Multi-culturalism: what is it good for?

Michael Barone discusses the British responses to the 2005 summer bombings in London. He argues that in the UK, multiculturalism is under attack, which is making a lot of left-wingers (for whom multiculturalism is a central issue of their ideology) uneasy. The usual idea behind multiculturalism is, as Barone writes, "that we should allow and encourage immigrants and their children to maintain and celebrate their own culture apart from the national culture." However, this idea has recently come under attack, as Britons (and the Dutch, and many others) realize that this isn't working for many Islamic immigrants, for whom maintaining and celebrating their own culture includes attacking the culture that allowed them in, gave them housing and refuge (and often an income).
In the United States, we have a bit more room (and a much less socialistic government,) so this problem doesn't seem to be seething on the surface. This direct attack on American culture while on American soil is here (as shown in various articles I have read), but seems to be harder to find. But we still, in many parts of US society, seem to value multiculturalism (abbreviated here as MC). In nearly every college job requirement list that I have seen, applicants are required to explain how they support the "doctrine" of MC, and what they do/have done to apply it in the classroom. And at the same time, it is also apparent that much of the members of the academy in the USA turn right around and declare that the culture of the USA is the cause of so many problems, and terrorism, and so on. Often this seems to be an attempt to excuse the brashness, the difference of American culture that is not part of the other. This excuse seems to be an attempt to say, "We know we are bad, but we hope that by admitting it, you will see that we are trying to change it to become more acceptable to you, and so you will be more tolerant of us and not quite so angry at us." This is exactly what Barone points out here:

The Age 's Tony Parkinson quoted the French writer Jean Francois Revel's Cold War comment: "A civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself." Tolerating intolerance, goodhearted people are beginning to see, does not necessarily produce tolerance in turn.

Barone then points out the relativistic underpinnings of moral relativism. This has even crept into many Christians' ideas about culture (they sing out "Don't judge--Jesus said not to!") But as Barone points out,

Multiculturalism is based on the lie that all cultures are morally equal. In practice, that soon degenerates to: All cultures all morally equal, except ours, which is worse. But all cultures are not equal in respecting representative government, guaranteed liberties, and the rule of law. And those things arose not simultaneously and in all cultures but in certain specific times and places--mostly in Britain and America but also in other parts of Europe.

In the American academy, MC is seen as an important aspect of education--much is made of trying to be MC, and teach MC, and to not call anything bad, as if by studying things hard enough, we can see all the good (or conversely, we can see that even we are more evil than we think we are.) This leads, as Barone points out, to fragmentation of information that privileges only that which supports a certain ideology rather than a broad picture:

In America, as in Britain, multiculturalism has become the fashion in large swaths of our society. So the Founding Fathers are presented only as slaveholders, World War II is limited to the internment of Japanese-Americans and the bombing of Hiroshima. Slavery is identified with America though it has existed in many societies, and the antislavery movement arose first among English-speaking evangelical Christians.

Amazing...but very much true. We can penny-wise, and know the minutiae about one aspect of things like slavery, but then completely ignore the rest, and the complete context, and become pound-foolish. The academy, however, seems to spend more time worrying about pennies than pounds (or dollars.) Barone points this out:

But most Americans know there is something special about our cultural heritage. While Harvard and Brown are replacing scholars of the founding period with those studying other things, book buyers are snapping up first-rate histories of the founders by David McCullough, Joseph Ellis, and Ron Chernow. Multiculturalist intellectuals do not think our kind of society is worth defending. But millions here and increasing numbers in Britain and other countries know better.

Therein lies the rub--the definition of just what our society is. Are we citizens of the world? Are citizens of Jesus-land, led by ignorant faux-patriots and neocons? Is American really special, or are we too clever to believe the lie, and we live to be the nail that sticks out, the gadfly of society, the one that is smarter than the rest of the sheep? Is American society worth defending as a whole, or in parts? Which parts do we get to emphasize, and which do we deemphasize? Which are the ones that matter?

Read the full editorial here.

Why do they want the USA to lose in Iraq?

No, I'm not talking about Al Qaeda, disaffected Sunnis, or other Islamist terrorist groups who seek for legitimacy, glory or publicity by fighting the USA in Iraq.
It's the left-wingers in the USA who seem to find a perverse joy in each American death, revelling in the suffering of families and enjoying a vindication of their anti-war = anti-Bush position. But Christopher Hitchens points out the absurdity of this position:

How can so many people watch this as if they were spectators, handicapping and rating the successes and failures from some imagined position of neutrality? Do they suppose that a defeat in Iraq would be a defeat only for the Bush administration? The United States is awash in human rights groups, feminist organizations, ecological foundations, and committees for the rights of minorities. How come there is not a huge voluntary effort to help and to publicize the efforts to find the hundreds of thousands of "missing" Iraqis, to support Iraqi women's battle against fundamentalists, to assist in the recuperation of the marsh Arab wetlands, and to underwrite the struggle of the Kurds, the largest stateless people in the Middle East? Is Abu Ghraib really the only subject that interests our humanitarians?

Hitchens is right on the money. He also points out the bankruptcy of deciding your war stance on pre-conceived ideology (easy to do from a comfy USA home) instead of what you actually want to happen in Iraq, given the current things that have *actually happened* and that you *cannot* go back and change (i.e. there is a war in Iraq, and it will go one way or the other):

There is a sort of unspoken feeling, underlying the entire debate on the war, that if you favored it or favor it, you stress the good news, and if you opposed or oppose it you stress the bad. I do not find myself on either side of this false dichotomy. I think that those who supported regime change should confront the idea of defeat, and what it would mean for Iraq and America and the world, every day. It is a combat defined very much by the nature of the enemy, which one might think was so obviously and palpably evil that the very thought of its victory would make any decent person shudder. It is, moreover, a critical front in a much wider struggle against a vicious and totalitarian ideology.

I have briefly wondered, myself, why anti-war demonstrations and sentiments are focused solely on Americans, and not on the people who are aggressively pursuing death and destruction in Iraq. Of course, the answer is likely one of the following:
a) the war is the USA's fault caused by their aggression, so they (never *we*) are to blame;
b) protesting where people ignore you is futile;
c) Iraq is too far away and too expensive to get to, to mount massive marches;
d) if this were tried in Iraq, you will be in mortal danger from those who want war (usually considered Americans, and, strangely, not those who are killing Americans.)
Imagine, if you will, if all human rights groups and world media attention suddenly began to roundly condemn and protest insurgency, and world organizations and funding was diverted to Iraqi causes. What would happen to support for the insurgency then?
But, of course, in many people's minds, that is the equivalent of support for Bush.

Voting Fraud in the USA--who did it?

You hear many stories talking about this, from the 2004 election or the 2000 election--but which are real? Are the stories just the pot calling the kettle black, or are they based in reality?
Read this article written by the bi-partisan American Center for Voting Rights (who are they?), and you may be surprised.
(Home Page) (HTML Article) (PDF Article)
The report concludes, after careful background checking and citing articles, investigations, and even court cases, the following:

While Democrats routinely accuse Republicans of voter intimidation and suppression, neither party has a clean record on the issue. Instead, the evidence shows that Democrats waged aggressive intimidation and suppression campaigns against Republican voters and volunteers in 2004. Republicans have not been exempt from similar criticism in this area, as alleged voter intimidation and suppression activity by GOP operatives led the Republican National Committee to sign a consent decree repudiating such tactics in 1982. However, a careful review of the facts shows that in 2004, paid Democrat operatives were far more involved in voter intimidation and suppression efforts than their Republican counterparts.

Hmm...Mr Pot, meet Mr. Kettle.

Apologizing for Terrorism, or not?

Norman Geras has a very dense and careful post on his blog discussing what is apologizing for terrorism, and what is not. Many writers, after the London bombings in July of 2005, have been writing about terrorism and trying to blame the West while purportedly not supporting the actions of the bombers. Often, these writers drag out the "anger" of the bombers, and often try to say that if we just put our rifles away and attempted to understand these folks, and their anger, we could reach a solution that didn't involve death on either side.

However, there is crack in the argument.

As Geras points out:

The anger either doesn't justify the act or it does. We have ruled out the case that it does; people who think so aren't apologists for terrorism, they're open supporters of it and not the object of the present discussion. But there are those who say that terrorist bombing isn't justified but the whole emphasis of whose comment is either to minimize the responsibility of the perpetrators and their 'managers' and supporters, or to deflect the consideration of this responsibility on to other targets. Here are a couple of questions for such people.

First - a question already posed in my original piece on this - if understanding and not justifying or condoning is what it is really all about, why is this 'understanding' discourse never deployed by the same people when racist thugs, angry about immigration, carry out hate crimes? It might be said, well, because their anger is unjustified, whereas Muslim anger over Afghanistan and Iraq is justified. But it's understanding, remember, and not justification, that this has just been said to be about, so the fact that the anger of the racists is unjustified is neither here nor there. It could still be a contributory cause and in need of being understood as such. You don't, however, read hand-wringing pieces in the Guardian or the Independent about that. It suggests that the apostles of (apologetic) understanding are caught between two places. They don't want to say that terrorism is justified because... they don't want to say it. But they do want to dwell on the anger which feeds it, not merely as cause, because they don't do this in pleading on behalf of white racists, or on behalf of those who, angered by acts of terrorism, attack Muslims. It looks like something else, both psychologically and in terms of subtextual meanings, must be going on - as if they felt that some of the justification for the anger might just seep over towards the act, even though they profess to believe that the act isn't justified.

Second, most of those who opposed the Afghan and/or Iraq wars, though some amongst them did let us know how very angry they were, have not resorted to the bomb and the wrecking of other lives. The vast majority of them, in truth, haven't even engaged in civil disobedience over it. They have remained within the framework of standard democratic procedure: of protest, argument, use of their votes, and so on. Since these people do not invoke anger on their own behalf towards explaining why they might (one day) violate the usual democratic norms as well as other human beings, why are they so ready to indulge others with this type of understanding? If anger is not a sufficient cause in the way they themselves react, how do they judge it such a mammoth cause of what the bombers do?

After due reflection, therefore, I think I want to say - there are apologists among us. Even though to understand is not necessarily to condone, there are those who, during the last month - to say nothing of before that, in relation to other atrocities - have been condoning acts they shouldn't have, under the plea of 'understanding'.

Read the complete article (parts 1 and 2)--it's not easy reading, but Geras is very careful here.

Historical Revisionism revised--World War II and the Atomic Bombs

Richard B. Frank, in his article titled "Why Truman Dropped the Bomb," points out that history research is often a process. The revisionist, military-antagonistic history of WWII that began in the 1960s frequently criticized the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan as unnecessary. Frank points out that all historical research is, in fact and substance, revisionist, and points out that it is more correct to term those who argue against the necessity of the bombs as critics rather than revisionists. Frank summarizes the common criticisms as follows:

The critics share three fundamental premises. The first is that Japan's situation in 1945 was catastrophically hopeless. The second is that Japan's leaders recognized that fact and were seeking to surrender in the summer of 1945. The third is that thanks to decoded Japanese diplomatic messages, American leaders knew that Japan was about to surrender when they unleashed needless nuclear devastation.

Frank draws conclusions from de-classified WWII "Magic" radio traffic to point out that most of these anti-bomb arguments are based on incomplete information (often earlier "Magic" record releases that were incomplete). The information that Truman actually had to work with suggests that the atomic bombs did, in fact, save millions of lives at the cost of the over one hundred thousand who died in (and after) those two explosions.
Frank points out that the US command did make some errors, but not the errors that critics accuse them of making.
Austin Bay's Blog has some more commentary on Frank's article. Among the comments is this little bit of information, that I had never known:
Comment #7:

When the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japanese physicists performed analysis.
They determined that there were reaction products of Uranium 235. They knew from their own weapons program that separation of U235 was difficult. They reported that the destruction of Hiroshima was a bad miracle, a catastrophe, but because of the difficulty in separating U235 from U238, it could not practically be accomplished again. Because of that report, the Japanese cabinet decided to fight on. Their strategy was to continue resistance to get the US to negotiate. With the 30 to 1 exchange rate of Okinawa, the Japanese Cabinet estimated that 30 million Japanese would have to die fighting, to inflict 1 million casualties on the US. They were willing to pay that price.
The US read their response because the US was reading Japanese diplomatic codes. The Soviet Union’s invasion of Manchuria began. The addition of Soviet manpower to the equation made their strategy invalid. As that was being digested, the Nagasaki attack occured. It was also analyzed. The Japanese found the reaction products from Plutonium 239. Since Plutonium can be chemically separated, there was now no limit to the bombs that could be produced. The Japanese cabinet reported this to Emperor Hirohito. The Emperor directed that the Japanese government surrender.
He sent members of the Imperial family to remaining centers of resistance.
It should be noted that the Nagasaki bomb was planned for the center of the residential sector, but was actually dropped on the industrial center. Based on German experience at Schweinfurt, the Japanese had move as much of their industry into residential areas. The Nagasaki bomb “only” killed some 25,000 people, compared to the 78,000 some odd at Hiroshima.
Because of the bombs, the Soviet Union did not have an occupation sector in Japan. We know what happened when they had occupation sectors in Germany, China, and Korea. At least Japan was saved that.
Comment by Don Meaker — 7/31/2005 @ 8:52 pm

The process of history continues--information is more trustworthy than ideology.

UPDATED:
Read Plunge Pontificates' whole series of articles on the bomb for a concise overview of the complexity involved.

How IT makes us think about things differently

Matthew B. Crawford writes about the unexpected influence of IT (Information Technology) on the academy. He points out that on one hand, IT liberalizes the academy, giving voices to the voiceless. But he points out how easily that is abused, by giving equal weight to all voices (and thus the rise and abuse of web "services" like RMP (Rate My Professor), which merely counts checkboxes rather than building a case for whether Professor X is really bad, or boring, or whether the student who is clicking the boxes is just a bad student, or bored.

I especially like what Crawford says about the effects of all this information and how it has moved the academy towards commerciality. In other words, butts in seats, and what classes "sell." He points out the dilemma towards what classes are offered, and the subsequent "evening out" of the PC curriculum, in this way:

Ideally, a teacher’s judgment about what is good for you is not colored by what is immediately pleasant for you. But increasingly, what is good for the teacher (professionally) is determined by what is immediately pleasant for the student.

Thus, professors are encouraged to do what the students like, rather than do what may be, in the professor's judgment, best for the student. Not a good place to go, if you ask me.
Read the entire article.

Who's not wild about Harry (Potter)? Terry Pratchett...

In this article, Terry Pratchett points out something that I observed also.

Pratchett, one of the UK's most successful novelists with 40 million books sold, said the media [by focusing on the Potter books and their runaway success] ignores the achievements of other fantasy authors.

At first, one might think this is mere professional jealousy, until one realizes that Pratchett himself is a very successful writer. He isn't actually criticizing Rowling for much, except for wondering why, as she said in a recent interview, she didn't think Harry Potter was actually a fantasy novel.

His full response to Rowling's admission that she did not think Harry Potter was fantasy as she was writing it, was:
"I would have thought that the wizards, witches, trolls, unicorns, hidden worlds, jumping chocolate frogs, owl mail, magic food, ghosts, broomsticks and spells would have given her a clue?"

As the article mentions, in a recent interview with Time magazine, Rowling said she was "not a huge fan of fantasy" and was trying to "subvert" the genre. Time magazine also said Rowling reinvented fantasy fiction, which was previously stuck in "an idealised, romanticised, pseudofeudal world, where knights and ladies morris-dance to Greensleeves".
Clearly, the writer at Time hasn't been following fantasy fiction very closely.

But this is just the kind of attitude towards fantasy fiction that Pratchett is actually criticizing. As the article says, Pratchett has complained that the status of Harry Potter author JK Rowling is being elevated "at the expense of other writers".

And he's right--there is so much out there that isn't Potter, even in the Young Adult fiction areas. Yet so much marketing muscle and bookstore space is devoted to Potter, that Diana Wynne Jones, and Susan Cooper (two writers who I think are better than Rowling yet are overshadowed by the sheer marketing success of Pottemania), and many others are completely overlooked.
It's the same problem that faced Madonna's attempts at writing children's books--if it weren't her name on the books, they would have to compete with books by better writers, and who would be overshadowed by the sheer volume of fame and media blitz that accompanies a big name. Not to mention the fact that beginning children's book and fantasy authors are often ignored in favor of the cash (media?) cow of the moment.