The Politics of Plenitude

The marketplace multiplies cultural identities and creates true diversity. No wonder the right and the left are upset.

Grant McCracken from the August/September 1998 issue

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The right suffers the debilitating illusion that small-town moralities are the way to contend with the challenges of the contemporary world. Because it cannot grasp how much of plenitude is "a thing indifferent," the right allows itself to be taken hostage by the small-minded and the life-denying--radical Christians and young fogies both.

One does not need to be a political strategist of any great cunning to see that this bodes ill. As the world becomes more various, not just on the margin but at the center, the party that turns its back on difference asks for trouble. And the world is becoming more various in the very dens, bedrooms, and basements of the most middle-class homes in the most Republican suburbs.

Naturally, the right has its own account of plenitude. Here is William Bennett on his Washington stay as secretary of education: "My wife Elayne and I...enjoyed wonderful evenings at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts...but we were also on more than one occasion dismayed by some of what we saw at this revered center of Washington cultural life."

In this case, and where he talks about "good art, good music and good books" that will "elevate taste and improve the sensibilities of the young," Bennett betrays a wish to see the world as exemplary. And he betrays a nervousness that the stage might be used for art that is at odds with higher values. In this world, there is a single set of things to revere, and the purpose of art is to encourage us in this reverence. Art that departs from lifting hearts and minds to higher, nobler goals is dismaying.

In this world, the art of Robert Mapplethorpe, for instance, is an outrage. But Bennett's difficulty is self-made. It is only when art is supposed to have an elevating moral purpose that Mapplethorpe's work is scandalous. Bennett is right, I think, on many points and especially when he insists that we are a culture, a civilization, with its own traditions and standards. He is right to insist that we preserve these traditions. He is right to say we mustn't make ourselves so accommodating of the values of others that we are unable to honor and realize our own.

The trick is to see that plenitude is our tradition. It is one of the traditions of which we have the right to be most proud--not just the ability to endure differences, but the ability to make them. The continual creation of difference, variety, and novelty may be a signature gesture of our culture. It is most certainly a defining characteristic as we enter the next century. This is the tradition that we must honor.

No return to classical simplicities will make plenitude go away. No purifying moral purpose will make art more fit for Washington cultural life. Art is already quite slow and confused enough in its response to the varieties of contemporary life. To devote it to the celebration of an exemplary would simply remove it from usefulness altogether. More important, to devote any political capital to the task of criticizing Mapplethorpe or controlling the public venues in which his work might be seen is ludicrously mistaken. This art is a thing indifferent.

Pity the right such a world. For this is the wrong landscape from which to take one's lessons. It is better, wiser to look to the great tutor of plenitude, city life. Cities tell us that plenitude is inevitable and that it is, within certain limits, benign. While the rural communities sought singleness, the city has always, blithely, thrown off difference and variety. The lesson of this great experiment is clear: The cultivation of sameness is not needed to secure compliance with a larger set of values. Cities work in spite of plenitude. They work because of plenitude. This is the symbolic landscape in which the real ideological lessons of the 21st century are to be found.

At the core of the right's difficulty with plenitude is the quiet conviction that anyone who departs from convention becomes dangerous and uncontrolled. Interestingly, there is sound anthropology at work here. A classic stage of ritual transition is the liminal one in which the individual is often seen to be a danger to him/herself and everyone around him/her. But there is another stage that follows: that of incorporation, in which the individual returns to the world to embrace its conventions.

The right acts as if the many groups thrown off by plenitude harbor an anarchic tendency, that people have become gays, feminists, or Deadheads in order to escape morality. This is not the logic of plenitude. These people have reinvented themselves merely to escape a morality, not all morality. New communities set to work immediately in the creation of new moralities. Chaos does not ensue; convention, even orthodoxy, returns. Liminality is the slingshot that allows new groups to free themselves from the gravitational field of the old moralities they must escape. But liminality is almost never the condition that prevails once this liberation has been accomplished.

The right is inclined these days to declare itself the true friend of tradition, and to declare tradition the path to civic virtue and public morality. It presents itself as champion of practices and values tested by time. But the truth of the matter is that plenitude is a Western value and indeed the very author of many of the traditions now being claimed by the right. The Protestant traditions the right holds so dear come out of the spirit of plenitude that created first a church distinct from Rome and then successive, ever more radical versions of Protestantism. Plenitude was there in the beginning. A return to tradition will not make it go away. It is tradition.

But there is perhaps a more pressing and personal reason for the right to rethink its attitude towards plenitude. It is that every member of the right must live in the world that plenitude has created for them. They must endure families that change shape and form. They must endure a workplace that is constantly reinventing itself. They must somehow manage their own lives as notions of gender change continually, as notions of the self come and go. The inhabitants of the right must live in the world that plenitude has wrought.

What the right needs is what we all need--the ability to shift perspectives, honor differences, embrace the generative powers of plenitude. For these generative powers cannot be diminished. They will continue to fill up the world, to work and rework the body politic so that it becomes a web of endless possibilities. New groups, entertaining new assumptions, creating new values, refusing all exclusions--these are inevitable. We need the intellectual and moral flexibility to live in such a world. There is no retreat to a single point of view. There is only movement forward into a world with many points of view. The left has made a great deal of its sensitivity on issues of gender, race, ethnicity, diversity, and multiculturalism--a sensitivity, it typically claims, the right cannot imagine. In fact, the left has misapprehended and mismanaged these issues almost as consistently as the right--with consequences every bit as grave.

The left has not always claimed a sensitivity on this score. Plenitude was regarded by some as a barrier the revolution would have to sweep away. In the words of the English anthropologist Ernest Gellner (recently deceased), "[T]he Marxists...thought universal and liberated man would emerge in the more tragic melting-pot of an impoverished proletariat, stripped by alienation of all specific attributes, and discovering, and implementing, true humanity through this historically imposed social nakedness."

And this is how socialist regimes were often judged. They were seen to be so suppressive of difference that life was rendered, in the favorite and damning adjective, "gray." More than the common ownership, a command economy, or state culture, this was the telling detail of the socialist regimes of the 20th century, the one that condemned them most in the eyes of a not always unsympathetic West. This may not have been the most sophisticated grounds for political judgment, but for our culture, then and now, it was the most compelling. Fairly or not, we damned these regimes as insufficiently various, as enemies of plenitude.