notwithstanding their recent media media make-over, the Beats were not Promethean iconoclasts. They were drug-abusing sexual predators and infantilized narcissists whose shamelessness helped dupe a confused and gullible public into believing that their utterances were works of genius. We have to thank Lisa Phillips and the Whitney for inadvertently reminding us of this with such vividness. If nothing else, 'Beat Culture and the New America' showed that the Beats were not simply artistic charlatans; the were -- and, in the case of those who are still with us, they remain -- moral simpletons, whose destructive influence helped fuel the cultural catastrophe with which we are now living.”
― Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America

“behind the many pseudo-sciences that have recently dominated literary criticism . . . you will find the same suspicion of literature, a desire to sever our relation to it by denuding it of meaning. The "methods" proposed are laughable caricatures of science; and the results delivered are useful to no one. But that was not the point. The methods of the new literary theorist are really weapons of subversion: an attempt to destroy humane education from within, to rupture the chain of sympathy that binds us to our culture. That is why the new schools of criticism have acquired a following: they promise to release us from the burden of study by showing that there is nothing after all to learn.*”
― Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education

“Kitsch lives with one foot in the realm of aesthetics and another foot in the realm of ethics.”
― Roger Kimball

“The Beats were tremendously significant, but chiefly in the way that they provided a preview in the 1950s of the cultural, intellectual, and moral disasters that would fully flower in the late 1960s. The ideas of the Beats, their sensibility, contained in ovo all the characteristics we think of as defining the cultural revolution of the Sixties and Seventies. The adolescent longing for liberation from conventional manners and intellectual standards; the polymorphous sexuality; the narcissism; the destructive absorption in drugs; the undercurrent of criminality; the irrationalism; the naive political radicalism and reflexive anti-Americanism; the adulation of pop music as a kind of spiritual weapon; the Romantic elevation of art as an alternative to rather than as an illumination of normal reality; the pseudo-spirituality, especially the spurious infatuation with Eastern religions: in all this and more the Beats provided a vivid glimpse of what was to come.”
― Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America

“Incidentally, why is it that drug abuse is always described as an 'experiment', as if some important scientific enterprise were at stake instead of hedonistic self-indulgence?”
― Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America

“The notion that some works are better and more important than others; that some works exert a special claim on our attention; that "being educated" requires a thoughtful acquaintance with these works and an ability to discriminate between greater and lesser-all this is anathema to the forces arrayed against the traditional understanding of the humanities. The very idea that the works of Shakespeare (for example) might be indisputably greater than the collected cartoons of Bugs Bunny is often rejected as "antidemocratic" and "elitist," an imposition on the freedom and political interests of various groups.*”
― Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education

“And let’s not forget “Dane-Geld”: It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation, To puff and look important and to say: “Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you. We will therefore pay you cash to go away.” And that is called paying the Dane-geld; But we’ve proved it again and again, That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld You never get rid of the Dane.”
― Roger Kimball, The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia

“The Beats, like their successors in the Sixties, have often been described as 'idealists'. But fantasies of total gratification are not the product of idealism. They arise from a narcissism that, finding the world unequal to its desires, retreats into a realm of heedless self-absorption. Modesty, convention, and self-restraint then appear as the enemies rather than as the allies of humanity. In this sense, the Beat generation marks a step away from civilization.”
― Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America

“In fact, Professor Showalter's proposals provide a sterling illustration of the way in which feminism has provided a kind of blueprint for special interests that wish to appropriate the curriculum in order to achieve political goals.”
― Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education

“If the politicization of art and education represents one large part of the counterculture's legacy, the coarsening of feeling and sensibility is another. No phenomenon has done more to advance this coarsening than rock music. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of rock music to the agenda of the cultural revolution. It is also impossible to overstate its soul-deadening destructiveness. The most reviled part of Allan Bloom's book The Closing of the American Mind was his chapter criticizing the effects of rock. But Bloom was right in insisting that rock music is a potent weapon in the arsenal of emotional anarchy. The triumph of rock was not only an aesthetic disaster of giant proportions: it was also a moral disaster whose effects are nearly impossible to calculate precisely because they are so pervasive.”
― Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America

“What is not possible is to combine the pursuit of pleasure and the enjoyment of comfort with the characteristic pleasures of a strong mind. If you wish for luxury, you must not nourish the inquisitive instinct.”
― Roger Kimball, Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse

“Like the medieval heretics that Norm Cohn wrote about in The Pursuit of the Millennium, the Beats cultivated an extreme narcissism that bordered on self-deification and that 'liberated them from all restraints' and allowed them to experience every impulse as a 'divine command'. What Norman Podhoretz observed of Ginsberg was also true of the Beats generally: they 'conjured up a world of complete freedom from the limits imposed by [bourgeois] responsibilities'. Podhoretz added, 'It was a world that promised endless erotic possibility together with the excitements of an expanded consciousness constantly open to new dimensions of being: more adventure, more sex, more intensity, more life'. Alas, the promise was illusory. Instead of an 'expanded consciousness', the Beats purchased madness, ruination, and, for many, an early death. Their attack on bourgeois responsibility led not to greater freedom but to greater chaos. The erotic paradise they envisioned turned out to be rife with misery.”
― Roger Kimball, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America