by Dinesh D’Souza for First Things
Multiculturalism is presented by its advocates in the schools and universities as a benign alternative to monoculturalism. Historian Peter Stearns insists that the multicultural debate “is between those who think there are special marvelous features about the Western tradition that students should be exposed to, and others who feel it’s much more important for students to have a sense of the way the larger world has developed.” This is the unmistakable appeal of multiculturalism: it is obviously better to study many cultures rather than a single culture, to have diverse points of view rather than a single one.
Yet if multiculturalism represented nothing more than an upsurge of interest in other cultures, it would be uncontroversial. Who can possibly be against hundreds of thousands of American students studying the Analects of Confucius or the philosophical writings of Alfarabi and Avicenna? The debate about multiculturalism is not over whether to study other cultures but how to study the West and other cultures. Multiculturalism is better understood as a civil conflict within the Western academy over contrasting approaches to learning about the world.
Critics of multiculturalism such as Allan Bloom, E. D. Hirsch, and Arthur Schlesinger have argued for an emphasis on Western civilization. Bloom asserts in The Closing of the American Mind that American students are aliens in their own culture—abysmally ignorant of the philosophical, historical, and economic foundations of the West. Hirsch in Cultural Literacy lists numerous literary references, historical facts, and scientific concepts that American students should know but apparently don’t. Schlesinger argues in The Disuniting of America that students should study Western civilization because it is their own. “We don’t have to believe that our values are absolutely better than the next fellow’s. People with a different history will have differing values. But we believe that our own are better for us.”
Schlesinger’s relativist argument for a Western canon is open to the objection, What do you mean we, white man? Literary critic Gerald Graff asks, in an ethnically diverse society, “who gets to determine which values are common and which merely special?” Barbara Herrnstein-Smith contends that different groups share “different sets of beliefs, interests, assumptions, attitudes, and practices . . . . There is no single comprehensive culture that transcends any or all other cultures.”
At its deepest level, multiculturalism represents a denial of all Western claims to truth. In a recent book, literary critic Stanley Fish spurns the very possibility of transcultural standards of evaluation. “What are these truths and by whom are they to be identified?” In Fish’s view, “The truths any of us find compelling will all be partial, which is to say they will all be political.” Another scholar, Barbara Johnson, identifies the multicultural project with “the deconstruction of the foundational ideals of Western civilization.” Anthropologist Renato Rosaldo urges the rejection of “timeless universals,” and philosopher Richard Rorty declares the need “to abandon traditional notions of rationality, objectivity, method, and truth.” The multicultural challenge is cogently summarized by philosopher John Searle…
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The preceding article originally appeared in the November 1995 edition of First Things magazine and is made available here for educational purposes only. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 106A-117 of the U.S. Copyright Law. Photo above: A statue of Christopher Columbus in Johnston, Rhode Island. Three years earlier, the statue was removed from the State Capitol grounds in Providence following violent protests sparked by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
