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 human 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.

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 ourselves 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 questions? 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 different 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 students 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 "difference" 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 monoculture 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 dialogue 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 tradition, 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 under 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. This could pose headaches for administrators, but let them take Advil. People might actually learn from each other's cultures, which despite official pretensions rarely happens now. To be heard, however, the various traditions must be voiced, which so-called multiculturalism discourages. The irony is that the recognition of "difference" by the monoculture serves most of those so recognized as merely a means of their integration into that culture. This would be salutary if they brought the richness of their respective traditions with them rather than checking it at the door. But check it they will, because membership in the monoculture is incompatible with tra- ditional outlooks of any kind. So great are the integrating tendencies of modern society that one cannot expect the descendants of great non-Western civilizations present on campus to make much of a case for them. Increas- ingly my brightest students in Toronto are of East Asian or South Asian back- ground, but increasingly also they know hardly more about the spiritual riches of their ancestors than I do. Yet if the promising children of immigrants cannot be expected to act as spokesmen for their forebears, some at least can be expected to manifest curiosity about them. They will therefore provide a reliable constituency for courses about their cultures of origin, courses also available to other students. From this everybody stands to gain, provided that ghettoization of such courses is avoided, whether ethnic or ideological. New courses on non- Western cultures would provide new opportunities for achieving analytical distance from the monoculture. This last would appear for what it is, merely an aspect of the here-and-now of contemporary North American liberal society. It would be a plausible rejoinder to my argument thus far that I have missed the point of multiculturalism, which has little to do with the serious study of non-Western or pre-Western ways of life and much to do with gratifying the claims to recognition of African Americans, Hispanic Americans, women, and gays. I concede this point; I stressed it in my previous article, and it is implicit in my analysis of the monoculture in this one. Still, the rhetoric of multiculturalism at least affords a platform for comparative studies of the great ways of life, Eastern and Western. And as regards these other, home- grown "constituencies," here too it makes good sense to broaden the circle of one's examples of human excellence. Prudence demands it, but so does jus- tice. One owes it not just to African Americans but to white Americans and to truth to recognize Frederick Douglass as a major American thinker. And so too with outstanding women who are too important to be left (exclusively) to feminists. Early, Fox-Genovese, Nelson, and Orwin 35

In general, we need not be inflexible in matters of curriculum, including the curriculum of the courses we ourselves design. Western books, as we know, are not the only ones. Indeed, the greatest Western books (the Bible and Greek literature) are not Western, and our understanding of them has only suffered from an erroneous presumption of familiarity. Would not our students' understanding of what it means to be Western profit from exposure to the non-Western and pre-Western, not as presented by the monoculture, but as they emerge from the sources themselves? In their present ignorance we can hardly expect students to appreciate the manifold uniqueness of the West; for this they require greater knowledge alike of the Western and the non-Western. And might not we benefit from learning whether the questions dearest to our hearts have been posed in non-Western traditions, and if so, in what guise and to what effect? Earlier this year I spent several months studying non-Western books, namely ancient (and some modern) Buddhist texts. This project surprised some people, but my reasons were not exotic. I had conceived a hope to learn from Buddhism on a topic I have long pondered, the political ramifications of compassion. In this I was not disappointed, although (or even because) Bud- dhist compassion, unlike its Western counterpart, has never given rise to a political program. My studies persuaded me, moreover, that certain Bud- dhist texts, such as the first sermon of the Lord Buddha in the deer park at Vanarati, should be read by all who profess to hold nothing human alien to them. The teaching there recorded, with its parallels with pre-Socratic philosophy and its Epicurean and even Hobbist overtones, both reminds of the universality of the problem of suffering and attests to the possibility of a more radical response to it than has been proposed by any Western thinker. In short, our determination to defend the wisdom we owe to Western thought should not discourage us from venturing outside it. I do not mean to understate the difficulty of this task, the disadvantage imposed by one's ignorance of the necessary languages, or the importance of avoiding dilettantism. But while we have every reason to be grateful to specialists in the non-West- ern fields, without whom our forays would not be possible, we need not be intimidated by them. With its dictum nihil humanum alienum puto, Western tradition has placed nothing in the human condition above scrutiny. Yet even these Latin words have pre-Western origins. As I have already suggested, our students, too, stand to benefit greatly from a serious look at a non-Western way of life. Unfortunately, multiculturalist ideology does not support seriousness here. All cultures are equal, and by pronouncing all cultures equal one achieves the peak of culture. This outlook hardly provides an incentive to study Sanskrit, or even to take demanding courses on texts in translation. This is why I follow my teacher, the late Allan Bloom, in seeing the ideology of multiculturalism as itself a recipe for paro- chialism rather than an antidote to it. 36 Academic Questions/Fall 1998

Indeed the monoculture has good reasons for positively discouraging such inquiry. The study of other ways of life naturally promotes an evaluation of their merits relative to each other and to one's own. While one seeks to as- cend to criteria ofjudgment superior to those from which one began-broader, better-grounded, less ethnocentric criteria-criteria and judgments there must be. A model for such study is Herodotus, eager to learn from both Hellenic and foreign ways and for that very reason compelled to judge among them. Yet such necessary judgments place one on thin ice today. This is perhaps the greatest irony of so-called multiculturalism. Its partisans are ready enough to evaluate when it comes to blaming Western culture, but that is as far as they permit themselves or the rest of us to go. Paradoxically, such an outlook inevitably "privileges" Western thought (a favorite complaint of our adversaries) by enshrining its current principles as sacred. As Charles Taylor has pointed out, equal "recognition" of other cultures would be meaningless if it were more than provisional. If reasonable evaluation of cultures is impossible, then the pronouncement that they are equal is empty; if there are no criteria of judgment, then this judgment is as idle as any other. If, on the other hand, reasonable evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of a culture is possible, then there can obviously be no promise in advance to find all of them equal, in general or in any particular. To abdicate judgment of other cultures is not to engage with them but to refuse to do so; it is no compliment to them and it is of no benefit to us. 5 We must in any case defend at all costs the principle, which is a liberal principle, that while all human beings grow up in "cultures" they are not bound to them, ascriptively or prescriptively. Humanity transcends culture, and the finest human beings transcend their particular cultures in ways that make them models for the rest of us. To abandon this principle, as so many so-called liberals rush to do today, is suicide for liberalism itself, which it deprives of all legitimacy. ~5 We must therefore also defend at all costs the principle that the core of a true education is reflection on the greatest works of the mind. For it is only such an education that can liberate from bondage to one's "culture." We can afford to be flexible by broadening our circle of examples of that greatness; can we afford not to be? Smugness about the superiority of the Western intellectual tradition serves no one's interest now, least of all that of the Western intellectual tradition.

Notes

1. Nathan Glazer, We Are All Multicultu~alists Now (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer- sity Press, 1997). 2. Glazer, 4. 3. Clifford Orwin, "All Quiet on the Postwes~ern Front," Public Interest (Spring 1996): 3- 21. Early, Fox-Genovese, Nelson, and Orwin 37

4. For the proceedings of this conference see the University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 66, no. 4 (Fall 1997). 5. Charles Taylor, "The Politics of Recognition," in Amy Gutmann, ed., Multiculturalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 63-73. For some problems with Taylor's position see H.D. Forbes, "Rousseau, Ethnicity, and Difference," in Clifford Orwin and Nathan Tarcov, eds., The Legacy of Rousseau (Chicago: University of Chi- cago Press, 1997), 220-45. 6. On this see the brilliant and angry statement of David Bromwich, "Culturalism, the Euthanasia of Liberalism," Dissent (Winter 1995): 89-102. For trenchant critiques of "culturalism" in political theory, see Ronald Beiner, Philosophy in a Time of Lost Spirit (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997).

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