Out
of Many, One—Or Chaos‡
Joseph Baldacchino*
The motto of the United States is E Pluribus Unum—"Out
of Many, One." It is an appropriate description for several reasons. In
the beginning there was the anomaly of one nation, with a single federal
government, comprising not merely a multiplicity of individuals but also
a multiplicity of states, each sovereign in its own sphere. The experiment
worked—at least for a time. Reason: it possessed
an ordering principle in the Constitution, which explicitly enumerated
the powers of the central government and specified that those "not delegated
to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited to it by the States,
are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
The motto E Pluribus Unum is also peculiarly apt in that, perhaps
more so than any modern jurisdiction, the United States is a nation of
immigrants, and yet—at least for a time—that
fact did not prevent its essential unity. For, though the United States
has been populated by successive waves of new arrivals from far points
on the globe, its social and political institutions and conceptions of
right and of rights are predominantly British in origin, its government
having evolved from those of the 13 colonies. And, overwhelmingly, the
men and women who have come from whatever far place to these shores, having
been drawn by the promises inherent in America's inherited culture, have
eagerly embraced it as their own, even while leavening it at the edges
with cultural particularities from their diverse homelands. In many instances
assimilation was made easier, as Russell Kirk has convincingly demonstrated,
because the British institutions at the root of American culture had roots
in turn in the ancient civilizations of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem—civilizations
that have influenced the cultures not only of most European nations but
significant parts of Asia and Africa as well.
.
Yet increasingly there are influential political and intellectual forces
in our society who would stamp out all vestiges of American unity and historical
continuity. Under the banner of "multiculturalism," and of offshoots such
as "Afrocentrism," these forces—who dominate
the humanities and social-science faculties of the nation's elite universities
as well as the public-school curricula in many states—insist
that there is not one American culture but many. Similarly, they teach
that there is no such thing as American history but women's history, African-American
history, Hispanic or Latino history, "gay" history, and so forth.
The practitioners of multi-speak do not contend merely that there are
subcultures and countercultures whose views and ways of life diverge from
that of the dominant culture. There has always been room within the nooks
and crannies of a free society for subcultures to practice their divergent
ways and to contend for—though not necessarily
to win—gradual acceptance from the cultural
mainstream. It is one thing to specialize in the study of these societal
groups and to chronicle their particular actions and concerns. But the
multiculturalists do not stop there. Rather, they maintain that there is
no commonality between society at large and its various subgroups and that
the very existence of "diversity"—i.e., contending
groups—is sufficient to deny to the mainstream
culture any right to make judgments about what qualities are to be encouraged
or discouraged by society—in short, any right
to set standards. Similarly, the majority of those who teach and write
about black history or women's studies do not treat their subject-matter
as a branch of a more encompassing discipline in the same way that a professor
of literature may focus special attention on English literature. They contend,
on the contrary, that the black mind alone is equipped to apprehend black
history and the female mind alone to properly comprehend the history of
women's experience. As if it were to be argued that only persons of English
descent—or should I say male persons
of English descent—could derive benefit from
the study of Shakespeare!
Although this is unmitigated nonsense, it is not cause for mirth—unless
one would get laughs from a clown who was juggling bottles of nitro-glycerin.
For make no mistake: That these ideas are being treated seriously in our
schools, universities, and dominant information media poses a threat more
lethal to the long-term health of American society than would a pack of
terrorists brandishing guns.
Yes, there is diversity and change in America; there is diversity and
change always and everywhere. History and the particular circumstances
with which men and women must contend are in constant flux, changing with
each passing moment. But there is also an element of unity in history:
namely, the will to right action with which good persons down the ages
have worked to make the best of the ever-varying historical circumstances
that confronted them in the service of the intrinsically right solution.
Without this element of unity and permanence to order the fleeting and
idiosyncratic—without the One in the Many,
as Irving Babbitt reminds us—human life would
be meaningless and human society impossible. Again, E Pluribus Unum.
The unity in diversity that is ever present in life has its source in
the universal structure of human experience, one aspect of which is the
presence of a war within human beings between two competing qualities of
will. The "lower will" is alternately described by Babbitt as man's "impulsive,"
"natural," or "ordinary" self. Its goal is self-indulgence for oneself
or one's group. The "higher" or "ethical" will is experienced as an "inner
check" on merely selfish impulse in favor of a unifying and more deeply
satisfying goal.
The higher will, Babbitt explains, "is not itself an expansive emotion
but a judgment and a check on expansive emotion." To the extent that man
disciplines his impulsive self, including even his ruling passion, in deference
to this transcendent purpose, he not only unifies his own personality and
achieves lasting happiness (as distinguished from momentary pleasure),
but "moves toward a common center with others who have been carrying through
a similar task of self-conquest." The individual thus promotes what is
simultaneously good for himself and good for all and thereby brings into
being such unity—and community—as
can exist in this imperfect world. Lack of deference to the higher will
leads to disharmony within the personality and society.
Men and women are not atomistic individuals, fully developed at birth
and morally self-sustaining. Rather, they are born into and shaped over
time by networks of family, church, local and national communities—each
with their own history, traditions, rules and laws, literature, art, and
defining myths. Together, these overlapping networks with their accompanying
ideas comprise a culture. The culture, in turn, is the summing up in concrete
experience—the incarnation in history—of
innumerable attempts by men and women over the course of centuries to embody
the good in particular circumstances. As such, it offers a valuable source
of inspiration and social support for new acts of moral creativity in the
novel circumstances that confront us daily. Without the support to man's
higher disposition that historical cultures provide, men and women would
be no higher on the social and moral scale than the beasts—indeed,
given our infinitely greater intellectual and imaginative potential for
destructiveness, much lower.
Although our American culture has roots in British and Western culture,
it is not coextensive with the latter because of the divergent history
of our two nations over the last 200 years. Whatever their relative merits
in some other ways, U.S. culture has at least this advantage over British
culture for Americans: U.S. culture developed in response to our unique
circumstances as a nation, hence it is more directly responsive to our
concrete needs. Still, just as individuals do not exist in isolation, neither
do cultures; so there is much that American culture can gain from selective
appropriations from its foreign counterparts. Because our civilization
shares roots with those of Europe and the Mediterranean area, borrowings
from those cultures may be applicable more frequently and directly to our
social and ethical needs. But, insofar as they embody the power of ordering
restraint that is present to some degree in all human experience, more
geographically remote cultures, such as those of sub-Saharan Africa and
the Far East, also have much to offer.
That man is a creature torn between contrary inclinations, who achieves
happiness by deferring to a higher purpose, is an insight shared by many
of the world's great religions, including Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism,
Islam, and some branches of Hinduism. Though for Americans this insight
is most frequently associated with Jewish and Christian beliefs, the recognition
of this fundamental aspect of the human condition is by no means dependent
on adherence to any religious creed or dogma. Thus the same insight is
also found in such humanistic, rather than religious philosophies, as Aristotelianism
and Confucianism. Traditionally, in fact, the defining purpose of the humanities
was to focus on the best that has ever been thought and written, without
regard to geographic and sectarian boundaries, and so to promote true peace
and true community across ethnic, racial, and sexual lines.
If the "multiculturalists" were what they proclaim themselves to be,
they, too, would be endeavoring to discern the universal that transcends
(even as it helps to shape) particular cultures. The late Swedish philosopher
Folke Leander noted in 1937, for example, that "a Mohammedan and a Christian
can both regard sexual restraint as an ethical ideal, although the former
lives in polygamy and the latter in monogamy; what they both admit is the
value of a certain spiritual attitude. They may both believe in the same
hierarchy of values, although their concrete ways of life can be shaped
very differently on account of the dissimilarities between the social conventions
under which they live." Aristotle, in his discussion of "the mean," also
describes humankind's recognition of this shared hierarchy of values; and
he does it without reliance on theistic doctrines. Though common to the
great historical religions, awareness of the hierarchy of values is not
dependent upon faith but is accessible to mundane experience. It emerges,
Leander explains, from "the intuition of our ability to check and control
every important group of impulses through volitional effort" in the interest
of a well-ordered and happy existence. And, without the exercise of this
ordering power in life, no culture, no society, would be possible but only
chaos and dispersion.
Yet the "multiculturalists," owing to their preoccupation with the ephemeral
and the eccentric, ignore—and, indeed, seek
to destroy—the quality of will that transcends
particular historical cultures even as it makes them possible. Hence, the
"multiculturalists" should with more accuracy be termed anticulturalists.
Writing in the University Bookman (Vol. 32, No. 2, 1992), John Lyon
noted that an official state document entitled "Multicultural Education
in Michigan," which was typical of similar policy statements being adopted
across the United States, defines the term culture so broadly—"all
the life-ways of a group of people"—as to
make the term meaningless. Multicultural education, says the Michigan document,
"values diversity and views cultural differences as a positive and vital
force in the development of our society." But its definition of culture
is so nebulous, Lyon observes, that any "vicious, eccentric, or weird"
cult or sexual orientation can claim positive status as a "culture," including
"'Skin-Heads,' racists, sado-masochists, or flat-earthers." Clearly, "culture,"
when defined in terms of diversity but not also the historical element
of unity, means anything and everything—and
therefore nothing.
Thanks in part to the growing influence of the "multiculturalists" and
their ideological allies, what now passes for "the humanities" in America—and
feeds off the largess of the nation's corporate, foundation, and governmental
donors—is antithetical to the humanities'
civilizing purpose and, in the truest sense, is inhumane. To assess the
impact of the usurpation of the humanities by its opposite, it is only
necessary to see the carnage in our streets, the increasingly brutal wars
of contending groups for an ever-shrinking (in relative terms) pot of governmental
hand-outs, and the eruption of contempt, and even hatred, for authority
in direct proportion to the spread of bureaucratic laws and regulations
that are destroying the last vestiges of America's once-vaunted freedom.
Unless the antihumanities are curtailed and the humanities are restored
very soon—to their rightful place in America's
schools and universities, cultural institutions, and, most importantly,
the hearts, minds, and lives of the educated public—American
civilization, or what remains of it, is doomed to a short and nasty existence.
Some will say I've overstated the significance of the humanities: that
a restoration of the churches will reverse the tide; and that is true in
part. But what many do not realize is that the corruption of the humanities
has infected organized religion itself, spawning confusion and much decadence
among both clergy and laity. Witness the spread of "religious" doctrines,
such as "Liberation Theology" and fundamentalist Islam, whose ends are
particularistic and expansive, not, as in genuine religion, universalistic
and self-questioning. In the corrupt intellectual climate of our time,
many, perhaps most, professing believers cannot distinguish what Babbitt
called "sham spirituality" from the genuine article—an
incapacity that is deadly. No, the churches cannot go it alone. Especially
in this ecumenical age, they need the support of humane studies and genteel
habits to nourish the cultural environment in which they can effectively
perform their special mission.
The humanities—with their evocation of
unity
in diversity—must be restored. The alternative
is too dismal to contemplate.
‡From the National Humanities Bulletin, Vol.
V, No. 1, 1994 [Back]
*Joseph Baldacchino is President of the National Humanities
Institute. [Back]
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INSTITUTE
Updated 29 July 2010