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<CENTER><H1>The Crimes of 
Christopher Columbus</H1></CENTER>

<HR align="center" 
width="25%">

<CENTER><H3><EM>Dinesh D'Souza</EM></H3></CENTER>

<HR align="center" 
width="25%">

<CENTER><A HREF="/ssi-hf/ftcopyright.html">Copyright (c) 1995 
<EM>First Things</EM> 57 (November 1995): 26-33.</A> <P></CENTER>

Multiculturalism is presented by its advocates in the schools and 
universities as a benign alternative to monoculturalism. Historian Peter 
Stearns insists that the multicultural debate "is between those who 
think there are special marvelous features about the Western tradition 
that students should be exposed to, and others who feel it's much more 
important for students to have a sense of the way the larger world has 
developed." This is the unmistakable appeal of multiculturalism: it is 
obviously better to study many cultures rather than a single culture, to 
have diverse points of view rather than a single one.<P>

Yet if multiculturalism represented nothing more than an upsurge of 
interest in other cultures, it would be uncontroversial. Who can 
possibly be against hundreds of thousands of American students studying 
the <EM>Analects</EM> of Confucius or the philosophical writings of 
Alfarabi and Avicenna? The debate about multiculturalism is not over 
whether to study other cultures but how to study the West and other 
cultures. Multiculturalism is better understood as a civil conflict 
within the Western academy over contrasting approaches to learning about 
the world.
<P>

Critics of multiculturalism such as Allan Bloom, E. D. Hirsch, and 
Arthur Schlesinger have argued for an emphasis on Western civilization. 
Bloom asserts in<EM> The Closing of the American Mind</EM> that American 
students are aliens in their own culture-abysmally ignorant of the 
philosophical, historical, and economic foundations of the West. Hirsch 
in<EM> Cultural Literacy</EM> lists numerous literary references, 
historical facts, and scientific concepts that American students should 
know but apparently don't. Schlesinger argues in The<EM> Disuniting of 
America</EM> that students should study Western civilization because it 
is their own. "We don't have to believe that our values are absolutely 
better than the next fellow's. People with a different history will have 
differing values. But we believe that our own are better for us."
<P>

Schlesinger's relativist argument for a Western canon is open to the 
objection, What do you mean <EM>we</EM>, white man? Literary critic 
Gerald Graff asks, in an ethnically diverse society, "who gets to 
determine which values are common and which merely special?" Barbara 
Herrnstein-Smith contends that different groups share "different sets of 
beliefs, interests, assumptions, attitudes, and practices. . . . There 
is no single comprehensive culture that transcends any or all other 
cultures."
<P>

At its deepest level, multiculturalism represents a denial of all 
Western claims to truth. In a recent book, literary critic Stanley Fish 
spurns the very possibility of transcultural standards of evaluation. 
"What are these truths and by whom are they to be identified?" In Fish's 
view, "The truths any of us find compelling will all be partial, which 
is to say they will all be political." Another scholar, Barbara Johnson, 
identifies the multicultural project with "the deconstruction of the 
foundational ideals of Western civilization." Anthropologist Renato 
Rosaldo urges the rejection of "timeless universals," and philosopher 
Richard Rorty declares the need "to abandon traditional notions of 
rationality, objectivity, method, and truth." The multicultural 
challenge is cogently summarized by philosopher John Searle:

<P>

<BLOCKQUOTE>Religion, history, tradition, and morality have 
always been subjected to searching criticism in the name of 
rationality, truth, evidence, reason, and logic. Now reason, 
truth, rationality, and logic are themselves subject to 
these criticisms. The idea is that they're as much a part of 
the dogmatic, superstitious, mystical, power-laden tradition 
as anything that they were used to attack.
</BLOCKQUOTE>

"Culture" for modern scholars (and also in colloquial use) has nothing 
to do with Matthew Arnold's deployment of universal standards of reason 
and taste to identify "the best which has been thought and said in the 
world." Today's advocates of multiculturalism uphold rival propositions: 
that there are many cultures, that Western standards are invalid for 
understanding non-Western cultures, that all truths are ideological, and 
that cultures should therefore be placed on a roughly equal plane. 
Cultural relativism-the presumed equality of all cultures-is the 
intellectual foundation of contemporary multiculturalism.
<P>

"Show me the Proust of the Papuans," Saul Bellow is reported to have 
said, "and I'll read him." Bellow did not say that the Papuans lack the 
capacity to produce their own Proust; he simply suggested that, as far 
as he was aware, they had not. Yet his remark, by hinting at the 
possibility of Western cultural superiority, seemed to deny to other 
cultures what philosopher Charles Taylor terms "the politics of equal 
recognition." As Taylor correctly describes it, the multicultural 
paradigm holds that "true judgments of value of different works would 
place all cultures more or less on the same footing." Multiculturalism 
is based on a thoroughgoing repudiation of Western cultural superiority. 
Reflecting a widely held view, literary scholar Mary Louise Pratt termed 
Bellow's remark "astoundingly racist."
<P>

Yet both in the world and in the traditional curriculum, all cultures 
are not on the same footing. Consequently multiculturalism in practice 
is distinguished by an effort to establish cultural parity by attacking 
the historical and contemporary hegemony of Western civilization. To do 
it, activists draw heavily on such leftist movements as Marxism, 
deconstructionism, and anticolonial or Third World nationalism. Social 
critic Edward Said blames Western imperialism for the sufferings of 
"ravaged colonial peoples who for centuries endured summary justice, 
unending economic oppression, distortion of their social and intimate 
lives, and a recourseless submission that was the function of unchanging 
European superiority."
<P>

Multiculturalism is based on the relativist assumption that since all 
cultures are inherently equal, differences of power, wealth, and 
achievement between them are most likely due to oppression. Sociologist 
Robert Blauner argues that these global disparities are replicated 
within the United States, so that blacks, American Indians, and nonwhite 
immigrations constitute a kind of Third World within the United States. 
Additionally, the African-American scholar Henry Louis Gates contends 
that a curriculum focused on the great works of Western civilization 
"represents the return of an order in which my people were the 
subjugated, the voiceless, the invisible, the unrepresented."
<P>

To compensate for these historical and curricular injuries and restore 
cultural parity between ethnic groups, advocates of multiculturalism 
seek to reinforce the self-esteem of minority students by presenting 
non-Western cultures in a favorable light. James Banks argues that 
multiculturalism should fight racism by helping students "to develop 
positive attitudes" about minority and non-Western groups. Deborah 
Batiste and Pamela Harris urge in a multicultural manual for teachers, 
"Avoid dwelling on the negatives which may be associated with a cultural 
or ethnic group. Every culture has positive characteristics which should 
be accentuated." Historian Ronald Takaki argues that blacks, Hispanics, 
and American Indians were no less responsible than whites for shaping 
the ideas and institutions of the United States: "What we need is a new 
conceptualization of American history where there's no center, and 
there's no margin, but we have all these groups engaging in discourse . 
. . unlearning much of what we have been told . . . in the creation of a 
new society."
<P>

In order to see the multicultural paradigm at work, we would do well to 
consider the passionate debate that has raged in the academy over the 
legacy of Christopher Columbus. Provoked by the five hundredth 
anniversary of the Columbus landing, virtually every leading advocate of 
multiculturalism-Edward Said, Stephen Greenblatt, Kirkpatrick Sale, Gary 
Nash, Ronald Takaki, Patricia Limerick, Garry Wills-lashed out against 
Columbus or his successors. Yet it is not Columbus the man who is being 
indicted but what he represents: the first tentative step toward the 
European settlement of the Americas. Consequently, the debate over 
Columbus is a debate over whether Western civilization was a good idea 
and whether it should continue to shape the United States. Many critics 
argue the negative:
<P>

<UL>
  <LI>"Columbus makes Hitler look like a juvenile delinquent," asserts 
American Indian activist Russell Means.

  <LI>Winona LaDuke deplores "the biological, technological, and 
ecological invasion that began with Columbus' ill-fated voyage five 
hundred years ago."

  <LI>The National Council of Churches declares the anniversary of 
Columbus "not a time for celebration" but for "reflection and 
repentance" in which whites must acknowledge a continuing history of 
"oppression, degradation, and genocide."

  <LI>Historian Glenn Morris accuses Columbus of being "a murderer, a 
rapist, the architect of a policy of genocide that continues today."

  <LI>"Could it be that the human calamity caused by the arrival of 
Columbus," African-American writer Ishmael Reed asks, "was a sort of 
dress rehearsal of what is to come as the ozone becomes more depleted, 
the earth warms, and the rain forests are destroyed?"

  <LI>"All of us have been socialized to be racists and benefit from 
racism constantly," Christine Slater laments in the journal 
Multicultural Education. "The very locations on which our homes rest 
should rightfully belong to Indian nations."

  <LI>Literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt alleges that Columbus 
"inaugurated the greatest experiment in political, economic, and 
cultural cannibalism in the history of the Western world."

</UL>

Let us examine the consistent portrait that emerges in multicultural 
literature about the legacy of Columbus. The advocates of 
multiculturalism are unanimous that Columbus did not discover America. 
As Francis Jennings writes in <EM>The Invasion of America</EM>, "The 
Europeans did not settle a virgin land. They invaded and displaced a 
native population." American Indian activist Mike Anderson says, "There 
was a culture here and there were people and there were governments here 
prior to the arrival of Columbus." Kirkpatrick Sale contends, "We can 
say with assurance that no such event as a 'discovery' took place." 
Novelist Homer Aridjis contends that Europeans and native Indians 
"mutually discovered each other." Garry Wills, Gary Nash, Ronald Takaki, 
and other scholars typically speak not of a "discovery" but of an 
"encounter."
<P>

But all of this is wordplay. The real issue, as Leszek Kolakowski points 
out, is that "the impulse to explore has never been evenly distributed 
among the world's civilizations." It is no coincidence that it was 
Columbus who reached the Americas and not American Indians who arrived 
on the shores of Europe. The term "encounter" conceals this difference 
by implying civilizational contact on an equal plane between the 
Europeans and the Indians.
<P>

The multiculturalists are equally unanimous that Columbus, as the 
prototypical Western white male, carried across the Atlantic racist 
prejudices against the native peoples. Gary Nash charges that Columbus 
embodied a peculiar "European quality of arrogance" rooted in irrational 
hostility to Indians. In a similar vein, Kirkpatrick Sale in<EM> The 
Conquest of Paradise</EM> argues that Columbus "presumed the inferiority 
of the natives," thus embodying the basic ingredients of the Western 
racist imagination that was bred to "fear what it did not comprehend, 
and hate what it knew as fearful." For Sale, Europeans are especially 
predisposed to violence, while the native cultures live in a 
"prelapsarian Eden." Sale concludes, "It is not fanciful to see warring 
against species as Europe's preoccupation as a culture."
<P>

It is true that Columbus harbored strong prejudices about the peaceful 
islanders whom he misnamed "Indians"-he was prejudiced in their favor. 
For Columbus, they were "the handsomest men and the most beautiful 
women" he had ever encountered. He praised the generosity and lack of 
guile among the Tainos, contrasting their virtues with Spanish vices. He 
insisted that although they were without religion, they were not 
idolaters; he was confident that their conversion would come through 
gentle persuasion and not through force. The reason, he noted, is that 
Indians possess a high natural intelligence. There is no evidence that 
Columbus thought that Indians were congenitally or racially inferior to 
Europeans. Other explorers such as Pedro Alvares Cabral, Amerigo 
Vespucci, Ferdinand Magellan, and Walter Raleigh registered similar 
positive impressions about the new world they found.
<P>

So why did European attitudes toward the Indian, initially so favorable, 
subsequently change? Kirkpatrick Sale, Stephen Greenblatt, and others 
offer no explanation for the altered European perception. But the reason 
given by the explorers themselves is that Columbus and those who 
followed him came into sudden, unexpected, and gruesome contact with the 
customary practices of some other Indian tribes. While the first Indians 
that Columbus encountered were hospitable and friendly, other tribes 
enjoyed fully justified reputations for brutality and inhumanity. On his 
second voyage Columbus was horrified to discover that a number of the 
sailors he left behind had been killed and possibly eaten by the 
cannibalistic Arawaks.
<P>

Similarly, when Bernal Diaz arrived in Mexico with the swashbuckling 
army of Hernan Cortes, he and his fellow Spaniards were not shocked to 
witness slavery, the subjection of women, or brutal treatment of war 
captives; these were familiar enough practices among the conquistadors. 
But they were appalled at the magnitude of cannibalism and human 
sacrifice. As Diaz describes it, in an account generally corroborated by 
modern scholars:

<P>

<BLOCKQUOTE>They strike open the wretched Indian's chest 
with flint knives and hastily tear out the palpitating heart 
which, with the blood, they present to the idols in whose 
name they have performed the sacrifice. Then they cut off 
the arms, thighs, and head, eating the arms and thighs at 
their ceremonial banquets. The head they hang up on a beam, 
and the body of the sacrificed man is not eaten but given to 
the beasts of prey.

</BLOCKQUOTE>

When Cortes captured the Aztec emperor Montezuma and his attendants, he 
would only permit them temporary release on the promise that they stop 
their traditional practices of cannibalism and human sacrifice, but he 
found that "as soon as we turned our heads they would resume their old 
cruelties." Aztec cannibalism, writes anthropologist Marvin Harris, "was 
not a perfunctory tasting of ceremonial tidbits." Indeed the Aztecs on a 
regular basis consumed human flesh in a stew with peppers and tomatoes, 
and children were regarded as a particular delicacy. Cannibalism was 
prevalent among the Aztecs, Guarani, Iroquois, Caribs, and several other 
tribes.
<P>

Moreover, the Aztecs of Mexico and the Incas of South America performed 
elaborate rites of human sacrifice, in which thousands of captive 
Indians were ritually murdered, until their altars were drenched in 
blood, bones were strewn everywhere, and priests collapsed with 
exhaustion from stabbing their victims. The law of the Incas provided 
for punishment of parents and others who displayed grief during human 
sacrifices. When men of noble birth died, wives and concubines were 
often strangled and buried with them.
<P>

Multicultural textbooks, committed to a contemporary version of the 
noble savage portrait, cannot acknowledge historical facts that would 
embarrass the morality tale of white invaders despoiling the elysian 
harmony of the Americans. Kirkpatrick Sale dismisses all European 
accounts of Indian atrocities as fanciful: "Organized violence was not 
an attribute of traditional Indian societies." Seeking to explain away 
the gory evidence, Sale adds, "It is hard to think that European seamen 
would be able to distinguish a disembodied neck or arm as distinctly 
human, and not from a monkey or a dog, and in any case there is no 
evidence that they were to be eaten." Stephen Greenblatt acknowledges 
the existence of human sacrifice but faults the Europeans for not 
recognizing its "deepest resemblance" to one of their own cultural 
practices: after all, Greenblatt says, the Spanish themselves 
symbolically consumed the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist, and 
ritual murder is merely a "weirdly literal Aztec equivalent."
<P>

Consider a recent analysis of two books on the Aztecs, published as a 
guide for teachers in <EM>Multicultural Review</EM>. The first book, 
Francisco Alarcon's<EM> Snake Poems: An Aztec Invocation</EM>, receives 
high praise as "a wonderful celebration of Aztec religion, beliefs, and 
customs, intermingled with the thoughts and feelings of today's Mexican 
Americans." The second book, Tim Wood's <EM>The Aztecs</EM>, is 
denounced for its "sensationalistic and lurid manner. . . . The Aztec 
practice of human sacrifice is described in gory detail. This book is a 
distortion of the Aztecs." This review illustrates the way in which the 
relativist ideology shapes the predispositions of the advocates of 
multiculturalism.
<P>

In the next item of the multiculturalists' indictment, Columbus-and by 
extension the West-is accused of perpetrating a campaign of genocidal 
extermination, a holocaust against native Americans. Kirkpatrick Sale 
charges the successors of Columbus with "something we must call genocide 
within a single generation." Claude Levi-Strauss charges that millions 
of Indians "died of horror and disgust at European civilization." 
Tzvetan Todorov in <EM>The Conquest of America</EM> accuses his fellow-
Europeans of perpetrating "the greatest genocide in human history."
<P>

The charge of genocide is largely sustained by figures showing the 
precipitous decline of the Indian population. Although scholars debate 
the exact numbers, in Alvin Josephy's estimate, the Indian population 
fell from between fifteen and twenty million when the white man first 
arrived to a fraction of that 150 years later. Undoubtedly the Indians 
perished in great numbers. Yet although European enslavement of Indians 
and the Spanish forced labor system extracted a heavy toll in lives, the 
vast majority of Indian casualties occurred not as a result of hard 
labor or deliberate destruction but because of contagious diseases that 
the Europeans transmitted to the Indians.
<P>

The spread of infection and unhealthy patterns of behavior was also 
reciprocal. From the Indians the Europeans contracted syphilis. The 
Indians also taught the white man about tobacco and cocaine, which would 
extract an incalculable human toll over the next several centuries. The 
Europeans, for their part, gave the Indians measles and smallpox. 
(Recent research has shown that tuberculosis predated the European 
arrival in the new world.) Since the Indians had not developed any 
resistance or immunity to these unfamiliar ailments, they perished in 
catastrophic numbers.
<P>

This was a tragedy of great magnitude, but the term "genocide" is both 
anachronistic and wrongly applied in that, with a few gruesome 
exceptions, the European transmission of disease was not deliberate. As 
William McNeill points out in <EM>Plagues and Peoples</EM>, Europeans 
themselves probably contracted the bubonic plague in the fourteenth 
century as a result of contagion from the Mongols of Central Asia-some 
twenty-five million (one third of the population) died, and the plague 
recurred on the continent for the next three hundred years. 
Multicultural advocates do not call this "genocide."
<P>

The reason advocates of multiculturalism charge Columbus with genocide 
is that they need to explain how small groups of Europeans were able to 
defeat overwhelming numbers of Indians, capsize their mighty native 
empires, and seize their land. Hernan Cortes rode into Mexico with 
around five hundred men, sixteen horses, and a few dozen long-barrel 
guns. The Aztec force that he faced numbered more than a million. When 
Gonzalo Pizarro confronted the Inca he had three ships, 150 men, one 
cannon, and thirty horses. The Incas had several hundred thousand troops 
ruling over a population of several million. Yet the Aztecs and the 
Incas were routed.
<P>

How did the Spanish prevail? The triumph of the Spanish over the Indians 
is an interesting dilemma because no army, however well-trained, can 
overcome such numerical odds. Nor did the slow-loading European rifles 
provide a decisive advantage. It is true that many Indians were 
astonished at the mobility of European troops on horseback-the Indians 
had no horses before the Spanish imported them to the Americas-but the 
novelty of Spanish cavalry could only have caused temporary confusion in 
the ranks of the enemy. Undoubtedly one factor that contributed to 
European victory was the defection to the Spanish side of a sizable 
number of Indians who came from tribes that had long been colonized and 
persecuted by the Aztecs and the Incas. Yet these are only partial 
explanations.
<P>

Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian writer and statesman, offers an 
arresting theory. However small their numbers, however crude their 
representatives, Europeans came to the Americas with a civilizational 
ideology that was unquestionably modern, even if embryonically so. Among 
the ingredients of this modernity were a rational understanding of the 
universe and a new understanding of individual initiative.
<P>

By contrast, the Indians still lived in the world of the spirits-the 
enchanted universe. They could not adapt to changing circumstances. They 
confused the Europeans with gods. They sought to reverse casualties by 
sacrificing their own soldiers to the totems. When Montezuma's military 
advisers and soothsayers warned him of ill-omens he ordered them 
imprisoned and their wives and children killed. The Indians were held in 
paralyzing obedience to the emperor. They were accustomed to 
exterminating their inferiors but were unfamiliar with the challenges of 
combat against well-armed peers.
<P>

In short, the Indians were defeated and massacred because, by a cruel 
juxtaposition of history, they encountered, even in the persons of 
"semi-literate, implacable, and greedy swordsmen," a Spanish 
civilization that was superior both in the sophistication of its arms 
and its ideas. Even today, Vargas Llosa argues, the principles of the 
West continue to shape the modern world, and "the nations that reject 
those values are anachronisms condemned to various versions of 
despotism."
<P>

Because of his defense of the West, Vargas Llosa has been criticized for 
advancing a reactionary position. Yet in a similar vein the left-wing 
Mexican novelist and diplomat Carlos Fuentes argues that the Europeans 
prevailed over the Indians because their empirical approach to knowledge 
gave them enormous civilizational confidence. By contrast, the Indians 
relied on a combination of direct perception, dreams, hallucination, and 
appeals to the spirits. Fuentes writes in <EM>The Buried Mirror</EM>, 
"The so-called discovery of America, whatever one might ideologically 
think about it, was a great triumph of scientific hypothesis over 
physical perception."
<P>

The West even supplied the Americas with a doctrine of human rights that 
would provide the basis for a sustained critique of Western colonialism. 
We may join Kirkpatrick Sale, Stephen Greenblatt, and others in 
expressing outrage at wanton Western seizure of Indian lands and abuses 
of basic rights. But upon reflection we would have to admit that these 
criticisms depend upon concepts of property rights and human rights that 
are entirely Western. Long before Columbus, Indian tribes raided each 
other's land and preyed on the possessions and persons of more 
vulnerable groups. What distinguished Western colonialism was neither 
occupation nor brutality but a countervailing philosophy of rights that 
is unique in human history.
<P>

Shortly after the Spanish established their settlements in the Americas, 
the King of Spain in the mid-sixteenth century called a halt to 
expansion pending the resolution of a famous debate over the question of 
whether Spanish conquest violated the natural and moral law. Never 
before or since, writes historian Lewis Hanke, has a powerful emperor 
"ordered his conquests to cease until it was decided if they were just." 
The main reason for the King's action was the relentless work of 
exposing colonial abuses that was performed by a Spanish bishop, 
Bartolome de las Casas. A former slave owner, Las Casas underwent a 
crisis of conscience which convinced him that the new world should be 
peacefully Christianized, that Indians should not be exploited, and that 
those who were had every right to rebel. Las Casas wrote his <EM>Account 
of the Destruction of the Indies</EM>, he said, "so that if God 
determines to destroy Spain, it may be seen that it is because of the 
destruction that we have wrought in the Indies."
<P>

Although Las Casas is sometimes portrayed as a heroic eccentric, in fact 
his basic position in favor of  Indian rights was directly adopted by 
Pope Paul III, who proclaimed in his bull Sublimis Deus in 1537:

<P>

Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by the 
Christians are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the 
possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of 
Jesus Christ; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the 
contrary happen it shall be null and of no effect. Indians and other 
peoples should be converted to the faith of Jesus Christ by preaching 
the word of God and by the example of good and holy living.

<P>

Leading Jesuit theologians such as Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco 
Suarez interpreted the Bible and the Catholic tradition to require that 
the natural rights of Indians be respected, that their conversions be 
obtained through persuasion and not force, that their land and property 
be secure from arbitrary confiscation, and that their right to resist 
Spanish incursions in a "just war" be upheld.
<P>

More than a century before Locke, and two centuries before the French 
and American revolutions, theologians at the University of Salamanca 
developed the first outlines of the modern doctrine of inviolable human 
rights. Although these rights were often abused in practice, largely 
because there was no effective mechanism for enforcement, they provided 
a moral foundation for the eventual enfranchisement of the native 
Indians. Multicultural textbooks are typically sparse in their 
acknowledgment of the liberal tradition of the West associated with Las 
Casas. The reason for this reticence is that liberalism is uniquely a 
Western achievement, and hence could provide a possible foundation for a 
claim to Western cultural superiority.
<P>

In order to undermine this claim, advocates of multiculturalism insist 
on the contribution of the American Indians to the West. There is little 
doubt that American Indians taught the white man a great deal: about 
canoes, snowshoes, moccasins, and kayaks. The hammock is an Indian 
invention. Indians also introduced Europeans to new crops: corn, 
potatoes, peanuts, squash, avocados, and other vegetables and fruits. 
Ronald Takaki informs us that "the term <EM>okay </EM>was derived from 
the Choctaw word <EM>oke</EM>, meaning: it is so." Yet even when one 
adds the heroic exploits of Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Chief Joseph, and 
Geronimo, it is not clear that American Indian society has established 
cultural parity with the West.
<P>

Consequently, advocates of multiculturalism frequently proceed to make 
an audacious claim: that the fundamental institutions for the 
recognition of liberal rights, such as the U.S. Constitution, were not 
the exclusive product of Western civilization but were decisively 
influenced by such groups as the Iroquois Indians. Anthropologist Thomas 
Riley asserts that the League of the Iroquois served "as a model for the 
confederation that would make up the United States." Alvin Josephy 
credits the Iroquois with being "particularly influential" on the 
thinking of the framers in Philadelphia. Jack Weatherford in Indian 
Givers observes that the Iroquois provided a blueprint "by which the 
settlers might be able to fashion a new government."
<P>

If these claims are true, then surely the past refusal of teachers to 
credit the Iroquois for the Bill of Rights and other vital instruments 
of liberal freedom provides a classic example of the kind of bias that 
multicultural advocates have insisted pervades the traditional 
curriculum. Historian Elisabeth Tooker investigated the issue and 
discovered that the main evidence linking the Iroquois to the American 
founding is a letter written by Benjamin Franklin in 1754.

<P>

It would be a strange thing if six nations of ignorant savages should be 
capable of forming a scheme for such a union, and be able to executive 
it in such a manner as that it has subsisted for ages and appears 
indissoluble, and yet that a like union should be impracticable for ten 
or a dozen English colonies, to whom it is more necessary and must be 
more advantageous, and who cannot be supposed to want an equal 
understanding of their interests.

<P>

Franklin is saying, in other words, if the barbarians can work out their 
problems and form a union, surely we civilized people can do as well.
<P>

In her inquiry, Tooker explores the similarities between the Iroquois 
League and the American Constitution and finds that they are virtually 
nonexistent. The League consisted of tribal chiefs whose title was 
partly hereditary. Only one tribe, the Onondagas, were permitted as 
"firekeepers" to present topics for consideration. All rulings by the 
League required unanimous consent. The claim that the Iroquois were the 
secret force behind the American Constitution is a myth, sustained only 
by ideology.
<P>

While advocates of multiculturalism are right to criticize many of the 
old texts, in which Columbus is presented as a valiant adventurer and 
American Indians are scarcely to be seen, contemporary activists merely 
replace the old biases with new ones. Columbus has metamorphosed from a 
grand crusader into a genocidal maniac and a precursor to Hitler. 
American Indians are now beyond reproach, canonized as moral and 
ecological saints.
<P>

In order to establish cultural parity, multiculturalists are routinely 
compelled to emphasize Western oppression and non-Western virtue. They 
are driven to downplay the illiberal traditions of other cultures even 
as they suppress the distinctively liberal tradition of the West. The 
consequence is that multiculturalism becomes an obstacle to true 
cultural understanding, and implants in students an unjustified animus 
toward the liberal societies of the West. Both truth and justice suffer 
as a consequence.
<P>

Ultimately cultural relativism itself, the intellectual scaffolding of 
multiculturalism, becomes the issue. One of the starting premises of 
relativism is that most Americans cannot objectively study minority and 
non-Western cultures because they will necessarily view them through a 
prism of Eurocentric assumptions. The multiculturalists are certainly 
right that none of us approach other societies in a culturally nude 
state: our perspective is necessarily shaped and perhaps clouded by our 
prior beliefs. But if this means that we have no way to transcend our 
beliefs and approach the ideal of objectivity, then multiculturalism 
becomes an illusion-for other cultures would constitute inaccessible and 
incommensurable worlds, and Westerners could only project their own 
values onto the cultures they appear to be studying. The assumption that 
other cultures are self-contained and untranslatable systems leads, 
ironically, to the conclusion that it is a waste of time for outsiders 
to attempt the inherently impossible project of understanding other 
cultures. Richard Rorty has reached precisely this conclusion, arguing 
in<EM> Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth</EM> that Westerners should be 
unabashedly ethnocentric because they cannot be anything else.
<P>

The vast majority of multicultural advocates reject Rorty's position, 
because it exposes multiculturalism as Eurocentric, whereas activists 
like to think of themselves as fighting Eurocentrism. Multicultural 
advocates such as Renato Rosaldo, Richard Delgado, and Ian Haney-Lopez 
typically argue that schools should recruit minority and Third World 
representatives who can provide much-needed black, Hispanic, Asian, and 
American Indian perspectives. In some cases, activists insist that it is 
inadequate for minority recruits to have the right skin color: they must 
also espouse progressive and left-wing views.
<P>

Of course, the question remains how we know that these progressive, 
left-wing, minority recruits truly represent their cultures. They may 
well represent marginal factions, or even be Eurocentric imposters.
<P>

Multicultural advocates typically avoid this problem by asserting that 
education does provide a bridge between cultures, and with proper 
training students can be taught to appreciate the equal worth of all 
cultures. "If we develop cultural consciousness and intercultural 
competence," Christine Bennett writes, "we may be able to understand 
that we might very well accept and even participate in such behaviors 
had we been born and raised in that society." But this conclusion does 
not follow from its premises. If standards of judgment derive from 
within cultures, we cannot arrive at external standards of evaluation 
that permit us to judge all cultures as valid for the people who live 
under them. Multicultural activists rely on the sleight-of-hand in which 
"I cannot know" becomes "I cannot judge" which becomes "I know that we 
are all equal." A skeptical confession of ignorance mysteriously becomes 
a dogmatic assertion of cultural egalitarianism.
<P>

This is not to condone approaching other cultures with a presumption of 
their inferiority. As Charles Taylor argues, "It makes sense to demand 
as a matter of right that we approach the study of other cultures with a 
presumption of their value." Thus cultural relativism may provide a 
valuable methodological starting point of humility and intellectual 
openness. Yet as Taylor points out, in evaluating other cultures "it 
can't make sense to demand as a matter of right that we come up with a 
final concluding judgment that their value is great or equal to others." 
Perhaps a careful examination of other cultures will reveal good reasons 
to be critical of other cultures, just as we are often critical of our 
own culture.
<P>

Indeed the first thing we notice when we study other cultures is that 
without exception they reject the cultural relativism that is a uniquely 
Western ideology. It should come as no surprise that relativism provokes 
a sharp resistance from people in other cultures. Imagine the legitimate 
anger of a Muslim who is cheerfully informed by a Western academic that 
Allah's teachings are true for him, when he deeply believes that they 
are universal principles. Moreover, as Leszek Kolakowski points out, it 
seems paternalistic to say that Islamic practices such as punishing 
thieves by cutting off their limbs represent legitimate judicial 
options-for those people. Such arguments, implying that our kind of 
people deserve democracy and human rights but their kind of people do 
not, seem self-serving and destructive to the contemporary aspirations 
of millions of Third World peoples. In a stunning admission, Claude 
Levi-Strauss writes:

<P>

<BLOCKQUOTE>The dogma of cultural relativism is challenged 
by the very people for whose moral benefit the 
anthropologists established it in the first place. The 
complaint the underdeveloped countries advance is not that 
they are being Westernized, but that there is too much delay 
in giving the means to Westernize themselves. It is of no 
use to defend the individuality of human cultures against 
those cultures themselves.
</BLOCKQUOTE>

A sincere effort to study other cultures "from within" requires a 
rejection of the Western lens of cultural relativism. Multiculturalists 
who wish to take non-Western cultures seriously must take seriously 
their repudiation of relativism. Otherwise a humble openness to other 
cultures becomes an arrogant dismissal of their highest claims to truth.
<P>

Students do need to be exposed to the great accomplishments of other 
cultures, as well as their influence on the West. But when 
multiculturalism goes beyond this to insist that we should understand 
cultural differences without applying (inherently biased) standards of 
critical evaluation, it forbids at the outset the possibility that one 
culture may be in crucial respects superior to another. An initial 
openness to the truths of other cultures degenerates into a closed-
minded denial of all transcultural standards. Seeking to avoid an 
acknowledgment of Western cultural superiority, relativism ends up 
denying the possibility of truth.
<P>

The purpose of a liberal education, as Cardinal Newman defined it, is to 
"educate the intellect to reason well in all matters, to reach out 
towards truth, and to grasp it." Schools and colleges should provide 
young people with an authentic multicultural curriculum that begins at 
home but is nevertheless open to the world beyond. Such a canon would be 
modestly Eurocentric, in recognition of the facts that we live in a 
Eurocentric world, that Europe has dominated the rest of the globe in 
the modern age, and that while the popular culture in America is 
culturally hybrid, the philosophical, political, legal, and economic 
institutions of this country are the product of European culture and no 
other.
<P>

Yet this new curriculum would also be cosmopolitan, seeking to criticize 
and enrich Western civilization with ideas imported from abroad. An 
authentic multiculturalism would expose students to "the best that has 
been thought and said" not simply in the West but in other cultures as 
well. The object is not diversity but knowledge: students should learn 
ways to seek to distinguish truth from falsehood, beauty from vulgarity, 
right from wrong. Knowledge is both a matter of ascertaining fact and a 
developing of the tools to formulate "right opinion." To use Plato's 
famous image, we live our lives in a cave, mistaking shadows for 
reality, but it is the aspiration of an authentic multicultural 
education to help us move from opinion to knowledge, to climb out of the 
darkness into the illuminating light of the sun.<P>

<P>

<HR align="center" 
width="25%">

Dinesh D'Souza, a John M. Olin Scholar at the American Enterprise 
Institute, is author of <EM>The End of Racism</EM>, published this fall 
by the Free Press.<P>


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