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The Trouble With Multiculturalism

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By Leon Wieseltier
Oct. 23, 1994

The Trouble With Multiculturalism

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October 23, 1994, Section 7, Page 11 Buy Reprints

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DICTATORSHIP OF VIRTUE Multiculturalism and the Battle for

America's Future. By Richard Bernstein. 367 pp. New York: Alfred
A. Knopf. $25.

PLURALISM is hard, for individuals and for groups. In the United

States, however, we have been so vain for so long about pluralism
that we have forgotten its hardships. Pluralism, after all, is
premised not only on difference, but on the proximity of difference:
another way to live is never out of mind in America, because it is
never out of sight. The sidewalks are crowded with
incommensurabilities. You live and work and play with people for
whom your view of the world is nonsense, or worse.

Exclusiveness is an illusion when experience is so porous, when

everything is everywhere. There is no safety in numbers. There is
safety only in sameness; and so pluralism frequently provokes
noisy fits of sameness. The recent movement in culture and politics
known as multiculturalism is one of those noisy fits. It will pass,
but it will come again. It is a regular feature of the American
situation. Multiculturalism claims to originate in a fear of
homogeneity, of an erasure of the particular by the general; but in
truth it reflects a fear of heterogeneity, which is a classically
American fear.

It should be obvious, as an empirical matter, that American society

has been, for at least a hundred years, a multicultural society. A
multicultural society, however, produces multicultural individuals.
And multicultural individuals, from the standpoint of the ancestral
group and the inherited tradition, are lost individuals, and fallen.
They join, in their persons, influences and instructions that were
not supposed to be joined. The American problem for groups and
traditions has been to retain the tolerance of the country and the
loyalty of their sons and daughters. And so the ideal of
traditionalists in the United States is a multicultural society of
monocultural people, an American nation that is nothing more than
a peaceful association of conformities. They believe in an
impossible union of insularity and democracy. But their mixture of
tolerance in the street and intolerance in the home often comes to
ruin, and so they, the free and strung-out communities of America,
panic. They read, and eat, and marry, inconsistently with their
own.

Richard Bernstein has written a study of panic. It is itself,

unfortunately, a little panicked. "Dictatorship of Virtue" is a weak
and important book. Its importance is owed to its author's
indefatigability. A cultural correspondent for The New York Times,
Mr. Bernstein has documented in detail the extent to which the
attempt to promote "diversity" has stifled diversity, and the
attempt to rectify racial and sexual stereotyping has reproduced it.
Mr. Bernstein roams widely across the boardrooms and the
newsrooms and the classrooms of America, where he has
discovered (and, in a few cases, thinks that he has discovered) the
gutting of the meritocratic vision by racial and sexual preferments.

His most harrowing tales, however, come from the embattled

precincts of American education. In Washington, an educational
consultant complains that "many educators fail to recognize
important cultural differences between Europeans or Euro-
Americans and Africans or African-Americans," and proposes to
turn back the hegemony with a curriculum according to which
"Africans know through symbols, imagery and rhythm, while
Europeans know through counting and measuring." And there is
this example of politically and sexually enlightened pedagogy on
the campus: "The number of seconds required to perform a six-
week vacuum aspiration abortion was recorded for a sample of six
such abortions," a professor of mathematics at the State University
of New York tells his students. "The results were as follows: 84,
100, 80, 85 and 84. For this sample, find: (a) The mean and the
median. (b) The range, the variance and the standard deviation."
Never mind that the professor was so smitten with the
righteousness of his six examples that he gave only five results.
Mr. Bernstein misses the mistake, but he is perfectly on the mark
in noting that "here is a way to impart political points of view
without bothering to have to defend them or discuss them."

Mr. Bernstein has grasped also that there is something new about
the contemporary panic. Multiculturalism has contributed an
emphasis to the repertory of American resentments, and that is the
vanity of victimhood. It is a fine thing that the oppressed (or their
descendants) no longer feel shame about their predicament; but
many of them have gone all the way from shame to pride. This, of
course, plays right into the hands of their predicament, by
promoting it into the foundation for a politics and a culture.
Lachrymosity, for individuals and for communities, has became
exhilarating. Scars have become signatures; and the prevailing
notion of honor requires that scars not heal. Self-reliance is no
longer an American characteristic, when the work of one's hands is
interpreted as the successful seizure of what one is owed. For
many of the angry and animated people whom Mr. Bernstein has
visited, there is no advancement, there is only restitution, and the
restitution for racial and sexual oppression will never be complete.

Since it is impossible for one's pain to be understood with precision

by someone else, it is the better part of social wisdom to be patient
with misunderstanding; or the efforts even of good people will be
experienced as insults. But patience is disappearing from the
United States, and our public life is becoming a brawl of insults. Of
course, insulting with impunity used to be one of the distinguishing
marks of a democracy; but Mr. Bernstein offers instance after
instance of individuals and institutions in America who refuse to
suffer what he nicely calls "the normal offenses of everyday life,"
who would rather tamper with the freedom of others than thicken
their own skins. His accounts of sensitivity training in the
workplace and on campus are especially discouraging.

The problem is that Mr. Bernstein's gift for anecdote is greater

than his gift for analysis. He despises multiculturalism, but he is
not exactly sure what it means. In one chapter it is the "derapage,"
or the skid, of liberalism, and in another chapter it is the "secret
victory" of the counterculture. (For Mr. Bernstein, everything to
the left of the right is pretty much the same.) He wishes to seem a
reasonable man, advocating no more than "a certain common-
sensical approach" and observing that multiculturalism is merely
"far too much . . . made of a few useful insights"; but then he is put
in mind of Robespierre, and then in mind of Mao, and then in mind
of Stalin. Such analogies rattle the reader's confidence in the
reporter.

Mr. Bernstein's anger at the multicultural burlesque of pluralism is,

much of the time, not at all misplaced, but it also gives way before a
troublesome complacence, as when he remarks about the
systematic destruction of the Indian population of America that
"history is often a tragic process." There is no crime that cannot be
marginalized with a reference to tragedy, and it is a strange retort
to those who insist upon the essential guilt of America to insist
upon its essential innocence.

Mr. Bernstein handles ideas coarsely. When he turns from the work
of the journalist to the work of the intellectual, he makes mistakes.
"Reify" is not a "New Age academic term," as anybody who sets
out to write about the contemporary convulsions in the humanities
should know. Worrying about cultural relativism, Mr. Bernstein
flirts with false and ugly notions about the superiority of some
civilizations over others. (From the fact that all civilizations are not
the same it does not follow that they are not "equal.") And he
believes that multiculturalism represents a revival of what he calls,
much too suavely, "that discredited 19th-century concept called
Marxism." This is preposterous. Multiculturalism will make no
revolutions and establish no concentration camps; and compared
to the tribal mystifications of race and gender, the economic
simplifications of Marx are the sterling stuff of universalism.

Many of Mr. Bernstein's stories fill one with horror. Good people
have suffered, personally and professionally, at the hands of the
anti-egalitarians. Still, multiculturalism in America does not
amount to a "New Consciousness," or to any kind of cultural
conspiracy. You would not know from Mr. Bernstein's
melodramatic book that the anti-egalitarians are meeting decent
and fierce resistance. Or that they are, finally, divided against
themselves: nobody ever responded to the temptations of an open
society by resisting them completely.

The airless, cheerless order of the diversity police will be defeated

by the diversity of the land in which they have prospered. Many
things are possible in America, but the singleness of identity is not
one of them. This is what Mr. Bernstein's villains, and also some of
his heroes, do not see. The dream of liberalism was not the
multicultural society, it was the multicultural individual; and in
America the dream came true.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section 7, Page 11 of the National edition with the headline: The Trouble
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