The latest news from the multi-cultural front comes from the American Indian Movement, headquartered here, where one faction is accusing another of being insufficiently pure-blooded in its Indian-ness.
The dispute has been noted in the public prints, but no one has wondered whether there isn’t something strange about folks over there on the political Left arguing about racial purity.
Actually, it isn’t strange at all. When you think about it, all AIM has done is drop the gloss from the race-obsession which for years has been the distinguishing feature of most (though not all) of the political Left, certainly its academic subdivision, but also some of its forces in the courts and the Congress.
Huey Long is supposed to have said that if fascism ever came to America it would come from the Left. Now elements of the Left have gone the Kingfish one better. What beckons from their precincts is not merely reactionary, or even fascistic; it’s downright pre-modern.
Whatever else distinguished the modern world from its predecessor, this did: the conviction that the rational human mind could transcend arbitrary authority.
The essential creed of the modern person was that he or she needed only information which could be empirically tested and a brain capable of analyzing the information. What came out of that process was mightier than anything held to be true just because it was propounded by a king, a priest or a village elder.
Now comes a school of thought, or at least a mindset, which would subvert the modern world by declaring that another arbitrary authority is superior to reason. This time that authority is not a king, priest or village elder. It’s skin color.
OK, sometimes it’s a variation on skin color-language, country of origin, gender or its preferences. Either way, its message is the same: if you are not one of me, you cannot understand me. And the political corollary to that: if you are not one of me, you cannot represent me.
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All of which is unquestionably pre-modern. A.J. Liebling, the only critic of the press who was ever worth reading, once noted that given time a good reporter could understand anything, a cat or an Arab. If a reporter didn’t know much about either cats or Arabs, Liebling agreed, it would probably take a bit longer, each cat and each Arab requiring a different approach.
Liebling was talking only about journalism, which just barely qualifies as an intellectual pursuit. Still, his little example applies to all disciplines, and it neatly expresses the modern point of view, which is that given time, information and thought, just about anyone can understand just about anything.
The “just about” is needed because some things defy understanding by most of us. Even in these cases, though, the race, sex or religion of those who do or do not understand is irrelevant. Only his or her mind matters.
Energy would be just as equal to mass times the speed of light squared had a Buddhist lesbian from Thailand been the first one to create the formula. It is neither more nor less true because a male, heterosexual, German Jew figured it out.
Yes, matters of history, literature and politics are less precisely measurable and more subject to interpretation than matters of physics or chemistry. And the interpretation of the observer can be influenced by the perch from which he is observing.
But you know something? It isn’t very difficult to figure that out, and many observers have done so. That’s part of the “thought,” listed above with time and information, which allows human beings of whatever hue or background to understand just about anything.
Matters of history, literature and politics are less precisely measurable and more subject to interpretation than matters of physics or chemistry. And the interpretation of the observer can be influenced by the perch from which he is observing.
Among the absurdities of this supposed multi-culturalism is that its victims will be those it pretends to champion. As an obvious example, if only blacks can understand or represent blacks, then only whites can understand or represent whites. So no black person can get the job of chairing the American history department, covering the governor (48 of 50 are white right now) or running the public library wherever whites are a majority, which is most places.
What is going on here is not really multi-culturalism. It is tribalism, which is inherently reactionary, pre-modern and anti-intellectual. There is nothing new about it. America has been plagued by it throughout the nation’s existence, but until recently it was a tactic of the political Right. It still is.
But liberals in this country used to celebrate a common American culture and invite everyone to join it. They may have been a little naive about how difficult joining it would be. They may have underestimated the strength with which some people would cling to certain aspects of separateness. But the shrewder among them knew that people could join the common culture and still preserve the languages, literatures and folkways of their subcultures.
A few shrewd liberals still know that. But what with the extreme interpretations of the Voting Rights Act; the petty bickering about how many thises and thats serve on every public agency; the childish disputes over whether white people can write about black people; and the coercive intellectual separatism so pervasive at many universities, liberals and their allies are in danger of sinking into a morass which reeks of the medieval, without medievalism’s appealing qualities.
Someone might remind these folks that the last time racial purity was the subject of discussion, the outcome was not desirable.