Such a magazine can be pompous and esoteric, intellectually arrogant and self-assured when it declaims what it likes (and doesn't like), but this one holds the line on making essential cultural judgments. These are true to Matthew Arnold's definition of the function of criticism, which is "to learn and propagate the best which has been known and thought in the world." Or as Goethe might put it: "To act is so easy; to think is so hard."
We must be vigilant in confronting the newest ideas just because they are untried and untested against evil and stupidity, the lowest of the common denominators of culture. We can't always see the enemy lurking in the ideologies that take over the minds of those who should know better. What the criticism in the New Criterion makes clear is that there is no absolute demarcation between political standards and aesthetic discipline. Sloppy thinking infects both the arts and governance, and high IQs and SAT scores are no guarantee against mediocrity and mendacity.
The cultural heroes of the intellectual left of recent years included Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara and Chairman Mao, whose faces still adorn T-shirts on college campuses. Intellectual luminaries of the Cold War years, including Jean Paul Sartre, Bertolt Brecht, Simone de Beauvoir and Bertrand Russell, socialists all, don't seem quite so luminous today.
"Humankind cannot bear very much reality," wrote T.S. Eliot on founding the first Criterion magazine in 1922, the model and inspiration for the New Criterion, founded in 1982 by Hilton Kramer, who was then chief art critic of The New York Times, and music critic Samuel Lipman. The magazine was founded to confront the dangers inherent in the current academic debates, where issues of race, gender and class dominate aesthetic judgment.
The insidious assault on ideas that emanated from the leftward intellectual turns in the '60s marked the birth of the New Criterion, and this leftward intellectual turn continues as a target for essays: "In everything from the writing of textbooks to the reviewing of trade books, from the introduction of kitsch into the museums to the decline of literacy in the schools to the corruption of scholarly research, the effect on the life of culture has been on-going and catastrophic." The New Criterion has exposed the worst of times, but rescued and identified what's best in the creative culture. An anniversary to celebrate.