Claimed cultural crisis rhetoric drew on a shared vocabulary borrowed from earlier sources

Evidence

For the novelists Saul Bellow and Martin Amis contempor­ ary America is a ‘moronic inferno’ (the phrase is actually Wyndham Lewis’s), a sinister, centreless chaos, in which the autonomous individual and the cultural tradition are increasingly displaced by a violent, illiterate mass lobotomized by television, all coherent under­ standing lost as, their attention span dwindling, they hop from channel to channel - a vision of the present to which Bellow and Amis have sought to give actuality in such novels as The Dean’s December and Money. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 533

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth checking whether Callinicos later uses the fact that ‘moronic inferno’ is Wyndham Lewis’s phrase — not Bellow’s or Amis’s — as evidence that the ‘break’ narrative recycles older reactionary tropes rather than describing something new.
• XREF: connects to: Discourses of civilization and modernity relied on repressing the non-Western Other — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 484; Nineteenth-century missionary rhetoric predicted a civilization-versus-barbarism framing of Islam — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes…, 512; Frankfurt School internal disputes shared a common vocabulary and assumptions — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 77 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Nineteenth-century missionary rhetoric predicted a civilization-versus-barbarism framing of Islam #corroborates (0.75) — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 512
• Discourses of civilization and modernity relied on repressing the non-Western Other #complicates (0.70) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 484