This section of DiscoverTheNetworks explores the premises of multiculturalism and its ascendancy in the Western world over the past several decades. In his January 2002 article, "The Cultural War on Western Civilization" (published by The New Criterion), Keith Windschuttle offers readers a host of vital insights into this phenomenon:
In the last week of September, shortly after the terrorist assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Prime Minister of Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, made an extraordinary statement. During a visit to Germany, he declared Western civilization superior to Islam. He said: "We must be aware of the superiority of our civilization, a system that has guaranteed well-being, respect for human rights and -- in contrast with Islamic countries -- respect for religious and political rights."
The minute he had uttered these words, a bevy of European politicians rushed to denounce him. The Belgian Prime Minister, Guy Verhofstadt, said: "I can hardly believe that the Italian Prime Minister made such statements." Spokesman for the European Commission, Jean-Christophe Filori, added: "We certainly don't share the views expressed by Mr Berlusconi." Italy's centre-left opposition spokesman Giovanni Berlinguer called the words "eccentric and dangerous". Within days, Berlusconi was forced to withdraw.
It is true that the statement could have been more diplomatically timed, made as it was while American officials were trying to put together an anti-terrorist coalition of Islamic allies. But there is little doubt it would have generated just as many denials no matter when it was uttered. The statement was extraordinary because, although Western superiority in every major area of human endeavour, especially in political and individual liberty, is patently obvious to everyone, it has become a truth that must not be spoken.
The chief reason is the prevailing ideology of the Western intelligentsia. For the past two decades and more, the leading opinion makers in the media, the universities and the churches have regarded Western superiority as, at best, something to be ashamed of, and at worst, something to be opposed....
Western political and economic dominance is ... commonly explained not by its internal dynamics but by its external behaviour, especially its rivalry and aggression towards other cultures. Western success has purportedly been at their expense. Instead of pushing for internal reform or revolution, this new radicalism constitutes an overwhelmingly negative critique of Western civilization itself.
According to this ideology, instead of attempting to globalise its values, the West should stay in its own cultural backyard. Values like universal human rights, individualism and liberalism are regarded merely as ethnocentric products of Western history. The scientific knowledge that the West has produced is simply one of many "ways of knowing". In place of Western universalism, this critique offers the relativism of multiculturalism, a concept that regards the West not as the pinnacle of human achievement to date, but as simply one of many equally valid cultural systems.
Although originally designed to foster tolerance and respect for other cultures, these sentiments were subsequently captured by the radical left and manipulated to the point of inconsistency. Their plea for acceptance and open-mindedness does not extend to Western culture itself, whose history is regarded as little more than a crime against the rest of humanity. The West cannot judge other cultures but must condemn its own.
Though commonly known as multiculturalism, this position is defined by its supporters with a series of post prefixes: postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism. However, it is best understood as an anti phenomenon because it defines itself not by what it is for but by what it is against. It is entirely a negation of Western culture and values: whatever the West supports, this anti-West rejects....
This anti-Western, multicultural, postcolonial intellectual edifice constitutes a true ideology: it sees the world as an arena of conflict and has a political program to change the world for its own ends. It is formidable in its comprehensiveness and in the number of intellectual fields it encompasses. They include history, literature, the arts, the social sciences, the physical sciences, and the law. It is also formidable in the number of professional and public institutions it has successfully captured and whose agenda it now controls. With the demise of Marxism since the 1980s, it has emerged as its major ideological successor. What follows is a summary of the creed, coupled with some of the more obvious objections to it.
Western culture was founded on aggression towards others: Despite being employed for the purpose of transmitting culture, most of the writers, editors and teachers who advocate this cause are united in their hostility to the cultural traditions that have nurtured them from birth. They see the whole of Western culture since the ancient Greeks as something to be disowned....
Western literature and arts endorse imperialism: Until the last two decades, most people brought up within Western culture believed that its literature, its art and its music were among the glories of its civilization. Western literary criticism once aimed to seek out the genius of its authors and to extol their contribution to defining the human condition. Today, much of the academic debate about the Western literary heritage claims that it is politically contaminated. Some of these charges have long been well known because they offended against the post-1970s ideological triumvirate of gender, race and class: Othello is ethnocentric, Paradise Lost is a feminist tragedy, Jane Eyre is both racist and sexist.... Western literature is today most severely rebuked for its support of imperialism....
The Western economic system exploits the rest of the world: According to this ideology, Western prosperity is based on ill-gotten gains. Globalisation, its adherents claim, is a euphemism for American imperialism. The poverty of the Third World is purportedly entrenched by debts from the International Monetary Fund and the free market policies of the World Trade Organisation. Hence, students and trade unionists riot outside the meetings that decide these policies, and church leaders sermonize us to forgive the debt....
Victimhood should prevail over individualism: Western individualism is another of the targets of this ideology. It regards individualism as both the cause and effect of capitalism, which in its turn produced the imperialism that now oppresses the wretched of the earth. Individualism is also regarded as deriving from such ethnocentric Enlightenment constructs as human rights. It is the one great barrier to a collectivist solution for humankind. So individualism has to go.
In its place, the creed offers victimhood. Its political constituency comprises those it defines -- by whatever stretch of the imagination this might take -- as the underdogs and the marginals of society. Within Western countries, this includes ethnic and racial minorities, women, homosexuals, indigenous peoples, the exiled, the poor, the incarcerated and the insane. Beyond Western society, it includes the masses of the Third World.
It is in pursuit of this political objective that much of the recent revision of the history curriculum has been done. Western history is no longer to be judged by the record of its achievements. Instead, it is to become a story of the struggle of its victims against oppression and discrimination, and of how they have risen to challenge their exploiters. Consequently, the purpose of teaching history becomes to "empower" its victims....
The West must be "provincialised": One of the most prominent fields of study produced by this ideology is postcolonialism. This is an intellectual movement focused primarily on the study of history and literature, although it is usually conducted at such an arcane level of theory that former students of either history or literature would find their subjects unrecognisable. Postcolonial social theorists and critics have gained a major foothold in academic life in the United States.
One of the leading tendencies within postcolonialism is the Subaltern group of Indian historians or, more accurately, Indian theorists about history. In 1994, the American Historical Review, the journal of the leading professional association, devoted an issue to them. The Subalterns took their name from a phrase coined by the Italian Marxist theorist, Antonio Gramsci. Their Indian origins lay in the 1960s middle class Marxist movement, the Naxalites, who emulated the Red Guards of Mao-tse-tung's China by assassinating landlords and police in Bihar province and West Bengal. A number of the movement's members subsequently moved to America and Australia where they gained academic positions teaching history.
Although they address historical topics, the Subalterns offer a radical critique of the discipline, which they see not as a methodology that can be applied to any society but as an ethnocentric product of European culture. History, they assert, is an artifact of the Western nation state. Contesting the imperialism of the West involves contesting its version of history as well. India, of course, gained its independence fifty years ago so one might have thought there has since been plenty of opportunity for its historians to go their own way. The Subalterns insist, however, that they still need to struggle to liberate themselves from European modes of thought, especially English historiography.
Rather than arguing the point at home in India, these theorists choose to do it in the Western education system. Indeed, one reason why there are now so many Indian academics employed in the humanities departments of American universities is because of the network of influence provided by the postcolonial movement.
The aim of their project is to use postmodernist and poststructuralist literary analysis to deconstruct historical documents to recover the voice of the colonial oppressed who, because they were illiterate, left no documents of their own. They want to recover the authentic voice of Indian peasants, bandits and others of low caste and to rewrite them into history. While English historians have generally regarded Mahatma Ghandi and the Congress Party as the leaders of the nationalist struggle against British imperialism, postcolonial historians want to argue that it was actually the work of the Indian lower orders....
Western values are culturally relative: In 1987, the American philosopher Allan Bloom opened his withering dissection of the faults of the higher education system, The Closing of the American Mind, with the observation of the triumph of relativism. "There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of," he remarked, "almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative." In the face of the various claims to truth and the divergent ways of life that characterise modern society, higher education had responded, Bloom argued, by promoting the idea that the real danger was the true believer. This, he noted with bitter irony, was "the great insight of our times".
The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all.
More than a decade on, Bloom's observation not only continues to be confirmed but relativism has become institutionalised in the higher education sector and is now taught as a formal doctrine. This is accomplished both through broad intellectual tendencies such as postmodernism and poststructuralism as well as in particular curriculum areas such as cultural studies, anthropology, literary theory, women's studies, the sociology of science, and the history and philosophy of science....
[The] notion of cultural relativism entailed a radical re-thinking of Western intellectual life. In aesthetic criticism, it meant traditional standards had to be jettisoned. Italian opera could no longer be regarded as superior to Chinese opera. The theatre of Shakespeare was not better than that of Kabuki, only different.
In political thought, the pursuit of universal values such as human rights became suspect. Rather than principles that were eternal or self-evident, cultural relativists said these values were bound by their own time and space. They were simply the ethno-centric products of the eighteenth century European Enlightenment. Instead of human rights, the fashionable term became social justice. Human rights not only derive from the West but they have also been written down in declarations and laws, so it is possible to check what they mean. Social justice lacks these qualities but this gives it the advantage of meaning whatever you want it to. Moreover, there is no way of ever telling when it is satisfied. Social justice thus offers an unlimited vista of political appeal.
The major problems for the acceptance of cultural relativism have come from its source in anthropology. Cultural practices from which most Westerners instinctively shrink, such as cannibalism, human sacrifice, the incineration of widows and female genital mutilation, have had to be accorded their own integrity, lest the culture that produced them be demeaned....
The reality is that if all cultures are relative then we are faced with moral nihilism. If values are always expressions of something called culture, and there are no universal moral principles, then no culture can itself be subjected to any values, because there could be no trans-cultural values to stand in judgement over any particular culture. Cultural relativism, in short, approves any cultural practice at all, no matter how barbaric. It is a philosophy of anything goes.
Moreover, cultural relativists are faced with two other unresolvable dilemmas. They endorse as legitimate other cultures that do not return the compliment. Some other cultures, of which the best known is Islam, will have no truck with relativism of any kind. The devout are totally confident of the universalism of their own beliefs, which derive from the dictates of God, an absolute authority who is external to the world and its cultures. They regard a position such as Western cultural relativism as profoundly mistaken and, moreover, insulting. Relativism devalues their faith because it reduces it to merely one of many equally valid systems of meaning. So, entailed within cultural relativism is, first, an endorsement of absolutisms that deny it, and, second, a demeaning attitude to cultures it claims to respect.
Western knowledge is culturally relative: Despite the overwhelming success of the scientific methods developed in Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the critics of Western culture still insist that truth is relative. Western knowledge is only one kind of knowledge and Western methodologies are only one of the "ways of knowing".
There are a number of sources of this cognitive relativism but the most popular is that of the French Nietzschean theorist, Michael Foucault, who argues that truth and objectivity are Western conceits. All knowledge is bound by culture, he claims. Within each culture, knowledge is generated for political purposes. Hence, Western knowledge is politically beholden to the powerful. To signify this interconnectivity, Foucault calls it "power/knowledge".
This is a congenial argument for postcolonial historians. They believe that Western empirical methods were among the forces that subjugated the Orient, so they regard empiricism and its quest for objective knowledge as a form of imperialism. This is why they are so enamoured of the subjective hermeneutics, or literary interpretations, that prevail in postmodernism and cultural studies. Objectivity equals domination; subjectivism equals intercultural equality and respect.
If taken seriously, this means that science can no longer be regarded as a universal method for discovering truths. Moreover, it means that any reasonably coherent doctrine or body of beliefs can produce "truths" of its own. Science is thus reduced to one belief system among many. This view is especially popular within the fields of cultural studies and the sociology of knowledge where science is invariably termed "Western science", in order to differentiate it from its ostensible competitors....
The truth is that the scientific method developed by the West is a universal method and its success is sufficient to refute any theory about the relativism of truth. Western science makes genuine discoveries. Western knowledge works, and none of the others do with remotely the same effectiveness. To say this, however, is not to be ethnocentric. Western knowledge has nothing whatever to do with racism, or the elevation of one segment of humanity over another. It endorses a style of knowledge and its implementation, not any particular race of people or ethnic group. This style of knowledge did, of course, have to emerge somewhere and at some time, and to this extent it certainly has links with the Western intellectual tradition. It emerged in this social context, but it is clearly accessible to people of any background. Far from being bound by Western culture, Western science belongs to the whole of humanity.
Culture prevails over civilization: When Silvio Berlusconi spoke of Western civilization rather than Western culture, he was reviving terminology that cultural relativism has rendered uncomfortable. The term "civilization" is not archaic but is actually a concept from the modern era. The word did not come into use until the 1770s....
Civilization was a concept born in the European Enlightenment and was identified principally with societies that were based on reason, that were open to new ideas, and that looked to the wider world for inspiration. In Germany at the same time, the romantic movement arose in opposition to this. Instead of reason as the basis of social organization, romanticism emphasised organic connections to the land and the virtues of closed rather than open communities. Civilization implied there was a hierarchy of human societies and that there were some who had not made the grade. Civilization meant establishing a polity on rational principles like liberalism and democracy whereas romanticism emphasized the bloodlines of ethnicity and race.
"Civilization" was in common use for the next two centuries. However, it became one of the first casualties of the culture wars of the post-Vietnam War era. After the 1970s it was widely regarded as politically incorrect. Subsequently, it took on an embarrassed and apologetic demeanour and was retained primarily as token usage.
In its place, the romantic concept of culture as a whole way of life came to prevail. Such a view was a direct result of the rise to intellectual prominence of the creed identified here. Its version of culture recognises no hierarchies and no excellence. Western civilization is just another culture. Cultures are beyond good and evil. Accordingly, "cultural studies" is the field that now dominates academic teaching and research in the humanities, in triumph over its adversary, the cultivation of civilization....
In this section of DiscoverTheNetworks, the category titled Multiculturalism's Nature and Historical Perspectives explores the major philosophical premises of multiculturalism and its ascendancy in the Western world over the past several decades.
The category titled Political Correctness is devoted chiefly to an exploration of this phenomenon which, in recent decades, has become a major force in American life. William Lind's "Political Correctness: A Short History of an Ideology" (published by the Free Congress Foundation) makes the vital observation that: "Political Correctness is directly derived from classical Marxism, and is in fact merely a variant of Marxism. Through most of the history of Marxism, cultural Marxists were “read out” of the movement by classical, economic Marxists. Today, with economic Marxism dead, cultural Marxism has filled its shoes. The medium has changed, but the message is the same: a society of radical egalitarianism enforced by the power of the state."
The category titled Premises of Cultural Relativism and Western Inferiority examines the multiculturalist movement's dogma which holds that no culture is preferable to, or inherently superior to, any other culture. In his July 9, 2004 article, "How Multiculturalism Took over America" (published by FrontPage magazine), Lawrence Auster writes the following: "The first principle of multiculturalism is the equality of all cultures. According to its proponents, America is an assemblage of racially or ethnically defined subcultures, all of which have equal value and none of which can claim a privileged position.... Moreover, we are told, [the] equal and public inclusion of different cultures does not threaten our culture, but 'enriches' it. By this reasoning, if we became (say) an officially bilingual society, ... our culture would not be harmed in the slightest. We would only be including something we once excluded. We would have become something more, not less."
The category titled Premise of Universal White Racism explores the roots and the implications of the multiculturalist movement's deeply held belief that white people carry, in their hearts and minds, a uniquely malevolent and far-reaching brand of racism, bigotry, and intolerance aimed at nonwhites. In his May 2, 2006 article, "White Guilt and the Western Past" (published by the Wall Street Journal's Editorial Page), Shelby Steele refutes this notion, writing: "Possibly white guilt's worst effect is that it does not permit whites -- and nonwhites -- to appreciate something extraordinary: the fact that whites in America, and even elsewhere in the West, have achieved a truly remarkable moral transformation. One is forbidden to speak thus, but it is simply true. There are no serious advocates of white supremacy in America today, because whites see this idea as morally repugnant. If there is still the odd white bigot out there surviving past his time, there are millions of whites who only feel goodwill toward minorities."
The category titled Diversity examines the movement to guarantee the presence of an "adequate" number of certified "victim-group" members (i.e., blacks, Hispanics, women, homosexuals, etc.) in any given work force or student body. Diversity of this type (which classifies people primarily as members of various demographic groups rather than as individuals) is promoted passionately by the political Left as an ideal to be pursued at any cost, even if its achievement can be ensured only by eliminating all objective standards of academic or professional competence.
The category titled Diversity Training explains how corporate America and academia spend immense sums of money on seminars and workshops designed to teach employees and students, respectively, how to "value diversity." In practice, however, a major function of such events is to promote a collective guilt among the whites in attendance. The trainers typically urge white participants to publicly confess their own hidden prejudices and bigoted impulses; teach that the definition of racism is nothing broader than "the systematic oppression of people of color"; and promote the notion that all whites are inherently racist, whether or not they realize it.
The category titled Education and Multiculturalism examines how multiculturalist doctrines and worldviews are passed on to students in America's classrooms, from grade school through college.
The category titled Noble Savage examines the philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau's assertion -- embraced by many modern leftists -- that Western capitalist societies corrupt the morals of mankind and are incompatible with virtue. Multiculturalists who subscribe to this belief typically romanticize the "natural" man (of non-Western cultures) who is supposedly unfettered by the societally imposed inequalities that constrain his "civilized" counterpart.
The category titled Kwanzaa examines the origins and teachings of the week-long Kwanzaa festival which is celebrated mainly in the U.S. from December 26 through January 1 each year. Of particular importance are: (a) the criminal past of its founder, Maulana Karenga, a socialist black nationalist who founded the militant black power organization United Slaves; and (b) the fact that Kwanzaa celebrates seven "principles" that promote socialism in all realms of life (in fact, they are the very same principles that the 1970s terrorist group, the Symbionese Liberation Army, listed as its guiding values).
The category titled Radical Gay Agendas explores the agendas of the gay lobby. To make these agendas explicit for our readers, we have reprinted the article, "The Overhauling of Straight America." Written by Marshall K. Kirk (who co-authored the 1990 book After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the '90s) and Erastes Pill, this article first appeared in Guide Magazine, a homosexual publication, in November 1987. According to MassResistance.com, "This landmark article has become a 'bible' of the homosexual movement ... It outlines strategies and techniques for a successful widespread propaganda campaign to confuse and deceive the American people and demonize opponents. Like all propaganda, their methods are based not on solid intellectual arguments, but instead upon emotional manipulation of the public in an attempt to gain widespread sympathy and approval for homosexual behavior."
The category titled War on Christmas and Easter examines how the political Left seeks to devalue Christian holidays and traditions in various ways.
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