Thesis: The best cultural criticism is at least a decade old, and often a good bit older.

The reason this is so is because incisive cultural criticism penetrates beneath the ephemera to the deeper forces shaping society and human life. These forces, it turns out, have a complex history and, therefore, continue to exert influence even beyond technological innovations or surprising political realignments. The best cultural criticism brings these structural dynamics into view. But it’s difficult to discern a book’s prescience except with hindsight. That’s why Lasch and Bellah (and so on) are still quoted regularly. It’s why Taylor’s A Secular Age seems to be a bottomless well for writers to draw from. And it’s why much of the best tech criticism—e.g., Postman, Ellul, Illich, Borgmann—was published so long ago.

So, a proposal for testing my thesis. Let’s take Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, which has been lauded as a brilliant work of intellectual history. Trueman’s narrative seems to offer a level of explanatory power for people trying to make sense of how Western culture has arrived at the place it’s at. To be clear, though I’ve not read the book, I fully expect that all the accolades are well deserved. Trueman is a top-notch historian and I assume his work is well-researched and tightly argued. My thesis would merely suggest that Rise and Triumph, if it is in fact the incisive work of commentary that we currently believe it to be, will be able to illuminate unforeseen circumstances in a decade or two. It’s ability to be uncannily relevant to a later time—where you check the copyright because it feels like it was written yesterday—that, to me at least, is the truest mark of a great work of cultural criticism.