The Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, one of the most talented writers of his generation, is getting cranky. But even if this collection of essays and other writings could be filed under the category of “Complaints by Aging Intellectuals,” Vargas Llosa, now approaching his ninth decade, remains an incisive critic who sees more deeply into the problems of our times than most of his peers.
Notes on the Death of Culture is a slender volume of both new and previously published work, unified by one common concern: the death of culture and its replacement by the “civilization of the spectacle.” That phrase, borrowed from French philosopher Guy Debord’s essay La société du spectacle, serves as Vargas Llosa’s touchstone:
What do we mean by civilization of the spectacle? The civilization of a world in which pride of place, in terms of a scale of values, is given to entertainment, and where having a good time, escaping boredom, is the universal passion…. It leads to culture becoming banal, frivolity becoming widespread.
The concept of the civilization of the spectacle helps Vargas Llosa elucidate the well-known rogue’s gallery of problems facing the West. And while he is not wrong in his assessment, his book at times can read like a litany. Literacy: “Today’s readers require easy books that entertain them.” Politics: “As banal as literature, film, and art.” Journalism: “Blurred, full of holes, and has in many cases disappeared.” Art: “No longer any objective criteria that make it possible to qualify or disqualify something as a work of art or situate it within a hierarchy.” Eroticism: “An organic activity, no more noble or pleasurable than drinking for the sake of drinking, or defecating.”
While Vargas Llosa may not be incorrect in despairing—at least in the short term—that “what we used to call the humanities” will become “little more than secondary forms of entertainment,” it is impossible to shake the sensation that we’ve heard these arguments before. Tocqueville comes primarily to mind, given his preoccupation with the impact of democracy on the mores of the West. Bacon, Descartes, and Swift anticipated many of the problems of technology, while Plato and Aristotle wrote enduringly about eroticism, aesthetics, and piety. What sets Notes on the Death of Culture apart, however, and what makes it a nice companion volume to the works of these foundational authors, is Vargas Llosa’s ability to trace contemporary ills back to their origins in a lively, even punchy manner.
In “Forbidden to Forbid,” for example, Vargas Llosa takes on the influence of the French postmodernists, whose ideas, he believes, led to the degradation of education, which in turn has become one of the leading causes of our current cultural crisis. His argument runs something like this: Postmodern philosophers, the deconstructionists in particular, propounded a philosophy that became quite popular (and arguably remains dominant) in the humanities, holding that language is incapable of truly expressing reality. Words, in this account, are subjective and deceptive tools used by those in power to control society. And the effect this teaching has had on the authority of our teachers has been, in Vargas Llosa’s view, devastating:
Teachers, stripped of credibility and authority, often singled out, from a progressive standpoint, as representatives of repressive power that had to be resisted and even shot down in order to achieve freedom and human dignity…lost the confidence and respect of their pupils, without which it was impossible for them to fulfill effectively their role as educators: to transmit values as well as knowledge.
Once this approach to knowledge infected our educational institutions, the confidence that had allowed earlier generations to distinguish “good” from “bad” was lost. In this environment, it is easy to understand how “some of the ‘monsters’ that we thought we had destroyed forever after the Second World War…have revived and are at large once again within the heart of the West, threatening once again its values and democratic principles.”
The main problem I have with this collection of essays is Vargas Llosa’s conviction that the civilization of the spectacle “cannot be rectified because it already forms part of the way we are.” This radical resignation leaves Vargas Llosa with “little curiosity for the future.” He feels, instead, “very interested in the past and extremely interested in the present.” But if the past is prologue, why not take heart? The West has weathered brief (and not so brief) periods of cultural collapse before—the Dark Ages come to mind—and though it can take time, wisdom has a way of reasserting itself. Had Vargas Llosa stopped to consider that possibility, he might have written a different sort of book asking a different central question: What are the conditions under which wisdom, once lost or abandoned, reasserts itself? Such a line of inquiry would have enabled him to use his considerable intellect to chart a way forward rather than sink into unmanly despair.