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CounterPunch
October
19, 2002
From Redistribution
to Recognition:
A Left Critique of Multiculturalism
by ANIS SHIVANI
Identity is a dream that is pathetically
absurd. You dream of being yourself when you have nothing better
to do. You dream of yourself and gaining recognition when you
have lost all singularity. Today we no longer fight for sovereignty
or for glory, but for identity. Sovereignty was a mastery; identity
is merely a reference. Sovereignty was adventurous; identity
is linked to security (and also to the systems of verification
which identify you). Identity is this obsession with appropriation
of the liberated being, but a being liberated in sterile conditions,
no longer knowing what he is. It is a label of existence without
qualities. Now, all energies--the energies of minorities and
entire peoples, the energies of individualisms--are concentrated
today on that derisory affirmation, that prideless assertion:
I am! I exist! I'm called so-and-so, I'm European! A hopeless
affirmation, in fact, since when you need to prove the obvious,
it is by no means obvious.
Jean Baudrillard,
Impossible
Exchange (Verso, 2001)
In the late eighties, the right decided that it
would take on liberalism at its most vulnerable and exposed front:
multiculturalism. The most cogent right critique of multiculturalism
was mounted by Allan Bloom in The
Closing of the American Mind (Simon and Schuster,
1987), one of the better-written polemics of the last twenty
years. Bloom's unscrupulous followers, like Dinesh D'Souza,
Roger Kimball, Thomas Sowell, Charles Sykes, and John Leo carried
on his fight to delegitimize identity politics as being against
the American grain. The peak of the first phase of the culture
wars was reached in the first few years of the nineties, as the
end of the Soviet Union made it imperative for the right to strike
against renewed legitimacy of liberal ideas for a reordering
of domestic priorities. At first, liberals were taken aback
by the ferocity of the attack on something they considered so
obviously wholesome, but by the mid-nineties liberals in academia
had mounted a counter-offensive to put the culture wars to rest--at
least to their own satisfaction. They wrote books proving to
like-minded colleagues that the left presence on campus was exaggerated,
that the traditional canon was taught nearly as rigorously as
before, and that the oft-cited instances of censorship were blown
out of proportion. All that was and is true, but did the word
get out to the masses? The typical response of liberals to the
controversies raised by the culture wars today is: What culture
wars? Wasn't the whole controversy laid to bed in the mid-nineties?
And their unspoken sentiment is, Didn't we come out the clear
winners, exposing the right's phony claims? Even on its own
terms, this response is inadequate: liberals did not in fact
deal with much of the substance of the right's critique. A lot
of the right's mockery of identity politics has seeped deep into
the popular imagination, where it lies dormant but exploitable
at the slightest instigation of the fascist propaganda machinery.
But there is a more important intellectual
gap. Over the last thirty years, liberalism, or shall we say
neoliberalism, increasingly distinguished itself from the right
primarily by its support for a kind of watered-down, nonthreatening
multiculturalism, since it has succumbed to the right's economic
convictions, except for marginal differences. So when we critique
multiculturalism, we are addressing the distinguishing substance
of American liberalism itself. Here we see holes in the wall
so gaping that fascism can stride right through--as indeed it
has. Even among those who consider themselves leftists and not
liberals, many have accepted unquestioningly the vacuous affirmations
of multiculturalism, without really asking if this commitment
involves sacrificing the radical alternative to capitalism.
Bloom's screed was profoundly conservative.
He nostalgically evoked traditional values, denigrating philosophical
systems smacking of relativism or hedonism (which in his mind
were alien to American culture, being European contraband sneaked
in by hippie academics who force-fed the thrilling but lethal
dose of Nietzsche and Heidegger and other deformed European minds
to unsuspecting all-American kids). There was much in Bloom's
thought that was easily subject to exploitation by his successors
to lay the cultural foundations for the kind of fascism we see
today. His followers were less careful to maintain any sense
of objectivity in describing the true state of affairs on the
American campus (hardly bastions of leftism, as the right culture
warriors would have it) and in the American economy, where the
historical victims remain as marginalized as ever.
Nevertheless, isn't it curious that there
really is no retrospective look at identity politics by liberals
today, especially at a time when the most reactionary cultural
forces seem to have gained the upper hand? If fascism is catching
on so speedily in the land, surely liberalism's main cultural
plank ought to be subject to review? We don't need to agree
with Bloom and his followers' ideology to realize that multiculturalism
as it has been practiced in America over the last few decades
is seriously limited in its capacity as a cultural framework
compatible with revolutionary struggle. The church of multiculturalism,
among liberals, has become infallible: none dare question the
catechism, except at the cost of excommunication. The icons
of identity politics are beyond the pale of criticism.
Identity politics sounds good on the
surface, but doesn't hold up under scrutiny as a useful cultural
practice. It can be argued that in the sixties there was need
for historically oppressed groups to realize that there was nothing
inherently inferior about them that relegated them to second-class
status compared to the privileged white male. But thirty years
later this valid assertion has become emptied of meaning, since
it is not backed up and broadened by a range of ideas to give
it content beyond the silly, self-referential declaration of
identity. Today, it is the brainless cult of self-esteem which
reigns supreme (even if it has to be accomplished via medication),
at the cost of intellectual claims for recognition.
The therapy fad bears uncanny resemblance
to the lexicon of popular elitism described by Umberto Eco
as one of the characteristics of ur-fascism: everyone
has something worth being proud of, even if it is only one's
identity. SNL's Stuart Smalley was a pretty reliable
precursor to the full-blown conformist fascist personality.
How many times can a minority woman get up to address a crowd,
and begin with the brainless talisman of gender or racial or
religious pride?: I am a woman, I am Black (or Hispanic, Asian,
Muslim), I am a mother, I am a wife, I am a daughter, and I am
proud to be who I am. How often can this happen without sliding
into farce? How about reciting some actual, intellectual accomplishment?
In this cornucopia of easily accessible self-worth, pride itself
is the end. It floats as abstraction, until it is seized by
fascist forces. If you can be proud enough to be black, why
not proud enough to be white? Or citizen of the greatest empire
in the history of the world? Sooner or later this must happen,
and the minority will be crushed in its vain aspiration, even
at the level of its insipid claim.
Here are some areas of concern for liberals
to think about, as they blindly uphold the reigning ideology
even in this time of fascist conformity:
1. Multiculturalism abridges speech
in ways that set the grounds for the ultimate abolition of
freedom of speech.
True, the right's culture warriors exaggerated
the actual range and impact of speech codes, sensitivity training,
and thought crimes, but freedom of speech has eroded to a large
extent because of the limitations liberals have placed on it.
(Liberals' claims to abridgement of speech were countered by
more vigorous, more successful claims by the right: Cheney,
Bennett et al.) The idea was that a "hostile environment"
not be created for those--minorities, women--unused to working,
studying, and competing in already stressful conditions. (Then
why not work to abolish a "hostile environment" for
students of Christian leaning who may not like evolutionist "indoctrination"?
Why not establish choice in the matter, which only means reverting
to pre-modern truth claims?) Certain words, jokes, innuendoes,
suggestions, recriminations, simply cannot be uttered in polite
society anymore.
In the course of expediency, liberals
forgot that freedom of speech applies with greatest force to
speech that we most abhor; it's easy to offer protection to speech
that does not offend. Pushed underground, unpopular ideas might
assume a momentum of their own, unseen, unscrutinized, but deadly
and shockingly relevant when they do make an appearance. The
best remedy for reactionism is to let it be exposed to the light
of day, and trust in the ordinary person's intelligence to make
the distinction between truth and falsehood. This presumes that
the media or the academy will be balanced enough to present both
sides of the argument, rather than weigh the discussion toward
the desired outcome. But leaving that aside, the fact that fascist
ideology has so quickly caught on with so many in the last few
years means that legitimate frustrations were being pushed underground.
It simply was not possible to articulate certain things in certain
ways, and that's always bad. Misguided or not, these repressed
ideas, which had gone underground for at least twenty years,
are making a vicious comeback. No ideas are worth suppressing.
Liberals chose not to assert an absolutist position on speech
in the eighties and nineties; now we are collectively paying
the price for this betrayal.
2. Multiculturalism creates the façade
of liberal cultural evolution when in fact it only covers up
for its progressive degeneration.
It is great that MTV (without explicit
political commentary) now offers endlessly repeated (and simulated)
tableaus of multiculturalist acceptance: thoroughly hard-working
Muslim- and Arab-Americans seen in colorful New York and Los
Angeles settings, headscarf-wearing and beard-sporting but imbued
with the American creed spoken in impeccable accents, grounded
in such trustworthy locales as Ivy League schools or volunteer
situations at the local hospital. Hey, these wholesome people
could be any one of us, identifiable with and undifferentiated
from the equally yearning, dreaming young white persons in movies
like Orange County! In this framework, dysfunction is
only momentary: given enough communal (and always respectful)
attention, it can be brought under control, efficiently managed.
But what if MTV were to present young
Arab-Americans who criticized American capitalism, the American
dream itself, or something equally untouchable, instead of the
fresh-faced pledges appealing: Please, treat us with dignity,
because we're really like the rest of you? Actually, that sentiment
is true for nearly all of the aspirants to the House of
Multiculturalism. They only want to gain some acceptance into
the club by not having contradictory opinions about the basic
principles of social and economic organization.
But even this level of acceptance is
only superficial. Among the younger generation, multiculturalism
is supposed to have made such deep inroads that racism is a thing
of the past: young white Americans have no hang-ups interacting
with blacks or Hispanics or Asians. Does this tolerance extend
to diversity of views, or does it only hold as far as young Americans
having no difficulty accepting the other as long as he looks
and acts and talks and works like anybody else? A majority of
Americans today do not have a problem with detention camps for
Arabs and Muslims, in the event of a crisis (and we haven't seen
the final crisis yet, where fear will be so generalized and unlocatable
that absolutely everyone will be under suspicion).
So just how far has multiculturalism
gone in overcoming the deepest fears of the other? Has it even
worked on the superficial level? Or has it, in some perverse
way, had the opposite of its desired effect? How hard is it
really for the state to set off rampant fears of the contaminating,
inferior, barbaric other, given the slightest pretext? The state
may not always want to mobilize such fears, because it may not
be necessary or it may be counterproductive to its ultimate ends,
but those reservoirs of fear are still there after decades of
cultural effort. The paradox of multiculturalism is that it
wants us to look beyond the surface by dismissing surface differences;
but it suggests that beneath the surface we're all the same,
and it only talks about the surface. This is a philosophy conducive
to totalitarian exploitation.
Liberals today need to ask the question:
What legitimate questions about identity as unassailable politics
were pushed underground over the last couple of decades to the
extent that they've now become converted (distorted and perverted)
into fascist expression? What has been the net result of decades
of ethnic clubs and cultural awareness campaigns on American
campuses?
3. Multiculturalism offers the false
promise of a "security" that is vulnerable to reactionary
exploitation.
Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin
were hardly careful when they painted pornography with the broadest
of brushes as violence against women. MacKinnon was on one extreme
end, but a range of feminist and minority writers took the promise
of security through alteration of language and thought patterns
seriously, working to institutionalize and bureaucratize it.
It is true that language influences attitudes and actions, so
that a man who lets misogynist speech patterns enter his consciousness
may be suspected of treating women poorly. But simply shifting
the language register is not a solution; it may even serve as
deception that real change has occurred, when in fact change
may only be on the outside, breeding resentment inside. For
women (or minorities) to be treated fairly, the whole system
of capitalist production must be changed. Everything else is
superficial treatment, at best cosmetically pleasing, at worst
festering at the core.
From MacKinnon to Naomi Wolf is a continuum,
in each case the mission being compromised by a linguistic short-cut
around the materialist causes of gender inequality. Multiculturalism
cannibalizes its own icons, as MacKinnon's puritanical censoriousness
leads to a Katie Roiphe, a liberal who questions the very idea
of date rape, not to mention insidious right-wingers like Christina
Hoff Sommers who seek to reestablish a licentiousness that sounds
liberating in contrast to Dworkin's stricture that all sex is
rape. Feminism before the third wave didn't want women to self-segregate:
the desire was for equality with men on universally shared terms.
But now that postmodernism has discredited "universality,"
every limited and local practice can be justified as morally
equivalent to the broadest global traditions.
Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards,
in Manifesta:
Young Women, Feminism, and the Future (Farrar Straus,
2000), carry the multiculturalist logic to its dead-end conclusion:
everything is feminist, from Courtney Love to the Spice Girls
(if the Spice Girls are feminist, then Bush is surely presidential
material). Nothing is excluded from feminism; this is
the natural result of not having any boundaries, any categories
of judgment and taste. Elitism turned on its head has made Generation
X feminism so inclusive as to be utterly contentless. A critical
evaluation of Maya Angelou or Buchi Emecheta, not to mention
Toni Morrison, is impossible because of the fact of their being
minority women. The more the badges of oppression worn by the
artist, the greater the claim to authenticity.
This is not to blame MacKinnon and Dworkin
for Bush and Ashcroft, but aren't the fascists promising ultimate
security to Americans: a bubble of artificial happiness, where
all contamination is rooted out, where the sources of pollution
are clearly identified, censored, and expelled, so that we may
live and breathe and work in peace? The American campus of the
eighties was the early prototype for this escalating promise
of total cleanliness: students at, say, Yale could subsist in
an enclosure of comfort where nothing untoward, unpleasant, or
unexpected would ever occur during their tenure there, even as
the blighted town of New Haven itself seethed with seen and unseen
violence, segregation and selection, homicide and suicide. No
American student kills herself without reason and motivation
on an elite campus; every life is meaningful to the fullest extent
possible, at least in retrospect. Meaningless death occurs only
outside the borders of the fully secured, placated, Disneyfied
campus. Isn't that what we're trying to do for the country as
a whole now?
In that sense, there is deep cultural
continuity (whether for the moment it assumes a soft-fascist
liberal Clintonian form or hard-fascist Bushian form) in this
particular strategy of pacification of idealism. When adventure
(risk, surprise, spontaneity) in many of its expected forms is
proscribed or seen only as an illusion, it assumes a more vicious
(militaristic) outlet in the end. Liberals, rather than changing
the economic conditions leading to subjection of women and minorities
(a project they gave up on a long time ago), sought to attack
some forms of speech, limiting it at times and abolishing it
at others. Not economic reorganization but speech performance
became the center of attention. (Jack Nicholson minus the offensive
verbal tics is as good as it gets.)
4. Multiculturalism offers the distracting
ruse of collectivist cultural belonging available on demand,
rather than the ethic of individualist realization brought about
by revolutionary change in economic structure.
Not class and economics, but race and
gender have taken precedence as markers of authentic liberalism.
You can be an economic conservative (having bought into the
right's castigation of liberalism during the eighties as tax-and-spend
profligacy), but as long as you endorse the indisputable rules
of multiculturalism, you are considered a liberal. No matter
how retrograde your views on class and economics, no matter how
cravenly you abandon the working class, you can always fall back
on your multiculturalist credentials to legitimate your discourse
as liberal.
Multiculturalism today is nothing but
a default setting to draw yourself apart from conservatives (actually,
even liberals no longer honestly believe in multiculturalism:
this is the only raison d'etre left to them for political appeal,
since they have given up on wealth and income redistribution).
Liberals began to lose the white working class as soon as multiculturalism
became ascendant, starting in the late sixties; this process
accelerated in the seventies, eighties, and nineties. They haven't
coaxed much of the white working class back, and they won't as
long as multiculturalism remains a distraction from the working
class's economic concerns.
The deceptive idea behind multiculturalism
was that it would level the playing field because equality of
treatment would follow equality of perception. This hasn't happened
because it is a roundabout solution, liable to be sidelined ever
more circuitously by a right that has perfected its counter-techniques,
rather than a direct address of class and economic concerns.
(Consider only the appropriation of Condoleezza Rice, Colin
and Michael Powell, Alberto R. Gonzales, Miguel Estrada, and
Elaine Chao for the most reactionary causes.) The white working
class perceives liberals as validating a language of resentment
and envy, rewriting the rules of earned reward that constitute
the fabric of American belief. Change must be perceived to flow
from founding principles, not grossly violate them. Liberals
have stopped addressing this resentment for some time now, extending
only ever broadening invitations to everyone to join the identity
movement.
There is a latent working class majority,
but this majority cannot be mobilized as long as liberals are
distrusted. And the major cause of distrust remains multiculturalism.
Even Michael Zweig, who brings up this source of alienation
in The
Working Class Majority: America's Best Kept Secret (ILR
Press, 2000), fails to come to terms with it. We don't have
to agree with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and others who have spoken
of the "balkanization" caused by multiculturalism,
and its fatal erosion of communal spirit, since these critics
are really talking about reconstructing an imperialist ideology;
but without appeal to class as a relevant category, what consequence
does liberalism have? How does liberalism propose to cut across
the race, language, and gender barriers it has helped make concrete?
5. Multiculturalism is liberalism's
excuse for a pervasive mediocrity of spirit and intellect, instead
of insistence on objective standards of intellectual superiority.
This remains perhaps the most persuasive
component of the right's early critique of multiculturalism.
There is much fog and confusion here, but behind all of it is
a valid judgment. We are not talking about testing and quantitative
standards and accountability--all methods to undermine the idea
of a universally available, good public education--but the real
erosion in standards of thought and taste that makes liberalism
only the reverse side of the stupidities on the right.
To pose this problem itself is to cross
multiculturalism's founding belief in the equivalency of expression,
regardless of intellectual and aesthetic content. It is not
what you write or how well you paint, but who you are that determines
whether you gain acceptance as a writer or artist speaking for
"your people." When standards of judgment are thrown
overboard in such fashion, is it too much to expect that Bush,
who can be said to speak Ebonics for whites and to have made
it to the presidency in an affirmative action program for the
retarded sons of the patrician ruling class, will be the end
result? Let's just say that Bush is our "special"
president, in need of on-the-job remedial training, which we
have gracefully provided. There is nothing inherently disabling
about Bush's dyslexic, drunk, drugged-out background, is there?
Judgmentalism here wouldn't go too well with the self-presentation
of a liberalism no longer talking about deficiencies of learning
and education as real obstacles to getting ahead.
Why shouldn't Bush be able to make these
affirmations: I used to drink, but one day I quit cold turkey;
I've never read a book in my life (not even at Yale), but I can
listen to great advisers; I was arrested for drunk driving, but
that was in my youth, and I've learned from my mistakes; I used
to do hard drugs, but I don't want to talk about it: that's
off-limits. None of these claims for refuge in his pure identity
(as a white man of limited intellectual ability who's overcome
inherited burdens to work his way up to minimal social and political
credibility) are assailable on their face by liberalism's own
current standards. Does multiculturalism say that if you're
a God-besotten recovering alcoholic you're worth any less than
a Berkeley professor of political science?
Should there be such a classification
as bad speech and discourse that ought to be dismissed out of
hand as not worth inclusion? No such standard exists for liberalism
anymore. One person's speech, no matter how badly riddled with
incorrect structure and content, is as good as another's. Bloom
got it right about college students having a vastly exaggerated
view of their own capacities, even as they refuse to pass judgment
on any aesthetic or political matter. Mark Crispin Miller, instead
of merely listing Bushisms to make fun of them as liberals were
apt to do before him, wrote in The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National
Disorder (Norton, 2001) of
how the fact of his being "elected" (half the voters
in the country did, after all, opt for him) suggests a dysfunctionality
in the thought processes of the country itself. Bush reflects
the deeper disorder of mediocrity of intellect that has taken
hold over the last few decades.
Liberals continue to laugh at Bush as
if he were an alien, springing from roots not indigenous to this
country, instead of reconsidering their basic social philosophy
that has made it possible for the media to take him seriously.
True, there have been other dumb right-wing presidents: but
nobody has come remotely close to this man's stupidity. This
is different by orders of magnitude. The right resorts to the
cri de coeur of "dumbing down" to nostalgically seek
a reestablishment of the old canon, to have students swallow
the "classics" of Western thought uncritically. But
disregarding that, there has been a dumbing down and degradation
of discourse, as social critics like Paul Fussell, Russell Jacoby,
Neil Postman and others have pointed out over the years. Liberals
have yet to acknowledge their part in the erosion of intellect
and the rationalization of mediocrity, as they promote a multiculturalism
that has attended to identity as a value in and of itself rather
than intellect compared and contextualized. There is much that
is Orwellian about multiculturalism. Liberals gave us Bush.
Mediocrity is institutionalized in multiculturalism's
highest expression: the jargon-ridden, formulaic, repetitive,
and mostly contentless academic regurgitations that constitute
much of ethnic, gender, queer, and postcolonial studies. Thirty
years ago the leading exponents of multiculturalism were encouraged
to safely hide out in the humanities, particularly English, departments.
The sixties street spirit became canalized into a comfortable
professorial existence that does not threaten the system in any
way (actually, those who lead academic multiculturalism today
were for the most part not members of the sixties movements;
they were bourgeois squares even then). Have you heard Judith
Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Homi Bhabha, Stephen Greenblatt,
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Marjorie Garber or other multiculturalist
academics speak out against dictatorship during the last year?
Of course, even if they spoke out, none of us would comprehend
what they were saying.
The right has been making fun of the
incomprehensible prose of these academics for years now, but
liberals have precious little to say about this lack of clarity.
The density of prose covers up a bigger problem: the ideas
are unoriginal, and have been so for years now. In the beginning,
French theorists shed some light around, reaching into the dark,
musty caves, from where frightening bats were liable to rush
out; American academics turned off the roving flashlight, and
took up exhibitionist positions under naked light bulbs shining
only on themselves. These multiculturalist academics revel in
the false comfort that the new America is racially tolerant.
If camps were to be established tomorrow for large numbers of
people, the multiculturalist academics wouldn't have a word to
say; their own bureaucratic lives would remain unaffected. The
lament has often been that there are no more public intellectuals;
one of the reasons is that multiculturalism leads to the kind
of deadening of spirit that makes old-style public intellectuals
inconceivable. Liberals have not seen the true face of Bush
because they have lost all literary sensibility; their uninspiring,
fiddling, technocratic language is incompatible with the stretch
of imagination needed to perceive present reality.
6. Multiculturalism has deviated
from the Western enlightenment spirit by setting up essentialist
identities instead of holding up a universalist philosophy of
liberation that appeals to all people.
The dream of the enlightenment was that
there were universal principles of liberty and equality that
would apply to people across the board, and that these principles
could be deduced and made to work regardless of the components
of your identity. In contrast, multiculturalism posits an essentialist
division among people based on race, color, class, gender, sexual
orientation, religion, age, appearance, and so on. By definition,
once this process is started, people will classify their identity
in narrower and narrower terms, because as an identity category
expands the only way to maintain distinction is to claim to belong
to more circumscribed subsets, ad infinitum.
Liberalism has denied all along that
it claims that only people of a particular identity can understand
and speak for that experience: only blacks can write for and
about blacks, for instance. But in practice, this is
the unspoken rule. If someone dares to enter empathetically
into another's experience, the result may be acceptable but it
can't be as authentic as the experience of the one with certified
membership in the identity club. Sandra Cisneros, Alice Walker,
Amy Tan, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Louise Erdrich may sit on the same
panel, but there will be oceans of difference dividing them.
These are all minority women who may be expected to share much
common territory, but their pinpoint focus on increasingly subdivided
cultural differentiations makes an across-the-board class articulation
difficult.
Multiculturalism began as a means of
bridging gaps in understanding; it has (predictably) ended up
reinforcing them. At college, an Asian can invite a Hispanic
to share in cultural celebrations, and there is the deception
that something of intent and motivation is being shared and commonly
evaluated; in fact, it is an evasion of exploring either differences
or commonality. Multiculturalism celebrates superficial difference;
it is racist, and essentialist in every dimension. It proposes
blackness to contrast with whiteness; whiteness therefore gets
more reinforced than ever before.
Carol Gilligan proposes the reductionist
idea of women being more caring and nurturing and men being more
abstract and rights-obsessed. This brand of difference feminism
reinforces what earlier waves of feminism had set out to abolish:
essentialist, incompatible, incontestable differences. Why
not differentiate among people based, for instance, on artistic
sensibility? That would be to set up standards that can be met,
with hard work and concentration. But if you're a man, what
hope is there that you can become interdependent and care for
the feelings of others, and if you're a woman, what hope is there
that you can be an abstract thinker concerned more with rights
than feelings, since Gilligan says that that's not really in
your nature and experience? What does liberalism have to say
when writers suggest, as they have in recent years, that there
is an inherent propensity among males to rape? How do you overcome
biological inheritance? By celebrating and legitimizing identity
differences, liberalism takes us down the road to Herrnstein
and Murray's essentialist racial difference in The Bell Curve.
Liberals ought to dump the carcass of
multiculturalism: it has sunk social democracy in this country,
serving as it has as an outlet of feverish expression for self-identified
victimized, weak, degraded peoples made unable to think beyond
the essentialness of their condition. No doubt, the right has
bandied about the term "victimization" to delegitimize
the valid aspirations of the poor and oppressed to gain equality
and freedom, so that's not the argument here. But multiculturalism
begins by celebrating weakness, marginality, and irrelevance,
and rests on the unfounded leap of faith that somehow this insistent
acknowledgment will allow the subject to transcend the forces
that hold him back. Here, it's Bloom's betes noirs, like Nietzsche,
who have much to say about the degraded spirit multiculturalism
seeks to capitalize on. Virtuosity then finds expression in
militaristic, violent, brutal, cruel ends, such as the U.S.'s
current global nihilistic mission. The principle of non-offensiveness
leads to the end of ideology, the end of politics, since socialism's
strategy of giving offense to the capitalist class is invalidated
for being tasteless.
The right was wrong to criticize victimization
as it did, since the victims identified by liberals are
the real victims (not white people as the right would have it);
but this turned into glorification of victimization for its own
sake, because it lends instant cachet to the subject. For the
last year, the entire country has been claiming victimhood.
Whatever the right may say about not liking victimhood, it has
claimed this already legitimated strategy to fight perpetual
war and destroy the world. Imagine the irony of Americans, the
richest people in the world, as victims of the Taliban and others
like them, the poorest people on earth. The orgy of grief and
shameless emotionalism of the last year reminds one of smaller
precursors in multiculturalism's philosophy that having suffered
grief of some sort makes you already special in some way. At
what point did the Take Back the Night rallies of the eighties
and nineties degenerate into marginality for its own sake, larded
with grief that knows no bounds, and self-obsession that rejects
its transcendence? If you're in that bubble, why would you want
to come out of it? A lifetime of therapy can't possibly rid
you of the deepest scars that really separate you from all others,
can it?
Emotionalism suggests inability to face
the facts, to link cause and effect: Isn't that what the nation
has been encouraged to do over the last year? Multiculturalism
presumes grief in one's inherent condition. As Americans, we
must now lament being Americans. This is presented as a matter
of pride (as it applied to black pride and gay pride before),
but a pride that brings grief along with it as its necessary
corollary. Endless nursing of this grieving, hollowing pride
is a condition not subject to recuperation (the whole pretense
of the recovery movement, its founding principle, is that it
implies the impossibility of recovery even as it claims recovery
in theory--to recover out of counseling would put the movement
out of business in short order). Grief is the most democratic
of emotions. But to have a tragic sense of life involves belief
in hierarchies, the will to moral judgment. Once that has been
abolished, and there is no longer a fight for justice in the
enlightenment sense, then the notion of human perfectibility
degenerates into simulated false tragedies that we must construct
to have some sense of ourselves as human. Good and evil both
reside for ever--without a final war, without resolution--in
the same self, in the very conditions of one's existence: a
perpetual battle with no beginning and end in sight, since transcendence
is not a possibility. Too much emotion softens discourse. Multiculturalism
hastened the end of hard, rational dialogue. The hardness had
to come from somewhere, and fascism stepped in to fill the breach.
This critique is not meant to lay all
the blame for fascism at liberalism's doors, particularly the
hallowed one labeled multiculturalism (so easy for anyone to
enter). But liberals, having attached themselves so thoughtlessly
and repetitiously to multiculturalism, need to explore their
share of contribution to the collapse of intellect and rational
discourse that has created such fertile ground for a second coming
of 1930s-style fascism here and around the world. What started
out as an adjunct to the larger struggle for economic justice
in the late sixties became the whole enchilada, when the going
got tough during the Nixon and Reagan "law and order"
years: liberalism today is facile multiculturalism plus the
earned income tax credit (and possibly prescription drug coverage).
The fig leaf for American liberalism is what it mistakenly understands
and presents as a radical review of Western patriarchal and imperialist
practices under the coverage of multiculturalism. Remove that
fig leaf, and it is a shameful nakedness.
Multiculturalism has always only wanted
disenfranchised groups to share a piece of the pie; its aim has
never been to change the taste and shape and size of the pie.
The peak of the multiculturalist moment was Clinton as president,
calling for a national initiative on race which led not to outlawing
of racial profiling but a set of feel-good recommendations by
his advisory board to get to know the other. That was the sign
of things to come. Economically, liberals don't even make the
pretense of taking care of you anymore, but you can still have
your social identity and be proud of it. The war on terror is
a pure identity problem, an "us" versus "them"
struggle. The only solution is to fight them with an indigenous
cultural strategy (backed by militant force), since there is
no way to rationally comprehend them or find common economic
ground.
Multiculturalism implies that we should
define difference in order to transcend it, but in practice it
always stops at defining difference. The reported instances
of censorship that D'Souza and others made much of may have been
exaggerated, but liberals have contributed to the establishment
of an all-pervasive atmosphere of feeling good rather than thinking
hard as the dominant value. Censorship on the American campus
(as in American life) is not in any single place or exchange.
It is everywhere. We have watched what we have said
for a long time now.
Multiculturalism is censorious of speech
and anti-intellectual; it covers up for the economic failings
of liberalism and offers a false promise of security exploitable
for fascist purposes; it diverts attention from class to culture
and fits comfortably into the bourgeois framework; and it values
mediocrity over achievement and makes class struggle more difficult
by setting up essentialist identity categories. These criticisms
apply, of course, to the actual, realized form of multiculturalism
in the United States, not some ideal practice of cultural diversity
which may extend to informed ideological opposition, playful
self-awareness, and a friendly dialogue of difference and contradiction
taking place in a non-therapeutic, non-bureaucratic language
of intellectual quality.
In the hands of American liberals, the
sixties French ideal of radical difference has degenerated into
yet another homogenous iteration of the bogus American dream,
as subject as ever to the periodic cleansing it must undergo
to reclaim purity of form. The fascists are succeeding so brilliantly
now because throughout the nineties the right attacked multiculturalism
so resonantly, while liberals remained complacent about their
reigning cultural ideology. Multicultural liberalism is a dead-end,
a false trail that has brought us to the abyss of fascism.
Anis Shivani
studied economics at Harvard, and is the author of two novels,
The Age of Critics and Memoirs of a Terrorist. He welcomes comments
at: Anis_Shivani_ab92@post.harvard.edu
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October 14,
2002
Harry Browne
Ireland:
No to War; No to Nice
Don Atapattu
The Tragedy of Alan Dershowitz
Linda Heard
So You
Think You Live in a Democracy?
Bob Feldman
Flashback: Inspecting Nuclear Israel
Adam Engel
The Anger
of Achilles
Anthony Gancarski
The
Washington Post and the Wal-Mart Way
Philip Farruggio
Sleepers
Harold Gould
Islamic
West Asia and US Foreign Policy:
A Tale of Strategic Self-Delusion
Dan Brook
An Open Letter to Barbara Lee
October 12
/ 13, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
Vindication
Through Violence:
Jimmy Carter and the DC Sniper
Robert Jensen
The American
Political Paradox:
More Freedom, Less Democracy
Ben Tripp
Congratulations! It's a War!
Susan Davis
Proverbial
Wisdom:
Red!
David Krieger
A Bleak Day for America
Anis Shivani
George W. in Therapy
Ken Paff
Where Do Hoffa's Tactics Belong in a Mob-Free Teamsters?
Carol Norris
The Politics of Fear
Elaine Cassel
The Lynne Stewart Case:
When Representing an Accused Terrorist Can Land a Lawyer in Jail
Musa AlShaer
Scenes
from an Occupied Wedding
Anthony Gancarski
Concerned Citizen: a serialized
novel (Episode 3)
M. Shahid
Alam
I Will Fight Your Enemies
October 11,
2002
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Montana
Fusion
Steve Kelly's Wild Ride for Congress
Ralph Nader
Whirlwind
Wheelchair Intl.
Anthony Gancarski
Stayin'
Alive: Notes on Facials and Saving Face
Romi Mahajan
What
War Means to the Iraqi People
Uri Avnery
Israel:
the Jewish Demographic State?
Francis Boyle
Bush's
Banana Republic
Lee Sustar
Taft-Hartley,
Bush and the Dock Workers
Katherine
van Wormer
Dry Drunk
Syndrome and George W. Bush
Jerre Skog
The Blessings
of Growth:
The Greatest Deception of All Time
October 10,
2002
Elson E. Boles
Iraq and
Chemical Weapons:
The US Connection
Senator Russ Feingold
"Confused Justifications and
Vague Proposals": Why I Oppose Bush's War Resolution
William A.
Cook
What Bush
Didn't Tell the UN:
The Case Against Israel
Jorge Mariscal
Chicanos
and Chicanas Say:
"No a la Guerra"
Norman Madarasz
Rio's
Holiest View:
Brazilian Elections 2002
Amir Boroomand
Just
Nod, Please
Fedwa Wazwaz
Falwell,
Graham & Friedman:
Religious Extremism in America
Kurt Nimmo
Condoleezza
Rice at the Waldorf Astoria
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