The Culture of Complaint
By Robert Hughes
Oxford University Press, 1993
Reviewed by Bill Doyle
Robert Hughes is probably best known in this country as the author of the excellent The Fatal Shore, or perhaps as the cheeky, slightly lairish host of TV art documentaries — The Shock of the New or his series on the art of Australia.
An Australian expatriate, now living in the US, Hughes is a man unafraid of putting in his two cents' worth, and in this book he gives us about $2.50 on the subject of "political correctness" in his adopted country.
Hughes presents himself as a beacon of liberal enlightenment in a sea of frauds and whiners, beset by currents of left extremism and the blustery gales of what he amusingly calls neolithic conservatism. And it is the extent to which he is articulating a genuinely liberal critique which makes his book a valuable one for those of us who would define ourselves as splashing around somewhere to Hughes' left.
For, trenchant criticisms of the right not withstanding, this book is a harangue of the left — half, it seems, in the hope that it will just go away, and half in the hope that it will revive itself and address what Hughes sees as the real issues. In fact, this struggle between Hughes the elitist curmudgeon and Hughes the liberal progressive permeates the whole book and frequently causes his argument to slip its moorings and drift off rather aimlessly.
"Complaint", Hughes tells us, "gives you power — even when it is only the power of emotional bribery, of creating previously unnoticed levels of social guilt". Surely, however, Hughes himself knows that merely creating guilt is hardly power. He himself says that "the loss of reality by euphemism and lies was twenty times worse and more influential in the utterances of the last two presidents [Bush and Reagan] ... than among [left] academics". Power is what happened when, to cull an example from the text, "the Gulf War taught us that bombing a place flat was 'servicing a target' or 'visiting a site'".
This kind of woolly reasoning persists throughout. The PC hordes are both taking over the US and a product of "the weak, constricted American left". Hughes demonises the very people he tells us are impotent.
For example, he derides a (purely hypothetical) left-academic analysis which sees "protean energies of capitalism seeking to reinvent its oppressive self everyday through popular culture in order to find new and better ways of turning us into docile consumers" on page 77, having told us on page 6 that "the great American form of rock 'n' roll has become over-technologised and run through the corporate grinder, until it is 95% synthetic". In other words, to refer to capitalism is pass‚, but the "corporate grinder" is chic. (Please note that the latter quotation is a standard PC whinge, too. Rock 'n' roll was always 95% crap, cultural nostalgics!)
Again, he quotes Orwell's exhortation to clear, forthright speech from "Politics and the English Language" while dallying in colourful flutings about "Mesopotamian satraps", "delphic sibyls" and "bienpensant academics".
He ridicules, quite justifiably, the grotesque, pseudo-mystical over-interpretations of post-structuralist/Marxist/whatever academia; then presents us with an analysis of the foetal overtones of the '96 Olympic mascot as a manifestation of the American psyche that would make a third year communications student blush.
An annoying persistence in the tired old debating tactic of setting up straw persons and then gleefully knocking them down, regardless of how representative of any left mainstream Ms or Mr Straw's real or imagined views are, is the major fault of this book. Had Hughes taken on, say, Noam Chomsky or Alexander Cockburn — both of whom have been persistently labelled ultraleft — rather than genuine extremists of the ilk of Andrea Dworkin or Louis Farrakhan, we might be more impressed by both his courage and his argument. If Hughes were to explain that these were not the kind of people with whom he had a problem, then we'd be left to wonder why he wrote a book denouncing the "left" when he was merely attacking the "loonies".
Hughes also misses the glaringly obvious point when it comes to labelling groups. Whereas obviously calling people "Afro-American" or "gay" does not automatically wipe out racism or homophobia these are much more positive, self-chosen titles for groups to think about themselves and their allies to discuss them. The very fact that anybody who uses a term like "nigger" or "faggot" is instantly marginalised in current Western discourse strikes me as one of PC's major achievements.
But the author of the largely "bottom-up" history The Fatal Shore can hardly be all bad, and Hughes certainly isn't.
He makes an important point when he contrasts "progressives who do not believe in the jackboot and the gag" to those who, along with the conservatives, believe that "we don't put as many restrictions on freedom of speech as we should ... the only difference being what they want to ban". Herein lies the difference between the authoritarian and the libertarian left. Reading this book reinforced for me just how ill advised are recent left calls for censorship of (non-violent, consenting adult) pornography and anti-immigration propaganda.
Hughes is an enthusiastic multiculturalist who doesn't want to see the mix broken up in favour of a series of separatist enclaves. He wishes to defend standards of truth and honesty in history against groupings of any persuasion who see history merely as a tool to be manipulated to serve their own chauvinist agenda, whether in the name of racial purity or "self-esteem". These are not anti-left positions. And when Hughes attacks the "paleo-conservatives", he is right on target.
A liberal may well be only a libertarian socialist who is afraid of a class analysis. Alexander Cockburn has talked about "fighting the good fight" alongside genuine liberals, and Hughes, when he puts his maverick Mr Hyde self away, is certainly one of those. His exhortation to "the American left ... to revitalize and ... reclaim not only the enlightenment principles but the language of Tom Paine and Orwell for itself" has resonance.
Plus the book is a rattling good read for any fan of a truly feisty polemic.