Slouching Towards Gomorrah (50 page)

In education at all levels, the substance of the curriculum changes to accommodate multiculturalist pressures. We have already seen this in feminist and Afrocentric studies, but it is everywhere. In New York state it is official educational doctrine that the United States Constitution was heavily influenced by the political arrangements of the Iroquois Confederacy. The official promulgation of this idea was not due to any research that disclosed its truth. Nor has any other state adopted this nonsensical idea. New York adopted it because the Iroquois mounted an intensive lobbying campaign directed at the State Department of Education. Far from this being a beneficial borrowing from another culture, it was a detrimental forcing of a false notion by one culture on another. John Leo notes that the decision “shows that some school authorities, eager to avoid minority group pressure
and rage, are now willing to treat the curriculum as a prize in an ethnic spoils system.”
¹³
That it is ideologcally driven by guilt and not an attempt to pacify a large bloc of voters is clear from the fact that there are only a little more than 38,000 Indians in New York state, most of whom probably have no interest in the myth of the Iroquois and the Constitution.

This sort of thing is happening across the country as various ethnic groups and feminists demand that history be rewritten according to their party lines. This not only debases history but pits the various groups against one another as they struggle for space in the textbooks. New York’s “interest in history is not as an intellectual discipline,” Schlesinger writes, “but rather as social and psychological therapy whose primary purpose is to raise the self-esteem of children from minority groups.”
¹⁴

Those who have traditionally been excluded because of race or gender are not helped by multiculturalists who teach them that European culture and standards are the cause of their difficulties and may be jettisoned, that history has no content aside from its ideological usefulness, that there are different ways of knowing, that linear thinking is a white male stratagem to oppress those who are not white or male, that standard English is no better than a variety of dialects such as “black English “To the extent the traditionally excluded believe any of this, they are additionally handicapped in life, and further excluded. To the extent they are taught that self-esteem comes before achievement and leads to achievement, they are lied to and held back.

In confidence games, there is a strategy called “cooling out the mark.” One of the con men, not known to be such by the victim, stays behind to sympathize, to point out that being taken wasn’t his fault, and generally to console and calm him so that he will be less likely to go to the police or pursue those who cheated him. Intentionally or not, multiculturalism is like that. It consoles low achievers by telling them that achievement has been falsely defined by white male, Eurocentric standards so that there is really no need to try to meet those standards. The result will be more failure, but the cooled-out minority student will have the consolation of knowing it was not his fault. There could be no strategy better suited to prevent what O’Brien thinks is the purpose of multiculturalism: “the enlargement and diversification of the composition
of the future governing class of the United States of America.” If there were a conspiracy by white males to consolidate their hegemony, they would find multiculturalism one of their best methods of oppression.

The adverse consequences of the multiculturalist relativism do not end there. If members of one ethnic group succeed more often in particular lines of work than members of other cultures, then, according to the multiculturalist philosophy, the reason must be discrimination; it could not be that some cultures are superior to others in preparing people for success in the modern world. If overt discrimination cannot be found, as is often the case because it does not exist, then discrimination must be built into our institutions and standards. These are said to be Eurocentric, as indeed they are. They are also said to be designed to buttress the hegemony of white, heterosexual males. Multiculturalism, therefore, necessarily requires affirmative action. If the standards are rigged against some groups, the solution is to use group membership as the basis for advancement. Thus, the multiculturalists have arranged matters so that our diversity does not enrich but festers.

Multiculturalism, or diversity, also requires “sensitivity.” We cannot, after all, value another person’s culture and outlook equally with our own unless we are sensitive to that which might offend him. Sensitivity, in turn, requires small tyrannies and personal humiliations, or worse. Worse is the destruction of careers and reputations. The only people ordered to take sensitivity training, so far as I am aware, are whites.

If anyone accused of insensitivity objects that he does not have racist or sexist attitudes, the sensitivity guru, sometimes genially, sometimes accusingly, is likely to respond that everyone, himself included, is a racist and a sexist. There is no way to argue with that. If someone insists that you have attitudes that you yourself are not aware of, it will be impossible for you to prove a negative. You might as well tell a psychoanalyst that you are sure you have no Oedipus complex. He knows better. “By its very nature,” Bernstein writes, sensitivity training “thrusts the concepts of ‘racism’ and ‘sexism’ and the various other isms to the forefront, turning them from ugly aberrations into the central elements of American life and implicitly branding anyone who does not share that assumption to be guilty of the very isms that he feels do not lie in
his heart.”
¹⁵
It is as if a prisoner pleading not guilty to a charge of armed robbery merely by denying his guilt became eligible for five to ten years in the penitentiary.

Only some groups have the right to demand sensitivity of others. Hispanics, Asians, blacks, American Indians, Aleuts, Pacific Islanders, homosexuals, and women have that right; heterosexual white males alone do not. So strong is the claim of such groups to sensitivity that it excuses them in the commission of what would otherwise be crimes. There was the notorious instance at the University of Pennsylvania when black and Hispanic students stole every copy of the student newspaper because a conservative columnist had criticized affirmative action. Penn’s president, Sheldon Hackney, whom President Clinton soon appointed to head the National Endowment for the Humanities, did not discipline the students but reprimanded campus police who had tried to stop the theft. One can imagine what would have happened had the students been whites stealing a black student newspaper. They would have been expelled or suspended and police would have been fired if they did
not
try to stop the theft.

More recently, at DePaul University in Chicago, the school newspaper ran a front-page story about a dance party sponsored by a black student publication that was broken up by police responding to a disturbance complaint. The article quoted a police report that identified some of the disruptive partyers as black males. Black students claimed insensitivity and demanded a front-page apology; when they got none, a group of them destroyed all the copies of the paper they could find. A supporter said, “If you’re going to have freedom of speech then it should be correct freedom of speech.”

DePaul’s president reprimanded those who mismanaged the party but also said that university departments were to respond with “sensitivity and diversity programs for staff,” a “university-wide diversity awareness program,” and enhancement of “multicultural staffing initiatives.” Not satisfied, a month later twenty to thirty black students seized the offices of the student newspaper, demanding the resignation of the article’s author and the paper’s faculty adviser, that the paper’s staff attend sensitivity sessions, and that at least one issue a year and one page each week be devoted to minority issues. The president told the paper it could not publish
until it met some of these demands. He agreed, among other things, to give the occupiers amnesty, provide tutoring to make up for the classes they missed during their ten-day occupation, increase the number of minorities on the faculty, establish a Diversity Council, and recruit and retain more minority students. The protest leader proclaimed an “almost complete victory” that gave them more than they expected.
¹⁶

Minority students should, of course, be held accountable for their actions in precisely the same way and to the same degree as white students. That said, it must also be said that minority students are only partially to blame for their behavior on campuses. The faculties and administrations who encourage that behavior in immature students are to blame. It is easy to see why the message of multiculturalism appeals to the minority student. If he comes from an ethnic or racial enclave, the university will be his first intense experience of pluralism. Even if he comes from a middle-class home in an integrated environment, entry into a university will be, as it is for most students, a somewhat disorienting experience. As Peter Berger points out, the opening of choices about values and vocations produces a process of individuation, which may then produce a backlash of de-individuation.
¹⁷

A youngster faced with a bewildering variety of choices and no longer embedded in the certainties of the culture and family from which he came becomes more individualistic but is also more inclined to feel lost and unhappy without those certainties. The multiculturalists on the faculty, in the administration, and in the student body come to the rescue by offering the lonesome and unhappy student the companionship and comfort of his ethnic group. All that is asked in return is that his primary loyalty be to that group. Group identity is the road to de-individuation. Henceforth, the student is not an individual but only a representative. The individual cannot easily reject an ethnic identity for an American identity, not only because of the anger of his or her group which will say the person is “acting white,” but because so many rewards, including friendship, depend upon insisting upon one’s ethnic identity.

So powerful has the fantasy world of multiculturalism become that many of us have accepted the myth that only a minority person can understand the thoughts and emotions of a person of the
same minority. That is a denial of the universality of human qualities. If that were true, a common culture and a peaceful society would be impossible. The multiculturalists, albeit inadvertently, make the case for a highly restrictive immigration policy, one that admits only people of European descent.

A white academic feminist is even prepared to concede that she cannot adequately interpret black literature because it is set within a history of racial oppression. The white scholar’s perspective is said to be utterly foreign to the culture from which the black literature issued.
¹⁸
It would seem to follow that black scholars cannot adequately interpret literature issuing from white culture and should not be allowed to teach it. Why should one of the oppressed be better able to interpret the literature of the oppressor race than the other way around? There is no reason, merely the fact that multiculturalism always sees the victim as uniquely insightful and comprehending.

Multiculturalism is a lie, or rather a series of lies: the lie that European-American culture is uniquely oppressive; the lie that culture has been formed to preserve the dominance of heterosexual white males; and the lie that other cultures are equal to the culture of the West. What needs to be said is that no other culture in the history of the world has offered the individual as much freedom, as much opportunity to advance; no other culture has permitted homosexuals, non-whites, and women to play ever-increasing roles in the economy, in politics, in scholarship, in government. What needs to be said is that American culture is Eurocentric, and it must remain Eurocentric or collapse into meaninglessness. Standards of European and American origin are the only possible standards that can hold our society together and keep us a competent nation. If the legitimacy of Eurocentric standards is denied, there is nothing else. There are no standards from any other quarter of the globe that we can agree upon. Islam cannot provide standards for us, nor can Africa or the Far East. Yet a single set of standards is essential to a sense of what authority is legitimate, what ideals must be maintained. The alternative to Eurocentrism, then, is fragmentation and chaos.

The attack on Eurocentrism is ignorant and perverse in an additional way. Europe made the modern world. Europe and America made the world that people from around the globe desperately
desire to enter. It is insane to say that they should enter this world in order to reject the culture that made it. European-American culture is the best the world has to offer, if one judges by where the people of the world want to immigrate. It is not hard to see what makes this culture superior. Europe was the originator of individualism, representative democracy, free-market capitalism, the rule of law, theoretical and experimental science, applied science or advanced technology, and so on through a list of achievements that have made the life of mankind much more free and prosperous. The static societies of Asia and Africa finally achieved dynamism, or varying degrees of it, only under the influence of European culture.

Today’s revolt against European standards is probably merely a continuation of the revolt against bourgeois rationalism that has marked this century. Ortega y Gassett characterized the phenomenon:

Standing on your head is not a bad description of multiculturalism. Unfortunately, it involves standing a civilization on its head. Fascism and Naziism were both romantic, anti-bourgeois movements. Communism, while pretending to scientific certainty, was clearly a religious movement impervious to rational argument. Perhaps hostility to rational, bourgeois culture reflects an irrationality in humans, a desire to escape rationality and firm standards. Sixties radicalism was acutely anti-bourgeois and romantic. Its family resemblance to fascism has already been noted. At a weaker, less fanatical level, the hostility to rationality is evidenced by American fascination with such farcical subjects as psychics, astrology, channeling, UFOs, and so on. Multiculturalism, as well as all of modern liberalism, belongs to this family of anti-rationalistic enterprises.