Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West

by R.R. Reno

Multiculturalism extends well beyond higher education, usually under the name of “diversity.” It is tempting, however, to overestimate its influence. Today, the great books of the Western tradition are more neglected than critiqued. In the 1960s, literary critics such as Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling commanded wide audiences. The graduates of the expanded postwar college and university system in those years looked to novels, and even poetry, for insight into the meaning of their lives. The cultural scene is very different in the twenty-first century. Few recent college graduates can name a living poet. We now turn to social psychology, brain science, evolutionary theory, and economics to understand our lives and our society. Science provides the tools to diagnose problems and formulate solutions, much as Popper had hoped. Devoid of transcendence, these ways of thinking are materialist, not in the moral sense of encouraging greed and consumption (though some do that too) but in the metaphysical sense of reducing human reality to instincts and biological processes. Why read Jane Austen when it’s obvious that economic theory provides a more objective and reliable guide to the dating and marriage marketplace?