The Ideal of Culture

by Joseph Epstein

  The contemporary university, where so many misbegotten ideas find fertile ground and ample watering, has been especially hospitable to the culture of victimhood. Two of the most consequential of these ideas, both catering directly to victims, have been multiculturalism and its twin sister, enforced diversity. Multiculturalism, with its insistence that all cultures are equal, has tended to diminish the centrality of western culture, with its dominance of white male writers, artists, philosophers, and to push what one might call victim studies, or victimology, to the forefront of university curricula. The result has been the emphasis on race, class, and gender and the concomitant politicalization—some would add trivialization—of much that goes on in the humanities and social sciences departments.

  Universities are proud of their diversity; some have deans of diversity. Every college catalogue shows blacks and Asians lounging languorously on their lush green lawns. Today, the rarest item at Northwestern University, where I taught for many years, is a photograph of its current president unaccompanied by at least one black, an east Indian, a Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, and, any other minority-group student with a few free minutes to kill on a photo op. Affirmative action itself was of course from the outset a victim compensation program.

  Now that so many different minority groups have become part of the contemporary university, the sensibility of their members, it became evident, must at all costs not be offended, their self-esteem in no way deflected, let alone deflated. In their putative defense, political correctness inevitably followed multiculturalism and diversity in universities as what psychologists might term a support system. In classrooms, the pronoun police were soon on the prowl, making certain no professor used such proscribed words as “lady” or “oriental” or failed to use “she” at least as often as “he” when citing examples, even if some seemed more than a bit forced: Every construction worker knows she can readily be laid off. As both a prefix (mankind) and a suffix (chairman), “man” had to go. If a teacher mentioned Shakespeare or Tolstoy in class, he had better find a way to drag in, under an unspoken equal-opportunity pedagogy rule, Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf. If he used the word Negro instead of African-American, or homosexual instead of gay, he acquired an instant reputation as a racist or a homophobe. Tell a slightly off-color joke, or make an indirectly sexual allusion, he could be hauled in for sexual assault. Victims, even if self-appointed ones, must be protected at all costs, and political correctness was there to do the job.

  Meanwhile the already ample glossary of political correctness grows, with many old words proscribed daily. The most recent is “thug” or “thugs.” The reason is that many people, including President Obama, have referred to the violent rioters and looters in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore as thugs. Thugs, it is now understood, means young, riotous black men, and therefore using the word marks its user as racist. The addition of newly politically incorrect language hastens apace; soon a daily bulletin will be required instructing which once commonly used words are now ruled verboten.

  If the rigidities of political correctness were limited to universities, it might not be so bad. The inmates in the bedlam that has become the contemporary university, after all, seem to get on cheerily enough with one another under this tyranny. Alas, these rigidities aren’t so limited. Students graduate, and many, if they take little else with them from their years in college, acquire the censorious sensitivities learned under the reign of political correctness experienced during those years.

  I had lunch a few weeks ago with a lawyer in his late seventies who told me that, owing to the retirement of several of his partners, he planned to close his office and move in with a large firm where he would become, in the trade phrase, “of counsel.” The deal was set, but before the actual move, he took 12 of what were to be his new firm’s associates to lunch, to explain to them how he worked with his clients. The day after the lunch, he was called by a senior partner of the firm and informed that the move couldn’t be made after all. When he inquired why, he was told that, at the lunch, he apparently made a joke about a fat man and more than once referred to women who had worked for him as “my girls.” The associates, as a body, found this unacceptable, and wanted no part of him. “When I was in college, there were certain words you couldn’t say in front of a girl,” Tom Lehrer remarked. “Now you can say them, but you can’t say ‘girl.’”

  I happen to know that the lawyer in fact paid these women well, treated them respectfully, and as a result they were as loyal to him as he to them over the decades they worked together. None of which, though, signified, since the associates made their judgment of him on grounds of political correctness, and from the kangaroo courts of political correctness there is no reprieve, no time off for good behavior, and no parole.

  In 1970, some 45 years ago, I wrote an essay in Harper’s on the subject of homosexuality. The chief points of my essay were that no one had a true understanding of the origins of human homosexuality, that there was much false tolerance on the part of some people toward homosexuals; that for many reasons homosexuality could be a tough card to have drawn in life; and that given a choice, owing to the complications of homosexual life, most people would prefer their children to be heterosexual. Quotations from that essay today occupy the center of my Wikipedia entry. In every history of gay life in America, the essay has a prominent place. When I write something controversial, this essay is brought up, usually by the same professional gay liberationists, to be used against me. That I am pleased the tolerance for homosexuality has widened in America and elsewhere, that in some respects my own aesthetic sensibility favors much homosexual artistic production (Cavafy, Proust, Auden), cuts neither ice nor slack. My only hope now is that, on my gravestone, the words Noted Homophobe aren’t carved.

  Political correctness excludes candor, or even complexity, in discussion of public problems, questions, issues. Might one bring up the high crime rates of blacks and black-on-black crime in the recent publicity of police shootings of black criminals without being called racist? Is it possible to mention the matter of potential pregnancy when hiring young married women for high-level jobs without being thought anti-woman? If one says sex-change operation instead of gender reassignment surgery, is one hopelessly insensitive? The answer in each case is plain enough: to ask or to say any of these things disqualifies one instanter.

  Thus has political correctness, the vigilantism of the victim, squashed discussion and in many realms of public life replaced ethics. Stefano Gabbana, of the clothing firm of Dolce & Gabbana, in an interview with the Italian magazine Panorama, recently made the mistake of criticizing in-vitro births. “Wombs for rent,” he called such arrangements, “sperm selected from a catalog. . . . Who would agree to be the daughter of chemistry? Procreation must be an act of love, now not even psychiatrists are prepared to deal with the effects of these experiments.” The singer Elton John, who with his companion is raising two such children, shot back,

  How dare you refer to my beautiful children as “synthetic”! And shame on you for wagging your judgmental little fingers at IVF—a miracle that has allowed legions of loving people, both straight and gay, to fulfill their dream of having children. Your archaic thinking is out of step with the times, just like your fashions. I shall never wear Dolce & Gabbana ever again.

  In an Instagram, Sir Elton called for a boycott of Dolce & Gabbana clothes, in which he was presently joined by Ricky Martin, Martina Navratilova, and Ryan Murphy, the producer of Glee.

  Stefano Gabbana, who is himself gay, apologized profusely, claimed that his views are those of someone brought up in the traditional Sicilian family, that he wished all gay couples with children well. His partner Domenico Dolce even chimed in that he loved Elton John’s music. “Boycott Dolce & Gabbana for what?” Gabbana asked. “They don’t think like you? This is correct? This is not correct. We are in 2015. This is like medieval. It’s not correct.”

  That there is a genuine issue up fo
r serious discussion in IVF births—that it often requires women so hard pressed for money that they agree to carry other people’s children in what is a form of modern bondage—is ignored in this exchange. Political correctness, though, isn’t about issues, about items in the flux of controversy. It’s about denouncing people who don’t think as you do, and as such it is a key weapon in the arsenal of victims.

  Because virtue is at the heart of so many political questions in our day, in victim culture things get to the contempt stage and beyond fairly fast. Elton John does not strongly disagree with Stefano Gabanna; he wants to put him out of business. Nor does one have oneself to be a victim to claim virtue for one’s position. Many bask in the warm virtue of victims by coming out strongly on their side. These are the virtucrats, or those people whose political opinions are propelled by their strong sense of self-virtue. They are people who judge others, mercilessly, by their opinions. Some years ago, a journalist with whom I found myself in a political argument closed off the discussion by claiming that the chief difference between us was that I did not care about people anywhere near as much as he, thus positioning himself as a much finer person than I. An old fellow traveler, a Stalinist in his day, once told me that he was of course wrong about Soviet communism, adding that nonetheless in his heart he was right, while I, who may have been correct in never falling for communism, owing to having early read George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, and Sidney Hook on the subject, in my heart was ultimately wrong for failing to have been moved by the promise of communism.

  One of the hallmarks of the virtucrat is his taste for underdogs, or what he takes to be underdogs, no matter how egregious their actions. With the underdogs, after all, is where virtue lies. The true virtucrat lines up with the oppressed (if rocket-launching) Palestinians against Israel, with black and Hispanic criminals apprehended by police, most recently against the French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo for mocking terrorists, who after all have feelings, too. In a presidential election between Al Sharpton and Mitt Romney, the virtucrat would have to go for Sharpton. In an earlier election between Louis Farakhan and Ronald Regan, he would, after much moral hand-wringing, probably have taken the high ground and abstained from voting. One of the reasons that virtucrats tend to be anti-American, is that America, however correct its position in foreign affairs, however clearly on the side of justice and generosity, is never—at least not yet—the underdog and therefore can never have virtue on its side.

  However repellent the professional victims, those who make a nice living off their victimhood— the race hustlers, the academic feminists finding a phallus in every chalice, and others—there is of course a core of truth to the oppression most victims have felt. Everyone knows of the travails of slavery and beyond, the battles of women for equality in the workplace and elsewhere, the mocking and shunning of homosexuals, and the degrading of other victim groups; it was genuine, and painful—its victims truly were victims, and a blot, though one would hope far from an ineradicable one, on our country. Anyone with a conscience in decent repair recognizes and regrets this.

  Yet the victims of our day make their appeal not to conscience but to guilt. An appeal to guilt is almost entirely negative; rather than awaken the best in one, it insists those who disagree with one are swine. An appeal to conscience, on the other hand, is an appeal to one’s ethical feeling, to one’s sense of fair play; it is fundamentally an appeal to act upon the best that is in one, one’s better nature.

  The brilliance of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., was their appeal to conscience, reinforced by their non-violent means of achieving their respective ends of Indian independence and the abolishment of vile segregation laws. The victims of our day work at inducing guilt, exacting punishment where possible through boycott and disqualification, and above all capturing, as they have no doubt they do, the high ground of superior virtue. God love them, for it is all but impossible for ordinary men and women to do so.

  Cool

  (2017)

  I don’t blow but I’m a fan.

  Look at me swing, ring-a-ding-ding.

  I even call my girlfriend “man” . . . .

  Every Saturday night with my suit

  Buttoned tight and my suedes on

  I’m getting my kicks digging arty French

  Flicks with my shades on.

  —“I’m Hip,” lyrics by Dave Frishberg

  The first distinction required in treating Joel Dinerstein’s exhaustive—and slightly exhausting—book is that between hip and cool. To be cool is, in Dinerstein’s words, “associated with detached composure as well as artistic achievement,” while to be hip “is to be knowledgeable and resourceful,” above all about those who are cool. Something there is a touch uncool about being hip, a camp follower or chronicler of cool. Joel Dinerstein is the hippest of the hip. To paraphrase Dave Frishberg, he was doubtless “hep when it was hip to be hep.”

  The Origins of Cool in Postwar America is a lengthy work, 25 years in the making. Its author was curator of a 2014 Smithsonian exhibition called “American Cool” (see “Strike a Pose: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Cool,” July 28, 2014) and has written Coach: A Story of New York Cool (2016), which is not a book about the New York Knicks under Red Holzman but about the luxury brand of purses and leather goods. During the past 15 years he has taught a course on the history of cool at Tulane, and is interested in (as he puts it) “the intersections of modernity and popular culture, race and American music, and literature and ethnicity.” How cool is that? I’ll leave it for you to decide.

  A larger, more complex question that Dinerstein’s book raises is: How cool is cool itself? Is the phenomenon of cool at all significant in our day? Was it ever? For Joel Dinerstein, cool is an apotheosis, elevating those who possess it to the secular equivalent of near divine status. The major figures in his cool pantheon are the jazz musicians Lester Young, Miles Davis, and Charlie Parker; the film noir actors Humphrey Bogart, Alan Ladd, and Robert Mitchum; the writers Richard Wright, Jack Kerouac, and Ralph Ellison; the existentialist thinkers Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir; the singers and actors Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Clint Eastwood, and Elvis Presley; and the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, whose career, for Dinerstein, in some ways marks the end of postwar cool.

  In its origin, cool was a creation of African-American jazz musicians to face the pressure of Jim Crow arrangements during a time when the United States was an unembarrassedly racialist white society. At various points in its history, cool was, in Dinerstein’s language, “the aestheticizing of detachment,” “an emotional mask, a strategy of masking emotion,” “a public mode of covert resistance,” “a walking indictment of society,” “relaxed intensity” played out through the jazz musician, who was “global culture’s first nonwhite rebel.”

  The first figure of cool Dinerstein takes up is Lester Young, the great tenor saxophonist. Born in Mississippi, Young met with Jim Crow at its most intense. He later moved on to Kansas City, where he played in Count Basie’s orchestra. Drafted during World War II, he was caught with marijuana and booze in his possession and clapped into a brutal Army jail in Alabama, from which, after a year, he was dishonorably discharged.

  Lester Young is the first to have invoked the word “cool” to mean “relaxed and under control.” Young also used it to apply to a musical aesthetic that Dinerstein describes as combining “flow and understatement, minimalism and relaxed phrasing, deep tone and nonverbal narration.” The guitarist B. B. King, greatly influenced by the playing and personal style of Lester Young, called him the “King of Cool.” The blues singer Billie Holiday referred to him as “Prez.” Dinerstein provides a telling anecdote about Young remarking to the young drummer Willie Jones III: “You have good technique, Lady Jones, but what’s your story?” What he meant, Jones recounted, is that the jazz musician uses music “to project the particular philosophy he subscribes to.” Whitney Balliett, that
most lyrical of writers on jazz, wrote of Lester Young in performance that “his relation to the band in a solo was that of a migrating bird to a tree: he circled, perched briefly, preened, and moved on; he enhanced the band, but it did not alter him.” Every jazz solo, as Dinerstein puts it, “is an artistic transmutation of personal experience processed into sound.” Lester Young died at 49, of liver disease and malnutrition brought on by alcoholism.

  The incarnation of cool Dinerstein considers after jazz is film noir, those stark movies, some about Western outlaws and urban gangsters, most of them detective stories—many made from Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett novels—whose representative actor was Humphrey Bogart. Cool is of course not a word that the Bogart—or the Alan Ladd or the Robert Mitchum—character in film noir would ever use, let alone call himself; but cool he indubitably was, though in a distinctly different way from the jazz musician’s notions of cool.

  In his film noir roles, Bogart was usually a private detective, with a dreary office, a furnished room, a single suit, and, of course, his ubiquitous fedora, kept on even during fist fights. His form of cool had nothing to do with adapting a mask to confront an unjust society but everything to do with retaining his integrity in a society that was thought to work against integrity itself. The noir films are distinctly short on happy endings: “Well, I’ll have some rotten nights after I’ve sent you over [to the police],” the Bogart/Sam Spade character says to the Mary Astor/Brigid O’Shaughnessy character at the conclusion of The Maltese Falcon (1941), “but that’ll pass.” And we are confident it will. What will remain intact, though, will be Bogie’s ironclad integrity. Cool.