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Posted on 10/26/2012 11:16:05 AM PDT by EveningStar
Jacques Barzun, the distinguished historian, essayist, cultural gadfly and educator who helped establish the modern discipline of cultural history and came to see the West as sliding toward decadence, died Thursday night in San Antonio, where he lived. He was 104.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
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Thank you for posting this Evening Star.
He was a good man who was able to live a long life. God bless.
I have been using one of his quotes as my tagline for a long time.
“Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred.” Jacques Barzun
” “Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred.” Jacques Barzun”
RIP, Mr. Barzun
“Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred.”
- Jacques Barzun
I didn’t see your post! Great Minds!
The last Renaissance humanist. He will be missed.
Of course!
A fair article from the NY Times
The fact that this man could be born in Paris, was a salon intellectual who moved to Columbia University in its worst leftist days and THEN could give it up to live in Texas to appreciate the space and society there tells me he is truly an intellectually honest scholar. There aren’t many - academics are often the most biased people I meet.
“Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred.”
- Jacques Barzun
Yes, very much sums up the last 50 years of downfall...
When I was living in Japan in 2002 I got interested in the idea that the active commercial culture of Renaissance Venice promoted good government there. I knew him to be the single greatest living repository of knowledge about Western history, and wanted to ask him for a list of things to read. He had no e-mail that I could find, but amazingly Google listed his home address in San Antonio. I sent him a letter asking for his thoughts, and to my astonishment a week or two later I (a veritable nobody) got back a nice hand-written letter both discussing the era and telling me things to read. (Including in Italian!)
Not only thoroughly knowledgeable and erudite, but a generous man to a fellow scholar.
Did he see the New York Times as part of that decadence?
From the NYT obit:
He was made a chevalier of the Legion of Honor, France’s highest award, established by Napoleon Bonaparte, and awarded the Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian honor, by President George W. Bush.
He became a United States citizen in 1933
“The intellectuals’ chief cause of anguish,” he wrote in “The House of Intellect” (1959), “are one another’s works.”
This view of science and his attempts to associate its supposed mechanistic qualities with Darwin or Wagner now seem to be among his weakest and most dated speculations.
Darwin, Marx and Wagner, he wrote, had each created a variety of “mechanical materialism,” in which all that is human and variable is subjected to domineering systems.
As an educator Mr. Barzun was an important critic of American universities, arguing in 1968 that their curriculums had become an undisciplined “bazaar” of miscellaneous studies.
He believed that the mission of the university should have nothing to do with professional training or political advocacy.
He traced periods of rise and fall in the Western saga, and contended that another fall was near — one that could cause “the liquidation of 500 years of civilization.” This time the decline would be caused not by scientism and absolutism, he maintained, but by an internal crisis in the civilization itself, which he believed had come to celebrate nihilism and rebellion.
And yet, in the cycles of history, he believed another renewal would come.
“It is only in the shadows,” he wrote, “when some fresh wave, truly original, truly creative, breaks upon the shore, that there will be a rediscovery of the West.”
“It is only in the shadows,” he wrote, “when some fresh wave, truly original, truly creative, breaks upon the shore, that there will be a rediscovery of the West.”
He foresaw the Tea Party.
I’ve read “From Dawn to Decadence” twice. He was a genius.
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