Two Puritan sects

In cultural matters the old division of right and left has come to look more like two Puritan sects, one plaintively conservative, the other posing as revolutionary but using academic complaint as a way of evading engagement in the real world. Sect A borrows the techniques of Republican attack politics to show that if Sect B has its way, the study of Plato, Titian and Milton will be replaced by indoctrination programs in the works of obscure Third World authors and Californian Chicano muralists, and the pillars of the West will forthwith collapse. Meanwhile Sect B is so struck in the complaint mode that it can’t mount a satisfactory defense, since it has burnt most of its bridges to the culture at large (and denies, in its more narcissistic moments, that the general intelligent reader still exists – though the worse problem is the shortage of general intelligent writers). With certain outstanding exceptions like Edward Saïd, Simon Schama or Robert Darnton, relatively few of the people who are actually writing first-rate history, biography or cultural criticism in America have professorial tenure, though many writers are attached to universities as decorative hermits or trophies in those therapeutic diversions known as Creative Writing courses. (“I am astonished,” wrote the boxing Dadaist Arthur Cravan in a philipic against art schools, back in 1914, “that some crook has not had the idea of opening a writing school.” Now we know better.) But on the whole, most contact between academe and the general intelligent reader seems to have withered, because overspecialization and the déformations professionnelles of academic careerism are killing it off.

Culture and the broken polity [fragment]
uit: Culture of complaint : the fraying of America - Robert Hughes