So-called
“political correctness” on our college campuses—the shaping or censorship of thought,
expression and deportment to conform to certain cultural dogmas of a mandarin
intellectual caste—is rapidly moving from being merely annoying if occasionally
amusing to seriously threatening and dangerous.
You have all heard or read about various absurd instances (the
prosecution of festive sombrero-wearers at Bowdoin, the banishing of the noun
“American” at the University of New Hampshire, etc.) More serious is the growing list of invited
speakers who have been disinvited or shouted down when they stood at the
lectern.
A teacher
of medieval literature might be secretly jealous of those whose message is
important enough to protest and to censor.
I have certainly put a few people to sleep, but in forty years of
lecturing on many subjects I experienced only one indignant public protest,
when in a tangential sentence I expressed my opinion that there was literary evidence
of probable editorial intervention in the narrative of the gospels as they have
come down to us. A man leapt up, noisily,
and huffed out of the lecture hall. I
almost felt I had finally made it.
The most
obviously politically incorrect people tend to be on the one hand business
executives, politicians, and officials (governmental or non-governmental)
deemed reactionary, and on the other social scientists and public intellectuals
deemed conservative. But artists and
imaginative writers are more and more frequently being called to task.
The idea
that all serious cultural analysis is necessarily based in the three
circumstances of race, gender, and class is what has authorized the politically
correct strait-jacket. That is, race,
gender, and class are the only things really worth talking about. When applied to works of art this triad often
leads the commentator away from imagination and empathy, precious qualities of
much great art, to dull sociology and dubious economic theory.
The thought
crime du jour for the politically
correct is “cultural appropriation”. I
think I understand what this phrase means—beyond the admonition that Bowdoin
boys better not wear sombreros unless they also carry Mexican passports. When applied to writers, the phrase “cultural
appropriation” means the spiritual and artistic effort to imagine and depict
with conviction characters and situations very different from oneself and one’s
own. There are genuine problems
involved. I first became aware of them
acutely in the late 1960s with the controversy over William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner—a fiction
deployed in the imagined voice of the leader of a Virginia slave rebellion of
the 1830s. There were those who took the
view that no white writer had the ethical right to do that. That seemed to me nonsense then, and seems nonsense
now.
In the
current moment of rampant identity politics and maximal racialization of almost
everything, it is hardly surprising that the issue has again become
current. It has been much in the news this
past week because of a controversial keynote address delivered by the
American novelist Lionel Shriver at the Brisbane Writers' Conference. Its title
was “I Hope the Concept of Cultural Appropriation Is a Passing Fad.” She
followed this in the Times with an
account (“Will the Left Survive the Millennials?”) of the experience of
delivering the talk, which featured a high profile walk-out by an ethnically indignant
fellow writer. I have not read Ms.
Shriver’s fiction, but if it is as good as her polemical essays I had better
get to it quick.
Writers are
well advised actually to know something about what they write about; and they
should be judged by whether they do so well or badly. But if everyone claims an artistic monopoly
on large swaths of cultural experience, the result will be a literature of
solipsism. Great books are not paeans to
parochialism but claims upon universal aspects of the human spirit. Humanists used to quote with approval a maxim
of the Roman playwright Terrence: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. “I am a man,
and I regard nothing of humanity as alien to me.” Maybe men can
say something about women, and vice
versa; maybe blacks can say something about whites. It is even possible that a spinster like Jane
Austen might write a small shelf of immortal books all about marriage.
There is a good deal of historical
evidence concerning the dismal effects of political correctness on literary
creation. Many intellectuals of a
hundred years ago truly believed that the Russian Revolution would usher in an
era of literary liberation and creativity such as the world had never seen. The aristocratic epic of Tolstoy, the puerile
mysticism of Dostoyevsky—all this would shrivel into oblivion before the humane
powers of Socialist Realism. By 1934 Max
Eastman, an early American Communist, an expert in Russian literature, and one-time editor of The Masses, published
a book, Artists in Uniform: a Study of
Literature and Bureaucratism, in which he examined the state of letters in
Stalin’s Russia. That state was dismal,
but also terrifying as it presented an image of a literary culture toward which
the tendencies of many left-wing intellectuals in the West at that time seemed
to be drawn. It may be time for an
Eastman revival.
