2398) Much mud has been stirred up by the linkage of multiculturalism with political correctness. This has turned what ought to be a generous recognition of cultural diversity into a worthless symbolic program, clogged with lumpen-radical jargon. Its offshoot is the rhetoric of cultural separatism.

But separatism is not, as some conservatives insist, the inevitable result of multiculturalism. The two are in fact opposites.

Multiculturalism asserts that people with different roots can co-exist, that they can learn to read the image-banks of others, that they can and should look across the frontiers of race, language, gender and age without prejudice or illusion, and learn to think against the background of a hybridized society. It proposes - modestly enough - that some of the most interesting things in history and culture happen at the interface between cultures. It wants to study border situations, not only because they are fascinating in themselves, but because understanding them may bring with it a little hope for the world.

Separatism denies the value, even the possibility, of such a dialogue. It rejects exchange. It is multiculturalism gone sour, fragmented by despair and resentment, and (in America, if not in Bosnia-Herzegovina or the Middle-East) it seems doomed to fail. To use the cultural consequences of American diversity as a tool for breaking the American polity only breaks the tool itself.

Robert Hughes
"Multi-Culti and Its Discontents"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2399) [Y]ou can't see other cultures well until, through knowing your own, you reach a point where inclusiveness means something. Otherwise you're left with mere indecisive mush.

Robert Hughes
"Multi-Culti and Its Discontents"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2400) The future of American [elites], in a globalized economy without a Cold War, will lie with people who can think and act with informed grace across ethnic, cultural, [and] linguistic lines. [...] In the world that is coming, if you can't navigate difference, you've had it.

Robert Hughes
"Multi-Culti and Its Discontents"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2401) [The] clamorous dismissals and swooping assertions [of some historical revisionists] are in fact caricatural reductions of what the great revisionary gestures of feminism, subaltern or black studies, and anti-imperialist resistance originally intended, For such gestures it was never a matter of replacing one set of authorities and dogmas with another, nor of substituting one center for another. It was always a matter of opening and participating in a central strand of intellectual and cultural effort and of showing what had always been, though indiscernable, a part of it, like the work of women, or of blacks [...] but which had been either denied or derogated.

Edward Said
"The Politics of Knowledge" in
Raritan (Summer 1991)
quoted by Robert Hughes in
"Multi-Culti and Its Discontents"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2402) The need for absolute goodies and absolute baddies runs deep in us, but it drags history into propaganda and denies the humanity of the dead: their sins, their virtues, their efforts, their failures. To preserve complexity, and not flatten it under the weight of anachronistic moralizing, is part of the historian's task.

Robert Hughes
"Multi-Culti and Its Discontents"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2403) [T]he [American] West is archetypally the place where Big Government is distrusted, the land of the independent man going it alone. Yet much of it - states like Arizona, for instance - has depended, not marginally or occasionally, but always and totally, on Federal money from Washington for its economic existence. The Southwestern states could never have been settled at their present human density without immense expenditure of government funds on water-engineering. They are less the John Wayne than the Welfare Queen of American development.

Robert Hughes
"Multi-Culti and Its Discontents"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2404) All American migrant groups draw cultural identity, and a measure of spiritual strength, from a sense of their original roots - in Sicily or the Ionian Islands, in Ireland or Cuba, and in Africa. In longing for the womb they also sentimentalize and stereotype their origins; this, as any outsider who has attended a full-blast Irish beano in Boston can testify, is a powerful tribal instinct. But it ought to be recognized that the "Africa," the imagined entity of which Afrocentrists like to speak, is very largely a construction of this kind - a lost maternal paradise.

American blacks, no less than whites, belong to, and are shaped by American culture, to which they have so immensely contributed and into which their own imaginations and deeds are inextricably wound: all they have in common with African blacks is their genes and, in the case of African states that were once English colonies, the English language. To imagine that the cultural experience of an American black resembles that of a citizen of Zanzibar or Uganda or South Africa, beyond the basic fact that both have suffered the corrosive and demeaning effects of white racism, is fanciful.

[...] The idea that African-Americans have a place waiting for them in some generalized "Africa," in any but a vaguely metaphorical sense, is mere cultural demagogy. Neither black nor white can "go home again," except as tourists; their mutual home, with all its ideals, opportunities, conflicts and evils, is America, and they have no other.

Robert Hughes
"Multi-Culti and Its Discontents"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2405) Africa, Islam, and Europe all participated in black slavery, enforced it, profited from its miseries. But in the end, only Europe (including, here, North America) proved itself able to conceive of abolishing it; only the immense moral and intellectual force of the Enlightenment, brought to bear on the hideous oppression that slavery represented, was able - unevenly, and with great difficulty - to bring the trade to an end. That we now have so-called historians who are prepared to glass over this fact strikes me as remarkable. But then, in these latitudes, neither Occam's Razor nor the notion that the burden of proof rests on the person making the assertion has any force.

For here we come up against a cardinal rule of the PC attitude to oppression studies, Whatever a white European male historian or witness had to say must be suspect; the utterances of the oppressed person or group deserve instant credence, even if they're thee merest assertion. Now the claims of the victim do have to be heard, because they may cast new light on history, But they have to pass exactly the same tests as anyone else's, or debate fails and truth suffers. The PC cover for this is the idea that all statements about history are expressions of power: history is only written by the winners and truth is political and unknowable, unless some victim knows it in his or her bones.

Robert Hughes
"Multi-Culti and Its Discontents"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2406) Once law and morality are confused it is easy to arrive at such statements as "whatever is good ought to be legislated." That premise is band enough [but] the mixing up of the realm of law with the realm of morals, is deadly ... Law can tolerate evils that morality condemns [...] We have a good law if it will be obeyed, if it is enforceable, and if it is so prudently drafted that it avoids most of the harmful effects that could flow from it. If the law does none of these things it is a bad law, no matter what the logic or the moral intensity behind it.

Rev. Thomas Healy
President of the New York Public Library
testifying before the House Subcommittee
on Postsecondary Education (11/1989),
from Culture Wars: Documents from the
Recent Controversies in the Arts (1992)
quoted by Robert Hughes in
"Moral in Itself: Art and the Therapeutic Fallacy"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2407) [N]ature films [are] electronic wallpaper for the ecologically concerned, known to skeptics in the [television] trade as "bugs fucking to Mozart."

Robert Hughes
"Moral in Itself: Art and the Therapeutic Fallacy"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2408) Americans, though among the lightest taxed people on earth, are notoriously resistant to the adage that there is no civilization without taxation.

Robert Hughes
"Moral in Itself: Art and the Therapeutic Fallacy"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2409) Democracy's task in the field of art is to make the world safe for elitism. Not an elitism based on race or money or social position, but on skill and imagination. The embodiment of high ability and intense vision is the only thing that makes art popular. [...] The greatest spectacles in America are elitist to the core: football games, baseball games, basketball, and professional tennis. [...] Like sport, art is an arena in which elitism can display itself at a negligible cost in social harm.

Robert Hughes
"Moral in Itself: Art and the Therapeutic Fallacy"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)

2410) It is in the nature of human beings to discriminate, We make choices and judgments every day. These choices are part of real experience. They are influenced by others, of course, but they are fundamentally the result of a passive reaction to authority. And we know that one of the realest experiences in cultural life is that of inequality between books and musical performances and paintings and other works of art. Some things do strike us as better than others - more articulate, more radiant with consciousness. We may have difficulty saying why, but the experience remains. The pleasure principle is enormous in art, and those who would like to see it downgraded in favor of ideological utterance remind one of the English Puritans who opposed bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.

Robert Hughes
"Moral in Itself: Art and the Therapeutic Fallacy"
The Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (1993)