BOOK REVIEW NONFICTION : No Room for Public Debate in This Politically Correct World : IN DEFENSE OF ELITISM <i> by William A. Henry III</i> ; Doubleday $20, 224 pages

It has become almost commonplace in America to be virtually silent in public about the values we espouse so passionately in private. We are silent, of course, in a well-intentioned effort to promote cultural harmony.

But I would argue that without the occasional, provocative interruptions from loudmouths such as William Henry III, our public silence may well have just the opposite effect: widening the already troubling gaps between what whites and blacks, men and women, conservatives and liberals, believe.

In the last year, two prominent writers--James Q. Wilson in “The Moral Sense” and Robert Wright in “The Moral Animal”--have broken this silence by defending traditional values similar to Henry’s. But whereas Wilson and Wright have couched their arguments in the softer language of philosophy and science, respectively, Henry goes out of his way to be provocatively blunt.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning critic with a habit of working 80-hour weeks (first for the Boston Globe, then for Time magazine), Henry confesses that in those few moments when he takes a break from the green glow of his computer screen and looks around him, he sees a country seemingly chucking the values--in equality and industry, curiosity and rationality--that he holds so dear.

On TV, a beer commercial advises “Why ask why?” while a Wheel of Fortune contestant, asked which letters might be found missing in “Secretar of State Gerge Sht,” says, “Pat, Give me an M , please.” In state capitals, officials help foster the belief that life itself is a wheel of fortune by enticing citizens to gamble their money away in lotteries.

In schools, special interests leave officials so cowed that a deaf girl (or “student with a birthright of silence”) is allowed to enter a national speech contest, while a leading American literature textbook excludes “overrepresented . . . male Jews” like Saul Bellow in favor of “rediscovered” feminist writers like Charlotte Perkins Gilman. And finally, in the streets, activists denounce as “white values” the injunctions “go to school, get a job, get married.”

Not surprisingly, advance reviews in the book trade have dismissed Henry as merely another white male snob “lashing back” at the hard-fought gains of women and minorities. And indeed, Henry anticipates that he will be lumped in with “some pretty strange bedfellows--racists, male supremacists, patriotic zealots, reactionaries, religious exotics, and assorted other creeps.”

But Henry--a registered Democrat, “card-carrying member of the ACLU” and the recipient of national awards for his journalism in defense of civil and gay rights--persuasively argues that a kind of anti-intellectual Populism is running amok today that is “eerily reminiscent” of the 19th-Century “Know-Nothing Movement”:

“Where that movement centered on ugly nativism and exclusion,” Henry writes, “this one carries inclusion to its comparable extreme, celebrating every arriviste notion, irate minority group, self-assertive culture and cockamamie opinion as having equal cerebral weight, and probably superior moral heft, to the reviled wisdom and attainments of tradition.”

Perhaps most controversially, Henry questions the central American promise of “equality for all.” While “equality of opportunity” is a reasonable and reachable goal, he argues, “equality of outcomes” is impossible because people have significantly different levels of intelligence and motivation.

This is not to suggest that Henry’s book is being slammed simply because it is bold. On the contrary, one can have a field day pointing out its faults:

Automatically equating social success with mental intelligence, Henry fails to consider that wealth can be inherited rather than earned and that our society often reserves its stingiest rewards for those who help it most (e.g., public school teachers). He claims that America’s “elite” elected representatives are allowed to “trust their brains and chart their own courses,” while in fact most men and women in Congress seem forced to trust only their focus groups and to chase mostly after campaign contributions.

Most disturbing, he claims that “any benefit to society from the mother’s working has to be weighted against the developmental loss to the next generation.” Henry means well: He’s concerned that today’s kids have come to see their parents for only a blink at breakfast and bedtime. But in contending that the only solution is for a single caretaker (the mother, his language strongly suggests) to stay at home “at least until the children enter school,” he is essentially asking women to commit professional suicide by dropping out of today’s rapidly changing job market. A far better solution is for men and women to share child-care burdens, something that could come about if businesses would only offer dual-income couples the option of a four-day workweek.

Still, just when Henry stretches our tolerance for the offensive to its limit (as when he writes, “It’s scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose”), he manages to win our sympathy back with self-deprecating humor. At one point, for instance, he acknowledges that “any woman still reading is probably wishing she could puncture my bombastic carcass with whatever is the contemporary equivalent of a hatpin.”

Such readers need wish no more, for shortly after finishing this book last summer, Henry died in London of a heart attack.

I, at least, will miss him, for it strikes me that even worse than all of his ideological excesses in defending traditional values is our culture’s increasing reluctance to discuss those values in public.