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THOMAS
R. EDWARDS
perhaps least endearing about their tone is its assurance that anyone
sympathetically interested in what the nonwhite minorities, the young,
the war resisters, the radical feminists, the university and public school
reformers and the rest have been trying to teach us is a
prima facie
fool,
poseur,
or machiavel, quite without the capacity for hard analytical
skepticism the new conservatives themselves so insistently exhibit. I do
wish they could stop sounding as if they have a monopoly on honest
doubt, as if every new political or cultmal event they dislike expresses
a single, sinister, monolithic assault on what they alone continue to
value.
In this tone, with its implied superiorities, I seem to detect the basis
of their anger and fear. Like most of us who've passed a certain age,
they had always assumed a cultural politics of permanent antagonism
between an intellectual elite and the rest of the populace, a drama in
which a liberal or even radical clerisy tells the vulgar laity what to do
in the comfortable expectation that they can't or won't obey. Advanced
ideas, in politics or the arts, can serve as the identification of a privi–
leged class rather as dress swords and powdered wigs used to do, and
like such tokens of status they may chiefly express their own practical
inconvenience, their luxurious irrelevance to the necessities of use. They
provide modes of competition within the group even while warning
outsiders that the game is probably too subtle or expensive for them
to try.
People who have themselves already made it in the arts, the
academy, the metropolitan intellectual world, and who feel under–
standable pride in having done so without compromising their devotion
to the unpopular values and forms of modernist high culture, shouldn't
be blamed too uncharitably for resisting incursions upon their turf by
people who seem not to have earned admission as they themselves did.
The newcomers are indeed ghastly parodies of what they had in mind,
shouting their own slogans yet somehow making them sound crude
and blurry, with no evident awareness of how much hard thought and
subtle argument went into making them. Worst of all, these rough beasts
want to do something, not understanding that populist application is
the death of the radical imagination.
Though it may not sound like it, I'm trying to be sympathetic. I
don't at all mean to deny that recent activ isms have frequently been
naive, muddled, ignorantly self-congratulating. Nor do I mean to im–
pugn anyone's motives when I suggest that the new cultural conserva–
tism looks like a form of backlash, an intellectual mode of what hap–
pens when white people find black people showing up on the block or
at the plant. That kind of backlash is serious, sincere and, within its
own orientation, quite justified; you can't adequately judge it, much
less make it go away, by telling those who feel it that they're wrong,
because in an important sense they're not wrong at all. But intel–
lectual backlash, if practically much less dangerous, is theoretically
more disturbing; it's a failure of historical and moral imagination in
precisely the place one most hopes to find it, a closing to new pos–
sibilities of minds that have always celebrated intellectual openness and
flexibility as the highest human good.
As George Levine impressively argued in the last issue of
PR,
the
