This critique about the intellectual and moral confusions of our age promotes the view that young people, lacking an understanding of the past and a vision of the future, live in an impoverished present. The author claims that universities no longer provide the knowledge of the great tradition of philosophy and literature that made students aware of the order of nature and of man's place within it and that higher education fails to arouse or to nurture the self-knowledge that has always been the basis for serious, humane learning. The result is a diagnosis of cultural changes which occurred in the last decades in Western civilization, including changes in the language of politics and morals.