Another great success of the P.C. critique is that it has helped mitigate the national influence of university ideologues such as Noam Chomsky, Andrew Ross, Eve Sedgwick, and Molefi Asante. Many of these radicals were the “public intellectual” darlings of the late eighties and early nineties. They were regularly featured on television, their articles routinely appearing in the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker. Their views were considered significant in shaping enlightened public opinion. But the conservative exposé of the narrowness and intolerance of these ideologues subjected many of them to intense national ridicule, and it has largely cut them off from having a broad cultural influence. Every now and then, one of the radicals surfaces to make some outlandish claim, is greeted either by indifference or by ridicule, and promptly ducks out of public sight.
On campus, the influence of the radicals remains strong. Despite the demise of the speech codes, multiculturalism and political correctness are still powerful forces to contend with. When I was a freshman at Dartmouth, there were two types of professors. The first group was made up of old-line liberals; they usually wore jackets and ties and spoke in an elegant, formal tone. Then there were the radicals whose politics were shaped in the 1960s. These professors wore informal clothing, wanted to be addressed by their first names, and used such words as “shit” in class. The radicals had their ideological agenda; but at least they were balanced by the old-line liberals, who believed in such things as high academic standards, teaching the classics, and maintaining the basic canons of civility.
Now, however, the old-line liberals are gone and, on many campuses across the country, the generation of the 1960s is fully in charge. Today’s deans and professors come overwhelmingly from this group. While a few have abandoned their old commitments, in general the intellectuals of this generation continue to espouse a worldview that took shape during their formative years. It is not hard to discover that ethos by reading what these fellows wrote in the 1960s and 1970s. Many of them predicted that capitalism would disintegrate, that its inner contradictions would be exposed. These savants expected guerilla revolutions of a Marxist stripe to break out all over the world. The future, they were convinced, lay in models adopted in Stalin’s Russia, or Mao’s China, or Castro’s Cuba, or Ortega’s Nicaragua.
Well, history has proved unkind to such prophecies. And now many from this sixties-generation are distressed to see that the world has moved dramatically in a conservative direction. Even worse, the professors know that they are in no position to reverse these trends. They can’t put the Berlin Wall back up. They can’t restore the Sandinistas to power in Nicaragua. They have no hope of stopping the powerful current of economic globalization. “But hey,” the professor at Oberlin College consoles himself, “at least here I can take over the English department.” So what we are seeing is a desperate effort on the part of the radicals to control their own environment, to dominate their fetid little ponds, to impose their political values on a new generation of students.
What can be done about this? Well, probably the best hope lies in the actuarial tables. The radicals now have tenure, and in one sense we simply have to wait until they die off. In the meantime, however, there are many ways to fight this entrenched group.
The best way to defeat political correctness is to expose its lies. Basically, P.C. is about pretending, about publicly insisting that something is true when we know privately that it isn’t, about shutting down people who won’t conform to the prevailing orthodoxy. Thus the three canonical principles of political correctness are to deny the relevant differences between racial groups, between men and women, and between heterosexuals and homosexuals. The observation that young black males have a higher violent crime rate than young white males is dismissed as a “stereotype,” even though a mountain of empirical data supports it. The military is relentlessly pressured by feminist groups to pretend that women are just as strong physically as men. Homosexual activists assure us, with straight faces, that “AIDS is an equal opportunity killer.” And so on, fiction upon fiction, the entire edifice relying for its stability on people’s fear that if they speak the truth they will first be accused of racism and then hounded and penalized. One has to be brave to defy these taboos and threats, and that is why one of the most important qualities needed among campus conservatives is courage.
Affirmative action has become a clinical sample of political correctness because many of its advocates now recognize that the only way to defend it is to lie about it. A few years ago, a law student who worked in the Georgetown University admissions department wrote an article for the campus newspaper revealing large differences in the grades and standardized test scores of blacks and whites admitted to Georgetown Law School. African American students with lower scores were routinely admitted, and white students with better scores were routinely turned away. Confronted with the data, the dean of the law school, Judith Areen, denied that merit principles were being compromised. “We don’t just measure a student’s ability with grades and test scores,” she indignantly asserted. “We also use other factors.”
But in a speech at Georgetown Law School, I challenged her to provide me with a list of those “other factors.” Presumably those factors referred to extracurricular talents. I was eager to have her specify those extracurricular talents, because, whatever they were, clearly no white students possessed them; whites were never admitted to the law school with the same low scores that proved adequate for black students. Needless to say, the dean did not respond to my challenge. But her silence did not go unnoticed by the students.
While there are some risks for students in fighting political correctness, these risks are, in my view, well worth taking. After all, there are few ways in which a student can make a greater contribution to strengthening the prospects for free inquiry and open debate on campus. A defeat for political correctness is, quite simply, a victory for truth and freedom of mind.
6
Authentic vs. Bogus Multiculturalism
Dear Chris,
I remember, during my first year at Dartmouth, going to meetings sponsored by the International Students Association. I enjoyed these meetings because they presented a fine opportunity to eat good ethnic food. It was in these venues that I first encountered that most intriguing creature, the multiculturalist. The multiculturalist that I remember most vividly was a white guy who wore a pony-tail and a Nehru jacket. He was visibly excited to meet a fellow from India.
“So you’re from India,” he said. “What a great country.”
“Have you ever been there?” I asked.
“No,” he confessed. “But I’ve always wanted to go.”
“Why?” I asked, genuinely curious.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s just—so liberating!”
Because I had a happy childhood in India, I have many nice things to say about my native country, but if I had to choose one word to describe life there, I probably wouldn’t choose “liberating.” I decided to prod my enthusiastic acquaintance a little.
“What is it that you find so liberating about India?” I asked. “Could it be the caste system? Dowry? Arranged marriage?”
My purpose was to challenge him, to generate a discussion. But at this point he lost interest. My question ran into a wall of indifference.
“Got to get another drink,” he said, racing toward the bar.
I tried the same experiment several times, always with a similar result. And as I reflected on the matter, a thought occurred to me. Maybe these students weren’t really so interested in India after all. Maybe they were projecting their domestic discontents with their parents, their preachers, or their country onto the faraway land of India. Maybe they imagined India to be something that she was not: a land of social liberation, where conventional restraints were completely lifted. While I sympathized to some degree with these aspirations, I also resented this exploitation of India for political ends. “You are entitled to your illusions,” I wanted to tell the pony-tail
ed guy, “but India simply is not like that.”
I mention this anecdote because it was an early indication of a phenomenon I was to investigate later, the phenomenon of bogus multiculturalism.
The multicultural challenge is one that conservatives must meet because it is central to what a university is all about. Multiculturalism is a movement to transform the curriculum and change the way things are taught in our schools and universities. Some people think that its triumph is inevitable. Thus sociologist Nathan Glazer a few years ago wrote a book called We Are All Multiculturalists Now. Glazer is not entirely enthusiastic about multiculturalism. He is convinced, however, that because America has become so racially diverse, multiculturalism is unavoidable. Glazer’s mistake is to confuse the fact of the multiracial society with the ideology of multiculturalism. The two are quite distinct, and the latter is not necessarily the best way to respond to the former.
To understand the multicultural debate, it may be helpful to begin with Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom argued that American students are shockingly ignorant of the basic ingredients of their own Western civilization. Even graduates of the best colleges and universities have a very poor comprehension of the thinkers and ideas that have shaped their culture. Thus Ivy League graduates know that Homer wrote the Odyssey, and that Aquinas lived during the Middle Ages, and that Max Weber’s name is pronounced with a “V.” But most of them aren’t sure whether the Renaissance came before the Reformation; they couldn’t tell you what was going on in Britain during the French Revolution; and they look bewildered if you ask them why the American founders considered representative democracy an improvement over the kind of direct democracy that the Athenians had. Bloom concluded that even “educated” Americans were not really educated at all.
Bloom’s ideas came under fierce assault, and leading the charge were proponents of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is, as the name suggests, a doctrine of culture. Advocates of multiculturalism, such as literary critic Cornel West and historian Ronald Takaki, say that for too long the curriculum in our schools and colleges has focused exclusively on Western culture. In short, it is “Eurocentric.” The problem, multiculturalists say, is not that students are insufficiently exposed to the Western perspective; it is that the Western perspective is all they are exposed to. What is needed, multiculturalists insist, is an expansion of perspectives to include minority and non-Western cultures. This is especially vital, in their view, because we are living in an interconnected global culture and there are increasing numbers of black, Hispanic, and Asian faces in the classroom. Multiculturalism presents itself as an attempt to give all students a more complete and balanced education.
Stated this way, multiculturalism seems unobjectionable and uncontroversial. It is controversial because there is a powerful political thrust behind the way multiculturalism works in practice. To discover this ideological thrust, we must look at multicultural programs as they are actually taught. Several years ago, I did my first study of a multicultural curriculum at Stanford University. I pored over the reading list, looking for the great works of non-Western culture: the Quran, the Ramayana, the Analects of Confucius, the Tale of Genji, the Gitanjali, and so on. But they were nowhere to be found. As I sat in on classes, I found myself presented with a picture of non-Western cultures that was unrecognizable to me as a person who had grown up in one of those cultures. Our typical reading consisted of works such as I, Rigoberta Menchu, the autobiography of a young Marxist feminist activist from Guatemala.
Now I don’t mean to understate the importance of Guatemalan Marxist feminism as a global theme. But were students encountering the best literary output of Latin American culture? Did I, Rigoberta Menchu even represent the culture of Guatemala? The answer to these questions was no and no. So why were Stanford students being exposed to this stuff?
It is impossible to understand multiculturalism in America without realizing that it arises from the powerful conviction that bigotry and oppression define Western civilization in general and America in particular. The targets of this maltreatment are, of course, minorities, women, and homosexuals. And so the multiculturalists look abroad, hoping to find in other countries a better alternative to the bigoted and discriminatory ways of the West.
And what do they find? If they look honestly, they soon discover that other cultures are even more bigoted than those of the West. Ethnocentrism and discrimination are universal; it is the doctrine of equality of rights under the law that is uniquely Western. Women are treated quite badly in most non-Western cultures: Think of such customs as the veil, female foot-binding, clitoral mutilation, the tossing of females onto the pyres of their dead husbands. When I was a boy, I heard the saying, “I asked the Burmese why, after centuries of following their men, the women now walk in front. He explained that there were many unexploded land mines since the war.” This is intended half-jokingly, but only half-jokingly. It conveys an attitude toward women that is fairly widespread in Asia, Africa, and South America. As for homosexuality, it is variously classified as an illness or a crime in most non-Western cultures. The Chinese, for example, have a longstanding policy of administering shock treatment to homosexuals, a practice that one government official credits with a “high cure rate.”
Of course, non-Western cultures have produced many classics and great books, and these are eminently worthy of study. But not surprisingly, those classics frequently convey the same unenlightened views of minorities and women that the multiculturalists deplore in the West. The Quran, for instance, is the central spiritual document of one of the world’s great religions, but one cannot read it without finding there a clear doctrine of male superiority. The Tale of Genji, the Japanese classic of the eleventh century, is a story of hierarchy, of ritual, of life at the court: It is far removed from the Western ideal of egalitarianism. The Indian classics—the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita, and so on, are celebrations of transcendental virtues: They are a rejection of materialism, of atheism, perhaps even of the separation of church and state.
What I am saying is that non-Western cultures, and the classics that they have produced, are for the most part politically incorrect.
This poses a grave problem for American multiculturalists. One option for them is to confront non-Western cultures and to denounce them as being even more backward and retrograde than the West. But this option is politically unacceptable because non-Western cultures are viewed as historically abused and victimized. In the eyes of the multiculturalists, they deserve not criticism but affirmation. And so the multiculturalists prefer the second option: Ignore the representative traditions of non-Western cultures, pass over their great works, and focus instead on marginal and isolated works that are carefully selected to cater to Western leftist prejudices about the non-Western world.
There is a revealing section of I, Rigoberta Menchu in which young Rigoberta proclaims herself a quadruple victim of oppression. She is a person of color, and she is oppressed by racism. She is a woman, and she is oppressed by sexism. She is a Latin American, and she is oppressed by the North Americans. And finally, she is of Indian extraction, and she is oppressed by people of Spanish descent within Latin America. Here, then, is the secret of Rigoberta’s curricular appeal. She is not representative of the culture or the great works of Latin America, but she is representative of the politics of Stanford professors. Rigoberta is, for them, a kind of model to hold up to students, especially female and minority students; like her, they, too, can think of themselves as oppressed.
This is what I call bogus multiculturalism. It is bogus because it views non-Western cultures through the ideological lens of Western leftist politics. Non-Western cultures are routinely mutilated and distorted to serve Western ideological ends. No serious understanding between cultures is possible with multiculturalism of this sort.
The alternative, in my view, is not to go back to the traditional curriculum focused on the Western classics. Rather, it is to develop an authentic multiculturali
sm that teaches the greatest works of Western and non-Western cultures. Matthew Arnold penned a resonant phrase: “The best that has been thought and said.” That sums up the essence of a sound liberal arts curriculum. Probably Arnold had in mind the best of Western thought and culture. There is no reason in principle, however, that Arnold’s criterion cannot be applied to non-Western cultures as well.
Personally, I would like to see liberal arts colleges devote the better part of the freshman year to grounding students in the classics of Western and non-Western civilization. Yes, I am talking about requirements. To heck with electives: Seventeen-year-olds don’t know enough to figure out what they need to learn. Once students have been thoroughly grounded in the classics, they have three more years to choose their majors and experiment with courses in Bob Dylan and Maya Angelou. My hope, of course, is that after a year of Socrates and Confucius and Tolstoy and Tagore most students will have lost interest in Bob Dylan and Maya Angelou.
7
What’s So Great About Great Books
Dear Chris,
I see that I have gotten ahead of myself. You are a premed student, and you profess to be confused by all this liberal arts talk. I take it that you understand the importance of politics—it provides the necessary infrastructure for us to live peaceful, prosperous, and good lives. But you are puzzled by my emphasis on the importance of books, especially books written a long time ago. I even detect a hint of sympathy for the liberal view that Sophocles, John Milton, and William Shakespeare are just a bunch of “dead white men.” Why should we read them instead of others? What do they have to say to us today? Your letter is full of questions, and they are good ones, so let me try to take them one by one. I have taken the liberty of reformulating them slightly so that they correspond to the questions that multiculturalists frequently ask.
Letters to a Young Conservative Page 4
