MORRIS DICKSTEIN
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practices and a broader undergraduate curriculum are transforming the
"notion of
differance
...
into an administrative concept of 'diversity' and
the scholarly praise for a new pluralism":
This is not to argue that anything short of "deconstruction" or any–
thing smacking of tolerance cannot be of intellectual interest. But the
multitrack approach of broadening out general education easily lapses
into the intellectually paralyzing cure-all which counsels that if only
women, or this or that minority, or Asian or African cultures would
be added to diversifY the Atlanticist curriculum, everything would be
fine.
It
is
not.
For a postmodernist like Geyer, committed to a quixotic notion of
destabilizing all forms of identity, the liberal faith in pluralism, diversity,
and tolerance are as alien as they are
to
Kramer and Kimball. Both sides
are against a "multitrack" approach since both have specific messages they
want general education to convey - one Western, canonical, confident
of the beneficent role of rationality and objectivity, oblivious to how
these words have been questioned or misused, the other anti-Western,
deconstructive, skeptical, anti-foundationalist. "One side needs the
other," notes Robert Hughes, "so that each can inflate its agenda into a
chiliastic battle for the soul of America."
In the context of this sterile opposition, the recent emergence of a
liberal critique of PC has been heartening. John Searle and Frederick
Crews in
The New York Review oj Books,
Irving Howe and
C.
Vann
Woodward in
The New Republic,
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in
The
Disuniting oj America,
David Bromwich in
Politics By Other Means,
Robert Hughes in
Culture oj Complaint,
Todd Gitlin in
Dissent,
and his–
torian John Higham in
The American Quarterly
by no means agree com–
pletely with each other. Schlesinger and Higham defend assimilation and
universalism while Hughes, an outsider himself, emerges as a critic of eth–
nic separatism but an ardent proponent of diversity, a genuine openness
to other cultures. For Hughes, most self-proclaimed advocates of
"diversity" are simply practicing ethnic boosterism and identity politics in
disguise.
Thus, one of the prime effects of the PC controversy has been a
resurgence of liberal thought, rejecting both intimidation of the left and
the hysteria of traditionalists, aggressively defining its own values. The
same shift occurred in Paris in the wake of Marxism's failures. The
Heidegger controversy in France, the long-delayed reckoning over the
Vichy years, the de Man controversy in America, the exhaustion of post–
structuralism and the exposure of its political irresponsibility, the end of
