Oikophobia
In ancient societies, the task of the educator was conceived in moral terms. Children were taught the difference between right and wrong, and required to love the one and hate the other. Any additional knowledge that they acquired was ancillary to this moral education, and judged to be worthless without it. Hence Quintilian’s insistence that the teaching of grammar should produce a certain kind of person – the vir bonus, dicendi peritus, the good man skilled in speech-and not just a certain kind of competence.
If morality enters the classroom today it is usually against a background of skepticism. “Right” and “wrong” have been eclipsed by a plurality of “values,” and morality is presented as a sphere not of certainty, but of doubt. Moral issues are “topics for debate,” and moral judgments appear in the curriculum only as opinions, which may be accepted or rejected without detriment to the individual or to the hard core of knowledge. Any other approach tends to be dismissed as “judgmental,” since it must assume the absolute validity of what is no more than a particular “culture” and a particular “point of view.” In place of such absolutism, we are told, children should be encouraged to “think for themselves,” to “question traditional values,” to be “open-minded” towards other “cultures” and other viewpoints. Since morality can be taught only as something absolute (or “unconditioned,” as Kant put it), morality is therefore no longer taught. And the result is just what the ancient philosophers feared.
Paradoxically, however, this jettisoning of moral education is usually presented as a moral necessity. Without it, we are told, we could not achieve the “inclusive” society to which education should aspire: the society in which everyone is accorded the respect and esteem that are due to him. The attack on morality is conducted, therefore, in the name of morality, and often with a puritanical zeal that stops little short of bigotry. In this paper I try to explain this new form of moral judgment – which one might describe as the “absolute commitment to relativism”- and to suggest a cure for it. My primary target will be “multiculturalism”: a movement in schools, universities and political institutions to make room for “other cultures,” besides the one that has prevailed in modern America.
For many years Americans assumed that they belonged to a single society, marked by local variations but with a common loyalty, a common language, and a common law. They did not understand the word “culture,” except as a vague term used to describe obscure activities whose value they neither doubted not understood. They were self-critical and conscious of social problems; but they never lost their hope that these problems could eventually be solved by the democratic process and the rule of law. They expected the schools to encourage some version of the Judaeo-Christian outlook and to instill a measure of respect for America, its people, and its history. If their children went on to college, they assumed that it would be to learn solid, decent, useful things: the kind of things that help you to get on in America, and help America to get on in the world. Without being nationalists or xenophobes, they assumed that it is right and normal to be proud of your country, to defend it in war, and to enhance it in peace. And all these assumptions cohered about a core of moral instinct, in which respect for freedom went hand in hand with an equal respect for public decency.
Of course the picture I have just drawn is a stereotype. But this does not mean that it is false; only that it is a simplification, and leaves out the specific quality of ordinary American life. In any case, the stereotype that I have described is rapidly giving way, under the pressure of “multiculturalism,” to another and negative stereotype – a stereotype which is used to foster animosity and distrust. This new stereotype of American society derives from a philosophy which may be summarized in five propositions:
- American society, morality and law express a “culture,” in the anthropologist’s sense – namely “Western culture,” which is distinguished by its imperialism, its desire to absorb, override, or extinguish every rival.
- Notwithstanding such imperialism, there are other cultures competing for attention in the American market.
- To grant privileges to one culture in the educational system is to “discriminate against” other and equally valid cultures.
- To be truly “inclusive,” it is not enough to teach those other “minority” cultures. We must remove from them the stigma of disadvantage, by actively promoting them.
- Each culture has its own set of “values,” and each set of “values” has an equal claim to respect.
Young Americans seem to find no difficulty in believing those propositions, which are rapidly acquiring the character of prejudices – parts of the great prejudice against prejudice which animates the new curriculum. Yet they are false, and evidently so. American society is not a “culture” in the anthropologist’s sense, but a part of Western civilization. It was formed by legal rather than cultural forces, and has absorbed culture after culture without change to its fundamental structure of secular government. There are no “rival” cultures competing in the American market, and American education could never be in the business of providing or promoting them. Its purpose is simply to provide worthwhile knowledge, and if professors of literature teach Shakespeare rather than “Dynasty,” it is because a knowledge of Shakespeare is worth something more than a moment’s entertainment. Moreover, our grandparents already had a great many “cultures,” if you want to use that word, in the curriculum. They studied the languages, religions, history and literature of ancient Palestine, Greece, and Rome, and if they came across some other culture that seemed worthy of interest, they studied that as well. But the purpose was not to introduce a choice of cultures; it was to study universal human nature, as revealed in other tongues and other times.
As for the talk of “values,” it seems to me that either you have them or you don’t. And to have them is precisely to deny alternatives. Values are not freely chosen: on the contrary they set limits to choice, by distinguishing right from wrong, and surrounding us with prohibitions. If someone tells me that there is a “culture” in which people expose new-born infants, abandon women after seducing them, force their neighbors to worship idols, freely kill strangers from another tribe or another religion, keep slaves and concubines, and mount public spectacles of torture, then I do not say that these people have other “values.” I say that they are wicked. If I teach my students to study these people, then I should hope that they would find them wicked too.
“Multiculturalism” is an attempt to “pluralize” what is essentially singular – my identity as a social being. To regard the human world as a collection of equally valid “life-styles,” “cultures,” and “values” is to fabricate choices where there are none. To choose a culture or a set of values is precisely to have no culture and no values. If people do not see this, it is because they have a misguided conception of tolerance. The tolerant person is not the one who thinks that everything goes and nothing matters – such a person is not tolerant at all, but merely indifferent. The tolerant person is the one who puts up with that of which he disapproves, so as to avoid civil conflict. Tolerance has been a cornerstone of American society; but it is increasingly worn away by this new thing which merely pretends to be tolerant while being not tolerant at all.
For this is what is most remarkable in the “multiculturalist” movement: it is unable to tolerate what it does not like – namely American “culture,” as it is called. It offers positive stereotypes of minorities, primitive cultures and “oppressed” groups, and only a negative stereotype of the so-called “majority culture,” which is variously described as materialist, patriarchal, racist, imperialist and obsessed with property and power. There is scarcely an insult in the book that is not thrown at American society by the advocates of “multiculturalism,” and the construction of the new negative stereotype has become a major occupation of the universities. To lake just one example: the new kind of radical feminist has, or seems to have, only one purpose, which is to create a negative stereotype of the traditional American male, and of the culture that he supposedly produced. With exemplary crudeness, the feminist critic moves from novel to novel, from poem to poem, in order to “prove” -what she in any case would never admit to be false – that the whole thing is a giant conspiracy, forged in the mind of the stereotypical male, in order to render women invisible. Such stereotyping would probably be regarded as a criminal offense if the victim were described in racial rather than sexual terms. But it is widely accepted as a legitimate academic pursuit, with departments of “women’s studies” devoted to nothing else.
And this is the meaning of “political correctness,” which should itself be seen as a form of enforced stereotyping, the purpose of which is to deprive the “majority culture” of its voice, by controlling the language of debate. You could describe the result as a kind of “capillary” censorship – a censorship which invades the very thought-processes of the victim, in the manner of Newspeak in Orwell’s 1984. Not only are you forced to use the “correct” language: you must distort your entire thought processes, lest you become guilty of “crimethink” by inadvertently uttering a remark which someone, somewhere, could construe as “racist,” “homophobic,” “sexist,” or whatever. As a result, language becomes distorted, crabbed, utterly deprived of all rhetorical devices and therefore incapable of real dialogue. Meanwhile, anyone who betrays an attachment to “Western culture” and a willingness to speak for it is regarded with the fiercest intolerance. He is the enemy among us, the one who is Other and who must be silenced or destroyed.
Whence comes the new negative stereotype of American society? The answer, I suggest, is this. The advocate of multiculturalism is in a state of rebellion against the established order; he is suffering from a pathological oikophobia, a hatred of home, which has been a frequent disease among intellectuals since the Enlightenment. He sees that which is his “own,” his inheritance, as alien; he has fallen out of communication with it and feels tainted by its claim on him. He wants to be free of that claim – free from the pressure to belong, to be with “us,” to love something, believe in something, accept something which is his. Therefore he portrays his home as something Other, by means of a stereotype that seems to free him from all obligation towards it.
At the same time he cultivates a promiscuous xenophilia – picking up other cultures in the supermarket of postmodernity and toying with them, as a child toys with the channels on a television set. Of course this is not real xenophilia: the other cultures are always seen through a sentimental haze and can be zapped off the screen the moment they begin to be disagreeable. Set him down in the midst of some cultural minority – in Harlem say, or in a Shi’ite village in Iran – and our “multicultural” intellectual will be overcome by nostalgia for the American way of life, and aware of America as his proper home. But so long as he can merely play with alternatives – a possibility which universities eminently provide – xenophiliac fantasies can drift unhindered through his mind, and he can wallow in a luxurious bath of nostalgia for a home that will never be his.
