Multiculturism, America, and the Middle East:

Intellectuals are essentially philosophers, at least to the extent that they seek to uncover the truth that underlies the world about them.  Hence their interest in primal causes–– the underlying reasons for the problems that confront the human condition.  One current question of compelling intellectual interest is why so many citizens of the democracies who are overwhelmingly dedicated to the cause of political liberalism express great sympathy for those who commit violent acts of  terrorism.  In their private lives these liberals are wont to deal kindly with their fellow citizens.  Yet many of these selfsame individuals are quick to condone the outrageous murder of innocent men, women and children by terrorist actions, proclaiming that the victims of terrorism are themselves to blame for having directly or indirectly caused the violence inflicted upon them.  Moreover, they claim such actions provide a needed corrective, or, at least, direct the world’s attention to the dire causes which have induced “militants” or “freedom fighters” (the designations by the extremists among the liberals for those who commit “justified” terrorism) to undertake otherwise reprehensible activity.

Invariably, those of ultra-liberal conscience also couple their justification of terror with the broader charge that the governments of the West in the past have exploited the peoples of the Third World, reducing them to the miserable, degraded condition in which they now find themselves, thus  prompting them to take equally desperate counter-measures.  In the ultra-liberal mind-set, acts of terror become acts of resistance against imperialist nations— the root cause (again in the ultra-liberal way of thinking) for the human suffering found in the Third World.  So, they opine that nationalism (the policy of fostering the interests of one’s own nation over those of others), should be eradicated because it conduces to imperialism, the purpose of which is the exploitation of subject peoples.  Instead, those of extreme liberal conviction hold that so trammeling a nationalism should be replaced by a more free (thus more ethical) mode of political organization— a supra-nationalism that would better promote the welfare of a humanity otherwise ground beneath the heel of present-day nationalist states.  In effect, they propose that universal concerns— that is, the broader interests of humanity— should replace the narrow interests of one or another specific nationality.

This rejection of nationalism has become a major component of the philosophy of post-modernism, a world-view that has dominated ultra-liberal thought for the past several decades.  In the post-modernist view there is to be a clear separation between the idea of “nation” and that of “state.” For, say the post-modernists, nationality implies that there are particular characteristics or purposes which set one nation off from another.  It is these peculiar traits or missions that those advocating the cause of nationalism advance as warranting the superiority of one culture over another and even the subjugation of the inferior culture by the superior.  In the post-modernist Weltanschauung, eighteenth century colonialism, nineteenth century imperialism and twentieth century totalitarianism were all directly attributable to the concept of nationality, which, inevitably, because of its tendency to see one nation as superior to another, fostered divisiveness and inequality among the world’s populations.  Rather, say the post-modernists, the state should be “neutral,” or have a universalist or supra-nationalist dimension and outlook.

Post-modernism (and its contempt for nationalism) is driven by the tenet that power is the final determinant of truth, and thus is not propelled by any inherent notion of rightness.  This “conceit” began in the humanities but eventually spread to the hard sciences.  Hear Stanley Aronowitz, the spokesman for post-modern sensibility: “The point is that neither logic or mathematics escapes the contamination of the social.”  Ergo, intellectuality be damned, up the social revolution!  And indeed, here the post-modernists quote no one less than science historian Thomas Kuhn.   He argues that scientific knowledge proceeds as a result of “paradigm shifts”— that is, as a result of revolutions in the way we view the world.  That “shift,”however, is not dependent upon the evidence being overwhelmingly supportive of the new paradigm.  Rather, claims Kuhn, it occurs only when  the people who believe in the old paradigm are “defeated.”  And this may occur only long after they are proven wrong.  Today’s scientists support Kuhn that “evidence and logic are necessary if not quite sufficient conditions for a paradigm shift, and that in the long run successive shifts bring society closer to objective truth.”  Where the post-modernists go awry is in their emphasis on Kuhn’s relativism.

The post-modernist viewpoint has also helped to promulgate a radically altered mode of writing history that defies the idea of objectively describing past events even as it denigrates nationalism as an expansionist, colonizing ideology.  This subjective revisionist historiography was warmly embraced by a new generation of students, born in the waning decades of the twentieth century, who studied in the universities of the democratic West.  Despite their own personal comfort as a consequence of the general prosperity of the time, many of these students found their parents’ political traditions discomfiting and irrelevant.  They regarded the very democracies which had nurtured their own well-being to be tainted by a system of nationalist governance that in their view stultified and confined the minds of its citizens and subordinated and debased other societies and cultures.   Following their teachers in the grove of academe and their leaders in the left-leaning circles of government,