Comments prepared for a debate sponsored by the Cosmopolitan Club, Santa
Barbara CA
By Tom Krannawitter
Posted February 7, 2003
Let me begin by thanking Marcus Crahan and the Cosmopolitan Club for
inviting me here to speak here in lovely Santa Barbara. (After my wife and I
married in 1997, we honeymooned here in Santa Barbara at a wonderful hotel,
the Montecito Inn, and I welcome any opportunity to come back.) I would also
like to thank my interlocutor, Ms. Saveeni Kahn-Marcus of the University of
California Santa Barbara's Multicultural Center, for agreeing to this debate.
I come here today in a spirit of charity and gratitude--in the
spirit of Aristotle, who once remarked that after all false opinions have been
removed, what remains is the truth. It is my hope that my contribution will
help reveal something of that truth, and that in turn I will receive the
benefit of my own thinking on these subjects becoming clearer.
In the brief time that has been allotted me, I would like to discuss
multiculturalism intellectually and politically. First Intellectually. How did
multiculturalism become a doctrine so nearly universally accepted by educated
elites?
Multiculturalism is on its face the study of many cultures. That there are
many and different cultures that exist in our world today, and that have
existed throughout human history--and that we might learn
something from these cultures--is undeniably true. But
multiculturalism represents something much more than that. To see this, we
need to step back and recall an older way of understanding, in order to first
make clear what multiculturalism is not.
Going back to the roots of the Western philosophic tradition, philosophy,
or the search for truth and knowledge, begins with three premises, which are
themselves indemonstrable, but which provide the foundation for any and all
demonstrable propositions:
1. The first is the common sense notion that man finds himself in a world,
a universe, a cosmos, that he did not create, and which he does not command,
but of which he is a part.
2. The second is that there is an order to the cosmos of which man is part,
evidenced by such common observations as the sun always rising in the East and
setting in the West, or the fact that dogs always give birth to puppies, while
human beings always give birth to babies, and there is never a mix up.
3. The third premise is that man by nature is rational, that the human mind
is free to observe, think, and discover truths about the universe in which he
lives--that man experiences himself as possessing the freedom to
contemplate evidence presented to his intellect, and judge for himself what is
more or less likely to be true.
These premises are the beginning point of philosophy, providing an
objective standard of truth and falsity, right and wrong, because it is a
standard that exists apart from the will of man. In fact, far being a product
of human will, according to the classics, the natural standards of truth and
right ought to guide human will, and human investigation.
This is a very general sketch of classical Western moral and political
thought, though I should emphasize that while this body of thought is a
feature of the West, or Western civilization, it never understood itself as
Western; it assumed the possibility of discovering objective truths
that transcend, and therefore are not bound by, place or time, because it
assumed nature to be universal and unchanging.
For the past several hundred years, however, Western philosophy has been in
a state of self-destruction. Certain modern thinkers zeroed in on the fact
that the premises of philosophy are indemonstrable--that man
cannot freely prove the cause of his own freedom; that as soon as man's
freedom is understood to be the effect of one or more causes, it is no longer
freedom. Thus modern Western philosophy began to deny man's freedom. Instead
of searching for objective truth, philosophy has increasingly become a search
for the causes of human thought and behavior, whether they are biological
(e.g. Darwinism), economic (e.g. Marxism), or psychological (e.g.
Freudianism). Though they disagree on the precise causes, these modern
doctrines agree on the basic premise that human thought is nothing but an
effect, and that there is no truth to be discovered by the human mind.
Multiculturalism is an offshoot of modern anthropology, itself a product of
this self-destruction of Western philosophy. Anthropology, and ultimately
multiculturalism, find their home in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an
18th Century thinker and writer who openly rejected the foundation of classic
thought, and whose influence continues to dominate the humanities departments
of most colleges and universities.
Rousseau posited that man by nature is not rational. Prior to political
life, in what Rousseau called the "state of nature," men were solitary beings,
having little or no interaction with one another. Therefore, argued Rousseau,
pre-political, solitary man lacked language, because he had no need for
language; and if man did not possess language, he could not possess reason.
For Rousseau, man by nature is not altogether different than any of the
irrational beasts. Man began to speak, and therefore think, by some chance
natural catastrophe, such as an earthquake or volcano, that brought men
together and forced them to interact with one another. From Rousseau's
premise, the very nature of language, and the elements of human thought,
reflect nothing but the environmental and cultural forces that produced them.
All human language and human thought--moral, political, and
religious--are the varying and purposeless effects of varying and
purposeless physical causes.
Upon Rousseau's theoretical hypothesis--and I emphasize here
that his theory was nothing more than hypothesis, though Darwin and his
epigones have worked tirelessly, if in vain, to provide physical evidence of
Rousseau's theory--arose the modern discipline of anthropology,
the academic study of human cultures. From the anthropological point of view,
it makes little sense to speak of reason as a fundamental faculty that
distinguishes humans from non-human beings. Rather, reason becomes one of the
many customs or habits of particular peoples living together in particular
places at particular times. Instead of pursuing the truth about man and how he
ought to live, anthropology, and its multicultural disciples, assume that
reason is incapable of telling us how man ought to live, because reason itself
is but an invention of different cultures. As evidence they trot out various
examples of the many disagreements between different cultures about basic
moral and political questions. From this multiplicity of perspectives, they
conclude, there is no objective ground upon which we might judge or rank the
many cultures of the earth--the "values" of each culture are
equally valid compared to the values of any other culture.
This is the intellectual basis of multiculturalism, and its emphasis on
"diversity" and "non-judgmentalism." As there are many interpretations of
right and wrong, the only thing we can know is truly wrong is the belief that
we can know true right from true wrong. It means, therefore, it is wrong to
think we can objectively distinguish civilized peoples from barbarous peoples.
To the degree to which the modern academy rests on modern philosophy, this is
the basis for much of what is taught under the name "higher education."
Immediately, however, certain problems arise for the multiculturalist.
First is the obvious fact that multiculturalism is a product of one culture,
or sub-culture, modern Western philosophy. Consider that nowhere in tribal
Africa, or in the Balkans, or among militant Islamists, or in Iraq, or in
Communist China or North Korea is there any demand for multicultural
"diversity." In short, multiculturalism is, itself, not multicultural.
Second is the fact that multiculturalism, built as it is upon a denial of
universal human nature, appeals unwittingly to that classical premise in its
focus of study. What, or who, after all, comprises the many cultures it
studies and celebrates? Human beings. Were they to reflect on this simple
observation, multiculturalists would recognize that Aristotle and the other
classics might in fact have much to teach them.
Most problematic is the fact that multiculturalism claims to tell us
something true about the human world, yet it is founded upon the denial
that objective truth is possible. In its celebration of the diversity of
cultural perspectives--and in its denial of any objective or true
point of view--multiculturalism becomes just another perspective.
That is, on its own ground, multiculturalism cannot defend itself as any more
(or less) true than non-multicultural perspectives.
Let us turn to the politics of multiculturalism, and in particular what it
means for American politics. Rejecting the waves of modern philosophy crashing
down on Europe at the time, the Americans in 1776 attempted something never
before attempted: they founded a nation upon a self evident truth, a truth
bound up in the "laws of nature and of nature's God." As Abraham Lincoln
reminded us at the Gettysburg cemetery, "our fathers brought forth on this
continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal." That proposition has been the
single greatest cause of the rise of American freedom, happiness, and
prosperity. The entire American experiment in free government stands or falls
by the principle of equality, and whether Americans remain dedicated to the
cause of defending it.
But Americans will not defend what they do not believe to be true. Under
the influence multiculturalism, increasingly the upper intellectual ranks of
Americans have come of the opinion that there is nothing they believe to be
true, and they persist in teaching that to our children. Indeed, the most
sinister aspect of multiculturalism, politically, is that it teaches American
students and citizens to discard their loyalty to the United States, in the
name of "diversity," and to abandon anything that smacks of "patriotism."
For a nation such as the United States, one dedicated to the natural rights
of man, this is problematic--especially in a time of war. It is
from multiculturalists that one hears the resurrected phrase, "one man's
terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." Of course, even some
multiculturalists winced when those "freedom fighters" crashed airplanes into
their cities, murdering their friends and relatives. But not all of them.
Today one can still read in the journals of the multiculturalist left, such as
the New York Times or The Nation, that America was ultimately to
blame for September 11th, and that we should focus our efforts on reaching out
to the "others" who live and think differently than do we.
Some multiculturalists try to square patriotism with their multiculturalism
by arguing that what unites Americans is our diversity. But the conclusion of
this argument is unsustainable. Individual rights, religious and civil
liberty, and the rule of law are either good, or they are not; a nation cannot
affirm both simultaneously. Put another way, if America stands for everything,
it can stand for nothing. As one multiculturalist intellectual extolled in the
New Yorker last fall, "the whole meaning of American life is that there
is no such thing as the meaning of American life."
Whether he rejects or redefines patriotism, the multiculturalist believes
patriotism must be subdued and subordinated to the wider claims of
multicultural diversity. One solution is to subject American patriotism to the
multi-national, and therefore multicultural, control of international
organizations such as the United Nations or the newly formed International
Court of Justice. In the rare cases that a multiculturalist will support
coercive action against one culture, that action must receive the blessings of
the international community, the only source of "multicultural justice,"
regardless of the (im)moral character of the nations that might comprise the
international community. For the American multiculturalist, America is ours,
which means it is not the "other," which means American in itself cannot be
worth defending.
When thinking about the politics of multiculturalism, we should recall that
multiculturalism not only exercises leftist political influence, it is a
product of those politics. Some multiculturalists try to defend the advent of
the term "multiculturalism" as a new, positive way to speak about "diversity."
In some sense this is true. But it was not by chance that the term
"multiculturalism" was coined at the same moment, in the mid to late 1980s,
when race-based preferences and quotas were coming under increasing public and
legal scrutiny.
At that time, the arguments for remedying past discrimination and forcing
racial parity in schools and businesses were failing to persuade the American
people. Why should Americans of all colors today pay for the sins of some in
the past? What do Americans of all colors today owe to the many fallen
Americans who gave their last full measure of devotion to make America the
free country it is? And who believes that all ethnic groups are equal in
preparing their children for college or work? In their desperate search for a
new defense of the discriminatory policies of affirmative action, liberals
concocted the notion that without race based preferences and quotas, there
would be no "diversity" in the classroom and workplace. Multiculturalism was
intended to lend academic authority to the racial politics of affirmative
action, as multicultural centers and departments began to spring up in
colleges and universities around the country. This was the political basis for
multiculturalism.
Let us conclude here. Intellectually, multiculturalism is indefensible. As
I believe I have shown, it is embarrassingly inconsistent. It is refuted and
undermined by its own argument. Politically, multiculturalism is dangerous.
Multiculturalism represents nothing less than the political suicide of the
West, and in particular the crown jewel of the West, the United States of
America. Multiculturalism attempts to undermine the good principles upon which
America is built, and it is corrosive of the patriotic spirit that fills the
hearts of free men and women. Though it operates much more subtly,
multiculturalism is no less a threat to our free institutions than the
terrorists who attack our cities with airplanes. It is the test of the
American people whether they have the intelligence to identify
multiculturalism for the mistake it is, and the resolve to ensure that it does
not triumph over this, the last best hope of mankind.
Tom
Krannawitter is the Vice President of the Claremont
Institute.
The Claremont Institute
http://www.claremont.org/writings/20030207krannawitter.html
© Copyright 2002, The Claremont Institute.
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