...Let’s start with the ideology of multiculturalism, which has become pervasive, from university and grade-school curricula to Disney cartoons and the mainstream media. Don’t believe the spin that multiculturalism just recognizes the contributions of other cultures and ethnic minorities; the West has been doing that since Herodotus wrote admiringly about Egypt in 450 BC. In fact, multiculturalism attacks the West as uniquely oppressive and destructive, all the while idealizing the non-Western “Other” as more authentically human and humane, more in tune with nature, more communal, and less materialistic than all those repressed Westerners enslaved to technology and the “cash nexus.”Even a cursory survey of world history explodes these romantic clichés and noble-savage fantasies. The West’s sins have been the sins of humanity everywhere. But the goods of the West—political freedom, consensual government, human rights, rationalism, and respect for the individual, to name a few—are unique to the West and account for its success. Just ask the millions of non-Western Others who every year risk their lives to migrate to Europe and America, even as virtually nobody goes in the other direction...
Bruce Thornton is a historian, classics professor at California State University, Fresno, and the author of several books including Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality, Plagues of the Mind: The New Epidemic of False Knowledge, Greek Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization, Bonfire of the Humanities. Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished Age (with John Heath and Victor Davis Hanson) and the forthcoming Decline and Fall: Europe’s Slow-Motion Suicide.The paragraphs printed above are from a brief essay Thornton wrote for City Journal in which he argues that multi-culturalism as practiced by Western educators and politicians has put the West at a very dangerous disadvantage in our struggle against jihadists. It's a sobering but very illuminating piece.
