2381) The all-pervasive claim to victimhood tops off America's long-cherished culture of therapeutics. To seem strong may only conceal a rickety scaffolding of denial, but to be vulnerable is to be invincible. Complaint gives you power - even when it's only the power of emotional bribery, of creating previously unnoticed levels of social guilt. Plead not guilty, and it's off with your head. The shifts this has produced may be seen everywhere, and their curious tendency is to make the "right" and the "left" converge. Consider the recent form of discussion of sexual issues, which revolve more and more around victimization.

Robert Hughes
"Culture and the Broken Polity"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2382) [I]t is worth remembering that although we tend to think of America as perpetually new, the fall of despotisms leave its form of government older and more continuous that any in Europe, older than the French revolution [...]

Robert Hughes
"Culture and the Broken Polity"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2383) The fundamental temper of America tends towards an existential ideal which can probably never be reached, but can never be discarded: equal rights to variety, to construct your life as you see fit, to choose your traveling companions. This has always been a heterogeneous country, and its cohesion, whatever cohesion it has, can only be based on mutual respect. There never was a core America in which everyone looked the same, spoke the same language, worshiped the same gods and believed the same things. [...] America is a construction of mind, not of race or inherited class or ancestral territory.

Robert Hughes
"Culture and the Broken Polity"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2384) It is too simple to say that America is, or ever was, a melting pot. But it is also too simple to say none of it contents ever melted. No single metaphor can do justice to the complexity of cultural crossing and perfusion in America. American mutuality has no choice but to live in recognition of difference. But it is destroyed when those differences get raised into cultural ramparts. People once uses a dead metaphor - "balkanization" - to evoke the splitting of a field into sects, groups, little nodes of power. Now, on the dismembered corpse of Yugoslavia, whose "cultural differences" (or, to put it plainly, archaic religious and racial lunacies) have been set free by the death of Communism, we see what that stale figure of speech once meant and now means again. A Hobbesian world: the war of all on all, locked in blood-feud and theocratic hatred, the reduction ad insanitatem of America's mild and milky multiculturalism. What imperial rule, what Hapsburg tyranny or slothful dominion of Muscovite appartchiks, would not be preferable to this? Against this ghastly background, so remote from American experience since the Civil War, we now have our own conservatives promising a "culture war," while ignorant radicals orate about "separatism." They cannot know what demons they are frivolously invoking. If they did, they would fall silent in shame.

[...] The fact remains that America is a collective work of the imagination whose making never ends, and once that sense of collectivity and mutual respect is broken the possibilities of Americanness begin to unravel. If they are fraying now, it is because the politics of ideology has for the last twenty years weakened and in some areas broken the traditional American genius for consensus, for getting along by making up practical compromises to meet real social needs. [...]

In society as well as in farming, monoculture works poorly. It exhausts the soil. The social richness of America, so striking to the foreigner, 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 cultural differences into impassable barriers and ramparts, not to fetishize their "African-ness" or Italianita, which makes them distinct, as the expense of the Americanness, which gives them a vast common ground. Reading America is like a scanning a mosaic. If you look only at the big picture, you do not see its parts - the distinct glass tiles, each a different color. If you concentrate only on the tiles, you cannot see the picture.

Robert Hughes
"Culture and the Broken Polity"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2385) We have entered a period of intolerance which combines, as it sometimes does in America, with a sugary taste for euphemism. This conjunction fosters events that go beyond the wildest dream of satire - if satire existed in America anymore; perhaps the reason for its weakness is that reality has superseded it.

Robert Hughes
"Culture and the Broken Polity"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2386) If the first law of American corporate like is that deadwood floats, the corresponding rule of liberation-talk is that air expands.

Robert Hughes
"Culture and the Broken Polity"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2387) America has been lately full of occasions when someone prevents someone else from saying something and then denies it's a free speech issue.

Robert Hughes
"Culture and the Broken Polity"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2388) If [euphemisms] actual made people treat one another with more civility and understanding, there might be an argument for them. But they do no such thing. Seventy years ago, in polite white usage, blacks were called "colored people." Then they became "negroes." Then "blacks." Now, "African-Americans" or "persons of color" again. But for millions of white Americans, from the time of George Wallace to that of David Duke, they stayed niggers, and the shift of names has not altered the facts of racism, any more than the ritual announcement of Five-Year Plans and Great Leaps Forward turned the social disasters of Stalinism and Maoism into triumphs. The notion that you can change a situation by finding a newer and nicer word for it emerges from the old American habit of euphemism, circumlocution, and desperate confusion about etiquette, produced by the fear that the concrete will give offense. And it is a peculiarly American habit. [...]

No shifting of words is going to reduce the amount of bigotry in this or any society. But it does increase what the military mind so lucidly calls collateral damage in a target-rich environment - namely, the wounding of innocent language.

Robert Hughes
"Culture and the Broken Polity"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2389) 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.

Robert Hughes
"Culture and the Broken Polity"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2390) 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.

Robert Hughes
"Culture and the Broken Polity"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2391) The proper objection to left-wing argument at American universities is not that it exists, for it ought to exist and prosper freely - it's that so much of it is opaque, filled with jargon and devoted to marginal issues.

Robert Hughes
"Culture and the Broken Polity"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2392) A college degree is not necessary for most jobs that people do in the world, whereas literacy, numeracy and basic skills at interpreting information are absolutely so.

Robert Hughes
"Culture and the Broken Polity"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2393) Untrained in logical analysis, ill-equipped to develop and construct formal arguments about issues, unused to mining texts for deposits of factual material, [...] students fell back to the only position they could truly call their own: what they felt about things. When feelings and attitudes are the main referents of argument, to attack any position is automatically to insult its holder, or even assail his or her perceived "rights", every argumentum becomes ad hominem, approaching the condition of harassment, if not quite rape.

Robert Hughes
"Culture and the Broken Polity"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2394) [T]he appreciation of art and literature has no scientific basis whatever: one is dealing with the unquantifiable coin of feeling, intuition and (from time to time) moral judgment, and there is no objective "truth" to which criticism can lay "scientific" claim.

Robert Hughes
"Culture and the Broken Polity"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2395) Obsession with theory, combined with a complete lack of writing talent, creates the awful prose of academic lit-crit.

Robert Hughes
"Culture and the Broken Polity"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2396) In cultural matters the old division of right and left has come to look more like two Puritan sects, one plaintively conservative, the other posing as revolutionary but using academic complaint as a way of evading engagement in the real world. [...] One side needs the other, so that each can inflate its agenda into a chiliastic battle for the soul of America. Radical academic and cultural conservatives are now locked in a full-blown, mutually sustaining folie a deux, and the only person each dislikes more than the other is the one who tells both to lighten up. Such is the last mutation of America's Puritan heritage.

Robert Hughes
"Culture and the Broken Polity"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2397)
What does this sudden uneasiness mean,
and this confusion? (How grave their faces have become!)
Why are the streets and squares rapidly emptying.
and why is everyone going back home, so lost in thought?
    Because it is night and the barbarians have not come;
    and some men have arrived from the frontiers
    and they say that barbarians don't exist any longer.
And now what will become of us without barbarians?
    They were a kind of solution.

Constantine Cavafy
"Waiting for the Barbarians" (1904) [ODQ]
quoted by Robert Hughes in
"Culture and the Broken Polity"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)