Indeed, even a perfectly crafted political response would not address most of the existing and ongoing multicultural phenomena. As described in this book, most of these phenomena took place on the microlevel—in the classroom, in the dormitory, in the church—and one generally cannot microlegislate, prospectively preventing the decisions of tenured professors to offer debased curricula or of government officials to promulgate multicultural directives. In this respect, at least, the multiculture represents an extraordinarily intractable problem, an obstacle that is present everywhere and therefore cannot be pinned down anywhere. Unlike the great political successes of the 20th century—such as the American triumph in World War II or the Apollo space program—the means and the ends are far less clear this time around. We must face the very real possibility that there may not be a silver bullet to finish off the multicultural hydra.
Political leadership often lags cultural trends, and there is little reason to believe that the case of the multiculture is any different. Or to put the matter another way: Multicultural politics became possible only after the multiculture itself had captured the hearts and minds of millions of American voters. This is not to deny the ability of leaders to exacerbate certain trends and to tinker at the margins of the cultural debates sweeping America, but it is to suggest that to focus on conventional politics is to misperceive the scope and nature of the problem. Along these lines, it is worth stressing that we do not place most of the blame for the multicultural mess on President Clinton or Hillary Clinton or Donald Kennedy or some other culprit. Instead, it would be more accurate to say that the multiculture, along with the ethos of resentment it promoted, paved the way for Clinton's election and Kennedy's great experiment. A rejection of this culture may lead to Clinton's defeat, but neither Clinton's defeat nor any other electoral success will suffice to stop the multiculture.
The fundamental difficulty with any purely political response is that such a response perceives the people who are enacting multicultural policies to be the problem—and views the solution simply as getting rid of these people. In important respects, this response is just the mirror image of the 1960s attitude—it involves a substitution of “the problem” for “the solution” and vice versa. But it is unlikely to be any more successful: Just as there are millions of Americans who disagree with the multiculture, there also are millions who agree with it, at least in part. We should stop multicultural policies whenever we can, but we cannot and should not stop the multiculture by disenfranchising all of its advocates. Just as the former Soviet Union could not have broken with the spirit of communism by sending all 25 million card-carrying members of the Communist Party away to the Gulag, we cannot break with the ethos of the multiculture by turning its self-proclaimed victims into real ones. Because excessive politicization is a major symptom of the disease, any purely political solution does not promise much of a cure.
The Cultural Response. If multiculturalism represents a triumph of the 1960s counterculture, then perhaps one might address the problem by going back to the Western culture which this counterculture replaced. This sort of a tack, favored by a number of traditional conservatives, has the advantage over the purely political response in that it at least acknowledges the cultural dimension of the problem.
One fairly popular version of the cultural response envisions returning America to a more homogeneous, functioning whole. America is sometimes described as a “melting pot,” in which the cultures of the world came together to forge a new hybrid culture. Might this hybrid culture not present a viable alternative to the multiculture? This approach does not really work, however, because its account of the American past is only half true: Although the old cultures were dissipated and weakened, no new American culture ever really replaced them. Bosnians and Serbs do not kill each other in America, not because they have discovered some new cultural identity, but merely because they have given up their old identities as Bosnians and Serbs (that is, their old interdividual identities as one another's enemies). The exact same could be said of Eritreans and Ethiopians, Koreans and Japanese, and Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics, to the extent that each has been assimilated in the United States. The melting pot did not melt cultural identities together; it melted them away.
From the time of its founding, America represented an opportunity for individuals to break with the cultures of their pasts—first the cultures of Western Europe, and later those of the rest of the world—and to forge their own destinies in the New World. For better and for worse, the rejection of culture has been carried further than anywhere else in history. As a result, America's common ground is no longer defined in terms of cultural particulars (such as dress, food, or customs, or even art, music, or literature), but in terms of abstract principles (freedom of speech and religion, property rights, freedom of the individual vis à vis the state, etc.), and it is an allegiance to these abstract principles that informs the constitutional framework of the United States. The multiculture, with its focus on culture creation, represents not a culmination of American civilization, but an aberrant regression towards something very different. As a historical matter, America has always been anticultural, at least in the classical sense of the word, with a vengeance.
Even if some sort of cultural return were possible in the American context, the cultural response presents other difficulties. An immediate issue centers on the following conundrum: If one does not like the multiculture, then one would presumably not want to go back to the culture that gave rise to it. Multiculturalism may have its historical roots in the protest movements of the 1960s, but these movements in turn reflected that not all was well with America more generally. A society that was in perfect shape would never have been torn asunder from within, as was the United States in the last years of that tumultuous decade.
This theoretical problem becomes even more acute when one reflects about details. “Western culture,” it must be remembered, was not a single well-defined entity; instead, it consisted of many distinct cultures, in different countries at different times. It is not clear how one would decide which Western culture we should return to—for example, should we go back to the America of the 1950s or the America of the 18th century, or Victorian England, or Salem in the 17th century, or pre-revolutionary France, or the Italy of the Renaissance, or the Athens of Pericles? This question aside, a return to the cultural systems of Periclean Athens, Bourbon France, Puritan Massachusetts, or even Victorian England would not, on balance, represent a tremendous improvement on modern America, which can do without slaves, serfs, or witch-hunts. Salem was not a better place than Stanford.
In any event, a restoration of or return to any specific cultural system—involving the implementation of particular rules and, even more important, the distribution of precise interrelated positions to its citizens—would today meet with fierce opposition. People no longer are willing to accept assigned stations in a Great Chain of Being. In the Western world of the late 20th century, the sort of unspoken and unanimous (or near-unanimous) agreement that enabled earlier cultures (be they “Western” or “non-Western”) to function has disintegrated. Even if there are many who would like to return to some culture of the past (or, like the multiculturalists, forge some altogether new cultural entity), no faction holds a decisive majority. Too many people refuse to sacrifice whatever measure of individuality they now possess—but such a sacrifice would be the necessary price for any such return. As a result of this lack of consensus, any attempt to implement a new (or old) culture results in failure or tends towards authoritarianism or both. The experience of the multiculture was not the exception, but the rule.
The Individualist Alternative. The multiculture exists to destroy Western culture, and this destruction has been ferocious and indiscriminate; the multicultural bulldozer has not drawn any distinctions between the good and the bad in Western culture. Both the historic cultures of the West, which admittedly were deeply flawed, and the transcultural civilization of the West, which has much to
offer, were expelled in one and the same movement. The mother was thrown out with the bathwater.
If there is something positive to be gleaned from the multicultural cataclysm, then it is this: The bathwater has indeed been thrown out, once and for all, and many of the bad aspects of the historic cultures of the West are truly dead now, at least in America. It is utterly inconceivable that we would return to a society in which blacks are slaves, women are disenfranchised, or people's stations are determined at birth. Nor does it seem even remotely plausible that people would once again be burned at the stake as witches or put to death on account of their religion. There has been that much progress, at least.
The real dispute, we suggest, is not about the desirability of that progress (everybody agrees on that), but about the cause of that progress. Multiculturalists postulate that progress is the result of an increasing distance from the West, led by people with a special gnosis enabling them to understand and perceive the West as unjust. Here the picture becomes very murky, however, since it is never clear where exactly this gnosis is supposed to come from.
One common suggestion is that the gnosis has been learned from archaic, non-Western, or “Third World” cultures, but this claim cannot really be taken seriously. None of these other cultures had much to say about the evils of slavery, the emancipation of women, or anything else of that sort. In addition, these cultures suffered from unique injustices, in many respects worse than those of the West (footbinding in China, clitorectomies in the Islamic world and Africa, suttee in India, to name a few), and therefore would not appear to provide particularly promising vehicles for achieving personal liberation.
The other common multicultural argument is that the gnosis has arisen at the margins of the West. Much of the multiculture's obsession with victims and victimizers relates to this point: Those who are subordinated in our society are the only ones able to describe it as it truly is, and so everybody else should listen to them. Even at its best, however, the argument remains unconvincing and incomplete. It does not explain why such an insight was possible in the West and not elsewhere, when all other cultures on the planet have had their own sets of outcasts and misfits. If subordination was all that it took to achieve gnosis, then every culture on the planet should have produced its own multicultural movement. But these other multicultures are strangely absent.
Only a very different interpretation can explain the progress achieved by the West. There is no need to invoke esoteric modes of knowledge, but there is a need to acknowledge a fundamental breakthrough that occurred in the history of the Western world. The breakthrough involved a single revolutionary idea: that individuals exist and have rights, and that these rights are independent of the cultures these individuals happen to inhabit. This idea provided the Archimedean lever with which to move the world. The Declaration of Independence, at the time of the American Founding, was one of the first documents to make all of this perfectly clear: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” These rights are grounded in nature, and do not depend on whether one is British, French, Zulu, or Aztec. The concept of the individual, with rights that transcend any particular cultural system, is the cornerstone of civilization.
These natural rights (or, in 20th-century parlance, human rights) are not recognized in every society, to be sure, but this nonrecognition does not negate their reality. Instead, the natural rights framework requires us to consider those societies (or cultures) that do not respect human rights to be fundamentally unjust. For the first time in history, the rights of the individual were greater than the needs of the collective.
Of course, there are disputes over where these rights came from and how exactly this breakthrough in understanding occurred. The two prime candidates, perhaps, are philosophy and religion—more specifically, the classical natural rights tradition of Socrates and the Judeo-Christian revelation—but we will not attempt to resolve the debate between Athens and Jerusalem here. For present purposes, all that matters is that the breakthrough occurred. And though it may have been quite sudden for particular individuals, it took many centuries to percolate through the historic cultures of Western Europe. For a long time, indeed, these cultures remained essentially hostile to the idea of the individual, which invariably challenged their most foundational institutions.
Eventually, however, the notion of individual human rights came to be applied in many contexts, and a political transformation leading to the abandonment of Western cultures and the simultaneous rise of a more or less unified Western civilization became inevitable. The recognition of the individual freedom of conscience brought the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries to a close. The individual right to property and contract undermined the feudal and mercantile systems, and made possible the capitalist revolution of the 19th century. The individual right to self-expression gave rise to a free press and a marketplace of ideas. Blacks and women were recognized as individuals, resulting in the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of women.
Although this distinction is not acknowledged by the multicultural bulldozer, “Western culture” is thus a confusing term because it denotes two very different things. On the one hand, it refers to the historic cultures of the West—to their languages, customs, and injustices. It is also often used synonymously with Western civilization—the transcultural framework within which the notion of individual rights first became articulated. The two meanings arose because the transcultural framework originated in the same societies that contained the historic cultures. But the two meanings were rarely harmonious, because little of Western culture (understood historically) would prove to be compatible with the transcultural framework.
This transcultural framework was applied first to Western cultures, because these cultures were the ones closest at hand. In large measure, the historic cultures of the West have not survived the test. Like the culture of the Confederate South, they have gone the way of the dinosaur. These cultures have been indicted by their own history books, and have disintegrated in direct proportion to their past violations of individual rights. Cultural institutions that were not compatible with the rights of individuals, such as slavery or the medieval Inquisition, have gradually disappeared. In a sense, the multicultural movement simply represents yet another, though largely unnecessary, phase of this cultural disintegration, denouncing oppressive institutions that have been virtually nonexistent for some time.
Of course, it was inevitable that the transcultural framework which disintegrated the West's historic cultures would encounter and be applied to cultures outside the West, with similar results. This stage, which multiculturalists refuse to understand or acknowledge, has already been going on for some time, and has driven archaic and non-Western cultures to the brink of extinction as well. The multicultural rhetoric about studying other cultures, if it were ever truly implemented, would only accelerate this process tremendously. The history books of non-Western cultures are as replete with savagery and violations of individual rights as the history books of the West; once these books are read as closely as those of the West have been, and subjected to the same level of scrutiny, the non-Western cultural alternatives will lose much of their allure.
If this process is carried to a successful conclusion, there will be liberation, but it will be of a sort quite different from anything ever envisioned by the likes of Aime Cesaire or Sonia Johnson. The liberation of the individual requires the triumph of civilization over all cultures, not just Western ones. The multicultural movement simultaneously goes too far and not far enough. It goes too far because it seeks to liberate people from Western civilization as well as Western culture. It does not go far enough because, in replacing the West with a neoprimitive multiculture, it does not seek to liberate people from the one cultural system right at hand. In short, the antidote to the multiculture is civilization—the same
transcultural framework that has made individual rights possible and dissolved other primitive cultures.
Liberation from the multiculture must occur one individual at a time, outside the politico-cultural realm. The true human subject (or person or individual) will not emerge as the object of some collective, utopian experiment, but only in the rejection of all such pretensions. Individuals must strike out and set their own destinies, free from both the historical cultures of the past and the newer multiculture.
Instead of a “great experiment,” a better metaphor for the history of our age might be a “great adventure,” consisting of the unique stories of the lives of countless individuals. This adventure cannot be reduced to a mere formula or verbal description. It is far richer, more exciting, interesting, and wonderful than anything dreamt in the philosophy of social scientists or totalitarian bureaucrats. If a comprehensive account exists anywhere, then it does so only in the mind of God. By rejecting all utopian delusions, we will embrace this truth, and it will set us free.
Notes
1. Charles Krauthammer, “The Tribalization of America,” The Washington Post, August 6, 1990.
2. Sue Hutchison, “Nobody found any dirt about Gerhard Casper,” The San Jose Mercury News, March 19, 1992.
3. Peter Robison, “Tone returns Stanford's sight to academics,” The Stanford Daily, October 5, 1992.
4. Ibid.
5. Barbara Koh, “A new agenda at Stanford; Stressing the good, Casper confronts the difficult,” The San Jose Mercury News, March 22, 1992.
6. Gerhard Casper, ‘“Stanford is a human institution,’” The San Jose Mercury News, March 22, 1992.
7. Mark Simon, “Stanford Image Repairman,” The San Francisco Chronicle, April 28, 1993.
8. Anthony DePalma, “Stanford Names Chicago Provost As Its President; Scholar to Take Over a University in Turmoil,” The New York Times, March 19, 1992.
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