Our present dilemma is simple, but persistent and widespread: a lack of faith in western civilization, a confusion about its mission in the world, and its replacement with the neo-marxist concept of multiculturalism. In reading this TNR book review about the intellectual grandfather of modern-day African-American studies, Melville Herskovits, I was struck by how the mass immigration of the early 20th Century precipitated the crack in the armor of America’s cultural confidence. The author writes:
Gershenhorn places this next and major phase of Herskovits’s career in the context of the prevalent debate about American identity, and how it was influenced by the huge immigrant waves that were coming to an end in the 1920s. The issue could be phrased in terms of the conflict between the desirability of assimilation or Americanization versus the maintenance of particularist group identity. This latter was given its most effective formulation by the philosopher Horace Kallen, who argued for “cultural pluralism” and the value of immigrant cultures, for the immigrants themselves and for American life. Herskovits knew Kallen at the New School. At the same time John Dewey and Jane Addams were also defending pluralism and distinctive immigrant culture; it was then a new and radical position to argue that these cultures could influence American culture to its benefit, just as American culture influenced the immigrant.
This orientation, exposed in other works such as Chilton Williamson’s The Immigration Mystique: America’s False Consciousness, has meant the gradual unraveling of America’s values and identity, as newcomers, resentful of the dominant WASP power structure, have sought to undermine its dominance by attacking its moral claims and by suggesting its impracticality. We see the intellectual origins of this attack go back much further than the fashionable multiculturalism that emerged in the 1980s.
10 Feb 2005 at 1:23 pm
I’m curious why you refer to multiculturalism as “neo-marxist.” I have my own theories, of course, but think that is an interesting enough aside to merit further development.
10 Feb 2005 at 2:55 pm
I think it’s neomarxist in the following sense. It portrays cultures as at war with one another and as mutually exclusive. It treats western culture as the oppressor and the various non-western cultures as the oppressed. It invites the non-western cultures not to emulate or assimilate to the western cultures, but to recognize the “false consciousness” whereby they hurt themselves by doing so, and instead to seek to dominate and ultimately undermine western culture in the name of authenticity and liberation. In much the same way, marxism teaches that workers in a capitalist system are oppressed and can only liberate themselves from their oppression and false consciousness by seizing the means of production.