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PARTISAN REVIEW
societies.
It
is in this sense, I would argue, that the uniculturalism known
as "multiculturalism" is also anti-cultural, because the claims in favor of
cultures that have not been included in the curriculum are almost always
made at the expense of the cultures on which European education has
tended to concentrate.
This new anticulturalism has led to absurd claims that are easily re–
futed: that Europeans are "ice" people, cold, calculating, and destructive,
and Africans are "sun" people, warm, natural, and peaceful; that Plato
and Aristotle "stole" their philosophy from Egypt, when there is no an–
cient evidence that the Egyptians might have produced philosophical dis–
courses that the Greek philosophers might have copied. But anticultural–
ism also encourages more subtle attacks on Greek "values" that can be
substantiated by partial presentation of the evidence, or by citations
taken out of context. For example, some have interpreted as an illustra–
tion of Athenian misogyny the metopes on the Parthenon that depict
the defeat of the Amazons by the Athenian hero Theseus, as examples of
men defeating women who try to behave like men. That argument has
attractions, but only if other possibilities are ignored. Why not suppose
that the Amazons represent the East, especially if the Parthenon celebrates
the triumph of Athens over the Persians? And how are we to interpret
the depiction on the Parthenon of the Lapiths defeating the Centaurs?
Using the line of reasoning that represents Amazons as women, it would
be possible
to
argue that the Greeks despised horses - when in fact they
valued them highly.
Anticulturalism has also led to some bizarre reconstructions of the
history of European religion. The Olympian gods are believed to be the
inventions of male invaders, replacing the indigenous Mother Goddess of
the Aegean. The principal evidence for this claim is the Greek myth of
creation, in which the Goddess Earth comes into being before the male
gods. But again, it is egually possible to argue that it is only natural for
the myth to give priority to the female, since it is the female who gives
birth. The revisionist interpretation of the ancient myth, although per–
haps more persuasive for being crude and schematic, prevents modern
readers from actually seeing what the ancient poet has written in favor of
females: in all the stories of father-son rivalry among the gods, it is the
goddesses who intercede and restore justice and order, and the god who
manages to remain in power, Zeus, does so in large part by giving the
various goddesses powers and honor. The female is always subordinate,
but the force of her moral reasoning cannot be ignored, nor can her
ability to upset world order by withholding her power to create life.
Since anticultural views have obscured the positive aspects of the
treatment of women in ancient Greek society, it seems almost natural to
countenance and even to believe many unwarranted criticisms, and to
