In Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (210 pages. Oxford. $19.95), Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes takes the usual line: the center cannot hold. The P.C. left whines about its victimization; the fundamentalist right and predatory rich victimize others; our rotting infrastructure suggests “a hollowness at the cultural core.” Yet the book is less a rant than a romp. Hughes’s clearsightedness, fairmindedness and plain-spokenness make the grimmest (and most familiar) diagnoses exhilarating: linking multiculturalism to political correctness, he writes, “has turned what ought to be a generous recognition of cultural diversity into a worthless symbolic program, clogged with lumpen-radical jargon. “All but P.C. hard-liners will say, Right on. Even when his ironies go over the top “pale patriarchal penis people,” for instance-he’s trying (in Samuel Johnson’s phrase) to clear our minds of cant.
Hughes bracingly defends an elitism based “on skill and imagination.” Sports’ for example, “are elitist to the core”; nobody, Hughes writes, “is going to pay to watch Hilton Kramer and me swim the 800-meter freestyle … despite our privileged position as not-quite-dead white European males.” To exempt intellectual life from critical standards, he argues, permits the flourishing of what the New York State Board of Regents, defending Afrocentrist historical theories, calls “non-dominant knowledge sources”–or, as Hughes puts it, “legend, hearsay and fantasy.”
Hughes’s demolition job on Afrocentric crankery would pain Cornel West, head of Afro-American Studies at Princeton and author of Race Matters (128 pages. Beacon. $15). West might not disagree-he calls Afrocentrism “gallant yet misguided” but he recoils from saying things straightforwardly. After the obligatory apocalyptic setup-” we are on a slippery slope toward economic strife, social turmoil, and cultural chaos” -he’s hard to pin down about how we got here and what to do. Black poverty, he says, “is primarily due to the distribution of wealth, power and income.” (Can’t fool these Princeton scholars) And his solutions come from a place called Rhetoric: finding leaders “who can grasp the complex dynamics of our peoplehood” and “reaching a dynamic consensus subject to questioning and criticism.”
Even Lewis H. Lapham, editor of Harper’s, isn’t that much in love with the sound of his own voice. His forthcoming jeremiad, The Wish for Kings: Democracy at Bay (224 pages. Grove. $22), argues that America is “an oligarchy, a government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich” over a brutalized populace, celebrity-mad and yearning to be ruled. He makes these insights seem almost fresh with neck-snapping statistics (the U.S. imprisons 426 citizens per 100,000, compared with 268 per 100,000 in the old U.S.S.R.), dryly comic anecdotes and a gift for invective: the news media, he writes, have “the instincts of an English butler.” But Lapham’s pose as the lone clear thinker in America’s upper crust gets wearing. “At least once a year for the last twenty years,” he writes, “I have attended some sort of solemn conference at which various well-placed figures [in] the American news media attempt to calibrate the precise degree of their own importance.” It took the guy 20 years to figure out such events aren’t worth his time?
In the closely reasoned Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought (178 pages. University of Chicago. $17.95), journalist Jonathan Rauch adopts a more persuasive persona: the open-minded inquirer forced to take a stand. Both scientific method and democratic process, Rauch argues, stem from two assumptions: that “no one gets the final say” and that “no one has personal authority.” These rules “define a decision-making system which people … use to figure out whose opinions are worth believing.” Both fundamentalism and wellintentioned crackdowns on offensive opinions are therefore “a menace” -not just to free speech, but to the very foundation of our culture. Unlike other current doomsayers, Rauch seems embarrassed: “I hate to be Jeremiah, but . . .” If this is a rhetorical strategy, it’s a dilly: a reluctant prophet makes any prophecy sound all the scarier. Aspiring Jeremiahs, take note.
