12
PARTISAN REVIEW
Part of the problem with the debate over multiculturalism is that it is
not being conducted in good faith by the politically correct academics.
Now two groups have been formed to combat "the conservative reac–
tion," led by Gerald Graff and Stanley Aronowitz. But they gloss over
the actual arguments.
Irving Kristol, in an excellent piece in
The Wall Street Journal,
re–
cently pointed out that the radical academics are arguing in bad faith. If
all they were propounding, as they claim publicly, is that the country
contains several cultural and ethnic groups and that educational practices
should recognize this, then there would be no argument. But it must be
emphasized that the politically correct teachers actually are denouncing
the traditions and values of the West and of America as being the work
of "dead, white males," and that they would substitute Mrican and Asian
traditions and values. They deny that there is a viable cultural consensus
that should be at the core of every curriculum. This consensus is not
frozen, but it does not change endlessly. And it is not dead. Yet if we
ignore our own cultural past, then indeed we will be culturally dead.
*
Toward the end of his essay on
Howards End,
Alfred Kazin changes
direction and makes some remarks about the New York Intellectuals'
abandonment of the radical tradition and their conversion to
neoconservatism. In this connection, I think it should be noted that the
abandonment of communism - and socialism - in the Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe should provide the final justification for the abandon–
ment of much of the radical tradition. In addition, the fact is that what
is known as radicalism today has taken on a number of fashionable and
politically correct causes and ideas that were not part of the radical
tradition.
I think Kazin also misreads Lionel Trilling. Trilling preferred the
novel of social manners as it manifested itself in Jane Austen and other
English writers to the kind of realism, for example, he associated with
Theodore Dreiser. This view of fiction seems to me to be arguable but
not necessarily priggish.
*
As John Gross reminded us several years ago, the man of letters is a dying
species, being supplanted by the theorists who follow the latest trends in
academic discourse.
It
was a pleasure, therefore, to read
along the rive"un,
the collection
of essays by Richard Ellmann, who died a few years ago, which combines
impressive scholarship with a critical mastery. As the excellent biographer
of Joyce and Wilde, Ellmann established himself as an outstanding
