Reviewed by T. Nelson

oger Kimball seems like one of those wild and crazy bowtie-wearing, stay-up-until-nine-o'clock, ultra-sober literary guys, more of a traditionalist in the mold of Roger Scruton than a typical conservative. But, like Scruton, he's amazingly well educated about culture as well as political history. Post-modern art and architecture, he suggests, are more to be pitied than hated; the poor devils have run out of boundaries to transgress. Their products are not much more than the (in some cases literal) pieces of carp that comprise them; they have become boring and predictable—visual evidence, Kimball would probably say, of the unsoundness and barrenness of their philosophy.

So it is with Marxism, which is the main focus of this collection of essays. Kimball says Marxism is “as wrong as it is possible for a theory to be wrong.” Yet despite 100 years of failure and mountains of dead bodies, the idea that humans can engineer a better world by forcibly eliminating inequality is still clinging to life. Kimball asks: Why do so many intellectuals still subscribe to these sentimentally appealing but provably unsound ideals?

Each chapter discusses this question from the point of view of a different thinker: G. K. Chesterton, John Buchan, Rudyard Kipling, Richard Weaver (the author of Ideas Have Consequences), and others. These writers all understood that building a utopia based on a false understanding of human nature is doomed to miserable failure, and said so in courageous and articulate ways.

Marxism may be dead at the moment, but it has the darndest habit of coming back to life. The impulse to build an egalitarian system exists today in the form of political correctness and feel-good leftism. In “What's Wrong With Benevolence” Kimball gets to the psychology of it. He says benevolence makes the purveyor of benevolence feel better—more smug and more self-righteous. Where else, other than government, he asks, are the pleasures of smug self-righteousness to be had for so little cost? By getting big government to do the work, the liberal can make others pay to make him feel smug. In return the government gets what governments always want: to become bigger.

In the chapter “Does Shame Have a Future?” Roger Kimball critiques an article written by a college professor named Martha Nussbaum discussing the practice of forcing ex-cons to post signs in front of their residence advertising that a child molester, or a burglar, or a sign thief, or whatever, “lives here.” His point of view is reminiscent of James Kirchick, writing in last month's Commentary, who decried British papers like the Guardian for carrying Edward Snowden's revelations about the NSA, calling it “Treason Chic.”

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