Based on what were originally a set of public lectures, Hughes's Culture of Complaint has all of the virtues of lively lectures: lucidity, point, wit, humor and a perfect sense of timing. His subject is the current cultural scene of the early 1990's, one that has changed slightly but not essentially. His key targets are political correctness, the nanny state, the privileging of victimology, multiculturalism as mushy relativism rather than openness to the unique contributions of multiple cultures, identity politics and, in the arts a high regard for self-`expression' rather than for skill and talent.
The bottom line is that while Hughes is a political liberal he is an intellectual conservative, with a high regard for history, facts and the search for the truth, all of the things whose importance or very possibility the postmodernists downplay or flatly deny. Thus, he is as harsh with sloppy thinking on the left as on the right and he does not hesitate to take firm stands. His special fortes are history and art and he has fascinating and trenchant things to say about both. Just one sample: on a commentator's explaining away some of the extremes of Robert Mapplethorpe--"This, I would say, is the kind of exhausted and literally de-moralized aestheticism that would find no basic difference between a Nuremberg rally and a Busby Berkeley spectacular, since both, after all, are examples of Art-Deco choreography."
A cognate pop culture analogue to Hughes's posture is the voice of the Eagles' Don Henley (no conservative) in "Get Over It": "I'd like to take your inner child and kick its little ass."
He does not spend a great deal of time on the origins of what Bloom calls the `school of resentment'; his task is more to explain it and talk about key examples. One key source is the `ed school', which has made a point of discouraging what was once called judicial criticism. Northrop Frye, coming from a very different direction, also warned about evaluative judgments, believing that the history of art resembles the stock market. Stocks rise and fall and it is not our principal task to identify what we, at this moment, perceive as excellent. The ed schools see it differently, I think. They conflate discrimination (making distinctions based on professional knowledge) with discrimination (making prejudiced statements or doing prejudiced things based on ignorance). It is related to their instruction of counselors to avoid being too `directive', i.e. to actually counsel.
Hughes sees it quite differently. He believes that it is precisely the historian (and historian of art's) task to make distinctions, to identify purpose, meaning and excellence and expose mediocrity and triviality. The `complaint culture's' response to this is often J. Hillis Miller's--that we should let a thousand flowers bloom (without, presumably, drawing any attention to the flowers' rarity or beauty). The problem is that (in terms of the appearance of books alone) there are about 800,000 flowers each year worldwide and 60,000 or so just in the U.S. The alternative to the sort of discrimination so ably practiced by Hughes is chaos and/or mush (of which he gives some superb examples).
This is a delightful, incisive book that now seems old-fashioned. More's the pity.
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