Letter to The Editor - It needs to be asked why so many great creators have been marginalized

To The Australian          John Carroll is too pessimistic about what is happening to Western European culture and civilization (“Disdain for best of the West”, 9-10/6). He claims, without producing justifying evidence, that ‘the Church, the one institution that could replace the university as the master teacher of eternal truths, is in a state of hopeless disrepair.’ However, he totally ignores the profound restorative work that has been achieved by giant intellects working within the Christian sacred tradition, such as T. S. Eliot, Russell Kirk and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and those working within a pan-religious context such as Rene Guenon, Ananda Coomaraswamy and Frithjof Schuon. Carroll’s pessimism extends to Western art, when he claims that ‘the high priest of modernism, Marcel Duchamp... has carried the day both in contemporary art and in university arts faculties.’ He says nothing about the greatest painter of last century, Andrew Wyeth, or about Balthus, or about the fact that representational painting of very high quality has continued to be done in all Western nations. It needs to be asked why so many great creators have been marginalized. That requires an analysis of the political orders of these nations (‘democracies’ in name only) and the international financial system, corruptly based on usury, which controls them. Carroll ignores that too.
  Nigel Jackson, Belgrave, Vic