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Letters
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Convincing In his new book, Letters
to a Young Conservative, Dinesh D’Souza uses the structure of short
letters from him to a college students as a way of presenting the compelling
case of conservatism by an articulate advocate to an open minded person. I
surprised myself when I paid attention to the ways in which I was agreeing
with D’Souza on more pages than I care to recall. Here’s an excerpt of an entire letter, all
of Chapter 6, titled “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-tailed 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
R.evolution; 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
Takald, 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 Ramay ana, 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 multiculturalsts 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 Veins, 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 onfront 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 multiculturalism 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. Whether you agree or disagree with D’Souza
and his politics, you’re likely to enjoy reading his articulate presentation
in Letters
to a Young Conservative. And if you find someone writing Letters to a
Young Liberal, please let me know. Steve Hopkins, December 23, 2002 |
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ã 2003 Hopkins and Company, LLC The
recommendation rating for this book appeared in the January 2003
issue of Executive
Times For
Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins
& Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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