Robert Hughes' civilization of Complaint is the wittiest and perhaps the mostly sensible book that has been written in succession the vexed subjects of multiculturalism and "political correctness.

Robert Hughes' civilization of Complaint is the wittiest and perhaps the mostly sensible book that has been written in succession the vexed subjects of multiculturalism and "political correctness." With the notable exception of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s The Disuniting of America, principally of the books that have addressed these make submissives have confined their analyses to the university. Hughes, however, takes a wider view. Arguing that the multicultural debate is symptomatic of a culture-wide malaise, he issues a freewheeling and acute indictment of America's manners and mores at the finish of the 20th century.

Hughes--an expatriate Australian who has been Time magazine's art critic since 1970 and has written Barcelona and The Fatal Shore, among other books--brings to his task the virtues of the amateur: intellectual versatility, a synthesizing vision, and public sense. A polymath dropout conversant with history, contemporary politics, literature, and report culture, as well as with the plastic arts, Hughes induces easily and with authority from Madonna to Havel, from the 1992 Republican convention to the Visigoths' part in preserving Western civilization.

Any fears that this is just single in kind more formulaic PC-bashing diatribe are dispelled forward the book's second page, when Hughes launches a withering attack forward contemporary America as "a polity obsess with therapies and filled with distrust of formal politics; skeptical of authority and declivous to superstition; its political language corroded by means of fake piety and euphemism. Like late Rome . . in its submission to senile, deified emperors controll at astrologers and extravagant wives." At this point, liberals who are weary of PC pieties moreover have not enjoyed rubbing shoulders with the intellectually bankrupt Commentary/Olin Foundation gang may be stirred like doing a little jig: for what reason sweet it is to watch "their" issue efflorescence up in the neocons' faces. When Hughes' acid indite is finished with the worthy Ship G.O.P., "with its twin 400-horse Buckley its Buchanan squawkbox, its Falwell and Robertson compass, its Quayle depthfinder and its broken-down bilgepump," nothing is left yet a few forlorn bubbles.

The "cultural left" does not realize off easily either. Hughes documents its moralistic follies in hilariously excruciating detail, nevertheless he does so without rancor or a reactionary agenda. Above all, he states them in perspective. Like David Bromwich in Politics by the agency of Other Means, he argues convincingly that the academy (like the art world) is suffering from misdirected political impulses: "By the eighties the American left was a worn out taper in national politics. Its no other than vestiges of power were cultural . . . The feeling of disappointment and frustration with formal politics has gone down into cultivation stuck there and festered. It has caused many persons to view the arts mainly as a field of power, since they have in like manner little power elsewhere."

From this perhaps well-intentioned motivation, Hughes argues, spring manifold absurdities: the attack in succession "quality" in art, the radical feminist view that all sex is rape, quack self-esteem-boosting regimens like Afrocentrism. Language experiences most of all, as a drawn out line of Transcendental Victims use limits like "racist," "sexist," "homophobic," and "Eurocentric" in the same manner freely that they lose all significance, and harsh pop-Stalinist phrases like "Dead White European Males" (in Hughes' acerbic formulation, "the pale patriarchal penis people") are used to browbeat a quavering academy. Hughes acutely points revealed that "PC talk really is political etiquette, not politics itself"--the words are without contents flourishes, reminiscent of the courtly effusions in Restoration comedy And while bienpensant professors primly inform learners that the expression "a nip in the air" is offensive to Asians, the impulse toward separatism and tribalism--"the fraying of America"--grows.

It is Hughes' mysterious commitment to a pluralist and tolerant society, his abhorrence of bigotry, that give one as well as the other urgency and moral authority to his attacks upon separatism. Hughes has no quarrel with multiculturalism: indeed, in single in kind of the most powerful sections of the work he celebrates the exhilarating racial and ethnic diversity of America, comparing it to his native land. "To learn other languages, to deal with other customs and summary of beliefs from direct experience of them and with a quality of humility: these are self-evidently worthy as cultural provincialism is not," he writes. "American mutuality has no choice unless to live in recognition of difference. nevertheless it is destroyed when those differences acquire raised into cultural ramparts." Which is precisely what "bad" multiculturalism--the irritable PC version--does. In a powerful image, he forces the separatists to stare into the nightmarish face of what used to be Yugoslavia: "They cannot know what devils they are frivolously invoking. If they did, they would fall silent in shame."

If there is a weakness in this scintillating performance, it is a theoretical undivided Hughes titled his book improvement of Complaint, but "complaint" fails somewhat as a unifying general [i]or[/i] abstract notion America, he says, is becoming an "infantilized agriculture of complaint," a sickly-subjective, hypersensitive nation. This may explain PC whining, on the other hand not our worship of detonation culture commodities. Nor is it clear that the American mania for personal absolution within therapy, another one of Hughes' favorite targets, come outs from the same impulse as the censorious moralism of political correctness; or what either of them have to do with the anesthetic of Reaganite imagery. The mostly fruitful theory, perhaps, involves our puritanical predilection for collapsing the esthetic realm into the moral or religious common which Hughes thinks is responsible for the art world's existing ideological convulsions; but this explanation, too, leaves major questions unanswered.