Modern Age - Summer 2016 - 78

REVIEW ESSAY

POSTMODERN DEMENTIA
R. V. Young
The State of the American Mind: 16 Leading Critics on the New Anti-Intellectualism
Edited by Mark Bauerlein and Adam Bellow
(West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2015)
The Great Divide: Why Liberals and Conservatives Will Never, Ever Agree
By William D. Gairdner
(New York and London: Encounter Books, 2015)

A

casual observer may be nonplussed by a review of these
two books in a single essay. The State of the American Mind
is explicitly a reconsideration of the cultural phenomenon analyzed by Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind. Mark
Bauerlein and Adam Bellow have assembled essays by a group
of academics, journalists, media professionals, and such like
who explain from their diverse perspectives how the intellectual
decadence surveyed by Bloom in 1987 has only gotten worse
despite the alarm thus raised, which was reinforced by another
popular book of the same year, E. D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy. In
the words of its editors, the new collection offers "an empirical
approach to the problem. Except for the final entries, which are
frankly general and prognostic, we downplay culture wars sallies
and skirt Grand Theses" (xiv).
R. V. Young is editor of Modern Age.
78

moder nagejour nal .com



http://www.modernagejournal.com

Modern Age - Summer 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Summer 2016

Contents
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