The inhumanities.(The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art)(Book Review)

The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art, by Roger Kimball (Encounter, 186 pp., $25.95)

ROGER KIMBALL's Tenured Radicals (1990) is one of the indispensable books of the last quarter-century, for its lucid analysis of the content of higher education. Kimball documented the transgressive insurgency and large-scale victory in the teaching of the humanities of radicalized intellectuals promoting "ever more sophistical layers of intellectualized mendacity," accomplished largely by self-dramatizing "orgies of disillusionment and skepticism" about reason and ethics. He patiently, carefully scrutinized the acts and works of transgressive Francophone literary sophists such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Paul de Man and their American allies and apologists such as Stanley Fish, J. Hillis Miller ("deconstruction's faithful mascot"), and Geoffrey Hartman.

Kimball's indictment could be ignored, but not answered very easily, as he deftly employed the mind's oldest tool of sanity and responsibility, the principle of non-contradiction. Quoting statements from these quicksilver literary sophists, he then employed the ancient "tu quoque" strategy: Apply your own statement to your own work and your own conduct. If, for instance, with Derrida, de Man, and Fish, we deny normal, Aristotelian rational and linguistic procedures and deny the possibility or authority of rational statements and denotative language, then these statements themselves fall under the asserted generalization and are invalid. Kimball's portrayal of "six-figure salary" Stanley Fish as a precise modern counterpart of Socrates's transgressive sophistical opponent Thrasymachus remains a devastatingly effective indictment of a generation of literary nihilists who now regularly confuse or debauch our young people from the expensive heights of Yale, Duke, Harvard, and Stanford. "La trahison des clercs, encore une fois!"

Our current post-humanist establishment is the sinister offspring of the marriage of the French disciples of Nietzsche with the American-born antinomian radicalism of Emerson and Whitman. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche praised France's "cultural superiority over Europe" as the talent for "converting even the most calamitous turns of spirit into something attractive and seductive." The "emancipated," post-moral, aesthetic-nihilist view of reality has indeed been made "attractive and seductive" to 40 years of American university students. Whether this is good news in the era of Zyklon B, the Gulag, AIDS, global terrorism, cloning, and civic illiteracy, is a question worth asking.

Kimball's new book, The Rape of the Masters, takes up where Tenured Radicals left off, applying the same antiseptic scrutiny to contemporary "cutting edge" art historians who have written about seven important Western paintings: Courbet's The Quarry (1857), Rothko's Untitled (1953), Sargent's Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882), Rubens's Drunken Silenus (1618), Winslow Homer's The Gulf Stream (1899), Gauguin's Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892), and Van Gogh's Pair of Shoes (1886)--all of which are beautifully reproduced in this volume. The preposterous verbiage and perverse ingenuity of these art historians would be hilarious if they were not so outrageous, feckless, and destructive. Of course, in a world where things disappear before one's sight--where there are no "facts," only interpretations--one is constantly "attracted and seduced" (or assaulted and insulted) by radical relativism and subjectivism. Kimball tries to manage a tone less somber than that of Tenured Radicals, where the seriousness of the stakes required not only great care but austerity. Yet he cannot help building toward the conclusion that the PC takeover of the humanities (which my teacher Lionel Trilling saw coming decades ago) has as "its aim to transform art into an ally in the campaign of decivilization."

Writers such as Trilling, Czeslaw Milosz, C. S. Lewis, F. R. Leavis, Quentin Anderson, Daniel Bell, Jacques Barzun, Philip Rieff, and Michael Polanyi have developed a wide-ranging critique of our voluble radical skeptics, relativists who nevertheless endlessly moralize. Following Dostoyevsky, Polanyi called "moral inversion" the contradictory syndrome of 1) denouncing ethics as groundless and then 2) furiously issuing ethical pronouncements; no more brilliant and ...