SOURCE: Pinsker, Sanford. “Dispatches from the Culture Wars.” Georgia Review 50, no. 3 (fall 1996): 575-83.

[In the following essay, Pinsker compares three books on the culture wars, among them The Twilight of Common Dreams, and claims that Gitlin's critique of both Left and Right is balanced and well-grounded historically.]

The marketplace of ideas has never been a refuge for the intellectually timid nor a safe haven for those who imagine that what the academy vigorously debates has no consequences beyond its ivy-covered walls. Yet one would be hard pressed to think of a time before now when the professoriate has been more divided, its squabbles more contentious, or its injury reports so widely covered in the popular press. What I'm describing, of course, are the “culture wars”—an umbrella term meant to cover the conflicts over not only who should be admitted to higher education's most prestigious institutions and what they should study when they get there but also whether standards of excellence can coexist with efforts at social engineering. Add the destabilizing effects of postmodernist theory and the result is a litany of fighting words: “evidence,” “rigor,” “logic,” and the “pursuit of truth wherever it might lead” from one end of the faculty spectrum; “multiculturalism,” “identity politics,” and “the social construction of reality” from the other. Even those professors who would prefer nothing more than to tend the narrow garden of their own disciplines have found themselves on edge, fearful that uttering an unpopular opinion might turn them into front-page campus news or, worse, end in official disciplinary procedures.

During the 1980's, a steely, pinchfaced curtain of what came to be known as “political correctness” began to descend on campuses from Brown to Berkeley. Identified with the academic Left, political correctness was an effort to seize the moral and intellectual high ground by insisting that only narrowly defined attitudes about race, class, and gender were “correct,” and thus worthy of serious consideration. Other possibilities on these matters need not apply; and indeed, those who so much as whispered a note of dissent were often treated to volleys of angry contempt. Later, of course, the list of politically correct attitudes widened to include nonnegotiable pronouncements about homosexuals, animal rights, and the handicapped.

For some (one thinks of Allan Bloom, Richard Bernstein, Dinesh D'Souza, and George Will), recounting the loopy antics of the local Thought Police became a cottage industry. Did such critics sometimes exaggerate the conditions that, taken together, traveled under the heading of “political correctness”? Possibly. On the other hand, were they onto something? Absolutely, for the missionary zeal of some on the far Left often matched the pundits' cartoon version with eerie precision. Nor did it take long before PC came to stand for bullying and intolerance rather than for a “personal computer.” In this regard, the strained insistences of the Language Police (for “manhole cover” read “personhole cover,” for “short” read “vertically challenged”) were an exercise in language-as-power that largely backfired. And when humorists such as Jackie Mason or Bill Maher got into the act, the academic Left—more noteworthy for self-righteousness than for a sense of humor—found itself with a sizable public-relations problem.

John K. Wilson's The Myth of Political Correctness is at once an effort at damage control and an attempt to put the PC monkey where, to his mind, it more properly belongs—namely, on the backs of those traditionalists guilty of what he calls “conservative correctness.” As such, Wilson's study means to assure readers that most, if not all, of the travesties so ballyhooed in the national press are benign rather than cancerous, and that day-to-day life on our nation's campuses pretty much goes on as it always has.

But in his own book, which dutifully footnotes hundreds of war stories, the evidence suggests otherwise. Take, for example, the oft-repeated 1989 anecdote about the memo written by a student on a committee examining diversity: “At Penn,” she argued, “we should be concerned with the experience of INDIVIDUALS before we are concerned with the group …”—only to have an administrator on the committee return her memo with the word “INDIVIDUALS” circled and with this response: “This is a ‘RED FLAG’ phrase today, which is considered by many to be RACIST.” Small wonder that many were outraged then, and many more continue to be rightly alarmed now. For Wilson, however, the very fact that the incident has been so often recounted (at last count, some thirty-five times) in articles and books about political correctness is proof that those with agendas of their own fastened onto a spark and then blew it into a firestorm. Wilson concedes that the administrator's comment was “stupid,” but he goes on to argue, “The administrator did not take any action to punish the student, did not control what the student thought, and did not even make a public statement condemning the student's view.” In short, it could have been worse but wasn't.

While Wilson acknowledges that some scattered incidents were pretty bad, for him even those hardly constitute the orchestrated threat to liberal learning that the bashers of political correctness rail about. After all,

There is no national conspiracy of leftists to suppress ideas they disagree with. No one can plausibly maintain that leftists exert powerful control over higher education. … Administrators on college campuses are equal opportunity offenders when it comes to academic freedom. Intent on avoiding controversy, they are rarely staunch defenders of free speech for anyone, and pressure to get rid of troublesome faculty most often comes from conservatives, not liberals.

Moreover, Wilson keeps asking, what about documented instances of intolerance from the religious Right? Why don't these get the same public venting that the misconduct by overzealous leftists occasions? Consider, for example, the under-publicized case of Daniel Maguire, a leader of Catholics for a Free Choice, who found that

… invitations to speak at Catholic colleges were canceled because of his unorthodox views, even when abortion was not the subject of his speeches. The president of Saint Martin's College in Lacey, Washington, wrote to Maguire: “The Board [of Trustees] determined that the Saint Martin's religious studies program should avoid the hiring of personnel who advocate teachings that may be contrary to the tenets of the Roman Catholic Church,” which included hiring Maguire to deliver a speech. Maguire's lecture at the College of Saint Scholastica in Duluth, Minnesota, was canceled by the president because of Maguire's “association with Catholics for a Free Choice.” Similar cancellations occurred at Villanova University and Boston College.

We are, at this point, very far indeed from the argument Wilson tries to press in his introductory remarks—namely, that what he read about PC simply never matched the reality he encountered in “more than 150 classes from dozens of departments.” (He is currently a graduate student in the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought program.) Apparently, lots of ugliness is going on elsewhere, however, and herein may lie the real value of Wilson's spin on how PC does or does not play itself out in the press. Rather than making charges and countercharges about what constitutes fairness, and then entering into shouting matches about who got whom last, shouldn't all of us be more concerned with why these efforts to level the academic playing field and extend the borders of academic study have produced at least as much backlash as social progress?

In large measure this is precisely the question Todd Gitlin addresses in his estimable study, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars. Rather than focusing narrowly on the campus battles, he is concerned with the broader ramifications of a culture in which Columbus Day becomes a litmus test of one's politics and the National History Standards end up in a dogfight about whose history? whose hegemony? and whose truth? Gitlin's credentials as a man of the Left are at once impeccable (during the Vietnam War protests, he was president of Students for a Democratic Society) and impressive (his book The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage remains one of the best accounts of a nation at odds with itself). Moreover, Gitlin is better equipped than Wilson to talk about how the march to social justice has become sidetracked, for he writes less as a partisan than as one able to balance his critique of the Right with sober advice for his friends on the Left. The result is a study that looks at our current culture wars from a wider, more historically grounded perspective. Gitlin calls our attention to the forest, while Wilson dutifully tags hundreds of free-standing trees.

For Gitlin, the questions that matter—and haunt—are these:

Who are we? The acrimony is as intense as the quarrels are predictable. Follow the script of each battle in the culture wars and before long you arrive at the same tangle of questions: What is America anyway, and who wants to know? Who gets to say, and with what consequences? Are we finding ourselves through or despite our differences, or are we falling apart despite what we hold in common? Do we become more equal as we become more antagonistic? Is separateness the necessary prologue to a commonality that can only be attained once the most oppressed secede to cultivate truths that the majority long suppressed? Are there bridges worth building?

To his credit, Gitlin realizes full well that vexing questions such as these are likely to raise still more questions, and that efforts to find common ground (much less the occasions for making common cause) will not be easy. Part of the problem has to do with the central truth of the American experience itself—namely, that it is more “dream” than fixity, something always in transition rather than inscribed. “Has any other nation, even an empire,” Gitlin ruminates, “ever identified itself so closely with a dream?” After all, he continues,

Is there a Spanish or Pakistani dream? Was there a Roman dream? a T'ang dream? a Hapsburg or Napoleonic dream? It is one thing to have a “vision,” to invoke glory or reason, or for that matter Aryan supremacy, as a national purpose; it is quite another to identify the nation with something so insubstantial as a dream. A dream may be evocative, illuminating, fascinating, or frightful, but one thing it is not is a fait accompli. It is incapable of verification. It invites revision. Intrinsically ambiguous, it begs for interpretation and reinterpretation. A dream, after all, is the most private and invisible of experiences. So, to paraphrase [Walter] Lippmann: America is not yet.

This being so, he goes on to argue, it is hardly surprising that our current culture wars are evidence of a long-standing condition writ large and especially problematic. It is impossible to “contemplate compressing the sense of what it is to be an American into a single procrustean idea.”

At the same time, however, we were formed by documents (above all, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution) that transmogrified a geographical place into an idea, “a democracy of free individuals. This new nation was to be more than another nation, it was to be the homeland of liberty, showing the rest of the world that what it wanted to be was, in fact, America. In its most liberal, least nativist version, America was the truth of the world unveiled, a decisive moment in the revelation of humanity to itself.”

Why our “common dreams” slowly unraveled is at the core of Gitlin's study. If it is true that the seeds of our present discontent germinated in the very fabric of our dreamy history, it is even truer that recent decades have produced what for Gitlin comes as a shocking reversal: the Left, which once stood for universal values, is now most noteworthy for its defense of identity politics—in whatever form a given group calls itself to wide public attention with claims of victimization and the need for reparation. Meanwhile the Right, long associated with privileged interests, dons the mantle as protector of common aspirations and needs.

Small wonder that Gitlin is perplexed. The agenda of a common social justice that was once the most prized possession of the New Left has been hijacked by Newer Leftists with more interest in the pluribus of e pluribus unum than in the unum. And although Gitlin makes heroic attempts to put efforts toward separatism into a larger cultural context and even to retain a margin of sympathy for some separatist programs, the shifting of focus from a politics of the mean streets to squabbles inside the academy just doesn't wash:

On campus, today's obsession with difference is distinguished … by the haughtiness of the tribes and the scope of their intellectual claims. Many exponents of identity politics are fundamentalists—in the language of the academy, “essentialists”—and the belief in essential group differences easily swerves toward a belief in superiority. In the hardest version of identity thinking, women are naturally cooperative, Africans naturally inventive, and so on. These pure capacities were once muscled into submission by Western masculine force—so the argument goes—then suppressed by rigged institutions, and now need liberating. Sometimes what is sought is a license to pursue a monoculture. Only the members can (or should) learn the language of the club. Only African Americans should get jobs teaching African-American studies; conversely, African Americans should get jobs teaching only African-American studies. Men, likewise, have no place in women's studies.

Gitlin rightly deplores all this and has the intellectual honesty to say so; and though he often joins Wilson in feeling that many conservatives have not been above playing the anti-PC card for political advantage, he puts the major share of blame squarely where it belongs: “the campaign against PC had legs—more legs than a caterpillar” because “identity politics and [its] attendant censoriousness were real.”

But the more fundamental crisis for Gitlin is the widening gap between traditionalists who want to “shore up the former center” and radicals who “resent any center at all.” Gitlin's book provides a powerful critique of both camps, along with an invitation to “see what lies on the other side of the politics of identity.” To get there, however, we must be willing, in his guardedly upbeat words, “to look, look again, and … go on looking.” What we need, in short, are more bridges than bunkers, less emphasis on “the perfection of differences,” and more efforts to envision common dreams and to work collectively toward their realization.

To such efforts, Stanley Fish's Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change would no doubt say “Godspeed,” although he would be quick to follow his assent with the more sobering observation that this is the sort of project that should—yea, must—be conducted outside the university's walls rather than within them. Whatever else might be said of Fish's voluminous writing, he conducts his quarrels in clear English, and he means to give mushy thinkers something to chew over. As one of postmodernism's more flamboyant practitioners (he often seems more akin to performance artist than professor), Fish is widely known for championing reader-response theory, deconstruction, and of late—as a professor of law—critical legal theory.

In this regard, his latest title seems consciously chosen to be as attention-grabbing and provocative as possible. My hunch is that Fish rues the occasions when he weighed in about “political correctness” (who knew that the term would circle back to bite him?), just as I suspect he regrets writing his infamous memo to Duke University's provost urging him not to appoint members of the National Association of Scholars (NAS) to key university committees because “you wouldn't want on a personnel or curriculum committee somebody who had already decided, in terms of fixed political categories, what is or is not meritorious.” Fish's memo (which he denied ever writing until the matter went public) was a shocking instance of intolerance, as was his equally notorious assertion that members of the NAS were “racist, sexist, and homophobic.”

Even John Wilson had trouble putting a happy face on such meanspiritedness, but he chose to air the affair nonetheless—and to its credit, Duke University Press (currently directed by none other than Fish himself) printed every word. Meanwhile, at least some of Fish's certainties seem to have changed since the early 1990's. By the time he gave the 1993 Clarendon Lectures at Oxford (on which Professional Correctness is based), he was out to question the political effectiveness of transforming literary study until it directly addresses such PC topics as oppression, racism, and cultural imperialism, and in the process he took a few well-aimed shots at the new historicism, along with the worst excesses of gender and cultural studies.

At the same time, however, the book's introductory remarks protest (perchance a bit too much?) that nothing essential about Fish's mind or politics has altered one whit, and that he continues to worship in the church of what's happening now: cultural studies, black studies, feminist studies, gay and lesbian studies, and (as he put it) “other forms of activity that have reinvigorated the literary scene.” Indeed, Fish has never met anything on the cutting edge he didn't like, but he points to a considerable difference between the accomplishments of the new kids on the academic block and “the claims that sometimes accompany those accomplishments, claims which are in my view uncashable.” Fish is out to give the latter a much-needed reality check:

It is not so much that literary critics have nothing to say about these issues [i.e., racism, terrorism, violence against women and homosexuals, cultural imperialism], but that so long as they say it as literary critics no one but a few of their friends will be listening, and, conversely, if they say it in ways unrelated to the practices of literary criticism, and thereby manage to give it a political effectiveness, they will no longer be literary critics. … Samuel Goldwyn once said in response to someone who asked him why his movies were not more concerned with important social issues, “If I wanted to send a message, I'd use Western Union.” I say, if you want to send a message that will be heard beyond the academy, get out of it. Or, if I may adapt a patriotic slogan, “the academy—love it or leave it.”

Having thus directed many of the newer academic Left to the egress, Fish settles down to do what he probably does best—namely, unpack the opening words of Milton's “Lycidas” (“Yet once more …”) by demonstrating what literary criticism can and ought to be. Fish has been a steady worker in the Milton industry for some thirty years, and it is clear that he knows how to talk the requisite talk. But it is even clearer that literary critics, including himself, do not traffic in wisdom, but in

… metrics, narrative structures, double, triple, and quadruple meanings, recondite allusions, unity in the midst of apparent fragmentation, fragmentation despite surface unity, reversals, convergences, mirror images, hidden arguments, climaxes, denouements, stylistic registers, personae. This list goes on and on, but it does not include arms control or city management or bridge-building or judicial expertise or a thousand other things, even though many of those things find their way into the texts critics study as “topics” or “themes.”

In short, Fish feels that literary critics ought to do what they do best, and ought not to dabble in what they don't know about. Politics, defined as the slow, patient business of building a wide public consensus and moving social justice forward by inches, tops the list. For all the heady talk about “power” on our campuses, the bald fact of the matter is that most professors, including those at postmodernism's outer reaches, are absolutely clueless about how power works or how to go about getting some. That all this emanates from Fish's mouth is refreshing, because if a more traditional scholar made the same arguments, he or she would have been hooted out of the room.

Unfortunately, Fish continues to have trouble heeding his own advice. Months after the deed, people are still guffawing about the hoax that physicist Alan Sokal of New York University perpetrated on the unsuspecting folks at the helm of the trendy postmodernist journal Social Text. His essay (entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”) was packed to the brim with fashionable jargon such as “privileged epistemological status”; copious footnotes to Jacques Lacan and Luce Irigaray; and arguments in support of the proposition that gravity is merely a social construction. Indeed, Sokal's claims on behalf of a nonsensical “liberatory science” were, in fact, nonsense. But this is precisely what the editors of Social Text printed. The result made it clear, as only ridicule can, that the hasty marriage between postmodernist theory and hard science is not likely to last.

In the concluding pages of Professional Correctness, Fish suggests that academics should quit defining public intellectuals as people who address matters of public concern (every law professor does that) and, instead, think of them as people who have the public's attention. By this reckoning, even those academics who occasionally pop up with Ted Koppel on Nightline (Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Noam Chomsky, Harold Bloom, and Fish himself) are at best “cameo intellectuals,” rent-for-a-day folks who show up, get some pancake makeup smeared on their noggins, and then are soon forgotten. Far better, Fish argues, for academic types to admit that they are busts in the lobbying/public relations business and to hire professionals to do the job. Imagine, Fish ponders, the giddy results of a vigorous PR campaign: millions of Americans will go to their beds “thankful that the members of the Duke English Department are assuring the survival and improvement of Western civilization.”

Unfortunately, when the rock hit the hard place—which is to say, when Sokal's article turned Social Text and Duke University Press into national laughingstocks—Fish gave his own words the deaf ear and fired off a long Op-Ed piece to The New York Times. The jury is still out with regard to how effective his effort at damage control was, but I think it a safe bet that millions of Americans are not nodding off pleased as punch that people such as Fish are at the cultural helm.

For better or worse, the culture wars are very much with us, and even though the skirmishes often seem like tempests in teapots, the fact of the matter is that important issues are at stake—not only for our nation's campuses but also for the nation itself. At its worst incarnations, political correctness turns classrooms into indoctrination centers and throws a wet blanket over national debate. Reasonable people can of course differ about how to strike a difficult balance between the claims of equity and the case for merit, or how best to close the gap between our national ideals and our current imperfect reality. But so long as trenches are being fortified and provisions continue to be stockpiled, I suspect that few true believers will buy into Gitlin's “bridge.” On the other hand, if tuition sticker-shock hangs around long enough, those who foot the bill for courses in oppression studies and its assorted cousins just might yell loud enough to make a moratorium on PC possible. As they say on television, stay tuned.