Attacks on the Confederate battle flag, the singing of Dixie, the prominence of Confederate monuments, etc., may at first glance appear to be of only regional even superficial concern. They may even seem justified given the use made of the Confederate flag by extremists not only in this country but abroad. Yet on closer examination we see that such attacks represent more than just a protest against Southern symbols; that in reality they form part of a far more ambitious effort carried out nation-wide under the banner of "multiculturalism" to "deconstruct" the national identity as it is currently conceived, and to delegitimize the history in which it is grounded.
Some view all this with little concern, believing that such abstractions as symbols, images and history are of only marginal importance. Yet symbols and images and the way a people views its history are by no means trivial matters, for as historian Benedict Anderson points out all nations are in reality "imagined communities" – that is the divergent people who comprise a modern nation must collectively imagine commonalities among themselves that can scarcely exist on such a scale if the nation is to achieve and maintain the degree of cohesiveness necessary to function in an effective manner. A shared national identity, therefore, grounded in a vision of history and embodied and transmitted in images and symbols, constitutes an essential, organic part of all modern nations.
National identities are by no means immutable. Indeed they change in response to the conditions in which people find themselves at different periods of history. Under conditions which prevailed during the first half of the last century the sheer size and geographic diversity of the United States made the country far less cohesive that it is today, thus rendering it prone to serious sectional divisions. In this regard Frederick Jackson Turner has observed that "the American physical map may be regarded as a map of potential nations and empires, each to be conquered and colonized, each to rise through stages of development, each to possess certain fundamental assumptions, and each to interact with the others…."
Loyalties under such conditions were accorded first to localities and states, then to sections and finally on the most abstract level to the nation as a whole. The ties which bound these entities together – the way the nation was imagined at the time- were limited to a common experience in the American Revolution, to certain goals acceptable to all the sections, and to allegiance to a federal Constitution whose ambiguities contributed to sectional and state divisions even while it created a consensus for union among them. What changed all this, beginning in the eighteenth, then building to full force in the nineteenth century, was the transforming processes of modernization that ultimately replaced traditional agrarian societies with modern societies not only in North America but also in an increasingly large portion of the world.
Modernization refers not only to a change in the way a society generates its wealth (from agriculture to industry), but also to radical transformations in the way people think about life, the way they envision themselves in the world around them, the kind of morality which justifies what they do and what they are, the way they feel about things and thus how they ultimately choose to act. Modernization therefore has been a social, cultural, and moral revolution of major importance in world history.
In the United States this revolution began in the northeastern corner of the country as a purely sectional phenomenon, and true to form vigorously spread outward to incorporate the rest of the country. The South, on the other hand, not only remained agrarian, but given the high demand for its principle crop, cotton, by the industrializing North and by the industrializing nations of Western Europe, became even more consciously committed to agriculture and to a traditional agrarian way of life. The Northeast thus imagined a national community consonant with modernity, while the South developed first a strong sectional identity and finally a distinctive national consciousness based on an idealization of the traditional agrarian society that was under increasing attack on all fronts from the North.
Thus two irreconcilable collective images of the nation emerged in two important sections of the country: two imagined communities each with its own distinctive interpretations of events, its own vigorously held morality and each generating intensely felt attitudes that could lead nowhere else but to war. In this respect historian Avery Craven, in The Growth of Southern Nationalism , says that the tragedy of American history during its transition to modernity "lies in the way in which attitudes were allowed to develop and in the fearful cost which the nation paid to get itself into the modern world."
The Civil War ended in the total military conquest of one section, one "potential nation" to use Turner's description, by another. The result was not the creation of an empire in the traditional sense, but rather the emergence of a modern unified nation-state, something quite different from what had gone before. The degree of integration which this cultural uniformity which characterized this new national entity meant that sectionalism would no longer form the primary fault lines in the nation. It did not mean, however, that regionalism was to disappear, for regional diversity always characterizes any large, geographically diverse country.
Nowhere in the United States is regional consciousness as strong as in the South. The ideal of agrarianism still forms a part of that consciousness yet to a far less extent than it did in the past. In fact the last serious defense of agrarianism was published in the 1930’s at a time when a truly agrarian way of life was rapidly fading away; a defense mounted not by social theorists, politicians, economists, or businessmen (indeed such defenses never are), but rather by poets and novelists (who generally do) in a statement aptly entitled I'll Take My Stand. Although agrarianism no longer provides a viable model of how a society should be organized, it still provides a guide as to how modern society might be tempered. In this regard most Southerners would probably agree with Richard Weaver who in 1944 wrote that "the Old South may indeed be a hall hung with splendid tapestries in which no one would care to live; but from them we can learn something of how to live."
The present Southern identity revolves more around a firm sense of time and place, an appreciation of the tragedy of conflict that broke the nation apart, and a sense of empathy for the human loss and suffering endured by the proud and spiritually undefeated people from whom today's Southerners are descended. Southern symbols stand for all these things; symbols that evoke respect for what has gone before (warts and all for no one is ever perfect nor can they ever hope to be), and for traditions that instruct that and that define what we are today. The balance between this regional identity and an overriding identity of national unity thus characterizes the way Southerners imagine themselves in the modern national community of which they form an integral yet distinctive part. It is both of these identities and the history from which they derive their meaning, not just the Southern one that are under serious and sustained attack today.
Current changes in the world suggest to many scholars an impending global transformation every bit as momentous as that which transformed the traditional agrarian world into the modern world. One sign of this transformation, they say, is the forces now pressing in on nation-states from subnational groups within their boundaries, such as ethnic, religious, linguistic and racial minorities, to international forces such as multinational corporations serving global markets, instantaneous world-wide communications and regional common markets and tariff unions. These forces, it is said, are increasingly rendering modern nation-states obsolete, thus new institutional forms, new sensibilities and even new moralities are required in order to meet the needs of the "post-modern" world we have already begun to enter.
It is against this backdrop that "multiculturalists" advance their claims. The "multicultural" image of a post modern America is that of a country in which different racial and ethnic groups live side by side in a colorful mosaic like an ethnically varied neighborhood in a large urban center, where no group's culture is preeminent over the others, and where each is entitled to create and maintain its own imagined community through public institutions and at public expense. One immediate practical result of such an image would be to justify policies that have proliferated over the past thirty years under the rubric of "civil rights." There is as yet no formal legislative mandate for such preferences, thus their status is unstable and potentially in doubt for the principles of group entitlement and equality of condition on which they rest, stand in sharp contrast to the principles of individual rights and equality of opportunity held by the majority of the population including many minorities.
A change in the way we imagine the nation, therefore, from one which emphasizes unity to one which stresses diversity would go a long way in resolving current ambiguities in favor of group entitlements, thus paving the way for far more radical political and economic changes in the future. In order to advance the "multicultural" image, as its proponents see it, the current national identity must be dismantled and the history in which it is grounded discredited. Also those who accept the unifying national culture as their heritage must be humbled, their "arrogance", as the "multiculturalists" call pride in their heritage, must be destroyed. This is done by depicting American history, in fact Western history as a whole, as a cause for shame and the rationale for perpetual repentance and compensation.
The world of the "multiculturalists" is a world narrowed to struggle where culture is subordinated to politics and where relations with others are reduced to zero sum game in which any gains by one party mean a commensurate loss by another. In this case the self esteem and power of minority groups can only be won by destroying the self esteem and power of the majority. Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer writing in The New Republic notes that "multiculturalism in its present form derives basically from black educators" with Hispanics forming "definitely junior partners" in the enterprise. The motives of these people range from simple opportunism through resentment over what they see as the slow pace of civil rights to compensation for a sense of inferiority which many minority intellectuals have not been able to shake. Other partners in the struggle come from the Left, people inherently hostile to Western Civilization who are now searching for a new anchor in the wake of the world-wide demise of Marxism.
The narrow political reductionism of "multiculturalism" based as it is on unrealistic expectations derived from radical egalitarianism and extreme cultural relativism- and fed by such unhealthy emotions as resentment, hostility and hatred- by no means provide a proper starting point in dealing with the changes we are now undergoing. The principle fault lines in the country today are no longer sectional as they were in the last century. Instead they are racial and to a lesser extent ethnic. By exploiting these weak points in national unity while "deconstructing" an image that stresses our commonality "multiculturalists" are playing a perilous game indeed, especially since such primordial ties as race, ethnicity and language are everywhere infused with emotion far greater than most other ties which bind people together in societies.
It is too early to say whether "multiculturalists" can achieve their goals. Yet it is certain that the formula they are now advancing in charged with the very real potential for generating the kinds of emotions and attitudes which, to paraphrase Avery Craven, may well exact a fearful cost in getting us into the postmodern world.
May 5, 2001
