Idol-Smashing and Immodesty in the Groves of Academe

We don’t hear the word “modesty” very much these days. And when it is used, it generally has a faintly antique, Victorian sound, a distant rustle of petticoats amid the stillness of overstuffed parlors with lacy tabletops and antimacassars and scrupulously concealed furniture legs. As a consequence, the word “modesty” often carries for us a negative weight of falseness or artifice or timidity. It cannot possibly be both sincere and healthy; it must be either insincere or pathological, or both. That it is seen this way is a sign of how completely “modesty” has come to embody the very things that modern mores have sought so ardently to defeat.

Even at its very best, “modesty” for us signifies a restraint or inhibition that one chooses – or more likely, has had drilled into one, so that it is an unconscious reflex – not because it conforms to what is inherently right or appropriate, but because it represents a safe and politic way of handling things, one that protects against public embarrassment, or against the envy or rivalrousness or passions of others. To the extent that the concept still lives, its force has become almost entirely “other-directed” rather than “inner-directed,” to use the sociologist David Riesman’s famous dichotomy. One is “modest” not because of what one believes but out of concern for how one is seen.

All of which is to say that modesty today is for us a psychological and stylistic category rather than a moral one – a way of presenting oneself rather than a way of grounding or orienting oneself. A woman who habitually chooses to wear “modest” clothing is no longer thought to be doing so on any grounds other than how she presumably “feels” about her body and the public display of it. And that is regarded as entirely a matter of individual choice and taste – although in fact, these days a certain suspicion falls on any reasonably well-endowed woman who would not flaunt what she’s got. Why not? What possible reason could she have for veiling her beauty?

There used to be a category of something called “false modesty,” meant to denote that kind of reticence that seems clearly phony or disingenuous. But that category seems superfluous now. We live in an age in which reticence has been discarded as a virtue, and all modesty is, in some sense, regarded as equally false, either because it is fake or because it is pathological, or perhaps merely because it is regarded as pathetic. A scholar whose book is praised for making a “modest” contribution to its field has in truth been tagged with having accomplished next to nothing, though the thought is stated in the most diplomatic of terms. And when the same scholar calls his own contribution “modest” he is merely trying to preemptively charm, or disarm, his prospective opposition. He does not, in short, mean it. No one, it seems, really wants to be “modest.”

Largely lost from view is the possibility that there can be a genuine modesty, a trait of character both heartfelt and rational, that stems not merely from socially or parentally inculcated inhibitions and “hangups” but from a certain depth of self-knowledge, from an awareness of how far we fall short of what we ought to be. In short, a modesty that arises out of an awareness of precisely who we are, and how much we have to be modest about. One recalls that the primordial act of modesty in our civilization was that recounted by the book of Genesis, in the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Having just committed the primal sin of eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the pair suddenly become aware of being naked, and sew together fig leaves to cover themselves. Their disobedient act had nothing to do with the use or misuse of their genital organs. And yet the first consequence of that act was a generalized sense of shame or ambivalence about the body, the first indication that they had entered a state of at least partial alienation from the true source of their being. The core of the biblical teaching about human nature, particularly as Christianity elaborated it, is that such complexity is part and parcel of the human condition as we experience it. It is thought to color our perceptions of the world’s beauties and desires, which we know can shift their moral meanings for us from good to bad in the flicker of an eye.

The loss of modesty, then, is not merely a matter of changing fashions, but also of the larger assumptions behind those fashions, which is precisely why it is always appropriate to conjoin manners with morals. There is always a philosophy of human nature, however hidden or implicit, lurking behind our manners. And in the optimistic view of the modern world, which has banished such concepts as sin and shame, there is no compelling reason for us to regard modesty as a virtue, or to regard the modest person as anything more than a dissembler or an anxious fool.

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It may be helpful at this point to observe that there are, broadly speaking, two meanings we ascribe to the word “modesty.” The first, following the footsteps of Adam and Eve, involves a reticence about the body. This includes preeminently a reticence about sexuality and sexual display, as in the example of women’s clothing cited above. This meaning also can extend to the public exposure of anything that is intensely private and personal, and is grounded in a strong sense of discreetness and shame. From this perspective, a modest person is one who exercises discretion and practices hiddenness, eschewing personal display, wanting neither to give offense nor be an occasion of lapses in judgment by others, keeping high walls up around certain aspects of private life.

There is a common belief that such modesty arises out of an unhealthy aversion to physical or emotional intimacy or a poor body image. But that is often little more than a casual slander, or a convenient line used by would-be seducers to flush their quarries. It is a concession to the culture of display, which shows no awareness of an alternative to itself. Indeed, such modesty may well indicate the opposite of unhealthiness, with the construction of those high walls being a sign not of fearful disengagement from the bodily side of life, but rather a testament to how intensely precious the things behind those walls are, and therefore of how important it is to maintain such barriers, letting in only those who are tried and true, and recognizing the dangers entailed in departing from that practice in one’s life. Far from being a barrier to intimacy, such modesty may be an indispensable partner to it, precisely because intimacy with many is impossible, a contradiction in terms. In the Song of Solomon, one of the great erotic poems in the Western tradition, which shares canonical status with Genesis – a fact that in itself shows something about the complexity of the biblical testimony regarding bodily beauty and desire – the beloved is vividly described as “a garden enclosed” and “a fountain sealed” (4:12). The image suggests something essential, perhaps, in the relationship between profound sexual intimacy and the protections of enclosure.

Second, “modesty” refers to a sense of tentativeness and humility in one’s assessment of one’s own accomplishments and status in the ultimate ranking of things. In this view, modesty means having a mature perspective on one’s ultimate insignificance and limitations, grounded in a sense of mystery about the vastness and incomprehensibility of the world, and skepticism about the limits of human nature and human capabilities. This is the meaning of the word that ought to attach to the “modest” achievement of even the greatest scholars. Whatever we do is, in the end, pretty puny.

This is also the kind of modesty that remembers the embarrassing contrast between human aspiration and human frailty. It remembers that the legendary King Ozymandias’s sole claim on our memory, in the poet Shelley’s unforgettable depiction of him, is the bitterly ironic contrast between his boastful claims for himself – “Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” – and the ruined tomb in the desert that records those words, and in recording them silently reinterprets them as the cruel and empty self-mockery that they are. It remembers the painful contrast between the youthful Cassius Clay’s arrogant and scornful cry, “I am the greatest!” and the pathetic figure that the elder Muhammad Ali has cut, his mind and body ravaged by his career in boxing and by the steady advance of Parkinson’s disease. It remembers that nearly every human glory and every human boast ends in the same sad and humiliating way.

These two superficially different understandings of “modesty” – the modesty of exposure and the modesty of pride – actually have a great deal in common. Both are reticent: fond of restraint, slow to disclose, and slow to assert. Both are skeptical, in the sense in which George Santayana meant that word when he proclaimed skepticism to be “the chastity of the intellect,” something that it is “shameful” to surrender “too soon or to the first comer.” Instead, Santayana observed, warming to the sexual analogy, “there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through a long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.”

Both forms of modesty share a suspicion of human desire and human will, a sense of how flawed we are, how frequently we fail to be what we know we can and should be. Both are also inherently conservative, in the sense that they share an awareness of how dangerous it can be to throw off well-established conventions, to disdain the guide rails laid down by previous generations, and instead presume to haul all of previous social reality before the bar of the present, and demand that it prove its worth to us and us only, or be banished in a wink to the ash heap of history.

In that sense, modesty is as countercultural a virtue as one could hope to find in an age of routinized ballyhoo, braggadocio, indulgence, and display – an age that arrogantly fancies itself a time of final truths, in which iconoclasm, the literal or figurative smashing of old revered objects, is the intellectual and moral virtue par excellence.

One would be hard put to think of a more polar opposition than that between modesty and iconoclasm. And, as in all such oppositions, there is a bit of the truth on both sides. Some icons deserve to be retired from time to time, and possibly even smashed for good measure. Modesty, like all virtues, can become a vice when it loses sight of its proper task, and instead becomes, immodestly, an end in itself. But that is hardly our problem in this age. Instead, our obsession with iconoclasm is so one-sided, and so oblivious to the need for balance, as to amount to a cultural pathology. The words of C. S. Lewis in his Screwtape Letters, placed in the mouth of that book’s devilish protagonist, could not be timelier in this regard:

The use of Fashions in thought is to distract the attention of men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running about with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under. Thus we make it fashionable to expose the dangers of enthusiasm at the very moment when they are all really becoming worldly and lukewarm; a century later, when we are really making them all Byronic and drunk with emotion, the fashionable outcry is directed against the dangers of the mere “understanding.” Cruel ages are put on their guard against Sentimentality, feckless and idle ones against Respectability, lecherous ones against Puritanism; and whenever all men are really hastening to become either slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.

Employing the same reverse capability of social fashion, which we will here call the Lewis Reflex – the idea that people are too easily convinced that they should defend the disease and attack the antidote – we might add that the exaltation of iconoclasm has metastasized into an icon that itself is as pernicious as anything it has sought to smash.

This in turn brings us to an additional irony, a twist that I believe to be unique to our own time: that a certain self-consciously countercultural ethos has become, in fact, the dominant one in the ranks of college-educated and culturally aspirant Americans. This observation is at the heart of journalist David Brooks’s hilarious but also dead-on depiction of the “bourgeois bohemian” in his book Bobos in Paradise. We have “repealed reticence,” in Rochelle Gurstein’s words, and have made the liberation from social convention into a new social convention all its own. Of course, this ideology rests upon a veiled form of class snobbery, since there must always be those unnamed “others,” the suburbanites and functionaries and breeders and Babbitts who are thought to sustain and uphold the conventions from which “we” perpetually need to be liberated. But those “others” are increasingly shadowy and hard to locate. The new convention has been triumphant beyond its wildest dreams, and is now entirely pervasive, suffusing our popular culture and our advertising and assimilated into the mainstream in the most remarkable and incongruous ways.

One can find endless examples of this in just an hour of television viewing or flipping through the New York Times. In the latter, for example, one’s eyes might light upon the front page of the Arts section for Monday, May 22, 2005, which features two representative articles: one a perfectly serious and sober piece on the birth of skateboarding as a “subculture,” and the other a story about the creation of a Museum of the Counterculture in Manhattan’s East Village by filmmaker and pizza-chain owner Phil Hartman, a man described as “an entrepreneur whose main form of transportation is his bicycle.” Like a good Bobo, Hartman is anxiously aware that “the idea of institutionalizing downtown culture” has “inherent contradictions in it,” and the idea has aroused some bitter opposition. But even the opposition has an unmistakably Bobo flavor. There is, for example, the film-archivist neighbor who complained, “We are not counterculture. We in the East Village are the culture and everything around us is the opposite of culture.” He’s so countercultural that he objects to the word itself.

I recently stayed in a meticulously restored Victorian inn in the meticulously restored Victorian town of Cape May. Two ex-artists, refugees from the East Village, run the inn, and throughout the house display their utterly predictable “cutting edge” works (cutting edge circa 1920, that is). They even posted a tasteful little sign “warning” guests that some images might be “disturbing.” But this is a silly little conceit on their part – the thought that any of their clientele would even notice let alone be disturbed by the images. And, truth be told, they do not believe it themselves, else they would never have posted the art throughout the house. But it is terribly important to them to believe that they are still pushing envelopes and slashing away at bourgeois complacency, even if they run a small business, the quintessential bourgeois enterprise, out of a quintessentially bourgeois structure that is worth millions of dollars, and worry more about real estate taxes and college tuitions than about global warming.

Like the wealthy suburban lapsed Catholic who still fancies himself a radical follower of Dorothy Day, or the hotdog TV journalist who makes a seven-figure salary but still thinks of himself as a “marginal man” who lives off his “shoe leather reporting” and a willingness to “speak truth to power,” these inn owners are people in the grip of a personal mythology from which they have no desire to free themselves. There is self-deception at work when people luxuriate in the fruits of worldly success while condemning the cultural forces that sustain them. The flourishing of various forms of “political correctness” shows that the “shame culture,” far from being dead, is alive and well, even if it is not acknowledged as such by those who fancy themselves to be living beyond such atavisms.

Yet even the most incongruous social conventions can take hold for a time. And in our era, the conjunction of a certain gemütlich neo-Victorian conventionality with a certain countercultural conventionality seems, by now, so entrenched and commonplace as to be almost natural. To be truly countercultural may mean opposing the convention of unconventionalism, bucking the force of the Lewis Reflex – and remembering why the Victorians who built those wonderfully expressive old homes also prized modesty as a personal virtue. It is, in fact, to reestablish an honest link between manners and morals, and recognize that the culture-wide repeal of modesty has been half-hearted, self-deceiving, and corrosive.

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So what are the ultimate sources of our iconoclastic dogma, which wars against the time-honored ideals of modesty? One might be tempted to look to Madison Avenue, or more generally, to every Bobo’s favorite whipping boy, Corporate Capitalism, which is thought to encourage the dissolution of all that is stable to create a constant flow of new desires and new markets for new consumables. There is probably some truth to this. But one should beware of the ease with which the Bobo looks up from his Blackberry to give you that response. In referring to it, might one be succumbing to the Lewis Reflex, and aiming fire extinguishers at the flood – or at any rate, mistaking the symptom for the cause?

To find the originating source of the dogma, one ought also to consider the role played by the world of ideas, since even a materialist has to concede that our ideas are the means by which we map the social landscape and determine what forces are in play. After all, one has to be introduced to the ideas of Marxism, even to the notoriously hazy idea of “class,” before one can have any notion of what it would mean to map the world as “nothing but class struggle,” and know which icons one should want to bust.

If we consider the role of ideas, then we are led ineluctably to the true Vatican of iconoclasm’s cultural authority, the Magisterium wherein its dicta and directives and metaphysics and moral theology are authoritatively formulated and propounded. And that is the vast archipelago of Academia – the very place where, as David Brooks points out, the anticonventional sensibility is most reliably inculcated and most effectively promulgated. There is no stronger correlative to the rise of the Bobo sensibility than the rise in the size and cultural influence of higher education. And that is, as the Marxists used to say, no coincidence.

Iconoclasm is not only de rigueur in popular culture and Hollywood, but is à la mode in high culture and institutionalized in academic life, where Nietzsche, Foucault, and their countless epigones and acolytes call incessantly for the transvaluation of values, the revising of history, the overturning of conventions, the discrediting of tradition, the debunking of pieties, the shocking of the bourgeoisie, the empowering of the powerless, the disempowering of the powerful, the liberation of sexuality, and so on, in an endless cinematic loop of self-congratulatory antimoralistic moralism. Young scholars make their reputations by “overturning conventional wisdom,” by publishing “pathbreaking” studies, by skewering sacred cows, by “reorienting” and “revisioning” our previous understandings of things.

Even the old coots can get into the act. A retired philosophy professor from Princeton named Harry G. Frankfurt recently published a slim (but not at all modest) book with the title On [a common epithet for barnyard excrement]. The book, a reworking of an essay Frankfurt had circulated many years ago that contains no great insights or developed ideas, created a minor sensation and sold many, many copies for Princeton University Press, which used to be above such fraudulence but chose, in this case, to promote the book to the hilt. In the age of immodesty, one shows one’s genuineness not only by using a dirty word in print, but by dressing it up in a white tie and tails and parading it before the reviewing stand as a demonstration of how immune one is to the mere social convention of thinking some things not appropriate for public disclosure.

Given that the professors’ liberatory rhetoric comports very well with the agenda of most adolescent students who find themselves away from parents and other constraints for the first time in their lives, it’s no wonder that it all works together so well, even if the professors sometimes suspect that the students are free riders – more interested in the uses to which the rhetoric can be put than in the ideas behind it. But the effect may have been more lasting than they think. For the post–World War II generation, college was surely the most powerfully formative experience of their lives, which explains the morbid ongoing interest in boomer-sentimental movies like The Big Chill, and other such increasingly dated evocations of the halcyon 60s.

But there is this thing that Max Weber called the “routinization of charisma,” and it happens to movements that begin to seriously contemplate creating museums for themselves. Nothing lasts forever, not even Woodstock Nation, without undergoing a sea change, and what has happened in academia, which remains one of the most procedurally conservative areas in American life, is a certain ossification of the liberatory dogma into something both weak and absurd.

I will illustrate this with an example from my own experience as a professor for nearly twenty years. A while back, when I was at an institution different from my present one, I was asked by a departmental search committee to read the files of their three finalists in search of a position in American women’s history. I consented, and read the files. They were fairly ordinary examples of their genre, but one of the applicants’ letters of recommendation stood out as a document which, precisely because of its ordinariness, illuminated the landscape like a lightning bolt. This letter was written by an uncontested luminary in the field, a very accomplished historian who co-edited an influential book series in women’s history and bestrode the field like a colossus. This was also someone whom I had met and knew to be a very pleasant, gracious, agreeable, and well-mannered person. The student’s dissertation was a community study, strictly delimited in its coverage of space and time. So I was a bit stunned to read the exact terms of the adviser’s praise for this student, our applicant. This sentence, in particular, struck me: “X has written the most transgressive dissertation it has ever been my pleasure to direct.”

What on earth could this word “transgressive” mean, I wondered. Did the student pepper the dissertation with offensive slogans, expletives, and racial slurs? Did she jump up on the table at her dissertation defense, strip off her clothes, and shriek like a banshee? Did she make death threats against public officials, or disclose the intimate details of their lives? She did none of these things. This was a perfectly conventional, even unusually docile and obedient graduate student, and honoring her work with the title of “transgressive” was, literally, the nicest thing that the adviser could have said about it. It was a conventional piece of work by a conventional graduate student, in an academic order in which the word “transgression” has completely lost its meaning, and become equivalent to the “disturbing” art on the innkeepers’ walls. A “transgression” rightly understood is a horrifying thing to any civilized person. To transgress is to take the next intensifying step beyond iconoclasm, for a transgressor is not only a person who violates rules but also someone who violates others. There is a gradient toward brutal aggression in the very idea of transgression. What does one make of a moral universe in which there are no words left to describe the things that rightly ought to horrify us, and where there is no justification left for the hiddenness of things that are shameful and embarrassing?

What such a story illustrates, and what the story of Princeton’s shameless little book illustrates, is the fact that the iconoclastic narrative that undergirds so much of contemporary academic life is completely exhausted and routinized, seamlessly assimilated into the bureaucracy of academic proceduralism. Those ideas lack any real incendiary power, but they also lack vigorous and principled opposition. The result is a general devaluation of ideas, which for me was epitomized by that strangely uncomprehending use of the word “transgressive.” Academic life suffers, as a result, from an enormous flatness and, to use a favored word of the 60s, irrelevance.

It is perhaps too much to hope for that to change anytime soon. The orthodoxy of iconoclasm may be completely enfeebled and discredited, but it can still summon the force to protect its perquisites. Perhaps what is most needed is something that the academy, at its best, excels in and is (or should be) warmly favorable to: a recovery of the spirit of real skepticism, including a skepticism that is skeptical of itself. Such a comprehensive skepticism will not only call on the carpet the battered pieties of the past, but also the tenured pieties of the present – the general social and cultural wreckage that has been wrought by the ideologies of iconoclasm and personal liberation. It would force the would-be prophets of transgression to answer for themselves, and say what they have to offer that can take the place of the things they have sought to destroy. It would force us to be more honest about the disconnection between the grandiloquent slogans and fantasies by which we claim to live, and the commonplace moral realities that actually order our lives. In short, it would force us to be more honest with ourselves about what flawed and inadequate and needy creatures we are – a recognition that will have to be the foundation of any reassertion of modesty as a cardinal virtue, and a centerpiece of a civilized and morally responsible life.

Such a spirit of skepticism may not be the same thing as modesty. But it is a close relation, and, if conscientiously applied, may be the way back to a recovery of that abandoned virtue. To paraphrase a familiar saying, some are born modest, and some achieve modesty. But there is nothing to prevent others from having it thrust upon them. Indeed, that will surely happen in due course, one way or another, willingly or unwillingly.