MULTICULTURALISTS

Dictatorship of Virtue
Richard Bernstein
New York: Vantage, 1994
Excerpts from the Prologue

I remember a scholar of China talking years ago about the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which raged in that country in the late 1960s and 1970s. Certainly, he said, the term referred to something momentous happening in China, but whatever it was was not Great, it was not Proletarian, it had nothing to do with Culture, and it was certainly not a Revolution. Similarly with multiculturalism. It does not have the kind of consistent or coherent set of ideas behind it to make it an ism exactly. That prefix “multi” is, yes, applicable in theory, but in practice it is often a mask for what would more accurately be called “mono.” Most important, multiculturalism has no more to do with with culture than the Cultural Revolution did…

There are clues to these questions among the self-proclaimed multiculturalists themselves. They rarely, at least as I have gotten to know them, know much about culture at all and even more rarely about anyone else’s culture. There are interesting and worthy and certainly very well-intentioned people within the ranks of what I will call the ideological multiculturalists. And yet their lack of curiosity about the real cultural richness of the world, or their reduction of that richness to a few rhapsodic clichés, seems to confirm that culture is not really what is at issue in multiculturalism. 
At best, the ideological multiculturalists reiterate a few obsessively sincere phrases about the holistic spirit of Native American culture or about how things are done in what they call Asian culture or in the African-American culture.

The Asian culture, as it happens, is something I know a bit about having spend five years at Harvard striving for a Ph.D. in a joint program called History and East Asian Languages and, after that, living either as a student (for one year) or a journalist (for six years) in China and Southeast Asia. At least I know enough to know that there is no such thing as the “Asian culture.” There are dozens of cultures that exist in that vast geographical domain called Asian. When the multiculturalists speak, tremulous with respect, of the “Asian culture,” it is out of goodness of heart, but not much actual knowledge.

My experience leads me to believe that insofar as culture is involved in multiculturalism, it is not so much for me to be required to learn about other cultures as for me to be able to celebrate myself and for you to be required to celebrate me, and, along the way, to support my demand for more respect, more pride of place, more jobs, more foundation support, more money, more programs, more books, more prizes, more people like me in high places, a higher degree of attention.

The paradox is that the power of culture is utterly contrary to the most fervently held beliefs and values of the advocates of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is a movement of the left, emerging from the counterculture of the 1960s. But culture is powerfully conservative. Culture is what enforces obedience to authority, the authority of parents, of history, of customs, of superstition. Deep attachment fo culture is one of the things that prevents different people form understanding one another. It is what pushes groups into compliance with practices that can be good or bad, depending on one’s point of view. Suttee (the practice, eradicated by British colonialism, in which Indian widows were burned alive on the funeral pyres of their husbands) and female circumcision, as well as the spirit of rational inquiry and a belief in the sanctity of each human life, are products of cultural attachments of different kinds. Those who practiced suttee, or who believe that women who commit adultery should be stoned to death, do not believe that there is anything bad about those practices, any more than those who practice rational inquiry under conditions of freedom that there is anything wrong with that.

The reality of culture is something that the ideological multiculturalists would despise, if they knew what it was. The power of culture, especially the culture rooted in ancient traditions, is anathema to the actual goal and ideology of multiculturalism, which does not seek an appreciation of other cultures but operates out of the wishful assumption that the unknown, obscure, neglected, subaltern cultures of the world are actually manifestations of a leftist ideology born out of the particular culture of American and European universities and existing practically no place else.