Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture by Anthony Esolen

Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture Reviews

• 
  Douglas Wilson

  Simply magnificent. Anthony Esolen is a baller.
• 
  Cindy Rollins

  Esolen is a prophet, and as such he says extreme, yet needful things. We all can't be prophets nor should we be but we should all listen to our prophets even if they make us very sad for what we have lost and still not sure what to do about it except be brave and speak the truth.
• 
  Jacob Aitken

  Esolen, Anthony. Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture. Regnery, 2016.
  
  Imagine if The Benedict Option were more focused and geared, not for running away, but for running towards the battle. This is what Anthony Esolen has given us. To borrow a line from his criticism of universities--the criticism being that there is no overarching truth in the university that unites all the disciplines--this book is united, not in a mere attack on modern education, but in a positive portrayal of the transcendentals: truth, goodness, and beauty. What happens to society when we sacrifice those transcendentals?
  
  In the ancient Greek world life was united around the polis, a small city-state that ordered society. Early America had something similar: the township (also see de Tocqueville).
  
  Speaking Truth: Proper Names
  
  The only way to “live not by lies” is to call things what they are. This is a metaphysical claim, since it presupposes that things have natures, essences. There is an older English word, cant, that means something along the lines of meaningless small talk. By itself, it isn’t evil. It only becomes evil when it reaches the political arena, where it then becomes sloganeering. Think of inane drivel such as “equality, democracy, inclusivity, anti-colonialism.” These are all abstract. The only way to counter such abstract drivel is by returning to the thing-ness of things. Things can’t be changed by lies (Esolen 26).
  
  Architecture and Beauty
  
  While America may not be able to boast of Gothic cathedrals, she has the simple beauty of the small township. The buildings of a small town--the church, the school house, the city hall--reflect the life of a people. Literally. The structure of these buildings communicates a certain home-ness about life. The easiest way to see it is to compare it with any building from a government bureaucracy. As Esolen notes, “We never sense, when we are in a government office building, that we are the creators and masters of the government. We sense that we are its wards, its clients, and perhaps its victim and its food” (63).
  
  In this same chapter--and largely for the same reason--Esolen proposes a renewal of school life. The form of the school should follow, not function, but essence (56). Unpacking that is difficult, but worth it. We must begin with grammar. No one will do this today. It is almost forbidden to teach in secondary school, never mind that grammar is literally the architecture of language and mind. Grammar gives you the keys to study--well, everything.
  
  Esolen then attacks foreign language study. Everyone knows that the conversational method to learning a foreign language is best. But is it? True, if you are stuck in Paris you will probably pick up French better than by memorizing a grammar book. But does this really work in the schools? Think about it: how many people graduate high school able to read Cervantes in Spanish (or English, for that matter)? True, they are able to ask for directions to the bathroom in Juarez.
  
  Almost without telling us, Esolen highlights the key reason for studying the humanities. Aristotle said that young men were not ready to study politics because they had not yet amassed any great experience of human nature (67). That’s why we study literature, to get such knowledge.
  
  Colleges
  
  Here Esolen comes close to what Dreher advocated in The Benedict Option. We’ll start by mentioning the main problem with modern universities (aside from not teaching, or even believing in, knowledge). “You sink yourself in debt to discover that your sons and daughters have been severed from their faith, their morals, and their reason. Whorehouses and mental wards would be much cheaper. They might well be healthier, too” (75).
  
  So what’s the solution? To answer that question, we need to answer the following: what is the relationship between reading Chaucer and studying the stars in the heavens? If a university can’t answer that question, then it shouldn’t exist. We’ll try. Esolen argues that since all knowledge is one, and if we as knowing subjects participate in that knowledge, “then to have the intellectual equivalent of an urban sprawl, wherein the teacher of poetry does not converse about history with the teacher of chemistry,” then we don’t have a college. Literally, there is no collegium.
  
  Here we need to acknowledge that we aren’t saying that the hard sciences shouldn’t exist. They should. That was never in doubt. This existential crisis is more acutely felt in the humanities, so most of the attention is there. We’ll start with pedagogy. Forget the fads. Focus on what Russell Kirk called “permanent things” (81). There is nothing magical about the word “classical” or the “Great Book Series.” The reason people are drawn to them is that they understand the unity of knowledge and they represent the widest and deepest gamut of human experience.
  
  This book will make you angry (cf., Kipling’s “When the Saxon Learned to Hate”), but it is a call to battle.
  
  Notable Quotables
  
  On love for country: “Unless he is taught otherwise, by some serpent of envy or by a cynical dog sniffling about the back alleys for garbage, the child will naturally love his country, just as he naturally loves his mother and father, not because they are perfect, but because they are his” (64).
  
  Multiculturalism: “Those who talk glibly about the ‘multicultural’ are, in my experience, mainly monolingual Westerners who have lost any strong sense of what culture must be about….[They always remain] stolidly certain that the whole world is moving toward their own supposedly progressive ideals--and if not, there are always armise, dollars, and food to make damned certain it does” (68).
  
  Sexuality: “If you got a girl pregnant, her brothers would show up at your door and congratulate you on your upcoming nuptials” (91).
  
• 
  Melanie

  I gobbled this book right up. Esolen reminds me of John Senior, but less cranky. He puts his finger precisely on the problems in American culture and then describes a beautiful, hopeful alternative. This is the life that I want for my family.
  
  Now I have to re-read this book slowly. And convince everyone I know to read it, starting with my husband. And also read more poetry. And more Wendell Berry. And that book on subsidiarity that's been sitting on my shelf...
• 
  Charles Haywood

  Reading this book is like wearing sackcloth and heaping ashes on your head. It certainly brings home to you that things have gone wrong, but unless the act of penance itself calls forth redemption, which sadly today it does not, without further action it only makes you feel bad and gets you dirty.
  
  Don’t get me wrong—I am all for sackcloth and ashes. Hence, I am busy preparing for what is, for a certain type of conservative, the Event of the Year—the publication in one week of Rod Dreher’s "The Benedict Option." To prepare for this, I am reading all the books with a closely related theme that have been published in the past several months. There are, depending on how you count, roughly five such books, among them this book, Anthony Esolen’s "Out of the Ashes." It is disconcerting to note, though, that roughly 80% of the blurb quotes for each of the five books come from the authors of the other four books. I am not sure what that says, if anything, but it may suggest a small audience for all these books. And if these books are to do more than preach to the converted, they need a significant audience, or they need to be exceptionally valuable to a core audience.
  
  But "Out of the Ashes," unfortunately, accomplishes neither goal. Oh, it’s an excellent book with excellent writing, and I agree with nearly 100% of what Esolen has to say. After reading it, though, I find myself knowing neither more facts nor having a clear sense of what Esolen thinks we should actually do about the problems he outlines. His book is a jeremiad, but that is not the problem. Jeremiads may not be to everyone’s taste, but Jeremiah, after all, chose his methods and the tone of his message for a reason (although let’s not forget he failed in his aims). The difference is that Jeremiah got his message across by getting physically in front of a mass target audience (who promptly tried to kill him). I am sure Esolen is brave enough to also do that. He is currently being persecuted at his academic employer, Providence College, though he does not mention that in the book. But those who read this book, unfortunately, all or almost all already know the litany of horrors Esolen presents, and are already just as horrified as Esolen. The book will therefore not reach a mass audience, and the audience it does reach will know neither new facts nor have a concrete action plan. They’ll just be sad.
  
  Esolen begins with an introduction, evocatively (and characteristically) titled “The Rubble.” Using the metaphor of a decayed family, mansion and town, he succinctly lays out the devastation he sees everywhere in today’s society, and quotes Livy, the historian of the very late Republic, that we “sank lower and lower, and finally began the downward plunge which has brought us to the present time, when we can endure neither our vices nor their cure.” The devastation, of course, is not material so much as cultural—the destruction of beauty and virtue.
  
  From here, Esolen first calls for “The Restoration of Truth-Telling.” This is a personal call to each reader, and I think this is the best and most practical part of the book. Esolen sees us adrift in a sea of unreality, in which even the names of things are ever-shifting. Like the Archmage Ged in LeGuin’s "A Wizard of Earthsea" (a fantastic trilogy ruined by LeGuin’s later shrewish re-visitation and re-interpretation), or Puddleglum in C.S. Lewis’s "The Silver Chair," we viscerally know that to give things their true names is both to understand and to have power over them, what otherwise have power over us. We should, each of us, begin by “clearing our minds of cant,” rejecting the multiplicities of lies we are fed, from that the Constitution has a right to privacy, and that right guarantees the right to kill children, to that family structure does not matter to society, to unexamined meta-lies like “Religion is the cause of almost all wars.” We should reject using words that have no meaning other than political force, such as “diversity,” “inclusion,” “equality,” and “homophobia.” We should focus on the real, for “it is hard to go completely mad if you spend your free time being free and accepting the free bounties of the world round about. . . . Things, in their beautiful and imposing integrity, do not easily bend to lies.” So, focusing on real things, we should learn to speak and read, with the depth of knowledge, learning and appreciation of virtue and beauty that at one time characterized all writing for educated people.
  
  The next call is for “Restoring a Sense of Beauty.” One sentence by way of example should give a flavor for much of Esolen’s writing, “I have seen beautifully tiled floors, their intricate cruciform patterns bespeaking careful and devoted craftsmanship, covered over with a plush red carpet, wall to wall, such as might be used in a whorehouse down on its luck.” Here Esolen particularly focuses on music, noting the neutering and watering down of traditional hymns, and calling for the restoration of their publication and performance. And not just hymns, of course, but the churches themselves—we should restore them from the metaphorical and often actual plywood that has been laid over the beauty of old churches, and create beautiful new ones. Esolen returns to this theme later in the book, with a call to once again surround ourselves with beauty, in part by returning to craft ourselves, to “work that is good for man” and in part by getting rid of middlemen rent-seekers, like colleges and government regulators, to allow the raising and employment of skilled craftsmen once again. How this is to be done is not clear, since those craftsmen first have to live, and demand for their services has disappeared, so there is a real chicken-and-egg problem. Esolen cares little for economics and has no interest in maximizing GDP per capita, but ignoring the importance of practical economy does not lessen its importance to daily life, and to the difficulties inherent in changing ways of making a living.
  
  Esolen next decries the current state of education, both in schools and in colleges. As to schools, he parades the known horribles—lowest common denominator teaching; radical leftist indoctrination; failure to teach any morals or anything about human nature or virtue, all of which he contrasts to an idealized one-room schoolhouse of the past. Esolen is, of course, correct that the common inheritance of the West, mostly based on religion and wholly dependent on religion for its idiom, is gone, and it would be impossible to teach the "Canterbury Tales" in schools without first imparting an endless litany of facts that used to be common knowledge, from what a pilgrimage is to who Thomas Becket was. He calls for more homeschooling. Esolen is correct that complete catechization of children requires homeschooling. He is not correct that this is necessary to prevent total indoctrination, since he ignores that despite the horribles we all know, there are actually many public schools where, at least at the elementary level, things are not that bad in the actual teaching, and a parent’s main job is managing the social milieu, not the classroom instruction.
  
  Colleges are worse, of course. Esolen notes the mottoes of various famous colleges and their utter inapplicability to the institutions that occupy the physical locations of those vanished halls of learning, such as Dartmouth’s "Vox clamantis in deserto": “The voice of one crying in the wilderness.” I am certain that only a handful of Dartmouth students could correctly delineate the meaning, derivation and weight of that phrase, and none without importing hackneyed political commentary at the same time. Here, Esolen’s recommendations become more concrete. “We must build new colleges. This is an absolute necessity.” He cites exemplars such as Christendom College and Hillsdale.
  
  I think this is absolutely correct, but of course the purpose of the higher education complex in America today is not education, but indoctrination while acting as gatekeepers, offering at tremendous cost of money and time a credential that allows easy entrance into the “meritocratic” clerisy that governs America. Creating what is in essence a parallel higher education system would create educated human beings. But existing alternatives (e.g.,. Christendom) are not just a parallel education system; they are also an alternative means of obtaining that necessary credential, perhaps at the cost of making it not as effective a credential, but one nonetheless. If they could not do that, very few parents would make the choice for their children of wholly foreclosing entrance into the clerisy. And, of course, as is common with conservative writers, Esolen fails to appreciate the destructive force that will be aimed at such new institutions if they gain enough traction to become a threat to the existing higher education complex and to the lock the Left has on indoctrination. Already the power of accreditation is used to force ideological conformity; in a future Democratic administration we can expect vicious, concentrated attacks on any set of colleges that seem to be attaining critical mass as a parallel system. (Though, I must admit, the success of homeschooling in the United States over past decades suggests I may be wrong about this. Forty years ago homeschooling wasn’t even legal in many states; now millions of students are homeschooled without any widespread attempt by the Left to suppress the practice, despite that it comprises a bulwark against Leftist domination. Why this is deserves further analysis.)
  
  Later chapters issue uncompromising calls for restoring traditional views of men and women, and rejecting masculinizing women and feminizing men, as well as homosexuality and gender fluidity. This is, of course, merely recognizing reality and human nature, which show us that men and women are different and complementary, an obvious truism that now is radical even to utter. Esolen also calls for restoring the sense of play among children, rather than pushing sports as chore and accomplishment.
  
  Esolen ends his book by a call for subsidiarity—the revitalization of the middle, non-governmental structures of society, and the devolution of as much power as possible, now ever more concentrated at the top, to those structures. “[S]ocial concerns should be left to the smallest group that can reasonably deal with them, the group that is nearest the concerns in question.” Although this is certainly true, it seems to me that this by itself, even if could be accomplished, will not produce the society Esolen wants. As Yuval Levin notes in "The Fractured Republic", “Subsidiarity means no one gets to have their way exclusively.” On Esolen’s own premises, of the nearly complete degradation of society, subsidiarity would mean some progress, but not over-much, if the vast majority of the individuals who make up society are already so far gone from the path of virtue. Esolen also (briefly) calls for us to revive our own social life, and to resist the ever-greater encroachments of the federal government. Together these things, if successful, might make subsidiarity possible, but doing all this is a tall order, and, unfortunately, not one Esolen has any concrete suggestions how to accomplish.
  
  Esolen in more than one place in this book touches on a topic that has bothered me for a long time, which is the habit in certain Christian churches to not, whenever possible, use a pronoun to refer to God. This practice is typically referred to with the euphemism “gender-inclusive.” Thus, “God took his . . . ” becomes “God took God’s . . . .” Of course this sounds unnatural, a very bad beginning for any sentence that involves God. The standard rejoinder is, perfectly accurately, that God has no sex and is, obviously, neither a “he” nor a “she.” This rejoinder is a cover for the real reason, that those pushing this new usage regard it as degrading or disempowering to women to refer to God as “he.” However, as Esolen points out, in English this usage necessarily sends the “message that God is not personal at all, but a concept, a thing.” This is what I had not seen before—dropping the pronoun as a matter of course is theologically unsound for precisely this reason. Whatever today’s grammar radicals may say, in English “he” is and should be the generic pronoun, and has always been understood to encompass all humanity. It is “she” that is limiting, because it is artificial and forced, and conveys a political message distracting from the meaning of any sentence in which it used. More than that, Jesus instructed us to call God “Father” and, of course, Jesus was male, suggesting certain masculine characteristics are emblematic of God. Using “she” for the generic pronoun for God would therefore not just be jarring because of its political overtones, but it would be theologically dubious as applied to the Trinity, and merely false as applied to Jesus in his human nature. Rather than being apologetic about it, we should therefore reject any other usage but “he” as the pronoun for God.
  
  Finally, I think that Esolen errs by repeatedly comparing the best possible of the past to the worst possible of the present. This is a propaganda technique unworthy of a serious call to social action. Yes, jeremiads are, in essence, propaganda. But it is still a distorted vision, and clarity of vision is important if strong, consistent action is to be taken. Esolen conveys with multiple examples that he would be happy, on most levels, with the American life of the late 19th or early 20th Century. Not only is this unrealistic, but I think Esolen overstates the virtue of the past. You can’t go back, and we need a moral sense and moral actions that can take root in today’s world as it actually is, not paeans to one-room schoolhouses, as good as they may have been at their best. I am hoping Dreher’s "The Benedict Option" will be the clear path to action that this book is not.
• 
  raffaela

  Conservatives (or at least, a certain subset of conservatives) have the unfortunate tendency to surrender without a fight on almost any and every cultural issue. Esolen is not one of those conservatives. Not content to stay in the small and skrinking corner Christians are allowed in the public square, he claims every sphere of life (home, school, college, work, play, sex and marriage, politics, and so on) as being under the dominion of Christ. We do not have to cower in the basement if all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to our Lord. So let's get to work - the harvest is plentiful and the workers are few.
• 
  Stephen

  Some things, like a Roman bridge, can last for millennia through the virtue of their design, the simplicity of their use, and the inherent strength of their materials. Other things, like the Golden Gate Bridge, or a house, require more steady attention. It isn't that they're built in an inferior fashion, but they are far more complicated and ambitious. A culture is a thing that requires attention; it must be renewed generation to generation. In Out of the Ashes, Anthony Esolen calls attention of Americans to the fact that western culture is past need for attention: it has sat too long exposed to the elements without refreshing layers of paint, the termites and mice of base creation have withered away its walls and support posts, and the foundation has sunk and cracked. What is needed is rebuilding and restoration. No one can do everything, but everyone must do something, and here Esolen offers hearty arguments for resurrecting education, play, a society based on marriage, family, and the home, politics reoriented towards the local, and the veneration of beauty and virtue. In short, he bids us deny the unholy trinity of Self, Sex, and the State, and to become participants in our own lives once more.
  
  In interviews and lectures Esolen maintains that what we must realize about American culture is that there isn't a culture there at all, merely memories and leftover habits. It is as we are walking through a dry creekbed; the impression of the creek is still there upon the land, even as the water itself is a far-distant trickle. The role of culture in Esolen's sense isn't the mere transmission of music and games from generation to generation, with improvisation and growth along the way. Instead, culture is more broadly applied to civil institutions supporting a common appreciation of man and the cosmos, supporting human life -- the cultivation of man as it were, the garden in which we are watered, thrive, and create anew the next generation. Society formerly relied on the subtle, consistent, and constant pressure of civil society -- of places like the home, the church, and the school. These were all institutions which people not only participated in, they were in complete control of them. These institutions not only shared a common architectural language, in that schoolhouses, homes, and village churches might look like, but they shared a common mission in promoting human welfare. That mission was also shared by social organization (the organization of dances to allow young people to meet one another, for instance) and ordinary habit, like allowing children to run outside and play unattended. In 2001, Robert Putnam decried the decline of civil institutions -- churches, civic groups, bowling clubs, local political moments -- and attempted to figure out what caused their decline. Now the fall is complete: state schools are such failures that colleges must teach remedial English (prior to their English Literature courses on Twilight and Fifty Shades, Dickens and Stoker having been dumped); young adults raised in hookup culture have no socialization in creating a bonafide soul-speaks-to-soul relationship, and every romantic encounter must be carefully navigated lest someone be sued because the old culture what ensured everyone knew what was appropriate and what was not is lost.
  
  There is no use complaining; we can only rebuild, and the place to start is the family. Esolen emphatically rejects the modern primacy of the individual, maintaining the family is the foundation of every human society. The home and family are where children are created, nurtured, and taught to become authentic members of their society, their polis. Speaking of the polis, it too needs awakening: the State has taken away every prerogative of local communities, leaving them a few pittances like garbage pickup. This is wrong in that it takes away from people the ability to be effective citizens of their community. Citizenship in the national government means nothing; the individual is grist in the mill. Yet there is little point in running for something like the school board nowadays, because the decisions have already been decided by far-distant strangers who know better than people what and how to teach their children. Esolen thus encourages people to create alternative institutions, to homeschool their children and work together to create private colleges in response to the past-pathetic state of university education today, a place that provides safe spaces and coloring books to its wards instead of teaching them to grapple, body and soul, with adversity and ignorance. Yet helping to participate in the restoration of society isn't as formidable as creating new and virile sources of education like St. John's and Christendom College; it can be as simple as learning to appreciate the poetic beauty of traditional hymns, so much more potent than the happy-clappy praisesongs favored by megachurches -- or leaving the television behind to use one's leisure time to build something with their hands. Fight ugliness with beauty, lies with truth, decay with work. Participation is the thing -- walking one's neighborhood and picking up litter is more effective than parading about D.C. dressed up as a vagina.
  
  Esolen's concerns are not necessarily exclusive to Christians; the Swedish eudaimonic philosopher Alain de Botton, for instance, has written extensively on the role of art, literature, and architecture in human flourishing, seeing them as important as philosophy in allowing human beings to grow to fulness. Wendell Berry and Bill Kauffman are both emphatic voices for subsidiarity, but rarely refer to religion. Robert Putnam also delivered the essential book on civil culture's decline in his Bowling Alone, which was not religious in the least. Nevertheless, Esolen is indisputably writing primarily to Christians, because the west’s civil culture has been Christian, and he is inspired and rooted by the Catholic social doctrine, referring to papal encyclical at times. At the end Esolen doubles down that he is writing a defense of Christian civilization. As he urges readers to devote themselves once more to truth and beauty amid the constant babble-babble of lies coming from politicians, the news, and , the amazon of banality that is social media, he bids them to realize that truth remains treason in the empire of lies, and that ultimately, we pursue the good and true because it is Good, not to create a heaven on Earth. That can never be, for all Christians are ultimately pilgrims on a journey to another world.
  
  Esolen -- whom I've heard described as a "fun Jeremiah" -- is a joy to listen to and to read, a man of passion with a deep bench of literary references. In a lecture on the decline of culture, for instance, he once used an obscure play by Ben Johnson to make his point. In an interview, someone off-handedly mentions a hymn -- "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence" -- and Esolen recognizes it, seizes on it with joy, and at once begins lovingly reciting it. He is capable of slinging barbs as his foes, but animosity is largely absent here. Instead he writes here in a mood of intense concern, driven on by hope in redemption. For those who look at the American landscape -- all the lonely people, the dehumanizing stretches of asphalt and smoke, the constant presence of the foul beast of Jabba the State, who forever demands attention and obedience -- this is a handbook to what went wrong, and a bracing cup to cheer to begin the work of restoring a more humane culture.
  
  
  Related:
  Bowling Alone: the Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam
  
  
• 
  Michael

  I don't know why I picked up this book. The whole "why has our culture decayed?" thing is interesting to me, I guess. I like the Catholic intellectual tradition, and this guy--a professor of classics at Providence College--writes well, so I gave it a shot. I should have known.
  
  First, an observation: I watch some TV shows with my daughters, who are 8 and 11. We like to watch The Flash, Supergirl, and Legends of Tomorrow. These shows are generally harmless, and tend toward reinforcing virtues like courage, friendship, teamwork, sacrifice, etc. But the language! I don't know when or how it became okay to use words like 'douche,' 'dick,' 'ass,' 'bitch,' and 'bastard' on TV at 8PM, but apparently it is. I can't get over it. When did this become okay? Is it okay? Why is it okay?
  
  My point here is that our culture has, demonstrably, coarsened. Things that were once considered to be rude (like children using the word 'suck' in a sentence when speaking. To adults. In school.) are now just hunky-dory. The uber-popular show The Walking Deadhas become so over the top violent that Little Alex from A Clockwork Orangewould turn his head away in horror. Not too long ago, my family and I were watching a re-run of an old episode of Little House on the Prairie, and I was shocked to see the family reading from the Bible. On television! Can you imagine a scene like that, today, when even the commercials for the show Jane the Virgin depict adults pretty much screwing on a kitchen table?
  
  For people younger than me--teenagers, young adults--this all probably seems normal. I mean, to younger people, this is pretty much how it's always been, right? (I shudder to imagine what Millennials will find shocking when they are my age). And, I can only imagine that my grandparents found the things I watched and saw as a teenager to be unspeakably vulgar. So the question here is, why? Why, as time goes by, does our culture's entertainment become more sexualized, more violent, more rude? Why?
  
  Emile Durkheim, the father of sociology, wrote that a culture can only tolerate so much deviance before it has to re-norm its mores so that what was once taboo becomes an acceptable norm. Why that happens, I have no idea, but it is certainly happening now (and fast as all hell, too, thanks to advances in technology). Plato wrote that a democracy will collapse under the weight of too many choices. In other words, people will think that men are women, that animals have rights, and that up is down (his words, in paraphrase) before they just become exhausted by it all and give up. We seem to be heading in that direction. But...why? Is it entropy? I wish I knew.
  
  The author of this right-wing Catholic jeremiad has the answer: gays, feminists, and a lack of religiosity. Also, people don't farm enough, or make their own clothes. Right.
  
  You can't have my $15 bucks, sir. I want a refund.
  
  I sometimes feel like an old Roman soldier, standing on a wall, looking out at the approaching barbarian hoards. Behind me, in Rome, the Republic is covered in graffiti and decay. The people demand bread and circuses. Things are burning, and people are milling about taking selfies and arguing about locally sourced kale. Before me, a clean death fighting for principals that no one really believes in anymore, but that I feel duty-bound to defend.
  
  It may be easier to just watch TV.
• 
  Sara

  Without question, one of the most important books written in my lifetime. Esolen is to be applauded for his his courage, his common sense, and the good that he is doing for Western Civilization in this hope-filled battle cry.
• 
  Becky Pliego

  WOW! Mr. Esolen is a needed voice today, I’m grateful he is writing. And I’m grateful to be able to read him!
  
  
• 
  Karl

  Upon completing this book, I was overwhelmed with the urge to call up some of the other men on my block to organize a pick-up football game in the middle of the street like we used to play when I was a kid.
  
  One cannot read this book without realizing the riches we have lost in the space of just three or four decades. Where once the streets teemed with neighborhood children playing, today they are barricaded behind closed doors, behind privacy fences, leading mostly solitary lives, connected only to other children by electronic fetters that chain them to their screens.
  
  Lost are the natural roles of men and of women as each pretends that there are no differences among the sexes and no special quality that one gender is more adept at providing than the other. And in the process, we have isolated ourselves from one another as each is driven out of the home and into the workplace, assuming even that there is a common home from which to be driven in the first place.
  
  Esolen provides a sobering look at what has been lost, and tantalizes with a vision of what could be - lives designed to honor our humanity. From our work to our play, our worship, our education, even to our being able to see the world as it really is, Esolen sketches a view of human flourishing that is every person's birthright.
  
  I cannot recommend this book more highly. Read it. And then play some kick the can in the streets of your neighborhood.
• 
  Jane

  This book is all dog-eared with bits that I want to share with people. I want everyone to read it.
• 
  Rick Davis

  Amazing book. Maybe the best and most comprehensive critique of modern culture that I've read. I recommend it for absolutely everyone!
• 
  Graychin

  Mr Esolen begins: “In this book I shall indulge myself in one of civilized man’s most cherished privileges. I shall decry the decay of civilization.” And that’s just what he does – rather effectively, too. I find myself reading a lot of these diatribes lately. Alongside Esolen’s book, I’ve been picking my way through John Senior’s The Death of Christian Culture, and I recently bought a used copy of Alasdair McIntyre’s famous After Virtue, which has been on my to-read list for ages. The traditions of the West, they all agree, are forgotten, or under attack.
  
  There is nothing very new in Western culture being under attack (think Darius, Attila, or the Siege of Vienna). What’s different today is that most of those doing the attacking are themselves the inheritors and beneficiaries of Western culture. In a backhanded sort of way, you might say they pay homage to the notion that Western culture is superior, by holding it to a higher standard. Western culture alone, it seems, must be cleansed of the sin and violence and corruption to which human nature is universally susceptible. If it means the death of the West as we’ve known it, so be it.
  
  The fact is, however, that many of the attitudes taken by these detractors of the West are only made available to them as children of the Enlightenment – that is, as westerners. They merely hold the trailing end of that thread the bewigged philosophers of the 18th century first tugged loose. There’s an argument to make, therefore, that they themselves represent a significant element of the (modern) Western tradition. In attacking them, you might say that Esolen and his ilk are also attacking the West, or a part of it. In other words, it’s a family affair.
  
  Now, I agree with Esolen on most of his points. You might say that I sing (baritone) in the choir he’s preaching to. I am proud of the traditions of the West; I wish that all my fellow westerners felt the same. And I will give Esolen credit for not merely “decrying the decay of civilization” but for making suggestions on the reclamation of public and private sanity. I agree with Esolen, too, that culture is only rebuilt by aiming for something higher than culture itself. This is one of his best insights. You do not fix a culture by tinkering with it directly. In order to rebuild in fidelity to its historical traditions, the West needs to rediscover the Faith and something like the old notion of Christendom.
  
  Esolen’s book, however, is not without its faults. He���s an excellent writer most of the time but he rushes things here and there, leaving some sloppier-than-necessary sentences behind. That’s a criticism of style rather than substance, but this occasional sloppiness is a distraction and the kind of thing that might prevent a book from having more staying-power. Esolen is also too enamored of a 1950s vision of American society; you get the feeling that most of his complaints would vanish if we simply rolled back the tape to a made-for-TV movie version of 1955. His notion of gender norms is a bit rigid as well. An awful lot of boys (I’m raising my hand) are not of the standard rough-and-tumble variety, and an awful lot of girls are not of the play-with-dolls-and-fantasize-about-dating variety.
  
  That said, there’s a lot of fervor in this book. It’s not easily set aside. One hopes that it is read more widely than most books of this sort are. Many of those who disagree with Esolen’s conservative Catholic perspective on the state of society would likely benefit from listening to his case. They might find plenty to disagree with, but they might also broaden their powers of sympathy in ways that would surprise them.
• 
  Kris

  Another ebook I read in small chunks over time. While I agree with many of his complaints, I can't rate this higher because it just felt repetitive and grating. Another reviewer on GR mentions that Esolen complains about the problems, but doesn't offer solutions. I have to agree. In one small sub-section of the last chapter he starts to explain solutions, but the section quickly derails into complaints again. The book is more about how American culture is falling apart, rather than how to rebuild American culture.
  
  This book reminds me of
  Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child.
  This book was like a more intense version of Dreher. See
  The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation and
  Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents.
  
  See this good review:
  
  https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
• 
  Maya

  Esolen has a vociferous dislike for, among many others: women, working women, single women, women in sports, infertile women, well-read women, women in politics, women part of the clergy, non-Christians, queer people, trans people, college professors, lawyers, businessmen, non-denominational education, separation of church and state, the removal of Greek and Latin classes from public education, those who don't see value in homeschooling, and Hillary Clinton. To name a few.
• 
  Kelly

  Esolen offers biting commentary on a culture destroyed and beautiful visions of a culture restored. This book made me laugh and cry as I read it aloud with my husband and we dreamed of making the rebuilt culture Esolen describes for our children - one that is sacred, relational, beautiful, and purposeful.
• 
  Brenda

  Fascinating and inspiring, I highly recommend this book to all, but especially to young adults and young families. It's not that it's too late for us baby boomers, it's just that most young adults had such different childhoods than we did, and this book really shows the value of the things that we took for granted when we were growing up, skills we developed in just living life, playing with friends, and watching our parents and grandparents live and work.
  
  Esolen used a phrase that will stick with me for a long time: "too rich to have children." I had never thought about it, but it's true. As we have become wealthier, families have generally become smaller because parents are too busy chasing the wealth and the things that accompany it to take time to have children and raise families.
  
  Some might think Esolen is asking for Utopia, but he's not. The lifestyle he describes was real and is still within living memory.
• 
  Jack W.

  A triumph. A true triumph. It made me so joyful to be a Christian. This is a must read for all those God-fearers who wish to fill this world with worship in all their daily activities.
• 
  Nicholas Kotar

  A cold shower of a book. Sometimes it can get a bit strident, but it ends on a very high note, and its ultimate message is one of attainable hope, which is sometimes rare in this kind of cultural criticism. Esolen is a wonderful writer too, leading you along by the hand, sometimes slapping you across the face, but ultimately offering you something like a cold beer on a hot day.
• 
  David Shane

  If you wanted to summarize this book in one sentence, that sentence might be something like "we have forgotten what life is supposed to be about, and that has messed everything up" - in a personal way, yes, but especially in this book in a social and national way. Or perhaps, to take a sentence from this book, "It is hard to get people to see things that are missing... to illustrate something strange has happened to us". We do not realize what we are missing or have forgotten. Or perhaps simply "modern America is incompetent at civilization and here is what we need to do about it"! "We are incompetent in the ordinary things of life", Esolen writes in the introduction, before rattling off an extended list of things our "benighted" ancestors were clearly better at than we.
  
  Esolen himself is an English professor and the book is pleasant to read and filled with literary allusions - a book like this almost had to be written by an English professor, because you cannot make the sort of cases he wants to make with statistics. You can make them with, "let's see what people have been saying about this for centuries". ("If people have always said it, it is probably true; it is the distilled wisdom of the ages. If people have not always said it, but everybody is saying it now, it is probably a lie; it is the concentrated madness of the moment.", he writes early in the book.) In terms of chapters the book talks about - truth (giving things their proper names), beauty, childhood education, college education, manhood, womanhood, work, play, and politics - and then ends with a chapter reminding us we are all pilgrims, and that we cannot rebuild culture if our first concern is culture. "Seek first the kingdom of God..
  
  This is a good book for Christians to read, I think, to shock them out of their unconsidered love-affair with the world - and I use "unconsidered" quite intentionally. No matter how counter-cultural we imagine ourselves to be, we live in this culture, we breathe it in every day, we accept stuff as normal or even good without thinking about it that some of our ancestors would have taken to be a sign of moral collapse immediately. We largely accept the worldview of the nation around us, and then offer little Christian tweaks to it here and there - the tweaks are good, but Esolen is here to say "the whole way you are thinking about this topic is wrong! We did not use to think this way or act this way at all. Can you remember?" Oftentimes my favorite books to read are those that make you realize that our culture has made a choice about the way it approaches a certain matter, and however inevitable and (in-fact) unchosen that might seem to someone living in that culture, there is another way to think. Perhaps a better way.
  
  The book is not perfect, you could perhaps rightly claim that he is too nostalgic at times, or too little concerned with how globalization and technological change have made difficult his suggestions. Perhaps also worth noting that this may be the least politically correct book I have ever read! A worthwhile read, certainly.
• 
  Christine

  We are living in the rubble and how to rebuild?
  
  While I enjoyed the book immensely, and agreed with everything in it, I found it lacking as a whole. Yes we are amidst rubble. But how, really, to build again? I found myself nodding while he bemoaned the current state of our some of churches - of their plywood walls, for example, and plywood floors, and, and, and - and yes, it shouldn't be. But how do we fix it? Me, a lay person, what can I do? Already I'm a crazy person for not liking the new electronic keyboard that has been moved to the front of the parish.
  
  Our society is so utilitarian that slough off beauty in order that we might construct more useful buildings. Yes, yes. I am thinking of the new strip malls my tiny, impoverished town insists on building directly across from the street from the old, abandoned strip malls no business wants to inhabit. But *how* do I stop it? I already vote, I'm already involved.
  
  For me, this repeated throughout most of the book. "Yes," I nodded, "yes, yes." But now what? Read good books, have your children read good books. Chase beauty. We do that. But I was hoping for more.
• 
  David Schumacher

  Esolen likes to talk about how wonderful religious culture is, especially his Catholic church. He seems to forget or ignore the fact that people with his Christian religion commented genocide against 2000 plus Native American cultures in order to propagate his culture on this continent.
  
  He quotes C.S. Lewis often, but like Lewis rejects reason and calls others liars who don’t agree with his opinions. Lewis dismisses the logical answer to the argument lord, liar or lunatic question which is none of the above.
  
  Christianity is the ultimate in scape-goating, so it is no surprise Esolen would like to pile all the parts of liberal culture he detests on the heap and burn it so he can rebuild culture out of the ashes in the religious image he prefers.
  
  Faith not only glorifies ignorance, in the case of over educated intellectuals it tries to justify and rationalize it.
• 
  amanda gardiner

  Wow what a book!!!!! This book was recommended to me by someone who’s recommendation I take seriously.....my husband ❤️ and of course, he was right, it was magnificent.
  
  Eloquent but down to earth. Thought provoking and yet when he speaks you get the feeling you knew the truth all along.
  
  Feminists will not like this book. Neither will state power living liberals or fanatics of everything “new and exciting” in the arts. But those that look at our sick, sad society and think to themselves that something is indeed wrong will find themselves a kindred sole In this author.
  
  His arguments are strong and persuasive and altogether full of beauty. He paints a picture of both how life once was as well as it could be once more.
  
  
  VERY highly recommend.
  
  Extra note: this is written from the catholic perspective.
• 
  Kyle Grindberg

  What an edifying read, this was a lucid look at our culture. Loved everything about it, minus the Roman Catholic stuff.
• 
  Christine

  A wonderful and necessary book. I wish it were possible to give it an even higher rating. Read it! Read it! Read it!
• 
  David Haines

  In this book, Anthony Esolen takes a look at the current state of our Western Society. The current state of things is not great. Though technology has advanced, we have receded in everything else. Our sense of beauty is corrupted; our schools no longer teach; our colleges no longer stimulate the mind; we no longer know what it means to be a man or a woman, and how men and women differ; we do senseless work for no other reason than to add to our already enormous pile of possessions, but don't make anything worthwhile; we no longer know how to play, and don't let our children learn how to play; and our sense of community is deficient--we are told how to live our lives by far away "leaders" who know nothing of the specifics of our daily realities.
  
  As he looks at the rot that has installed itself in each of these areas of society, Esolen also reminds us of our past, and makes suggestions about how to return to a sane life, in which we appreciate beauty, and know how to create good and beautiful things; we educate our children so that they grow up to be virtuous human men and women; and so on.
  
  Our society has abandoned the good, the true, and the beautiful. This book calls us back.
• 
  Kris

  One of the few five star-ratings I have given out this year. I am already looking forward to a second closer reading. Esolen connects many aspects of life that often don't get connected, and shows us that the progress we readily accept often has us sacrificing things more important to our humanity and culture.
• 
  Brandon

  Creates a hopeful sense of longing for the kind of life the gospel could produce. I wish all the members of my church would read and receive this.