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PARTISAN REVIEW
advertising jingle. The time has come to note its problems. Actually, it
has a trio of defects.
First, a book that declares that "X matters!" announces a polemic
and implies some category of benighted people who say or believe "X
doesn't matter much at all." The title, by its very urgency, consigns most
people to this company of ignorance. That is, unless you happen to be
among the select few who have been nursing the same resentment as the
author and feeling, "The world takes mud (or spirit, class, women's
money, etc.) for granted. But damn it! Mud matters!" you are person–
ally attacked by this kind of title. You stand accused as one who, in your
pride, has not given mud its due. Sure you have from time to time
looked at the particles of earth clinging to your fresh-dug garden veg–
etables and blessed the nutritious soil. But have you ever paid full atten–
tion to the role mud plays in human affairs?
I think the author who wrong-foots most of his potential audience
like this is off to a bad start. We readers have a lot of things on our
minds. Mud may be important, but so after all is sand. And this
broaches my second objection to the "X Matters!" formula. For in most
cases, we don't doubt that race, money, marriage, and math matter.
Rather, our task as responsible people is to find some proportion among
the myriad things that matter and to know the contexts in which they
matter a lot and those where they ought not to matter so much or even
at all. The title that looks you in the eye and asserts that
Culture
Matters
invites the considered response, "Thank you, but I already
knew that." Does race matter in American life? All too much. Does
spirit matter? Few, if any, doubt it. Justice? Family? Beauty? We are in
the realm of the platitudinously true.
But we are not wholly in that realm, and this is my third objection to
the title. The author who issues a book under the "X Matters!" rubric
wishes to shift us from the obvious to the special case and to establish
some claim of priority.
It
is not just that culture matters, but that it may
matter more than, say, economics, when it comes to what accelerates or
impedes third-world development. It is not just that beauty matters, but
that, because it matters, we are susceptible to certain kinds of commer–
cial manipulation. Such arguments have to be weighed on their own
merits, and if "X Matters!" were but a warning label that declares a
book's focus on pleading the analytic force of one explanation against
others, it would be a wholesome device. But it is not wholesome,
because it employs the use of words as excessive force.
Such titles call to mind David Merkatz, the enterprising owner of Pre–
cision Lock and Auto Glass Company in New York City, who was
