Amid a hailstorm of cries emerging from the academic left, urging people not to “be bigots” and “appreciate the value of other cultures”, ethnic and racial prejudice continue to plague businesses, educational facilities, and cultural relations. Affirmative action, the policy of hiring on the basis of skin color, “minority” quotas on college admissions, and a nihilistic pop-culture which brazenly parades itself as “black” continue to encourage an individual’s reliance upon the aspects of his genome identifying him with a particular ethnic pressure group rather than his personal merits and capacities for advancement in his academic or career standing. At a superficial glance, it would seem that the “liberal” academics would condemn such treatments as bigoted or intolerant toward those who are discriminated against. But they maintain not merely a contemptuous silence in regard to the victims of job profiling and violent slurring from the slums, but rather emerge as the prime advocates of such practices! This is because the attitudinal foundations of the men masquerading as champions of “civil liberties” are closer to those of an Adolf Hitler than of a Martin Luther King.

 

Today’s academia is afflicted with the ideology of ethical and metaphysical relativism, which declares that there exists no objective standard for categorizing facts and evaluating values, that in fact “anything goes”, be it arbitrary, self-destructive, or even coercive. No logical validation is required for the actions of a particular entity, and when a rational and an irrational deed are compared, all evidence for the rationality of the former is discarded. As long as something “works” for a particular entity (and the definition of “works” is whatever the entity views it to be), no individual is permitted to raise a squeak against it. Chinese foot binding had “worked” to create a gender underclass incapable of rising on its own accord. Aztec human sacrifice had “worked” to entrench a cabal of superstition-spewing priests within the bastions of power. So had the mass slaughter of Jews during the Holocaust “worked” to “unify” the devastated German people toward a common goal (the value premise behind the goal considered irrelevant by the relativists).  It is correct to view this doctrine as harboring a blatant disregard for commonsense facts of reality, where, for example, within the sciences, a comprehensive scheme of observation, experimentation, theorization, and application is required to employ the data of reality for the interests of man’s prosperity. The peoples and tribes whose cultures focused on witch-doctoring rather than innovation and experimentation had been unable to develop a Scientific Method, and their lack of technology had resulted in catastrophic mortality rates, famines, disease, and feudal tyranny. Obviously, they had not been employing what had “worked” for them. They had neglected to discover what works in reality and have languished as a result, implying that a single fundamental fact/value scheme is inherent in existence.

 

Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises had identified a pillar on which the relativists rely in order to exhibit the pretense of refuting the above reasoning. Its name is polylogism, and it asserts that particular “collective entities” (genetic races or socioeconomic classes) are endowed with differing structures of mind and a different “race logic” or “class logic”. When a Western middle-class thinker criticizes the sloth and stagnation of destitute Polynesian natives, he is utilizing his own “white bourgeoisie logic”, which, because it is not “their Mongoloid proletarian logic”, is automatically rendered futile when directing any criticisms against savages who devour their neighbors as a sign of “respect” and deck their totem poles with the skulls of their victims.

 

Von Mises describes a typical scenario which would be advocated by a polylogist.

 

“Some ethnologists tell us that it is a mistake to speak of higher and lower civilizations and of an alleged backwardness of alien races. The civilizations of various races are different from the Western civilization of the peoples of Caucasian stock, but they are not inferior. Every race has its peculiar mentality. It is faulty to apply to the civilization of any of them yardsticks abstracted from the achievements of other races. Westerners call the civilization of China an arrested civilization and that of the inhabitants of New Guinea primitive barbarism. But the Chinese and the natives of New Guinea despise our civilization no less than we despise theirs. Such estimates are judgments of value and hence arbitrary. Those other races have a different structure of mind. Their civilizations are adequate to their mind as our civilization is adequate to our mind. We are incapable of comprehending that what we call backwardness does not appear such to them. It is, from the point of view of their logic, a better method of coming to a satisfactory arrangement with given natural conditions of life than is our progressivism.”

 

This interpretation, of course, cannot stand the test of an objective standard of functionality for every human being, derived from a peculiarly human trait, that men must employ reason for cognition and utility of reality, reason being the non-contradictory identification of factual data and their application to man’s life. If all men are endowed with such a capacity and a distinct requirement of human nature, then there can be no delusion concerning functionality for one group of that, which fails for another.

 

Therefore the polylogist will proclaim that there exists a biological difference between races and classes, that the “varying” structure of the organism of a Chinese would somehow necessitate for his survival the practice of foot binding or the Daoist vegetable attitude toward the material world, or, in a more modern context, that an African-American C student’s “genetic/socioeconomic past” would require a college admission for him at the expense of a Caucasian honors student. Von Mises demonstrates how the facts of intercultural relations refute such an absurdity.

 

“The Asiatics and the Africans no less than the peoples of European descent have been eager to struggle successfully for survival and to use reason as the foremost weapon in these endeavors. They have sought to get rid of the beasts of prey and of disease, to prevent famines and to raise the productivity of labor. There can be no doubt that in the pursuit of these aims they have been less successful than the whites. The proof is that they are eager to profit from all achievements of the West. Those ethnologists would be right, if Mongols or Africans, tormented by a painful disease, were to renounce the aid of a European doctor because their mentality or their world view led them to believe that it is better to suffer than to be relieved of pain. Mahatma Gandhi disavowed his whole philosophy when he entered a modern hospital to be treated for appendicitis.”

 

China today, despite the shortcomings of its government, is experiencing industrial growth and a surge in entrepreneurship precisely because it has embraced Western methods of production, Western practices of seeking a global export market, and the beginnings of a Western, capitalistic political and economic theory. A man of the Mongoloid race, or of the African race, can become just as apt and affluent from the utility of the achievements of Newton, Locke, and Rockefeller as can a Caucasian. A proletarian in the slums can rise to the level of a prosperous businessman or inventor if he logically develops a cost-effective method of production or marketing strategy or technological gadget. In regard to prosperity, a Polynesian is not condemned to eternal fluctuations between starvation and cannibalism. Neither is a man in a free, Western society forever entrenched within a rigid caste system. Thus, there cannot be inherent genetic differences between races governing the rational faculty, and cultural practices, ideologies, and mindsets are ultimately dependent on the judgment of the originating individuals and those of the latter’s followers on whether or not to support the particular doctrine.

 

Polylogism is ludicrously flawed, but what are its implications in practice? A hint is to be derived from the fact that the Marxists had been polylogists; so had the Nazis in Germany. The former had ruthlessly confiscated property from, excluded from universities, and sentenced to slavery in the gulags those whose class affiliation was “bourgeois”. The latter committed genocide in the millions against members of races not of “pure Aryan stock”. A question emerges, however: how does a viewpoint of collectives as immune to judgment and inherently divergent result in the persecution of one by the other? Polylogism in the context of an Aryan master race would state that because the racial identity of, say, the Chinese or the Polynesians or the Jews renders them inevitably “backward” (in the context of “Aryan logic”) or, in the example of the Jews, inherently “exploitative”, there exists from the standpoint of “Aryan logic” an irreconcilable conflict between the “master race” and miscellaneous ethnic groups. Because no common ground can be found between the followers of “different” systems (as, if a German cannot grasp Jewish logic, neither can a Jew grasp German logic), the only solution to the conflict is not persuasion and analysis, but brute, unthinking force. Just as the Polynesians are allowed to, under this vile calculus, disembowel and roast a Western missionary who seeks to teach them basic arithmetic (as he is irreconcilable with Polynesian logic), so can the Germans vaporize the Jewish people as a different species acting upon a framework to which the Germans cannot relate. What results ultimately is a violent contest of brutality, determined by which ethnic group is able to amass the greatest amount of coercive pressure to violently squelch the others. The Marxists had admitted this with a greater degree of frankness, claiming that all the objections to their immoral and unrealizable theories were from the standpoint of “bourgeoisie” economists who were inherently incapable of fathoming the essence of socialist theories and thus needed to be swept aside by the rising tide of proletarian revolution.

 

Therefore, relativism (or “multiculturalism”, as its more affirmative-action specific offshoot is called) is ultimately a racist doctrine advocating persecution, segregation, and pressure-group warfare. Not only, say the relativists, are the African-Americans entitled to first dibs on employment because we cannot grasp their peculiar genetic requirements, but also because, from the viewpoint of “African-American logic,” it is necessary to displace the sub-humans that are the Caucasians who are incapable of “understanding” the life of the African-American in its full scope. So must minority quotas be established in colleges to seek to facilitate antagonistic pressure groups and create for them an arena where they may resolve their differences forcefully, determining whose genes may or may not be admitted based on the outcome of their slur-hurling, ancestor-blaming back-and-forth tirades.

That is why individual merit is inevitably discarded in the muck of relativistic polylogism. Grades and test scores cease to matter in college admissions, because arithmetic is somehow judged to be inaccessible to a twelfth-generation Eskimo-American and SAT tests are declared to be covering concepts against which there is an inherent barrier in the genetic makeup of Hispanics. Admissions are determined solely by one’s DNA “heritage”, and students cease to concern themselves with such trifling matters as learning the date of the Declaration of Independence’s signature (“What an absolutely Western-biased, Eurocentric document!”) or Sir Isaac Newton’s three laws of motion (“Obviously, an Englishman cannot describe how objects move in the world of the Apaches!”).

 

Dr. Michael S. Berliner and Dr. Gary Hull of the Ayn Rand Institute describe another devastating effect of racist collectivism, one taking its toll on the individual’s self-esteem.

 

“The spread of racism requires the destruction of an individual’s confidence in his own mind. Such an individual then anxiously seeks a sense of identity by clinging to some group, abandoning his autonomy and his rights, allowing his ethnic group to tell him what to believe. Because he thinks of himself as a racial entity, he feels ‘himself’ only among others of the same race. He becomes a separatist, choosing his friends — and enemies — based on ethnicity. This separatism has resulted in the spectacle of student-segregated dormitories and segregated graduations. The diversity movement claims that its goal is to extinguish racism and build tolerance of differences. This is a complete sham. One cannot teach students that their identity is determined by skin color and expect them to become colorblind. One cannot espouse multiculturalism and expect students to see each other as individual human beings. One cannot preach the need for self-esteem while destroying the faculty which makes it possible: reason. One cannot teach collective identity and expect students to have self-esteem.”

 

This pressure-group mentality, holding that one can only rise or even feel comfortable in a group of the same genetic makeup as oneself, fuels ethnic conflicts on the streets and in universities, which in turn entail greater segregation and more explosive conflicts, in the manner of a positive loop. As racist hatred amasses, the only true diversity, that of individuals with various aptitudes, skills, and levels of proficiency, becomes stifled, as a particular Caucasian prodigy may become barred from taking an honors course while a particular African-American dimwit receives a doctoral degree after putting less effort into his course work than he had wads of chewing gum under his desktop.

 

This modern racist relativism is most overtly manifested in the pop-culturist trends of today, where rappers rant about their desire to rape and murder innocent people, or to gorge themselves with a myriad of narcotics, and excuse it through recourse to their “uniquely African-American roots in the ghettoes”. This is a blend of racial and socioeconomic polylogism, a Communazism if you will, which seeks to incapacitate the judgment mechanisms of thinkers appalled at the trash of the lyrics accompanied by anti-aesthetic cacophony. And woe to him who dares criticize rap in a public setting, as he will immediately be decried as a bigot incapable of “understanding black culture”.

 

The intention of the racists is not cultural diversity, or even racial dominance per se. The racists are nihilists in that, in the Orwellian sense, they seek power for power’s sake and seek to inflict suffering for the purpose of retaining it. This is due to the fact that they are unable to thrive by means of production and thus enviously seek to degrade and enslave those who do, not because they want to live, but because they want the producers to die. The Oceanians in 1984 had been conditioned to viciously loathe the Eurasians and the Eastasians and giggle at the murder of foreign children. This placed them in a position to accept the oligarchy of the Party as a vehicle for materializing their hatred. This was Hitler’s motivation for scapegoating the Jews, as well as that of Lenin and Stalin for extorting the bourgeoisie. Neither is the property of the victims the ultimate aim, but rather the power obtained over those who had carried out the expropriations, those who had mouthed the slogans, be they of Aryan supremacy, of proletarian revolution, or of affirmative action. That the multiculturalists are militant supporters of every rancid feudal totalitarian primitivism, from the barbarities of the Aztecs to the oppression of the Hindu caste system to bin Laden’s “victimized response” to “U.S. imperialism”, demonstrates their nihilistic lust for pure uncontested power, one which despises the competitive principles of the capitalist system and seeks everything for nothing, to remain at the top without advancing, by instead lowering those who are able to advance. The rule of such tyrannies and oligarchies throughout a majority of history was what had stunted progress in all cultures but one, and that is the reason why that one truly superior culture (not due to its racial roots, but precisely because of its universality and ability to enhance the lives of all men who seek to use its accomplishments) is under a vicious assault by the polylogist, relativist left.

Columnist John Leo has spotted this trend.

“Multiculturalism, with its radical cultural relativism, is becoming a serious problem. It leaves a great many students dubious about traditional American values and cynical about any sense of common purpose or solidarity. This is particularly so when the mantra of the cultural left that America is ‘racist-sexist-homophobic’ is added to the mix. This hybrid philosophy -- no judgment of other cultures, but severe judgment of our own -- is already beginning to color many responses to the terrorist attacks. It peeks out from behind the ‘root causes’ argument and the need to ‘understand’ the terrorists and to see their acts ‘in context.’ Often what is really meant by the root-cause people is that reckless and imperial America brought the attacks on itself.”  

The motive for targeting America in particular is because American values are antithetical to racism and suffering for suffering’s sake. America had been a nation which managed to abolish slavery because of its racism and incompatibility with individual rights, because the imprisonment of human beings had also intervened with technological development and the job market. America had been a nation previously known to tolerate all ethnic and religious groups and establish uniform laws and uniform rights for all, implying, of course, that no one tribe is inherently different from another, that the laws of nature mandate particular negative obligations on behalf of all human beings toward each other, and that beyond this must form a hierarchy not of skin color or nationality or class ancestry, but of merit, determined by individual choice and accomplishment. The meritorious individual is the producer, and the producer is antithetical to the parasitically envious power-luster.

America, in its philosophical principles, is the epitome of color-blindness, which can be realized only through comprehending that there exists but one reality, one form of reason, one correct ethical code, and that coercive circumstantial discrimination must not hinder men from aspiring toward it for their own benefit. In order to follow the legacy of Jefferson and not Hitler, it is essential to wholly reject relativism, polylogism, and multiculturalism, lifting their “compassionate” veneer once and for all to reveal the hideous bloodbath that had always been and will be their end result.

References:

Berliner, Michael S. and Hull, Gary. “Diversity and Multiculturalism: The New Racism”. Available October 2, 2002: http://multiculturalism.aynrand.org/diversity.html.

Leo, John. “Cultural relativism leaves some blind to evil”. October 15, 2001. Available October 2, 2002: http://www.townhall.com/columnists/johnleo/jl20011015.shtml.

Von Mises, Ludwig. Human Action. 1949. “Chapter III. Economics and the Revolt against Reason.” Available October 2, 2002: http://www.mises.org/humanaction/chap3sec2.asp and http://www.mises.org/humanaction/chap3sec4.asp.

G. Stolyarov II is a science fiction novelist, independent filosofical essayist, poet, amateur mathematician, composer, contributor to Enter Stage Right, Le Quebecois Libre, and the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Senior Writer for The Liberal Institute, and Editor-in-Chief of The Rational Argumentator, a magazine championing the principles of reason, rights, and progress. His newest science fiction novel is Eden against the Colossus. His latest non-fiction treatise is A Rational Cosmology. Mr. Stolyarov can be contacted at gennadystolyarovii@yahoo.com.