Status Updates From Notes Towards the Definitio...

Elliot’s description of what is going wrong with culture in the West is profound. His solution: a decentralized society based on local or provincial identity which is bound together by religion and an elite class that transcends those local identities. He is arguing not just for a revival of our educational systems but for a deeper understanding of what education is supposed to accomplish.

This book is not an easy read, perhaps demonstrating the declining level of this reader’s culture, mainly because Elliot goes far beyond his stated purpose (to define culture) and refuses to take a stand on any potential mechanism for restoring or elevating what was already in his day a disintegrating level of culture. He tries too hard to be a jaded British intellectual.