The Judgments of TimeBecause of our technology, the shallowness of the cast of “The View” will be on display for anyone to see, for 1,000 years. But they do not tremble. I would, in their shoes.
By Anthony Esolen
February 6, 2022
The sometime actress, Whoopi Goldberg, recently commenting on the Holocaust, said that it was not so much a matter of racism as of the cruelty of mankind. When she was criticized for it, the boss of the political television show on which she regularly appears, “The View,” suspended her for two weeks—a punishment that is rather like being told by your second grade teacher to sit on a stool in the corner.
Now, “The View” is as nasty a show as you will ever see, and that is saying much; a shrill, cackling coop of irritable hens, commenting on national and world affairs as only chickens can do. What puzzles me about it, and about every area of current arts and letters, social commentary, and what must pass for political thought and oratory, is how badly done it is. If it were a chair, it would break into pieces as soon as you sat on it. If it were a wheel, it would jolt along for a little while before its not-being-quite-round had wrenched the axle out of joint, or gotten your carriage stuck in a rut.
Of course, we do not run our cars on lumpy wheels, and even particle-board furniture will last a good while before warping. There is a hard limit set upon incompetence in technology. But there is no such when it comes to the stupidities of what your child reads in English class, or the historical ignorance and philosophical simple-mindedness of what you will hear as political discourse either in Congress or in the mass media. Anyone can eye up a badly made table and say, “That won’t work.” It takes some education—I am not talking about the higher forms of schooling that take your natural endowment of dullness and deepen it into outright stupidity, but rather the general knowledge you gain from reading good books and not fouling things up by reading stupid books—to say, “That political maneuver has been tried here and here, and this is what happened.”
Thus it is that when you abandon both tradition and traditional learning, when you assume the modernist’s scorn for the past, you are like a self-appointed first inventor of tables and chairs and wheels. You revert, in both matter and manner, to ignorance. It does not happen all at once, because some vague knowledge hangs about for a while, and not everyone in a society will share the scorn to the same degree. But it does happen. It has happened.
* * *
Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/06/the-judgments-of-time/
