Dethroning the serious

Norman Mailer was not the only upscale intellectual striving to make “a revolution in the consciousness of our time.” Musing about the glories of Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution in 1969, that archetypical New-Left writer Susan Sontag noted in passing that “perhaps the foremost difference between New and Old Left is that New Left people are busier with cultural revolution than with anything else.”She was right. The endless demonstrations, sit-ins, rallies, petitions, marches, and “non-negotiable demands” that were such a prominent feature of the 1960s and 1970s had myriad political ramifications. Nevertheless, the result of the counterculture’s political activism was not to topple a regime but to transform morals—using “morals” broadly, as Matthew Arnold did in his famous essay on Wordsworth, to encompass “whatever bears upon the question, ‘how to live:”’ Art, too, had a moral function. “Poetry,” Arnold suggested, “is at bottom a criticism of life:”

It is against this Arnoldian compact of morals and culture that the long march of America’s cultural revolution has scored its greatest victories. In a famous epithet, Arnold described the task of culture as “a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.” The “new sensibility” of the Sixties and Seventies set out not simply to lower intellectual, aesthetic, and moral standards, but also to undermine the shared intellectual and moral foundations upon which such standards must rest. Distinctions between high and low, good and bad, noble and base, were suddenly rendered otiose, beside the point. The revolution brought with it a process of blurring or (more accurately) of inverting that made its partisans believe that critical discrimination was an antiquarian pursuit.

As a consequence, the long march of America’s cultural revolution resulted in a corruption of taste that was at the same time the triumph of a certain species of aestheticizing decadence. Today, the results of that victory are recognizable everywhere—above all in the garbage dumps of popular culture, but also throughout those cultural institutions that traditionally had been entrusted with perpetuating the ideas and achievements that Arnold celebrated: academia, the fine-arts museums, theaters, orchestras, even churches and other repositories of moral wisdom.

No one has more lovingly delineated, or more perfectly epitomized, the mandarin ambiguities of this situation than Susan Sontag, the critic, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, theatrical director, professional aesthete, and full-time political radical. Sontag descended on the New York intellectual scene in the mid-1960s with a handful of remarkable essays: “Notes on ‘Camp’” (1964) and “On Style” (1965) in Partisan Review; “Against Interpretation” (1964) in Evergreen Review; “One Culture and the New Sensibility” (1965), an abridged version of which first appeared in Mademoiselle; and several essays and reviews in the newly launched New York Review of Books. (Sontag contributed a short review of Simone Weil’s essays for the Review’s inaugural issue in 1963.) Almost overnight these essays electrified intellectual debate and catapulted their author to celebrity.

Not that Sontag’s efforts were unanimously praised. The critic John Simon, to take just one example, wondered in a sharp letter to Partisan Review whether Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’”was itself “only a piece of ‘camp.’” No, the important things were the attentiveness, speed, and intensity of the response. Pro or con, Sontag’s essays galvanized debate: indeed, they contributed mightily to changing the very climate of intellectual debate. Her demand, at the end of “Against Interpretation,”that “in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art”; her praise of camp, the “whole point” of which “is to dethrone the serious”; her encomium to the “new sensibility” of the Sixties, whose acolytes, she observed, “have broken, whether they know it or not, with the Matthew Arnold notion of culture, finding it historically and humanly obsolescent”: in these and other such pronouncements Sontag offered not arguments but a mood, a tone, an atmosphere.

Never mind that a lot of it was literally nonsense: it was nevertheless irresistible nonsense. It somehow didn’t matter, for example, that the whole notion of “an erotics of art” was ridiculous. Everyone likes sex, and talking about “erotics” seems so much sexier than talking about “sex”; and of course everyone likes art: How was it that no one had thought of putting them together in this clever way before? Who would bother with something so boring as mere “interpretation”—which, Sontag had suggested, was these days “reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling,” “the revenge of the intellect upon art”—when we could have (or pretend to have) an erotics instead?

It was a remarkable performance, all the more so as Sontag was then barely thirty years old. In truth, there had always been something precocious—not to say hasty—about her. Born in New York City in 1933, she had been brought up mostly in Arizona and California. (Her father died in 1938; Sontag is her stepfather’s name.) She began skipping grades when she was six. Graduating from high school when she was barely sixteen, Sontag went first to the University of California at Berkeley and then, in the fall of 1949, to the University of Chicago. In December of 1950, when she was seventeen, she met the critic Philip Rieff (author of The Triumph of the Therapeutic [1966], among other works). Rieff, then a twenty-eight-year-old instructor, was giving a course that Sontag audited. As she was leaving after the first class, Sontag recalled, “He was standing at the door and he grabbed my arm and asked my name. I apologized and told him I had only come to audit. ‘No, what’s your name?’ he persisted. ‘Will you have lunch with me?’”Married ten days later, the couple in due course found themselves, in 1952, with a son—who would grow up to be the left-wing writer David Rieff—and a divorce in 1958. (Sontag later told an interviewer: “You know, I think rock & roll is the reason I got divorced.”) Meanwhile, having picked up a bachelor’s degree at Chicago after three years, Sontag also spent time studying at Harvard—where she took a master’s degree in philosophy—and at Oxford and the Sorbonne. Armed with a battery of French names that few people knew about here, she returned to New York in 1959, worked briefly at Commentary and elsewhere before taking up, in 1960, a teaching position at Columbia in (mirabile dictu) the department of religion.

The art of intellectual impersonation

But all this was prolegomenon. Looking back on it now, it seems obvious that throughout those years Sontag was constructing, burnishing, perfecting—what to call it? A style, partly; a tone, assuredly; but in the end, perhaps, it might be best described as an altitude: chic, lofty, disdainful. By the time she began publishing in highbrow journals like Partisan Review and The New York Review of Books, Sontag had made herself the mistress of a new brand of cultural hauteur. It was ferociously intellectual without necessarily being intelligent; it deployed, but did not rely upon, arguments. Its invariable direction was de haut en bas. In her early essays, “formal” and “formalist” were among Sontag’s favorite words. She endlessly repeated that works of art must be judged for their formal properties, not their “content.” If we judge Sontag’s own essays in “formal” terms, they may appear as models of fashionable daring; but judged in terms of content, they are little more than a repository of intellectual cliches—witness the insistence, as if it were something original, on judging art for its formal excellence and not its “message,”one of the hoariest of modern half-truths. “The satisfactions of Paradise Lost;” she writes in “On Style,”“do not lie in its views on God and man, but in the superior kinds of energy, vitality, expressiveness which are incarnated in the poem.” What she doesn’t say is that the energy, vitality, and expressiveness of Milton’s poem are unintelligible apart from the truths it aspires to articulate. If this were not the case, Paradise Lost might just as well be about baked beans as about “justify [ing] the ways of God to men.” In “Susie Creamcheese Makes Love Not War,”a devastating—and devastatingly funny—review of the Sontag oeuvre as of 1982, the critic Marvin Mudrick noted that Sontag was

a critic whose every half-baked idea is a reject or thrift-shop markdown from the pastry cooks of post-World War II French intellectualism.... [W]hat matters [to her] isn’t truth or sincerity or consistency or reality; what matters is ‘style’ or getting away with it. ⁶

What we are dealing with in Sontag’s work is only partly a matter of intellectual style. Sontag was creating a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, and it had sartorial as well as cerebral leitmotifs. We get a hint of this in the introduction to a collection of interviews with Sontag published in 1995. The editor quotes a description of an author’s photograph depicting Sontag “in black trousers, black polo-neck and wearing cowboy boots. She is stretched out on a window-sill with a pile of books and papers under her arm. The seriousness is lightened by the faint flicker of pleasure: this is an image which pleases the author. At home, with books, wearing black.” It is not said whether this was before or after the publication of Texas Boots, David Rieff’s celebration of cowboy boots. In any event, it is clear that a less physically attractive woman could never have aspired to be Susan Sontag.⁷

It is hardly surprising that one of Sontag’s indisputable contributions has been to the art of pretension—or perhaps it should be called intellectual impersonation. It is not every day, after all, that a writer, asked when his interest in “the moral” began, will reply as did Sontag that

I believe that it began when I was three years old. In other aspects, I am not very clear about when I was young, which is a source of strength and a problem at the same time. I remember that I would think much on the things that I think about now before I was ten years old.

It is almost enough to make one join Sontag in her campaign “against interpretation.”

In one early essay, Sontag described the bombastic performance events known as “happenings” as “an art of radical juxtaposition.”The same can be said of her essays, singly and taken together. What she produces are not essays, really, but verbal collages. Against Interpretation (1966), her first collection, contains pieces on Sartre and science fiction novels, the literary criticism of the Marxist Georg Lukács and a paean to Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, a cult film in which, as Sontag cheerfully puts it, “a couple of women and a much larger number of men, most of them clad in flamboyant thrift-shop women’s clothes, frolic about, pose and posture, dance with one another, and enact various scenes of voluptuousness, sexual frenzy, romance, and vampirism,”including scenes of masturbation, gang rape, and oral sex. Sontag castigates the “indifference or hostility” of “the mature intellectual and artistic community” to this “small but valuable work” in the tradition of “the cinema of shock.” She praises the “extraordinary charge and beauty of [Smith’s] images” and—a signature Sontag touch —the film’s “exhilarating freedom from moralism.”Sontag is very big on that “exhilarating freedom from moralism.” Acknowledging that “by ordinary standards”—but not, of course, by her standards—Flaming Creatures is composed of themes that are “perverse, decadent,”she insists that really the film “is about joy and innocence,”not least because it is “both too full of pathos and too ingenuous to be prurient.”

This sort of thing was catnip to the intellectual establishment of the mid 1960s. Not that any of it was new, exactly. Nostalgie de la boue has long been a defining disease of bourgeois intellectuals, and has been effectively peddled by many before the advent of S. Sontag. But few if any writers commanded Sontag’s air of perfect knowingness, which managed to combine commendation, indifference, and disdain with breathtaking virtuosity.

In his review of Under the Sign of Saturn, a collection of Sontag’s essays published in 1980, John Simon noted that “nothing succeeds better than highbrow endorsement of lowbrow tastes.”Sontag was a master at that game. Her great trick was not merely to endorse lowbrow tastes, but to create the illusion that for the truly sophisticated all intellectual, artistic, and moral distinctions of merit were infra dig, dispensable, de trop. This is one reason that she championed the camp sensibility. Camp is the enemy of earnestness. “Camp,”Sontag observed, “is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates a victory of ‘style’ over ‘content,’‘aesthetics’ over ‘morality,’of irony over tragedy.”Camp, she went on to say, “is a solvent of morality,”concluding with one of her famous paradoxes: “The ultimate Camp statement: it’s good because it’s awful.“ (She immediately added: “of course, one can’t always say that. Only under certain conditions”—thus letting you know that not just anyone is allowed to indulge in contradiction and win praise for it.)

Beyond good and evil

One of Sontag’s characteristic productions was “The Pornographic Imagination” (1967), which appears in Styles of Radical Will (1969), her second collection. In essence, it is a defense of pornography—though not, of course, as something merely salacious; Sontag doesn’t champion pornography the way its usual clients do: for its content, for the lubricious stimulation it supplies. Instead, she champions pornography for its “formal” resources as a means of “transcendence.”It is hardly news that sexual ecstasy has often poached on religious rhetoric and vice versa; nor is it news that pornography often employs religious metaphors. That is part of its perversity—indeed its blasphemy. But Sontag decides to take pornography seriously as a solution to the spiritual desolations of modern secular culture. Writing about Pauline Réage’s pornographic Story of O, for example, she solemnly tells us that

O is an adept; whatever the cost in pain and fear, she is grateful for the opportunity to be initiated into a mystery. That mystery is the loss of self. O learns, she suffers, she changes. Step by step she becomes more what she is, a process identical with the emptying out of herself. In the vision of the world presented by The Story of O, the highest good is the transcendence of personality.

Which is about as accurate as saying that the Marquis de Sade’s books are essentially about physical exercise.

One of Sontag’s great gifts has been her ability to enlist her politics in the service of her aestheticism. For her, it is the work of a moment to move from admiring pornography—or at least “the pornographic imagination”—to castigating American capitalism. Accordingly, toward the end of her essay she speaks of

the traumatic failure of capitalist society to provide authentic outlets for the perennial human flair for high-temperature visionary obsession, to satisfy the appetite for exalted self-transcending modes of concentration and seriousness. The need of human beings to transcend “the person” is no less profound than the need to be a person, an individual.

“The Pornographic Imagination,”like most of Sontag’s essays, is full of powerful phrases, seductive insights, and extraordinary balderdash. Sontag dilates on pornography’s “peculiar access to some truth.” What she doesn’t say is that The Story of O (for example) presents not an instance of mystical fulfillment but a graphic depiction of human degradation. Only someone who had allowed “form” to triumph over “content” could have ignored this. In a way, “The Pornographic Imagination” is itself the perfect camp gesture: for if camp aims to “dethrone the serious” it is also, as Sontag points out, “deadly serious” about the demotic and the trivial. Sontag is a master at both ploys. Having immersed herself in the rhetoric of traditional humanistic learning, she is expert at using it against itself. This of course is a large part of what has made her writing so successful among would-be “avant-garde” intellectuals: playing with the empty forms of traditional moral and aesthetic thought, she is able to appear simultaneously unsettling and edifying, daringly “beyond good and evil” and yet passionately engage. In the long march through the institutions, Sontag has been an emissary of trivialization, deploying the tools of humanism to sabotage the humanistic enterprise.

“The Pornographic Imagination” also exhibits the seductive Sontag hauteur in full flower. After telling us that pornography can be an exciting version of personal transcendence, she immediately remarks that “not everyone is in the same condition as knowers or potential knowers. Perhaps most people don’t need ‘a wider scale of experience. ’It may be that, without subtle and extensive psychic preparation, any widening of experience and consciousness is destructive for most people.”Not for you and me, Dear Reader: we are among the elect. We deserve that “wider scale of experience”; but as for the rest, as for “most people,” well ...

It doesn’t always work. As a writer, Sontag is essentially a coiner of epigrams. At their best they are witty, well phrased, provocative. A few are even true: “Nietzsche was a histrionic thinker but not a lover of the histrionic.” But Sontag’s striving for effect (unlike Nietzsche, she is a lover of the histrionic) regularly leads her into muddle. What, for example, can it mean to say that “the AIDS epidemic serves as an ideal projection for First World political paranoia” or that “risk-free sexuality is an inevitable reinvention of the culture of capitalism”? Nothing, really, although such statements do communicate an unperturbable aura of left-wing contempt for common sense. In “One Culture and the New Sensibility” Sontag enthusiastically reasons that “if art is understood as a form of discipline of the feelings and a programming of sensations, then the feeling (or sensation) given off by a Rauschenberg painting might be like that of a song by the Supremes.”But of course the idea that art is a “programming of the sensations” (a phrase, alas, of which Sontag is particularly fond) is wrong, incoherent, or both, as is the idea that feelings or sensations might be “given off”by any song or painting, even one by Rauschenberg (odors, yes; sensations, no). As often happens, her passion for synesthesia and effacing boundaries leads her into nonsense.

Charity dictates that we pass lightly over Sontag’s fiction and drama. Most of it reminds one of Woody Allen’s parody of Kafka: “Should I marry K.? Only if she tells me the other letters of her name”—that sort of thing. Here’s a representative sample from I, etcetera (a book whose title might be reused for Sontag’s collected works): “Dearest M. I cannot telephone. I am six years old. My grief falls like snowflakes on the warm soil of your indifference. You are inhaling your own pain.” Indeed, readers looking for the comic side of Sontag’s oeuvre will want to dip into her fiction : The Benefactor (1963) and Death Kit (1967) are particularly fine, provided they are read as parodies of intellectual solemnity. In Either/Or, Kierkegaard advised the aspiring aesthete to look for “a very different kind of enjoyment from that which the author has been so kind as to plan for you.” It is advice that is particularly relevant when approaching Sontag’s “creative writing.”

“The cancer of human history”

If one wanted to sum up Sontag’s allure in a single phrase, it would be difficult to do better than Tom Wolfe’s “radical chic.” In her manner, her opinions, her politics, Sontag has always been a walking inventory of radical chic attitudes. Writing about Camus’ notebooks in 1963, she naturally patronizes him as having been “acclaimed beyond his purely literary merits,” assuring us that, unlike Sartre (but like George Orwell), he was not “a thinker of importance.” In 1963, Sartre was still an Approved Radical Figure, whose Communist sympathies and virulent anti-Americanism made him beloved of American intellectuals. Camus, who had had the temerity to criticize Communism, was distinctly non-ARF and had to be taken down a peg or two.

And then there were Sontag’s own political activities. Cuba and North Vietnam in 1968, China in 1973, Sarajevo in 1993 (where she went to direct a production of Waiting for Godot—surely one of the consummate radical chic gestures of all time). Few people have managed to combine naïve idealization of foreign tyranny with violent hatred of their own country to such deplorable effect. She has always talked like a political radical but lived like an aesthete. At the annual PEN writers’ conference in 1986, Sontag declared that “the task of the writer is to promote dissidence.” But it it turns out that, for her, only dissidence conducted against American interests counts. Consider the notorious essay she wrote about “the right way” for Americans to “love the Cuban revolution.” Sontag begins with some ritualistic denunciations of American culture as “inorganic, dead, coercive, authoritarian.” Item: “America is a cancerous society with a runaway rate of productivity that inundates the country with increasingly unnecessary commodities, services, gadgets, images, information.” One of the few spots of light, she tells us, is Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, which teaches that “America’s psychic survival entails her transformation through a political revolution.” (It also teaches that, for blacks, rape can be a noble “insurrectionary act,” a “defying and trampling on the white man’s laws,” but Sontag doesn’t bother with that detail.)

According to her, “the power structure derives its credibility, its legitimacy, its energies from the dehumanization of the individuals who operate it. The people staffing IBM and General Motors, and the Pentagon, and United Fruit are the living dead.” Since the counterculture is not strong enough to overthrow IBM, the Pentagon, etc., it must opt for subversion. “Rock, grass, better orgasms, freaky clothes, grooving on nature—really grooving on anything—unfits, maladapts a person for the American way of life.” And here is where the Cubans come in: they enjoy this desirable “new sensibility” naturally, possessing as they do a “southern spontaneity which we feel our own too white, death-ridden culture denies us.... The Cubans know a lot about spontaneity, gaiety, sensuality and freaking out. They are not linear, desiccated creatures of print culture.”

Indeed not: supine, desiccated creatures of a Communist tyranny would be more like it, though patronizing honky talk about “southern spontaneity” doubtless made things seem much better when this was written. In the great contest for writing the most fatuous line of political drivel, Sontag is always a contender. This essay contains at least two gems: after ten years, she writes, “the Cuban revolution is astonishingly free of repression and bureaucratization”; even better perhaps, is this passing remark delivered in parentheses: “No Cuban writer has been or is in jail, or is failing to get his work published.” Readers wishing to make a reality check should consult Paul Hollander’s classic study Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society, which cites Sontag’s claim and then lists, in two or three pages, some of the many writers and artists who have been jailed, tortured, or executed by Castro’s spontaneous gaiety.⁸

Sontag concocted a similar fairy tale when she went to Vietnam in 1968 courtesy of the North Vietnamese government. Her long essay “Trip to Hanoi” (1968) is another classic in the literature of political mendacity. Connoisseurs of the genre will especially savor Sontag’s observation that the real problem for the North Vietnamese is that they “aren’t good enough haters.” Their fondness for Americans, she explains, keeps getting in the way of the war effort.

They genuinely care about the welfare of the hundreds of captured American pilots and give them bigger rations than the Vietnamese population gets, “because they’re bigger than we are,” as a Vietnamese army officer told me, “and they’re used to more meat than we are.” People in North Vietnam really do believe in the goodness of man ... and in the perennial possibility of rehabilitating the morally fallen.

It would be interesting to know what Senator John McCain, a prisoner of war who was brutally tortured by the North Vietnamese, had to say about this little fantasia.

Sontag acknowledges that her account tended somewhat to idealize North Vietnam; but that was only because she “found, through direct experience, North Vietnam to to be a place which, in many respects, deserves to be idealized.” Unlike any country in Western Europe, you understand, and above all unlike the United States. “The Vietnamese are ‘whole’ human beings, not ‘split’ as we are.” In 1967, shortly before her trip to Hanoi, Sontag had this to say about the United States:

A small nation of handsome people ... is being brutally and self-righteously slaughtered ... by the richest and most grotesquely overarmed, most powerful country in the world. America has become a criminal, sinister country-swollen with priggishness, numbed by affluence, bemused by the monstrous conceit that it has the mandate to dispose of the destiny of the world.

In “What’s Happening in America (1966),” Sontag tells readers that what America “deserves” is to have its wealth “taken away” by the Third World. In one particularly notorious passage, she writes that “the truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, and Balanchine ballets don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.” After a bout with cancer in the 1970s, Sontag emended that last observation because on reflection she had come to believe that it was unfair—to cancer.

A tourist of reality

What can one say? Sontag excoriates American capitalism for its “runaway rate of productivity.” But she has had no scruples about enjoying the fruits of that productivity: a Rockefeller Foundation grant in 1964, a Merrill Foundation grant in 1965, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1966, etc., etc., culminating in 1990 with a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award.

It is not simply in such mundane terms, however, that Sontag wants to have it both ways. Inveterate aestheticism entails intractable intellectual and moral frivolity. Some years after instructing us on the “right way” to love the Cuban revolution, she finally blasted the Castro regime for its brutal treatment of certain approved writers. But her condemnation meant little more than her initial enthusiasm. It was, as she herself might put it, merely “formal”: the content didn’t count. It was the same at the famous Town Hall symposium in 1982 when Sontag stunned the audience with reflections like this:

Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Reader’s Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or the New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?

Sontag had plenty of throat-clearing qualifications about how she, too, “detest[ed] the Reagan Administration”—about “Reagan the union-buster, Reagan the puppet master of the butchers in El Salvador,” etc.—but she nonetheless concluded her remarks with the famous announcement that “Communism is fascism.” How piquant that Susan Sontag should finally face up to this elementary truth!

Or did she? Immediately after making that declaration she went on to add that if “Communism is itself a variant ... of fascism,” it is nevertheless “Fascism with a human face.” In her essay “On Style,” Sontag had assured her readers that Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi films “transcend the categories of propaganda or even reportage”: the content of the films—i.e., their endorsement of Nazi ideology—has come “to play a purely formal role.” Ten years later, in an essay called “Fascinating Fascism” (1974), she says the opposite: that the “very conception” of Triumph of the Will “negates the possibility of the filmmaker’s having an aesthetic conception independent of propaganda.” Taxed by an interviewer with the contradiction, Sontag replied that “both statements illustrate the richness of the form-content distinction, as long as one is careful always to use it against itself.” “Rich” is indeed the mot juste.

In her book On Photography (1977), Sontag says that photography transforms people into “tourists of reality.” It is a neat phrase: vivid, arresting, overstated. But as she has shown over and over, Sontag herself is just such a tourist. One day she embraces camp, the next day she warns about the “perils of over-generalizing the aesthetic view of life.” As the critic Hilton Kramer observed in his review of The Susan Sontag Reader, “it is not that Sontag was ever prepared to abandon her stand on aestheticism and all its implications. It was only that she did not want it to cost her anything.” Sontag once noted that “the relation between boredom and Camp taste cannot be overestimated.” One suspects that boredom underlies a good deal of her unhappy radicalism. Discontented with “the Matthew Arnold notion of culture,” she abandoned the question of “how to live” and became instead a harbinger of aesthetic nihilism and radical chic politics.

When Sontag began writing, in the early 1960s, the kind of programmatic contempt she exhibited for the Arnoldian humanistic tradition was still a fringe phenomenon. Although warning signs were beginning to flash, the major cultural institutions in America had not yet caught up with the “new sensibility” she both embodied and proclaimed: a sensibility that rejected seriousness while embracing amoralism and histrionic political radicalism. All that was about to change. Within a very few years, “the Matthew Arnold idea of culture” was everywhere in rout. The universities—institutions pre-eminently charged with perpetuating the Arnoldian inheritance—were the scenes of the most violent confrontations and abject betrayals of principle. They provided the perfect breeding ground for the anti-American radicalism extolled by figures like Sontag. When the dust had cleared, the universities were still standing, their faculties and departments intact. But the long march of the cultural revolution had largely transformed them from bastions of Arnoldian humanism into repositories of politically correct sentiment in which intellectual standards had collapsed. As Sontag herself put it, “one important consequence of the new sensibility (with its abandonment of the Matthew Arnold idea of culture) ... [is] that the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture seems less and less meaningful.” What we had witnessed was the spectacle of wholesale capitulation—a liberal capitulation to the grim yet smirking radicalism whose goal was the destruction of an intellectual tradition and, ultimately, a way of life.