Letters to a Young Conservative by Dinesh D'Souza Read Free Book Online

the multicultural debate, it may be helpful to begin with Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom argued that American students are shockingly ignorant of the basic ingredients of their own Western civilization. Even graduates of the best colleges and universities have a very poor comprehension of the thinkers and ideas that have shaped their culture. Thus Ivy League graduates know that Homer wrote the Odyssey, and that Aquinas lived during the Middle Ages, and that Max Weber’s name is pronounced with a “V.” But most of them aren’t sure whether the Renaissance came before the Reformation; they couldn’t tell you what was going on in Britain during the French Revolution; and they look bewildered if you ask them why the American founders considered representative
democracy an improvement over the kind of direct democracy that the Athenians had. Bloom concluded that even “educated” Americans were not really educated at all.
    Bloom’s ideas came under fierce assault, and leading the charge were proponents of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is, as the name suggests, a doctrine of culture. Advocates of multiculturalism, such as literary critic Cornel West and historian Ronald Takaki, say that for too long the curriculum in our schools and colleges has focused exclusively on Western culture. In short, it is “Eurocentric.” The problem, multiculturalists say, is not that students are insufficiently exposed to the Western perspective; it is that the Western perspective is all they are exposed to. What is needed, multiculturalists insist, is an expansion of perspectives to include minority and non-Western cultures. This is especially vital, in their view, because we are living in an interconnected global culture and there are increasing numbers of black, Hispanic, and Asian faces in the classroom. Multiculturalism presents itself as an attempt to give all students a more complete and balanced education.
    Stated this way, multiculturalism seems unobjectionable and uncontroversial. It is controversial because there is a powerful political thrust behind the way multiculturalism works in practice. To discover this ideological thrust, we must look at multicultural programs as they are actually taught. Several years ago, I did my first study of a multicultural curriculum at Stanford University.
I pored over the reading list, looking for the great works of non-Western culture: the Quran, the Ramayana, the Analects of Confucius, the Tale of Genji, the Gitanjali, and so on. But they were nowhere to be found. As I sat in on classes, I found myself presented with a picture of non-Western cultures that was unrecognizable to me as a person who had grown up in one of those cultures. Our typical reading consisted of works such as I, Rigoberta Menchu, the autobiography of a young Marxist feminist activist from Guatemala.
    Now I don’t mean to understate the importance of Guatemalan Marxist feminism as a global theme. But were students encountering the best literary output of Latin American culture? Did I, Rigoberta Menchu even represent the culture of Guatemala? The answer to these questions was no and no. So why were Stanford students being exposed to this stuff?
    It is impossible to understand multiculturalism in America without realizing that it arises from the powerful conviction that bigotry and oppression define Western civilization in general and America in particular. The targets of this maltreatment are, of course, minorities, women, and homosexuals. And so the multiculturalists look abroad, hoping to find in other countries a better alternative to the bigoted and discriminatory ways of the West.
    And what do they find? If they look honestly, they soon discover that other cultures are even more bigoted than those of the West. Ethnocentrism and discrimination
are universal; it is the doctrine of equality of rights under the law that is uniquely Western. Women are treated quite badly in most non-Western