The Diversity Myth

by David O Sacks

  The consequences of this division have been particularly serious and troubling in the realm of gender relations, which have rarely seemed more strained. Recent events at the Department of Transportation are just one indicator of how some of the multicultural victimology is being implemented in America. In a bizarre (but by no means unusual) episode in June 1992, the Federal Aviation Administration held a sensitivity training workshop on gender relations where male employees allegedly were forced to walk through a gauntlet of women who fondled the men's genitals and ridiculed their sexual prowess.71 “Women were also asked to look at photographs of penises in various states of arousal and were told to use them to rate their male colleagues’ sexual attributes,” reported the Washington Times. The purpose of this session was to “educate” the men about “how it feels to be a woman.”72

  Once again, there are eerie similarities to the Stanford experiment. On campus, the raison d'etre of sensitivity training is that men “just don't get it.” That is, men do not understand the special perspective of women and thus behave inappropriately around them. The belief that men and women fail to communicate is part and parcel of the more radical feminist view that the natural way men (the patriarchy) and women interact is antagonistically. Men victimize women, and it is high time for women to get them back. It is hardly surprising that to the extent “sensitivity” trainers are receptive to radical feminism, they become insensitive or hostile to men. The results are the same on the federal level, once the government has bought into the radical feminist position about “how it feels to be a woman” in its efforts to “educate” men.

  Gender strife hits home in a way that the reparations movement or plight of gays in San Francisco does not. How men and women interact determines the nature and composition of families, the building blocks of communities and society. Over the last few centuries, for instance, the replacement of the extended family with the nuclear family has precipitated a seismic shift in the social order. As bonds of family have dissipated, the federal government has come to play an increasing role in providing a safety net (though cause and effect here are the subject of much debate). The multicultural reshaping of the family will likely have ramifications of similar magnitude, in directions we may only guess.

  Gender relations affect everybody's life in a central way, and so it is not surprising that a sensational case like that of Lorena and John Wayne Bobbitt grabs people's attention. While men generally squirm, wince, and cross their legs when they think about Mr. Bobbitt's fate, many women react to Lorena Bobbitt's cutting off of the penis of her allegedly abusive husband with a different state of mind. Time Magazine essayist Barbara Ehrenreich has described this “grass-roots female backing for Ms. Bobbitt”:

  The woman in the streets is making V signs by raising two fingers and bringing them together with a snipping motion…. And, without any prompting from NOW, thousands of women are sporting bumper stickers identifying themselves as BEYOND BITCH and buying T shirts that say TOUGH ENOUGH or make unflattering comparisons between cucumbers and men.73

  The emergence of the new family, comprised of “beyond bitch” mothers (should they choose to bear children at all) and men who are tough enough to stand them, certainly represents a sea change from Ozzie and Harriet. Interestingly, Ms. Ehrenreich herself makes the multicultural connection, identifying Lorena Bobbitt as a “multicultural manicurist.”74

  This description is curious, though, because most manicurists are not well versed in the intricacies of black hairstyles, group communications, pizza consumption, and other multicultural dogma. While Ms. Bobbitt likely would not think of herself as a “multiculturalist,” the notable aspect of the reaction to her is that she is perceived as such, a subtle recognition of her role as a catalyst of the “Beyond Bitch” culture. The primary reason for her embrace by multicultural America is that, in the new atmosphere of gender antagonism, her story functions on an allegorical level. It is not the story of one disturbed woman injuring one man who may have abused her. It is the story of All Women being liberated from All Men. As Ehrenreich explains, “The retail clerks who send her letters of support, the homemakers who cackle wildly every time they sharpen the butcher knife are…tired of being victims. And they're eager to see women fight back by whatever means necessary.”75 Lorena Bobbitt is portrayed as striking a blow (literally) for women all over the world. And similarly, John Bobbitt, who stars in this multicultural production as the Man, is perceived as the victimizer, rather than the unsuspecting victim of the cruel punishment inflicted upon him.

  Reduced to allegorical form for popular consumption, the episode is reminiscent of a Greek myth, which is not meant to convey a factual account of events but rather a moral virtue or message about society. “I'm not willing to wait another decade or two for gender peace to prevail,” Ehrenreich finally concludes. “And if a fellow insists on using his penis as a weapon, I say that, one way or another, he ought to be swiftly disarmed.”76 So what Lorena Bobbitt did to John Wayne Bobbitt, or what John did to Lorena, becomes symbolic of what women do to men or men do to women. It is part of a larger story line in the saga of the gender war, the unstated implication of Ehrenreich's suggestion that “gender peace” is absent. To the extent that Lorena plays the role of victim in this myth, she is indeed “multicultural.” As for her unfortunate husband, he is relegated to guest spots on the Howard Stern Show.

  The Bobbitts are just one case where history has been mythologized into a broader story of heroes and villains. The reparations movement invokes a similar pattern, where whole classes of people (the descendents of slaves and the descendents of slave owners) become the victims and oppressors. Many reparations advocates expand the myth to include all the world's people, maintaining that Western nations should redress African nations and other Third World countries. Closer to home, we have such allegorical tales as the Tawana Brawley hoax, about which The Nation editorialized, “In cultural perspective, if not in fact, it doesn't matter whether the crime occurred or not.”77 “The facts were irrelevant, it seems,” columnist John Leo observed, “because Brawley's story line reflected the broader reality that whites have abused blacks for centuries. In other words, forget about the facts. Just tell stories that convey emotional truth.”78 One is reminded of the anthem of Group Comm—“I don't care about facts, I care about how you feel.” Nevertheless, every time such a hoax is revealed, one also has to wonder about the accuracy of the underlying story line, whose credibility would seem to depend on the empirical accuracy of some of the specific stories. How could one possibly know that any of these cases are truthful, if educated people are in the habit of fictionalizing reality and Stanford graduates can turn a candlelight vigil into a KKK rally?

  Myth is integral to the new culture because a historically grounded view of the world would completely undermine Caliban's kingdom; a factual account of events would reveal that many self-proclaimed victims have never been wronged and that many supposed victimizers have been falsely accused. Indeed, while a culture of victimization and blame makes every misfortune the fault of someone else, a civilization based on history recognizes two other possibilities—that an individual can bring a problem upon himself, or that nobody at all is at fault. Even though the very possibility of tragedy is anathema to the culture of blame, the unfortunate reality is that not all bad things that happen to good people are caused by other human beings.

  Just as multicultural attitudes towards sex are turning America's genders against one another, multicultural attitudes towards economic matters focus people's unhappiness with their current income levels outwards. The target of these resentments are rich people, and capitalism more generally. In the multicultural allegory, the wealthy are per se oppressive, because their success creates misfortune for others. The other two possible causes of poverty—bad fortune or bad choices—are rejected a priori. Quite naturally, multiculturalists conveniently overlook the fact that without productive people paying taxes, there could be no welfare for the poor.

>   The Clinton administration has effectively tapped into such sentiments of class warfare in pushing its policies. In his book The Agenda, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward (no conservative) describes the president's glee at punishing the rich with higher tax rates:

  At 10:15 p.m…the [budget vote count went over the top, to 218]…. Clinton grabbed his head with his fingers and thumbs, digging in like a madman. He whooped and threw his arms around each of his aides…. Clinton said that Carville was the only one of them making top-tax-bracket money, and he would be the one paying the tax increase…. He would gladly pay it all, someone joked. Clinton bent Carville over his big Oval Office desk to pick his pocket…. About 20 of them posed around the desk with Clinton's hand in Carville's pocket, the populist president fleecing the rich…. Clinton finally released the wallet from Carville's back pocket. Some $80 in cash was inside. The president took it out and started throwing the $20 bills around the Oval Office, symbolically redistributing the wealth.79

  It is difficult to imagine a similar spectacle occurring in Franklin Roosevelt's Oval Office or that of Lyndon Johnson. To former presidents, taxes on the rich were simply the means for the liberal welfare state. Within the multicultural administration, by contrast, taxing the rich seems to have become an end in itself. In Woodward's account, Clinton does not take particular care to distribute the money in an equitable way. He seems to care very little where the money goes; as long as the rich (represented by Carville) no longer possess it, he seems happy.

  But politics are usually a lagging, not a leading, indicator. Woodward is correct that, appearances notwithstanding, Clinton is acting like a “populist president.” The administration's class warfare rhetoric represents a salient political strategy because it taps into a culture of blame. Hillary Clinton, at least, understands this. Woodward reveals that part of her political strategy for gaining public support of her health care program was to generate myths blaming one class of people for the deprivations of another:

  [Hillary] told her staff, they had to find a story to tell, with heroes and villains…. Research showed the enormous profits of drug companies, and Hillary was poised to denounce them. Hillary wanted to find more villains. She ruled out family doctors, since most people liked their physicians; but she had no problem going after specialists, such as plastic surgeons who performed facelifts and other expensive cosmetic operations. AMA, one of the best financed and most powerful lobbying groups in the country, was an obvious, lush target, but for the very reason of its power would have to get a pass. She decided on the insurance companies.80

  Tellingly, those with the most power, such as the AMA, “have to get a pass.” Only the relatively powerless can suffer the vilification of being labelled a “victimizer.”

  The most remarkable feature of the culture of blame is that it has nothing to do with questions of actual guilt or innocence. One suspects that no monetary payoff, whatever the amount, would make reparations advocates happy, because their carping has nothing whatsoever to do with real grievances. Nor is it likely that any amount of academic recognition would satisfy the Afrocentrists, or that public recognition would appease the homosexuals who deliberately contracted H.I.V. Similarly, no particular change in the behavior of pharmaceutical companies would end their vilification, because no specific action they took led to their scapegoating. They are just the morally unlucky, unwilling participants in the self-indulgence of others. These myths are not the means to some larger end (the rare exception, perhaps, being their cynical invocation by a politician). In the culture of blame, they have become an end in themselves.

  The Problem and the Solution

  Because the multiculture represents a cultural phenomenon, we have examined it as such, applying the techniques any good anthropologist might use. We have focused on the way this new culture is organized, how personal identity is conceived, what domains are sacred and which ones are taboo, and, more generally, how all of these different pieces fit together. We have found that the multiculture can perhaps best be thought of as a neoprimitive culture in which individuals are not recognized as such and, in some sense, do not even exist. Instead, people conceive of their identity relationally, in a way that is profoundly dysfunctional: racial minorities in relation to racism, women in relation to sexism, homosexuals in relation to homophobia. These interdividual identities drive multicultural ressentiment and require multiculturalists to expel and denounce their (largely imaginary) enemies; instead of the rule of law, one sees an archaic scapegoating ritual gone berserk. The multiculture is profoundly antirational and seems singularly incapable of perceiving itself as it really is—perhaps one of the main reasons the whole edifice has continued for so long. As a result, the multicultural academy appears shallow and hypocritical, but these are merely symptoms of the underlying illness: The core problem with the multiculture is interdividuality itself, and any satisfactory solution to that problem will require people to transcend their interdividual identities.

  As a historical matter, we have seen that the multiculture largely can be traced back to the protest movements of the 1960s. This should hardly be surprising, since many leading multiculturalists (whether faculty at Stanford or the president of the United States) were student activists back then, and today see themselves as pushing the struggles of that era to a logical conclusion. But at the same time, there has been a broadening of the focus, from immediate political goals (for example, civil rights or the removal of the U.S. from Vietnam) towards sweeping cultural transformation. Or, to frame the matter in another way, the political field of activity has been widened, to the point where just about everything has become political—from cartoons in bathroom stalls to church sermons to the relationships between men and women. No refuge from the new political order—no space for the individual—appears to be left.

  One of the especially telling slogans of 1960s activists had declared, “If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.” The slogan denoted a neat division of people, between those who stood on the side of Progress (or History) and those who were opposed to it. The multiculture has developed a similar distinction with respect to “victims” and “victimizers”; the former are privileged in the multiculture, whereas the latter (“part of the problem”) must be excluded. More complex possibilities—that the roles of victim and victimizer are less clearly defined (so that the same person can be both in different contexts, or even in the same context), that all people are simultaneously part of the problem and part of the solution, and that real solutions start on an individual (rather than a collective) level—are implicitly precluded. Once again, it is this very interdividual mind-set that has become the real problem: There are too many people who think that everything is political, that “top-level curriculum decisions all the way down to what you'll be eating for dinner tonight” affect the ordering of society, that, in short, “if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.”

  A priori, there are several possible approaches one might envision towards counteracting the multiculture. One sort of response is political in nature: If we could systematically undo the damage wrought by multiculturalists, then perhaps we would undo the multiculture itself. A second sort of response goes somewhat deeper and is cultural in nature: If the multiculture represents the ascension of a new culture over the West, then perhaps we could move beyond multiculturalism through a further round of cultural innovation—for example, through some sort of a counter-counterculture to attack and displace the multicultural counterculture. We will consider and reject both of these approaches as inadequate and conclude by outlining a third, very different framework. We believe that only a civilization centered on individual rights offers the possibility for a genuine escape from the problems that underlie the multiculture.

  The Political Response. The most natural inclination, perhaps, is to address each of the symptoms of the multiculture, one at a time—from unjust hiring preferences to speech restrictions, from mistaken curricular prior
ities to the funding of obscene art, from domestic-partner programs for homosexuals to racially gerrymandered election districts. According to this approach, the multicultural disease will be cured by treating all of its symptoms. If Americans would only elect the right president (along with representatives and senators committed to fighting the multiculture), if universities would only appoint better leaders and hire more responsible faculty, then, so goes the reasoning, we could solve each of these problems once and for all.

  If multiculturalism were no more than a set of poorly conceived policies and entitlements, such a political approach might suffice. But it is much more than that: At a very minimum, the multiculture also includes the attitudes, habits, and beliefs—the character—of the people who are implementing these diverse policies. As a result, any specific repeal effort would not stop the future enactment of similar programs, so long as the underlying worldviews and psychological makeup of the multicultural actors remained essentially unaffected. A political response is necessary but not sufficient: Unless much else changes at the same time, such a response is akin to cutting off the tip of an iceberg, only to see another piece emerge from the angry sea.