The Wreck of Western Culture: Humanism Revisited by John Carroll
(Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2008)

HUGH MERCER CURTLER is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Southwest Minnesota State University and recently published Provoking Thought with Florida Academic Press.

John Carroll is not concerned about the
decline of Western culture; in his mind
that ship has sailed. Western culture is no
more and lies scattered about us in ruins.
He sees the fall of the Twin Towers in New
York as symbolic of the wreck of Western
culture that perished over one hundred
years ago. He makes a persuasive case in
this book which is nothing less than an intellectual
tour de force taking us breathlessly
from the heights of Western culture in ancient
Greece past its funeral dirge, sung by
Nietzsche, to the films of John Ford and
the novels of Henry James—”two later attempts
to build anew within the wreckage.”
On that journey, which incorporates
key works of literature and philosophy
together with remarkably sensitive and
insightful interpretations of selected paintings
and film, not to mention a discriminating
ear for the music of Bach, Carroll
seeks to “arouse disgust” in the reader and
make him yearn for the restoration of faith
in God. Western culture, culminating in
the humanities, has transformed the “I”
into the “me” of self-satisfied Occidentals
who think living the good life means “to
consume, to procreate, and to sleep.” In
these terms, says Carroll, “there was giant
progress.” But along the way what we call
“high culture” slowly crumbled into a pile
of rubble.

Carroll greatly admires Edmund Burke’s
Reflections on the Revolution in France and
applauds his “fight against the advance of
nihilism.” But, in the end, he considers the
conservative movement in general “a futile
reaction against the juggernaut of modernity,
a series of last-ditch stands here and
there, on occasion successful for the moment
while the war is steadily lost.” His
real heroes are Martin Luther and Søren
Kierkegaard, the former because he led
the attack—not against the Roman Catholic
Church, but against the dawning of
humanism with its self-worship; the latter
because he sought to breathe new life
into the dying carcass of Protestantism.
Kierkegaard’s mistake was trying to find
his way to the faith of Martin Luther by
means of human reason, whereas Carroll
is convinced that our confidence in reason,
which reached its height during the
Enlightenment, coupled with our mistaken
notion that humans have free will,
brought about the wreck of Western culture.
He seeks to have us return to Luther’s
“death of death” by way of a blind faith
in the necessity of God’s will: a “faith in
a stable world predicated on a fixed higher
order strong enough not to come tumbling
down if [things] start to run amok.”

Make no mistake: this is a deeply disturbing
book—not because the thesis is
disquieting (to say the least), but because
the thesis is so convincingly argued. Carroll
makes a strong case, and while some
readers—like the reviewer in the Guardian
quoted on the dust jacket—might find
Carroll “half-crazed,” they will have to
admit (along with that reviewer) that he is
also “at times brilliant.” The journey this
author would take us on is breathtaking
and exhilarating, while at the same time
it does indeed arouse disgust when we
consider that “the heritage of the death of
culture in the humanist mode has been a
routine public life, and a retreat into the
individual unconscious in the hope of staving
off madness or melancholia…. [Herbert
Hendon’s] rat girl is the reality, the true
child of modern culture.” The epitaph for
this culture, as written by John Carroll, is,
“I no longer believe in anything beyond
myself.” What possible role could such
institutions as the universities play in the
world John Carroll describes?

Traditionally, the university’s primary
role has been to preserve high culture and
pass it along to the younger generation.
Additionally, as Max Weber noted a century
ago, students came to universities “in
search of answers to the great metaphysical
questions—what to do and how to live.”
Today, however, we find mainly a few
scattered graybeards who know or care
about high culture standing among hordes
of students who think the meaning of life
is to be found in the pursuit of pleasure.
Surrounding the graybeards are legions
of brash young faculty members busily
stuffing their political agendas down the
throats of uninterested and unprepared undergraduates
who want only to have fun,
get their degree, and go to work and make
a living. The function of the university in
our postmodern world has clearly changed
and this change supports John Carroll’s
thesis that, at the very least, high culture
shows little sign of life. In his words, “the
university [has become] a conglomerate of
single-person sects each obeying his or her
individual conscience, while all around
the institution decays into an aimless and
moribund bureaucracy.” If this author is
right about the current condition of the
university, is he also right about the wreck
of that culture as a whole?

On the face of it, this book might seem
like just another postmodern attack on the
“despised logos,” since Carroll holds human
reason in low esteem, subject to “demonic
forces” within the individual that
render it “weak, subsidiary, and circumscribed.”
His choice of faith over reason
is avowedly that of “the darkness of faith
where the light of reason does not shine.”
But postmodernism, despite its devastating
effect on higher education, is simply a reappearance
of the Romantic revolt against
reason that began with Goethe; it has no
intellectual credibility. The author sees it
as little more than a feature of our “fantasy
life” on a level with the Hollywood movie
and the popular song. Carroll’s position,
in contrast, has considerable intellectual
credibility and must be taken seriously.
At the same time, Carroll most assuredly
agrees with postmodernism in his rejection
of human reason. He notes that any
attempt to reason our way to human goodness,
as was attempted by Immanuel Kant,
is doomed to failure as was Kierkegaard’s
attempt to reason his way to faith. “The
forces that determine goodness—that is,
whether humans obey the moral law or
not—have little to do with either reason or
will. They have to do with faith and its obscure
minions.” And here lies the critical
difference between John Carroll and the
zealots in the academy who are intent on
replacing reason and truth with a thin pabulum
of sociology and cultural anthropology.
Postmodernists embrace themselves
and their own theories; Carroll embraces
faith in God.

As well, despite his call for a return
to “the darkness of faith” in God, Carroll
differs in important respects from the
evangelical fundamentalists in this country.
One must suppose that this author has
no time for the “feel-good” religion of
the fundamentalist variety that has done
so much to foster anti-rationalism in our
schools: the goal here is to “kill Luther’s
monster and once again achieve the death
of death.” Compromise is unacceptable:
commitment to God must be total. Most
comfortable Christians who attend Sunday
service while sipping a latté would
find Carroll’s agenda too demanding. One
must find salvation by an extinction of self,
finding meaning outside the self in love for
others and, ultimately, in an unflinching
faith in God. In order to accomplish that
“it is time to bury the dead and to start the
difficult business of restoring our capacity
for life.” This sounds alarmingly like a formula
taken from a postmodern text, but,
once again, we must bear in mind that for
John Carroll the restoration of “our capacity
for life” is not to be found in shallow
self-indulgence, or condemnation of creeds
and people we find intolerable, but only
through a leap of faith in a loving God that
even Kierkegaard was unable to take.

This book is unquestionably as brilliantly
written as it is disturbing. At the
end of the day, however, after we have paid
the author due homage, we must pause. If
we are to agree with Carroll that Western
culture has been dead for more than
one hundred years and that we have lately
been rummaging around among the broken
remnants of a culture that is rapidly
turning to dust, we must face the question
of where we go from here. It is not enough
to insist that we recover the blind faith of
a Martin Luther. That is no longer possible
for the vast majority of Westerners who
are lost in a cloud of hedonistic pleasure
they mistake for happiness—though this
could end suddenly if we lose control of
our own technical wizardry. Nor is it possible,
or acceptable, to reject human reason
altogether as Carroll seems to do. In his
insistence that we embrace “the darkness
of faith where the light of reason does not
shine,” his argument smacks of bifurcation,
and we must reject his final conclusion as
too extreme and leading to helplessness
in the face of seemingly insurmountable
real-world problems. What he means, of
course, is that we must not blanch at the
contradictions that reason tells us lie at the
heart of faith in God—that humans are responsible
for their acts while at the same
time they are not truly free; that God is
good, but His creation is flawed; that innocents
suffer while evil men prosper. To
be sure, paradox and contradiction lie at
the heart of faith and must be embraced
as mysteries beyond human understanding.
But at the same time, we must act as
if we are free and act responsibly. And in
doing so we must try to determine what
is the right thing to do to save a planet we
are rapidly destroying with our expanding
population and stubborn demands that
the earth sustain us at our present level of
comfort. As we do this we may want to
continue to plumb the depths of the extraordinary
works of men and women that
defined Western culture—to the extent
that this is still possible.

Human reason may be a fragile thread,
but it is the only one we have to lead us out
of our present labyrinth. Faith alone leads
to quietism, and that will not allow us to
address our many problems; to do that we
must remain engaged. Machiavelli was not
alone in thinking that the devout Chris-
tian makes a poor citizen. It is certainly the
case that Western culture has replaced God
with the human ego (as Nietzsche saw so
clearly that it drove him mad), and Carroll
is correct to see this as a major cause of our
present malaise. But any workable solution
to real-world problems must reach outside
the self to find meaning while at the same
time rethinking the thoughts of the great
minds that have come before us and trusting
to reason and science to make possible
what we come to realize is absolutely necessary
for the survival of the human race.
At a time in our history when more than
two-thirds of the American public do not
know that DNA is the key to heredity and
one in five think the sun revolves around
the earth, we must repulse any attempt to
denigrate reason. Faith begins with selfdenial,
but it must find room for reason if
we are to survive as a people and begin to
fashion a new culture to replace the old
one we have destroyed. All of the rubble
must not be discarded.