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the multiculturalist project. But never before has the entire movement of
multiculturalism appeared so simplistic, so ephemeral, so bankrupt.
And Clausen's criticisms of the multiculturalist project do not end
there. He realizes that most Americans have, in recent years, become
less and less tied to their own cultural moorings. "For all but a tiny pro–
portion of the North American population," he writes, "the connection
with an ancestral culture is now so vestigial that whether
to
assert or
ignore it has become entirely a matter of choice." Finding increasing
mobility and ever-improving technology in large part responsible for
this predicament, Clausen implicitly links the weakening of cultural
mores to a vision of the world's future associated with Marshall
McLuhan's "global village."
Thus committed multiculturalists are championing sundry distinct
cultures precisely when the distinctiveness of these cultures is fading
from American life. In this sense, multiculturalism's supposed embrace
of non-Westerners is a backward-looking endeavor: it celebrates cul–
tures as their hard-and-fast distinctions die away.
For this reason, Clausen proves critical of the defenders of American
assimilation-those who promote the "melting pot" vision of immigra–
tion. To what are new citizens asked to assimilate? Indeed, in a time in
which the imperatives of all cultures have drastically weakened, the
dominant WASP culture of America has by no means escaped this less–
ening of influence. Americans hardly live in a rigid, monolithic country,
as cultural studies gurus assert; rather, posits Clausen, they inhabit a
"post-cultural" world-a world more afflicted by ennui than by the
rigid demands of any given culture.
Though Clausen's critique of multiculturalism is powerful and com–
pelling, his tracing of the origins of post-culturalism seems less convinc–
ing. By claiming that technology and a strong central government are
chiefly responsible for the rise of cultural relativism, Clausen gives short
shrift
to
the avant-garde Parisian intellectuals who outlined many of the
precepts Americans now hold dear-albeit in watered-down form. One
can understand why Clausen chooses
to
do this; ever since Allan Bloom,
in
The Closing of the American Mind
(1987), argued that Foucault,
Barthes, et al. were "Nietzsches of the left" in order to excoriate the
views of American radicals, conservative critics have harped on the
influence of these thinkers, often finding them responsible for the ideol–
ogy of multiculturalism and political correctness. Clausen, perhaps
wishing to grant his critique a greater degree of originality, distances his
work from these arguments.
