February 23, 1992

Whose History Is Bunk?

By FRANK KERMODE

THE DISUNITING OF AMERICA By Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

ational communities with culturally diverse populations can always expect trouble, and at present they are getting it. In Eastern Europe an empire collapses, and ancient ethnic animosities come into the open. In the West, minorities are angry and vocal. There is a new and rancorous divisiveness. Even in the United States, where it was invented, the melting pot is out of fashion.

By comparison with a potentially explosive global situation the current American debate, subsumed under the label "political correctness," may seem trivial. And it is true that the often witless linguistic quibbling associated with it can make it sound academic in the worst sense. Perhaps that is why I hear nonacademic friends dismiss the whole phenomenon as largely a fad of foolish and petulant academics.

They may be mistaken. The historian Arthur Schlesinger, who knows the world as well as the universities, is sure that current academic arguments have urgent implications for society at large, that debates about what is taught, and in what academic dialect, are, in the end, debates about what it is to be an American. For example, the self-ghettoizing of black history or women's history presages a more general social fragmentation, and endangers the precious ideal of political unity in ethnic diversity.

"The Disuniting of America" is a sane and temperate book. Mr. Schlesinger admits the shameful errors of the past; even his own field was long dominated by the unconscious prejudices of white males. He attaches very great importance to historically, as distinct from politically, correct history, and thinks it is at present under threat less from his own kind than from prejudiced ethnic historians.

The universities, he believes, can handle their problem, but the situation in the public schools is disturbing. He specifically deplores the Ethnic Heritage Studies Program Act, passed by Congress in 1974, which, "by applying the ethnic ideology to all Americans, compromised the historic right of Americans to decide their ethnic identities for themselves." In the schools as elsewhere he wants to do justice to ethnic claims, but without sacrificing the idea of an Americanness that can be shared. The remedy, he feels, may lie in improved intellectual hygiene. Honest history cannot regard the European origins of American culture and Constitution as poisonous, nor will it condone the provocative ethnic mythmaking with which some seek to supplant it. Mr. Schlesinger is unusually severe on what he regards as tendentious pseudo-learning, such as Afrocentric history. And he finds inconsistency in those who profess to despise Western civilization yet claim their ancestors as its dispossessed originators.

In the present climate he will make few converts, and his rare bursts of indignation may prove inflammatory: "If some Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan wanted to devise an educational curriculum for the specific purpose of handicapping and disabling black Americans, he would not be likely to come up with anything more diabolically effective than Afrocentrism." He simply cannot believe that black English and the trashing of Eurocentric democratic ideals and European-derived culture can be the right ways to satisfy just ethnic aspirations. The right way, for everybody, is to broaden the American cultural base without destroying it. Admittedly, Mr. Schlesinger concedes, the burden of compromise will fall on the minorities, who need to accept a historical culture that they now profess to abhor. But unless they can accept it, he says, the republic is "in serious trouble."

Mr. Schlesinger's position and his tone, more urbane than the tones of the dissenters, are shared by many moderates. Brigitte Berger, in an impressive paper on the present unease of the academy, contained in Partisan Review's special issue "The Changing Culture of the University," touches on a central question. She claims that "there is a wide gulf between the sociological proposition that knowledge is culturally based and the claim that all knowledge reflects politics (be this now the politics of class, race, age or gender)."

That claim, now very familiar, implies, among other things, that it is futile to discuss ideas or works of art except in terms of their political orientations. It is a claim hard to reconcile with what Ms. Berger, a professor of sociology at Boston University, calls the true business of universities: not the raising of ethnic self-esteem but the free exercise of "cognitive rationality."

Can the requirement of free speech be regarded as Eurocentric and self-serving? Should there be restrictive speech codes? Stanley Fish, a professor of English and of law at Duke University, writing in "Debating P.C." (a volume of articles edited by Paul Berman), reasonably concludes that the First Amendment cannot confer absolute freedom -- "freedom of expression would be a primary value only if it didn't matter what was said." For words do things; so, Mr. Fish declares, it is right to ban the use of certain expressions likely to do things that cause trouble. "The risk of not attending to hate speech is greater than the risk [ of ] regulating it." This, alas, is an argument as old as censorship. Another essay by Mr. Fish, in the collection entitled "The Politics of Liberal Education," edited by Darryl J. Gless and Barbara Herrnstein Smith, decides that the ethnic diversification of the curriculum is so manifest a good that academics should pursue it with energy (though presumably watching their mouths as they do so). Here authoritarian restrictions on free speech and unargued surrender to militancy go cozily together.

That the suppression of certain kinds of language has the effect desired is surely doubtful. Forbidden language may be dangerously attractive simply because it is forbidden. Older speech codes banned from civilized society the street language of sex, but this inhibition does not seem to have improved sexual behavior or the status of women. And when "political correctness" restrictions are extended to absurdity, the imposition of speech codes might be thought useless as well as tyrannous.

So, too, might the assertion, made by some of the multiculturalists, that philosophy nowadays has shown that truth is only a product of the persuasive force with which you make your point. Voices were raised against this fashionable defense of lying at the conference that was the basis for the Partisan Review special issue. Perhaps the multiculturalists' argument needn't be a worry if it is merely a matter of academic game playing, of debates about courses and canons. But if, as Mr. Schlesinger believes, such a view increases the threat to the republic, it could be dangerous as well as detestable.

What, briefly, is the multiculturalist case? Richard Petty, a researcher in linguistics at the University of Louvain, Belgium, and Patricia Williams, an associate professor of law and women's studies at the University of Wisconsin, offer a brief account of it in "Debating P.C." Until recently higher education was provided largely for students who were American-born, white, male, Christian. The curriculum reflected this white male hegemony. Now there is an attempt to cater to a more heterogeneous population. But this attempt has met with "a virulent backlash." And the advent of multiculturalism has not prevented "eminent scholars" from continuing to justify slavery, Czarist pogroms, colonial subjugation and the oppression of women. (These "eminent scholars" are not named in the indictment.) Meanwhile others freely "spout racist, sexist and homophobic epithets completely unchallenged."

The language of this weak and intemperate article would be better for some correctness of a more old-fashioned sort; it mimics the most slovenly forms of current political discourse ("if . . . we could ever get to the point where we can honestly speak of having achieved a level playing-field in the marketplace of ideas," etc.). How can babble of this kind prevail against the quieter, more reasonable language of Mr. Schlesinger, or of Diane Ravitch?

Her essay (in "Debating P.C.") is called "Multiculturalism: E Pluribus Plures." It echoes Mr. Schlesinger: ethnic diversity must coexist with the adapted Europeanism that is the real foundation of American culture. Discussing recent claims that "white" knowledge was stolen from black Africans, Ms. Ravitch, currently an Assistant Secretary of Education of the United States, wonders how you can lose knowledge by sharing it, and how it can be thought sensible to divide instruction so that black teachers impart black knowledge only to black students, and white to white; or to allow the language in which knowledge and experience are transmitted to be enfeebled by absurd euphemisms. Replying, Molefi Kete Asante, the chairman of the African-American Studies department at Temple University, declares that Ms. Ravitch's restricted multiculturalism is merely a mask for "hegemonic" Eurocentricity. There is, he says, no such thing as mainstream American culture. And Ms. Ravitch is wrong to deny the influence of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederation of upstate New York on the Constitution. And so on, with rancor substituting for argument. Compromise begins to look impossible.

The Gless-Herrnstein collection, with its noisy crowd of antihomophobes, antiracists and antiwhites, tends to confirm that gloomy conclusion. One of the more original advocates of change is Richard A. Lanham, a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, who comes up with an engaging post-McLuhanite argument: the computer has radically changed our attitudes to text, escorted us into new freedoms and made available vast new teaching opportunities. And the book, that obstacle to freedom and diversity, shall be no more. Mr. Lanham takes the Italian Futurists as a precedent for his attack on the book, without noting that it has long survived them; and although he wrote his piece in pixeled letters on a screen, I read it in a book. This is worth mentioning because it illustrates an error of enthusiasm committed many times in these exchanges: to neglect fact and continuity because fiction and change look more exciting.

Finally: is the republic in danger? Nations are nearly always loose confederations, and when they fall apart they often do so into ethnic groups. Yet there was a time, not so long ago, when the American minorities, however conscious of discrimination and other wrongs, still wanted to be American. The prospect of a kind of internal ethnic migration is disquieting.

There is further cause for disquiet in the flaunting of real or simulated hatreds, and in an apparent unwillingness to pay the old price of freedom, which is to use it rationally. One can only hope that Mr. Schlesinger is right to think the academy can contain its problems, and that the person in the street is right to believe they are merely academic.

Americans have been proud of their past(s) as well as confident of their future. The contestants here would do well to recall a saying of Emerson's: "The past has baked your loaf, and in the strengths of its bread you would break up the oven." Emerson, unfortunately, is a dead white male, and some think the past he refers to is a hegemonic lie. But others believe that to pay disinterested attention to the past is a prerequisite of both cognitive rationality and national solidarity. And they are right.

Frank Kermode's most recent book is "The Uses of Error."

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