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Multiculturalism to a Point Early, Fox-Genovese, Nelson, and Orwin 31 If you had the patience and intellectual responsibility, say, to distinguish between different versions of nmlticulturalism or poststructuralism, you would find that some such folks make special effort to argue for morality and hu- man values. One who does so is Jacques Derrida. Part of what poststructuralism can help you learn from this century of world wars is that no human values are ever guaranteed, that nothing we value as humane is certain to be trium- phant, that it must constantly be relearned, defended, disseminated anew. Part of what you can learn from cultural studies is how to wage that sort of struggle. And with multiculturalism you can discover the myriad forms that struggle takes. Multiculturalism to a Point Clifford Orwin: Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. According to Nathan Glazer, "we are all nmlticulturalists now. 'q To this we might reply as Tonto did to such an inclusive application of the first person plural by the Lone Ranger: "What do you mean we, white man?" In fact, however, I accept Mr. Glazer's claim that like the Lone Ranger we find our- selves surrounded, that "multiculturalism...has, in a word, won. ''2 Nowhere has it won more decisively than in the university. "Western Civilization"-or to speak less portentously, the vanished consensus within the university on the goodness of a liberal education based exclusively on Western texts-has ceded to the new dispensation. The question is no longer how to avert the triumph of multiculturalism, but how to respond to it. How can we turn this outcome to the advantage of the serious study of permanent human ques- tions? Can we make multiculturalism work for us? One option always available to those who can't beat their adversaries is to join them. Last year I published an essay in the Public Interest titled "All Quiet on the Postwestern Front. ''3 There you will find my account of the character of so-called multiculturalism in the university and my analysis of the differ- ent factors-some obvious, some not-that have contributed to its triumph. Although I won't go over the same ground today, this essay is a kind of foot- note to that one. That one was widely interpreted as an attack on multiculturalism; I will now display my supineness before an idea whose time has come by saying some things in praise of it. In praise, to be sure, of a moderate version of multiculturalism, even an idiosyncratic one. My notion of a salutary multiculturalism will emerge only by contrast with what I will call the "monoculture." I have borrowed this last term from my new Toronto 32 Academic Questions/Fall 1998 colleague, David Novak. Ugly and neologistic as the term may be, it aptly indicates the foil for my praise of a kind of multiculturalism. Already in my article I indicated that my chief objection was not to multiculturalism as such but to the spuriousness of so much of what claims the name. If the reforms enacted under the rubric of multiculturalism in fact compelled our students to come to grips with cultures other than their own- with non-Western cultures or pre-Western cultures such as those of Israel or Hellas-then multiculturalism would merit at least two cheers. For this would involve a vast broadening of the horizons of students today. God knows these horizons are narrow, narrower, I suspect, than they have ever been. No stu- dents have ever been so thoroughly immersed in the here and now as ours today. Unfortunately the effect of multiculturalism as practiced is not so much to rescue them from this immersion as it is to apply firm downward pressure upon whatever heads happen to bob above the surface. The effect of so- called multiculturalism is to reinforce what I mean by the monoculture. The monoculture is the post-Western (or as its enthusiasts like to call it, postmodern) culture. It is distinguished from its predecessor by its conspicu- ous lack of the vitality, variety', and fruitful tensions that so long characterized the West. Its premise is cultural relatMsm, and it draws dogmatic conclusions from this premise~ As the official university culture, monoculturalism celebrates "difference." But this celebration of "difference" is remarkable primarily for its sameness. Who among us could not forecast, without recourse to the Psychic Network, the position of a typical university official on every issue of "differ- ence" that arises within his or her bailiwick? As the new campus orthodoxy, "diversity" is every bit as diverse as any other orthodoxy. We must therefore contest the claim of the monoculture to have inaugu- rated the era of multiculturalism. For the diverse cultures to which the mo- noculture pays lip service were vibrant once and may be vibrant still-outside the university. I do not dismiss the possible wisdom of Zulu warriors or Mayan peasants or Korean sorceresses or anyone else. Socrates, after all, listened to almost anybody, and a foreigner in town (even a foreign courtesan) was a special treat. What galls me is the bowdlerization, the falsification of non- Western ways of life by the monoculture. To the extent that what now reigns in the university is the monoculture, our task is not to repel diversity but to introduce it. It is to open a real dia- logue about and among different "cultures" in place of the spurious one that now sits there like congealed mush. The first step to so doing, of course-it remains the crucial one-is to rekindle interest in the great books of the West. This we must do not by asserting their status as a "canon"-canonicity only repels today-but by showing that they still speak to students more powerfully than postmodernism can. Precisely because their oldness tells against them now, we must make them new again, rescuing them from their place in tradi- tion, which almost always obscures more than it illuminates. Early, Fox-Genovese, Nelson, and Orwin 33 I do not now defend and never have defended "the canon." Canons are for churches, not universities. I teach many books that I regard as unfairly ne- glected, and I don't begrudge my colleagues the right to do the same. I have even been credited with expanding the canon, by persuading some people that Thucydides, never a member of the canon of political philosophy, de- served admission to that enclave. (Yes, even some dead white males have been unfairly excluded therefrom.) But "the canon" was never my canon, and I have never willingly taught a book simply because it was on someone else's list. Some old books speak to me, some don't. I teach the books that do. You cannot force teachers to teach works that they do not want to teach, nor can you force them to teach in a manner uncongenial to them. It is almost as bad that good books be taught badly as that they not be taught at all. So a scheme of liberal education that rejects the deconstructionist approach to reading these books presupposes the availability of a competent corps of teachers who do so. That presupposi- tion would be rash today. It is a rare university, I would bet, where one could find enough like-minded colleagues (especially like-minded colleagues un- der forty) to staff a successful "great books" program. For the foreseeable future, then, we will probably have to concentrate on what we can accomplish in our own classrooms and in unofficial collaboration with such allies as we can find, recommending them to our students and hoping that they will rec- ommend us to theirs. Outside the classroom we must be willing to make our case in every forum, even or especially those dominated by colleagues who disagree with us. It would be foolish of us to huff and puff without even hope of blowing their house down, and we might well learn from the dialogue. It will surely serve the Millian purpose of forcing us to re-examine our arguments, and while we will likely fail to persuade our demurring colleagues, we might win over some bystanders. Last year I participated in a conference organized by the chair- man of the English department to discuss a book that had achieved some celebrity for its postmodernist critique of the contemporary university. The participants, most but not all of them professors of literature, were about evenly divided between adepts and critics of postmodernism. Whether or not I accomplished anything else that day, at least I learned who my allies were among the literature professors. 4 Beyond this we should favor a dialogue among the diverse "cultures" rep- resented in the university, rather than merely within the monoculture. For these "cultures" have much to contribute to the university precisely as alter- natives to the monoculture. Consider the current controversy involving Or- thodox Jews at Yale. I do not know the details of the dispute; the specific demands of the students may or may not be warranted. Clearly, however, they have raised fundamental moral issues, thereby challenging the monoculture, and they have done so on the basis of a genuinely "diverse" or "different" 34 Academic Questions / Fall 1998 culture. (It is telling that religion, the core of all great civilizations, requires laundering as a condition of admission to the inonoculture.) If more such challenges were raised, if more students and teachers brought to bear on the current situation the insights of their respective traditions, the university would be a more tumultuous place and a far livelier one.
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