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MORRIS DICKSTEIN
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the ranks of Pc. The end of the Cold War has exposed the hollow
rhetoric of ersatz academic radicals. Many holding extreme views have
moved back toward the center, while outright time-servers and academic
careerists have changed their tune.
I'm
struck by the fact that political correctness belongs to the sec–
ondary culture of academic and journalistic opinion, rarely to the pri–
mary culture of new novels, stories, and poems. Secondary cultures,
whether cultures of publicity or of professionalism, feed on the creativity
of others. Immensely trendy and conformist, they ebb and flow with the
conventional wisdom of the moment. Genuine artists, on the other
hand, like research scientists, work not from received ideas but from
within or from observation. Depending on creative intuition, they are at
once personal and objective.
We are in the process, I hope, of putting political correctness behind
us, yet a whole academic generation has been brought up on it. PC will
continue
to
have an enormous impact at the school level, where, as
Nathan Glazer pointed out, the textbooks are rewritten every genera–
tion, propagating new myths, bolstered by strong political constituencies.
Universities have an institutional investment in this outlook. Journals
have been started, departments have been created, faculty have been
tenured.
Multiculturalism itself is not the issue. Because the world is shrinking
and America's population is changing, our future will be a multicultural
one. But assimilation and economic striving should exert as strong a pull
as ethnic pride. Once- excluded minorities will assimilate to America's
corporate and professional cultures just as those cultures, themselves in–
creasingly global and multinational, will be considerably altered to re–
ceive them. The result should be a more genuine diversity, not separatism
and fragmentation.
There's no doubt that some of the influence of politically correct
thinking has been good. We have become far more sensitive to the rights
and needs of women, minorities, gays, the handicapped. My children's
generation, which went to college in the 1980s, is probably the most
color-blind and gender-blind in American history. I hope these virtues
won't be lost in the inevitable backlash against PC but instead, free of
dogmatism, will remain a vital constituent of a resurgent liberalism.
