ROBERT BRUSTEIN
529
sors. It goes without saying that the university exists not
to
confirm
what you desire to believe or believe already, but to extend the reach of
your mind into areas of ignorance. Yet gays want to learn the virtues of
being gay, blacks study their own role models, and women search for
instances of gender discrimination throughout the history and literature
of the West (replacing the witch-hunts of the seventeenth century with
twentieth-century warlock hunts).
PC's narcissistic agenda begins early, particularly in the schools. In a
number of states, most notably New York, the basic subjects required for
advancement in society are being replaced by a "Rainbow" curriculum
more preoccupied with inspiring self-esteem and promoting tolerance
than with teaching reading or writing. The time is nigh when eight–
year-olds will have more knowledge about Native American totem ritu–
als than about the multiplication tables and will be better instructed in
how to use a condom than in how to apply the rules of grammar. In a
recent newspaper cartoon, two little girls are walking down the street.
One of them says, "My friend has two mommies," and the other replies ,
"How much is two?" The skills with which young people advance are
being smothered in a wash of feel-good civics lessons, as if achievement
was produced by self-esteem and not the other way around.
In culture, the problem is, if anything, more acute. If there was a
time when intellectuals could fight for social justice and high art simulta–
neously, when it was possible to study both Leon Trotsky and James
Joyce (or, like Shaw in the British Museum, both Marx and Wagner) ,
that time is no more. Today we are being asked to choose, in the belief
that "elite" culture (the dismissive phrase for the entire Western tradi–
tion ) is simply another instance of white male oppression.
"Multi culturalism" - in its true sense the fertilization of one culture by
another - has become a process for promoting exclusive "life styles" and
endorsing struggles for artistic supremacy. Instead of integrating a variety
of cultures and peoples, it has led to isolated enclaves and polarized con–
stituencies.
Culture wars are nothing new. What
IS
novel about
"multiculturalism" is the effort of its practitioners and publicists to de–
molish what little remains of high culture in this country. Just as rock
and hip-hop stations on FM radio often drown out the weaker signals
of National Public Radio's classical programming, so the multicultural–
ists, using a variety of political means and aesthetic arguments, try to
drown out the weaker signals of high art. Although this is represented as
another form of equal opportunity, popular or mass culture has never
wanted for audiences or acclaim - or money for that matter (popular
recording artists are now among the highest paid in the land) - in
America. The branding of serious art as "elitist" is simply another power
