SOURCE: A review of The Culture We Deserve, in Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 17, Nos. 2-3, Fall-Winter, 1990, pp. 211-12.

In the following review of The Culture We Deserve, Pinsker expresses sympathy for “Barzun's heartfelt, uncompromisingly idealist pronouncements,” though finds little evidence that Barzun's hopes will be realized.

The dozen essays collected here [in The Culture We Deserve] explore the gap between claim and performance in contemporary culture: art and literature, education and scholarship, philosophy and history. Not surprisingly, Barzun has sobering things to say about our current state of cultural affairs. For Barzun, culture is not “any chunk of social reality you like or dislike” but, rather, what used to be called “cultivation—cultivation of the self.” And it is within that Arnoldian sense of “cultivation” that Barzun finds ample evidence for evasions of thought and for flights from common sense. Thus, “professional historians no longer write for...