The Life of the Mind | An interview with cultural critic Roger Kimball | Carl E. Olson

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Roger Kimball is Managing Editor of The New Criterion, a monthly review of the arts and intellectual life, and an art critic for the London Spectator. In September he will take on the added duties of co-editor and publisher of The New Criterion.

Kimball's latest books are The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art (Encounter, 2004), Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee, 2002), and Art's Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity (Ivan R. Dee, 2003).

Other books by Kimball include The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America (Encounter 2000) and Experiments Against Reality: The Fate of Culture in the Postmodern Age (Ivan R. Dee, 2000). Kimball is also the author of Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (HarperCollins). A new edition of Tenured Radicals, revised and expanded, was published by Ivan R. Dee, in 1998.

He is a frequent contributor to many publications here and in England, including The New Criterion, The Times Literary Supplement, Modern Painters, Literary Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Public Interest, Commentary, The Spectator, The New York Times Book Review, The Sunday Telegraph, The American Spectator, The Weekly Standard, National Review, and The National Interest.

Carl E. Olson, editor of IgnatiusInsight.com, recently interviewed Kimball and spoke with him about the current state of culture, the place of the arts, the dangers of deconstructionism and other academic fads, and the necessity of religion for the survival of culture.


IgnatiusInsight.com: Your books have addressed topics including art criticism (Art's Prospect), criticism of art criticism (Rape of the Masters), higher education (Tenured Radicals), cultural revolution/cultural history (The Long March), postmodernism (Experiments Against Reality), and intellectual history (Lives of the Mind). Your work reflects the expertise and knowledge of a specialist, but would it be correct to describe it as multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary in character? Has this interdisciplinary approach been part of a conscious project on your part, or does it simply reflect the vital interconnectedness of disciplines (art criticism, literary criticism, philosophy, sociology, education, etc.) that is increasingly rare in an age of hyper-specialization?

Roger Kimball: That is an interesting question, or rather set of questions. You are right that ours is an age in which academic life is often described as increasingly specialized. And yet I suspect that only certain disciplines are accurately so described. The natural sciences, certainly, have become more and more specialized. As our knowledge of the natural world has exploded, so too it has become increasingly finely focussed, with the result that scientists tend, in their professional lives as scientists, to know more and more about increasingly narrow slices of a subject.

In the humanities, by contrast, what we see is a sort of parody of this process. You hear talk of increasing specialization in literature, history, or philosophy. But what this turns out to mean in most cases is increasing irrelevance and fatuousness. This is partly because the humanities, in a vain effort to ape the sciences, pretend to a knowledge which does not pertain to humanistic inquiry. The sciences tell us what the world is like. The humanities educate the emotions and, in a sense, tell us what we, homo sapiens, are like. You certainly do find people who know and immense amount about the first book of The Fairie Queen (say) but who otherwise seem deaf to the life of literature, art, philosophy, and history. You also find self-consciously "inter-disciplinary" projects that turn out to be not aspects of the humanities but aspects of the nihilistic anti-humanism that has insinuated itself so disastrously into cultural life today.

Take a look at the "humanities institutes" that have sprouted at so many colleges and universities today. They're typically two parts Derrida, Foucault, and deconstruction, five parts queer studies, and eight parts feminism, post-colonial studies, and general purpose political posturing. They are, in short, utterly inimical to the humanities as traditionally conceived. Such anti-intellectual intellectualism is described as "specialized" by those outside the academy mostly because they find its language unintelligible. Being of charitable disposition, they conclude that what they do not understand must be too deep for common intelligence. In fact, much of what passes for humanistic research and scholarship today is not only not deep, it is not even superficial: it is merely politically motivated verbal static, a ghastly sort of impersonation of intellectual activity.

As for my own work, there is nothing especially ambitious about it. Like many people interested in cultural life, I have devoted a fair amount of time to reading philosophy and literature, looking at art, pondering the fate of universities and other institutions charged with nurturing cultural life. It is natural, I believe, that such interests would result in work that embraces this plurality of subjects.

IgnatiusInsight.com: In the 1980s you were a graduate student at Yale working on a dissertation. But you didn't finish the dissertation, stating in an interview that once you started writing for magazines such as The New Criterion you found yourself "drifting further and further away from the culture of academia." How did that drift take place and how has it been reflected in your books and essays? Put another way, how did you become a cultural critic?

Kimball: Well, when the time came to leave New Haven I had to decide whether I want to take an academic position in some (as it seemed to me) far-flung and desolate outpost or whether I might be better off pursuing my intellectual interests as a freelance writer. I decided to chance the latter. Already it had become clear to me that the nature of my interests in the humanities made me an odd figure in the academy. I found that writing for The New Criterion, The American Scholar (which was then edited by Joseph Epstein), Commentary, and other such publications was refreshing and every bit as intellectually challenging as more strictly academic writing. I fully intended to finish that dissertation, by the way, and I still regret not doing so–one should, I believe, complete what one begins. As for how I became a cultural critic, the answer is simple: I started writing cultural criticism! In many ways, it was an accident–I kept writing about what interested me, and what interested me happened to fall under the rubric of cultural criticism.

It was not purely an accident, though. For I did receive some crucial guidance early on from Hilton Kramer, the founding editor of The New Criterion. He saw, in a way that I didn't, what I was up to, and he did a great deal to nudge my writing in the direction that it eventually took. Hilton is an editor in the old sense. That is, he is not simply someone who fiddles with one's prose to make it clearer and more polished: he is really a teacher and forger of talent operating under a different license. He has helped many, many people find their own voice and intellectual direction. I am lucky to be among that number.

IgnatiusInsight.com: You are the managing editor of The New Critierion, which takes its name from The Criterion, edited by T.S. Eliot. For those readers who have never read The New Criterion, how would you describe its contents and focus?

Kimball: Of course it pains me to think that there might be some of your readers who are unacquainted with The New Criterion. Can it really be? Well, the world is full of deprivations. Fortunately, this is one deficiency that is easily remedied. Any such unfortunate souls should start by going to www.newcriterion.com and then, after having seen what they have been missing, clicking on button that says subscribe!

But back to Eliot, The Criterion, and The New Criterion. Eliot once defined the task of criticism as "the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste." That is a pretty fair summary of what we at The New Criterion are up to as well. Like Eliot, we aim to provide an engaging and independent look at cultural life. By "engaging" I mean lively and well-written, by "independent" I mean not beholden to the reigning academic and politically correct orthodoxies.

Like the original Criterion, The New Criterion is modernist in its cultural stance and conservative in its politics. By "modernist," incidentally, I do not mean to suggest allegiance to any particular school or style but rather to suggest a seriousness about the aesthetic and moral responsibilities of criticism. There really is no other magazine like The New Criterion–none that I know, anyway–none that offers the sort of serious reflection on the monuments of past cultural achievement together with amusing and percipient criticism of contemporary culture. I want to underscore the word "amusing." The New Criterion is undoubtedly a serious magazine. But it is the opposite of somber. Our writers address themselves to their subjects with dash and brio–take, for example, Mark Steyn, our theater critic. I cannot think of a funnier drama critic going (though Mark is much more than a drama critic). Nor can I think of one who is more insightful. As Horace urges, Mark delights as well as instructs. It is a model all of us at the magazine aspire to follow.

IgnatiusInsight.com: In what way are the arts a gauge of cultural health? What does today's "fine" art and "progressive" literature tell us about culture in the West?

Kimball: I believe that the arts provide a good barometer of cultural health. They reflect the fears, obsessions, aspirations, and ambitions of a culture. It tells us a great deal, I think, that terms like "transgressive" and "challenging" have emerged as among the highest words of praise in the critical lexicon. It tells us, among other things, that much art today is less affirmative than corrosive, that it places itself in an adversarial attitude toward the traditional moral, aesthetic, and cultural ambitions of our culture.

We are living in a post-Romanic moment, a moment when we still go through the motions of investing the arts with great existential importance (that's the Romantic part) but find to our chagrin that the spiritual aspirations that might have informed and guided our artistic endeavors have turned rancid (the "post-" part). That, anyway, goes a long way toward describing the dominant "establishment" culture. Here and there, one finds dissenting figures and institutions–The New Criterion is one such–whose commitment is not to what is new but what is true, figures and institutions that look upon tradition not as a crippling but an enabling resource, who understand that beauty and pleasure are essential parts of the life of art. In the introduction to my book Art's Prospect, I noted that: