The Diversity Myth

by David O Sacks

  The BSU's tactics for dealing with nonconformists were still quite gentle, at least compared to the methods devised by MEChA, Stanford's militant Chicano/Latino group. MEChA sought to promote “unity” under its leadership, with a stress on radical causes (like the grape boycott and hunger strike). Those in Stanford's Hispanic community who disagreed with these priorities were singled out as “disrupters,” and subjected to personal attacks and harassment. One of the most frequent tactics, used against countless “disrupters,” involved the physical “encirclement” of individual Hispanic students and staff who disagreed with MEChA. In such encirclements, five MEChA members would surround the lone “disrupter” and make pointed and abrasive statements until the student was intimidated into silence. The individual would be accused of lacking solidarity, betraying his people, and so on; a number of students were driven to tears in the process.62

  In the spring of 1989, MEChA launched a takeover of El Centro Chicano, the university-funded Hispanic student center on campus. Director Juan Yniguez, who hoped to make the center open to the entire Hispanic community, was denounced because he “never envisioned unity in the community as a possibility in the first place.”63 Yniguez was subject to taunts, harassment, and abuse (no protection from fighting words here), and both he and his staff were constantly asked what their “employment plans are for the future.”64 MEChA's critics received degrading and menacing phone calls and had their places of work repeatedly vandalized.65 For Yniguez, the last straw came when he and his four-year-old daughter encountered decapitated birds on their doorstep at home.66 As a result of these tactics, Yniguez eventually resigned and someone more in line with the MEChistas replaced him.

  Even more disturbing than these encirclements and systematic harassments, however, was the Stanford administration's response to MEChA's coup. When 40 Hispanic students sent a complaint to President Kennedy and Dean of Student Affairs James Lyons, the administration responded by informing MEChA of who the troublemakers were.67 MEChA members proceeded to call the 40 students who had written the letter to pressure them into withdrawing it.68 Predictably, MEChA accused the letter writers of undermining unity:

  The recent letter supposedly supported by 40 members of our community to Donald Kennedy is a destructive effort in that it only serves to keep our community from focusing on the true concerns of Chicanos and Latinos at Stanford…. It has shocked many in our community…. It is behavior such as this that creates a negative atmosphere in our community, not MEChA.69

  The letter writers became subject to the very kinds of abuse they had complained about in the first place, as MEChA redoubled its harassment.

  Unfortunately, these muzzling techniques worked. A number of students withdrew their names from the petition, and even those who did not withdraw their names did not push the matter any further: what would be the use, given the apparent complicity of the administration? As a result, MEChA achieved its main objective (“unity,” or at least the appearance of unity, which was almost as good), and more than a year elapsed before this particular series of events came to light.70 In the end, for many non-MEChA Hispanic students, the whole episode became an object lesson in the price of criticizing the new multicultural state. Much like Soviet dissidents writing letters to Premier Brezhnev complaining about the KGB's human rights violations, those who sought redress from the Kennedy administration for multicultural abuses—such as the 40 letter signers, or the seven Phi Delt protestors at Otero—often became the logical next targets of the very abuses they challenged.

  Moral Luck

  Taken separately, these episodes are easy to dismiss. Each incident involves a handful of targets or more often, only a single person. After the fact, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, it is always possible to identify ways in which the targets could have avoided opprobrium. It is then seductive to reinterpret their failure to do so as a kind of misbehavior. But taken together, these episodes cannot be dismissed. They bring a disturbing picture into focus. The multicultural hunt for nonexistent “oppressors” who can be held responsible for all of America's ills leads to the vilification of innocents. Individuals are held responsible for crimes they did not commit.

  In the process, justice is not the only thing sacrificed. So is truth, the very mission of the university. Sustaining false accusations necessitates the replacement of facts with myths. A detailed case is rarely brought against individuals; rather, an accusation of wrongdoing simply requires identifying someone as a member of a mythical group of oppressors.

  The problem with these myths is not exactly that they ignore cause and effect, but that they require an excess of cause and effect. Causal links are perceived even where none exist, or where only the most tenuous correlations can be drawn between an offense and the offending person. In Salem, old women identified as witches were blamed for all sorts of individual misfortunes and social problems. In that case, the mythical causal link between the women and the problems was that the witches had supposedly been casting evil spells on people. Similarly, primitive peoples assumed that gods or demons were responsible for illnesses and plagues. Multicultural superstition revolves around a similar primitivism.

  Multiculturalists invent myths of causation when they blame Copeland's for contributing to the oppression of blacks or Jan Kerkhoven for contributing to the oppression of women. Certainly, a sporting goods store would appear to have no link to a police beating hundreds of miles away. But by creating an elaborate web of connections and arbitrarily focusing on a small subset of these connections, multiculturalists are able to isolate particular culprits as the parties responsible for societal ills. This mythical victimology is not falsifiable: If any links in the causal chain were shown to be fanciful, then new and circuitous routes of causation would spring up to replace them. For the most part, the multiculture's “oppressors” are never quite sure what hit them, because they never could have imagined their actions to have all of the ramifications perceived by the multicultural community.

  The general direction in which this bizarre scapegoating ritual is leading is not difficult to discern. Institutions like Stanford University are indoctrinating the current generation of American graduates with a new mythology—a complete pantheon, filled with heroes and villains, deified victims and demonized oppressors. Like the shamans of primitive peoples, the high priests of multiculturalism provide their acolytes with a comprehensive doxology, offering explanations and connections to make sense of an otherwise mysterious and complex reality. This mythology allows them to point to deep structural problems for any mishaps and identify immediate culprits.

  The multiculture is not only creating chronic malcontents; it is providing them with a lexicon of New Age crimes. These crimes have no objective indicators or causation. Much like the case of witchcraft, which could only be discerned by the “victims” of spells, their legitimacy is guaranteed by the mental states of the “victims” alone. Since every individual reacts and takes offense in unpredictable ways, nobody is safe from the multicultural witch-hunt. There are no principled rules—indeed, there are not even arbitrary guides—telling people how to conduct themselves in order not to give offense. The various episodes may fit a general pattern, but it is never clear when a particular event will meet the threshold to trigger a multicultural episode. Because multicultural causation is arbitrary, individuals are targeted almost at random; they are not in any meaningful sense morally culpable.

  Multiculturalists often claim that they are merely holding individuals to account for the consequences of their actions. Little could be further from the truth. Multiculturalism is teaching a new generation to engage in wanton name-calling and senseless accusation. When a stray look could lead to a charge of sexual harassment or an ill-timed joke to a charge of a racial slur, careers and lives are needlessly destroyed. Hapless innocents get thrown out of housing, lose their jobs because of “insensitivity,” or spend years fighting frivolous lawsuits. The accused are not morally flawed, just unlucky.

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  While the specific details vary from episode to episode, the larger storyline always seems very much the same. Individuals or organizations embody or espouse views that are incompatible with the multiculture: a defense of traditional morality, of the free-enterprise system, or of Western civilization, or perhaps merely a minor dissent from the multicultural orthodoxy. The community finds this challenge (however miniscule and seemingly insignificant) intolerable, regardless of whether the challenge is presented seriously or humorously, is framed positively or negatively, or is advanced by a 70-year-old professor or a 19-year-old sophomore. The multicultural response seeks to achieve a unanimous (or near unanimous) condemnation of the critics, as the initial incident becomes the excuse for “educational” opportunities and a springboard for other “multicultural events.”

  These “multicultural events,” more reminiscent of totalitarian show trials or medieval inquisitions than of the rational pursuit of truth, raise an important but troubling question: Do Stanford's faculty and administrators have nothing better to do with their time? Even if their causes were worthwhile, the extent of the effort still seems excessive. A Shakespeare teacher should have more interesting things to do than circulate petitions condemning a library, and a law school dean should have more pressing things to do than hand out fliers disavowing military recruiters. The silliness of these activities is matched only by the zeal of the respective advocates.

  Nietzsche once noted that most people would rather believe in nothingness than in nothing. If the multiculturalists were true relativists, believing in nothing at all, then nothing would matter, and there would not even be a need or much of a point to any of these unsavory attacks and ritual denunciations. But, as already noted many times, the multiculturalists are not full-fledged nihilists. And because they would prefer an anti-Western nothingness to a relativistic nothing, they are left with the singular task of purging the community of those who might suggest alternatives. These systematic attacks, expulsions, and persecutions are at the very core of multiculturalism.

  The multicultural explanations and rationalizations for these various “multicultural events” are likely to be incomplete, if not downright misleading. The major reason for the denunciation of Keith Rabois was not sensitivity towards homosexuals, just as the major reason for the opposition to the Reagan Library was not ecological and the major reason for the elimination of the Western Culture program was not curricular. Multicultural events are not primarily for the benefit of a handful of activists concerned about ecology or abstract ideals of nonpartisanship. One should not be distracted by what is taking place on the multicultural stage—by the morality plays of self-proclaimed “victims,” who use their status to attack the politically incorrect representatives of the West. Of course, like the “witches” at Salem and the dissidents in the Soviet Union, the suffering inflicted on the “people's enemies” is very real. But for the multiculturalists, this suffering is just an incidental part of the price that must be paid to reconstitute the multicultural community in the only possible way—in perpetual opposition to the West.

  The multicultural mob does best if it can find actual representatives of the West to persecute, just as the communist regimes of the 20th century could stage the most dramatic show trials on those rare occasions when they actually caught real subversives. For both of these regimes, however, the most important component is that the spectators believe the distortions and untruths that they are being told. Salem was not a community that was confronted with an epidemic of witchcraft, but merely a community that believed it was so confronted. In a similar way, the supposed Western representatives need not be particularly credible enemies of the multicultural state. As in the case of Copeland's, the Hispanic students attacked by MEChA, or the liberal male in the feminist studies class, the multicultural imagination can be counted on to do the rest. The theater of multiculturalism exists primarily for the benefit of the spectators, so that the entire community can release a kind of cathartic anger.

  In light of these observations, it is worth considering the work of Romanian ethnologist Mircea Eliade. Eliade studied religious rituals and observed that in many archaic cultures, these sacred rites served a foundational purpose in describing the creation of the world. Because archaic societies subscribed to a cyclical rather than a linear (Western) conception of time, these rituals, from the point of view of the participants, actually reenacted the original creation of the world. Each new year involved a repetitious celebration of the cosmogony—of the passage from chaos to cosmos. Eliade summarizes the elements of the annual rituals accompanying the new year:

  Fasting, ablutions, and purifications; extinguishing the fire and ritually rekindling it in a second part of the ceremonial; expulsion of demons by noises, cries, blows (indoors), followed by their pursuit through the village with uproar and hullabaloo; this expulsion can be practiced under the form of the ritual sending away of an animal or of a man, regarded as the material vehicle through which the faults of the entire community are transported beyond the limits of the territory it inhabits.71

  A successful completion of the sacred rituals guaranteed that the world (and the human community participating in these rituals) would go through the same eternal cycle anew.

  The multiculture—with its hunger fasts, expulsions, and ritualized scapegoatings—bears some remarkable similarities to the archaic cultures studied by Eliade. Like archaic societies throughout the world, Stanford's multicultural tribe periodically reproduces the original event—the rejection of Western Culture—in which the multiculture had its genesis. All of the original components come back together for a mythical moment in time: the mob chanting slogans, the individual or institution that symbolizes the West (or some trace of the West), the elimination of the latter by the former, and the re-creation of the multicultural community in the process of this elimination. In this sense, the protest at Copeland's (or any of the other incidents described in this book) was not merely a “multicultural event,” but became another incarnation of the original multicultural event itself.

  Of course, Stanford's multiculturalists do not perceive themselves to be engaged in any sort of primitive scapegoating ritual. In this new (as in the very old) context, the true nature of the ritual must remain hidden if it is to be foundational. If the multiculturalists ever realized that they were themselves creating new victims, presumably their zeal for the process would cease. At the very least, they would lack the passionate conviction needed to transform each discrete event into another founding myth.

  Nevertheless, no matter how evocative the parallels to the non-Western cultures studied by Eliade, there also are differences. Although the degree of uniformity is remarkable, the multiculture is unable to shut out all foreign ideas and thus cannot achieve the complete closure that it seeks. A unanimity of belief, regarding the proper allocation of guilt and innocence (and a consensus regarding who the victims and victimizers are), cannot be reached in the multiculture as it could in archaic cultures. At the end of the day, disagreements remain, so that no finite list of scapegoats satisfies everyone. Multiculturalism promises to found a new utopia, but only at an infinite price, as a never-ending list of the people's enemies must be denounced and expelled.

  The multiculture will never reach “the new kind of community” sought by President Kennedy. Stanford under multiculturalism is not a New Jerusalem, the shining city on the hill envisioned by the Puritans of New England, providing a beacon of light to an unrepentant world. But more than any of Eliade's primitive tribes, perhaps, multicultural Stanford does resemble the day-to-day exigencies of 17th-century Salem, with its similarly explosive mixture of superstition and zeal. The denunciation “you witch, welcome to Salem” points to both the parallels and the differences. It evokes the imagery of Salem, of the lynching mob confronting the lone individual, while, on a deeper level, reminding us that Stanford is not Salem, for nobody in Salem would have ever used those words to signify what they today
mean. In Salem, nobody seemed troubled by the notion that the so-called witches actually might be victims or scapegoats. Convinced of their righteousness, Salem's good citizens could be resolute in closing ranks against the offenders in their midst. Scapegoating depends on a misrecognition of the scapegoat, so that the efficacy of the scapegoating process is inversely proportional to a community's understanding of that process.

  Unlike Salem's populace, today's multiculturalists are painfully aware of victimization and scapegoating—at least in the abstract. They speak of almost nothing else, and their words betray a level of knowledge that far surpasses the innocent ignorance of the archaic past. Multicultural discourse is filled with accounts of how societies and groups of people subordinate minorities and persecute outcasts. But these accounts are generally limited to other times and other places, and never applied to the one place where some immediate applications are necessary—the here and now, whether at Stanford University or in multicultural America. Rather, the extreme focus on victimization has become the method par excellence for a new round of victimization, with multiculturalists using their much-vaunted victim status as the proverbial stick with which to beat others over the head.

  Ultimately, the liberation of Caliban—and, for once, it does not matter whether one prefers Shakespeare's original or Cesaire's revision, because the two authors are in agreement on this most fundamental point—means nothing more or less than the freedom to express his resentments without any restraint whatsoever. In a similar way, multicultural victimology has founded a new community that channels its collective anger in myriad directions.