Tyr-Ziu Saxnot
08-08-2015, 05:34 PM
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Institutionalizing-our-demise--America-vs--multiculturalism-1472
JUNE 2004
Institutionalizing our demise: America vs. multiculturalism
by Roger Kimball
Tenth in the series "Lengthened Shadows."
There are similar anecdotes from around the country—an access of flag-waving followed
by a relapse into indifference. Does it mean that the sudden upsurge of patriotism in
the weeks following 9/11 was only, as it were, skin deep? Or perhaps it merely testifies
to the fact that a sense of permanent emergency is difficult to maintain, especially in
the absence of fresh attacks. Is our sense of ourselves as Americans patent only when
challenged? “Does it,” Huntington asks, “take an Osama bin Laden … to make us realize that
we are Americans? If we do not experience recurring destructive attacks, will we return to
the fragmentation and eroded Americanism before September 11?”
One hopes that the answer is No. The behavior of those schoolchildren at Fort McHenry—behavior
that was, I am happy to report, quietly encouraged by their teachers—suggests that the answer
cannot simply be No. But I fear that for every schoolchild standing at attention for the
National Anthem, there is a teacher or lawyer or judge or politician or ACLU employee
militating against the hegemony of the dominant culture, the insupportable intrusion of
white, Christian, “Eurocentric” values into the curriculum, the school pageant, the town
green, etc., etc. The demonstration of national character and resolve following September
11 was extraordinary. It did not, however, purchase immunity from the virus of cultural
dissolution. The usually perceptive commentator Max Boot, writing about the issue of gay
marriage, remarked in passing that “no one who saw the response to 9/11 can think we are
soft or decadent” or that “America is in cultural decline.” Alas, the display of national
heroism and resolve following 9/11 has had little if any effect on the forces behind the
fragmentation and “eroded Americanism” to which Huntington refers.
Those forces are not isolated phenomena; they are not even confined to America. They are
part of a global crisis in national identity, coefficients of the sudden collapse of
self-confidence in the West—a collapse that shows itself in everything from swiftly falling
birthrates in “old Europe” to the attack on the whole idea of the sovereign nation state.
It is hard to avoid thinking that a people that has lost the will to reproduce or govern
itself is a people on the road to destruction.
Only a few years ago we were invited to contemplate the pleasant spectacle of the
“end of history” and the establishment of Western-style liberal democracy, attended
by the handmaidens of prosperity and rising standards of health care and education,
the world over. Things look rather different now as a variety of centrifugal forces
threatens to undermine the sources of national identity and, with it, the sources of
national strength and the security which that strength underwrites.
The threat shows itself in many ways, from culpable complacency to the corrosive
imperatives
of “multiculturalism” and political correctness. (I use scare quotes because what
generally travels under the name of “multiculturalism” is really a form of mono-cultural
animus directed against the dominant culture.) In essence, as Huntington notes,
multiculturalism is “anti-European civilization… . It is basically an anti-Western ideology.”
The multiculturalists claim to be fostering a progressive cultural cosmopolitanism
distinguished by superior sensitivity to the downtrodden and dispossessed. In fact,
they encourage an orgy of self-flagellating liberal guilt as impotent as it is insatiable.
The “sensitivity” of the multiculturalist is an index not of moral refinement but of moral
vacuousness. As the French essayist Pascal Bruckner observed, “An overblown conscience is
an empty conscience.”
Compassion ceases if there is nothing but compassion, and revulsion turns to insensitivity.
Our “soft pity,” as Stefan Zweig calls it, is stimulated, because guilt is a convenient
substitute for action where action is impossible. Without the power to do anything,
sensitivity becomes our main aim. The aim is not so much to do anything, as to be judged.
Salvation lies in the verdict that declares us to be wrong.
Multiculturalism is a moral intoxicant; its thrill centers around the emotion of superior
virtue; its hangover subsists on a diet of nescience and blighted “good intentions.”
Wherever the imperatives of multiculturalism have touched the curriculum, they have left
broad swaths of anti-Western attitudinizing competing for attention with quite astonishing
historical blindness. Courses on minorities, women’s issues, the Third World proliferate;
the teaching of mainstream history slides into oblivion.
“The mood,” Arthur Schlesinger wrote in The Disuniting of America (1992), his excellent book
on
the depredations of multiculturalism, “is one of divesting Americans of the sinful European
inheritance and seeking redemptive infusions from non-Western cultures.”
A profound ignorance of the milestones of American culture is one predictable result of this
mood. The statistics have become proverbial. Huntington quotes one poll from the 1990s
showing that while 90 percent of Ivy League students could identify Rosa Parks, only 25
percent could identify the author of the words “government of the people, by the people,
for the people.” (Yes, it’s the Gettysburg Address.) In a 1999 survey, 40 percent of seniors
at fifty-five top colleges could not say within half a century when the Civil War was fought.
Another study found that more high school students knew who Harriet Tubman was than knew that
Washington commanded the American army in the revolution or that Abraham Lincoln wrote the
Emancipation Proclamation. Doubtless you have your own favorite horror story.
But multiculturalism is not only an academic phenomenon. The attitudes it fosters have profound
social as well as intellectual consequences. One consequence has been a sharp rise in the
phenomenon of immigration without—or with only partial—assimilation: a dangerous demographic
trend that threatens American identity in the most basic way.
These various agents of dissolution are also elements in a wider culture war: the contest to
define how we live and what counts as the good in the good life. Anti-Americanism occupies
such a prominent place on the agenda of the culture wars precisely because the traditional values of American identity—articulated by the Founders and grounded in a commitment to individual liberty and public virtue—are deeply at odds with the radical, de-civilizing tenets of the “multiculturalist” enterprise.
To get a sense of what has happened to the institution of American identity, compare Robert
Frost’s performance at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961 with Maya Angelou’s performance
thirty-two years later. As Huntington reminds us, Frost spoke of the “heroic deeds” of
America’s founding, an event, he said, that with “God’s approval” ushered in “a new order of
the ages.” By contrast, Maya Angelou never mentioned the words “America” or “American.”
Instead, she identified twenty-seven ethnic or religious groups that had suffered repression
because of America’s “armed struggles for profit,” “cynicism,” and “brutishness.”
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From 11 years ago. We have now seen how far its went. Right up to the very point of falling off the cliff. Make no mistake that is exactly where we are at now!Government tricks, cover ups and propaganda hide it and doso deliberately because current government is in on it all the way. -Tyr
JUNE 2004
Institutionalizing our demise: America vs. multiculturalism
by Roger Kimball
Tenth in the series "Lengthened Shadows."
There are similar anecdotes from around the country—an access of flag-waving followed
by a relapse into indifference. Does it mean that the sudden upsurge of patriotism in
the weeks following 9/11 was only, as it were, skin deep? Or perhaps it merely testifies
to the fact that a sense of permanent emergency is difficult to maintain, especially in
the absence of fresh attacks. Is our sense of ourselves as Americans patent only when
challenged? “Does it,” Huntington asks, “take an Osama bin Laden … to make us realize that
we are Americans? If we do not experience recurring destructive attacks, will we return to
the fragmentation and eroded Americanism before September 11?”
One hopes that the answer is No. The behavior of those schoolchildren at Fort McHenry—behavior
that was, I am happy to report, quietly encouraged by their teachers—suggests that the answer
cannot simply be No. But I fear that for every schoolchild standing at attention for the
National Anthem, there is a teacher or lawyer or judge or politician or ACLU employee
militating against the hegemony of the dominant culture, the insupportable intrusion of
white, Christian, “Eurocentric” values into the curriculum, the school pageant, the town
green, etc., etc. The demonstration of national character and resolve following September
11 was extraordinary. It did not, however, purchase immunity from the virus of cultural
dissolution. The usually perceptive commentator Max Boot, writing about the issue of gay
marriage, remarked in passing that “no one who saw the response to 9/11 can think we are
soft or decadent” or that “America is in cultural decline.” Alas, the display of national
heroism and resolve following 9/11 has had little if any effect on the forces behind the
fragmentation and “eroded Americanism” to which Huntington refers.
Those forces are not isolated phenomena; they are not even confined to America. They are
part of a global crisis in national identity, coefficients of the sudden collapse of
self-confidence in the West—a collapse that shows itself in everything from swiftly falling
birthrates in “old Europe” to the attack on the whole idea of the sovereign nation state.
It is hard to avoid thinking that a people that has lost the will to reproduce or govern
itself is a people on the road to destruction.
Only a few years ago we were invited to contemplate the pleasant spectacle of the
“end of history” and the establishment of Western-style liberal democracy, attended
by the handmaidens of prosperity and rising standards of health care and education,
the world over. Things look rather different now as a variety of centrifugal forces
threatens to undermine the sources of national identity and, with it, the sources of
national strength and the security which that strength underwrites.
The threat shows itself in many ways, from culpable complacency to the corrosive
imperatives
of “multiculturalism” and political correctness. (I use scare quotes because what
generally travels under the name of “multiculturalism” is really a form of mono-cultural
animus directed against the dominant culture.) In essence, as Huntington notes,
multiculturalism is “anti-European civilization… . It is basically an anti-Western ideology.”
The multiculturalists claim to be fostering a progressive cultural cosmopolitanism
distinguished by superior sensitivity to the downtrodden and dispossessed. In fact,
they encourage an orgy of self-flagellating liberal guilt as impotent as it is insatiable.
The “sensitivity” of the multiculturalist is an index not of moral refinement but of moral
vacuousness. As the French essayist Pascal Bruckner observed, “An overblown conscience is
an empty conscience.”
Compassion ceases if there is nothing but compassion, and revulsion turns to insensitivity.
Our “soft pity,” as Stefan Zweig calls it, is stimulated, because guilt is a convenient
substitute for action where action is impossible. Without the power to do anything,
sensitivity becomes our main aim. The aim is not so much to do anything, as to be judged.
Salvation lies in the verdict that declares us to be wrong.
Multiculturalism is a moral intoxicant; its thrill centers around the emotion of superior
virtue; its hangover subsists on a diet of nescience and blighted “good intentions.”
Wherever the imperatives of multiculturalism have touched the curriculum, they have left
broad swaths of anti-Western attitudinizing competing for attention with quite astonishing
historical blindness. Courses on minorities, women’s issues, the Third World proliferate;
the teaching of mainstream history slides into oblivion.
“The mood,” Arthur Schlesinger wrote in The Disuniting of America (1992), his excellent book
on
the depredations of multiculturalism, “is one of divesting Americans of the sinful European
inheritance and seeking redemptive infusions from non-Western cultures.”
A profound ignorance of the milestones of American culture is one predictable result of this
mood. The statistics have become proverbial. Huntington quotes one poll from the 1990s
showing that while 90 percent of Ivy League students could identify Rosa Parks, only 25
percent could identify the author of the words “government of the people, by the people,
for the people.” (Yes, it’s the Gettysburg Address.) In a 1999 survey, 40 percent of seniors
at fifty-five top colleges could not say within half a century when the Civil War was fought.
Another study found that more high school students knew who Harriet Tubman was than knew that
Washington commanded the American army in the revolution or that Abraham Lincoln wrote the
Emancipation Proclamation. Doubtless you have your own favorite horror story.
But multiculturalism is not only an academic phenomenon. The attitudes it fosters have profound
social as well as intellectual consequences. One consequence has been a sharp rise in the
phenomenon of immigration without—or with only partial—assimilation: a dangerous demographic
trend that threatens American identity in the most basic way.
These various agents of dissolution are also elements in a wider culture war: the contest to
define how we live and what counts as the good in the good life. Anti-Americanism occupies
such a prominent place on the agenda of the culture wars precisely because the traditional values of American identity—articulated by the Founders and grounded in a commitment to individual liberty and public virtue—are deeply at odds with the radical, de-civilizing tenets of the “multiculturalist” enterprise.
To get a sense of what has happened to the institution of American identity, compare Robert
Frost’s performance at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961 with Maya Angelou’s performance
thirty-two years later. As Huntington reminds us, Frost spoke of the “heroic deeds” of
America’s founding, an event, he said, that with “God’s approval” ushered in “a new order of
the ages.” By contrast, Maya Angelou never mentioned the words “America” or “American.”
Instead, she identified twenty-seven ethnic or religious groups that had suffered repression
because of America’s “armed struggles for profit,” “cynicism,” and “brutishness.”
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From 11 years ago. We have now seen how far its went. Right up to the very point of falling off the cliff. Make no mistake that is exactly where we are at now!Government tricks, cover ups and propaganda hide it and doso deliberately because current government is in on it all the way. -Tyr