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The 'multicultural' lie
... Diversity is not the most important truth about America. Where it is important - in the Balkans, Lebanon, Armenia, Angola, Sri Lanka, Cyprus, Iraq, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, South Africa - diversity becomes violent divisiveness. In America, the greater truth - or miracle - is how one culture unifies our diversity. Yet in college, after years of high schools' marinating minds in the pieties of multiculturalism, diversity is a curricular diversion from the intellectual engagement with the great books, people and events that make America still the world's best hope, even for the refuse-to-be-assimilated immigrant who wants our culture as a cure while rejecting it with a curse.Though some multiculturalists would actually exchange courses in Shakespeare for ones in healing chants, few would replace automobiles with rickshaws or computers with signaling drums. And none would visit a witch doctor for coronary care, countenance female infanticide or clitorectomies, cast themselves on their husband's funeral pyre, applaud bloody coups and despots, be tolerant of cruel and unusual punishment, laudatory about theocracies and open-minded about slavery. Yet many multiculturalists teach, in the cause of liberal open-mindedness, as if they would grant cultures still practicing such customs a moral equity with - if not superiority to - Western ways. And having themselves studied Western civilization not so long ago in college, they would deny that privilege to their own students. Their ethical compass spins wildly. The American compass points steadily to the classical West, via England. Our national culture believes in equality before the law, due process, civil rights, freedom to speak, to worship, to keep arms and defend ourselves, to own property, to vote, to move about freely. While Americans feverishly disagree about policies, we fervently agree about these English principles to debate and resolve them. But how can debate and citizenship even begin if not in a common language? America may be gloriously multiethnic, but it is not multicultural. For the better of all hyphenated Americans, starting with the language, it is an English culture. And that culture is our common and precious tradition. The academic and political danger now is not so much in having a closed mind about other cultures, but an empty mind about our own. For academics and demagogues to close their mouths to that danger is worse than ignorance. It's a lie. Posted by: tipper 2004-05-22 |
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