There is perhaps no more reliable measure of the health of a political order than the degree of autonomy that culture enjoys within it. Culture, high and low, may be construed as the sum total of the feelings and the values of a society as they are expressed by means of beauty (or by their opposite, if that too is an aesthetic ambition) — the spiritual life of humanity as it submits to form. Breakthroughs in culture, including strictly formal breakthroughs, have been breakthroughs in human freedom. That is not because anything and everything needs to be said and shown, though a case can be made for such wanton laissez-créer, but because the decision by artists to exert their skills upon inner and outer materials that have not yet been the subject of such exertions multiplies the evidence of what human spirits can accomplish when they are unfettered and their powers of creation are left alone. Even people who cannot hear the structure of a Coltrane solo can hear the freedom in it (and learn from it that there is no contradiction between freedom and structure). Culture generally advances by means of shock, which is its method of expansion and enlightenment. The shock eventually becomes platitudinous as the innovation is accepted and acknowledged to have been a gift, an enlargement of a horizon that was in need of enlarging. Our understanding of life has often been heightened by works that were once regarded as blasphemous. Consider the ravishing amorality about love in Così fan tutte, or the genitals of Christ that Michelangelo painted on the wall at the Vatican. If you could consider them, that is: not long after Michelangelo died a colleague of his, acting on the ferocious criticism that the master’s voluptuously neo-pagan figure aroused, painted them over with the image of a loincloth, for which he became known as “the breeches-maker”; and a direct line runs from this orthodox rectification to, say, the refusal of the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., to host the Robert Mapplethorpe show in 1989, a capitulation to pressure from a breeches-maker from South Carolina named Jesse Helms. But danger is culture’s middle name. Freedom promises the giving and taking of offense. Umbrage should be welcomed as evidence of liberty. The only safety that a polity owes its members is physical safety. Too many people now mistake censure for prohibition; but when I criticize what you say, it has nothing to do with your right to say it. Go ahead, be wrong. You are free to err, as am I. And please say it all, so that I may know where we stand. And pardon my antagonism, but the unpleasantness of our exchange must be endured for the sake of mature self-governance. Civility is a fine practice, but not if it represents an early form of self-censorship, or an avowal that comity is our most cherished ideal. The rules by which culture operates are its own and nothing else’s; or so they should be. Even when cultural expressions are difficult or obscure, they add to what we know and do not subtract, and the same is true of the most rudimentary three-chord love song that enhances the oldest emotion in the world. Who ever made out to Verklärte Nacht? And the intrinsic independence of the imagination — except from its own internal distortions and blockages, which are owed to its confinement in the early circumstances of a particular psyche — is the exhilarating equivalent of the intrinsic independence of the mind. Many thinkers, most trenchantly Moses Mendelssohn, have shown that, strictly speaking, belief cannot be compelled. You cannot force someone who does not agree with your opinion to agree with it; you can only force him to pretend that he agrees with it, and thereby produce not a convert but a hypocrite. In some circumstances this hypocrisy is a clandestine heroism. (The annals of the Spanish Inquisition, and of the crypto-Jews that it created, abundantly document this doubleness, which is a characteristic feature of life under tyranny.) External conformity is not internal conformity unless there is internal agreement, which cannot be imported from outside, when force stupidly attempts to do the work of persuasion. This is true even now, when the technological instruments of manipulation and demagoguery are staggeringly strong. The problem, the crisis, the tragedy is that the impotence of power before the inner lives of other people is not generally welcomed by those with consolidated power. They do not grasp why culture cannot be directed or legislated or decreed. They are offended by whatever will not bow and bend. After all, the autocrat’s most precious verification that he has made it to the top is the constant sensation of the supremacy of his will. And so the history of authoritarianism is riddled with political campaigns against cultural liberty and cultural diversity. These campaigns, indeed, are one of the first signs that a dictatorial regime, or a would-be dictatorial regime, has arrived. The essential multiplicity of cultural expression, which can serve as an engine of tolerance, stands as a formidable obstacle to the uniformity that autocratic (and theocratic) regimes desire. They harbor a top-down fantasy of perfect consensus. Their intellectuals’ screeds against “relativism” are at bottom complaints against the limits of political power in matters of belief, against the failure of absolutists to impose absolutism. Shouldn’t it be enough that they are in exclusive possession of the truth? If there is only a single truth and only a single authority, what is all that other noise? Silence it! Or better yet, bring it into line — synchronize it with power. One of the most central, and most swiftly implemented, concepts of Nazi ideology was Gleichschaltung, which means synchronization, regimentation, integration, coordination — the unification of disparate elements in government and society under a single ideological description, so that all diversity and dissonance is banished and smoothed out into a seamless and coercive general will that reflects the ideals of the regime and
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