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tion of the "two cultures," the scientific and the literary; think of the
difference between "British culture" construed as referring to Shake–
speare, Handel, Eliot, and so on, or as referring to soccer, fish and chips,
warm beer, perennial miners' strikes, and so forth. Recall that, despite
our membership in the Common Market, we British still have some dif–
ficulty thinking of ourselves, as opposed to those foreigners across the
Channel, as "Europeans," but would agree with the French in finding
the idea that American culture is "European" somewhat comical; and
that "Europe" blurs together a great variety of racial types, languages,
ways of life - as "Africa" does, or "Asia."
Beyond these familiar kinds of fuzziness, however, is a recent, crucial
shift of meaning, a shift just barely hinted at in my characterization of
philosophical multiculturalism. Initially, with philosophical multicultural–
ism, the contrast seems to be between the majority culture in a multicul–
tural society and minority culture(s) - as it might be, between the
majority Hindu culture of India, say, and Muslim and Christian
minorities; or, in this country, between the
soi-disant
"European" culture
of the majority (actually itself pretty varied), and many and varied not–
even-distantly-European minority cultures. But oflate "Western culture"
has come to refer to anything associated with what is taken to be the
dominant class of contemporary American society, and the theme is that
this
"culture" should not be privileged over the "cultures" of what are
taken to be oppressed, marginalized, disadvantaged classes - classes
identified in terms of color, sex, and sexual orientation. The scare quotes
here are intended to signal that the term "culture" has been extended far
beyond anything its ordinary elasticity permits; for, so far from respecting
the usual contrast of culture with nature, we are now to take "black"
or "female" as designating cultures.
Diane Ravitch , distinguishing pluralistic and particularistic concep–
tions of multiculturalism, urges the value of the former and the dangers
of the latter. Daniel Bonevac, distinguishing liberal and illiberal multicul–
turalism, complains of a "bait and switch" operation replacing the liberal
by the illiberal. Richard Bernstein writes of a
derapage,
or slide, from a
benign to an alarming kind of multiculturalism. Mary Lefkowitz distin–
guishes multiculturalism, of which she approves, from uniculturalism and
anticulturalism, of which she does not. Lefkowitz's tripartite distinction
reflects the fact that we need to accommodate both a shift from plural–
ism to particularism, and a shift from an ordinary, vague, ambiguous, but
maybe just-barely-serviceable notion of differing and overlapping cultures,
to the more-than-debatable notion of cultures of the dominant and the
oppressed, "cultures" identified by race, sex, etc. - from multiculturalism
