SOURCE: “The Battle of the Books,” in Washington Post Book World, July 16, 1989, p. 5.

In the following excerpt, Dirda discusses Barzun's disillusionment and contempt for contemporary culture in The Culture We Deserve.

Books, like marriages, are rewarding in direct proportion to the passion we put into them. A critic like Roland Barthes could get more out of a half-baked Balzac novel than most of us will get out of a lifetime studying Madame Bovary. Better enthrallment to an adventure story than a bored skim through a masterpiece.

Still, for more than a hundred years humanists such as Matthew Arnold, Irving Babbitt, T.S. Eliot and Russell Kirk have called for a focused canon of works as a means of preserving or reestablishing a common culture. Each has spoken eloquently for the traditional, as do Jacques Barzun, Peter Shaw and Robert Proctor now, but all of them betray the desperation...