Date: Mon, 20 Feb 1995 11:15:04 -0800 (PST)
From: Scott London <london@rain.org>
Subject: DICTATORSHIP OF VIRTUE by Richard Bernstein


Book Review:
~~~~~~~~~~~~

DICTATORSHIP OF VIRTUE
Multiculturalism and the Battle for America's Future
By Richard Bernstein
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994, 367 pages


In this hot-tempered contribution to the ongoing culture wars, Richard
Bernstein, a cultural correspondent for the New York Times, continues
what is, in many respects, an ancient quarrel about education and the
meaning of diversity.  While this argument dates back all the way to
Plato and the Sophists, it seems to have reached a feversish pitch in
recent years with the publication of such books as Allan Bloom's "The
Closing of the American Mind," Dinesh D'Souza's "Illiberal Education,"
Benjamin Barber's "An Aristocracy of Everyone," and Russell Jacoby's
"Dogmatic Wisdom."  While Bernstein seems to have fanned the flames in
his latest offering, there is surprisingly little that is new here.

Bernstein calls multiculturalism "a humane and humanizing idea that has,
somehow, gone wrong" (p. 11).  Today, he argues, we are being threatened
by a growing "bureaucracy" of diversity trainers, educational counselors,
organized feminists, arts administrators, college deans, and proponents of
a "New Consciousness" who are peddling not merely an appreciation of
diversity but a radical political ideology.  Multiculturalism condemns
Western culture as racist, sexist, and imperialist, he says, while
elevating the virtues of non-Western, non-patriarachal, and minority
cultures as underrepresented and underappreciated.  In doing this, it
often operates not through the usual means of civil discourse and
persuasion but through intimidation and intellectual decree, cheapening
public discourse and elevating the politics of difference over the
politics of equality.

Bernstein devotes the better part of this book to a series of accounts
which exemplify the forces multiculturalism at work.  Some of Bernstein's
examples are already well-documented; others, collected during his visits
to newsrooms, school boards, liberal churches, corporate training
seminars, and university campuses across the country, are reported here
for the first time.  Bernstein uses these narratives to develop a dual
thesis.  First, he argues, the once-liberal impulse to safeguard equality
and social justice, to let in the excluded and defend the virtues of
pluralism, has now merged with the forces of political correctness to
create a powerful "dictatorship of virtue."  Second, assimilation into the
American mainstream has become a taboo notion.  As radical
multiculturalists strive to suppress the mainstream elements of our
culture in the institutions they control, the very values and traditions
we have in common begin to wither away.

Bernstein uses a word favored by scholars of the French Revolution --
derapage, meaning "skid" or "slide" -- to describe the shift that has taken
place as a movement "aimed supposedly at a greater inclusiveness of all of
the country's diverse component parts ... has somehow slipped from its
moorings and turned into a new petrified opinion of the sort it was
supposed to transcend" (p. 4).  Just as Robespierre's insistence on virtue
led to the Terror (to which the book's title is an allusion), so the new
drive to stamp out racism and sexism in America is the first step toward
the creation of a tyranny of good intentions.  In Bernstein's view,
multiculturalism, in its more radical manifestations, is the derapage of
the civil rights movement.  "The whole point of the liberal revolution
that gave rise to the 1960s was to free us from somebody else's dogma," he
writes, "but now the very same people who fought for personal liberation a
generation ago are striving to impose on others a secularized religion
involving a set of values and codes that they believe in, disguising it
behind innocuous labels like `diversity training' and `respect for
difference'" (p. 38).


                                   Scott London * london@rain.org