Roger Kimball Quote
If the politicization of art and education represents one large part of the counterculture's legacy, the coarsening of feeling and sensibility is another. No phenomenon has done more to advance this coarsening than rock music. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of rock music to the agenda of the cultural revolution. It is also impossible to overstate its soul-deadening destructiveness. The most reviled part of Allan Bloom's book The Closing of the American Mind was his chapter criticizing the effects of rock. But Bloom was right in insisting that rock music is a potent weapon in the arsenal of emotional anarchy. The triumph of rock was not only an aesthetic disaster of giant proportions: it was also a moral disaster whose effects are nearly impossible to calculate precisely because they are so pervasive.
If the politicization of art and education represents one large part of the counterculture's legacy, the coarsening of feeling and sensibility is another. No phenomenon has done more to advance this coarsening than rock music. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of rock music to the agenda of the cultural revolution. It is also impossible to overstate its soul-deadening destructiveness. The most reviled part of Allan Bloom's book The Closing of the American Mind was his chapter criticizing the effects of rock. But Bloom was right in insisting that rock music is a potent weapon in the arsenal of emotional anarchy. The triumph of rock was not only an aesthetic disaster of giant proportions: it was also a moral disaster whose effects are nearly impossible to calculate precisely because they are so pervasive.
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About Roger Kimball
He currently serves on the board of the Manhattan Institute, and as a Visitor of Ralston College, a start-up liberal arts college based in Savannah, Georgia. He is Chairman of the William F. Buckley, Jr. Program in New Haven and has also served on the Board of Visitors of St. John's College (Annapolis and Santa Fe) and the board of Transaction Publishers.
On May 7, 2019, he was awarded the Bradley Prize in Washington, D.C.
On September 12, 2019, he was awarded the Thomas L. Phillips Career Achievement Award from The Fund for American Studies.