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Each of Dissanayake’s books concludes with an exhortation. In What Is Art For? she argues that the arts should be integrated into modern life, as they are in premodern cultures, not set aside as the fiefdom of specialists self-conscious about their outsider status. In Art and Intimacy, she calls for more art education in schools. And in Homo Aestheticus, she takes aim at the hyperliterate credo of poststructuralism: The arts are a part of our evolved nature, she explains; literacy, a recent invention, isn’t. She diagnoses the Derridean notion that there is nothing outside the text as a delusion typical of — and flattering to — someone overinvested in the skill of writing. She dismisses as “poppycock” the notion that there cannot be thinking or experience without language. Split-brain studies, she points out, plainly document the contrary; patients with no link between their left and right hemispheres can use drawings to answer questions they cannot respond to with language. Until language stamps it with meaning, Gayatri Spivak once argued, the “shudder in the nerve strings” is “a direct sign of nothing.” Dissanayake retorts: “Nothing? Fire is hot. Hunger is bad. Babies are good.”

 
Several audience members promptly rose to criticize her for collaborating with a methodology so identified with white Victorian males. Ellsworth allowed that she too had problems with some of those dead males but noted that they had laid the groundwork for such crucial accomplishments as the discovery of DNA. Came the retort: “You believe in DNA?”


Another person innocently asked Mr. Ross how one could defend the Zuni world view and not at the same time disarm oneself for combating Jerry Falwell and other Christian fundamentalists who have their own creationist ideas. This was an obvious and sensible question. A lesser man, when faced with the task of answering it, might have stumbled over his own inconsistencies and beat a retreat. But Andrew Ross is not a famous cultural theorist for nothing. He simply “reframed” the question.

 
To the intellectually meritorious went the praise, the teacher’s smiles, and the highest grades. In the currency the schools had to offer, the smartest constituted the upper class. Though not part of the official curricula, in the schools the intellectuals learned the lessons of their own greater value in comparison with the others, and of how this greater value entitled them to greater rewards. The wider market society, however, taught a different lesson. There the greatest rewards did not go to the verbally brightest. There the intellectual skills were not most highly valued. Schooled in the lesson that they were most valuable, the most deserving of reward, the most entitled to reward, how could the intellectuals, by and large, fail to resent the capitalist society which deprived them of the just deserts to which their superiority “entitled” them? Is it surprising that what the schooled intellectuals felt for capitalist society was a deep and sullen animus that, although clothed with various publicly appropriate reasons, continued even when those particular reasons were shown to be inadequate?


Economic growth is, almost inevitably, uneven. Some countries, regions and people do better than others. The result is growing inequality. To regret that is to regret the growth itself. It is to hold, in effect, that it is better for everyone in the world (or within individual countries) to remain equally poor. You come close to saying just that. It seems to me a morally indefensible and practically untenable position.

 
As a senior Treasury official in the First World War, Keynes was an important organizer of British survival and the eventual Allied victory. But all through the war he held fast to the pacifist dogma that the military rulers of Germany wanted a compromise peace every bit as much as Bloomsbury did. “Indeed,” Skidelsky comments sadly, “a gross overestimate of the strength of the German moderates, as well as a misunderstanding of their aims, was characteristic of the whole British middle-class peace movement.” They projected their own image upon a hostile and dangerous world. If not naïveté, this was at least narcissism — an involvement with oneself so all-consuming that one could not absorb the information that other people held radically different opinions and behaved in entirely different ways.


Even Locke himself endorsed laws that provide for the “direction of a free and intelligent agent to his proper interest,” adding that it “ill deserves the name of confinement which hedges us in only from bogs and precipices.” Why, then, should the state deny itself the power to drain bogs and fence off precipices so as to save the unwise and unwary from themselves? Here is one answer: People have different concepts of the good life, and any attempt to impose one favored view will be contentious. Contention leads to war, and war is the antithesis of civil peace. So better to leave people to their own ways, wayward though they be. Here is another response: We are fallible beings who do not always judge correctly concerning matters of right and wrong.

 
Anti-missile demonstrators in West Germany had directed nearly all their indignation at the U.S., and almost none at the Soviet Union. Which superpower was occupying half of Europe, though? “We are left with the scandal,” Glucksmann said, “that 500,000 people demonstrated against Reagan, but only 10,000 against Brezhnev. This fact has a scandalous effect not only in Paris, but also in Prague and Warsaw, and on all those who struggle for freedom in Eastern Europe.” Fischer replied that Glucksmann seemed to expect some enormous turn-about in political life, some immense change. And no such thing was going to happen. “You are taking a perspective twenty years from now,” Fischer said. “Gorbachev will not change. America will also not fundamentally change. Without a doubt, there is a huge monopoly of opinion in the Soviet Union. This is probably the case in two-thirds of the world, or even more. But Hollywood is essentially more effective as far as the monopoly of opinion is concerned.” From Glucksmann’s perspective, Fischer had lost the argument right there. It was preposterous to suppose that Soviet censorship and America’s Hollywood were in some way comparable, and crazier still to imagine that Hollywood was “essentially” worse. And Glucksmann responded with a terrible swift word: “No.” Back in 1986, it would have been easy to suppose that Fischer had merely blundered at that moment, and in the heat of argument had let loose a foolish volley of hyperbole, as anyone might do. But today we may look on that debate with a bit of accumulated knowledge and recognize that blunders such as Fischer’s bubbled up naturally from the fundamentals of his anti-imperialist outlook. The blunders came out of the instinct that led him and everyone else with old-fangled or even new-fangled leftist points of view to look at the world from the standpoint of the crimes of capitalism — from a standpoint that, by definition, attributed the world’s woes principally to capitalist economics (and therefore to the United States, the capital of capital), and by afterthought to anything else. Then again, maybe the foolishness in Fischer’s remark was obvious even at the time, and not just to Glucksmann. For what does seem plain, looking back today, is that Fischer’s side of the argument — the popular side, many people would have said, judging from the mass demonstrations in West Germany and Britain and the United States and elsewhere — was not as strong as it may have seemed. And Glucksmann’s side — the unpopular one, judging from the malicious scorn that so many commentators heaped and still heap on the new intellectual generation in France, the non-geniuses, the less-than-Sartres — was gathering strength year by year.


As it evolved with its juries, its torts, its precedents, its limitations on monarchic power, its defense of the local rights of civil society, and its astonishing capacity for commercial and technological innovation, it came to dominate the world. Finally the Christian Church was forced to acknowledge the secular dominance of the law of right. After the agonizing upheavals of the Reformation, Christianity was able to internalize the law of good, as the Israelites had been forced to do two thousand years earlier, and abandon the inquisitorial attempt to enforce it externally by secular means. Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and unto God that which is God’s; and now that Caesar made no claim to a law of the good, but wanted only to enforce the right, the way was open for the Enlightenment compromise, in which the Church could have men’s souls if the State could claim men’s bodies and enrich — and tax — men’s pocketbooks.

 
The American mainstream is predominantly individualistic. Postmodern leftists, in contrast, are radical-egalitarian to the core. With Marxism in ruins, they can offer no viable social system that will reliably produce equal outcomes; yet so fiercely do they burn with egalitarian zeal that they insist more stridently than ever on the unfairness and wickedness of capitalism and materialism. Thus their new turn toward nihilism — toward ideology and action that always protest but never propose, toward suggestions, as in Seattle, in the form of rocks hurled through plate-glass windows.

 
“How are you liking Zora?” Mike asked over a beer, after they’d mulled over the war and the details of Dick Cheney’s tax return, which had just been printed in the paper. Why wasn’t there a revolution? Was everyone too distracted with tennis and sex and tulip bulbs? Marxism in the spring lacked oomph. Ira had just hired someone to paint his house, so now on his front lawn he had two signs: “War Is Not the Answer” in blue and, on the other side of the lawn, in black and yellow, “Jenkins Painting Is the Answer.”