CULTIVATING SOPHISTRY
The rise of multiculturalism in the academy has created a dilemma for many faculty and scholars. Those honest enough to think through the implications of identity politics realize that it is inimical to the fundamental assumptions of liberal democracy: that autonomous, rational individuals are the loci of nonnegotiable rights more essential than the accidents of race or ethnicity, and that government exists first to protect the rights of those individuals. In contrast, identity politics asserts that race or “culture” (usually vaguely or tendentiously defined) constitutes the basis for public treatment: membership in certain groups (those considered victims of historical oppression and exclusion) ipso facto entitles one to special consideration by public institutions.
Yet, at the same time, multiculturalism and its twin, “diversity,” constitute the dominant orthodoxy on campus, in the media, and in government: hence, public obeisance to it is necessary for the ambitious. The grant, the promotion, the prize, the next rung of the employment ladder are all more accessible to those who at least publicly can mouth the pieties of multiculturalism. Therein lies the dilemma.
Martha Nussbaum’s Cultivating Humanity, the subject of the review-essays that follow, represents a sophistic (in the worse sense) attempt to resolve this dilemma. Nussbaum’s career, like Bill Clinton’s, is a masterpiece of “triangulation”: she has attacked the loonier excesses of postmodernism that trouble the editors of organs of middle-brow intellectual orthodoxy such as the New York Review of Books and the New York Times Book Review, yet at the same time has distanced herself from the so-called “conservative” intellectual bogeys represented by, inter alia, Allan Bloom. She has also championed tony liberal causes like gay rights, even giving (what some have argued was perjurous) testimony in the court challenge to Colorado’s Amendment 2.1 And, like Clinton’s, her triangulation has worked: she is a darling of the New York Times and now holds a prestigious chair at the University of Chicago.
For in my sight, the villain with a crafty tongue incurs a most heavy retribution: he boasts that his words will cloak deceit decently, and boldly pursues his wicked end: yet in fact he is not so very wise.
Medea 580-83, trans. D. L. Page
IN Cultivating Humanity, Martha Nussbaum tries to make a liberal-democratic silk purse out of the sow’s ear of multicultural identity-politics. Despite numerous commentaries from across the political spectrum that have demonstrated the anti-Enlightenment, antihumanist assumptions of multicultural ideology,2 Nussbaum asks us to dismiss all this work as a distorted picture that “bears little resemblance to the daily reality of higher education in America” (2), one motivated by the usual pop-psyche suspects, “anxiety and resentment” (21), on the part of a blinkered, conservative establishment jealously guarding its traditional prerogatives. Yet the only counterevidence Nussbaum presents is anecdotal in the worst sense: her own subjective and biased accounts of her experiences in the classrooms of people she knows and “trusts” (x). This un-Socratic reliance on impressionistic “opinion” rather than on knowledge does not bode well for the soundness of Nussbaum’s argument.
Just as troubling is Nussbaum’s un-Socratic failure to examine carefully the concept of multiculturalism. Her implied definition is the standard pragmatic one repeated by the popular press and educrats alike: “Today’s teachers are shaping future citizens in an age of cultural diversity and increasing internationalization. Our country is inescapably plural.” Hence we must understand different cultures “if our economy is to remain vital and effective solutions to pressing human problems are to be found” (6). This is the establishment version of multi-cult, and as such is dismissed by true believers as “corporate multiculturalism,” the ideology “of a centrist academy and multinational corporations that take themselves to be committed to the broad tenets of philosophical liberalism.”3 Most multiculturalists reject this definition because it insidiously universalizes Western ideology in order to strengthen the West’s pernicious hegemony: “This view often collapses into an ethnocentric and oppressively universalistic humanism in which the legitimating norms which govern the substance of citizenship are identified most strongly with Anglo-American cultural-political communities.”4 Nussbaum’s version of multi-cult, then, is one its own theorists reject as inauthentic, which again raises the issue of just how accurate it is.
Other problems, however, lurk about this concept, problems an old-fashioned Socratic examination of terms could bring to the surface. First, two issues are confused by Nussbaum: the need of businessmen and government officials to know something about the foreign countries they deal with, an issue as old as Ambrose’s advice Si fueris Romae, Romano vivito more; and the problem of what constitutes the “cultures” of American minorities or women or homosexuals. As for the first, I can’t imagine any corporate hegemon who wouldn’t agree that a knowledge of, say, Asian custom and protocol makes good business sense. The second is more complicated, demanding a discussion of “culture” that Nussbaum never undertakes.
In what sense do middle-class white women, for example, have a “culture” different from their fathers’ or husbands’? And even in the case of American-born minorities, how much of their identities derives from a non-Western “culture” that is presumably so “other” from American culture? Leaving aside for the moment the diversity ignored by labels like “African-American” or “Hispanic,” how much does Africa (ignoring again the variety of societies, dialects, religions, etc., subsumed under that vast noun) really account for American black identity, given that the slave trade was ended in 1808, and so African culture among the slaves could not be renewed and kept alive by fresh captives? How do, say, Mexican-Americans—who typically speak languages like Spanish and English and worship as Catholics-become non-Western “others”? They can’t all have descended from the Aztecs, precious few of whom were left alive by the Spaniards. They are at least as likely to have as antecedents the Tlascalans who helped Cortes destroy the Aztecs.
In addition to indulging the gross simplifications and distortions lurking within the “culture” half of “multiculturalism,” Nussbaum ignores the role of American popular culture in shaping the identities of American students whatever their backgrounds. Russell Jacoby has pointed out how the chimera of “cultural difference” hides the commonality created by consumerism and popular culture:
The issue is how different these “cultures” are from each other and the dominant American culture. Do they constitute distinct structures of work, living and beliefs? In their dress, activities, religion, and desires these cultures are becoming more alike. Only in the current ideological climate is this news or heresy.… America’s multiple cultures exist within a single consumer society. Professional sports, Hollywood movies, automobiles, designer clothes, namebrand sneakers, television and videos, commercial music and CDs: these pervade America’s multiculturalism.… The multiple cultures define themselves by their preferences within a consumer society, not by a rejection of it.5
So the issue is infinitely more complex than evidenced in Nussbaum’s Diversity Industry boilerplate. Given the kinds of pop-culture-laden lives our students live, the ethnic “culture” they encounter in a university course is likely to be an ideologically loaded fantasy concocted by academics, though one replete with potential for career and resume aggrandizement.
Multiculturalism, then, is not about teaching authentic “cultures” in the framework of liberal Enlightenment tolerance. Rather, at the heart of multiculturalism is an antiliberal identity-politics Nussbaum correctly deplores (7, 12, 67). Multiculturalists themselves are up front about the obsession with group identity: “Much of the utopian project of multiculturalism,” the Chicago Cultural Studies Group writes, “lies in the notion that it will allow intellectual work to be the expression and medium of identity.”6 One of the classic essays discussing the philosophical assumptions of multiculturalism is Charles Taylor’s “The Politics of Recognition,” which he defines precisely in opposition to the liberal politics of universalism:
With the politics of equal dignity, what is established is meant to be universally the same, an identical basket of rights and immunities; with the politics of difference, what we are asked to recognize is the unique identity of this individual group, their distinctness from everyone else. The idea is that it is precisely this distinctness that has been ignored, glossed over, assimilated to a dominant majority identity. And this assimilation is the cardinal sin against the ideal of authenticity.7
Moreover, the universal political procedures of liberalism in this view are, as we have already seen, highly suspect: “The claim is that the supposedly neutral set of difference-blind principles of the politics of equal dignity is in fact a reflection of one hegemonic culture. As it turns out, then, only the minority or suppressed cultures are being forced to take alien form.… [B]lind liberalisms are themselves the reflection of particular cultures.… [T]he very idea of such a liberalism may be a kind of pragmatic contradiction, a particularism masquerading as the universal.”8 As Taylor suggests, this concern with group identity necessarily militates against the universal human nature that underwrites liberalism and its notion of human rights. And we shouldn’t forget that ideologies of group identity have some unsavory bedfellows: “Like the racists before them,” Alain Finkielkraut writes, “contemporary fanatics of cultural identity confine individuals to their group of origin. Like them, they carry differences to the absolute extreme, and in the name of the multiplicity of specific causalities destroy any possibility of a natural or cultural community among peoples.”9
Multi-cult, then, is not really about just tolerating diversity within the big tent of liberalism. Rather, it is a form of history as therapeutic melodrama: it provides victim-narratives that bolster the self-esteem of those groups who have been designated as “others” oppressed by Western science, capitalism, political ideology, and so on. As such its roots—ironically, given its anti-Western bias—lie in that nineteenth-century Teutonic fit of anti-Enlightenment pique that found expression in, inter alia, Germanic romantic nationalism.10 Just as Germans resented the cool Gallic “universal man” for ignoring what was distinctly vital about the unique Volk, so today’s multiculturalists define their identities in opposition to a soulless Western culture and its destructive values of rationalism and individualism and materialism. These anti-Enlightenment, identity-politics roots of multiculturalism seriously challenge Nussbaum’s attempt to sugarcoat it as an expression of universal liberalism.
In fact, Nussbaum herself occasionally lapses into the questionable assumptions of identity politics. Consider the following statement explaining the presumed alienation of pre-multiculturalism black students from the masterpieces of Western culture, an alienation she implies was corrected by ethnic-studies courses: “In short, for a black student being asked to study the great books was not like being asked to do so for a white student. For the latter, it was an initiation into the elite stratum of one’s own world. For the former, it was like going to a debutante party in whiteface and knowing that one wasn’t on the invitation list” (159). And the “price of admittance” to the great tradition required black students to “repudiate their origins and to avow the superior value of European civilization” (151). These statements make sense only in terms of a simplistic racialist view of culture that sees it as somehow biologically linked to race. Consider all the identity-politics assumptions in Nussbaum’s statement, leaving aside the marvelous variety ignored by the catch-all phrase “great books,” and the implication that they are mere hosts for uniform totalizing ideologies. The first is that if you are white you immediately feel some mystic kinship with Homer and Shakespeare. Presumably, Caucasians have a “great books” gene that can overcome the limitations of economic class and ignorance. Maybe in Nussbaum’s privileged “elite stratum” reading Homer is an initiation into a world recognizable because one’s upbringing has been surrounded by the art and literature of high culture, but for many so-called “white” people who lack such cultural advantages, the only Homer they know is surnamed Simpson. Or does Nussbaum believe that a poor-white Appalachian by nature has some racial affinity with a Mediterranean Greek? Nussbaum’s unacknowledged class biases are particularly glaring coming from someone so conspicuously concerned about the excluded “other.”
The second assumption is that black American “culture” is “African” and hence so completely different from American culture and its European antecedents that any black student would find them at some level incomprehensible. This, as I have mentioned, is simply untrue. Black “culture” is American, and no matter how many African folkways managed to survive and influence three centuries of black (and white) life in America, black identity at its core is Western; just consider the important role Christianity has played in black life. Astonishingly, Nussbaum twenty pages later admits as much and contradicts this assumption of the great books’ alien irrelevance for blacks when she quotes a famous passage from Du Bois in which he speaks of reading great literature as “cross[ing] the color line.” Nussbaum’s gloss—nearly identical, by the way, to Allan Bloom’s earlier one on the same passage—is that “the world of the mind is common to all. To judge that truth, logic, and literature written by whites are all inappropriate objects of study for the African-American is to yield to the feudal society of ‘knightly America,’ which made Truth and Beauty off-limits to all but an elite” (177-78). Amen, but you’re not likely to hear such sentiments in the multiculturalist classroom that Nussbaum champions.
Nussbaum, however, apparently believes that contemporary multiculturalism facilitates a Du Bois-like understanding of the Western tradition on the part of blacks by somehow making that tradition “relevant” or by linking it to a self-esteem-boosting recognition of black “culture.” But who today argues that Western culture is inappropriate for black students, that it is a hegemonic imposition of alien values? Certainly not traditionalists, who believe exactly as Nussbaum does about what Bloom calls the “common transcultural humanity” exemplified in Du Bois’s statement.11 No, one is more likely to find the rejection of “white culture” in the classrooms of the multiculturalist, who subscribes to an identity politics that Nussbaum implies was forced on black students in the past. On the contrary, it is the contemporary multiculturalist who is partially responsible for keeping today’s black students away from the great works of a tradition that, as Du Bois recognized without the benefit of multi-cult guidance, is their birthright as much as it is anyone’s.12
Nussbaum herself, however, provides us with the clue to understanding her confusion. She pauses from her argument to confess that all her knowledge of black American life is second-hand, since she wasn’t allowed to play with blacks when she was a child, and as a professor has had few black students or colleagues (151-52). That lack of first-hand experience is exactly why Nussbaum is so vulnerable to the definitions of “black identity” or “black culture” created by self-selected race tribunes who have an institutional and professional stake in controlling the “race dialogue” and exploiting the privilege, segregation, and guilt of the white academic. Unlike Nussbaum, I grew up in rural Fresno County where the majority comprised poor and working-class blacks and Mexicans; I lived the diversity that to Nussbaum is a mere abstraction or collection of exotic lifestyle accessories. That experience is precisely why I reject most of what academics have to say about race—it usually trades in stereotypes and generalizations that simply don’t reflect what I learned day-by-day from the unique individuals with whom I walked to school, worked, fought, danced, and made out: that race is an illusion, and that people have to be taken on their merits, one at a time. In other words, I learned through experience the fundamental truth of Enlightenment liberalism: it is the individual heart and mind that counts, not the group. And that knowledge is reinforced for me every semester, since again, unlike Nussbaum, I teach the “great books” in an institution in which half the students are minorities. I have never once noticed receptivity to Socrates or Homer conditioned by race or gender or anything other than the inclination and mind of the individual.13
Another confusion that results from Nussbaum’s failure to scrutinize Socratically the concept of multiculturalism concerns the issue of cultural relativism. Most multiculturalists would agree with the proto-fascist philosopher Joseph de Maistre, who rejected Enlightenment universalism: “In the course of my life I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.… But as for man, I declare that I have never met him in my life; if he exists, he is unknown to me.”14 So too modern multiculturalists, as we have seen above, are cultural determinists who distrust any pretensions to universalism, all values and identities ultimately reflecting contingent, specific circumstances. Hence no culture or values are more “true” or “better” than any other; indeed, no standard exists by which we can judge another culture, since any standard ultimately is fixed in a particular time and place and thus serves particular power interests. The logical result must be cultural relativism, though multi-cult aficionados are notoriously inconsistent in this regard: the West can be wantonly criticized, almost always, of course, on the basis of principles invented by the West, and always from the material safety and abundance of the West.
As a liberal, Nussbaum necessarily must reject the idea that one cannot criticize other cultures: “Confrontation with the different in no way entails that there are no cross-cultural moral standards and that the only norms are set by each local tradition” (33). Self-criticism, she says later, “does not entail suspending criticism about practices and beliefs of non-Western cultures or portraying them as free from domination or misrepresentation” (116). Obviously, but the question begged is where does this historically contingent “standard” come from? Why is it privileged over others? What is the basis of the criticism? That standard or basis will involve principles and ethical assumptions that have specific origins, growth, and development. Freedom, for example, for Nussbaum provides a basis for criticizing cultural practices: “Tolerant people usually do not tolerate everything: where real harm to others is present, their interest in the protection of liberty will require them to draw a line” (136). But where does the idea of freedom come from? Who first identified it as an abstract good to be pursued? The Greeks, of course, are the first people to record a self-consciousness about the concept of freedom that none of their contemporary cultures possessed. What is the word for “freedom” or “free citizen” in Persian or Egyptian?15 If Nussbaum is going to trump cultural practices with the standard of freedom, then she necessarily is assenting to the belief that the West invented a superior ideal that should apply to all peoples everywhere, regardless of their ethnicity or race or culture—precisely the belief of the so-called traditionalists who want the Western tradition to take priority in the curriculum because in it are embodied those universal ideals like freedom or a critical consciousness that, if globally endorsed, could allow people, as Nussbaum herself puts it, “to take charge of their own thought and to conduct a critical examination of their own society’s norms and traditions” (30). But aren’t those “norms and traditions” precisely what is celebrated in the multicultural classroom?
Nussbaum’s anxious concern to avoid any hurtful hierarchies and to give every culture its due leads her to further confusion on the issue of cultural relativism. Consider the following: “If we have in mind a general shared goal but, like the Stoics, acknowledge that our students approach the goal from many different starting points, we will naturally conclude that many different curricular approaches are required” (32). Once more, where does the “shared goal” come from? Why is it chosen over others? And more important, what if the “starting point” conflicts with the “shared goal”? If the starting point, say, is a belief in the subordination of women as enforced by purdah, what possible “curricular approach” will get to that liberal goal that does not at some point require the critical rejection of the “starting point,” as well as an assertion that it is flawed or simply wrong and perforce inferior? Ultimately, the Western notion of innate rights that cannot be compromised because of gender will trump the “starting point”—and once more we are back to the traditionalist view that is anathema in the typical multicultural classroom.
Over and over Nussbaum’s attempt to eat her multicultural cake and have it too confuses her argument. She asserts, remarkably, that “any and every human tradition is a tradition of reason, and the transition from these more ordinary and intracultural exercises to a more global exercise of critical argument need not be an abrupt transition” (63). I’d like to know how human sacrifice, female infanticide, cannibalism, slavery, suttee, clitoridectomies, female foot-binding, torture, apartheid, and witch burning are “traditions of reason.” Nor do all the cultures that practice those abominations practice as well a “critical argument” based on reason and the assumption of innate rights possessed by all humans, a criticism that ultimately can dispel the superstitions of tradition and liberate people from such horrors. That critical tradition arose in the West, was used in the West to end its own irrational oppressive customs, and from there spread to the whole world, so that now attacks on traditional cruelties and oppression are based on Western assumptions of human rights. That’s why a model of the Statue of Liberty was erected in Tiananmen Square; that’s why indigenous critics of their own culture’s crimes seek refuge, support, and aid from the West.
Nussbaum’s attempt to honor simultaneously multicultural difference and liberal universalism culminates in her assertion that the West didn’t alone invent these notions of human rights and tolerance and rationalism and individualism, but rather all these can be found in other traditions as well (139-43). Such a remarkable argument requires a lot of sophistic tweaking of terms and rhetorical hedging: “Once we spell the ideas out, asking what it means to say human beings have a right and on what basis they are taken to have these rights, we will find that many cultures have at least some of the elements that are involved in the various different views of rights that we inherit from the Enlightenment” (141). Notice the loophole of “at least some of the elements”: of course “some of the elements” of just about anything can be found probably everywhere, given the variety of human behavior and societies; but the point avoided is that only in the West did the elements cohere into a system of abstract concepts that could be the subject matter of a rational intellectual (as opposed to religious) tradition, and hence develop, be refined, and ultimately culminate in the Enlightenment. It was in the West that these rights became ideals and goods to be consciously pursued, rather than remaining accidental “elements” subject to the contingencies of time and place and power and superstition. That’s why the West developed a vocabulary for these concepts, and other traditions didn’t; that’s why the Enlightenment happened in Europe instead of in China or India; that’s why the “other” is becoming more Western rather than the Westerner becoming more “other.” Likewise with individualism and the rest: practices and behaviors and sentiments that look like these ideals no doubt occurred accidentally, but the trick for humans has been to identify these ideals as goods to be consciously pursued and liberated from both the whim of individuals with power and from the vagaries of chance and time. There’s a world of difference between the de facto freedom of the savage Scythian and the de jure freedom celebrated in Herodotus; a palace coup against the Pharaoh is very different from a city-state’s creation of democratic institutions.
Nussbaum’s confusion on this score is obvious in her attempt to attribute the invention of religious tolerance to the third-century B.C. Indian king Ashoka: “What we take to be a crucial aspect of the Enlightenment turns up in India, well before any Western thinker dreamed of it, as a humane response to the fact of religious pluralism” (143). Yet Nussbaum fudges several issues in making this claim. First is the possibility that Stoic ideas of tolerance influenced Ashoka, given that there were cultural and diplomatic contacts between Mauryan India and the Hellenic world since the time of Ashoka’s grandfather Chandragupta.16 Next, Nussbaum ignores the distinction between a philosophy, like Buddhism, that is deeply embedded in a religious worldview with soteriological and theological implications, and a secular philosophy that grounds ideals not in the supernatural or the mystical but mainly in reason and argument, a reason possessed by every human being, not just the divinely sanctioned priest or king or believer. And third, practices endorsed by men of power because such practices reinforce public order and facilitate their rule must be distinguished from practices resulting from rational principles viewed as valid apart from any political power or individual man. The former will last only as long as the individual ruler and be dependent on his whims, which is why, despite Ashoka’s tolerance, the caste system exists in India today and religious violence flourishes; the latter can transcend particular times and places and ethnicities and become part of a developing tradition available to reformers, just as the Enlightenment ideal of human rights, though violated by American institutionalized racism, was nonetheless available to Martin Luther King to justify the civil rights movement.
Contrary to Nussbaum, it is the West alone that invented the idea her own book celebrates: the rational individual who should be free to choose apart from the accidental constraints of race or national origins, and who possesses certain inalienable rights that should demand our respect regardless of gender, race, religion, or culture. This vision of human identity had its beginnings in ancient Athens and Jerusalem, and over the centuries its slow, painful development has been repeatedly betrayed by those in the West who should have known better. But despite that betrayal, it is the West that has identified those universal human evils like slavery or racism or sexism as evils to be rejected and combated; it is the West that has discovered and nourished the idea of natural rights inherent in all humans simply because they are human and not because they are members of some clan or tribe or sect. And despite that betrayal, that ideal of freedom for the individual has survived, and today this vision of human rights represents the best hope that all humans, Western or not, have for creating societies in which freedom, justice, and respect for individuals take precedence over the appetites or whims or superstitions of various elites. In this sense most of the world is either Western or trying to become Western; for as Jacques Ellul, no cheerleader of the West, has put it, non-Western societies have “inherited the consciousness of and desire for freedom. Everything they do today and everything they seek is an expression of what the western world has taught them.”17 And those parts of the world that brutally repress the freedom of the individual are those, like Bosnia and Rwanda, that are riven by an ethnic particularism too often found in the multicultural classroom.
Nussbaum’s muddled concept of multiculturalism is the Tweedledum of her argument; the Tweedledee is the traditionalist straw man. This ragged scarecrow is the favorite bogey of the postmodern philosopher and multicultural apologist alike, a caricature that feeds the self-serving illusion that antitraditionalist professors are embattled, cutting-edge minorities fighting a powerful establishment anxiously bent on repressing the “other” and protecting its power and privilege: “In our own society, traditionalists frequently resist the idea that we should cultivate our perceptions of the human through confrontation with cultures and groups that we have traditionally regarded as unequal. Defenders of the older idea of a gentleman’s education urge that our colleges and universities focus on acculturation to what is great and fine in our own tradition, rather than on Socratic and universalistic goals” (294). “Traditionally regarded as unequal,” the adverb recalling its cognate “traditionalists,” is a sly slur, implying that anybody who criticizes multiculturalism is committed to inequality. Likewise with “gentleman’s education,” which suggests a philistine elite concerned only with cultural gate keeping. But the big lie is the contrast of “our tradition” and traditionalists with “Socratic and universalistic goals.” I’ll get to that false Socratic analogy later. For now, let’s look more closely at this assumed Western tradition of jealous exclusion of the “other.”
Anyone casually familiar with Western history knows that it invented the idea of diversity, not to mention cultural relativism. Starting with the Greeks (as Nussbaum herself notes, 53-60), no other culture has left a more extensive record of fascination with other peoples, partly because of geography, partly because of the critical curiosity that has typified the Western mind. In fact, no other world culture has been as receptive to the “other” as the West, no other people less resistant to the stranger and more voracious at appropriating everything from technology to fashion. Closer to home, how else can one explain the remarkable influence that black people-despised and legally excluded for centuries—have had on American culture, if not partly by this tradition of curiosity about different people and cultures? How did such a presumably exclusionary humanities professoriate come to make classics out of the works of Du Bois and Ellison and Wright,18 not to mention numerous other Third World writers who were translated and taught and studied before the multiculturalists came along?19
Western intellectuals have always sought out the cultural productions of other peoples, from Chinese novels in Goethe’s time to African masks in D. H. Lawrence’s. When Matthew Arnold defined “true criticism,” he asserted that it “obeys an instinct prompting it to try to know the best that is known and thought in the world, irrespectively of practice, politics, and everything of the kind; and to value knowledge and thought as they approach this best, without the intrusion of any other considerations whatever.” Hence, Arnold went on, “The English critic of literature…must dwell much on foreign thought, and with particular heed on any part of it which, while significant and fruitful in itself, is for any reason specially likely to escape him.”20 These are hardly the sentiments of a blinkered xenophobe jealously guarding the purity of his cultural tradition against contamination by the excluded “other.” In fact, this cosmopolitan openness to other cultures has been the norm among Western intellectuals for most of the modern period. Thus it is hard to believe Nussbaum’s adverb when she asserts that American college students in the past “rarely got…knowledge of non-Western cultures, of minorities within their own, of differences of gender and sexuality” (10). What they didn’t get were melodramatic victimology and half-baked ideas like the social construction of gender or sexual preference.
Moreover, the issue of how to reconcile American ethnic differences with its core of liberal values—the burden of Nussbaum’s argument—is an old one too, predating multiculturalism by decades. In the early part of this century, with the influx of immigrants from Slavic and southern Mediterranean countries, the debate was between “assimilationists”—those who believed cultural differences should be refined away in the WASP melting pot—and “cultural pluralists,” whose position is very similar to Nussbaum’s, as can be seen in this definition published in 1937: “[N]o one culture contains all favorable elements, but each group that makes up the total American population has unique values, and…the nation will be richer and finer in its cultural make-up if it, the country, conserves the best that each group has brought.… [T]heir natures, characters, and personalities are built out of a culture different from our own, and the method of effective cultural transmission requires that the fundamentals of their heritages be preserved for generations.”21 Apart from the assumption in “our own” that equates American culture with Anglo-Saxon Protestants, these sentiments are not that far off from the spirit of Nussbaum’s argument when she says that “we need not give up our special affections and identifications, whether national or ethnic or religious; but we should work to make all human beings part of our community of dialogue and concern, showing respect for the human wherever it occurs” (4-5).
Nor is Nussbaum’s concern with democratic education and cultural pluralism one that arose in the sixties with multiculturalism and ethnic studies. In the early forties a whole series of books addressed what was then called “intercultural education.” Its intent was “to help our schools to deal constructively with the problem of intercultural and interracial tensions among our people” and to alleviate “the hurtful discrimination against some of the minority groups which compose our people.” With the proper curriculum, the schools “can help to mitigate some of the present evils by teaching the young to see the unjust pain which certain of their present thoughtless practices and prejudices inflict on their fellows. They can in some cases help build respect for groups not otherwise sufficiently esteemed.”22 This concern with minority exclusion, moreover, is specifically linked, as in Nussbaum, to democracy: “The younger generation needs to know the facts about race, prejudice, and conflict of cultures, and to rethink the place of majority and minority racial groups in a society committed to making democracy a working reality.”23 As in Nussbaum’s argument, this will be achieved by respect for different cultures along with commitment to the unifying liberal values: “Provided that individual and minority group patterns of thought and action do not run counter to the essentials of unity, the majority is required by the theory [of cultural democracy] not only to accept or ‘tolerate’ racial and cultural differences but to honor them as well.”24 Likewise Nussbaum: “This exposure to foreign and minority cultures is not only, and not primarily, a source of confirmation for the foreign or minority student’s personal sense of dignity.… It is an education for all students, so that as judges, as legislators, as citizens in whatever role, they will learn to deal with one another with respect and understanding. And this understanding and respect entail recognizing not only difference but also, at the same time, commonality, not only a unique history but also common rights and aspirations and problems” (69). Clearly, the issues with which Nussbaum is concerned have been on educators’ minds for many decades, which makes one wonder just who is that “traditionalist” conservative so terrified of the culture of the “other.”
In fact, many contemporary presumed conservative critics of multiculturalism have been, like Arnold, proponents of exposing students to a great variety of cultures and traditions. Camille Paglia, a trenchant critic of identity-politics multiculturalism whom Nussbaum takes great pains to ignore, co-taught a course which originated in “the pressing need of American students for a broader international understanding.” Paglia and her co-instructor had as an aim “to sketch out the possibilities, to find threads of connection. We imagined the course as a mutual exploration.”25 This sounds pretty much like what Nussbaum recommends. But more importantly, Nussbaum’s definitions of liberal education and her call for Socratic education are not new and can be found in the work of her favorite “conservative” bogey, Allan Bloom.
Throughout Bloom’s writings, one finds statements remarkably similar to Nussbaum’s. Consider Nussbaum’s definition of liberal education: it “liberates the mind from the bondage of habit and custom, producing people who can function with sensitivity and alertness as citizens of the whole world” (8). Again: “For the only kind of education that really deserves the name liberalis…is one that makes its pupils free, able to take charge of their own thought and to conduct a critical examination of their society’s norms and traditions” (30); such students will be free “because they can call their minds their own.… They have looked into themselves and developed the ability to separate mere habit and convention from what they can defend by argument” (293). Compare now with the definitions of Bloom, Nussbaum’s epitome of the exclusionary traditionalist: “By liberal education I mean education for freedom, particularly the freedom of the mind, which consists primarily in the awareness of the most important human alternatives.”26 Bloom too sees liberal education not as the force-feeding of “traditional values” but as helping students gain the power to seek the answers to the perennial questions of human value and identity, and to resist the dominant habits and customs of their society: “A liberal education means precisely helping students to pose this question [what is a human?] to themselves, to become aware that the answer is neither obvious nor simply unavailable, and that there is no serious life in which this question is not a continuous concern.… Liberal education provides access to these alternatives [i.e., answers to the question], many of which go against the grain of our nature or our times. The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.”27 Finally, like Nussbaum, Bloom sees critical argument as the lifeblood of liberal education: “The essence of philosophy is the abandonment of all authority in favor of individual human reason.… The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself, by being the model of true openness.”28 If Allan Bloom’s sentiments about liberal education are so similar to Nussbaum’s, who then is the reactionary traditionalist she repeatedly constructs and knocks over in her book?
But doesn’t Nussbaum differ from Bloom in advocating non-Western works as well as Western, whereas Bloom wants to restrict students to the so-called canon of Western “great books”? Nussbaum attempts to show Bloom’s ethnocentrism by distorting a point he makes in The Closing of the American Mind. In the passage in question, Bloom is arguing that required courses in non-Western cultures, as well as taking up time not being spent on the Western tradition, usually are little more than exercises in bashing the West for its ethnocentrism rather than a serious study of another culture. For a close, honest look at non-Western cultures would show that they are ethnocentric, the West alone showing “some willingness to doubt the identification of the good with one’s own way.”29 Hence the study of non-Western courses done properly should lead to the conclusion that to prefer one’s own way is best—“exactly the opposite of what is intended by requiring students to study these cultures.” Bloom’s point is that the multiculturalist course, by ignoring non-Western ethnocentrism, ironically validates the Western view of ethnocentrism: “What we are really doing is applying a Western prejudice—which we covertly take to indicate the superiority of our culture—and deforming the evidence of those other cultures to attest to its validity.”30 Yet Nussbaum takes the quote about the West’s uniqueness in rejecting ethnocentrism, rejects it as false without any evidence or examples to the contrary, and then distorts Bloom’s conclusion to be that Bloom “judges the West to be superior and the non-West to be not worth studying” (132). Bloom, of course, says no such thing; rather he is talking about a certain way of teaching non-Western societies in order to further a political program, and he is pointing out the contradictions of a multiculturalism that criticizes the West on the basis of Western values. But Nussbaum needs her straw man to be a Eurocentric white-male elitist, all the easier for her to knock down.
But in actual fact Bloom, like Arnold before him, does not close off liberal education from non-Western cultures or restrict it to some canon of “great books.” We have already seen in his comments about liberal education an emphasis on providing students with “alternative” answers to the perennial questions of human value and good rather than “implied answers…which exclude other possible alternatives.”31 Likewise in Closing of the American Mind: “Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even specially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.”32 And elsewhere Bloom makes it clear that these “possibilities” or “alternatives” can come from anywhere: “I appreciate and need further information. So do we all. The serious scholars in non-Western thought should bring us the powerful texts they know of to help us. The true canon aggregates around the most urgent questions we face. That is the only ground for the study of books. Idle cultural reports, Eastern or Western, cannot truly concern us, except as a hobby.…” And as Bloom goes on to note, this has always been the case with Western intellectuals like Nietzsche and Machiavelli: “Male, female, black, white, Greek, barbarian: that was all indifferent, as it should be.”33 Again, these points are exceptional only to those who believe in the canard that the West has traditionally been resistant to other cultures, and that traditionalists worship some secret list of “great books” rather than, like Bloom, being concerned with critical consciousness and the tradition in which it is best embodied.
Not only is Nussbaum’s view of liberal education similar to Bloom’s, but her championing of Socratic critical examination (15-49) was also anticipated in Bloom’s work; indeed, the whole point of The Closing of the American Mind is ultimately the need for Socratic education. Even before that book, Bloom had written that “it would be easy to demonstrate that the questions are the same today as they were for Socrates. It is these questions which are permanent and the consideration of which forms a serious man. It is the role of the university to keep these questions before its students.”34 In Closing he asserted that “the academy and the university are the institutions that incorporate the Socratic spirit more or less well”; this spirit should be the “soul” and “essence” of the university, which exists “to preserve and further what he [Socrates] represents.” His conclusion was that the “contemplation of Socrates is our most urgent task.”35 Like Nussbaum, Bloom saw the essence of liberal education not as the injection of perennial “values” into students but rather the inculcation of the habit and techniques of critical questioning and contemplation of alternatives, particularly the questioning of the larger society’s dominant values in order to protect the freedom of the individual mind. Bloom opposed multiculturalism because he viewed it, correctly in my view, as instead attempting to indoctrinate students with a tendentious ideological program that at its heart is incoherent and antiliberal and that limits students to the prison-house of race or ethnicity or gender. I find it hard to reconcile Bloom’s Socratic emphasis on “questions” and “alternatives” with Nussbaum’s caricature of the narrow traditionalist who wants to preach a uniform doctrine to all students. On the contrary, it is the multiculturalists who, in Finkielkraut’s words, “demand the right of everybody to wear a uniform.”36
If multiculturalism is at heart a species of identity politics inimical to Enlightenment liberalism, then Nussbaum’s central claim—that Socratic education can be found today not in the classrooms of traditionalists like Bloom but in the courses of her like-minded friends—rests on an egregiously false analogy. Worse is Nussbaum’s equation of her multiculturalists with Socrates, and the traditionalist critics with those who executed the philosopher because they were frightened of his questioning: “Socratic questioning is still on trial. Our debates over the curriculum reveal the same nostalgia for a more obedient, more regimented time, the same suspiciousness of new and independent thinking, that find expression in Aristophanes’ brilliant portrait” (2; cf. 15-16, 22, 26). We have already seen that this traditionalist straw man is literally incredible; nothing in Bloom’s work or that of any critic that I have read calls for “regimentation” or “obedience,” or distrusts “new and independent thinking,” or is afraid of anything that might “subvert traditional values” (37). How could they, when the essence of the tradition they champion is precisely the critical questioning of everything? On the contrary, the basis of most criticism of multiculturalism is that it demands obedience to a particular ideology that stifles “independent thinking” and opinion and questioning. On my campus it was a women’s studies professor, not a traditionalist, who called the police to have a student removed because his “Socratic tendency to ask for reason and arguments” (22) annoyed the instructor. Speech codes and sensitivity training whose effect, if not their intent, is to curtail Socratic inquiry are proposed by campus multiculturalists, not by traditionalists. When unpopular speakers appear on campus, it is not the traditionalists who shout them down and organize protests to silence them as the radical democrats silenced Socrates. Finally, the protest against teaching non-Western or minority “cultures” derives not from any objection to non-Western or minority cultural products per se, but from the politically loaded and illiberal way these are taught, not to mention the fact that increasingly, multicultural courses replace rather than supplement courses in the Western tradition, which hardly is taught at all anymore.37
The greatest insult to the reader’s intelligence, however, is Nussbaum’s comparison of herself and other well-heeled academics to the impecunious Socrates: “We live, as did Socrates, in a violent society that sometimes turns its rage against intellectuals. We may be embarking on a new era of anti-intellectualism in American life, an era in which the anger of Aristophanes’ father [Strepsiades] is all too real a force” (49). This is pure bathos. The only risks Professor Nussbaum runs by promoting multiculturalism are another notch on her CV and another rung up the academic cursus honorum, where she is even more unlikely to encounter the “other” over whom she frets. For the fact is, multiculturalism is the establishment these days, the reigning ideology from kindergarten to university, from television to advertising, from sit-coms to Disney cartoons, from the government bureaucracy to the corporate fief, where Diversity Trainers make big bucks schooling white folks on their insensitivity to the “other.”38 On college campuses “multiculturalism” and “diversity” are the favorite mantras of the ambitious school administrator and professor alike, for whom “diversity” functions as a secular religion, a sort of Apostles’ Creed that certifies one’s superior social conscience and sensitivity to the “oppressed other” who always seems to live on the other side of town.39
The reason for multiculturalism’s triumph in the culture is obvious: it gratifies the new cosmopolitan “aristocracy of brains” in both its academic and corporate guises. As Christopher Lasch pointed out, multiculturalism suits both “to perfection, conjuring up the agreeable image of a global bazaar in which exotic cuisine, exotic styles of dress, exotic music, exotic tribal customs can be savored indiscriminately, with no questions asked and no commitments required. The new elites are at home only in transit, en route to a high-level conference, to the grand opening of a new franchise, to an international film festival, or to an undiscovered resort.”40 Multiculturalism provides the peripatetic careerist and rootless consumer, whether of cuisine or ideas, with a wide variety of lifestyle options and choices, “bits and pieces they can try on for a while, taste and enjoy, and throw away,”41 all the while that their trivializing consumption is justified as “tolerance for the other” and “sensitivity to difference.”
Contrary to Nussbaum, she and her friends are the ruling class in academe, the establishment it doesn’t do to criticize unless one wants to be charged with the modern version of “corrupting the young”—being sexist and racist. If anybody can be compared to the crotchety Socrates, the late and oft-despised Allan Bloom fits the bill better than Nussbaum. Honest about his elitism, Bloom shared the philosopher’s disdain for the masses, and he recognized the distrust with which a democracy views the elites who devote their lives to critical examination.42 If we want Athenian models for Professor Nussbaum, we should look to the Sophists, those spin-doctors of the ancient world who “made the worse argument the better” and were well paid for their efforts. So it is with Nussbaum, whose sacrifice of sound argument and critical examination to the political prejudices of the academic elite has its own rewards. But the mantle of Socrates won’t be one of them.