Only some groups have the right to demand sensitivity of others. Hispanics, Asians, blacks, American Indians, Aleuts, Pacific Islanders, homosexuals, and women have that right; heterosexual white males alone do not. So strong is the claim of such groups to sensitivity that it excuses them in the commission of what would otherwise be crimes. There was the notorious instance at the University of Pennsylvania when black and Hispanic students stole every copy of the student newspaper because a conservative columnist had criticized affirmative action. Penn’s president, Sheldon Hackney, whom President Clinton soon appointed to head the National Endowment for the Humanities, did not discipline the students but reprimanded campus police who had tried to stop the theft. One can imagine what would have happened had the students been whites stealing a black student newspaper. They would have been expelled or suspended and police would have been fired if they did not try to stop the theft.
More recently, at DePaul University in Chicago, the school newspaper ran a front-page story about a dance party sponsored by a black student publication that was broken up by police responding to a disturbance complaint. The article quoted a police report that identified some of the disruptive partyers as black males. Black students claimed insensitivity and demanded a front-page apology; when they got none, a group of them destroyed all the copies of the paper they could find. A supporter said, “If you’re going to have freedom of speech then it should be correct freedom of speech.”
DePaul’s president reprimanded those who mismanaged the party but also said that university departments were to respond with “sensitivity and diversity programs for staff,” a “university-wide diversity awareness program,” and enhancement of “multicultural staffing initiatives.” Not satisfied, a month later twenty to thirty black students seized the offices of the student newspaper, demanding the resignation of the article’s author and the paper’s faculty adviser, that the paper’s staff attend sensitivity sessions, and that at least one issue a year and one page each week be devoted to minority issues. The president told the paper it could not publish until it met some of these demands. He agreed, among other things, to give the occupiers amnesty, provide tutoring to make up for the classes they missed during their ten-day occupation, increase the number of minorities on the faculty, establish a Diversity Council, and recruit and retain more minority students. The protest leader proclaimed an “almost complete victory” that gave them more than they expected.16
Minority students should, of course, be held accountable for their actions in precisely the same way and to the same degree as white students. That said, it must also be said that minority students are only partially to blame for their behavior on campuses. The faculties and administrations who encourage that behavior in immature students are to blame. It is easy to see why the message of multiculturalism appeals to the minority student. If he comes from an ethnic or racial enclave, the university will be his first intense experience of pluralism. Even if he comes from a middle-class home in an integrated environment, entry into a university will be, as it is for most students, a somewhat disorienting experience. As Peter Berger points out, the opening of choices about values and vocations produces a process of individuation, which may then produce a backlash of de-individuation.17
A youngster faced with a bewildering variety of choices and no longer embedded in the certainties of the culture and family from which he came becomes more individualistic but is also more inclined to feel lost and unhappy without those certainties. The multiculturalists on the faculty, in the administration, and in the student body come to the rescue by offering the lonesome and unhappy student the companionship and comfort of his ethnic group. All that is asked in return is that his primary loyalty be to that group. Group identity is the road to de-individuation. Henceforth, the student is not an individual but only a representative. The individual cannot easily reject an ethnic identity for an American identity, not only because of the anger of his or her group which will say the person is “acting white,” but because so many rewards, including friendship, depend upon insisting upon one’s ethnic identity.
So powerful has the fantasy world of multiculturalism become that many of us have accepted the myth that only a minority person can understand the thoughts and emotions of a person of the same minority. That is a denial of the universality of human qualities. If that were true, a common culture and a peaceful society would be impossible. The multiculturalists, albeit inadvertently, make the case for a highly restrictive immigration policy, one that admits only people of European descent.
A white academic feminist is even prepared to concede that she cannot adequately interpret black literature because it is set within a history of racial oppression. The white scholar’s perspective is said to be utterly foreign to the culture from which the black literature issued.18 It would seem to follow that black scholars cannot adequately interpret literature issuing from white culture and should not be allowed to teach it. Why should one of the oppressed be better able to interpret the literature of the oppressor race than the other way around? There is no reason, merely the fact that multiculturalism always sees the victim as uniquely insightful and comprehending.
Multiculturalism is a lie, or rather a series of lies: the lie that European-American culture is uniquely oppressive; the lie that culture has been formed to preserve the dominance of heterosexual white males; and the lie that other cultures are equal to the culture of the West. What needs to be said is that no other culture in the history of the world has offered the individual as much freedom, as much opportunity to advance; no other culture has permitted homosexuals, non-whites, and women to play ever-increasing roles in the economy, in politics, in scholarship, in government. What needs to be said is that American culture is Eurocentric, and it must remain Eurocentric or collapse into meaninglessness. Standards of European and American origin are the only possible standards that can hold our society together and keep us a competent nation. If the legitimacy of Eurocentric standards is denied, there is nothing else. There are no standards from any other quarter of the globe that we can agree upon. Islam cannot provide standards for us, nor can Africa or the Far East. Yet a single set of standards is essential to a sense of what authority is legitimate, what ideals must be maintained. The alternative to Eurocentrism, then, is fragmentation and chaos.
The attack on Eurocentrism is ignorant and perverse in an additional way. Europe made the modern world. Europe and America made the world that people from around the globe desperately desire to enter. It is insane to say that they should enter this world in order to reject the culture that made it. European-American culture is the best the world has to offer, if one judges by where the people of the world want to immigrate. It is not hard to see what makes this culture superior. Europe was the originator of individualism, representative democracy, free-market capitalism, the rule of law, theoretical and experimental science, applied science or advanced technology, and so on through a list of achievements that have made the life of mankind much more free and prosperous. The static societies of Asia and Africa finally achieved dynamism, or varying degrees of it, only under the influence of European culture.
Today’s revolt against European standards is probably merely a continuation of the revolt against bourgeois rationalism that has marked this century. Ortega y Gassett characterized the phenomenon:
Europe had created a system of standards whose efficiency and productiveness the centuries have proved…. Now, the mass-peoples have decided to consider as bankrupt that system of standards which European civilisation implies, but as they are incapable of creating others, they do not know what to do, and to pass the time they kick up their heels and stand on their heads.19
Standing on your head is not a bad description of multiculturalism. Unfortunately, it involves standing a civilization on its head. Fascism and Naziism were both romantic, anti-bourgeois movements. Communism, while pretending to scientific certainty, was clearly a religious movement impervious to rational argument.
Perhaps hostility to rational, bourgeois culture reflects an irrationality in humans, a desire to escape rationality and firm standards. Sixties radicalism was acutely anti-bourgeois and romantic. Its family resemblance to fascism has already been noted. At a weaker, less fanatical level, the hostility to rationality is evidenced by American fascination with such farcical subjects as psychics, astrology, channeling, UFOs, and so on. Multiculturalism, as well as all of modern liberalism, belongs to this family of anti-rationalistic enterprises.
Is there hope that multiculturalism will fade as other passions have? The best guess is that it will not. We have started down the road that other societies have taken, societies that are now riven with ethnic violence, and ethnic violence seems to cease only when a stronger force imposes peace. The center of the agitation in America is the educational system, and particularly the universities. Will they abandon the multiculturalist enterprise? Some think so. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., is one of the optimists: “The situation in our universities, I am confident, will soon right itself once the great silent majority of professors cry ‘enough’ and challenge what they know to be voguish nonsense.”20 Well, they have had thirty years to cry “enough” to voguish and pernicious nonsense and haven’t done so yet. This silent majority seems to be like the previous ones we have heard about, permanently silent. That is what Morson’s Law would predict.
We are, then, entering a period of tribal hostilities. Some of what we may expect includes a rise in interethnic violence, a slowing of economic productivity, a vulgarization of scholarship (which is already well under way), and increasing government intrusion into our lives in the name of producing greater equality and ethnic peace, which will, predictably, produce still greater polarization and fractiousness. Since multiculturalism is a movement of the left and a yearning for more power, which is necessarily government power, its spread and entrenchment also bodes ill for the institutions of capitalism.
As Ortega y Gasset said, “Civilisation is before all, the will to live in common…. Barbarism is the tendency to disassociation. Accordingly, all barbarous epochs have been times of human scattering, of the pullulation of tiny groups, separate from and hostile to one another.”21 Multiculturalism is barbarism, and it is bringing us to a barbarous epoch.
PART III
16
Can Democratic Government Survive?
Sir Henry Maine made the point that, looking back, we are amazed at the blindness of the privileged classes in France to the approach of the Revolution that was to overwhelm them.1 Yet Maine finds “the blindness of the French nobility and clergy eminently pardonable. The Monarchy … appeared to have roots deeper in the past than any existing European institution.”2 In his own place and time, men looked upon popular government and the democratic principle as destined to last forever. Maine asked whether the confidence of the French upper classes just before the Revolution “conveys a caution to other generations than theirs.”3 In the following century, of course, nations that had adopted the democratic principle, in whole or in part, rejected it for totalitarian systems.
Yet we seem at least as sanguine about the prospects for democratic government as were Maine’s contemporaries.4 The democratic principle is in rhetorical ascendancy everywhere, and yet it is worth asking whether in actuality, as a matter of practice rather than declamation, it is not in retreat, particularly in what had been its strongest bastion, the United States. Unlike the sudden cataclysm that overtook the French monarchy, ours appears to be a slow crisis, a hollowing out of democracy from within, that gives ample warning of the unhappy condition towards which matters tend.
Modern liberalism is fundamentally at odds with democratic government because it demands results that ordinary people would not freely choose. Liberals must govern, therefore, through institutions that are largely insulated from the popular will. The most important institutions for liberals’ purposes are the judiciary and the bureaucracies. The judiciary and the bureaucracies are staffed with intellectuals, as that term is used in this book, and thus tend to share the views and accept the agendas of modern liberalism.
In his First Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln asserted: “The candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court … the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.” Lincoln was thinking of Dred Scott, the infamous decision that created a constitutional right, good against the federal government, to own slaves. Today, however, his observation is even more pertinent, as we have resigned into the hands of the federal judiciary ever more vital questions affecting the whole people. We have in very significant measure ceased to be our own rulers.
Chapter Six discussed the manifold ways in which the Supreme Court, without authorization from any law, has changed our politics and our culture. That process continues as the lower federal courts and state courts are following the Supreme Court’s example. The courts, without authorization from law, are taking out of the hands of the American people the most basic moral and cultural decisions.
There seems no possibility of retrieving democratic government from the grasp of the Supreme Court, which now governs us in the name of the Constitution in ways not remotely contemplated by the framers and ratifiers of that Constitution. Lino Graglia, a professor of law at the University of Texas, concludes:
The hope that this situation can be changed by shifts in personnel on the Court has been shown to be futile. Eleven consecutive appointments to the Court by Republican presidents pledged to change the Court’s direction have not resulted in the overruling of a single major ACLU victory or even halting the flow of ACLU victories…. The Court will continue to serve as the mirror, mouthpiece, and enacting arm of a cultural elite that is radically alienated from and to the left of the ordinary citizen. … Judicial activism presents the … currently crucial question whether and how we can return to the federalist system of representative self-government that the Constitution contemplates, a return which is necessary if we are to reverse the socially destructive policies that judicial activism has imposed.5
Graglia is quite right about what the Court has become, but he does not suggest how we can return to the system of representative self-government that the Constitution contemplates and that the courts, most especially the Supreme Court, are gradually but inexorably destroying. As we saw in chapter 6, the only practical way of reining in the Supreme Court is a constitutional amendment making its rulings subject to democratic review. As matters now stand, the Court’s assumption of complete governing power is intolerable, and yet, absent a constitutional amendment, we have no way of refusing to tolerate it.
The question is not only one of the illegitimacy of the Courts performance in usurping powers that belong to the people and their elected representatives. The judiciary is slowly disintegrating the basis for our social unity. Our cultural elites, the modern liberals, have contempt for democracy because it produces results and elects politicians they disapprove of. The courts have long since run out of ways to derive modern liberal results from even distortions of the original understanding of the Constitution. They, and the academic commentators who sustain them and urge them on, have, therefore, resorted to increasingly abstract and meaningless moralistic arguments and to lifeless legalisms.
We too often forget that the liberties guaranteed by our Constitution were not based on legalisms or moral theorizing but upon the historical experience of being governed by the British Crown. Our Constitution, and most particularly our Bill of Rights, were designed to prevent the federal government from becoming as oppressive as British rule was perceived to be. But as the historical meaning of the Constitution fades from memory, or is regarded as irrelevant, its guarantees begin to change. We have a student who can say, with no sense of incongruity, that speech should not be free unless it is also correct. Far worse, consti
tutional adjudication has become the battleground of warring minorities who seek to capture the Supreme Court, and who have, on significant occasions, including the present, done so.
As it departs from the constitutional text and history that give our rights life, rootedness, and meaning, and substitutes abstractions reflecting modern liberalisms agenda, the Supreme Court brings itself and the entire concept of the rule of law into disrepute. It expends a dwindling moral capital and weakens both political authority and the possibility of a common culture. The increasing legalization of our culture is a sign of the fracturing of that culture, the continuing disappearance of the vestiges of unity. John Gray, after discussing the fragmentation of British culture, noted:
We may see the same somber development occurring on a vast scale in the United States, which appears to be sliding inexorably away from being a civil society whose institutions express a common cultural inheritance to being an enfeebled polity whose institutions are captured by a host of warring minorities, having in common only the dwindling capital of an unquestioned legalism to sustain them…. The idea that political authority could ever be solely or mainly formal or abstract arose in times when a common cultural identity could be taken for granted. For … the framers of the Declaration of Independence, that common cultural identity was that of European Christendom. In so far as this cultural identity is depleted or fragmented, political authority will be attenuated.6
A variety of forces are destroying America’s political and cultural unity, and judicial activism must surely be ranked among them. As the courts recklessly squander our common cultural inheritance in the names of radical individualism and radical egalitarianism, they necessarily offer themselves and their authority over law as the only institution capable of holding our turbulent society together. But that task will prove beyond the capabilities of the courts. It takes more than legalisms, abstractions, and judicial diktats to hold a community together. Indeed, by its emphasis on individual and group rights—rights it has invented—against those of the larger community, the Court denigrates the idea that there is value in community, the idea that the collectivity should exert a centripetal force. What the Court is doing is forcing the libertarian-egalitarian philosophy of our cultural elites upon the rest of us.
Slouching Towards Gomorrah Page 37