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                                                                                ESSAY, Page 44

The Fraying Of America


When a nation's diversity breaks into factions, demagogues rush
in, false issues cloud debate, and everybody has a grievance

By Robert Hughes


    Just over 50 years ago, the poet W.H. Auden achieved what
all writers envy: making a prophecy that would come true. It is
embedded in a long work called For the Time Being, where Herod
muses about the distasteful task of massacring the Innocents. He
doesn't want to, because he is at heart a liberal. But still, he
predicts, if that Child is allowed to get away, "Reason will be
replaced by Revelation. Instead of Rational Law, objective
truths perceptible to any who will undergo the necessary
intellectual discipline, Knowledge will degenerate into a riot
of subjective visions . . . Whole cosmogonies will be created
out of some forgotten personal resentment, complete epics
written in private languages, the daubs of schoolchildren ranked
above the greatest masterpieces. Idealism will be replaced by
Materialism. Life after death will be an eternal dinner party
where all the guests are 20 years old . . . Justice will be
replaced by Pity as the cardinal human virtue, and all fear of
retribution will vanish . . . The New Aristocracy will consist
exclusively of hermits, bums and permanent invalids. The Rough
Diamond, the Consumptive Whore, the bandit who is good to his
mother, the epileptic girl who has a way with animals will be
the heroes and heroines of the New Age, when the general, the
statesman, and the philosopher have become the butt of every
farce and satire."

    What Herod saw was America in the late 1980s and early
'90s, right down to that dire phrase "New Age." A society
obsessed with therapies and filled with distrust of formal
politics, skeptical of authority and prey to superstition, its
political language corroded by fake pity and euphemism. A nation
like late Rome in its long imperial reach, in the corruption
and verbosity of its senators, in its reliance on sacred geese
(those feathered ancestors of our own pollsters and spin
doctors) and in its submission to senile, deified Emperors
controlled by astrologers and extravagant wives. A culture that
has replaced gladiatorial games, as a means of pacifying the
mob, with high-tech wars on television that cause immense
slaughter and yet leave the Mesopotamian satraps in full power
over their wretched subjects.

    Mainly it is women who object, for due to the prevalence
of their mystery-religions, the men are off in the woods,
affirming their manhood by sniffing one another's armpits and
listening to third-rate poets rant about the moist, hairy satyr
that lives inside each one of them. Meanwhile, artists vacillate
between a largely self-indulgent expressiveness and a mainly
impotent politicization, and the contest between education and
TV -- between argument and persuasion by spectacle -- has been
won by TV, a medium now more debased in America than ever
before, and more abjectly self-censoring than anywhere in
Europe.

    The fundamental temper of America tends toward an
existential ideal that can probably never be reached but can
never be discarded: equal rights to variety, to construct your
life as you see fit, to choose your traveling companions. It has
always been a heterogeneous country, and its cohesion, whatever
cohesion it has, can only be based on mutual respect. There
never was a core America in which everyone looked the same,
spoke the same language, worshipped the same gods and believed
the same things.

    America is a construction of mind, not of race or
inherited class or ancestral territory. It is a creed born of
immigration, of the jostling of scores of tribes that become
American to the extent to which they can negotiate
accommodations with one another. These negotiations succeed
unevenly and often fail: you need only to glance at the history
of racial relations to know that. The melting pot never melted.
But American mutuality lives in recognition of difference. The
fact remains that America is a collective act of the imagination
whose making never ends, and once that sense of collectivity and
mutual respect is broken, the possibilities of American-ness
begin to unravel.

    If they are fraying now, it is at least in part due to the
prevalence of demagogues who wish to claim that there is only
one path to virtuous American-ness: paleoconservatives like
Jesse Helms and Pat Robertson who think this country has one
single ethneoconservatives who rail against a bogey called
multiculturalism -- as though this culture was ever anything but
multi! -- and pushers of political correctness who would like
to see grievance elevated into automatic sanctity.

    BIG DADDY IS TO BLAME

    Americans are obsessed with the recognition, praise and,
when necessary, the manufacture of victims, whose one common
feature is that they have been denied parity with that Blond
Beast of the sentimental imagination, the heterosexual,
middle-class white male. The range of victims available 10 years
ago -- blacks, Chicanos, Indians, women, homosexuals -- has now
expanded to include every permutation of the halt, the blind and
the short, or, to put it correctly, the vertically challenged.

    Forty years ago, one of the epic processes in the
assertion of human rights started unfolding in the U.S.: the
civil rights movement. But today, after more than a decade of
government that did its best to ignore the issues of race when
it was not trying to roll back the gains of the '60s, the usual
American response to inequality is to rename it, in the hope
that it will go away. We want to create a sort of linguistic
Lourdes, where evil and misfortune are dispelled by a dip in the
waters of euphemism. Does the cripple rise from his wheelchair,
or feel better about being stuck in it, because someone back in
the early days of the Reagan Administration decided that, for
official purposes, he was "physically challenged"?

    Because the arts confront the sensitive citizen with the
difference between good artists, mediocre ones and absolute
duffers, and since there are always more of the last two than
the first, the arts too must be politicized; so we cobble up
critical systems to show that although we know what we mean by
the quality of the environment, the idea of quality in aesthetic
experience is little more than a paternalist fiction designed
to make life hard for black, female and gay artists.

    Since our newfound sensitivity decrees that only the
victim shall be the hero, the white American male starts bawling
for victim status too. Hence the rise of cult therapies
teaching that we are all the victims of our parents, that
whatever our folly, venality or outright thuggishness, we are
not to be blamed for it, since we come from "dysfunctional
families." The ether is jammed with confessional shows in which
a parade of citizens and their role models, from LaToya Jackson
to Roseanne Arnold, rise to denounce the sins of their parents.
The cult of the abused Inner Child has a very important use in
modern America: it tells you that nothing is your fault, that
personal grievance transcends political utterance.

    The all-pervasive claim to victimhood tops off America's
long-cherished culture of therapeutics. Thus we create a
juvenile culture of complaint in which Big Daddy is always to
blame and the expansion of rights goes on without the other half
of citizenship: attachment to duties and obligations. We are
seeing a public recoil from formal politics, from the active,
reasoned exercise of citizenship. It comes because we don't
trust anyone. It is part of the cafard the '80s induced: Wall
Street robbery, the savings and loan scandal, the wholesale
plunder of the economy, an orgy released by Reaganomics that
went on for years with hardly a peep from Congress -- events
whose numbers were so huge as to be beyond the comprehension of
most people.

    Single-issue politics were needed when they came, because
they forced Washington to deal with, or at least look at, great
matters of civic concern that it had scanted: first the civil
rights movement, and then the environment, women's reproductive
rights, health legislation, the educational crisis. But now they
too face dilution by a trivialized sense of civic
responsibility. What are your politics? Oh, I'm antismoking. And
yours? Why, I'm starting an action committee to have the suffix
-man removed from every word in every book in the Library of
Congress. And yours, sir? Well, God told me to chain myself to
a fire hydrant until we put a fetus on the Supreme Court.

    In the past 15 years the American right has had a
complete, almost unopposed success in labeling as left-wing
ordinary agendas and desires that, in a saner polity, would be
seen as ideologically neutral, an extension of rights implied
in the Constitution. American feminism has a large repressive
fringe, self-caricaturing and often abysmally trivial, like the
academic thought police who recently managed to get a
reproduction of Goya's Naked Maja removed from a classroom at
Pennsylvania State University; it has its loonies who regard all
sex with men, even with consent, as a politicized form of rape.
But does this in any way devalue the immense shared desire of
millions of American women to claim the right of equality to
men, to be free from sexual harassment in the workplace, to be
accorded the reproductive rights to be individuals first and
mothers second?

    The '80s brought the retreat and virtual disappearance of
the American left as a political, as distinct from a cultural,
force. It went back into the monastery -- that is, to academe
-- and also extruded out into the art world, where it remains
even more marginal and impotent. Meanwhile, a considerable and
very well-subsidized industry arose, hunting the lefty academic
or artist in his or her retreat. Republican attack politics
turned on culture, and suddenly both academe and the arts were
full of potential Willie Hortons. The lowbrow form of this was
the ire of figures like Senator Helms and the Rev. Donald
Wildmon directed against National Endowment subventions for art
shows they thought blasphemous and obscene, or the trumpetings
from folk like David Horowitz about how PBS should be
demolished because it's a pinko-liberal-anti-Israel bureaucracy.

    THE BATTLES ON CAMPUS

    The middle-to-highbrow form of the assault is the ongoing
frenzy about political correctness, whose object is to create
the belief, or illusion, that a new and sinister McCarthyism,
this time of the left, has taken over American universities and
is bringing free thought to a stop. This is flatly absurd. The
comparison to McCarthyism could be made only by people who
either don't know or don't wish to remember what the Senator
from Wisconsin and his pals actually did to academe in the '50s:
the firings of tenured profs in mid-career, the inquisitions by
the House Committee on Un-American Activities on the content of
libraries and courses, the campus loyalty oaths, the whole
sordid atmosphere of persecution, betrayal and paranoia. The
number of conservative academics fired by the lefty thought
police, by contrast, is zero. There has been heckling. There
have been baseless accusations of racism. And certainly there
is no shortage of the zealots, authoritarians and scramblers who
view PC as a shrewd career move or as a vent for their own
frustrations.

    In cultural matters we can hardly claim to have a left and
a right anymore. Instead we have something more akin to two
puritan sects, one masquerading as conservative, the other
posing as revolutionary but using academic complaint as a way
of evading engagement in the real world. Sect A borrows the
techniques of Republican attack politics to show that if Sect
B has its way, the study of Milton and Titian will be replaced
by indoctrination programs in the works of obscure Third World
authors and West Coast Chicano subway muralists, and the pillars
of learning will forthwith collapse. Meanwhile, Sect B is so
stuck in the complaint mode that it can't mount a satisfactory
defense, since it has burned most of its bridges to the culture
at large.

    In the late '80s, while American academics were emptily
theorizing that language and the thinking subject were dead, the
longing for freedom and humanistic culture was demolishing
European tyranny. Of course, if the Chinese students had read
their Foucault, they would have known that repression is
inscribed in all language, their own included, and so they could
have saved themselves the trouble of facing the tanks in
Tiananmen Square. But did Vaclav Havel and his fellow
playwrights free Czechoslovakia by quoting Derrida or Lyotard
on the inscrutability of texts? Assuredly not: they did it by
placing their faith in the transforming power of thought -- by
putting their shoulders to the immense wheel of the word. The
world changes more deeply, widely, thrillingly than at any
moment since 1917, perhaps since 1848, and the American academic
left keeps fretting about how phallocentricity is inscribed in
Dickens' portrayal of Little Nell.

    The obsessive subject of our increasingly sterile
confrontation between the two PCs -- the politically and the
patriotically correct -- is something clumsily called
multiculturalism. America is a place filled with diversity,
unsettled histories, images impinging on one another and
spawning unexpected shapes. Its polyphony of voices, its
constant eddying of claims to identity, is one of the things
that make America America. The gigantic, riven, hybridizing,
multiracial republic each year receives a major share of the
world's emigration, legal or illegal.

    To put the argument for multiculturalism in merely
practical terms of self-interest: though elites are never going
to go away, the composition of those elites is not necessarily
static. The future of American ones, in a globalized economy
without a cold war, will rest with people who can think and act
with informed grace across ethnic, cultural, linguistic lines.
And the first step in becoming such a person lies in
acknowledging that we are not one big world family, or ever
likely to be; that the differences among races, nations,
cultures and their various histories are at least as profound
and as durable as the similarities; that these differences are
not divagations from a European norm but structures eminently
worth knowing about for their own sake. In the world that is
coming, if you can't navigate difference, you've had it.

    Thus if multiculturalism is about learning to see through
borders, one can be all in favor of it. But you do not have to
listen to the arguments very long before realizing that, in
quite a few people's minds, multiculturalism is about something
else. Their version means cultural separatism within the larger
whole of America. They want to Balkanize culture.

    THE AUTHORITY OF THE PAST

    This reflects the sense of disappointment and frustration
with formal politics, which has caused many people to look to
the arts as a field of power, since they have power nowhere
else. Thus the arts become an arena for complaint about rights.
The result is a gravely distorted notion of the political
capacity of the arts, just at the moment when -- because of the
pervasiveness of mass media -- they have reached their nadir of
real political effect.

    One example is the inconclusive debate over "the canon,"
that oppressive Big Bertha whose muzzle is trained over the
battlements of Western Civ at the black, the gay and the female.
The canon, we're told, is a list of books by dead Europeans --
Shakespeare and Dante and Tolstoy and Stendhal and John Donne
and T.S. Eliot . . . you know, them, the pale, patriarchal penis
people. Those who complain about the canon think it creates
readers who will never read anything else. What they don't want
to admit, at least not publicly, is that most American students
don't read much anyway and quite a few, left to their own
devices, would not read at all. Their moronic national
baby-sitter, the TV set, took care of that. Before long,
Americans will think of the time when people sat at home and
read books for their own sake, discursively and sometimes even
aloud to one another, as a lost era -- the way we now see rural
quilting bees in the 1870s.

    The quarrel over the canon reflects the sturdy assumption
that works of art are, or ought to be, therapeutic. Imbibe the
Republic or Phaedo at 19, and you will be one kind of person;
study Jane Eyre or Mrs. Dalloway, and you will be another. For
in the literary zero-sum game of canon-talk, if you read X, it
means that you don't read Y. This is a simple fancy.

    So is the distrust of the dead, as in "dead white male."
Some books are deeper, wider, fuller than others, and more
necessary to an understanding of our culture and ourselves. They
remain so long after their authors are dead. Those who parrot
slogans like "dead white male" might reflect that, in writing,
death is relative: Lord Rochester is as dead as Sappho, but not
so moribund as Bret Easton Ellis or Andrea Dworkin.
Statistically, most authors are dead, but some continue to speak
to us with a vividness and urgency that few of the living can
rival. And the more we read, the more writers we find who do so,
which is why the canon is not a fortress but a permeable
membrane.

    The sense of quality, of style, of measure, is not an
imposition bearing on literature from the domain of class, race
or gender. All writers or artists carry in their mind an
invisible tribunal of the dead, whose appointment is an
imaginative act and not merely a browbeaten response to some
notion of authority. This tribunal sits in judgment on their
work. They intuit their standards from it. From its verdict
there is no appeal. None of the contemporary tricks -- not the
fetishization of the personal, not the attempt to shift the
aesthetic into the political, not the exhausted fictions of
avant-gardism -- will make it go away. If the tribunal weren't
there, every first draft would be a final manuscript. You can't
fool Mother Culture.

    That is why one rejects the renewed attempt to judge
writing in terms of its presumed social virtue. Through it, we
enter a Marxist never-never land, where all the most retrograde
phantoms of Literature as Instrument of Social Utility are
trotted forth. Thus the Columbia History of the American Novel
declares Harriet Beecher Stowe a better novelist than Herman
Melville because she was "socially constructive" and because
Uncle Tom's Cabin helped rouse Americans against slavery,
whereas the captain of the Pequod was a symbol of laissez-faire
capitalism with a bad attitude toward whales.

    With the same argument you can claim that an artist like
William Gropper, who drew those stirring cartoons of fat
capitalists in top hats for the New Masses 60 years ago, may
have something over an artist like Edward Hopper, who didn't
care a plugged nickel for community and was always painting
figures in lonely rooms in such a way that you can't be sure
whether he was criticizing alienation or affirming the virtues
of solitude.

    REWRITING HISTORY

    It's in the area of history that PC has scored its largest
successes. The reading of history is never static. There is no
such thing as the last word. And who could doubt that there is
still much to revise in the story of the European conquest of
North and South America that historians inherited? Its basic
scheme was imperial: the epic advance of civilization against
barbarism; the conquistador bringing the cross and the sword;
the red man shrinking back before the cavalry and the railroad.
Manifest Destiny. The notion that all historians propagated this
triumphalist myth uncritically is quite false; you have only to
read Parkman or Prescott to realize that. But after it left the
histories and sank deep into popular culture, it became a potent
myth of justification for plunder, murder and enslavement.

    So now, in reaction to it, comes the manufacture of its
opposite myth. European man, once the hero of the conquest of
the Americas, now becomes its demon; and the victims, who cannot
be brought back to life, are sanctified. On either side of the
divide between Euro and native, historians stand ready with
tarbrush and gold leaf, and instead of the wicked old
stereotypes, we have a whole outfit of equally misleading new
ones. Our predecessors made a hero of Christopher Columbus. To
Europeans and white Americans in 1892, he was Manifest Destiny
in tights, whereas a current PC book like Kirkpatrick Sale's The
Conquest of Paradise makes him more like Hitler in a caravel,
landing like a virus among the innocent people of the New World.

    The need for absolute goodies and absolute baddies runs
deep in us, but it drags history into propaganda and denies the
humanity of the dead: their sins, their virtues, their failures.
To preserve complexity, and not flatten it under the weight of
anachronistic moralizing, is part of the historian's task.

    You cannot remake the past in the name of affirmative
action. But you can find narratives that haven't been written,
histories of people and groups that have been distorted or
ignored, and refresh history by bringing them in. That is why,
in the past 25 years, so much of the vitality of written history
has come from the left. When you read the work of the black
Caribbean historian C.L.R. James, you see a part of the world
break its long silence: a silence not of its own choosing but
imposed on it by earlier imperialist writers. You do not have
to be a Marxist to appreciate the truth of Eric Hobsbawm's claim
that the most widely recognized achievement of radical history
"has been to win a place for the history of ordinary people,
common men and women." In America this work necessarily includes
the histories of its minorities, which tend to break down
complacent nationalist readings of the American past.

    By the same token, great changes have taken place in the
versions of American history taught to schoolchildren. The past
10 years have brought enormous and hard-won gains in accuracy,
proportion and sensitivity in the textbook treatment of American
minorities, whether Asian, Native, black or Hispanic. But this
is not enough for some extremists, who take the view that only
blacks can write the history of slavery, only Indians that of
pre-European America, and so forth.

    That is the object of a bizarre document called the
Portland African-American Baseline Essays, which has never been
published as a book but, in photocopied form, is radically
changing the curriculums of school systems all over the country.
Written by an undistinguished group of scholars, these essays
on history, social studies, math, language and arts and science
are meant to be a charter of Afrocentrist history for young
black Americans. They have had little scrutiny in the mainstream
press. But they are popular with bureaucrats like Thomas Sobol,
the education commissioner in New York State -- people who are
scared of alienating black voters or can't stand up to thugs
like City College professor Leonard Jeffries. Their implications
for American education are large, and mostly bad.

    WAS CLEOPATRA BLACK?

    The Afrocentrist claim can be summarized quite easily. It
says the history of the cultural relations between Africa and
Europe is bunk -- a prop for the fiction of white European
supremacy. Paleohistorians agree that intelligent human life
began in the Rift Valley of Africa. The Afrocentrist goes
further: the African was the cultural father of us all. European
culture derives from Egypt, and Egypt is part of Africa, linked
to its heart by the artery of the Nile. Egyptian civilization
begins in sub-Saharan Africa, in Ethiopia and the Sudan.

    Hence, argued the founding father of Afrocentrist history,
the late Senegalese writer Cheikh Anta Diop, whatever is
Egyptian is African, part of the lost black achievement;
Imhotep, the genius who invented the pyramid as a monumental
form in the 3rd millennium B.C., was black, and so were Euclid
and Cleopatra in Alexandria 28 dynasties later. Blacks in Egypt
invented hieroglyphics, and monumental stone sculpture, and the
pillared temple, and the cult of the Pharaonic sun king. The
habit of European and American historians of treating the
ancient Egyptians as other than black is a racist plot to
conceal the achievements of black Africa.

    No plausible evidence exists for these claims of Egyptian
negritude, though it is true that the racism of traditional
historians when dealing with the cultures of Africa has been
appalling. Most of them refused to believe African societies had
a history that was worth telling. Here is Arnold Toynbee in A
Study of History: "When we classify mankind by color, the only
one of the primary races . . . which has not made a single
creative contribution to any of our 21 civilizations is the
black race."

    No black person -- indeed, no modern historian of any race
-- could read such bland dismissals without disgust. The
question is, How to correct the record? Only by more knowledge.
Toynbee was writing more than 50 years ago, but in the past 20
years, immense strides have been made in the historical
scholarship of both Africa and African America. But the
upwelling of research, the growth of Black Studies programs, and
all that goes with the long-needed expansion of the field seem
fated to be plagued by movements like Afrocentrism, just as
there are always cranks nattering about flying saucers on the
edges of Mesoamerican archaeology.

    To plow through the literature of Afrocentrism is to enter
a world of claims about technological innovation so absurd that
they lie beyond satire, like those made for Soviet science in
Stalin's time. Afrocentrists have at one time or another
claimed that Egyptians, alias Africans, invented the wet-cell
battery by observing electric eels in the Nile; and that late
in the 1st millennium B.C., they took to flying around in
gliders. (This news is based not on the discovery of an aircraft
in an Egyptian tomb but on a silhouette wooden votive sculpture
of the god Horus, a falcon, that a passing English businessman
mistook some decades ago for a model airplane.) Some also claim
that Tanzanians 1,500 years ago were smelting steel with
semiconductor technology. There is nothing to prove these tales,
but nothing to disprove them either -- a common condition of
things that didn't happen.

    THE REAL MULTICULTURALISM

    Nowhere are the weaknesses and propagandistic nature of
Afrocentrism more visible than in its version of slave history.
Afrocentrists wish to invent a sort of remedial history in which
the entire blame for the invention and practice of black slavery
is laid at the door of Europeans. This is profoundly
unhistorical, but it's getting locked in popular consciousness
through the new curriculums.

    It is true that slavery had been written into the basis of
the classical world. Periclean Athens was a slave state, and so
was Augustan Rome. Most of their slaves were Caucasian. The word
slave meant a person of Slavic origin. By the 13th century
slavery spread to other Caucasian peoples. But the African
slave trade as such, the black traffic, was an Arab invention,
developed by traders with the enthusiastic collaboration of
black African ones, institutionalized with the most unrelenting
brutality, centuries before the white man appeared on the
African continent, and continuing long after the slave market
in North America was finally crushed.

    Naturally this is a problem for Afrocentrists, especially
when you consider the recent heritage of Black Muslim ideas
that many of them espouse. Nothing in the writings of the
Prophet forbids slavery, which is why it became such an
Arab-dominated business. And the slave traffic could not have
existed without the wholehearted cooperation of African tribal
states, built on the supply of captives generated by their
relentless wars. The image promulgated by pop-history fictions
like Roots -- white slavers bursting with cutlass and musket
into the settled lives of peaceful African villages -- is very
far from the historical truth. A marketing system had been in
place for centuries, and its supply was controlled by Africans.
Nor did it simply vanish with Abolition. Slave markets,
supplying the Arab emirates, were still operating in Djibouti
in the 1950s; and since 1960, the slave trade has flourished in
Mauritania and the Sudan. There are still reports of chattel
slavery in northern Nigeria, Rwanda and Niger.

    But here we come up against a cardinal rule of the PC
attitude to oppression studies. Whatever a white European male
historian or witness has to say must be suspect; the utterances
of an oppressed person or group deserve instant credence, even
if they're the merest assertion. The claims of the victim do
have to be heard, because they may cast new light on history.
But they have to pass exactly the same tests as anyone else's
or debate fails and truth suffers. The PC cover for this is the
idea that all statements about history are expressions of
power: history is written only by the winners, and truth is
political and unknowable.

    The word self-esteem has become one of the obstructive
shibboleths of education. Why do black children need
Afrocentrist education? Because, its promoters say, it will
create self-esteem. The children live in a world of media and
institutions whose images and values are created mainly by
whites. The white tradition is to denigrate blacks. Hence blacks
must have models that show them that they matter. Do you want
your children to love themselves? Then change the curriculum.
Feed them racist claptrap a la Leonard Jeffries, about how your
intelligence is a function of the amount of melanin in your
skin, and how Africans were sun people, open and cooperative,
whereas Europeans were ice people, skulking pallidly in caves.

    It is not hard to see why these claims for purely remedial
history are intensifying today. They are symbolic. Nationalism
always wants to have myths to prop itself up; and the newer the
nationalism, the more ancient its claims. The invention of
tradition, as Eric Hobsbawm has shown in detail, was one of the
cultural industries of 19th century Europe. But the desire for
self-esteem does not justify every lie and exaggeration and
therapeutic slanting of evidence that can be claimed to
alleviate it. The separatism it fosters turns what ought to be
a recognition of cultural diversity, or real multiculturalism,
tolerant on both sides, into a pernicious symbolic program.
Separatism is the opposite of diversity.

    The idea that European culture is oppressive in and of
itself is a fallacy that can survive only among the fanatical
and the ignorant. The moral and intellectual conviction that
inspired Toussaint-Louverture to focus the rage of the Haitian
slaves and lead them to freedom in 1791 came from his reading
of Rousseau and Mirabeau. When thousands of voteless,
propertyless workers the length and breadth of England met in
their reading groups in the 1820s to discuss republican ideas
and discover the significance of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar,
they were seeking to unite themselves by taking back the
meanings of a dominant culture from custodians who didn't live
up to them.

    Americans can still take courage from their example.
Cultural separatism within this republic is more a fad than a
serious proposal; it is not likely to hold. If it did, it would
be a disaster for those it claims to help: the young, the poor
and the black. Self-esteem comes from doing things well, from
discovering how to tell a truth from a lie and from finding out
what unites us as well as what separates us. The posturing of
the politically correct is no more a guide to such matters than
the opinions of Simon Legree.