Morgan N. Knull, a Richard M. Weaver Fellow, is a graduate student at St. John's College in Annapolis, MD.

"Democratic nations care but for little what has been," a traveller noted, "but they are haunted by visions of what will be." Yet Americans, whom Alexis de Tocqueville had in mind when he wrote those words, paradoxically are both reverent towards their past and apostles for progress. Ours is a country in which schoolchildren still don period costumes to celebrate Thanksgiving at Plymouth, but where people are also fascinated by new gadgets and innovations.

For some time, however, cultural observers—and not just conservative ones—have detected the onset of something alien to the American spirit. It constitutes more than relentless and destructive self-criticism; it represents a deliberate effort to re-invent history to conform with faddish political programs.

In The Future of the European Past, Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball have edited a volume of sprightly essays reflecting on the state of our culture. "The moral and cultural achievements of European civilization—the very achievements that underwrite our prosperity and give meaning and purpose to our liberty—are everywhere under attack," they declare in the introduction.

Kramer and Kimball, editor and managing editor, respectively, of the New Criterion, are trenchant critics of our age’s fashionable "epidemic of intellectual slumming." Academia, in particular, seems terminally ill.

Championing behavior which is socially subversive or downright sick, trendy professors keep carving out new "academic specialties" whose legitimacy is as tenuous as their boosters’ grasp of reality. Women’s studies begat gender studies begat queer studies.

"In this endeavor, which is designed to deconstruct the historical past for the purpose of bringing it into ideological alignment with the imperatives of postmodern discourse," Kramer writes in his essay, "a concentrated interest in perverse sexuality is a common priority."

Masquerading as scholars while actually fomenting cultural revolution, deconstructionists must rightly be regarded as ideological propagandists rather than historians. For history, after all, is about what was, not what we wish had been.

Contrast that view with theorist Michel Foucault’s declaration, "I am well aware that I have never written anything but fictions." Though arguably the one true thing he ever uttered, Foucault and his kin redefine not only history but all of reality. For them, reality is fiction, an endless series of social constructs designed to perpetuate political control.

Whatever they may have thought of it, scholars and critics once readily understood America’s history to be tied inextricably to Europe’s, particularly to Northern European and Protestant culture. Though not exclusive influences, they were defining ones. Our language, legal institutions, religion, and customs owe their origin to Europe. "The very concept of a liberal arts education is, of course, an invention of the European past," Kramer and Kimball write. "So is the idea of liberal democracy."

The essays in the present volume, commissioned from ten English-speaking scholars and critics across three continents, address subjects ranging from music to art to philosophy to pop culture, considered within the context of Europe’s historical influence on American thought. With one exception, the contributors believe that educational institutions are failing to inculcate a love for wisdom in students.

In place of grounding in history and literature, shallow courses on ephemeral subjects now are taught to kids more acquainted with Homer Simpson than Homer’s Odyssey. The cultural costs cannot be underestimated. In his contribution, the late classicist John Herington writes, "The future integrity of classical studies, if not their survival, depends ultimately on the future of Greek and Latin learning."

We ought to read the classics not simply because they contain our history, but because they offer wisdom and insight about the human condition, across time. "To know nothing of what happened before you were born is to remain ever a child," Cicero realized.

Without the ability to place their own existence within the continuity of history, students are left believing "the world began yesterday," as book critic John Gross notes in his essay. "What is particularly disheartening about the junking of the past is how little resistance has been offered by institutions which not so long ago would have been considered bulwarks of social stability."

Instead of serving as cultural conservators, churches, schools, museums, and foundations aspire to the vanguard of social and political change. "The most effective remedy for our cultural discontents is naturally education—or it would be, if one didn’t know better," Gross laments.

The plight of contemporary learning—ever more money spent towards ever diminishing results—demonstrates that education as a process guarantees nothing. Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia had educational systems that produced the first jet engine and put the first man into space. But they were less successful at affirming human dignity and inspiring great artistic works.

"The crisis in history teaching is part of a more general breakdown of standards in education;" Gross writes, "it is all of a piece with the policy of dismissing instruction in punctuation and grammar as ‘hegemonic,’ or the belief that you empower children by not correcting their mistakes."

Contrasting historians’ treatment of Communism with Nazism, London Evening Standard columnist Anne Applebaum’s powerful essay documents the pernicious "gulag denial" of Western intellectuals. Refusing to concede the Soviet Union’s "experiment with human nature" produced horror, journalists and professors continue to offer paeans to the "noble" ideas of Communism which sadly failed in practice.

Applebaum cites the egregious example of New York Times editorial writer Tina Rosenberg, who claims, "Communism’s ideas of equality, solidarity, social justice, an end to misery, and power to the oppressed are indeed beautiful."

"Here it is again," Applebaum writes of Rosenberg’s apologetic, "the ideas were fine, it is just the people who failed. That the ideas were wrong still escapes her; that Hitler had ideals, too, is also not mentioned." Tyrants, as surely as romantic reformers, possess ideals, but earnestness cannot absolve bad ideas of the consequences they wreak.

This insight—that the only genuine test of ideas is their effect on real people—is a theme which unites this volume’s contributors. Kimball’s essay invokes political philosopher Hannah Arendt’s description of totalitarianism as an "experiment against reality." The dominant strain of Euro-American culture today, Kimball asserts, represents just this.

A dissonant voice is offered by literary critic Ferdinand Mount, who regards the defects of higher education as structural rather than substantive.

The explosion of knowledge in recent decades means "a reasonably dutiful undergraduate today will probably know more chemistry than Goethe knew." But whereas Goethe mastered his discipline, contemporary students are confronted with an explosion of subjects. "Broader means shallower," Mount explains, calling for more attention to basics (such as mathematics) and less on applications (such as computer science).

Describing multiculturalism as "at worst a congeries of small sillinesses and at best a form of courtesy to insecure immigrants," Mount remains unpersuaded that it imperils national identity.

Although Hispanics shall soon attain plurality in several states, and are about to surpass blacks as the largest ethnic minority, he writes: "Hispanic culture cannot represent any kind of long-term challenge to the dominance of English-speaking America, since it has no single mother country to draw sustenance from (unlike the French in Canada), it has no historical territorial base within the United States, nor does speaking Spanish offer much of an avenue to advancement for the next generation."

Mount concludes that our cultural crisis stems from an "exhaustion of the present" rather than the loss of the European past.

In an essay focusing on Continental Europe, writer David Pryce-Jones ponders a similar question. "The external glow of prosperity is unmistakable," he writes. "But a cluster of related political concepts, and their social and moral consequences, conspire to reduce that prosperity to an end in itself. Poverty of spirit is the price to be paid."

If our culture suffers from an exhaustion of the present, is history a burden or does it offer a source of renewal? Roger Kimball has the final word.

"The Enlightenment sought to emancipate man by liberating reason and battling against superstition," he notes. "It has turned out, however, that when reason is liberated entirely from tradition—which means also when it is liberated entirely from any acknowledgment of what transcends it—reason grows rancorous and hubristic: it becomes, in short, something irrational."

Yet the greatest contribution of European culture, as even Nietzsche recognized, is what Kimball describes as its "faith in the liberating power of truth." That is one aspect of our European past which we scarcely can afford to junk.