The Multicultural West

...The wall that multiculturalist slogans create between just one Western culture and nonWestern culture thus reflects a kind of amnesia...

...In any case, it is this misreading of the nature of Western culture that has allowed the discussion to become so sterile and unproductive...

...Borders are now gates, not walls, through which pour problems—drugs and too many Toyotas—but also essential ingredients such as oil...

...Most important, across borders now pour people...

...Multiculturalists urge members of the mainstream culture to learn about other cultures so that we can learn from them as well as learn about them...

...By now, it is those rude, uncivilized people who seem to stand at the center of European culture...

...they, too, argue that the foundation of American culture is Western culture...

...Now this sense of culture as something learned, something constructed, something that we share with and take from others, is in quite sharp contrast to the anthropological sense of culture as the ensemble of practices of a given community...

...The point here is that even the best intentions are not enough, that misinformed teaching can in fact reinforce the stereotypes and prejudices it is attempting to move beyond...

...Its birthplace is undoubtedly "Eastern" and non-European, and it stands in close relation to other religions seen clearly as non-Western and "other," particularly Zoroastrianism and Islam, or whose status in this cultural geography is problematic, particularly Judaism...

...The education system plays a crucial role in maintaining our commitment to these values, and we ought to teach a curriculum centered on Western culture precisely for that reason...

...If we can talk about European unity or about a certain unified "Anglo" culture in this country, it is only as a result of a long historical process of knocking down the walls that have separated the different European communities...

...Once we see the fundamental continuity between multiculturalism today and earlier moments in our history, the polemical anti-Western thrust of much multiculturalist rhetoric seems absurdly out of place, as does that side of multiculturalism seeking to "preserve" the culture of minority students by focusing their curriculum on their own culture...

...We now need to do this with the totality of the cultures of the world...

...Our country is part of Western civilization, and it is Western civilization that has given us what is admirable about our society: its democracy, its commitment to due process, its economic and political openness, its technology and high standard of living...

...But this doesn't represent a surrender of the Western tradition as much as a reaffirmation of it...

...The year comes (approximately) from the date of Christ's birth, so is Christian in inspiration, but the numerical system is Arabic (and ultimately Indian) in inspiration...

...The name of the day comes from a Norse God, the name of the month from a Roman emperor...

...Ayatollah Khomeini's condemnation of Salman Rushdie is the most conspicuous exemplification of this rage: that one of "us" could be "polluted" by contact with the other side...

...I believe the construction of a world culture—as Wyndham Lewis said over forty years ago and V. S. Naipaul has recently reiterated—is the task that now faces us...

...Contemporary thinking usually answers, domination—assuming that we always go on being ourselves until someone else overpowers us...

...For many of the world's central cultures are multicultural in the sense I am describing, made up of complex mixtures of local and borrowed elements...

...Despite all of the talk on both sides about preserving earlier cultural identities, these identities are changing quickly and inexorably...

...When we speak of a common Western culture or, more narrowly, of a common European culture, we are speaking of something that took millennia 550 • DISSENT Debates in the Academy to construct and consolidate...

...So a responsible and responsive multiculturalism is not going to take shape overnight...

...Consider, for a final example, the "Western calendar," now sometimes resisted for imposing a common "eurocentric" grid on the world...

...for an anthropologist culture is what a given people do...

...Moreover, given the spirit of guardianship for these cultures dominating the attempts to represent them in the curriculum, it is unlikely that anything but a sanitized, idealized portrait of these cultures could emerge, even though it is precisely such a portrait of Western culture that multiculturalism objects to...

...Thus, both positions assume that multiculturalism can come into being only by the incorporation of non-Western culture in the curriculum...

...Our current models of culture all seem to be either/or (eurocentric vs...

...To pay some attention to the history of Western culture, I want to argue, makes our present situation look very different from the way it has been portrayed, far less a unique challenge to our culture (or even a unique opportunity) than another example of something we have faced and faced successfully many times before...

...Culture in the normative sense is what we ought to do...

...the project is for our students and our society to become more multicultural, not simply to be more informed about other cultures...

...Greek exiles in Italy helped spark the Renaissance, as did the discovery of the New World...

...However the details of this particular controversy sort out, the imitativeness of Western culture—its ability to learn from cultures outside the West as well as from other places inside the West—has obviously been one of its constitutive features...

...What created the relative coherence of European culture we see today out of this multiplicity of peoples, cultures, and traditions...

...In fact, the discussion about "afrocentricity" took shape first in literary criticism when critics such as Chinweizu attacked Wole Soyinka and other African writers for their "euromodernism...

...non-Western, monocultural vs...

...Even when we can find someone located univocally in what seems to be a homogeneous culture, a historical perspective shows how that culture was itself formed at some earlier point out of a multicultural context...

...It is empty posturing to pretend to choose non-Western culture over Western culture when our task is to harmonize them and choose the best of both...

...Multiculturalism is called for because it mandates the incorporation of other cultures, the non-Western cultures, into the curriculum alongside (or in some more radical "afrocentric" versions, instead of) the Western culture that has always been taught...

...Yet the bridges these writers are building, by importing European forms into non-European contexts and by introducing non-European cultural traditions into European languages, may in retrospect seem as crucial to the formation of a world culture as the Augustan imitation of Greek culture was for the formation of classical culture and the Renaissance imitation of those classical forms and of Italian culture was for the construction of European culture...

...I'm not sure whether the misreading by the "defenders of the West" or by the multiculturalists is more remarkable...

...Perhaps it is because we are so out of practice in this matter that the terms of the debate have been so poorly defined...

...It was created primarily by cultural imitation, the mysterious process by which one culture responds to the influence of another...

...However, though force undoubtedly played a role, Europe did not take shape primarily through conquest or forcible assimilation...

...How do we respond to the complex interaction of cultures that shapes the contemporary world...

...In an effort not to seem prejudiced, most of those articulating this view add that learning something about other cultures is of course a good idea, but non-Western cultures are other cultures...

...We are in for a period of experimentation, and we can only hope that more complex models and pedagogies slowly emerge and replace the simplistic visions and responses of both sides in the current debate...

...On the other hand, a George Will or a William Bennett finds it hard to admit that the West might have something to learn from as well as something to teach the rest of the world...

...This process of imitation, repeated many times over, gives birth to the essential Western concept that culture is not autochthonous, that it comes from somewhere else: from the East, if one is a Midwesterner or Westerner...

...Despite the fashionable nostalgia for pockets of difference yet unintegrated into a world community, the alternative to such a world culture is not a lively diversity of cultures as much as unending conflict among them...

...And if we are to become more multicultural, then we must consciously become a combination of what we wish to retain from our culture and what we wish to adopt from that of others...

...On the one hand, we are faced with a new wave of immigration into the United States: our country is becoming less European, less white, more Asian and more Latin American...

...from the Continent, if one is British...

...Differences remained, but cultural influence and imitation created a degree of commonality such that we can speak with some accuracy of a shared Graeco-Roman or classical civilization...

...After all, if the heritage of classical civilization is one key strand in Western culture, the second key strand would have to be Christianity...

...but derived immediately from Judaism, and ultimately from Zoroastrianism...

...Will pointing this out magically transform the current debate into a less shrill one...

...our culture is Western culture...

...But this body of literature has not yet played an important role in the curriculum at any level, since it doesn't seem English or American enough to make it into the English curriculum, or "different enough" to make it into those parts of the curriculum concerned with other cultures...

...The status quo ante that conservatives want to preserve, and that multiculturalists want to change, is seen by both as monoculturalism: a coherent, univocal entity called Western culture...

...I would be astonished if the new afrocentric schools conveyed a much more accurate sense of what African culture is really like...

...When faced with disparate cultures in contact (which usually means conflict), the successful response has always been assimilative and syncretic, to mix and match, taking the best of each...

...If this history teaches us anything, it is that crises of multiculturalism have deep historical roots and cannot be wished away...

...Early mediaeval England was a country riven by a schism between the indigenous culture and language of the Anglo-Saxons and the imported culture and French language of the conquering Normans: what resulted was the hybrid language of English and a profoundly hybrid and syncretic culture...

...And each of these tendencies is likely to become more pronounced, not less, for the foreseeable future...

...Even if much of it comes from the Greeks, they took their astronomy from the Sumerians and Egyptians, and we only know about much of Greek science because of the Arab role in transmitting it...

...And it is for the same reason that this project is also resisted so strongly: those opposed to multiculturalism are just as Virgilian, insisting that we should model FALL • 1991 • 551 Debates in the Academy ourselves on the models we have long imitated, not on "alien" traditions and ways of being...

...One of the loci of the recent debates has been the argument advanced in Martin Bernal's Black Athena and elsewhere that classical Greek culture is deeply indebted to Egyptian (and therefore to "black") culture...

...My answer may seem paradoxical: we need to adopt a good deal of the multiculturalist agenda precisely because it is in keeping with the best and most important aspects of Western and American culture...

...Multiculturalism is simply the standard human condition...

...On the other hand, we and every other trading nation are faced with an increasingly integrated world, above all an increasingly integrated international economy, in which we can no longer pretend to separate ourselves from other nations...

...Europe, having for decades felt smug and superior about racial problems and tensions in America, is faced with the same phenomenon and is—if anything —considerably less prepared to deal with it...

...It is hard to imagine "Western" science without the Chinese invention of gunpowder, rockets, and printing, without the Indian and Arab contributions to mathematics, and without the key Arab discovery of how to sail upwind...

...The writers themselves are often attacked from both sides, precisely because they don't fit into one camp or the other, as the case of Salman Rushdie has shown most spectacularly...

...For there is no disputing the obvious debt of Hellenic culture to ancient Egyptian and Near Eastern cultures...

...afrocentric, Western vs...

...English is an international language, playing an important role inside about one fourth of the world's one hundred and sixty countries, and it has therefore become an important international literary language...

...This should be obvious to anyone upon a moment's historical reflection...

...In just one generation, it would seem, the once crucial distinctions between Protestant and Catholic, between Protestant and Jew, between Anglo-Saxons and other European ethnic groups have ceased to matter: all of these groups are seen to be part of a homogeneous "eurocentric" tradition...

...Whatever happened to the WASP...

...The great moments of our historical tradition have been moments of contact with and borrowing from other cultures: a good deal of what was important about the Middle Ages was prompted by contact with Islamic civilization...

...Finally, the third key element in any definition of Western culture would have to be science and technology...

...one might remind anyone glibly talking about a homogeneous Anglo culture in the United States of the intense resistance, as recently as 1960, to the election of the Irish Catholic John F. Kennedy to the presidency...

...For it was really Christianity, not the classical heritage, which cemented a sense of European identity: the fundamental affirmation of European identity has come from Europeans defining themselves as Christian in opposition to cultures that were seen as heathen or pagan...

...only twenty years ago the straw man of comparable polemics was the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant...

...The recent movement in American education—both in the schools and in colleges and universities— to incorporate into the curriculum works from non-Western cultures has aroused an exceptional amount of public debate...

...This is crucial both for the monoculturalist praise of the West (Jacob Neusner's insistence that "we are what the rest of the world wants to be") and the multiculturalist critique, which tends to find in other cultures a saner because more respectful attitude towards nature...

...It was introduced to Europe by Christianity...

...Diversity in the curriculum is seen as important because other cultures have traits to learn from...

...Yet monotheism is an indigenous notion nowhere in Europe...

...q FALL • 1991 • 555...

...A cover story in Newsweek, long discussions in the Atlantic and the New Republic, vociferous denunciations from George Will and other conservative intellectuals, even a speech by George Bush touching on the matter—this amounts to an unusual outpouring of attention in a country very little given to debating (or even noticing) intellectual or educational issues...

...If this is what we need to do, how can we do it responsibly...

...it also, by removing the sacred from the natural world to a metaphysical realm, justifies thinking of the natural world as something to be used, transformed, and conquered...

...African Americans should study African and African American literature to maintain their own cultural identity as African Americans, and it is partly for this reason that it is deemed important to have African Americans—not members of other groups—teaching these subjects...

...I find this a remarkable misreading of European and American history and of the nature of "Western culture...

...Of course not, for there are powerful reasons why each side in this debate wants not to understand the other...

...Important—great—writing is being done in English all over the world, on every continent today...

...from Greece, if one was Roman...

...from the Mediterranean, if one is Nordic...

...We might broaden T. S. Eliot's dictum and say that "immature cultures borrow, mature cultures steal...

...In any case, the thought of what could happen when hundreds of thousands of not very well-informed—even if well-intentioned — school teachers and college professors are turned loose on the cultures of the world is enough to make anyone cringe, and certainly what passes for multiculturalism in the nation's schools is often shallow, misinformed, and intellectually shoddy...

...It is rather that neither side perceives the world in which we live...

...Together, they represent a point of view that is historically irrelevant...

...My point is not just that both sides hold to blindingly narrow ideals...

...when I pointed this out to his teacher, she asked me what the difference was...

...Yet Western science and technology (whether we think it a good or a bad thing) is no more exclusively Western than Western religion...

...Is Christianity a Western or European religion...

...We must become like Virgil...

...This year in first grade, a whole section on Native American culture followed, so rife with misinformation and clichés that the children wouldn't have 554 • DISSENT Debates in the Academy been much worse off just playing cowboys and Indians...

...Culture thus is not what we do but usually what someone else does better than we do...

...Moreover, the disparate elements out of which "Western culture" has been created are themselves often non-Western in origin...

...Our historical situation is perhaps more complex than any of these, since we are now in contact with the entire world through immigration and trade, but it is nevertheless a situation these examples will help us to understand...

...The anthropological sense seems to govern the current use of the term among multiculturalists, particularly in their assumption that it is important to "preserve" the culture of minority students...

...multicultural), but culture itself is both/and, not either/or...

...Nor is this hybridization and syncretism anything uniquely Western...

...Is coffee good to drink...

...To anyone searching in the interim for what such a multiculturalism would look like, my advice is to read contemporary non-Western literature written in English, which seems to me to be a crucial site where we can move toward a more sophisticated sense of the world's cultures...

...What has not been sufficiently noticed is how the multiculturalist position shares many of the same presuppositions as this conservative critique of multiculturalism...

...The straw man of the multicultural polemics is now the dead white European male or the Anglo...

...If, say, William Bennett's attitudes toward other cultures had always been dominant in the West, we would still be worshipping Zeus and trying to use Roman numerals...

...In kindergarten, my son brought home some nationally disseminated materials about Columbus Day that made an attempt (obviously influenced by multiculturalism) to show something about pre-contact Native American culture as well as the usual stuff about the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria...

...Dante, Spenser, and Milton—in seeking to fuse classical culture with Christianity— are thus in a sense just as multicultural as Virgil was, and if we fail to realize this immediately, we are only testifying to how successful their work of assimilation was...

...This helps to explain why, if classical civilization and Christianity are the two most important strands or constitutive elements of Western culture, it took an immense synthesizing labor 552 • DISSENT Debates In the Academy across centuries to bring them into some sort of harmony...

...Indeed, the key moment in the creation of a European culture was not the initial sudden emergence of essential Western concepts such as democracy in Athenian Greece...

...Opposition to multiculturalism has come most noticeably from the right, and the terms of that opposition seem clear...

...In this context, that is precisely its virtue...

...Joseph Conrad's brilliant frame for Heart of Darkness reminds his British readers of 1900 that Britain, by then the very center of European civilization, was once also a "heart of darkness," considered by its Roman conquerors to lie at the outer edges of civilization...

...Is tobacco good to smoke...

...flow, nothing I have said so far should be controversial...

...The Roman Conquest of Britain left a few ruins but had little lasting effect...

...The very spirit of the West when it encounters another cultural practice is to say, "Is there something we can use here...

...Multiculturalism has FALL • 1991 • 553 Debates in the Academy emerged in the United States today out of a comparable historical exigency...

...One might remind anyone glibly referring to "the European tradition" (as if it were a harmonious whole) of the long conflict from 1914 to 1945 (or really from about 1500 to 1945) concerning who was to dominate Europe...

...For, when looked at with a modest effort of imaginative accuracy, Western culture is itself an example of multiculturalism...

...There was no common European identity two thousand years ago, just a collection of disparate peoples and cultures ranging from the world's most powerful and sophisticated, the Roman Empire, to the rude Germanic and Celtic peoples of the North...

...Monotheism allowed us to justify conquest of the "pagan" and "idolatrous" countries of the non-Western world...

...The choice cannot be between a closed Western tradition and openness to other non-Western traditions, for the Western tradition itself has always been open—if not always prone to admit that it is—to other cultural traditions...

...the discovery of the spiritual traditions of Asia played an important role in British and particularly American Romanticism...

...But there is never any ambiguity about which is the sophisticated side: it is, simply, the side that is the object of imitation over the long term...

...How many elements enter into a date such as Thursday, August 15, 1991...

...It is in this sense that—despite the apparent polarization of the debate—the two sides are really one...

...The difference is between a normative or prescriptive and a descriptive concept...

...If you changed into or out of pajamas, took a bath, brushed your teeth, or had a cup of tea or coffee this morning, each of these activities is something we have taken from Asia...

...Most African Americans are no more culturally African than I am culturally German...

...To see the choice as one between eurocentrism and afrocentrism is to deny the very possibility of multiculturalism...

...But the worksheet identified Columbus as landing in Bermuda, not the Bahamas...

...Virgil thus is in a sense more important in the creation of "Western" culture than Homer precisely because of his acceptance of Homer as a normative ideal...

...Yet this is deeply paradoxical...

...Indian culture is a complex mixture of indigenous Hindu and imported Muslim elements, and Islam has been a profound influence on the culture of much of Africa...

...Yet the facts should lead us to see the debate about multiculturalism in an unexpected light...

...However, those on both sides who present Western culture and multiculturalism as if they were opposed options miss what I would call the fundamental multiculturalism of Western culture, the fact that it has been constructed out of a fusion of disparate and often conflicting cultural traditions...

...The debate here is really about the extent to which Egyptian culture can be said to be African...

...It was, instead, the more gradual process by which another society — Rome—underwent Hellenization and took over Greek ideals and culture as its own...

...Multiculturalists also refer to Western culture as a single unified entity...

...I have recalled some basic historical facts...

...from Europe, if one is American or Russian or Australian...

...Is chocolate good to eat...

...The afrocentric curriculum being advocated by some black intellectuals and implemented in some school systems is both impractical and no more multicultural than the suggestions of William Bennett and George Will...

...Yet the educational practice urged on the society as a whole by multiculturalists is deeply Virgilian...

...This relation is always double-edged: the provincial side both resents and admires the sophisticated side in the relationship...

...Not every borrowing has been wise, but by and large Western culture has been immeasurably enriched by its ability to adapt to and borrow from others...

...But these internal barriers inside the "Western tradition" in America did not go away magically or easily, any more than the internal barriers inside of Europe did...

...If one master concept could be said to crystallize a Western mind-set, it is probably not democracy—which so many European countries managed to do without for so long—as much as monotheism...

...Moreover, this way of framing the issue ignores the degree of acculturation already undergone by minorities in this country...

...The way in which successive European cultures rewrote the Homeric epics to trace their own history back to Greece is paralleled by the successive rewriting of the Indian epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, in Southeast Asia...

...And that process is not complete even today...

...On the one hand, advocates of a separatist cultural identity for minorities reserve their harshest criticism for those of their own communities like Naipaul or Richard Rodriguez who insist that a measure of assimilation is inevitable, that accommodation must be a two-way street...