The inhumanities.

The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art, by Roger Kimball (Encounter, 186 pp., $25.95)

ROGER KIMBALL's Tenured Radicals (1990) is one of the indispensable books of the last quarter-century, for its lucid analysis of the content of higher education. Kimball documented the transgressive insurgency and large-scale victory in the teaching of the humanities of radicalized intellectuals promoting "ever more sophistical layers of intellectualized mendacity," accomplished largely by self-dramatizing "orgies of disillusionment and skepticism" about reason and ethics. He patiently, carefully scrutinized the acts and works of transgressive Francophone literary sophists such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Paul de Man and their American allies and apologists such as Stanley Fish, J. Hillis Miller ("deconstruction's faithful mascot"), and Geoffrey Hartman.

Kimball's indictment could be ignored, but not answered very easily, as he deftly employed the mind's oldest tool of sanity and responsibility, the principle of non-contradiction. Quoting statements from these quicksilver literary sophists, he then employed the ancient "tu quoque" strategy: Apply your own statement to your own work and your own conduct. If, for instance, with Derrida, de Man, and Fish, we deny normal, Aristotelian rational and linguistic procedures and deny the possibility or authority of rational statements and denotative language, then these statements themselves fall under the asserted generalization and are invalid. Kimball's portrayal of "six-figure salary" Stanley Fish as a precise modern counterpart of Socrates's transgressive sophistical opponent Thrasymachus remains a devastatingly effective indictment of a generation of literary nihilists who now regularly confuse or debauch our young people from the expensive heights of Yale, Duke, Harvard, and Stanford. "La trahison des clercs, encore une fois!"

Our current post-humanist establishment is the sinister offspring of the marriage of the French disciples of Nietzsche with the American-born antinomian radicalism of Emerson and Whitman. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche praised France's "cultural superiority over Europe" as the talent for "converting even the most calamitous turns of spirit into something attractive and seductive." The "emancipated," post-moral, aesthetic-nihilist view of reality has indeed been made "attractive and seductive" to 40 years of American university students. Whether this is good news in the era of Zyklon B, the Gulag, AIDS, global terrorism, cloning, and civic illiteracy, is a question worth asking.

Kimball's new book, The Rape of the Masters, takes up where Tenured Radicals left off, applying the same antiseptic scrutiny to contemporary "cutting edge" art historians who have written about seven important Western paintings: Courbet's The Quarry (1857), Rothko's Untitled (1953), Sargent's Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882), Rubens's Drunken Silenus (1618), Winslow Homer's The Gulf Stream (1899), Gauguin's Spirit of the Dead Watching (1892), and Van Gogh's Pair of Shoes (1886)--all of which are beautifully reproduced in this volume. The preposterous verbiage and perverse ingenuity of these art historians would be hilarious if they were not so outrageous, feckless, and destructive. Of course, in a world where things disappear before one's sight--where there are no "facts," only interpretations--one is constantly "attracted and seduced" (or assaulted and insulted) by radical relativism and subjectivism. Kimball tries to manage a tone less somber than that of Tenured Radicals, where the seriousness of the stakes required not only great care but austerity. Yet he cannot help building toward the conclusion that the PC takeover of the humanities (which my teacher Lionel Trilling saw coming decades ago) has as "its aim to transform art into an ally in the campaign of decivilization."

Writers such as Trilling, Czeslaw Milosz, C. S. Lewis, F. R. Leavis, Quentin Anderson, Daniel Bell, Jacques Barzun, Philip Rieff, and Michael Polanyi have developed a wide-ranging critique of our voluble radical skeptics, relativists who nevertheless endlessly moralize. Following Dostoyevsky, Polanyi called "moral inversion" the contradictory syndrome of 1) denouncing ethics as groundless and then 2) furiously issuing ethical pronouncements; no more brilliant and tragic insight has been articulated in the last half-century.

Along these lines Kimball writes: "In contemporary literary and art history ... the sex card" is "deployed primarily as a weapon" in a transgressive assault on any normal idea of a "received social and moral sensibility." The "normalization of previously tabooed sexual attitudes and behaviors has been at the forefront of cultural radicalism since the 1960s," and this antinomian insurgency "is part of a campaign for decivilization." We end up with a world of men without chests and women without modesty (nec vir fortis nec femina casta), where traditional universals such as common sense, courtesy, reciprocity, deference, honesty, courage--on which any decent civic order must depend--are seen as always ignorant, fraudulent, or self-interested, worthy only of contempt and assault. Ariel has been killed, Prospero is in chains, and Caliban holds a named professorship in a "Humanities Institute" in a major university.

Kimball is refreshingly sensible about the arts; he doesn't think art is necessary for salvation or even justice. He suggests that "the pleasures afforded by purely aesthetic experience" may well be "essentially thirsty pleasures, which by their very nature crave satisfaction in another, less worldly realm," and he worries about the "gaseous conflation of art and a certain anemic species of godless religiosity." What he is coldly, clinically outraged about is conceptual relativism and verbal pollution, the debasing of the intellectual, linguistic currency of our civilization. Just as Samuel Johnson rebuked the radical skepticism of Hume and the French philosophes in the 18th century, so in the mid-20th century Whitehead rebuked Hume and T. H. Huxley on the same grounds: What reason, he asked, could they possibly give for any moral views they held, "apart from their own psychological inheritance from the Platonic religious tradition?" Kimball knows that the post-modern, "deconstructionist" hatred of "Logocentrism"--of reason itself--is really a hatred of our civilization, a battered and tattered civilization, admittedly, but one that nevertheless retains a civilizing trajectory and momentum for many millions of people.

Like that of George Orwell and Malcolm Muggeridge (and Abraham Lincoln), Kimball's defense of the normal idiom of English is itself pitched in normal and lucid prose. He rightly despises the pretentious jargon of the tenured post-humanists. After quoting a ludicrous gobbet of epistemological nihilism from Derrida, he notes that "every page of Derrida is like this--a goulash of punning, pointless abstraction"; of Jacques Lacan, he says that his "radical Freudianism has been a godsend to sex-obsessed obscurantists everywhere."

What Kimball does not mention is that the radical arts establishment makes it very difficult for traditionally minded contemporary artists (e.g., figurative painters and sculptors, neoclassical architects) to get shown or known, The New Criterion of Kimball and Hilton Kramer being the great, honorable exception. Following on his own satire The Painted Word--one of Kimball's compass points--Tom Wolfe has written poignantly in "The Invisible Artist" about the studied neglect of the work of the late, great contemporary American sculptor Frederick Hart. In addition, 15 years ago I submitted to one of the nation's most prominent, highly esteemed illustrated journals an article, with illustrations, on the work of the great contemporary Italian painter Pietro Annigoni (1910-1988), who had recently died. By return mail the article was enthusiastically accepted for publication by a senior editor. Months passed, with no publication and no word from the editor, who did not answer my letters or take my calls. Finally reached on the phone, he whispered huskily to me that an external adviser, a feminist art historian, had vetoed Annigoni as a retrograde traditionalist. Nonetheless, the large crowds at the major Annigoni retrospective at the Strozzi Palace in Florence a few years ago took the kind of delight in art that Roger Kimball defends, recommends, and tries to facilitate in his fine tract for our times.

Mr. Aeschliman is professor of education at Boston University, professor of English at the University of Italian Switzerland, and author of The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case Against Scientism.