Letters to a Young Conservative (6 page)

Of course, non-Western cultures have produced many classics and great books, and these are eminently worthy of study. But not surprisingly, those classics frequently convey the same unenlightened views of minorities and women that the multiculturalists deplore in the West. The
Quran,
for instance, is the central spiritual document of one of the world’s great religions, but one cannot read it without finding there a clear doctrine of male superiority. The
Tale of Genji,
the Japanese classic of the eleventh century, is a story of hierarchy, of ritual, of life at the court: It is far removed from the Western ideal of egalitarianism. The Indian classics—the
Vedas,
the
Bhagavad Gita,
and so on, are celebrations of transcendental virtues: They are a rejection of materialism, of atheism, perhaps even of the separation of church and state.

What I am saying is that non-Western cultures, and the classics that they have produced, are for the most part politically incorrect.

This poses a grave problem for American multiculturalists. One option for them is to confront non-Western cultures and to denounce them as being even more backward and retrograde than the West. But this option is politically unacceptable because non-Western cultures are viewed as historically abused and victimized. In the eyes of the multiculturalists, they deserve not criticism but affirmation. And so the multiculturalists prefer the second option: Ignore the representative traditions of non-Western cultures, pass over their great works, and focus instead on marginal and isolated works that are carefully selected to cater to Western leftist prejudices about the non-Western world.

There is a revealing section of
I, Rigoberta Menchu
in which young Rigoberta proclaims herself a
quadruple
victim of oppression. She is a person of color, and she is oppressed by racism. She is a woman, and she is oppressed by sexism. She is a Latin American, and she is oppressed by the North Americans. And finally, she is of Indian extraction, and she is oppressed by people of Spanish descent within Latin America. Here, then, is the secret of Rigoberta’s curricular appeal. She is not representative
of the culture or the great works of Latin America, but she
is
representative of the politics of Stanford professors. Rigoberta is, for them, a kind of model to hold up to students, especially female and minority students; like her, they, too, can think of themselves as oppressed.

This is what I call bogus multiculturalism. It is bogus because it views non-Western cultures through the ideological lens of Western leftist politics. Non-Western cultures are routinely mutilated and distorted to serve Western ideological ends. No serious understanding between cultures is possible with multiculturalism of this sort.

The alternative, in my view, is not to go back to the traditional curriculum focused on the Western classics. Rather, it is to develop an authentic multiculturalism that teaches the greatest works of Western and non-Western cultures. Matthew Arnold penned a resonant phrase: “The best that has been thought and said.” That sums up the essence of a sound liberal arts curriculum. Probably Arnold had in mind the best of Western thought and culture. There is no reason in principle, however, that Arnold’s criterion cannot be applied to non-Western cultures as well.

Personally, I would like to see liberal arts colleges devote the better part of the freshman year to grounding students in the classics of Western and non-Western civilization. Yes, I am talking about requirements. To heck with electives: Seventeen-year-olds don’t know enough
to figure out what they need to learn. Once students have been thoroughly grounded in the classics, they have three more years to choose their majors and experiment with courses in Bob Dylan and Maya Angelou. My hope, of course, is that after a year of Socrates and Confucius and Tolstoy and Tagore most students will have lost interest in Bob Dylan and Maya Angelou.

Dear Chris,

I see that I have gotten ahead of myself. You are a premed student, and you profess to be confused by all this liberal arts talk. I take it that you understand the importance of politics—it provides the necessary infrastructure for us to live peaceful, prosperous, and good lives. But you are puzzled by my emphasis on the importance of books, especially books written a long time ago. I even detect a hint of sympathy for the liberal view that Sophocles, John Milton, and William Shakespeare are just a bunch of “dead white men.” Why should we read them instead of others? What do they have to say to us today? Your letter is full of questions, and they are good ones, so let me try to take them one by one. I have taken the liberty of reformulating them slightly so that they correspond to the questions that multiculturalists frequently ask.

“What, really, is a classic and why should we read so-called classics?” Samuel Johnson provides the answer in his
Preface to Shakespeare.
A classic, he writes, is a work that has survived the provinciality of its own moment in space and in time. If Shakespeare, who wrote in Elizabethan times, continues to appeal to Victorian and modern readers, and to readers outside England, it must be because he addresses universal themes, and in an appealing and enduring way. The literary critic Northrop Frye put it a little differently: A classic is simply “a work that refuses to go away.”

“Even so, why is it important for students to know about a bunch of great books?” It is less important for students to learn
about
the great books than it is for them to learn
from
the great books. The great books are about fundamental human questions; indeed, they are a kind of extended argument about these questions. The philosopher Leo Strauss writes, “Liberal education consists in listening to the conversation among the greatest minds. But here we are confronted with the overwhelming difficulty that this conversation does not take place without our help—that in fact we must bring about that conversation. The greatest minds utter monologs . . . and they contradict one another regarding the most important matters. . . . We must transform their monologs into dialogs.”

As Strauss suggests, this is not an easy process, but it is one that can be learned through effort, and the effort is worth it because the result is wonderfully illuminating.

Once again, the goal is not to give students a cocktail-party familiarity with a canon of great works. Indeed, Allan Bloom says it is better that students should be deeply excited, even have their lives changed, by
one
book. So if you want to embark on this journey, Chris, begin by choosing a writer who really speaks to you, such as Plato or Rousseau. That will get you started on what, I assure you, will be the most exhilarating and long-lasting adventure of your life.

“What is the point of having a static curriculum? Shouldn’t the curriculum change?” Yes, and the curriculum has always changed. When
Moby Dick
was first published, the book was a failure. One reviewer complained that it was a rather lengthy account of whaling practices in Boston.
Silas Marner
was once assigned in most great book courses in America. But in time,
Moby Dick
’s literary stock went up and
Silas Marner
’s went down. Today,
Silas Marner
is considered a derivative work, but
Moby Dick
is regarded as a great book. So curricula do change. But the basis for changing them has always been judgments of merit. What is new is that multiculturalists are seeking changes in the curriculum not based on merit but based on representation. They don’t argue that Rigoberta Menchu is better than Dante; their argument relies primarily on the fact that Dante was a white male and Rigoberta is a Guatemalan female. This is no basis for choosing great works or for giving students a good education.

“Shouldn’t people know something about other cultures?” Yes, but it is even more important that they understand
the foundations of their own culture, especially when their own culture is shaping the modern world. If you met an educated fellow from China who had never heard of Confucius but was an expert on Mark Twain, this would be odd. People are expected to have a basic comprehension of their own culture. Similarly, American students should be reasonably well versed in the
Federalist Papers,
they should know the arguments that led to the Civil War, they should be familiar with the New Deal and the Great Society, they should be acquainted with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Otherwise they will remain aliens in their own civilization.

“But what does Western culture have to say to blacks and other minorities?” Western culture is the only culture to take diversity seriously. Only in the West has there been a serious questioning of ethnocentrism, of the notion that “my way is the best way.” The Greeks were ethnocentric, in a fashion, but their greatest thinkers realized that truth is the property of no culture. The Greeks were interested in diversity not for its own sake, and certainly not to affirm the self-esteem of anyone. The Greeks didn’t have, for example, Persian History Month. But the Greeks studied other cultures because they wanted to discover what is universally true about human nature. The Greeks recognized that human nature comes draped in the garb of culture and convention. Only by carefully and critically examining other cultures in relation to their own could the Greeks hope to discover what peoples had in
common, and how they differed. The Greeks investigated the evident diversity of cultures to uncover the hidden truths about human nature.

“Give me an example of a Western classic that has something to say to a black man.” I can think of several, but let me give the example of Shakespeare’s
Othello.
Allan Bloom wrote a wonderful essay on this play for a book he co-authored with Harry Jaffa,
Shakespeare’s Politics.
In Bloom’s reading, which I am following here,
Othello
is a play about a dark-skinned man, a Moor, who is trying to become a full citizen of Venice. The problem is that Venice is a relatively closed society, an ethnocentric society, and it does not easily grant membership and recognition to foreigners. Othello is a convert to Christianity and he is a military hero, but this is not enough to give him entry into the inner citadels of Venetian society. So what does he do? He marries. He marries the fairest and most beautiful woman in Venice, Desdemona. And what does she see in him? She certainly does not marry him for looks because she says herself that she considers him ugly. Her attraction to Othello is that he tells wonderful and moving stories about faraway places and the grand exploits in which he has participated. Desdemona is a young and intelligent woman who feels restricted in the narrow, formal world of Venice. Othello represents for her a new world. But their relationship is based on a deep mutual insecurity that neither of them recognizes. The only person who recognizes this insecurity is the villain of the play, Iago. He uses it to bring about Othello’s destruction.

Think about this: A man wrongly suspects his wife of adultery, kills her, and then kills himself. Allan Bloom has remarked that if this were a Greek play, it would certainly be a comedy. But there is nothing comic or ridiculous about Othello. Even though he makes horrendous errors of judgment and destroys himself, Othello is a great man. The play can be read as a tragedy of assimilation, as a profound look at the vulnerability inherent in a person who seeks to become a full member of another society. Moreover, Shakespeare’s dignified portrayal of Othello, even as Iago and other characters make fun of his blackness, shows that even a work written in the sixteenth century is capable of magnificently transcending the ethnocentrism and prejudices of its time.

My conclusion is that not only do great works such as
Othello
have powerful and important things to say about prejudice and ethnocentrism—issues of special concern to minority students—but also such works demonstrate the universality of knowledge and greatness. Such universality was once the goal of leading African Americans such as scholar W. E. B. Du Bois, who envisioned a world in which “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas . . . I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously, with no scorn nor condescension.” It is in the great works of the Western tradition that minority students, and indeed all students, are most likely to discover the liberation they are seeking.

Dear Chris,

From your e-mail, and its accompanying attachment, I see that you looked up Rigoberta Menchu on the Web and discovered that she won the Nobel Peace Prize. “Why, then,” you ask, “do you portray her as such a buffoon?” My friend, you have a lot to learn about those wacky Swedes who hand out Nobel prizes. Being a buffoon is by no means a disqualification. Remember that Rigoberta won in 1992, the five-hundred-year anniversary of the Columbus landing. The Swedes were determined to show their political correctness by giving the prize to an American Indian. But who? Chief Sitting Bull was dead, and Russell Means was a bit passé. So the choice seems to have come down to Rigoberta Menchu or the actress who played Pocahontas in the Disney movie. And Rigoberta won, although thank God it wasn’t for literature!

There is a further postscript to this story. In 1998, an American anthropologist, David Stoll, revealed that many of the incidents described in
I, Rigoberta Menchu
were fabricated. Stoll’s allegations were checked and verified by Larry Rohter of the
New York Times.
For instance, in one of the most moving scenes in her book, Rigoberta describes how she watched her brother Nicolas die of malnutrition. But Stoll and the
New York Times
found Nicolas alive and well enough to be running a relatively prosperous homestead in a nearby town. According to Rigoberta’s own family, as well as residents of her village, she also made up an account of how a second brother was burned alive by army troops as her parents were forced to watch. Central to Rigoberta’s story—and the supposed source of her Marxist beliefs—is her account of how her impoverished family, working for slave wages on plantations, was oppressed by wealthy landowners of European descent. According to the locals, the dispute was really a land feud that pitted Rigoberta’s father against his in-laws. “It was a family quarrel that went on for years,” the mayor of the town told the
New York Times.
“I wanted peace, but none of us could get them to negotiate a settlement.”