Prisoners of Liberation
Bethell, Tom
Prisoners of Liberation by Tom Bethell In times when the focal point of accepted truth shifts slightly to one side, an ideological parallax develops, allowing us to see that truth with...
...Looking back over this dismal history, what seems so remarkable is that scarcely one reactionary critical voice was heard...
...Still, in view of the painful evidence from one’s ears, it is surprising that such a degree of unanimity was maintained, and it is worth looking to see how this came about...
...A strong case can be made for the argument that this difference is innate, however, and if this is true then no amount of consciousness raising (a phrase that ofteq tends to be a euphemism for brainwashing) is going to make any difference...
...Sexual liberation, did you say...
...When we turn to literature, we immediately find a different state of affairs: the same course was not followed...
...Does the music critic call for a liberation of the symphony...
...It pays to break the rules, in other words...
...As a result many women began to suspect, not without reason, that they had been subjected to some misleading advertising (in the name of enlightenment and progressive thinking), and they formed their own movement in self-protection-a movement that in its more extreme forms took the form of ganging up on men, and assuming just that machismo guise that it was warring against...
...It is worth noting in a cautionary way, however, that the development that is so often said to have “liberated” painting, to wit, photography, was clearly the villain...
...Then came...
...The approved method of doing this is to “raise consciousness,” raise girls the same as boys, throw out the dolls, get out of the house, avoid “shitwork,” get involved in work the way men do, and so on...
...It should not have escaped our notice that since World War I1 movements of political liberation have either failed to liberate a people living under a totalitarian regime, as in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, or, more commonly, have justified the reduction of the civil liberties of citizens by claiming that they were being liberated in the process...
...His appeal has had a way of resulting in greater prestige accruing to the critic than to the future state of the symphony...
...That suits Idi Amin just fine (but it’s not so nice for those in the dungeons...
...Their combined effect was so great that in the end they did quite unexpectedly give birth to something: the women’s liberation movement...
...Such purities were thought to be the proper concern of the artist (who tends to be considered a noble being in our culture...
...He could criticize it, attack it, and run the risk in the future of seeming to have been opposed to progressunprogressive...
...did what Haydn had dared not do, and of course in the process caused the critics (Oh, those foolish reactionary critics...
...Before that time the words had referred either to the side effects of experiments in chemistry or to the release of the soul from the body...
...In fact, it looks as though a recent liberation movement came along Precisely as a response to such damaging effects-the women’s liberation movement...
...Getting Screwed What happened here, surely, is that the theory that by taking the Pill parity would finally be introduced into the sexual relations of men and women did not work out in practice...
...The great problem with assessing the net result of sexual liberation as put into practice is that the effects are likely to be so gossamer fine as to be hard to detect, and they may not appear for some time, which is precisely why its advocates have their nerve to be so self-confident in telling us what they don’t really know about...
...A New ‘Lifestyle’ But not a bit of it...
...Seeing blacks win their rights had the effect of making women decide the time had come to reach for theirs, too...
...and in this we are quite likely to be right...
...The new liberationism has, of course, most conspicuously surfaced in the realm of sexual conduct, and secondarily in the repudiation of the 8 notion that there is any redeeming merit to censorship...
...According to this model, Wolfe suggests, indulging in “orgasmic regularity” does not so much let off steam as “turn on the YES gates...
...Man lives increasingly alone, in touch with his “head,” which no doubt is in a strange place, his hand in touch with his body, his television droning on, his companion a pet, and a pet plant, and a pet rock, and he knows that he is alienated, in our Age of Aquarius, under the sign of Libra...
...Liberation from colonial oppression...
...It is the fundamental axiom of the recent movements of political liberation, and these days people of liberal views are not allowed to question it...
...One would think that some of these people might at least consider the possibility that ancient societies themselves had, at various points, experimented with different “lifestyles” and had concluded, after much pain and suffering, that monogamy, the avoidance of promiscuity, and so on, did in fact produce the most harmonious results...
...Under its auspices, things tend to work out not quite as planned...
...This is, however, also a self-serving interpretation...
...Particularly since the early 1960s, and particularly in America, the general principle of liberation has been applied much more generally to society at large, the argument being that the restrictions, inhibitions, and restraints that confined us in the past were rather arbitrarily imposed on us in unenlightened and authoritarian times, and the sign of enlightenment is to liberate oneself from these antiquated notions by adopting a new “lifestyle...
...The Spirit in the Attic It was in the realm of the arts that the then-pristine banner of liberation (fresh from its triumphs over slavery) first began to be waved regularly, and in the field of music especially...
...Humans will always experiment and “create” and try something new...
...An artist has often been said to have been faced with a certain technical “problem,” which he proceeds to “solve,” and then of course passes on to a harder (logically more advanced) problem, much as a mathematician does...
...The aesthete, if he wishes, can listen to his Beethoven records...
...So we have been given a confident go-ahead, where perhaps there should have been less confidence...
...But again, modern technology now threatens to refute the ideas that seem to have been spawned by its predecessors, Contemporary physiologists, examining the organism, do not find boilers but “something more like an electronic circuit, such as a computer...
...The inalienable right to independence, as Daniel P. Moynihan has said, is “triangulated” with two related concepts: that colonial nations have been subjected to economic exploitation, and the belief that they have also been subjected to “ethnic discrimination corresponding to class distinctions in industrial society,” both beliefs often justified, as Moynihan concedes...
...They were liberated at last-free simply to enjoy one another...
...George Orwell would have appreciated the point...
...They are inspired...
...Unlike progress and repression, which seem to have been inspired by technology, liberation surely began life as a purely political idea...
...Apparently the Victorians sought to dissuade the practice by claiming that it led to blindness or insanity or worse...
...It is noteworthy, also, that just as the contemporary critic of the arts who wants to seem enlightened is above all else permissive, so our current poseurs, those psychologists and psychoanalysts who have arrogated to themselves expertise about the human condition, know that if they are to seem enlightened they must always, whatever else they say, reassure us that, yes, it’s okay, and you’re okay, and go ahead and do it and don’t feel bad about it and above all don’t be repressed or deny the full expression of your own true self...
...Freud’s Boiler Room Axiom, he calls it...
...It provides a marvelous justification for our own excesses...
...Well, how wrong can you get...
...A recent example in Washington has been Michael Novak, who, as writer-inresidence at The Washington Star, wrote a number of columns exploring this theme...
...Today we have swung to an opposite extreme...
...These people, then, were not liberated...
...After that, however, the concept of liberation began to be metaphorically applied in a variety of different fields: in the arts, notably music and painting...
...Codes and moral imperatives themselves must go, then, and we must, as Michael Novak put it so well, “bravely grope towards new values...
...The lkgitimacy of the civil rights movement is, by extension, conferred upon the women’s movement, although in reality the relationship between men and women is quite unlike the relationship between blacks and whites...
...the Titanic Spirit . . . the liberator of music: Beethoven...
...It is interesting to reflect, also, that the artist or composer who abandons the constraints and restrictions traditionally associated with his art form in the quest for greater “individuality” also becomes, in the end, isolated, alienated, incommunicado...
...as it were-was “the human race is progressing...
...But this did not happen before one other liberation movement got under way, perhaps the most famous of them all, women’s liberation...
...There is, of course, a close analogy with the way our contemporary critics have urged freedom upon the arts...
...the latest machine, we have discovered, does not automatically confer a greater blessing...
...In the newer incarnations of liberation (the Hefnerian variety), no particular grievance is asserted...
...free to engage in the “pursuit of hap,” which they were supposed to md in one another’s bodies...
...In the European “classical” tradition, this process of destruction was completely unchecked and went into its terminal phase: total anarchy, as represented by concerts in which c o m p u t e r ized sound effects were called music and pianos were smashed with axes...
...In literature, the vehicle of communication (in this country) is the English language, and the English language must of necessity survive in our society because it is used for purely nonartistic p urp o ses-communication, business dealings, and so on...
...Things might improve...
...In Russia they have been waiting since 19 17 for this period to end...
...In that climate, all standards can disappear almost overnight...
...Similarly, just as experience has shown that an eagerly avant-garde critical fraternity eventually succeeded in doing far more damage than reactionary critics (whose effect, in fact, was probably beneficial), so we might consider the possibility that the advocates of permissiveness in sexual and personal conduct will do more harm than a society that imposes codes of morality and conduct...
...Egging on Innovation And therein lies one of the grave dangers of the ethic of liberation...
...and finally once again in politics, in which the concept of liberation, by now debased, is used as a justification for the erosion of civil liberties under new regimes that have thrown off the yoke of colonial “oppression...
...But that is precisely an unliberated thought, of course...
...e through the advent of an increasing variety of labor-saving devices in 10 the home, but it seems likely that the really important impetus was provided by the new technology of contraception and abortion, and its legalization, which had the effect of liberating couples from the “burden” of children, from families, finally from social responsibility...
...and to turn instead to the comfortable baqlities of Rossini and other Viennese trendies...
...Not surprisingly, nearly all critics in the past 100 years or so have decided that if they are going to err at all, it is going to be on the side of being too progressive...
...and very generally in life, as in the adoption of a liberated “lifestyle,” in which a rationale is constructed for the abandonment of conventional codes of behavior or morals...
...According to this view of music histcry (and it is the standard one), Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and other deferential inhabitants of court society were only too glad to operate under these rules, wouldn’t dream of breaking them, with their polite, well-mannered 18th-century minds, for whom form, perhaps, was rated a shade higher than substance, and who were, in any event, in the employ of the nobility, came and went by the servants’ entrance, and composed pieces on schedule according to request by their masters, for church occasions, and so on...
...When this is pointed out to the type of liberal fellow traveler only too common in this country who is very selective in his capacity for outrage about totalitarianism (if the word ‘junta’ is associated with it, he will be outraged...
...The loss of faith in progress appears to have been caused above all by the new fear of technology...
...Presumably, then, such liberation movements would by now be regarded with the gravest suspicion, the European traditions of music and painting having been done in under the banner of “More freedom, fewer restrictions...
...Something else was operating here, operating to guard literature where painting and music had been defenseless, and it is worth looking to see what it was, because it is of relevance to the further consideration of “liberation” as applied to society at large...
...And what does a woman become when she takes the Pill...
...But again, how can we be so sure...
...It was the age of Simon Bolivar, Garibaldi, The Liberator newspaper (founded in 1831 and dedicated to the abolition of slavery), and above all, of course, Abraham Lincoln that gave to the concept of liberation its current underlying meaning, although that meaning has, as I hope to show, subsequently been degraded...
...And it is noteworthy that this fundamental belief in progress has been strongly undermined in recent years-a key element in the shifting focus of wisdom mentioned above...
...The old codes, it is argued, were imposed by people of authoritarian mentality, analogous to the pedantic music teacher, whose only aim seems to have been to curb human happiness...
...Unable to procreate, she is in grave danger of being treated as an object of sex...
...But the women’s liberation movement seems to have occurred, nevertheless, as a result of the “abrasive contact with reality” mentioned above in connectioi with the literary avant-garde...
...it is delightful when we do, but life is not insupportable without them...
...In light of this kind of press, then, it is not surprising that the ethos of rule-breaking became so firmly established in the canons of critical approval...
...In any event, the notion that women’s liberation was principally triggered by the Pill seems eccentric to those who merely saw in the Pill a harmless, and indeed a liberating device...
...In the process he has shed some unexpected light on the ideas intellectuals live by...
...The lesson provided by the arts seems to be that liberation movements are apt to end up as purely destructive when they do not encounter an abrasive contact with reality...
...this was to be this way, that must be that way, and nothing was to be changed...
...He is liable to develop a “communication problem,” in the cant phrase, or to become “alienated,” because he can make do, after a fashion, by himself...
...This has applied in both music and painting...
...We can have symphonies, or we can not have them...
...In short, when the critic was faced with a new piece of music, he was, in a sense, faced with two alternatives...
...they do not make mistakes...
...How foolish those people were, we say, how unenlightened, how enslaved their minds...
...In one, “Why Archie Bunker Always Loses Out-And Shouldn’t,” Novak set out a dozen propositions, or “imperatives,” summarizing the outlook of what he called the “middlebrow...
...In practice, men and women started to treat one another as sex objects, and this turned out to be rather unsettlingan outcome unforeseen, and in fact denied, by the prospectuses of Playboy and Playgirl...
...The question is sometimes asked: Why did the women’s movement come when it did...
...Notice, once again, the underlying assumption of progress...
...And that is why the women’s movement ultimately looks so self-defeating: because its main desire, surely, is to liberate women from their womanliness...
...This is the Aquarian Age and the time to be oneself, to love one’s beauty, to go with one’s process...
...He freed it from bondage, that was the general idea...
...Who, pray, will free us from an idea whose time has passed...
...If a new idea, or thought, or theme, can’t stand a little criticism when it is exposed to the light of day, it probably isn’t worth much anyway...
...A ‘Communication Problem’ Take the case of masturbation, for example...
...We may now be living in just such a time, for a number of writers have begun to take note of our conventional wisdom, expressing it as a set of ideas...
...Without ever really plumbing the depths of the human spirit, or soaring to majestic heights, they turned out some pretty music that has deservedly survived to this day...
...What was unforeseen, or perhaps one should say what was wilfully ignored by the advocates of sexual liberation, was that when a man and a woman approach sex with a view simply to “screwing,” then someone does in fact tend to get screwed...
...There would be no shortage of applause for these endeavors, but somehow it never made any difference...
...And what do we find...
...The theory was that in olden times music had found expression by means of a language that was very traditional, conservative, unchanging (not at all liberated, you see), and above all respectful of some ancient and dimly perceived authority...
...As Pamela Hansford Johnson has observed, at least some of the “ritual screaming” in favor of such “openness” has died down...
...In addition, there has been much use in the critical literature of a false overlay of technology and mathematics...
...masturbation became a matter of doctrinal importance, lesbianism was encouraged, women were liberated from men, the balance of society was knocked further askew, and the banner of liberation was kept flying...
...In fact, of course, it is a purely contingent matter whether home rule is more or less “oppressive” than colonial rule-a matter for scientific investigation if needs be...
...Liberation, it therefore turns out, is a slogan that often tends to benefit the liberators-the new rulers, the new government, the new oppressors-more than it does the liberatedthe citizenry...
...Beethoven has since, of course, become established as the genius par excellence in the history of Western music, while most of his Viennese conterhporaries have been forgotten...
...A tattered banner, one would think...
...Romanticism took hold, the music became mistier and gauzier and more “individualistic,” eventually becoming so individualistic that the audience for it was reduced to a few individuals...
...here a Ulysses there a Waste Land, over yonder a mightily incomprehensible piece of writing, possibly inspired, possibly not...
...And the usual answer, the answer normally provided by the movement itself, is that it came when it did because it was modelled after the civil rights movement...
...A book was actually written about him called Beethoven: The Man Who Freed Music...
...Perhaps Norman Mailer (who has, almost alone, as far as I know, held out on this subject) was right after all, not to mention the Bible...
...The Pill has been seen by many, including until recently most movement theoreticians, as a welcome liberator, and in general it is worth noting that liberation has been so powerful a slogan in our time that the women’s movement as a whole has not dreamed of denouncing the concept of sexual liberation, because that would seem so terribly unprogressive...
...But the same is not true of English...
...Painting was liberated to death, and, as with music, with the active encouragement of the critics...
...The defiant spirit in the attic was worth a hundred pedagogues rapping their pupils over the knuckles in an attempt to curb the human spirit, merely because of a few worthless rules...
...Is it not time that he, too, was liberated...
...The damage is likely to have been done by the time the effects show up...
...For decades, of course, the male approach to sexuality that is characterized by the word “macho” had held sway, but it had held sway, as it were, only in the locker rooms and so its effects were not all-pervasive...
...But thanks to the passage of reform legislation, the development of a gradually more progressive attitude, as expressed in such changes as universal, or at least widespread, enfranchisement, and the appearance on the political and national scenery of wise leaders who champion& these causes-the liberatorsa greater degree of justice began to prevail, It was only in the 19th century that the terms “liberation,” and the verb “to liberate” toof on political connotations...
...The sign of an unprogressive mind...
...The great moral imperative behind the “wars of liberation” has been that nations have an inalienable right to liberation from the state of colonial dependency on Some other country...
...Each new step was inevitably heralded as an “innovation” by the fraternity of critics, and when one of their number, Henry Pleasants, denounced the whole thing as a fraud, he in turn was denounced as a knownothing, so that a wall of conformity and unanimity was maintained...
...some, in certain societies, were outright enslaved...
...The liberation impulse was there, of course, and the same avant-garde of creative souls eagerly lined bp waiting to breach the citadels of tradition, but they never made any real inroads...
...Liberation, then, is a slogan that should be watched carefully...
...It is much better that “innovations” be subjected to this critical obstacle course, in any field...
...There is no doubt some truth to this-women participating in the radical movements of the late OS, such as SDS, often found themselves shut out by macho male radicals, and so they decided to gang together and form a macho female movement in retaliation...
...Most of the population was made up of serfs and other second- or third-class citizens, who had little or no say in the control of their destiny, no vote, only rudimentary “rights...
...They are, in this sense, parasitical arts...
...It will result merely in frustration, and therefore in the tendency of the women’s movement to go even more into opposition against men...
...After Beethoven-le deluge...
...But this program draws attention to another weakness of the movement, a potentially fatal one: it is based very precariously on this fundamental Article of Faith: that the differences between men and women have been induced by society, and are not innate...
...It is surely significant that the word should be retained as a colloquialism for taking advantage of someone...
...Another writer who seems to be increasihgly interested in these matters is Tom Wolfe...
...Colonial Oppression’ By this time, then, we’ have become quite accustomed to the notion that liberation has been used as a meritorious label to pin onto unseemly outcomes, and this is the way the label has been used most recently in the political sphere, to return finally to that...
...thus the painter was free to concentrate on the a bstractions-pure line, pure form, pure composition...
...On the other hand, a much more dangerous situation threatens to develop when the winds of critical opinion blow constantly in the direction of change and novelty and innovation-in the same direction, that is, as the vast majority of people who like to think of themselves as creative...
...The term normally deployed was “freedom” rather than “liberation,” but the idea was exactly the same...
...Then macho-sex was given an enormous boost in currency and circulation by Playboy, its imitators, and, oddly, Cosmopolitan...
...There were other factors, such as the gradual “liberation” of the housewi...
...Related words such as “logical” and “valid” became important weapons in the critical arsenal...
...One has to be progressive and liberated in this day and age, and so the women’s movement in its more extreme manifestations proceeded even further out on the risky limb of liberation...
...A Tattered Banner It turns out to be very simple...
...The number one complaint of the women’s movement, it turns out, has been that women tend to be treated as “sex objects” by men...
...No rights, as normally understood, are being denied...
...to shake their heads uncomprehendingly, to lose interest in Beethoven eventually (wasn’t he slightly off his head...
...One is tempted also to say that women get screwed more often than men, although a slightly different way of looking at it would be to say that the “screwing” approach to sex tends to be the male approach, and Pillsterilized women who found themselves forced to adopt the same approach soon also found that they didn’t like it...
...There is a much simpler truth, and it is that “liberation” often constitutes a marvelous justification for the seizure of power, and its legitimization, and subsequently the suppression of civil liberties becomes the simplest way of maintaining power once attained...
...Marvelous, says Hugh Hefner, looking wise as he sucks on his pipe...
...This has no doubt been the fundamental axiom of enlightened thought over the past hundred years or more, propping up many of the other ideas intellectuals live by...
...How much it does promise...
...or, on the other hand, of having been merely the over-eager handmaiden of progress...
...This clearly happened in the case of the European musical tradition...
...But how can they be so sure that the old standards were set up thoughtlessly...
...If they are not themselves gods, the gods whisper in their ears...
...and then came further technological developments that did more to make a reality of the sexual freedom movement than all the installments of Playboy philosophy: the Pill, and the perfected techniques of abortion...
...In any event, it is worth noting that the Founding Fathers of liberation, if we may call them that, quite justifiably imbued the term with meritorious meaning, Liberation, whatever else it may have been, was a good thing...
...Implicit in this analysis, of course, is the assumption that the male and female psyches are not identical, and the women’s liberation movement has subsequently devoted an enormous amount of energy to figuring out how to eradicate this difference...
...Where is our modernday Lincoln, our William Lloyd Garrison...
...He broke the rules, in other words...
...Painting was “liberated,” too, although we may pass over this briefly...
...The rules of music’s language were broken, in other words, and when they were broken there was soon no language left, but a Babel of dialects, each individual composer succeeding only in becoming more incommunicado than the last as he broke one more rule...
...And the same is true of portraits and still lifes...
...The same is not true of music and painting, alas...
...Not only did Beethoven in his personal life emancipate himself from the nobility, going round Vienna being rude to everyone and establishing himself as the prototype of the LonelyArtist-in-Garret, he also emancipated music itself from its past...
...inasmuch as it is people who are normally thought to have rights, not countries, and if in a new nation the idea of liberation is used to excuse the reduction of individual liberties, there is clearly something wrong...
...So the original, and one might say literal, meaning of liberation was simply this: that when a man, or a class of men, stood in shackles, and someone came and knocked those shackles off, then an act of liberation had taken place...
...In the language of Esalen: “You gotta be you ’cause you’re you and you gotta be, and besides, if you aren’t gonna be you who else’s gonna be you...
...The large monuments erected to the memory of its secular patron saints attested to that...
...Perhaps his most remarkable (and unremarked) suggestion has been that the whole idea of repression, which has been so influential in our time, is nothing more than a metaphor drawn from the Victorian steam engine...
...This notion was further encouraged by the near deification of composers (and artists generally) in our society...
...Thus the new technology supplies the model for an idea that, if it ever became fashionable, would finish off Freud quicker than a cadre dispatched 4 from the ranks of Women’s Liberation...
...if the 12 word ‘liberation’ is associated, it will be fine, even though the condition of the citizenry may be identical), the stock response is that it is unfortunate, but that in the interest of stability the new regime must, for a while, curtail civil liberties, and so on...
...It fulfills a functional requirement, in other words...
...Hugh Hefner, one could say, has been the most visible symbol of both of these movements, Both ideas, however, are by now far less certainly believed in than they were seven or eight years ago, again indicating a shift in the focus of wisdom...
...Here and there it is, for instance, conceded, although reluctantly, that a free press may survive even if ten-year-olds aren’t exposed to the offerings of the Marquis de Sade...
...It was difficult to be against it...
...And unfortunately, such an investigation of a number of recently “liberated” countries, especially in Africa, would show that, as things worked out in practice, liberation meant q reduction in civil liberties for rank and file citizens...
...Theirs was a pitfall ever afterwards to be avoided...
...Nevertheless, although one may assent to the idea, it clearly needs watching all the same...
...Once again, the Axiom of Progress played a key role, Once it had been established that all change is progress, that “innovation” is a uniformly beneficial thing, then it followed that all the changes taking place in music in the 19th century were good and would somehow result in music ending up in a kind of promised land...
...It could be said that all along Wolfe has been interested in fashion, but in recent years he has turned away from the manifestations of fashion in popular culture and tofiards the manifestations of fashion in “high” culture (the quotation marks are advisable because Wolfe leaves us in no doubt that he vastly prefers popular culture-American-to high culture, which is based on European models...
...We cannot get along without that, at least not without an almost inconceivable reorganization of life...
...And in fact we do not have to approach the subject in a mystical way in order to see that masturbation plainly does have a harmful social effect on the individual...
...As a result, totally arbitrary musical developments, such as the introduction of serialism or the twelve-tone row, somehow took on an air of inevitability when they were called logical...
...If the composer’s innovation didn’t, somehow, in the years ahead seem to come to anything, then at least it would have been better to have given him marks for trying, rather than to have blighted his creative spirit by saying nay...
...Still and all, they didn’t do too badly, it is conceded...
...Where Is Our Lincoln...
...the more you get, the more you want, in other words...
...No group, it is claimed, is being mistreated...
...As we now perceive it, the idea goes something like this: In former, pre-democratic times, an aristocratic elite was the only group to enjoy the full rights of citizenship...
...There is merely the appeal for the abandonment of certain standards of conduct on the grounds that they were established thoughtlessly, by the authoritarian minds of a former age, and in a generalized way we are encouraged to adopt a new state of mind-a “liberated” state of mind...
...Today, we are wiser...
...It is, admittedly, a sign of the increasing dilapidation of the liberation label that when we hear it used today, in connection with international politics, we are half inclined to suspect that the movement in question has totalitarian ambitions, and is most likely using the term liberation as a euphemism for terrorism...
...What I want to argue here is that women’s liberation was in fact a reaction against the sexual liberation movement, although the strange thing is that hardly anyone in the women’s movement seems to have realized the fact...
...Go forth and masturbate if you so desire, relieve your tension, open your safety valve, it won’t do you any harm...
...Prisoners of Liberation by Tom Bethell In times when the focal point of accepted truth shifts slightly to one side, an ideological parallax develops, allowing us to see that truth with detachment for the first time...
...The vast majority of the people won’t object, particularly in a society such as ours in which a newer and vastly more popular (American) musical tradition has started up...
...free, at last, to treat one another as “sex objects...
...In any event, once it becomes axiomatic that nations have the right to cast aside the yoke of political dependence, and once it becomes firmly established in the lexicon of political discourse that the adjective “colonial” is always to qualify one of two nouns, either “oppression” or “exploitation,” then it very soon becomes a corollary that the course of action pursued by the “liberators” who take the reins of power into their hands becomes morally justified, even if they oppress the citizenry more than the colonial administrators did...
...Thus music was liberated from its traditions...
...John Cage wrote the final note by composing a piece of music consisting of silence...
...Just as the composer is exhorted to break the rules, so that he can express his own and nobody else’s individuality, so we are urged in sex to “do our own thing,” to do, in fact, anything provided it feels nice...
...The results of the application of this theory about painting have been deplorable, of course, a subject fit for ridicule, as Tom Wolfe has well shown...
...It is not the creative human spirit that is in danger of being blighted by a conservative critical climate...
...The Age of Simon Bolivar And there’s another idea, Liberation, that now seems to be just sitting idly around, waiting to be picked up and examined...
...and so that which English also incidentally transmits, namely poems and novels and belles lettres, is also accidentally preserved...
...In most cases it will tend to isolate him socially from his fellow beings...
...The language was not destroyed...
...If one starts to consider these ideas of our time, or the recent past, such as progress and repression, one very soon begins to bump into liberation, one of our most dominant and topical notions...
...Literature, then, has the good fortune to be rooted an$ grounded in reality in a way that music and painting are not...
...The normal fallout attributed to such codes of conduct is guilt-that guilt which we love to dwell on as an object lesson of what is to be avoided...
...The citadel was not breached...
...we can get along without them-can and do...
...and in life, in our “lifestyle,” we are urged to be anything, anything at all, as long as we are uniquely ourselves...
...The argument has always run that painting was made up of two elements-content (the subject matter, the object that was to berepresented on the canvas), and the abstractions (form, design, and so on), With the arrival of photography the painter was thought to have been liberated, because he no longer had to concern himself with such mundane matters as the depiction of the world (getting the sitter’s likeness down for posterity), since this could now be handled by photography...
...When one considers the movements toward sexual and personal liberation, one immediately notices a big difference between them and the way the concept of liberation originated politically...
...One does not have to look far...
...Women’s lib era t ion liberates women from men, just as personal liberation liberates people from society...
...If aesthetic liberationists wish to weaken them fatally in the name of progressive thinking, there is very little countervailing force at work in society, and very lit-tle to stop the process from acquiring a momentum of its own and proceeding on to the total destruction of the arts in question...
...Liberation movements have continued apace...
...The first proposition-the first commandment, Tom Bethell is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
Vol. 8 • September 1976 • No. 7
