One Crummy Culture

SCIENCE: THE GLORIOUS ENTERTAINMENT by Jacques Barzun. 322 pages. Harper & Row. $6.

Jacques Barzun used to have a proprietary feeling about the U.S. In God's Country and Mine, written a decade ago, he defended modern-day America against carping critics. Apparently, he did not convince himself. Now he sounds like one of the carpers.

Barzun's bugaboo is science--not just the Bomb, but all the works of science. The trouble began with Newton, whose mechanical laws of the universe reduced man to an abstraction. Later, Newton was abetted by Darwin, who said man was at the mercy of evolution, and Freud, who made man a prisoner of his instincts. According to Barzun, there are not two warring cultures, as set forth in C. P. Snow's famed thesis. The war is over and science has won. The humanities have succumbed. The spurious social sciences with their lifeless jargon dominate modern thought; the arts have become analytical and overly abstract; the common tongue is bland and depersonalized.

Barzun is peevish about so many things: "the mixing of peoples, the spate of democratic and totalitarian harangues, the burst of inventions and new sciences, the spawning of processes, abstractions and manufactured goods, the freedom to play with language that literacy and advertising encourage." He is even upset that people are living longer these days. "Unwanted by the business world, unwanted by their younger families, lacking authority, respect and responsibility," American oldsters may as well leave their Florida benches and march into the sea. Barzun has an irritating habit of telling other people how to live--and die.

In spite of his breathless baroque style, Barzun adds nothing new to the literature of dismay. As is often the case with prophets of doom, Barzun overlooks the fact that much of what he finds unpleasant today has always existed, and cannot be blamed on Freud, Darwin, science, literacy, or even advertising.

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