Robert Hughes
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Robert Hughes writes in Culture of Complaint about the battle he sees in America today over culture, and he sees this argument as evidence of a broken polity, a division between elements in society and a division that has endangered the commonalities which hold us together as a people. He sees this as being made manifest in the way more and more groups of people take on the role of victims in society and demand special rights as a consequence, and he links this culture of victimization to the debate over multiculturalism, another concept that divides people into discrete groups rather than bringing them together. The discussion offered by Hughes ranges far and wide to show how both right and left in American society have been brought into the battle over multiculturalism and how each side has shaped the argument in a different way. Hughes notes how people today find ways to avoid taking responsibility for their own actions. They have a variety of potential causes for their behavior, all of which absolve them of guilt and in effect make them victims. He blames television for the development of this cult of victimization to a great degree, in part because television provides the forum where people bare their souls and announce their own victimization in a vulgar ritual on daytime talk shows. This is a form of "vulgar therapeutics" that leads to a sense of victimhood: Complaint gives you power--even when it's only the power of emotional bribery, of creating previously
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lead to separatism:
It alleges that European institutions and mental structures are inherently oppressive, and that non-Eurocentric ones are not--a dubious idea, to say the least.
Hughes finds that these people also give more political power to the arts than the arts can possibly support.
Hughes finds that the arts placed in complete service to politics cannot possibly serve their rightful function:
Politics ought not be all-pervasive. Indeed, one of the first conditions of freedom is to discover the line beyond which politics may not go, and literature is one of the means by which the young (and the old) find this out. Some works of art have an overt political content; many carry subliminal political messages, embedded in their framework. But it is remarkably naive to suppose that these messages exhaust the content of the art as art, or ultimately determine its value.
Yet the two PCs--political correctness and patriotic correctness--each assume that the political message of art is its end-all and be-all. The view Hughes takes of multiculturalism is broader than this and indicates that studying different cultures and different cultural messages enhance one's education and gives one a wider view of the world, while ne
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1583
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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