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Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America
The best-selling author of The Shock of the New, The Fatal Shore, and Barcelona here delivers a withering polemic aimed at the heart of recent American politics and culture.
Culture of Complaint is a call for the re-knitting of a fragmented and over-tribalized America--a deeply passionate book, filled with barbed wit and devastating takes on public life, both left and right of center. To the right, Hughes fires broadsides at the populist demagogy of Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, Jesse Helms and especially Ronald Reagan ("with somnambulistic efficiency, Reagan educated America down to his level. He left his country a little stupider in 1988 than it had been in 1980, and a lot more tolerant of lies").
To the left, he skewers political correctness ("political etiquette, not politics itself"), Afrocentrism, and academic obsessions with theory ("The world changes more deeply, widely, thrillingly than at any moment since 1917, perhaps since 1848, and the American academic left keeps fretting about how phallocentricity is inscribed in Dickens' portrayal of Little Nell"). PC censoriousness and 'family-values' rhetoric, he argues, are only two sides of the same character, extrusions of America's puritan heritage into the present--and, at root, signs of America's difficulty in seeing past the end of the Us-versus-Them mentality implanted by four decades of the Cold War.
In the long retreat from public responsibility beaten by America in the 80s, Hughes sees "a hollowness at the cultural core"--a nation "obsessed with therapies and filled with distrust of formal politics; skeptical of authority and prey to superstition; its language corroded by fake pity and euphemism."
It resembles "late Rome...in the corruption and verbosity of its senators, in its reliance on sacred geese (those feathered ancestors of our own pollsters and spin-doctors) and in its submission to senile, deified emperors controlled by astrologers and extravagant wives."
Culture of Complaint is fired by a deep concern for the way Hughes sees his adopted country heading. But it is not a relentless diatribe. If Hughes lambastes some aspects of American politics, he applauds Vaclav Havel's vision of politics "not as the art of the useful, but politics as practical morality, as service to the truth." And if he denounces PC, he offers a brilliant and heartfelt defence of non-ideological multiculturalism as an antidote to Americans' difficulty in imagining the rest of the world--and other Americans.
Here, then, is an extraordinary cri de coeur, an outspoken call for the reconstruction of America's ideas about its recent self. It is a book that everyone interested in American culture will want to read.
Culture of Complaint is a call for the re-knitting of a fragmented and over-tribalized America--a deeply passionate book, filled with barbed wit and devastating takes on public life, both left and right of center. To the right, Hughes fires broadsides at the populist demagogy of Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, Jesse Helms and especially Ronald Reagan ("with somnambulistic efficiency, Reagan educated America down to his level. He left his country a little stupider in 1988 than it had been in 1980, and a lot more tolerant of lies").
To the left, he skewers political correctness ("political etiquette, not politics itself"), Afrocentrism, and academic obsessions with theory ("The world changes more deeply, widely, thrillingly than at any moment since 1917, perhaps since 1848, and the American academic left keeps fretting about how phallocentricity is inscribed in Dickens' portrayal of Little Nell"). PC censoriousness and 'family-values' rhetoric, he argues, are only two sides of the same character, extrusions of America's puritan heritage into the present--and, at root, signs of America's difficulty in seeing past the end of the Us-versus-Them mentality implanted by four decades of the Cold War.
In the long retreat from public responsibility beaten by America in the 80s, Hughes sees "a hollowness at the cultural core"--a nation "obsessed with therapies and filled with distrust of formal politics; skeptical of authority and prey to superstition; its language corroded by fake pity and euphemism."
It resembles "late Rome...in the corruption and verbosity of its senators, in its reliance on sacred geese (those feathered ancestors of our own pollsters and spin-doctors) and in its submission to senile, deified emperors controlled by astrologers and extravagant wives."
Culture of Complaint is fired by a deep concern for the way Hughes sees his adopted country heading. But it is not a relentless diatribe. If Hughes lambastes some aspects of American politics, he applauds Vaclav Havel's vision of politics "not as the art of the useful, but politics as practical morality, as service to the truth." And if he denounces PC, he offers a brilliant and heartfelt defence of non-ideological multiculturalism as an antidote to Americans' difficulty in imagining the rest of the world--and other Americans.
Here, then, is an extraordinary cri de coeur, an outspoken call for the reconstruction of America's ideas about its recent self. It is a book that everyone interested in American culture will want to read.
224 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1993
36 people are currently reading
1395 people want to read
About the author
Robert Hughes
183 books323 followersRobert Studley Forrest Hughes, AO was an Australian art critic, writer and television documentary maker who has resided in New York since 1970. He was educated at St Ignatius' College, Riverview before going on to study arts and then architecture at the University of Sydney. At university, Hughes associated with the Sydney "Push" – a group of artists, writers, intellectuals and drinkers. Among the group were Germaine Greer and Clive James. Hughes, an aspiring artist and poet, abandoned his university endeavours to become first a cartoonist and then an art critic for the Sydney periodical The Observer, edited by Donald Horne. Around this time he wrote a history of Australian painting, titled The Art of Australia, which is still considered to be an important work. It was published in 1966. Hughes was also briefly involved in the original Sydney version of Oz magazine, and wrote art criticism for The Nation and The Sunday Mirror.
Hughes left Australia for Europe in 1964, living for a time in Italy before settling in London, England (1965) where he wrote for The Spectator, The Daily Telegraph, The Times and The Observer, among others, and contributed to the London version of Oz. In 1970 he obtained the position of art critic for TIME magazine and he moved to New York. He quickly established himself in the United States as an influential art critic.In 1975, he and Don Brady provided the narration for the film Protected, a documentary showing what life was like for Indigenous Australians on Palm Island.
In 1980, the BBC broadcast The Shock of the New, Hughes's television series on the development of modern art since the Impressionists. It was accompanied by a book of the same name; its combination of insight, wit and accessibility are still widely praised. In 1987, The Fatal Shore, Hughes's study of the British penal colonies and early European settlement of Australia, became an international best-seller.
Hughes provided commentary on the work of artist Robert Crumb in parts of the 1994 film Crumb, calling Crumb "the American Breughel". His 1997 television series American Visions reviewed the history of American art since the Revolution. He was again dismissive of much recent art; this time, sculptor Jeff Koons was subjected to criticism. Australia: Beyond the Fatal Shore (2000) was a series musing on modern Australia and Hughes's relationship with it. Hughes's 2002 documentary on the painter Francisco Goya, Goya: Crazy Like a Genius, was broadcast on the first night of the BBC's domestic digital service. Hughes created a one hour update to The Shock of the New. Titled The New Shock of the New, the program aired first in 2004. Hughes published the first volume of his memoirs, Things I Didn’t Know, in 2006.
Hughes left Australia for Europe in 1964, living for a time in Italy before settling in London, England (1965) where he wrote for The Spectator, The Daily Telegraph, The Times and The Observer, among others, and contributed to the London version of Oz. In 1970 he obtained the position of art critic for TIME magazine and he moved to New York. He quickly established himself in the United States as an influential art critic.In 1975, he and Don Brady provided the narration for the film Protected, a documentary showing what life was like for Indigenous Australians on Palm Island.
In 1980, the BBC broadcast The Shock of the New, Hughes's television series on the development of modern art since the Impressionists. It was accompanied by a book of the same name; its combination of insight, wit and accessibility are still widely praised. In 1987, The Fatal Shore, Hughes's study of the British penal colonies and early European settlement of Australia, became an international best-seller.
Hughes provided commentary on the work of artist Robert Crumb in parts of the 1994 film Crumb, calling Crumb "the American Breughel". His 1997 television series American Visions reviewed the history of American art since the Revolution. He was again dismissive of much recent art; this time, sculptor Jeff Koons was subjected to criticism. Australia: Beyond the Fatal Shore (2000) was a series musing on modern Australia and Hughes's relationship with it. Hughes's 2002 documentary on the painter Francisco Goya, Goya: Crazy Like a Genius, was broadcast on the first night of the BBC's domestic digital service. Hughes created a one hour update to The Shock of the New. Titled The New Shock of the New, the program aired first in 2004. Hughes published the first volume of his memoirs, Things I Didn’t Know, in 2006.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 83 reviews
March 31, 2016
Hughes was one of those clever people whose work it's great to read but whom I would have hesitated to meet in person - you just know he'd immediately have spotted your weaknesses and delusions and commented accordingly. Some of this made me laugh out loud, some scared me. As a non-American I can see that where America led with the cult of self-esteem, and, ultimately, the race to dumb down (at least in some circles), we are already following. I like the fact that he doesn't save his vitriol for one "side", but spares no stupidity, wherever he spots it. The bits about the sanctity, or otherwise, of the literary canon and the fear of elitism and excellence are truly thought-provoking. And this is a meaty book - unlike many books of so-called ideas, he really does have ideas, in the plural. He doesn't just rehash one in different words. Not an easy read but definitely worth the effort.
August 21, 2011
Hughes takes aim at political correctness and at our modern culture of whining. Great book. Annoy your leftist friends by buying it for them.
September 18, 2007
An outstanding book about American culture by Australian art critic Robert Hughes. I like his gritty, in-your-face assessment of the American animal. He loves his Australian heritage, to be sure, but also has a deep love for the United States. For Hughes, Australia and the United States are kindred spirits, brothers in a silly world. Put another way, this book is about tough love - showing us how ridiculous we've become but how we still have what it takes to straighten up.
March 24, 2019
When this book was released in the early 1990s, during the height of the "cultural wars" of that time, it made quite a splash. Now, nearly twenty-five years later, much of what Hughes wrote seems to the current reader to be prophecy. The "culture of complaint" now seems to be dominant; turbo-driven by the advent of social media.
Hughes' book came out of a series of lectures he gave in New York, in which he discussed in turn politics, multiculturalism, and morality in art. One of the themes that weaves throughout the book describes the way in which both the Left and Right of the political spectrum are driving the breakup of US society into its constituent parts, creating ghettos of race, sex, sexual orientation and so on.
What Hughes does so well is punch holes in the idea that creating these ghettos actually "empowers" those who chose to identify with them in any meaningful way. While not for a moment suggesting that there hasn't been a hegemony of the "White West" for many centuries, the solution is not to retreat into a self-reflective circle of your own kind, or, conversly, to claim genius for works or ideas that don't deserve to be given that label. Hughes also exposes, in withering fashion, how those that would denigrate what has happened in the past use the same methods now to push their own barrows.
Unfortunately we have seen, since this book was written, an increase in the acceptance of the ideas that one can't criticise if you are not part of the "group" from which the work or history eminates, or that the idea of quality when it comes to art is a suspect notion that smacks of old-fashioned imperialism. We have now entered a world that Hughes predicted in this book: groups of artists and politicians speaking only to themselves, in a language only they understand, and blaming the "other" - whoever that might be - for their lack of success.
Hughes goes on to explain that this "culture of complaint" has also had an effect on those institutions that exhibit. Caught between the faux moral and religious outrage of the Right, and the equally prudish theorising of the Left, museums and galleries have played it safe with what they exhibit.
As one would expect from Hughes, it is the section on visual art that has the most meat. Hughes gives us a potted history of how art has been absorbed in America, and why it is in that place in particular that art is seen as something that should be morally uplifiting and therapeutic. Hughes doubts that art can ever have those properties, in fact he believes that art is justified by its beauty alone, and that any other claims it might make - particularly political claims - are tendentious. Art doesn't change history.
His final few pages explain the irony that, at the moment in history when the West has never been more open to accepting great art without any baggage of racism, sexism or homophobia, many of these previously repressed groups have retreated from the idea of entering a mainstream of cultural life. The Balkanisation of American political and cultural life does no-one any good, least of all those who were in the past marginalised.
As Hughes writes, we happily accept, in the world of sport, that there are players of genius and that a rigorous selection process leaves the best at the top. The same should occur in art: new art should always be compared to the best, and strive to be the best.
For those who wonder how we got to where we are today, this book is worth reading. It has aged well.
Check out my other reviews at http://aviewoverthebell.blogspot.com.au/
Hughes' book came out of a series of lectures he gave in New York, in which he discussed in turn politics, multiculturalism, and morality in art. One of the themes that weaves throughout the book describes the way in which both the Left and Right of the political spectrum are driving the breakup of US society into its constituent parts, creating ghettos of race, sex, sexual orientation and so on.
What Hughes does so well is punch holes in the idea that creating these ghettos actually "empowers" those who chose to identify with them in any meaningful way. While not for a moment suggesting that there hasn't been a hegemony of the "White West" for many centuries, the solution is not to retreat into a self-reflective circle of your own kind, or, conversly, to claim genius for works or ideas that don't deserve to be given that label. Hughes also exposes, in withering fashion, how those that would denigrate what has happened in the past use the same methods now to push their own barrows.
Unfortunately we have seen, since this book was written, an increase in the acceptance of the ideas that one can't criticise if you are not part of the "group" from which the work or history eminates, or that the idea of quality when it comes to art is a suspect notion that smacks of old-fashioned imperialism. We have now entered a world that Hughes predicted in this book: groups of artists and politicians speaking only to themselves, in a language only they understand, and blaming the "other" - whoever that might be - for their lack of success.
Hughes goes on to explain that this "culture of complaint" has also had an effect on those institutions that exhibit. Caught between the faux moral and religious outrage of the Right, and the equally prudish theorising of the Left, museums and galleries have played it safe with what they exhibit.
As one would expect from Hughes, it is the section on visual art that has the most meat. Hughes gives us a potted history of how art has been absorbed in America, and why it is in that place in particular that art is seen as something that should be morally uplifiting and therapeutic. Hughes doubts that art can ever have those properties, in fact he believes that art is justified by its beauty alone, and that any other claims it might make - particularly political claims - are tendentious. Art doesn't change history.
His final few pages explain the irony that, at the moment in history when the West has never been more open to accepting great art without any baggage of racism, sexism or homophobia, many of these previously repressed groups have retreated from the idea of entering a mainstream of cultural life. The Balkanisation of American political and cultural life does no-one any good, least of all those who were in the past marginalised.
As Hughes writes, we happily accept, in the world of sport, that there are players of genius and that a rigorous selection process leaves the best at the top. The same should occur in art: new art should always be compared to the best, and strive to be the best.
For those who wonder how we got to where we are today, this book is worth reading. It has aged well.
Check out my other reviews at http://aviewoverthebell.blogspot.com.au/
April 14, 2021
Lungimirante e profetico, soprattutto se pensiamo all'anno in cui è stato scritto.
Da far leggere a tutti gli amici radical chic, nazi-femministi, attivisti di stoc*zzo fissati con sessismo, fascismo, razzismo, omofobia e asterischi vari. Superbo.
Da far leggere a tutti gli amici radical chic, nazi-femministi, attivisti di stoc*zzo fissati con sessismo, fascismo, razzismo, omofobia e asterischi vari. Superbo.
August 29, 2015
Okay, here it is, simple as can be: this is a book length complaint about complaining. Pure genius if it was meant to be a kind of mental mirror style joke, purely dumb if this guy is actually taking himself seriously. And also whiney and annoying (yes I am aware that I am complaining about complaining, I just happened to get it done in a sentence instead of 200 pages). I give it two stars because i am still reading it and determined to finish it now that I reviewed it, and I still believe it is possible that it has one redeeming quality.
February 9, 2021
Read it twice. It's a great, great book. Hughes writes in a powerful way to tell the tale of PC culture gone haywire - and that was 30 years ago already!
December 10, 2008
Although written during the Clinton Administration, this compilation of three very seminal essays is as relevant today as when they were first published. Hughes is a historian and art critic, but Culture of Complaint qualifies as a philosophical counterbalance to Allen Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind To be sure, there are some points where Bloom and Hughes might find agreement. Both would agree that our current culture has sold out to some inconsistent ideals of multicultural idealism, but they would have very different means of righting the ship of culture. Bloom would have us return to a purely classical monoculture, what the apostles of multiculturalism call Eurocentric. Hughes would have us celebrate our multiplicity of backgrounds without neglecting our foundation of western tradition.
“In society as in farming, monoculture works poorly. It exhausts the soil.” (p. 14) But Hughes doesn’t follow the fetishists of ethnicity and pseudo-nationalism, recognizing much of the academic talk around multiculturalism for what it is—hot air (p. 15). As he notes: “A student can be punished under academic law for verbal offences and breaches of etiquette which carry no penalty off-campus, under the real law of the land. …But in practice it may impede the student’s progress from protected childhood to capable adulthood.” (p. 26).
One of the things I enjoyed about the book was that Hughes spent equal time between cautioning concerning the PCs of political correctness and the PCs of patriotic correctness (p. 28). But the most horrifying part of the book and the most topical was how he demonstrated what prostitutes the media has become since the era of Reagan.
“In the 80s, as never before in America, we saw statecraft fuse with image-management. Too many things in this supposedly open republic got done out of sight of the citizens. Or they were presented in terms that mocked public intelligence by their brevity and cartoon-like simplicity. This was known as ‘Letting Reagan be Reagan,’ and it accorded perfectly with the dictates of TV.” (p. 40) He went on to call Reagan “the world’s most successful anchorman.” (p. 41) He noted how Reagan “educated America down to his level” and “left his country a little stupider in 1988 than it had been in 1980,” as well as “a lot more tolerant of lies, because his style of image presentation cut the connective tissue of argument between ideas and hence fostered the defeat of thought itself.” (p. 41)
“Celebrity politics for an age of celebrity journalism.” (p. 42)
Well, that’s what we had in the 80s and it seems to have reappeared on the other side of the aisle in the 00s. Personally, I despised it then—calling Reagan the Anti-Christ (supporting my illogical rhetoric with the 6 letters in each of his names)—and I despise it now, finding myself emotionally resonating with Rush Limbaugh for the first time as he refers to the current President-Elect as “The Chosen.”
I enjoyed a lot of Hughes’ metaphorical riffs in the book. He quotes Dinesh D’Souza as describing academic leftists as “Visigoths in tweed.” (p. 58) and waxes eloquently when he states that “Marxism is dead; …Its carcass will continue to make sounds and smells, as fluids drain and pockets of gas expand; …” (p. 73) Or check out this terrific bit of wisdom, “In the literary zero-sum game of Canon talk, if you read X it means that you don’t read Y.” (p. 104) Or quoting Baudelaire: “We have all of us got the republican spirit in our veins, a we have the pox in our bones: we are democratized and syphilized.” (p. 106) He really pounded the point home with “The first trouble with a rigid, exclusionary canon of Great Writing is that it can never be complete: it is always in some sense a prosthetic device, …” (p. 107).
Perhaps, one of the most profound sections in the book was when he explained the development of Western Civilization as a college course by starting during WWI as a course in “war issues” designed to turn young students into “thinking bayonets.” (p. 61) After the war was over, the course was adapted into Contemporary Civilization for the purpose, not of making “thinking bayonets,” but of making students “safe for democracy.” In short, one of the courses considered foundational for college students was designed as propaganda. (p. 61)
I was also intrigued by another section where he touched on a supreme irony regarding the Portland Baseline Essays. Here, Afro-centric “scholars” actually states that black children are “impelled by their genetic heritage to ‘process information differently’ from white ones—a claim which white supremacists, from their side of the fence, have been making since before the Civil War.” (p. 148) Another provocative section was when he demythologized Mapplethorpe as an artist (p. 159) , the Helms amendment (on the NEA appropriations bill) as ludicrous (p. 162), and how neo-conservatives attacked the NEA on moral grounds because, “Having lost the barbarian at the gates, they went for the fairy at the bottom of the garden.” (p. 171).
What was most appreciated was the fact that Hughes deflates the egotistical posturing on both sides of the multicultural politically correct versus patriotically correct issue. What was saddest about the book was that he tends to blame evangelicals of all stripes, not just right-wing extremists, as adding to the polarization of the U.S. Regardless, Culture of Complaint is a fascinating work that is as relevant today as when it was initially published.
“In society as in farming, monoculture works poorly. It exhausts the soil.” (p. 14) But Hughes doesn’t follow the fetishists of ethnicity and pseudo-nationalism, recognizing much of the academic talk around multiculturalism for what it is—hot air (p. 15). As he notes: “A student can be punished under academic law for verbal offences and breaches of etiquette which carry no penalty off-campus, under the real law of the land. …But in practice it may impede the student’s progress from protected childhood to capable adulthood.” (p. 26).
One of the things I enjoyed about the book was that Hughes spent equal time between cautioning concerning the PCs of political correctness and the PCs of patriotic correctness (p. 28). But the most horrifying part of the book and the most topical was how he demonstrated what prostitutes the media has become since the era of Reagan.
“In the 80s, as never before in America, we saw statecraft fuse with image-management. Too many things in this supposedly open republic got done out of sight of the citizens. Or they were presented in terms that mocked public intelligence by their brevity and cartoon-like simplicity. This was known as ‘Letting Reagan be Reagan,’ and it accorded perfectly with the dictates of TV.” (p. 40) He went on to call Reagan “the world’s most successful anchorman.” (p. 41) He noted how Reagan “educated America down to his level” and “left his country a little stupider in 1988 than it had been in 1980,” as well as “a lot more tolerant of lies, because his style of image presentation cut the connective tissue of argument between ideas and hence fostered the defeat of thought itself.” (p. 41)
“Celebrity politics for an age of celebrity journalism.” (p. 42)
Well, that’s what we had in the 80s and it seems to have reappeared on the other side of the aisle in the 00s. Personally, I despised it then—calling Reagan the Anti-Christ (supporting my illogical rhetoric with the 6 letters in each of his names)—and I despise it now, finding myself emotionally resonating with Rush Limbaugh for the first time as he refers to the current President-Elect as “The Chosen.”
I enjoyed a lot of Hughes’ metaphorical riffs in the book. He quotes Dinesh D’Souza as describing academic leftists as “Visigoths in tweed.” (p. 58) and waxes eloquently when he states that “Marxism is dead; …Its carcass will continue to make sounds and smells, as fluids drain and pockets of gas expand; …” (p. 73) Or check out this terrific bit of wisdom, “In the literary zero-sum game of Canon talk, if you read X it means that you don’t read Y.” (p. 104) Or quoting Baudelaire: “We have all of us got the republican spirit in our veins, a we have the pox in our bones: we are democratized and syphilized.” (p. 106) He really pounded the point home with “The first trouble with a rigid, exclusionary canon of Great Writing is that it can never be complete: it is always in some sense a prosthetic device, …” (p. 107).
Perhaps, one of the most profound sections in the book was when he explained the development of Western Civilization as a college course by starting during WWI as a course in “war issues” designed to turn young students into “thinking bayonets.” (p. 61) After the war was over, the course was adapted into Contemporary Civilization for the purpose, not of making “thinking bayonets,” but of making students “safe for democracy.” In short, one of the courses considered foundational for college students was designed as propaganda. (p. 61)
I was also intrigued by another section where he touched on a supreme irony regarding the Portland Baseline Essays. Here, Afro-centric “scholars” actually states that black children are “impelled by their genetic heritage to ‘process information differently’ from white ones—a claim which white supremacists, from their side of the fence, have been making since before the Civil War.” (p. 148) Another provocative section was when he demythologized Mapplethorpe as an artist (p. 159) , the Helms amendment (on the NEA appropriations bill) as ludicrous (p. 162), and how neo-conservatives attacked the NEA on moral grounds because, “Having lost the barbarian at the gates, they went for the fairy at the bottom of the garden.” (p. 171).
What was most appreciated was the fact that Hughes deflates the egotistical posturing on both sides of the multicultural politically correct versus patriotically correct issue. What was saddest about the book was that he tends to blame evangelicals of all stripes, not just right-wing extremists, as adding to the polarization of the U.S. Regardless, Culture of Complaint is a fascinating work that is as relevant today as when it was initially published.
January 27, 2014
Imprescindibile aiuto contro i sensi di colpa Robert H. affronta la saga del (ugh!) politically correct in tre conferenze acute e ficcanti. Sarebbe stato pi� Bastard Contrario con qualche digressione in meno � un po' di ferocia in pi�. (ecco il perch� della stella in meno). Il Politically Correct � una peste non un raffreddore per cui caro - Mr Hughes - il DDT � mooolto meglio dello uno spray nasale... Con qualche piccolissimo adattamento � un libro totalmente accostabile alla corrente situazione AKA "pantano" socioculturale nel nostro paese. [Mi vanto di cercare personalmente i miei tartufi ma qui avevo mancato completamente: il libro era stato debitamente tradotto poco dopo la comparsa ma io ne ho avuto notizia solo nel gennaio 2007!]
December 22, 2022
Robert Huges è un saggista e critico d'arte australiano trapiantato negli States.
In questo brillante saggio scritto nel 1993 delinea le tendenze socio-politiche della società americana, tratteggiando un inquietante panoramica del tutto analoga a quella vissuta nell'ormai decadente e odierna cultura europea.
Lungi dal imbastire una critica sterile, Huges porta argomenti solidi contro un certo politicamente corretto ormai imperante nella società americana. E lo fa ricordando come il multiculturalismo, da sempre fonte di ricchezza culturale per una società complessa come quella americana, sia diventata ormai sinonimo della cultura del "piagnisteo", la tendenza a difende l'orticello da parte di ciascuna minoranza (che sia essa di matrice razziale, religiosa o di orientamento sessuale), senza la ben che minima voltontà di dialogo. Il linguaggio del politicamente corretto, lungi dall'avere un fine educativo, ha trasformato le parole in eufemismi che mentono continuamente, giungendo al paradosso di fornire ai conservatori e a certa destra estremista di natura religiosa gli strumenti ideali per imporre con la retorica le peggiori scelte idelogiche, proprio quelle contro le quali la sinistra progressista si è sempre battuta.
Questo e molto altro in un saggio a tratti complesso, ma che ci lascia qualche bagaglio in più per interpretare con razionalità certi fenomeni in atto nella nostra società.
In questo brillante saggio scritto nel 1993 delinea le tendenze socio-politiche della società americana, tratteggiando un inquietante panoramica del tutto analoga a quella vissuta nell'ormai decadente e odierna cultura europea.
Lungi dal imbastire una critica sterile, Huges porta argomenti solidi contro un certo politicamente corretto ormai imperante nella società americana. E lo fa ricordando come il multiculturalismo, da sempre fonte di ricchezza culturale per una società complessa come quella americana, sia diventata ormai sinonimo della cultura del "piagnisteo", la tendenza a difende l'orticello da parte di ciascuna minoranza (che sia essa di matrice razziale, religiosa o di orientamento sessuale), senza la ben che minima voltontà di dialogo. Il linguaggio del politicamente corretto, lungi dall'avere un fine educativo, ha trasformato le parole in eufemismi che mentono continuamente, giungendo al paradosso di fornire ai conservatori e a certa destra estremista di natura religiosa gli strumenti ideali per imporre con la retorica le peggiori scelte idelogiche, proprio quelle contro le quali la sinistra progressista si è sempre battuta.
Questo e molto altro in un saggio a tratti complesso, ma che ci lascia qualche bagaglio in più per interpretare con razionalità certi fenomeni in atto nella nostra società.
July 3, 2025
Per fortuna non può vedere cosa sta succedendo adesso.
October 3, 2021
Hughes’s conferences aged very poorly
Read
August 28, 2021assolutamente incomprensibile, una storia del politically correct in America dalla notte dei tempi (se ho capito bene)? Non so perché mi ostini a leggere saggi
November 20, 2020
C’è stato un tempo felice in cui, se una persona pronunciava pubblicamente parole come “negro” o “mongoloide” nessuno aveva niente da eccepire, perché erano normali sostantivi privi di significato offensivo. Poi un bel giorno arrivarono i fanatici del politicamente corretto e decisero per conto terzi che queste, e molte altre parole, non si potevano più usare, perché erano scorrette, razziste, irrispettose. Così io, e probabilmente non solo io, quando parlo sono spesso costretto a reingoiare parole che hanno sempre fatto parte del mio vocabolario e di cui mi sento ingiustamente deprivato. Poi saltano fuori gli intelligentoni che ci vengono a spiegare che la lingua si evolve e cambia anche nei significati delle parole, e magari è anche vero, ma allora bisognerebbe epurare tutti i libri in cui la parola “negro”, per dire, è usata correntemente, e ristamparli sostituendola con “nero”, comprese evidentemente le opere di quella infame razzistona di Simone de Beauvoir pubblicate dalla famigerata casa editrice di estrema destra Giulio Einaudi. E anche questo volume, che peraltro risale solo a metà degli anni Novanta. Volume che sono corso a procurarmi non appena ho saputo della sua esistenza, con l’evidente speranza di trovare solidarietà e sollievo per il disagio e il senso di deprivazione che mi prende ogni volta che sono costretto a pronunciare parole come “nero” o “trisomico”. In effetti li ho trovati, ma ho trovato anche molto di più. Hughes è uno scrittore e critico d’arte australiano, che ha praticamente vissuto sempre negli Stati Uniti e verso i quali ha quindi potuto praticare un’opportuna visione “dall’esterno”, arrivando a percepire, anche grazie alla sua peculiare vicenda biografica, tutte le assurdità di un universo sociale e politico che si suddivide fondamentalmente tra due estremismi, quello conservatore in cui ogni aspetto della cultura deve essere accuratamente censurato e pilotato in ossequio ai sani valori della società americana, della famiglia e della religione, e quello “liberal” nell’ambito del quale al contrario nel nome della libertà d’espressione ogni cosa è legittima, arrivando a giustificare, tra l’altro proprio nel campo artistico e letterario che sono quelli che Hughes conosce meglio, le più aberranti degenerazioni, comprese quelle linguistiche del “politicamente corretto” che spesso equivale, nei fatti, a spingere la polvere sotto il tappeto e far finta che non esista, o pensare che l’eliminazione del sintomo porti alla rimozione della causa (divieto di usare la parola “nigger” - che, occorre specificarlo a beneficio dei “liberals” nostrani, non ha niente a che vedere col nostro “negro” = fine del razzismo, eccetera). Alcuni degli esempi citati è difficile spiegare se suscitino più pena o ilarità. L’aspetto grottesco sta nel fatto che - come dimostra agevolmente Hughes - negli esiti le censure di destra e di sinistra, la prima agita nel nome dei Sacri Valori Americani, la seconda in quello di un malinteso “politicamente corretto”, non sono così dissimili e producono uguale incapacità critica ed analitica, e dissesto del sistema educativo. La prima parte del libro - che, probabilmente, risulta dalla collazione di una serie di articoli pubblicati su varie riviste, o di relazioni congressuali - è più accentrata sulle vicende politiche, sociali e, va da sé, culturali e linguistiche. Gli ultimi capitoli si occupano specificamente invece di arte, e in particolare di artisti che a Hughes evidentemente non piacciono né li considera particolarmente di rottura o di importanza epocale (e spiega anche perché) ma che evidentemente hanno trovato uno spazio di mercato e di successo probabilmente proprio in funzione del loro essere rappresentativi di minoranze bisognose di riconoscimento e tutela (Mapplethorpe in quanto gay, o Basquiat in quanto negro - pardon, nero - e tossicodipendente). In conclusione un libro assolutamente da leggere (è anche scritto con un linguaggio comprensibile e fluido, molto consequenziale nei ragionamenti). Rigorosamente consigliato, anzi obbligatorio, a tutte le testine sedicenti di sinistra del PD e dintorni, giusto perché si rendano conto su che china rischiano di scivolare, ammesso che non sia troppo tardi.
December 2, 2022
entre rants trasnochados ("antes teníamos a howlin'wolf ¿y ahora qué? a michael jackson) y excesos de blancocentrismo, robert hughes anota varios puntos chonchos y se anticipa (críticamente y generalmente con acierto) por un par de décadas a la exacerbación de la cultura de la queja y por lo menos por una década a la de "lo políticamente correcto". es un libro incómodo pero también cargado de un humor muy fino que habría que leer antes de que desaparezca en la hoguera de la intolerancia y el buenismo acéfalo.
December 9, 2008
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.
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.
July 27, 2014
Robert Hughes The Culture of Complaint
Thoughts 20 years after publication
Hughes' assumption that because we worshipped readily in the past we are always seeking to worship something – supported by a quote from Auden - is a paradigm I do not accept. Even when worshipping gods the 'mystery' in religion was a strong force and just because people want to believe in mysteries now now does not mean they worship them. The conspiracy theories we see everywhere are the banal ravings of people who have no political power and have not learned that this not the only or the strongest, power available to individuals.
He states at the outset he is not a citizen of the USA. That and his age make it useful to him to comment upon American culture as he has one foot in history. He then denigrates modern society, its loss of focus on anything much but victim-hood as an excuse never to take blame for one's own actions. To this we can quote Tacitus Histories, 'and how should it be otherwise, if the father ceases to give a laudable example?' (Book 2 chapter 4, paragraph 52. Trans Arthur Murphy) Throughout his book I did have problems wondering if anything he said was new or different from what commentators upon society have said for two thousand years.
He is right though that political correctness in its attempts to change language without changing education and therefore the foundations where ignorance grows, has done nothing but create a mass of new euphemisms. Words do matter, they will hurt, but it is ignorance that kills.
His important, unspoken, critique of American politics is true of all politics in democratic society; there will always be an element of fascism in any and all laws and mores.
On the other hand seeing multiculturalism as a new form of communism because it seeks to bring everyone under one umbrella society goes too far because acceptance in order to stem bigotry and ignorance, is not the same as demanding conformity.
Andrew Riemer's quote on 'cultural nationalism' is where these lectures really begin because multiculturalism is not a call for nations to be inclusive but a challenge to live in the world as we have colonised it. He is right that revisiting history has destroyed many national myths – and rightly so.
Yet his argument that everything in America devolves into the kitsch is ultimately searing. That museums and art galleries are locked into funding rounds that nod towards public morality. That Modernism is, in fact, a euphemism for 'publicly funded' (my deduction not his).
He claims there is a war for culture. That political prestige from cultural good works is mixed with the vision of public morality within the governments of States. Art, he says, is another therapy in a therapy culture.
His final comments, on how awed American were when they toured Europe in the 1850s goes to the heart of of his critique of the avant guarde in the USA. America has not produced an artist on a par with the best in Europe. Maybe she hasn't had the time. Maybe she hasn't had enough wars on her soil to get the grit into the consciousness of artists that makes the pearls. Or maybe she doesn't want them.
The point of Hughes' lectures is to inspire debate. He makes many good points. He may be angry but his anger has its own strength of character. He isn't looking to define art or aesthetics but he does demand that no one's narrow minded political opinion rule a whole country.
Thoughts 20 years after publication
Hughes' assumption that because we worshipped readily in the past we are always seeking to worship something – supported by a quote from Auden - is a paradigm I do not accept. Even when worshipping gods the 'mystery' in religion was a strong force and just because people want to believe in mysteries now now does not mean they worship them. The conspiracy theories we see everywhere are the banal ravings of people who have no political power and have not learned that this not the only or the strongest, power available to individuals.
He states at the outset he is not a citizen of the USA. That and his age make it useful to him to comment upon American culture as he has one foot in history. He then denigrates modern society, its loss of focus on anything much but victim-hood as an excuse never to take blame for one's own actions. To this we can quote Tacitus Histories, 'and how should it be otherwise, if the father ceases to give a laudable example?' (Book 2 chapter 4, paragraph 52. Trans Arthur Murphy) Throughout his book I did have problems wondering if anything he said was new or different from what commentators upon society have said for two thousand years.
He is right though that political correctness in its attempts to change language without changing education and therefore the foundations where ignorance grows, has done nothing but create a mass of new euphemisms. Words do matter, they will hurt, but it is ignorance that kills.
His important, unspoken, critique of American politics is true of all politics in democratic society; there will always be an element of fascism in any and all laws and mores.
On the other hand seeing multiculturalism as a new form of communism because it seeks to bring everyone under one umbrella society goes too far because acceptance in order to stem bigotry and ignorance, is not the same as demanding conformity.
Andrew Riemer's quote on 'cultural nationalism' is where these lectures really begin because multiculturalism is not a call for nations to be inclusive but a challenge to live in the world as we have colonised it. He is right that revisiting history has destroyed many national myths – and rightly so.
Yet his argument that everything in America devolves into the kitsch is ultimately searing. That museums and art galleries are locked into funding rounds that nod towards public morality. That Modernism is, in fact, a euphemism for 'publicly funded' (my deduction not his).
He claims there is a war for culture. That political prestige from cultural good works is mixed with the vision of public morality within the governments of States. Art, he says, is another therapy in a therapy culture.
His final comments, on how awed American were when they toured Europe in the 1850s goes to the heart of of his critique of the avant guarde in the USA. America has not produced an artist on a par with the best in Europe. Maybe she hasn't had the time. Maybe she hasn't had enough wars on her soil to get the grit into the consciousness of artists that makes the pearls. Or maybe she doesn't want them.
The point of Hughes' lectures is to inspire debate. He makes many good points. He may be angry but his anger has its own strength of character. He isn't looking to define art or aesthetics but he does demand that no one's narrow minded political opinion rule a whole country.
June 30, 2019
The late Robert Hughes was never a dull read and quite often an inspired critic. There are those that would say that Hughes was the conservative of the pack. For sure there was a lot more insight in the criticism coming from his pen as opposed to the pretty-pretty world of all the Graham-Dixon's. This book comes out of three lectures that Hughes gave in either 1988 or the early 90s.
Hughes berates the populist Right of Amerika as well as the left/liberal side which can only come up with rampant PCisms to fight the drag-down into the gutter of uniformity which the right wants to proceed with.It’s what might be termed these days as Issue Politics –v- Neoliberalism. Its a wonderful three episode polemic full of finely turned pieces of prose and acerbic quotations. Hughes has little time for the kultural midgets of the museum, the right-on brigade, and he takes that further with a look at the emasculated and dumbed-down world in general. Remember this was all delivered way back in the early 90s so there was still a looooonnnngggggggggggg way to go. But Hughes was as upset enough at what he saw as the dragging down of American society into petty debates, that he produced some real quality rants.
Hughes isn't always right or even right-on (which is why he was dubbed The Conservative Critic by the liberal arts community). And he would be the last one to set himself up as the demagogue with all the answers. He has as many attacks against the liberal PC right-on-ers as well as the Pro-Life body-and-mind fascists. But that’s where the reader comes in. You pays yer money, reads and makes yer choices. Or like me you write addenda, remarks, asterisks lines, underlines and notes and references all over the book.
I think its a brilliant piece of mind exercise.
Hughes berates the populist Right of Amerika as well as the left/liberal side which can only come up with rampant PCisms to fight the drag-down into the gutter of uniformity which the right wants to proceed with.It’s what might be termed these days as Issue Politics –v- Neoliberalism. Its a wonderful three episode polemic full of finely turned pieces of prose and acerbic quotations. Hughes has little time for the kultural midgets of the museum, the right-on brigade, and he takes that further with a look at the emasculated and dumbed-down world in general. Remember this was all delivered way back in the early 90s so there was still a looooonnnngggggggggggg way to go. But Hughes was as upset enough at what he saw as the dragging down of American society into petty debates, that he produced some real quality rants.
Hughes isn't always right or even right-on (which is why he was dubbed The Conservative Critic by the liberal arts community). And he would be the last one to set himself up as the demagogue with all the answers. He has as many attacks against the liberal PC right-on-ers as well as the Pro-Life body-and-mind fascists. But that’s where the reader comes in. You pays yer money, reads and makes yer choices. Or like me you write addenda, remarks, asterisks lines, underlines and notes and references all over the book.
I think its a brilliant piece of mind exercise.
April 20, 2018
Among the most rewarding of recent rereads, given its startling prescience. Based on a series of lectures given in New York a little over a quarter-century ago, collected and adapted as “Culture of Complaint,” the acerbic Australian art critic Robert Hughes located and illuminated a “ground zero” of cultural moments in his adopted country that have since burgeoned into what we’re witnessing today, with certain extremes now in play that even Hughes, had he lived to see it, might not have thought possible. Assuming for the moment that “commonsense diatribe” is workable, that’s the best description of Hughes’ whip-smart, wide-ranging criticisms, most of which are hard to argue with. It also has the benefit of containing a little something for everyone, no matter where one falls on the political spectrum, while never coming off as muddled or equivocal.
January 3, 2024
3.5/5
A clinical and enjoyable look at the American academic system's descent into theory and identitiy politics, which seems rather prophetic (considering it was written in the early 90's). Hughes is even more critical of the Republican party and its extreme Puritan views, Reagan gets the sharp end for making US politics so image based and ruining the traditional way of business. He also dismantles the the claim that University courses (Western Civ) have been "neutral" or apolitical until now.
A clinical and enjoyable look at the American academic system's descent into theory and identitiy politics, which seems rather prophetic (considering it was written in the early 90's). Hughes is even more critical of the Republican party and its extreme Puritan views, Reagan gets the sharp end for making US politics so image based and ruining the traditional way of business. He also dismantles the the claim that University courses (Western Civ) have been "neutral" or apolitical until now.
Want to read
May 22, 2009I've had this on my shelf for years. Its targets seem varied and no party line appears safe. I think I bought it because I somehow believed it espoused the conservative line (this was when I was more sympathetic to that brand of viewpoint). Luckily, it's not something Rush's crowd can trot out in its defense. I hope to give this book a read soon.
April 29, 2012
I would LOVE to get hold of this book again, given the reading I have done on America and art since then. At the time (late 90s) I loved it, but as an artist trained in a more modernist environment, I was suspicious of postmodernism in the art world, sometimes justifiably so, but I realise now, also often out of ignorance.
May 27, 2009
excellent - it ALL true.....
October 2, 2014
A dated collection of lectures in which the author spends 244 pages complaining. Disclaimer: I skimmed.
September 4, 2008
One of my favorite books of all time.
November 24, 2025
Currently reading this salty treatise on snowflakes and broflakes. Should suspend judgement until its conclusion. 3 stars for being articulate & thought provoking, not for being demonstrably correct or well argued across the board, nor for unanimous agreement. He says some things that should be acknowledged more often with a nonpartisan stance and in a clever & acerbic but precise way. But he also just bellyaches a lot and isn’t even always on the money with his facts.
Don’t know what I expected with such a grouchily polemic clickbaity title. The cover literally tried to warn me. Am I self harming with literary doomscrolling, or going boldly into a warzone of competing unpopular truths trying to find a throughline of reality and why that is less about blame and more about actual solutions?
In either case; this had a lot of blame, and while it was bipartisan, I don’t know how useful it was, and I *do* know how demonstrably (in)accurate some of it was.
For instance, one thing he keeps referencing, and it undermines everything of value that he states, is the idea that Dworkin conflated all sex with rape. She did not! How can someone seemingly so well read & critical of language so utterly misinterpret her very clear framework? It smacks of polemic & willful ignorance, and if he mentioned it only once, it would have been bad enough, but he brings it up multiple times even in the same chapter, at the risk of being redundant!
His argument was sound without punching down on Dworkin as a strawman in such a way that reveals his poor reading comprehension (or *lack* of reading in the case of Dworkin?)—who, in contrast to nearly every other text referenced—he never directly quotes!
This is a discredit far more to his own points than to Dworkin, though it certainly perpetuates the dumbed-down dogwhistle distillation of what the reading-impaired took away from her ideas in Intercourse. A caveat here: I have not read Intercourse cover to cover. I read most of it, some years back—I think, enough of it to have context for what was said and how it was caveated, and this seems much more than Hughes has done. I will reread it after this in entirety & ensure that I have not falsely maligned Mr. Hughes.
But it’s a shame that this trifle should undercut the value of what he has to say, which is in itself full of critical nuance. (Uh oh, are only men entitled to nuance? Maybe that’s why he hates feminists…jk!) I enjoyed his spirited flavorful phrasing and the work has turned out to be largely…shall we say prophetic? In regard to politics of left and right in the US; both missing the forest for the trees, both dissolved functionally in a soup of euphemism that ensures (in my grim opinion) that mostly evil will succeed.
The copy I got had the first three pages missing and planted me right into an excerpt of tirade by Herod puppetted by WH Auden in For the Time Being: “…The New Aristocracy will consist exclusively of hermits, bums and permanent invalids. The Rough Diamond, the Consumptive Whore, the bandit who is good to his mother, the epileptic girl who has a way with animals will be the heroes and heroines of the New Age, when the general, the statesman, and the philosopher have become the butt of every farce and satire.”
It reminds me a little of “the future liberals want” meme, in that honestly, the latter half of Herod’s rant doesn’t sound that bad to me (I’ve truncated the excerpt here—admittedly, the first part is grim and reminiscent of Leonard Cohen’s “The Future”—but Hughes didn’t just quote the first part; he quoted the entire thing, and we are presumably to take it that he agrees with Auden’s Herod that this is some altogether baleful prognostication. And so I immediately entered this book wondering what’s so wrong with that? 😂 Though maybe some essential framing was lost in those first missing pages. Maybe that page was immediately preceded by: “Check out this joker—isn’t he silly? Wouldn’t this be cool, if cripples and whores were running the show?”)
Yet here, on page 31, he cites as an example of right wing hysteria & catastrophizing:
“…for some American bigots, feminism is actively diabolical; Pat Robertson, a former candidate for the Presidency who may conceivably run for office again, recently attacked a proposed equal-rights amendment to the Iowa state constitution as part of a"feminist agenda . . . asocialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians."”—which is also hilarious to me, because a cursory foray through Tumblr sorta demonstrates that Robinson’s prophecies weren’t *that* unhinged. Not in the sense that this was “the future liberals want”—only in the sense that it was a bad thing. Remember when Limbaugh and Jones insisted that without DOMA, people would start marrying their dogs? Man, it got repealed and furrycore just burst into every convention center almost instantaneously. 🤣 I think, to be fair, we need to acknowledge that they weren’t completely wrong; just that they’re petty fucks and as long as it’s consensual, we don’t care.
We don’t care if AMABs wear skirts. And they didn’t care during WWI in Scotland, and they didn’t care when Jesus’ hair was long, and they didn’t care when Mel Gibson wore makeup; they only care when it reminds them of women cos we’re the bad bitches who talk to snakes. They’re not delusional about what we’re doing. We just mostly don’t agree that it’s wrong, cos we don’t all live our lives based on a centuries long game of telephone played with chomos and Bronze Age schizophrenics. They have every right to play it, just not with my taxes, and not at the expense of silly little games I want to play, or telling Moonshadow that she can’t decide how many cubs she wants to have.
Anyway, Hughes makes some robust arguments for the necessities of feminist advancements. He’s obviously very sympathetic to racial politics, gay rights and other essential civil rights movements from a pragmatic standpoint of pursuing relatively equal opportunity (“relatively” because I suspect he would loathe Sapolsky’s biological/structural determinism), so maybe the Dworkin reference was an honest mistake. His thoughts on abortion are hilarious (‘A fetus is innocent. So is lettuce.’). In any case, I wouldn’t throw this baby of an insightful treatise out with the bathwater. Rather; there’s way more baby here than bathwater.
It’s like a tub of several babies with maybe just a few cups of bath water.
Will update if my opinion changes by the end.
Also, treating arts like tennis is a whack take. I see his point, and sympathize, but the side he comes down on is sooo ludicrously over the top it’s downright chuckle inducing.
But on the flip side, it’s reassuring to see someone write this:
“The American right has had a ball with Political Correct-ness. Yet its glee is hollow, and there is something distasteful about its caperings, its pretence to represent "real" language.
One would rather swim than get in the same dinghy as the PC folk. But neither would one wish to don blazer and topsiders on the gin-palace with its twin 400-horse Buckleys, its Buchanan squawkbox, its Falwell & Robertson compass, its Quayle depthfinder and its broken-down bilgepump, that now sits listing in the Potomac as its crew bickers over who "really" lost the 1992 election.”
and
“Gazing on the fall of Communism, conservative columnists wrote about a "unipolar world"—an exquisitely silly piece of late imperial thinking, if you don't happen to be American—and George Bush announced that America now presided over "The New World Order." This uplifting phrase meant nothing. Bush was lucky that the Berlin Wall fell…At present there is no "New World Order." Instead, we have an intractable New World Disorder, laced with Arms Business as Usual, as all the nationalist passions and religious hatreds that had been frozen under the Soviet imperial icecap since 1945—some, inside Russia, since 1917—emerge, refreshed by their siesta, impotently watched by the rest of Europe and by the few Americans who can bestir themselves to look up Sarajevo in an atlas, and start killing.
The right has its own form of PC-Patriotic Correctness, if you like—equally designed to veil unwelcome truths. It, too, has a vested interest in keeping America divided, a strategy that bodes worse for the country's polity than anything the weak, constricted American left can be blamed for.
Polarization is addictive. It is the crack of politics—a short intense rush that the system craves again and again, until it begins to collapse. The exacerbated division between "right" and "left" in America comes from reality-loss. It no longer fits the way that most voters respond to politics or envisage their own needs. In the 60s, the New Left tried to label every conservative a fascist. In the 80s, the New Right called every liberal a socialist—and the name stuck.”
Then he tears Reagan a new one and we love him again.
“When political utterance descends to such levels, fanatics enlist in the crusade but sensible people tend to wash their hands of it. There was little point, as the 1992 election amply showed, trying to build a party platform on "family values" when what people are really worried about is jobs, or in attempting to sell a campaign for less government which so largely consisted of moving the field of state control out of the corporate boardroom and into the cervix. States tend to look absurd to their own citizens when they try to legislate morality in this way, especially in a country where, polls indicate, clergy are held in lower respect than pharmacists. "Reasonable" voters begin to suspect that the talk about moral values may be a cover-up for the lack of practical social policy. But it is political folly for the "reasonable" to assume that the election of Clinton and Gore in any way neutralizes the large gains made by evangelical groups at the local political level in 1992. On school boards, in city councils and state legislatures, indeed in all areas of American political life outside Washington itself, evangelical bigotry is gathering strength and will continue to do so.
When the American economy recovers, there may be fewer people voting against Republican fiscal policy and more voting for the moral promises of an evangelized GOP. Intelligent Americans have no grounds for complacency—not unless they want to hear their kids chirping about the Sin of Sodom and parroting the inanities of "creation science" after school a few years from now. The fundamentalists' drive to annul the constitutional separation of Church and State, to spread theocracy on the land, must be resisted by anyone who cares about democracy in America.“
Mmm. Kiss him full on the mouth. Then explain to him how it wasn’t consensual under patriarchy. 😂
Don’t know what I expected with such a grouchily polemic clickbaity title. The cover literally tried to warn me. Am I self harming with literary doomscrolling, or going boldly into a warzone of competing unpopular truths trying to find a throughline of reality and why that is less about blame and more about actual solutions?
In either case; this had a lot of blame, and while it was bipartisan, I don’t know how useful it was, and I *do* know how demonstrably (in)accurate some of it was.
For instance, one thing he keeps referencing, and it undermines everything of value that he states, is the idea that Dworkin conflated all sex with rape. She did not! How can someone seemingly so well read & critical of language so utterly misinterpret her very clear framework? It smacks of polemic & willful ignorance, and if he mentioned it only once, it would have been bad enough, but he brings it up multiple times even in the same chapter, at the risk of being redundant!
His argument was sound without punching down on Dworkin as a strawman in such a way that reveals his poor reading comprehension (or *lack* of reading in the case of Dworkin?)—who, in contrast to nearly every other text referenced—he never directly quotes!
This is a discredit far more to his own points than to Dworkin, though it certainly perpetuates the dumbed-down dogwhistle distillation of what the reading-impaired took away from her ideas in Intercourse. A caveat here: I have not read Intercourse cover to cover. I read most of it, some years back—I think, enough of it to have context for what was said and how it was caveated, and this seems much more than Hughes has done. I will reread it after this in entirety & ensure that I have not falsely maligned Mr. Hughes.
But it’s a shame that this trifle should undercut the value of what he has to say, which is in itself full of critical nuance. (Uh oh, are only men entitled to nuance? Maybe that’s why he hates feminists…jk!) I enjoyed his spirited flavorful phrasing and the work has turned out to be largely…shall we say prophetic? In regard to politics of left and right in the US; both missing the forest for the trees, both dissolved functionally in a soup of euphemism that ensures (in my grim opinion) that mostly evil will succeed.
The copy I got had the first three pages missing and planted me right into an excerpt of tirade by Herod puppetted by WH Auden in For the Time Being: “…The New Aristocracy will consist exclusively of hermits, bums and permanent invalids. The Rough Diamond, the Consumptive Whore, the bandit who is good to his mother, the epileptic girl who has a way with animals will be the heroes and heroines of the New Age, when the general, the statesman, and the philosopher have become the butt of every farce and satire.”
It reminds me a little of “the future liberals want” meme, in that honestly, the latter half of Herod’s rant doesn’t sound that bad to me (I’ve truncated the excerpt here—admittedly, the first part is grim and reminiscent of Leonard Cohen’s “The Future”—but Hughes didn’t just quote the first part; he quoted the entire thing, and we are presumably to take it that he agrees with Auden’s Herod that this is some altogether baleful prognostication. And so I immediately entered this book wondering what’s so wrong with that? 😂 Though maybe some essential framing was lost in those first missing pages. Maybe that page was immediately preceded by: “Check out this joker—isn’t he silly? Wouldn’t this be cool, if cripples and whores were running the show?”)
Yet here, on page 31, he cites as an example of right wing hysteria & catastrophizing:
“…for some American bigots, feminism is actively diabolical; Pat Robertson, a former candidate for the Presidency who may conceivably run for office again, recently attacked a proposed equal-rights amendment to the Iowa state constitution as part of a"feminist agenda . . . asocialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians."”—which is also hilarious to me, because a cursory foray through Tumblr sorta demonstrates that Robinson’s prophecies weren’t *that* unhinged. Not in the sense that this was “the future liberals want”—only in the sense that it was a bad thing. Remember when Limbaugh and Jones insisted that without DOMA, people would start marrying their dogs? Man, it got repealed and furrycore just burst into every convention center almost instantaneously. 🤣 I think, to be fair, we need to acknowledge that they weren’t completely wrong; just that they’re petty fucks and as long as it’s consensual, we don’t care.
We don’t care if AMABs wear skirts. And they didn’t care during WWI in Scotland, and they didn’t care when Jesus’ hair was long, and they didn’t care when Mel Gibson wore makeup; they only care when it reminds them of women cos we’re the bad bitches who talk to snakes. They’re not delusional about what we’re doing. We just mostly don’t agree that it’s wrong, cos we don’t all live our lives based on a centuries long game of telephone played with chomos and Bronze Age schizophrenics. They have every right to play it, just not with my taxes, and not at the expense of silly little games I want to play, or telling Moonshadow that she can’t decide how many cubs she wants to have.
Anyway, Hughes makes some robust arguments for the necessities of feminist advancements. He’s obviously very sympathetic to racial politics, gay rights and other essential civil rights movements from a pragmatic standpoint of pursuing relatively equal opportunity (“relatively” because I suspect he would loathe Sapolsky’s biological/structural determinism), so maybe the Dworkin reference was an honest mistake. His thoughts on abortion are hilarious (‘A fetus is innocent. So is lettuce.’). In any case, I wouldn’t throw this baby of an insightful treatise out with the bathwater. Rather; there’s way more baby here than bathwater.
It’s like a tub of several babies with maybe just a few cups of bath water.
Will update if my opinion changes by the end.
Also, treating arts like tennis is a whack take. I see his point, and sympathize, but the side he comes down on is sooo ludicrously over the top it’s downright chuckle inducing.
But on the flip side, it’s reassuring to see someone write this:
“The American right has had a ball with Political Correct-ness. Yet its glee is hollow, and there is something distasteful about its caperings, its pretence to represent "real" language.
One would rather swim than get in the same dinghy as the PC folk. But neither would one wish to don blazer and topsiders on the gin-palace with its twin 400-horse Buckleys, its Buchanan squawkbox, its Falwell & Robertson compass, its Quayle depthfinder and its broken-down bilgepump, that now sits listing in the Potomac as its crew bickers over who "really" lost the 1992 election.”
and
“Gazing on the fall of Communism, conservative columnists wrote about a "unipolar world"—an exquisitely silly piece of late imperial thinking, if you don't happen to be American—and George Bush announced that America now presided over "The New World Order." This uplifting phrase meant nothing. Bush was lucky that the Berlin Wall fell…At present there is no "New World Order." Instead, we have an intractable New World Disorder, laced with Arms Business as Usual, as all the nationalist passions and religious hatreds that had been frozen under the Soviet imperial icecap since 1945—some, inside Russia, since 1917—emerge, refreshed by their siesta, impotently watched by the rest of Europe and by the few Americans who can bestir themselves to look up Sarajevo in an atlas, and start killing.
The right has its own form of PC-Patriotic Correctness, if you like—equally designed to veil unwelcome truths. It, too, has a vested interest in keeping America divided, a strategy that bodes worse for the country's polity than anything the weak, constricted American left can be blamed for.
Polarization is addictive. It is the crack of politics—a short intense rush that the system craves again and again, until it begins to collapse. The exacerbated division between "right" and "left" in America comes from reality-loss. It no longer fits the way that most voters respond to politics or envisage their own needs. In the 60s, the New Left tried to label every conservative a fascist. In the 80s, the New Right called every liberal a socialist—and the name stuck.”
Then he tears Reagan a new one and we love him again.
“When political utterance descends to such levels, fanatics enlist in the crusade but sensible people tend to wash their hands of it. There was little point, as the 1992 election amply showed, trying to build a party platform on "family values" when what people are really worried about is jobs, or in attempting to sell a campaign for less government which so largely consisted of moving the field of state control out of the corporate boardroom and into the cervix. States tend to look absurd to their own citizens when they try to legislate morality in this way, especially in a country where, polls indicate, clergy are held in lower respect than pharmacists. "Reasonable" voters begin to suspect that the talk about moral values may be a cover-up for the lack of practical social policy. But it is political folly for the "reasonable" to assume that the election of Clinton and Gore in any way neutralizes the large gains made by evangelical groups at the local political level in 1992. On school boards, in city councils and state legislatures, indeed in all areas of American political life outside Washington itself, evangelical bigotry is gathering strength and will continue to do so.
When the American economy recovers, there may be fewer people voting against Republican fiscal policy and more voting for the moral promises of an evangelized GOP. Intelligent Americans have no grounds for complacency—not unless they want to hear their kids chirping about the Sin of Sodom and parroting the inanities of "creation science" after school a few years from now. The fundamentalists' drive to annul the constitutional separation of Church and State, to spread theocracy on the land, must be resisted by anyone who cares about democracy in America.“
Mmm. Kiss him full on the mouth. Then explain to him how it wasn’t consensual under patriarchy. 😂
December 26, 2025
This book was based on three lectures that long-term American resident art critic Robert Hughes gave in 1992 on which he expanded significantly as he prepared the book for publication in 1993. The book opens with the description of what is claimed to be a national psychosis resulting from "everyone" having come from a dysfunctional family and thus having a "bruised inner child" as a result which led to the all persuasive claim of "victimhood". This was followed by a criticism of the politically correct movement and its attack on free-speech, which the book noted had no echo in Europe, but it also just as vigorously attacked the right-wing loonies in the anti-PC brigade. It also observed that, in a partial hangover from the McCarthy era, the American Democratic Party suffered electorally when it was too obsessed with political correctness and the Republican Party when it was too obsessed with abortion.
The book then took issue with what would, in more recent years, be called "cancel culture", and defended the (Western) canon against charges of being Eurocentric, elitist etc. noting the porosity of the canon’s borders and taking issue with those who argue against the canon who fail to recognise the expansive capability of reading from outside one’s own experience.
This was followed by a discussion of some of what might be termed minority group studies and the agendas that pervade such programs. While acknowledging that the arrival of European colonists decimated the indigenous populations in North and South America, the book reminded the reader that prior to their arrival, these indigenous populations were just as murderous to each other. It then challenged the ridiculous claims of Afrocentrism such as that all Egyptians were black and these black Egyptians invented hieroglyphics, the pillared temple, monumental stone sculpture, wet-celled batteries, gliders and even semiconductors, they sent expeditions that colonised South America, the records of which have been lost, and they benevolently colonised Europe and bequeathed that continent with all the knowledge and inventions Europeans subsequently produced. The book then noted that Black African studies programs in the USA deny that black African tribes enslaved each other long before Europeans visited the continent and that scholarly rebuttals of these denials don’t get a mention in these programs.
The book then critiqued the claims for compensation for past slavery to be paid by Western powers to both African countries and the descendents of slaves living in the USA whereas those making these claims did not address, let alone mention compensation for, the very extensive systems of slavery that existed within Africa, Arabia and Asia long before Europeans settled in North America.
"Curiously, none of them suggest that the Arab emirates or Iraq should kick in their share, which, by all rights, should be a very large one, larger than Europe’s or even America’s, and just as easily raised from the flow of oil. If Washington must pay cash for the sins of Simon Legree, then it seems only fair that Baghdad should expiate those of the Abassid caliphs."
The book then cited the expectation that, when visiting Europe, 19th century Americans would see fine art that would be accompanied by noble and devout behaviour by the artists, and were disappointed if not shocked when they found it wasn’t always so. This moved on to a discussion of the Maplethorpe photographs and the Piss Christ sculpture, and the attacks on them by politicians and commentators which raised their profiles, and their prices. The book noted that while not always recognised when they were working, over time the merits of artists are duly recognised. However, during the 1980s, many artists vaunted because of their "diversity" were unworthy of much praise. Similarly, the book noted that the "protest as art" movement often omitted actual talent as if protest and victimhood was all that was needed and challenged the expectation that art reflected talent and competency of being "elitist". Tellingly, the book observed that if the objective of art was to "change society", it wasn’t working. Hughes then cited the 1980s Dutch art program which resulting in the government buying 1,000s of works of art which were subsequently recognised only for their mediocrity, which no one wanted and which only created a massive waste disposal program. In conclusion, he reiterated the case for museums to exhibit works of excellence indifferent to current political trends.
The book was well-written and reflected Hughes’s extensive and very deep knowledge of art and art criticism, hence, his attacks on some then-fashionable notions were from a very informed position and his polemics were more subtle and understated that those of, say Christopher Hitchens, and thus sharper.
The book then took issue with what would, in more recent years, be called "cancel culture", and defended the (Western) canon against charges of being Eurocentric, elitist etc. noting the porosity of the canon’s borders and taking issue with those who argue against the canon who fail to recognise the expansive capability of reading from outside one’s own experience.
This was followed by a discussion of some of what might be termed minority group studies and the agendas that pervade such programs. While acknowledging that the arrival of European colonists decimated the indigenous populations in North and South America, the book reminded the reader that prior to their arrival, these indigenous populations were just as murderous to each other. It then challenged the ridiculous claims of Afrocentrism such as that all Egyptians were black and these black Egyptians invented hieroglyphics, the pillared temple, monumental stone sculpture, wet-celled batteries, gliders and even semiconductors, they sent expeditions that colonised South America, the records of which have been lost, and they benevolently colonised Europe and bequeathed that continent with all the knowledge and inventions Europeans subsequently produced. The book then noted that Black African studies programs in the USA deny that black African tribes enslaved each other long before Europeans visited the continent and that scholarly rebuttals of these denials don’t get a mention in these programs.
The book then critiqued the claims for compensation for past slavery to be paid by Western powers to both African countries and the descendents of slaves living in the USA whereas those making these claims did not address, let alone mention compensation for, the very extensive systems of slavery that existed within Africa, Arabia and Asia long before Europeans settled in North America.
"Curiously, none of them suggest that the Arab emirates or Iraq should kick in their share, which, by all rights, should be a very large one, larger than Europe’s or even America’s, and just as easily raised from the flow of oil. If Washington must pay cash for the sins of Simon Legree, then it seems only fair that Baghdad should expiate those of the Abassid caliphs."
The book then cited the expectation that, when visiting Europe, 19th century Americans would see fine art that would be accompanied by noble and devout behaviour by the artists, and were disappointed if not shocked when they found it wasn’t always so. This moved on to a discussion of the Maplethorpe photographs and the Piss Christ sculpture, and the attacks on them by politicians and commentators which raised their profiles, and their prices. The book noted that while not always recognised when they were working, over time the merits of artists are duly recognised. However, during the 1980s, many artists vaunted because of their "diversity" were unworthy of much praise. Similarly, the book noted that the "protest as art" movement often omitted actual talent as if protest and victimhood was all that was needed and challenged the expectation that art reflected talent and competency of being "elitist". Tellingly, the book observed that if the objective of art was to "change society", it wasn’t working. Hughes then cited the 1980s Dutch art program which resulting in the government buying 1,000s of works of art which were subsequently recognised only for their mediocrity, which no one wanted and which only created a massive waste disposal program. In conclusion, he reiterated the case for museums to exhibit works of excellence indifferent to current political trends.
The book was well-written and reflected Hughes’s extensive and very deep knowledge of art and art criticism, hence, his attacks on some then-fashionable notions were from a very informed position and his polemics were more subtle and understated that those of, say Christopher Hitchens, and thus sharper.
August 6, 2025
Vivimos en una época donde la queja ha dejado de ser una reacción puntual para convertirse en una forma de identidad. En medio de esa transformación, conviene detenernos a pensar cómo el lenguaje, las sensibilidades colectivas y las estructuras culturales han contribuido a forjar una sociedad que, más que enfrentar el conflicto, prefiere disfrazarlo con corrección superficial. En “La cultura de la queja”, Robert Hughes lanza una mirada lúcida y sin concesiones sobre este fenómeno, desnudando los síntomas de una civilización que, atrapada entre el infantilismo emocional, el eufemismo institucionalizado y una violencia simbólica normalizada, ha cambiado el pensamiento crítico por la tranquilidad que ofrece lo políticamente correcto.
Al ahondar en sus páginas, ineludiblemente recordé “La tentación de la inocencia”, de Pascal Bruckner. Aunque cada autor escribe desde contextos distintos, sus diagnósticos dialogan con inquietante sintonía. Ambos coinciden en señalar una tendencia cultural a evadir la responsabilidad individual, a refugiarse en el papel de víctima y a erosionar, poco a poco, el espacio del debate libre. Escritos en los años noventa, estos libros parecen describir con precisión el presente, como si el tiempo no hubiera hecho más que confirmar sus advertencias. Esa coincidencia entre textos —esa conversación soterrada entre autores que nunca se propusieron hablar entre sí— es uno de los aspectos más fascinantes de la lectura.
Lo que más valoro de Hughes es que no se limita a denunciar: provoca. Es un texto que incomoda, nos obliga a cuestionar nuestras propias convicciones. ¿Qué buscamos realmente en la cultura: un espejo complaciente o una ventana que nos exponga a la complejidad del mundo? El autor no ahorra críticas, ni a la izquierda ni a la derecha, y se atreve a señalar cómo ciertas identidades colectivas hacen del sufrimiento un estandarte político. También arremete contra las derivas del arte contemporáneo, dominado —según él— por una lógica posmoderna vacía, más interesada en provocar que en construir. Escrito hace más de dos décadas, “La cultura de la queja” se siente tan actual que, por momentos, uno se olvida de que está leyendo el pasado.
Al ahondar en sus páginas, ineludiblemente recordé “La tentación de la inocencia”, de Pascal Bruckner. Aunque cada autor escribe desde contextos distintos, sus diagnósticos dialogan con inquietante sintonía. Ambos coinciden en señalar una tendencia cultural a evadir la responsabilidad individual, a refugiarse en el papel de víctima y a erosionar, poco a poco, el espacio del debate libre. Escritos en los años noventa, estos libros parecen describir con precisión el presente, como si el tiempo no hubiera hecho más que confirmar sus advertencias. Esa coincidencia entre textos —esa conversación soterrada entre autores que nunca se propusieron hablar entre sí— es uno de los aspectos más fascinantes de la lectura.
Lo que más valoro de Hughes es que no se limita a denunciar: provoca. Es un texto que incomoda, nos obliga a cuestionar nuestras propias convicciones. ¿Qué buscamos realmente en la cultura: un espejo complaciente o una ventana que nos exponga a la complejidad del mundo? El autor no ahorra críticas, ni a la izquierda ni a la derecha, y se atreve a señalar cómo ciertas identidades colectivas hacen del sufrimiento un estandarte político. También arremete contra las derivas del arte contemporáneo, dominado —según él— por una lógica posmoderna vacía, más interesada en provocar que en construir. Escrito hace más de dos décadas, “La cultura de la queja” se siente tan actual que, por momentos, uno se olvida de que está leyendo el pasado.
November 16, 2021
This book is certainly a worthwhile read, not least because it shows that the debates that currently permeate the Western cultural and academic spheres are not some recent phenomena.
Not knowing anything about the author, I was somewhat afraid by the title and blurb of this book as it led me to suspect that it was going to be a rather one-sided sneer at 'those crazy lefties'. Now, whilst there is certainly plenty of grievance levelled at 'PC', for Hughes this is an acronym applied to both the Left and Right (political and patriotic correctness respectively) and throughout the three lectures that make up the text he raises various examples that, mostly, highlight the hypocrisy found in the arguments conscripted by two dogmatic, irreconcilable factions.
Some of these examples are a little dated, with many of the contemporary (1992) names raised going straight over the head of a British twenty-something such as myself. Indeed, the terminology he uses on occasion might strike the younger reader as a relic of a bygone age, though it would be, perhaps, to miss the point of some of Hughes' more salient arguments if we judge him too harshly for this.
Reassuringly, I found myself alternating between agreement and disagreement throughout (it is always depressing to discover that a book has caused no conflict within you). In both instances, however, Hughes argues with great clarity (dated references not withstanding) and wit and I enjoyed the ride as a result.
In short, this is a well-written and still relevant piece of critical literature that cannot help but enrich its readers' perspective through either acceptance or refutation. Naturally, this comes with the advisory note that America is not the world entire.
Not knowing anything about the author, I was somewhat afraid by the title and blurb of this book as it led me to suspect that it was going to be a rather one-sided sneer at 'those crazy lefties'. Now, whilst there is certainly plenty of grievance levelled at 'PC', for Hughes this is an acronym applied to both the Left and Right (political and patriotic correctness respectively) and throughout the three lectures that make up the text he raises various examples that, mostly, highlight the hypocrisy found in the arguments conscripted by two dogmatic, irreconcilable factions.
Some of these examples are a little dated, with many of the contemporary (1992) names raised going straight over the head of a British twenty-something such as myself. Indeed, the terminology he uses on occasion might strike the younger reader as a relic of a bygone age, though it would be, perhaps, to miss the point of some of Hughes' more salient arguments if we judge him too harshly for this.
Reassuringly, I found myself alternating between agreement and disagreement throughout (it is always depressing to discover that a book has caused no conflict within you). In both instances, however, Hughes argues with great clarity (dated references not withstanding) and wit and I enjoyed the ride as a result.
In short, this is a well-written and still relevant piece of critical literature that cannot help but enrich its readers' perspective through either acceptance or refutation. Naturally, this comes with the advisory note that America is not the world entire.
May 27, 2019
È un’analisi della situazione politica e sociale degli Stati Uniti, e di un po’ tutto il mondo occidentale, degli anni Novanta ma, superato il “fastidio” di leggere qualcosa relativo a venti anni fa (quasi trenta, perché l’anno delle conferenze di Hughes è il ‘92), si trovano spunti molto interessanti e sorprendentemente attuali. Brevi esempi:
“Le trasmissioni delle reti televisive americane sono per lo più robaccia destinata a produrre carenza di realtà”; “...sono mutate proprio le parole che descrivono la comprensione degli avvenimenti: una delle vittime, tra le decine, e stata la “percezione”, che una volta denotava una visione delle cose aderente alla realtà, mentre negli anni Ottanta è venuta a significare “opinione” e infine “illusione” o “cantonata”.”
“Ma la promessa basilare del marxismo, un’Internazionale di lavoratori uniti da interessi comuni in quanto forza transnazionale, si è rivelata un’assoluta chimera. Il nazionalismo sopravvive. Mezzo secolo dopo la morte di Hitler, le bande neonaziste tedesche fanno manifestazioni, tengono concerti di “rock dell’odio” e bruciano immigrati turchi nei loro letti; in Italia una nipote di Mussolini è in politica. Invece, quarant’anni dopo la morte di Stalin non c’è in nessuna parte d’Europa uno schietto credente marxista al potere o vicino al potere.”
“La sinistra accademica è molto più interessata a questioni di sesso e razza che non di classe; (...) Ciò permette ai suoi luminari di sentirsi all’avanguardia del cambiamento sociale senza doversi affannare in ricerche sul campo; e la “sinistra tradizionale” è rimasta un bel tratto indietro, impelagata nei dimessi e rifritti discorsi sugli operai”.
E tanto, tanto altro.
“Le trasmissioni delle reti televisive americane sono per lo più robaccia destinata a produrre carenza di realtà”; “...sono mutate proprio le parole che descrivono la comprensione degli avvenimenti: una delle vittime, tra le decine, e stata la “percezione”, che una volta denotava una visione delle cose aderente alla realtà, mentre negli anni Ottanta è venuta a significare “opinione” e infine “illusione” o “cantonata”.”
“Ma la promessa basilare del marxismo, un’Internazionale di lavoratori uniti da interessi comuni in quanto forza transnazionale, si è rivelata un’assoluta chimera. Il nazionalismo sopravvive. Mezzo secolo dopo la morte di Hitler, le bande neonaziste tedesche fanno manifestazioni, tengono concerti di “rock dell’odio” e bruciano immigrati turchi nei loro letti; in Italia una nipote di Mussolini è in politica. Invece, quarant’anni dopo la morte di Stalin non c’è in nessuna parte d’Europa uno schietto credente marxista al potere o vicino al potere.”
“La sinistra accademica è molto più interessata a questioni di sesso e razza che non di classe; (...) Ciò permette ai suoi luminari di sentirsi all’avanguardia del cambiamento sociale senza doversi affannare in ricerche sul campo; e la “sinistra tradizionale” è rimasta un bel tratto indietro, impelagata nei dimessi e rifritti discorsi sugli operai”.
E tanto, tanto altro.
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