Sunday Night Journal — April 3, 2011
As sometimes happens, I’ve chosen a topic and launched into
it only to find, when it’s too late to turn back, that I can’t
hope to do justice to it in the time available. I’ve tried to hit what I consider the main points, but I’m very conscious that there is much more to be said.
I’ve been thinking about some remarks on multiculturalism
from Fr. Samir’s book on Islam. This is a lengthy quote, but a
worthwhile one, I think.
There is the very human desire that aspires to the new, to the
novel and fresh, which is indicative of a thirst for knowledge of
reality in all of its multiplicity. Unfortunately this can easily
degenerate into cheap exoticism, into the admiration of everything
that is different and new. This tendency is growing increasingly
pronounced in the West.
There also exists a relativistic attitude that derives from the
crisis of the ideological and religious uncertainties characterizing
the contemporary age and leading to a tendency to blame whatever is
"traditional."
Finally, there is a guilt complex (which I prefer to call
"mea-culpism") that is very widespread in the West
regarding the colonial experiences of the Third World nations. This
complex goes so far as to justify the acceptance of any cultural
"import" in the name of relativism or simply because "in
their country this is the way they behave." Promoters of this
position claim that extra-European cultures, which were subjugated in
the past, must not be discriminated against today. Neither should
Europeans oppose those people who want to transplant their cultures
to the West today...
...these premises penalize the Christian host culture...in the
name of multiculturalism Muslims and those students of other faiths
are also prevented from knowing fundamental elements of Western
history and civilization...These forms of self-censorship are harmful
and nourish conflicts instead of controlling them and indicate
very real identity problems in those who promote them.
[My emphasis.]
It is that last observation that I want to pursue. I think
multiculturalism begins with a generous impulse—as Fr. Samir
says, there is the impulse to learn. And it’s accompanied by
the impulse to appreciate, to seek out and acknowledge what is good
in cultures other than one’s own. Often there is an explicit
intention to disarm hostility, which is obviously a good thing,
because there is nothing that comes more naturally and powerfully to
mankind than suspicion of those outside one’s own community,
whether the community is a nation or a tribe or the fans of a sports
team. Just a few days ago, a man wearing the insignia of the San
Francisco Giants was beaten almost to death by a couple of fans of
the Los Angeles Dodgers, apparently for no other reason than that he
was at a Dodgers game in, so to speak, an enemy uniform. I have never
heard of anything quite that bad between Alabama and Auburn fans,
though I would not be greatly surprised to hear of one, and I’m
sure less destructive fights happen frequently. I have read that what
we treat as the names of tribal societies often mean simply “the
people.” The problem is not confined to primitive, uneducated, or stupid people—we certainly have a vast amount of merely tribal hostility between liberals and conservatives in this country, to say
nothing of ethnic and racial divisions, and intellectuals seem every bit as capable of hating as anyone else.
We like to think that fear and hatred of “the Other”
(as academics like to say) is an aberration, a pathology generally
characteristic of some group we don’t like (thereby manifesting
the same pathology ourselves). That Western civilization is uniquely
or especially wicked in this respect is an idea that has been
actively promoted from within the society itself for many years now.
It did not begin in the 1960s, but, like a number of other bad ideas,
it flowered then. As a reaction to blind chauvinism, it was healthy,
but it often became, and remains, a perverse bigotry against one’s
own culture, in which the other is always right, and one’s own
heritage mainly a series of atrocities to be condemned, the act of
condemnation serving to lessen the hereditary guilt of the one
issuing it. Sometimes this begins as part of the youthful awakening
to the fact that the world is full of bad things and that one’s
family and culture have their share in the blame. Maturity ought to
lead to a more balanced perspective, but manifestly it doesn’t
always. As a young left-winger I was generally inclined to credit
other cultures with all sorts of virtues in which my own was
deficient, and I remember how astonished I was to hear a Japanese
student express the crudest sort of bigotry toward Koreans. Such
incidents were useful in teaching me that racism, and group
hostilities in general, were not particularly American vices, but
human ones.
There’s nothing wrong with holding one’s own culture
to a higher standard. But when alienation from the culture becomes a
sense of almost total separation, the result can be a cultural
masochism which takes a positive pleasure in thinking the worst of
one’s own, and even, to all appearances, a cultural death wish:
a belief that the culture does not deserve to survive.
I particularly recall, in the aftermath of 9/11, a number of
commentators reaching back almost a thousand years, to the Crusaders’
sack of Muslim Jerusalem, by way of demonstrating that Muslim
hostility to the West is eminently justified. They seemed to revel in reciting the gruesome details, even including
what were no doubt exaggerations of the time, such as accounts of
horses up their knees or even to their necks in blood.
Well, all right. There is nothing wrong, and much right, with
acknowledging the crimes of the past, though in that context it only
seemed likely to further inflame the jihadists and assist them in
justifying their own sense of righteousness and grievance. But not once did I hear any
of these commentators mention the Muslim sack of Constantinople, or
any of the many, many acts of violence by which Islam seized control
of the Middle East, North Africa, and Spain. This does indeed seem to
deserve to be called cultural masochism; it amounts not only to
saying “we deserve it” but to taking some kind of
pleasure in announcing the fact. To acknowledge the failings of one’s
own culture and religion is noble; to apologize for
its existence is not (unless you really consider it thoroughly evil, in which case why do you remain a part of it?).
This unhealthy streak is paradoxical, in that it combines a
dislike of one’s own culture with a sense, usually
unacknowledged, of personal superiority to all cultures. In that
second respect it seems a last decadent stage of the Enlightenment’s
flight from abstract and absolute principle. What begins as a sort of
humility, a refusal to assert one’s superior grasp of the truth
or of value, becomes an unwillingness to make any judgment of pure
truth or value at all. One sometimes hears, in reference to some ugly practice
among a non-white non-European people, that “it’s their
culture.” Yes, it is
their culture, but why should we pretend not to
find it repulsive? Is it because we don’t believe we have the
right to find anything repulsive? But this broad pseudo-tolerance,
stops, as politics was once said to do, at the water’s edge,
when those who can’t bring themselves to judge another culture
often consider Republicans to be hardly human at all.
And in the end the multiculturalist does, after all, believe that
he is right, and that the world should operate according to his
ideas, with secular liberalism determining what is permissible and
what is not. He smuggles this belief in silently, perhaps
unconsciously, in unexamined axioms. “All animals are equal,
but some are more equal than others.” He sets up a sort of
museum or exposition, in which one may browse the colorful dress, the
music, the food, of a number of cultures. But it is the
multiculturalist who provides the hall, and makes the rules, for the
exhibitors.
What happens when one of these refuses to accept his position as
one among many, and asserts his right to rule the others, or to have removed those of whom he disapproves, or at least
not to be forced to coexist with them as equals? The multiculturalist
must either surrender or face an internal crisis: the necessity of
declaring absolute principles and justifying them, not only in their
specifics but in their absoluteness.
The outcome of that decision depends on whether the masochistic
tendency or the stubborn and instinctive human belief in abstract
truth and right prevails. If the former wins, it may be the last
gasp of the Enlightenment project. But the latter requires a serious
consideration of the absolute, a dangerous course for the officially
non-dogmatic—dangerous internally, because, in a once-Christian
society, it might lead to an unwelcome reconsideration of the roots,
dangerous externally because it could lead to the establishment as
dogma of some secular ideology, under which Christianity is not
likely to fare well. Either way, a stance of principled
unprincipledness is unlikely to endure.