Citizen as monk

I've talked about the writer, the artist, as monk here before. I'm reading Morris Berman's The Twilight of American Culture and find this:

The new monk is a sacred/secular humanist, dedicated not to slogans or the fashionable patois of postmodernism, but to Enlightenment values that lie at the heart of our civilization: the disinterested pursuit of the truth, the cultivation of art, the commitment to critical thinking, inter alia. Above all, he knows the difference between quality and kitsch, and he seeks to preserve the former in the teeth of a culture that is drowning in the latter. If she is a high school teacher, she has her class reading the Odyssey, despite the fact that half the teachers in the school have assigned Danielle Steel. If he is a writer, he writes for posterity, not for the best-seller lists.

And later:

 This is, then, a book for oddballs, for men and women who experience themselves as expatriates within their own country. It is a guidebook of sorts, to the twenty-first century and beyond. It seeks to give the reader a sense of where we are, in historical terms, and what this means; a way of orienting him- or herself to contemporary events, so as to be able to find meaning in a disintegrating culture, and perhaps to contribute in some way to the eventual reconstruction of that culture on a very different basis.

This book looks like one I'm going to enjoy. I'm a big Berman fan since The Reenchantment of the World.