With this issue, The New Criterion embarks on its
twenty-fifth anniversary season. Twenty-five years—a
quarter century: yes, it is a long time, but how quickly the
years have passed!
A lot has changed since September 1982.
Back then, there was still something called the Soviet
Union, a minatory, intractable behemoth which, for most
observers, seemed destined to lumber on indefinitely.
In August of that year, the Dow
Jones Industrial Average dipped to 776—that’s seven
hundred and seventy-six—and many were the bulletins
alerting us to the impending “Death of Equities.”

By 1982, we’d suffered through the disgusting spectacle of
the Ayatollah Khomeini and the brazen economic blackmail of
OPEC—how many of our current political woes were
engendered by our inadequate response to those
assaults!—but al Qaeda was not yet a twinkling in the
mullahs’ eyes. No one (near enough) had heard of email, cell
phones, or the internet, and the words “multiculturalism”
and “political correctness” had yet to be enlisted to
register the burgeoning pathologies they named. The
university, then as now, was essentially a one-party state,
its reflexive, hermetic leftism still untroubled by such
broadsides as Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American
Mind.

Elsewhere in the world of art, culture, and intellectual
life, a similarly sclerotic complacency reigned. The term “diversity”
had yet to emerge as the favored shibboleth of those bent on
enforcing conformity, but the conformity itself was already
deeply entrenched. “All good people agree,” as Kipling put
it, “And all good people say,/ All nice people, like Us, are
We/ And everyone else is They.” Standards—aesthetic as well
as intellectual—were low, but then so were expectations.
Words like “transgressive” and “challenging” had just begun
their bizarre mutation into terms of critical commendation, while
traditional epithets such as “beautiful,” “technically
accomplished,” even “true” were drifting into desuetude. What the
historian Elie Kedourie called “The Chatham House
Version”—that amalgam of smugness, moral relativism,
and cherished feelings of guilt about the achievements of
Western civilization—everywhere nurtured the catechism of
established opinion.

This, of course, was a world allergic to dissent, and it
was no surprise that when The New Criterion first appeared
the reaction
was astonishment followed quickly by rage:
astonishment that anyone would even think of starting an
unabashedly conservative journal devoted to serious culture
and the arts, rage that it would have the temerity
to translate that thought into action.
We were at first
taken aback and then mildly amused by the fury of the
left-liberal—especially the academic left-liberal—response
to the debut of The New Criterion. One common if
unarticulated assumption was that by presuming to intervene
in cultural debate from a conservative perspective, we had
somehow violated an unspoken pact: culture, the arts,
intellectual life—wasn’t all that the Left’s prerogative?
Who were we upstarts, presuming to contribute to the war of
ideas and cultural controversy? We early on lost count of
the accusations that we were a nefarious tool of the Reagan
administration. After our first issue appeared, The New
Republic ran a hysterical piece that, inter alia,
insinuated some dark connection between The New Criterion
and the Olin
Corporation, a munitions manufacturer. It
certainly made for some entertaining press, and it reinforced
overall our fondness for William Dean Howells’s observation that
the problem for a critic is not making enemies but keeping
them.

The New Criterion has always owed a lot to its enemies.
They
instantly attributed to us an influence and connection
to the corridors of power far greater than we possessed. By
so doing, they helped assure our success, amplifying our
authority by the simple expedient of decrying it.

The business of the critic, said Walter Bagehot, is to
criticize.
To criticize: that means to sift, compare, discriminate, judge.
As T. S. Eliot put it, the fundamental task of criticism is to
distinguish good from bad, and its severest test is to
select the good and lasting from the noisy throng of new
works clamoring for attention. Most cultural artifacts today, as always, are
mediocre or worse. Recent cultural life is subject to some
special deformations—above all, we think, an ongoing
ambition to politicize culture and a concomitant effort to
blur the distinction between high and low. But the present
age has no monopoly on mediocrity. We look back, and
rightly, to the Victorian novel as a stupendous achievement.
But there were, what, two dozen masterpieces? An acquaintance
recently reminded us that between 1837—when Victoria
ascended the throne and Dickens’s first novel, Pickwick
Papers, was published—and 1901, the year of Victoria’s
death, there were some 70,000 novels published in Great Britain.
How many do you suppose have stood the test of time?

In his poem “At the Grave of Henry James,” W. H.
Auden speaks of the “Resentful muttering Mass,”
its “ruminant hatred of all that cannot/ Be simplified or
stolen” and “its lust/ To vilify the landscape of
Distinction.” James dedicated his career to opposing that
hatred of complexity and lust for leveling. From the
beginning, The New Criterion has understood its vocation
in similar terms. “All will be judged,” Auden declaims in the
last stanza of his elegy for that master of discrimination. For us, the imperative
of judgment, of criticism, revolves primarily around two
tasks.

The first is the negative task of forthright critical
discrimination. To a large extent, that meant the job of
intellectual and cultural garbage collector.
In the note to our
inaugural issue, we spoke of applying
“a new criterion to the discussion of
our cultural life—a criterion of truth.”
The truth was, and is, that much of what presents itself as
art today can scarcely be distinguished from political
sermonizing, on the one hand, or the pathetic recapitulation
of Dadaist outrages, on the other. Mastery of the
artifice of art is mostly a forgotten, often an actively
disparaged, goal. At such a time, simply telling the truth
is bound to be regarded as an unwelcome provocation.

In the university
and other institutions entrusted with preserving and
transmitting the cultural capital of our civilization,
kindred deformations are at work. Pseudo-scholarship
propagated by a barbarous reader-proof prose and
underwritten by adolescent political animus is the order of
the day. The New Criterion sallied forth onto this
cluttered battlefield determined not simply to call
attention to
its carnage, but to do so with
wit, clarity, and literary panache. We acknowledge that these have been hard
times for the arts of satire and parody. With increasingly
velocity, today’s reality has a way of outstripping yesterday’s
satirical exaggeration.
Nevertheless, The New Criterion
has always been distinguished by its effective deployment
of satire, denunciation, and ridicule—all the astringent resources in the
armory of polemic—and that is one of the things that
enabled the magazine to live up to Horace’s injunction to
delight as well as instruct.

But The New Criterion is not only about polemics.
The second, equally important part of criticism revolves around the task of
battling cultural amnesia. From our first issue nearly a
quarter century ago, we have labored in the vast storehouse
of cultural achievement to introduce, or reintroduce,
readers to some of the salient figures whose works helped
weave the great unfolding tapestry of our civilization.
Writers and artists, philosophers and musicians, scientists,
historians, controversialists, explorers, and politicians:
The New Criterion has specialized in resuscitating
important figures whose voices have been drowned out by the
demotic inanities of pop culture or embalmed by the dead
hand of the academy.

It is worth noting that our interest in these matters has
never been merely aesthetic. At the beginning of The Republic,
Socrates reminds his young interlocutor, Glaucon, that their
discussion concerns not trifling questions but “the right
conduct of life.” We echo that sentiment. The New
Criterion is not, we hope, a somber publication—but it is a serious
one. We look to the past for enlightenment and to art for
that humanizing education and ordering
of the emotions that
distinguish the man
of culture from the barbarian.

Allan Bloom once observed that a liberal
education consists in knowing and thinking about the
alternative answers to life’s perennial questions.
Today, when some of history’s less savory alternatives are
once again on offer, the claims of culture—and criticism,
which keeps culture vital—are particularly exigent.
Five years ago, in a note introducing our twentieth
anniversary issue, we quoted two passages from Evelyn Waugh.
The first, written near the end of Waugh’s life, concerned
Rudyard Kipling’s conservative view of culture. Kipling,
Waugh wrote,
“believed civilization to be something laboriously achieved
which was only precariously defended. He wanted to see the
defenses fully manned and he hated the liberals because he
thought them gullible and feeble, believing in the easy
perfectibility of man and ready to abandon the work of centuries
for sentimental qualms.”

In the second passage, written
three decades earlier,
Waugh dilates more fully on this theme.
“Barbarism,” he wrote
in 1938,

is never finally defeated; given propitious circumstances, men
and women who seem quite orderly will commit every conceivable
atrocity. The danger does not come merely from habitual
hooligans; we are all potential recruits for anarchy.
Unremitting effort is needed to keep men living together at
peace; there is only a margin of energy left over for experiment
however beneficent. Once the prisons of the mind have been
opened, the orgy is on… .
The work of preserving society is sometimes onerous,
sometimes almost effortless. The more elaborate the society, the
more vulnerable it is to attack, and the more complete its
collapse in case of defeat. At a time like the present it is
notably precarious. If it falls we shall see not merely the
dissolution of a few joint-stock corporations, but of the
spiritual and material achievements of our history.

We wrote this only a few weeks before the terrorist attacks
of 9/11. In the years since, we have often returned to
Waugh’s prescient observations. “Conservative”: that means
wanting to conserve what is worth preserving from the ravages
of time and ideology, evil and stupidity. In some plump
eras, as Waugh says, the task is so easy we can almost
forget how necessary it is. At other times, the enemies of
civilization transform the task of preserving of culture into a
battle for survival. That, we believe, is where we are
today. And that is one reason that The New Criterion’s effort to tell
the truth about culture is as important today as it was
in 1982.