Margarine of the Arts

“Based on his study of twenty-one world civilizations—ranging from ancient Rome to imperial China, from Babylon to the Aztecs—Toynbee found that societies in disintegration suffer a kind of ‘schism of the soul.’ They are seldom simply overrun by some other civilization. Rather, they commit a kind of cultural suicide. Disintegrating societies, he says, have several …

Postmodernism Much Larger Than Its Theorists

“Modernism, however, is being replaced by the new secular ideology of postmodernism. This new set of assumptions about reality—which goes far beyond mere relativism—is gaining dominance throughout the culture. The average person who believes that there are no absolutes may never have heard of the academic exercise of ‘deconstruction.’ The intellectual establishment may disdain the …