Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (American Lectures) - Robert Hughes Henry Louis Gates, Jr. reviewed Robert Hughes' (author of Fatal Shore) new book, The Culture of Complaint in the April 19, 1993 issue of The New Yorker. Hughes takes aim at both the Right and the Left who are both involved with politicizing culture: "If someone agrees with us on the aims and uses of culture, we think him objective; if not, we accuse him of politicizing the debate. In fact, political agendas are everywhere and the American conservatives' ritual claim that their own cultural or scholarly positions are apolitical is patently untrue."
But Hughes has little time for the "hoary Victorian notions" about how art and literature can be uplifting. For example, the most universally recognized painting of the century, "Guernica" had no effect whatsoever on the conduct of the Spanish Civil War nor on Franco in particular. (One could even speculate that watching the Brady Bunch might have been more formative socially to larger numbers of people given the pervasiveness of visual media.)
"Joe Sixpack isn't looking at the virtuous feminist knockoffs of John Heartfield on the Whitney wall -- he's got a Playmate taped on the sheetrock next to the band saw, and all the Barbara Krugers in the world aren't going to get him to mend his ways."
Hughes does worry about the fragmentation of American life; the "us" vs. "them" rhetoric that "John Mitchell called 'positive Polarization.'" We are in deep trouble when "'sensitivity' gets more attention than social justice. Behind our propensity for offering lexical redress to political grievances, [Robert Hughes] suspects, is the hope of creating 'a sort of linguistic Lourdes, where evil and misfortune are dispelled by a dip in the waters of euphemism.'"
Ironically, he suggests the cry from the right that Afrocentrism is a political movement is backwards. "The trick of Afrocentrism is to have supplanted real politics with a kind of group therapy. It seeks to redress the problem of poor self-esteem [borrowing language from the ubiquitous self-therapeutic movement] rather than the problem of poor life chances....Afrocentric education is presented [by its proponents] as a technique of social control, one that will contain what white America fears most -- black violence --...culture as therapy....self-love makes the world go round." The problem, of course, is that self-esteem is not just difficult to measure; it doesn't correlate with the behavior it's supposed to support. As sociologist Neil Smelser reported in a 1989 survey "The associations between self-esteem and its expected consequences are mixed, insignificant, or absent...even less can be said for the causal relationship between the two."
Hughes is a proponent of multiculturalism. "...monoculture works poorly. It exhausts the soil. The social richness of America ... comes from the diversity of its tribes. Its capacity for cohesion, for some spirit of common agreement on what is to be done, comes from the willingness of those tribes not to elevate their differences into impassable barriers and ramparts."
The reviewer suggests that "diversity" is something of a "distraction from the more serious issues of racial immiseration [you won't find this in your little Webster's, at least I didn't -- It means a state of making miserable, great word] and economic inequality." Gates contends that the ubiquitous media or "Coca[cola]-culturalism is far more significant for the destruction of diversity -- that in Nepal ancient Hindu religious practices have been disrupted by the BBC World Service and Michael Jackson more than indigenous social fragmentation and the same thing has happened in the United States -- a kind of corporate culturalism -- which will destroy the individuality of diverse cultures.