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

cultures: Think of such customs as the veil, female foot-binding, clitoral mutilation, the tossing of females onto the pyres of their dead husbands. When I was a boy, I heard the saying, “I asked the Burmese why, after centuries of following their men, the women now walk in front. He explained that there were many unexploded land mines since the war.” This is intended half-jokingly, but only half-jokingly. It conveys an attitude toward women that is fairly widespread in Asia, Africa, and South America. As for homosexuality, it is variously classified as an illness or a crime in most non-Western cultures. The Chinese, for example, have a longstanding policy of administering shock treatment to homosexuals, a practice that one government official credits with a “high cure rate.”
    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