DAVID LEHMAN
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awareness of them, precisely because their own institutional structures arc
among the most hierarchical in our society. The desire to please one's
powerful elders comes as second nature to climbers of tenure ladders.
If
you really want to strike at the very roots of political correctness, begin
with a system that reduces assistant professors to sniveling grovelers -
scrap tenure.
Premise: "correctness" has more to do with conformity than with a
sense of rectitude.
It
is curious that the urge to conform should be so
strong in the land of Emerson and Thoreau.
It
is doubly curious that
professors who want to "teach students to think for themselves" should
be so susceptible to an anxiety about being (or being thought to be)
different. There is very little real deviation from accepted norms of
thought in the academy. The self-styled radical is in actual behavior as
much an organization man as the "other- directed" members of David
Riesman's
The Lonely Crowd
-
a book written on the eve of the 1950s.
Yet valedictorians do laud the virtues of individualism and originality,
and a great hue and cry will always be made over figures who seem to
embody a "new" and putatively revolutionary spirit. The mimetic com–
pulsion assures that any true or apparent maverick will instantly be
copied; that the copies will circulate with terrific speed via the techno–
logical media; and that in time the ever-proliferating copies of copies
will swamp the market denuded of whatever substance inhered in the
original.
It
is all like a media junkie's version of the parable of Plato's
cave. The process turns heroes into "role models" and, in the realm of
ideas, reduces convictions into theoretical propositions to be entertained
and abandoned. Intellectual discussion is definitely "academic" to the
precise extent that it is weightless, of no real consequence, running no
risks.
When the long hair and beards of the 1960s succeeded the crewcuts
and flattops of the 1950s, many thought that the change was a symbolic
representation of a change in social values. When jocks of the 1970s be–
gan to sport mustaches and filled the locker room with hair dryers, it
was becoming clear that the hirsute revolution signaled a change in style
only. The handlebar mustache on the mug of the ace relief pitcher signi–
fied less than the mustache Marcel Duchamp contributed to the face of
the Mona Lisa. But in time Duchamp's gesture was canceled out by its
own ubiquitousness - it had been reduced to the status of a reproducible
image, empty of meaning. The obsessive concern of American academic
intellectuals with matters of style and fickle fashion seems irreversible.
Back in 1972, in his essay "Discipline and Hope," Wendell Berry cited
"an intellectual fashionableness" as an instance of consumer mentality.
"The uniformity of dress, hair style, mannerism, and speech is plain
