Dictatorship of virtue : how the battle over multiculturalism is reshaping our schools, our country, and our lives

The next-to-last batch of quotes from the book (which I am returning, freeing up one slot to borrow more pressing shit):

"Thirty years ago, something shifted in the national mind. The Vietnam War and the attitudes engendered during that period, the vast disillusionment with the American nature that characterized the elite members of an entire generation, led us to a fault line. For the first time in our history, many of us, especially those headed for the professions, for graduate school, for journalism, the professoriat, the ministry, came to see the United States, its role in the world and its record in history, as more tainted by iniquity than infused with good."


"Before the Vietnam War and the transformations of the 1960s, the space creature was typified by the beings portrayed in Body Snatchers. In the 1950S and early 1960s the movies showed us here on earth fighting off a wide variety of intergalactic Others, most of whom came in nonhuman form. [Examples of The Blob, The Children of the Damned, I Married a Monster from Outer Space, This Island Earth and War of the Worlds]...

Playing roles in both of these last two movies is a dramatic character who is open-minded and charitably inclined toward the space creatures, who wants to assume a certain good-heartedness on their part, even believing that they may embody some wisdom in short supply among the earthlings. These characters were ahead of their time in the 19505 in their openheartedness toward Otherness, so it is worth noting that they are treated as irritating fools in these movies. In War of the Worlds, the type is represented by a man of the cloth who approaches the spaceship of the invaders, his hand outstretched in a gesture of conciliation, forgetting that the goal of the Martias, which is to seize the earth for themselves, makes them unconciliable. The pastor says, “They are living creatures out there; if they are more advanced than us, they should be closer to the Creator.” The good man recites “The Lord Is My Shepherd” as he walks toward the beastly high-tech thing from another planet and is then vaporized by the creatures’ matter-destroying weaponry. In The Thing, the pro-Otherness character is a scientist who believes we have something to learn from what is, evidently, an intellectually higher form of life. He tries to dissuade the other scientists from their view that the only recourse is to set a trap for the monster and kill it. He makes his approach to the thing, which, uninterested in dialogue or mutual understanding, smashes him to the floor...

It is when E. T. The Extra-Terrestrial comes along in 1982 to be the biggest-grossing movie in the history of Hollywood that the space invader as a symbol of good reaches its highest point. E. T. is a clarion call to the antiracist ethos, a cinematic lesson in tolerance and it pluralism. He is gnomelike, dwarfish, dark-skinned, semireptilian, ungainly, innocuous, sentimental, bug-eyed, scaly. He combines the qualities of Mahatma Gandhi and a lizard. More to the point, he is a twenty-first-century Christ.

Like Jesus, E.T. is mightily unappreciated by the holders of power on earth, who, imbued with the suspicious mentality of the pre—baby boom generation, think that he is of the older genre of the body snatchers, perhaps a carrier of some deadly virus. So the scientists and technicians march around in airtight space suits, making them look far more monstrous than E.T. himself. E.T. spends his last night on earth in a forested glade—a clear reference to the Garden of Gethsemane-striving to communicate with his folks back home. The next day, the scientists and technicians—who play the role that the Pharisees and the Roman centurions play in the biblical version of this story—capture him and stick him behind a prophylactic shield where he dies, temporarily. Only the children, the disciples, the innocents who have no knowledge of intergalactic bacteria and are unprejudiced toward reptilian beings from other solar systems, understand E.T. for what he is: a foil for our own moral blindness, our deep prejudice and racism, our failure to see the evil that lurks in us, or to perceive the good within the different. E.T. is resurrected by the love of the children. A spaceship arrives and he ascends to heaven...

Even if the period genres are not entirely consistent, it is not hard to see the general drift in the movies’ representations of ourselves and of the Other, a change that stemmed from the great intetllectual revolution effected by the war in Vietnam. The space invader, the symbol of something that is not us, changes from the devil incarnate to a new Jesus. The earthlings, the beleaguered innocents of the 1950s, are the imperial Romans of the next era...

If the space invader has become hero and the earthling the villain, similar inversions have taken place in at least one other cinematic prototype—the cowboy-and-Indian adventure, the classic in this case being Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves of 1990. Never mind thatCostner uses a historical event that never happened (the defection of a Civil War cavalry officer to the Indians) and transforms the warlike, scalp-taking, torturing, predatory, patriarchal, male-chauvinistic Sioux Indians into a group that might have founded the Ethical Culture Society. Dances With Wolves replaces one myth, that of the brave settler and the savage Indian, with another—the morally advanced friend-of-the-earth Indian... and the malodorous, foulmouthed, bellicose white man.

The desire to put the Indian on the pedestal of superior moral awareness defeats even simple truth. In 1991 two American Indians [Chief Seattle and Forrest Carter] were the subjects of best-selling books. They became icons of the New Consciousness, and they continued to be so even after it was discovered that in both cases that their most admirable qualities had been invented for them by white men."


"Who could have thought, [Margo Culley] said, that at the Modern Language Association, which is the largest scholarly group in the world, with more than thirty thousand members, "the subjects of gender and race have overwhelmed the field?” Who could have imagined that "race and gender issues would be the hottest game in town, or that at times it would seem the only game?”

It might seem odd that someone interested in diversity would so happily proclaim that one perspective has become "the only game" in town, but Professor Culley in fact assumes that within that single game there is fabulous variety, many “perspectives”. “Diverse feminisms have extended the boundary of our knowledge,” she told her audience in New Jersey. “In the taxonomy of feminisms we find, among others, liberal, cultural, radical, socialist, Third-world, post-colonial, and post-structuralist feminists,” she said. Among the others in this diverse phylum are, presumably, Marxist, lesbian, deconstructionist, posthistoricist, and other feminisms. Certainly, there was no point in mentioning Christian or Jewish or Muslim feminists, and Republican or conservative feminists would be oxymoronish.

Professor Culley had other things to say, many of them marinated in the half dozen or so concepts that have become conventional wisdom since the explosion she described began. She spoke of "the importance of subject positions," the "privileging of theory," of the “site of the collision of post-structuralism and feminist politics.” She mentioned “gender as a social construct” and “the politics of representation,” the "emergent voices of women from the Third World," and how, after she read American Indian autobiographies, white women's autobiography became for her “very specific historically and culturally constructed representations of the white female self.”

For those not familiar with this jargon, it might seem to embody something new, when, in fact, it is the standard boilerplate, the prefabricated lingo of academic life. Indeed, it is one of the major conceits of the New Consciousness that a brilliantly "transgressive" (another commonly used word) way of scrutinizing the world is being developed by what is called the new scholarship. And, indeed, there is a great deal that is eye-opening and compelling in literary criticism, history, sociology, and other fields where many scholars are taking a radically skeptical approach to conventional attitudes. Contrary to some critics of the newer academic trends, I find much that is both enjoyable and edifying in deconstruction, in the new historicism, in black studies, and in feminism, where a previously unmapped terrain is being explored by lively minds. The problem is that so much of what is claimed under the banner of the new is actually a stale, simpleminded, Manichaean, and imitative reformulation of that discredited nineteenth-century concept called Marxism, its creases of great age tasked by the lipstick and rouge of a new terminology. It would be hard to hear a speech at the annual conference of the New Jersey Project, or at many an academic convention, that did not have a heavy sprinkling of the phrases and terms of this new language.

There is “dominant discourse,” "marginal subjects," the "victimized subaltern"; there are “overdetermined structures of meaning” and "hegemonic arrangements of power." Open up almost any contemporary academic journal, and you will find phrases like "colonized bodies," the “vantage points of the subjugated,” the “great underground terrain of subjugated knowledge,” the “marginalized other,” which are in contradistinction to the “totalizing metanarratives” and the "socially produced meaning" of the dominant white-male culture, represented in the “hegemonic curriculum.” Inspired by the ideas of French philosopher Michel Foucault, the jargon represents the reformulation of basic nineteenth-century Marxist ideas that have been borrowed by generations of intellectuals bent on showing that the world as it exists is the creation (the “social construction”) of the groups that hold power, their ideology (the “dominant discourse”) used to maintain sway over everybody else (the "victimized subaltern"). Substitute the new jargon for such older terms as "substructure" and “superstructure,” and you have just about the entire
addition of ideological multiculturalism to already existing Marxist social theory.

Here, for example, is Rothenberg answering a question about what she calls “the opponents of a multicultural, gender-balanced curriculum,” namely: “How does the traditional curriculum serve their interests and perpetuate their power?” Rothenberg’s answer is right out of the sophomore’s guide to nineteenth-century dialectical materialism. “The traditional curriculum teaches all of us to see the world through the eyes of privileged, white, European males and to adopt their interests and perspectives as our own,” she writes. Rothenberg is advancing her insight as if it were something new, when, in fact, all she is doing is replacing the word “bourgeois” or "capitalist" with the words “white, European males.” This tradition, she conntinues, “calls books by middle-class, white male writers 'literature' and honors them as timeless and universal, while treating the literature produced by everyone else as idiosyncratic and transitory... It teaches the art produced by privileged white men in the West and calls it ‘art history.’" Rothenberg continues to say that the traditional curriculum "values the work of killing and conquest over the production and re-production of life.""


"Culley did not explain how, if the climate is so repressive, the number of women’s studies programs went from nothing in the late 1960s to being “the hottest game in town” - at times, indeed, “the only game” - twenty years later."


"Nobody wants to be complacent about injustice, especially when that injustice involves racial and other discriminations. But the postsixties, E.T.-ish sensibility did more than create a generation willing to see the fault within itself. It robbed us of our defenses at the same time. It made us prone to dérapage. It is responsible in this sense for more than just a bit of noxious but probably not-very-harmful academic silliness ala Culley, Rothenberg, and the New Jersey Project. Bereft of any strong sense of ourselves as embodiments of a great culture and system of values, riven with guilt about the worth of our own tradition, we have become defenseless against the extremist claims of multicultural ideology in general. We have become ridden with guilt. We have lost the will to have a common identity, since we no longer have faith that the common identity is morally worthy. We are unwilling to defend complicated truths, whether about Christopher Columbus or the extent to which racism and sexism explain the total experience and status of minority group members and women. We foster an exaggerated sense of aggrievement rather than insist on a degree of responsibility. We are uncomfortable with the notion of standards, because we are prone to the argument that standards and “metanarratives” are one and the same thing - merely ways of seeing the world “through the eyes of privileged, white, European males.” And it is all because we are afraid, as Margo Culley might put it, to be found complicitous in the hegemonic arrangements of power. We are subject to the tyranny of political correctness, the dictatorship of virtue, because we have granted the forces of the New Consciousness the right to determine what virtue is."


"Of course, Reagan won two elections by landslides, and George Bush won one of them. The conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh sells far more books and has more listeners than Margo Culley or any other professors at any university. So how could it be that the New Consciousness has come to power? Limbaugh is a clue to this. His success is the product of a grassroots feeling among many Americans that their values and their self-conception are being assaulted by the liberal elites, and, moreover, that to express their discontent with this would be to expose them as benighted and racist. And they are correct in this. The victory of ideological multiculturalism is not in the numbers or in the polls, because there it would always lose. It is in the penetration of the sensibility into the elite institutions, in the universities, the press, the liberal churches, the foundations, the schools, and show business, on PBS and “Murphy Brown,” at Harvard and Dallas Baptist University, on editorial boards and op-ed pages, at the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the National Education Association, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the National Council of Churches, and the Pew Charitable Trusts. In all of them, the sensibility that has fomented the challenge to the American places of memory provides overall guidance. What were once small enclaves of dissent replicated themselves and became so numerous that they became the establishment."
He should've set out his thesis earlier! This comes on 230/357!

--- Dictatorship of virtue : how the battle over multiculturalism is reshaping our schools, our country, and our lives / Richard Bernstein (1995)