I feel impelled to respond to Mr. Buckley's outrageous, intemperate, imprudent and thoroughly ungentlemanly obituary of Justice Blackmun. I think he owes all of us a genuine apology. His well-known views on abortion are abhorrent to me, as I am sure mine and Justice Blackmun's are to him. But to use the occasion of Justice Blackmun's death to rehearse his personal views in such an insulting and inappropriate manner is a measure of why the debate about abortion is so profoundly disruptive and degrading to the level of public discourse in our republic. Justice Blackmun may have been right or he may have been wrong in his Roe vs. Wade opinion, but he certainly made that opinion in good faith, after serious and thoughtful reflection, and he based it on his considered views of our constitution. Mr. Buckley certainly knows all that though he seems to have deliberately violated all the canons of good taste as well as the classical distinction between the public and the private in his remarks.

I have several remarks to make about Mr. Buckley's views and the way he states them .

1) All the scientific information about pregnancy, fetuses, viability, etc. even if it were complete and unequivocal, will not, and in the nature of the case, cannot settle one way or the other the controversy about abortion. Abortion is an ethical and, in some respects, a political matter to be properly determined by prudence, practical wisdom, not theoretical knowledge. If Mr. Buckley doesn't know that he is far more ignorant than I thought. But I believe he does know that, and he is merely using bits and pieces of scientific knowledge as rhetoric to support his views which obviously ape the official view of the Roman Catholic Church. He is, of course, entitled to his views wherever they come from, but he should in all honesty and candor make clear that it is not the science but the religious dogma (and I do not use this term in a derogatory sense) that generates his argument.

2) Mr. Buckley is fully aware that something like 2/3 of American citizens do not share his views about criminalizing or delegitimizing abortion. This, I believe, is why he wants foolishly to make the protection of the fetus a constitutional right so that it cannot be overturned by a mere legislative majority either on the national or state level. He is also, I believe, fully aware of all the absurd and utterly impractical consequences of making the fetus a legal person protected by the constitution and the bill of rights. His argument on this matter is therefore not a serious one, but a purely rhetorical ploy designed primarily to counter the constitutional argument in Roe, but not to replace it.

3) Why will Mr. Buckley not acknowledge publicly, what he also assuredly knows, that abortion is and must always be a profoundly personal, that is private, matter, one of those complex and difficult issues that are best left to the individuals concerned and that the state, at all levels, ought to ignore as beyond its competence to deal with. Mr. Buckley can write and publicly argue against abortion all he wants, but does it not make sense that the argument ought to be about private morality, not public policy and legislation?

4) I can understand Mr. Buckley's frustration that after arguing this issue for over a generation he and those who agree with him have not moved even a small part of the American citizen body to accept their views. For some opponents of abortion that frustration has now spilled over into overt violence, deliberate terrorist acts, and cold-blooded murder. Is it not time to cool it, to tone down the rhetoric that inflames only the already converted, that persuades only those who are confused about the nature of the issue, that disrupts and degrades all public discourse about all public matters? Let us return to civility, diminish the mean-spiritedness of so much of our public discourse, admit that there may well be some unresolvable moral differences between us, but that we can live with them within the frame of our constitutional order, and limit our rhetoric to arguments that bring out the best, not the worst, in our fellow citizens.

Herman Siniako

MACHIAVELLI ON READING

"When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reasons for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me."
--Machiavelli, Letter to Francesco Vettori

MULTICULTURALISM AND THE WESTERN TRADITION
by John Boleyn
The Washington Times -- The Forum
Sunday, April 4, 1999

Multiculturalism is now the primary vehicle of social and political change which our education establishment imposes on America's students. Most multiculturalists have determined that all cultures in their manifest behavior are relative; one is as good or right as the other and any attempt to judge otherwise is biased due to our own cultural and social prejudices.

Unfortunately, the social and cultural prejudices of multiculturalists have never interfered with their ability to judge ours or someone else's culture. But many political and cultural conservatives abide under the illusion that such relativism on the part of students, not to mention their professors, first emerged in the 1960s. On the contrary, it has been endemic in this century and continues to divide our families, our communities, and our nation.

Any idea of truth is extreme; exclusively the ruling classes habit of defining truth to its own advantage. This extreme skepticism is an abyss which is used to destroy the concept of any kind of cultural, moral judgment. Its end is the long historical reality of Realpolitk; politics for power sake, where only force and propaganda count. And most of the arguments which counter the multicultural premise continue to focus on a cultural basis, instead of looking for the important, universal truths which illuminate our common human nature.

Multiculturalists have established a number of "dirty words" which they wish to erase from our educational vocabulary. Terms such as "Eurocentric" is a name for the traditional values in western culture, a culture dominated by "dead white males" from Greek antiquity to the first half of the twentieth century in Europe and North America. They have replaced these buzz words with a few of their own, such as "cultural diversity" and "Multiculturalism."

In our ethnically and culturally diverse large cities, the school populations include children from black homes of African and West Indian origin, as well as white homes having families of European origin. They also include Hispanics, Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans, and children in families from India, Southeast Asia, and the Arabic and Iranian Near East. And for some time, educators have responded to these facts by making efforts to acquaint this diversified school population with the plurality of ethnic backgrounds and cultural differences which go into the tapestry of American society.

And because of this descriptive multicultural character, students should have some understanding of history and geography, and how they relate to the mixture and cultural differences which have entered into the fabric of American life. Children should learn that many different cultural groups, especially in antiquity, have contributed to the development of mathematics, physics and astronomy, and they should be impressed with the fact that these sciences are not solely of Greek and Roman origin.

Contributions to our understanding of these sciences come from ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India, not just Greece. Such teaching of the early developments in mathematics and natural sciences is not inconsistent with the present transcultural character of the disciplines themselves. At this point, "Eurocentrism" is a moot issue.

It is the prescriptive character of transcultural ethics which gives us the proper understanding of our descriptive multicultural society. The truth lies in the universal values which transcend matters of culture -- matters of taste. If judgments can be made about how government and society should be organized everywhere, in order to be good for human beings to live in, then a prescriptive political philosophy can be transcultural, and education in these affairs should not be multicultural. On the contrary, if there are no objectively and universally valid prescriptions in the fields of ethics or politics, then schooling in these matters is multicultural, strictly matters of taste.

It is the believers of multiculturalism who seek to expunge important works of western thought from our schools and colleges. So then, why should there be some prospected set of books which are deemed important or what has been called by America's most noted philosopher and educator, Mortimer J. Adler, "Great Books?" Dr. Adler was editor and chief of the second edition of the Great Books of the Western World series, which was published in 1990.

An editorial board comprised of individuals from the fields of politics, history, the sciences, literature, and philosophy reached agreement on what titles and authors were selected. Their criteria for selection was (1) relevance to contemporary issues, (2) re-readability or "depth" and (3) a reference to a large number of the Great Ideas which have been addressed by authors of important books over the past twenty-five centuries.

Dr. Adler has stated the percentage of agreement was about 90%, an amazing achievement for any compendium of thought. Their reason for only western authors is that they are engaged in a great discussion across the centuries about great ideas and issues. In the multicultural tradition of Asia, there are perhaps as many as four, maybe five important conversations, each a different set of ideas, which do not combine into one culture.

For Dr. Adler, a true great books program is not a course in the history of Western civilization, nor is it a scholarly study of the books read. It is influenced by the discussion of the great ideas and issues to found in those books. Each of the great books in its own way raises the recurrent questions which human beings always face. Because these questions are never completely solved, these books are the sources and monuments of a continuing intellectual tradition. They surpass the provincial limits of their origin. Mark Twain once remarked that "the great books are the books which everyone wishes he had read, but no one wants to read."

People wished they had read them because they are the indispensable substance of a true liberal education. It is precisely because they raise problems which they do not finally answer which can provoke us to think, inquire and discuss. Their complexity challenges our skill in reading and they help us improve that skill. It is precisely because they often challenge our accepted prejudices and our established opinions that they help us to develop our critical faculties.

The prescriptive multiculturalism of today's education establishment is really not multicultural at all. It exalts one particular human sub-group to the exclusion from consideration of others in the mixture which constitutes our pluralistic society. The branches of knowledge are not the private cultural property of any human sub-group. However, what is desirable is a limited cultural pluralism, where expression in matters of taste flourish, but not at the expense of objectively valid truth, either descriptive factual truth or prescriptive normative truth.

And the question of transcultural ethics should not be answered alone by the present cast of multiculturalists whose turbulent pluralism substitutes pure power and might for truth and right in the effort to control what should be taught and thought.

* Mr. Boleyn is a writer in the fields of philosophy and politics.

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