The Tyranny of Virtue

Identity, the Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies

Robert Boyers

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781982127190
• eBook ISBN: 9781982127206
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Essays in Education

From public intellectual and professor Robert Boyers, " a powerfully persuasive, insightful, and provocative prose that mixes erudition and first-hand reportage" (Joyce Carol Oates) addressing recent developments in American culture and arguing for the tolerance of difference that is at the heart of the liberal tradition. Written from the perspective of a liberal intellectual who has spent a lifetime as a writer, editor, and college professor, The Tyranny of Virtue is a "courageous, unsparing, and nuanced to a rare degree" (Mary Gaitskill) insider's look at shifts in American culture—most especially in the American academy—that so many people find alarming.Part memoir and part polemic, Boyers's collection of essays laments the erosion of standard liberal values, and covers such subjects as tolerance, identity, privilege, appropriation, diversity, and ableism that have turned academic life into a minefield. Why, Robert Boyers asks, are a great many liberals, people who should know better, invested in the drawing up of enemies lists and driven by the conviction that on critical issues no dispute may be tolerated? In stories, anecdotes, and character profiles, a public intellectual and longtime professor takes on those in his own progressive cohort who labor in the grip of a poisonous and illiberal fundamentalism. The end result is a finely tuned work of cultural intervention from the front lines.

HIGH ANXIETY: THE ATTACK ON APPROPRIATION

The image of traveler depends not on power but on motion, on a willingness to go into different worlds, use different idioms, and understand a variety of disguises, masks, and rhetorics.

—Edward Said

So: Aren’t you sort of annoyed when you read something and you can tell right away that the writer has appropriated what belongs to someone else and hasn’t even apologized or asked anybody’s permission? That was the question put to Jamaica Kincaid one July afternoon at the New York State Summer Writers Institute by an intrepid graduate student. Surprising, Jamaica said, that you think I’d be annoyed. I mean, I’ve heard the complaint about appropriation before, she went on, and I just don’t understand what it’s about. It’s a complaint, you know, that’s bound to come from people who don’t know what goes into making something like a novel or a painting.

A version of the same question was put, by graduate and undergraduate students, to other writers throughout the July program—to Allan Gurganus, Francine Prose, Caryl Phillips, Joyce Carol Oates, Darryl Pinckney, Russell Banks, and others—and each time the response was a version of Jamaica’s courteous but disillusioning refusal to concede anything to a notion that had attracted a large following. An elementary idea had somehow become an idée fixe, and I soon saw that it would take more than the testimony of mere writers and artists to dislodge it.

The case against appropriation is rooted in several assumptions. One is that the cultural forms, experiences, and history of a people are a property they can rightly own, and that the owners are thus rightly obliged to defend what is theirs against the predations of others. Recent eruptions—focused on a high-profile Taiwanese athlete wearing dreadlocks or a black athlete sporting Chinese tattoos on his biceps or an American rock star (Rihanna) attending a Costume Institute affair in an “imperial yellow” gown designed by a Chinese couturier—suggest that those who are invested in this issue have no wish to differentiate between predation and homage, and that the notion of ownership can extend from hairstyles to footwear, from mundane artifacts to poetic iconography. Though it would seem obvious to say that these kinds of objections are often misguided and that no group can own an image or a trope or a fashion, the will to register insult and to complain of violation is so pronounced in so many quarters of the culture that the obvious will no longer seem so.

A further assumption underwriting the case against appropriation is that it simply isn’t possible for artists without the lived experience of the situation or condition they wish to capture to adequately represent it. This is felt to be especially true when the experience at issue belongs to marginalized people, and even the supposedly good intentions of artists from “privileged” backgrounds—white persons—cannot prevent them from doing damage, promoting stereotypes, spreading falsehood. Francine Prose notes that already we can see the results of this increasingly widespread assumption, where “books are being categorized—and judged—less on their literary merits than on the identity of their authors.” More, the absurdity entailed in this way of thinking about books and artists is not at all registered by those in thrall to these assumptions. Consider, Prose asks, “how can one write a historical novel if one has no ‘lived experience’ of that period?” Must we not “dismiss Madame Bovary because Flaubert lacked ‘lived experience’ of what it meant to be a restless provincial housewife?” Though proponents of “lived experience” are notoriously reluctant to follow out the logic informing their convictions, they might at least concede that in effect they are prepared to censure much of the art and literature that most of us admire—not merely canonical works but the contemporary efforts of many of our best writers.

Nor is this way of anathematizing and dismissing artworks limited to academics and journalists who have swallowed the Kool-Aid. What Prose refers to as “the popular Twitter hashtag #ownvoices” routinely, on principle, “steers readers away from books that feature marginalized characters that have been written by ‘authors who aren’t part of that marginalized group,’ ” so that artists and writers who do what the most ambitious and gifted writers and artists have always done are now pilloried by legions of inflamed defenders of the new faith. Online sites are of course notable for the virulence of the attacks unleashed, and the “lived experience” standard has predictably been invoked by throngs of would-be cultural guardians who have already had some success in scaring artists and writers away from subjects that do not clearly belong to them. But more worrying by far is the related effect of this campaign, in that “writers from every group,” as Prose argues, are thus discouraged “from describing the world as it is, rather than the world we would like.”

Of course the case against appropriation might well have assumed an entirely different form. It might have been focused on genuine issues and genuinely offensive instances and would thus at least resemble a serious critical enterprise. Criticism at its best does, after all, tend to hold books and artworks accountable for actual violations of plausibility, fairness, even propriety. Critics have always routinely asked whether or not a particular work is adequate to the task it sets itself. When Zadie Smith looks at a painting called Open Casket by an artist named Dana Schutz, she doesn’t complain that a white woman has had the temerity to deal with a subject that can be fairly represented only by a black person. But she does reasonably ask whether the work conveys the weight and emotional intensity of the event it purports to represent. That is, in every respect, a legitimate question to ask, and it does have something at least to do with the issue of appropriation, in that the Schutz painting does clearly allude to an iconic photograph of Emmett Till, murdered in a 1955 incident that continues to stir the imagination of Americans still troubled by race matters and drawn to the history of an enduring conflict. Whatever the formal achievement of the Schutz painting, it was necessary, in dealing with it, for Smith to consider its adequacy and its relation to the iconic photograph it alludes to. To find the Schutz painting deficient, as Smith does, is not to build a case against appropriation but to argue that this particular painting fails to accomplish what it might have done or purported to do.

Just so, it has always been necessary to ask whether particular artworks do plausible justice to their subjects, and to ask about the peculiar relationship between a source and its later incarnation in a parallel work. This ought to go without saying. Why wouldn’t a critic ask what J. M. Coetzee has made of the material he “appropriated” from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe when he wrote the novel Foe? Of course we are interested in the virtues and defects of the particular “appropriation” involved in Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea, given its relation to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. What reader of Caryl Phillips’s novels would not wish to ask questions about his inspired and challenging “appropriation” of material from Othello or Wuthering Heights or the life of Anne Frank?

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Unfortunately, the concern with appropriation, however legitimate when pursued by readers and critics actually invested in raising important questions, is more often pursued by people who know, even before they have asked the essential questions, what they hope to find. In a recent class on political fiction one of my own students—an especially gifted and articulate young woman—strenuously objected not only to the text we were discussing (Nadine Gordimer’s novel The Pickup) but to our way of dealing with sensitive material in the novel. The complaint against my selection of the novel was that its author was a white woman attempting to deal with a black man whose experience—of race, of poverty and religion—she could not possibly represent. This complaint the student voiced at a moment in our class discussion when she could “no longer tolerate where this thing is headed,” provoked by a question I had raised about the Islamic environment of the African community to which the black husband in the novel had brought his new wife. “What,” my student asked, “did you expect a student to say when asked such a question? Of course you want us to say that the white woman is surprised by what she sees, and of course this is all designed to reveal that these supposedly primitive people are bound to be disappointing to someone from a Western society. Here you can see why it’s always a bad idea for a white writer to be sticking her nose into this kind of thing, and why assigning these kinds of books to students can only confirm the cultural bias you yourself can’t help sharing with the white author you so much admire.”

It’s not often that one of my students will complain about my selection of course texts or, indeed, about my “designs” or intentions, and given that the assigned readings for that particular course included works by Chinua Achebe, Michael Ondaatje, Anita Desai, and Orhan Pamuk, among others, it had never occurred to me that my choices might be vulnerable to complaint. But my student—as I was soon to learn in a lengthy conversation we later enjoyed in my office—had been through two other courses in which appropriation had been front and center, and she was primed to be offended by what she took to be the intentions informing the novel and, by extension, my own goals in teaching it. Though I spent a good deal of time assuring the student that Gordimer’s work, much of it focused on race and race relations, had seemed impressive not only to white men like me but to Nelson Mandela, Bishop Desmond Tutu, and a wide range of writers, black and white, she insisted that it was “nevertheless a bad idea” for a “privileged” white woman to be dealing with people about whose lives “she was bound to be clueless.”

And were there particular instances in the novel, I asked her, where Gordimer seemed to her “clueless” and had clearly gotten things wrong? She couldn’t say. And was it her sense that the students in the class who responded to her outburst—before I myself jumped in—were mistaken when they pointed out that the white wife at the center of the novel not only registers accurately what is unfamiliar to her in the Islamic environment she enters but soon decides that she feels better about herself as a human being in that environment and eventually refuses to leave it, even when her husband flies off to find employment in the West? “No, of course I saw that,” my student conceded, “and yet I didn’t like the way the questions you were asking were designed to get students to say how bad things were in that place, how weird it was that the wives couldn’t sit and eat until the men were finished, and how backward the attitudes were in general. I mean,” she went on, “that it all felt very anti-Islamic, and that Gordimer had appropriated this material, which didn’t belong to her, in ways that just confirmed the usual Western prejudices.” But wasn’t it clear that Gordimer did not confirm those prejudices, I asked, and that we were reading her novel as a prime example of the effort to break through those prejudices? “I can only repeat,” my student answered, “that I felt very uncomfortable about the direction we were heading in.”

Of course a single instance proves nothing at all, and I myself had to feel that the particular student, who went on to enroll in another course with me the following semester, was to be commended for her forthrightness and courage, though also I felt that she had learned all too well the lessons taught to her in those earlier courses on appropriation. Would she try at least to rethink what we had debated? She would, though my sense was that she had invested too much in the pieties and assumptions she embraced to let go of them.

Like other ideas that have acquired an aura of sophistication, “appropriation” is often invoked as a strategy to ward off unpleasant thoughts—the kinds of thoughts sparked by the works of writers like Gordimer, or, for that matter, other novels included on my course syllabus. Consider, just for a moment, Orhan Pamuk’s memoir Istanbul, a great and beautiful book that many tell me they find disturbing and uncomfortable. Why uncomfortable? Because Pamuk is notoriously susceptible to second thoughts about his own sentiments and deftly stirs agitation and ambivalence in readers. When he is dealing with appropriation—one among many ideas he handles in his book—he does so not to confirm a prejudice or to curry favor with a reader like my young student but to uncover what is genuinely confounding in what are often complex transactions. To be sure, Pamuk does note, at several points, instances of the very cultural biases that inform legitimate complaints about certain kinds of appropriation. André Gide, Pamuk says, was one of many writers who came to Turkey a hundred years ago and “boast[ed] that his travels have taught him that western civilization . . . is superior to all others.” At the same time, Pamuk goes on, Turkish writers at the time, “in their heart of hearts . . . feared Gide’s insults might be well-founded,” and soon after Gide’s work was published, “Atatürk, the greatest westernizer of them all, instituted a revolution in dress, banning all clothing that wasn’t western.” Uncomfortable? To be sure. Disturbing? By all means, and of course we want and expect no less from a writer who regards everything with a blend of misgiving and bemusement.

Obviously there is much more to say about Gide’s appropriations—for example, his depiction of sexually available adolescent boys in the North African setting of a novel like The Immoralist—but for Pamuk the insights he is after belong not to a grievance or to the settling of scores but to an interrogation that will often prove unsettling. Unsettling in what sense? In effect, Pamuk works at that question over the entire course of his memoir, where he anatomizes the experience of a culture—his own Turkish culture—perpetually living out its deepest conflicts under Western eyes, alert to its own history of decline and fall, savoring its peculiar blend of pathos and the species of “sweet melancholy” conjured by the term hüzün. Pamuk labors mightily to convey the precise flavor and significance of hüzün, much in the way that Milan Kundera (in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting) labored to convey the meaning of the “untranslatable” word litost, and as Gregor von Rezzori (in Memoirs of an Anti-Semite) did with the word skushno. Each of these writers acknowledges that translation itself is a kind of appropriation and that its objective is bound always to remain at least somewhat out of reach. In Pamuk, one mark of the failure to successfully capture hüzün is cited in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s efforts to associate it with “tristesse,” an approximation by no means adequate: “The tristesse that Lévi-Strauss describes,” Pamuk writes, “is what a Westerner might feel as he surveys those vast poverty-stricken cities of the tropics, as he contemplates the huddled masses and their wretched lives. But he does not see the cities through their eyes. Tristesse implies a guilt-ridden Westerner who seeks to assuage his pain by refusing to let cliché and prejudice color his impressions. Hüzün, on the other hand, is not a feeling that belongs to the outside observer. To varying degrees, classical Ottoman music, Turkish popular music, especially the arabesque that became popular during the 1980s, are all expressions of this emotion, which we feel as something between physical pain and grief.”

Pamuk differentiates hüzün from tristesse not to indict Western writers for a failure of sympathy in their efforts to understand a peculiarly Turkish sentiment, and not, certainly, to argue that such efforts are inevitably misguided or worse. But he does wish to suggest that within each culture there is a core of feeling that an outside observer will have a hard time understanding. As a result, efforts to appropriate and fairly represent what is elusive may well seem inadequate, even where intentions are good, and the outside observer has made strenuous efforts to allow for discrepant modes of feeling. Only a fool would wish to forbid efforts to reach across those divides or to represent what may well seem obscure. And even within one’s own culture, Pamuk argues, there are bound to be, much of the time, varieties of incomprehension and division. Hüzün can seem to one who lives within its soft, unremitting embrace either “resignation . . . the outcome of life’s worries and great losses” or, to another inhabitant, “their principal cause.” For some residents of Istanbul, Pamuk argues, “hüzün does not just paralyze the inhabitants [of the city]; it also gives them poetic license to be paralyzed.” For other inhabitants, “the honor we derive from it can be misleading.”

Try, with these irresolvable contradictions, to insist on a single correct way to translate or appropriate the precise core of feeling entailed in the recourse to hüzün, and inevitably you find yourself willing what cannot be willed. And consider as well that the distinguished Franco-Turkish writer Elif Shafak has written: “I do not think hüzün is the word that embodies the gist of Istanbul, as Pamuk claims. Istanbul is a vibrant city that throbs, grows and pulsates with endless energy and hunger. . . . And my generation in Turkey is not a generation of melancholy.”

And thus it is that, where essential matters are concerned, even writers within a given culture may differ—a fact that would seem obvious were it not for the exertions of many ostensibly sensitive persons, who would have us believe that they are in possession of the indisputable truth about their culture and about what ought to be forbidden to outsiders, who are said to transgress merely by virtue of their efforts to reach across the divide that separates them from others. Appropriation, then, more often than not, is a fraught encounter, though again, the increasingly popular notion that such encounters are hopelessly predatory is not at all what writers like Pamuk and Shafak would have us believe.

In recent decades the cultural relationship between the West and other regions, between so-called Orient and Occident, has frequently been associated with the term “orientalism,” a “point of departure,” according to Edward Said, for studies of “the right of formerly un- or mis-represented human groups to speak for and represent themselves.” These groups, Said contends, “were supposed . . . to be confined to the fixed status of an object frozen once and for all in time by the gaze of western percipients.” Where “Europe’s interlocutor” was wanted, Said argues, the standard scholarship associated with orientalism imposed on its frozen object a “muteness,” the status of “its silent Other.” The work of recent decades has thus been to dispute the “authority and objectivity” of orientalist scholarship and to find ways to permit all of the “un- or mis-represented human groups”—by no means limited to persons from the “regio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• A Preface
• Privilege for Beginners
• The Academy as Total Cultural Environment
• Correctness & Denial: Willing What Cannot Be Willed
• The Identity Trap
• Hostile & Unsafe: Ideas & the Fear of Diversity
• Policing Disability
• High Anxiety: The Attack on Appropriation
• Junk Thought: The Way We Live Now
• Epilogue: What Is to Be Done?
• An Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright