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Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Towards a Secular Theocracy

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In light of the depraved nature of American culture, it's easy for any second-hander to catalog a bunch of disparate events and ideas and package them with a littany of canned-bromides about "multiculturalism" and "political correctness." (As an example, I just read a story the other day about "ethnomathematics.") On the other hand, it takes a scholar to make sense of the intellectual trends that are dominating the Western world.

Fortunately, the paleoconservative movement has such a scholar in Dr. Paul Gottfried. Prof. Gottfried focuses on trends such as "diversity," "multiculturalism," and "sensitivity" showing that there is a theology behind them. The Christian view of sin and redemption is replaced by a secular counterpart of "insensitivity" and psychological manipulation. Based on Prof. Gottfried's approach, the desire of the left (old left and neocon "right") becomes understandable. American foreign policy (which was historically based on the idea of American interest, however misguided at times) is now focused on fighting "intolerance." The love affair of the left with immigration likewise becomes understandable. What better way to apologize for your nation's alleged sins then slowly destroying your culture through a change in the population? This fact isn't lost on European conservatives, who - as Prof. Gottfried notes - realize that these new voters aren't likely to vote conservative.

For some reason, the Jewish holocaust takes center stage in this new religion, in which both liberals and their alleged opponents seeks to draw lessons from this event. That nearly three million Poles died at the hands of the Nazis is ignored. Likewise, Stalin's murder of millions of Ukrainians in the name of egalitarianism gets short shift. Whereas people are put in jail for denying the Jewish holocaust, even mainstream publishers will print books downplaying Stalin's evils.

Prof. Gottfried breaks from standard neoconservative and paleoconservative analysis by showing that although the "sensitizing" may be carried out by the managerial class, it appears to have substantial public support. The multicultural agenda has majority support in the United Kingdom, and perhaps close to that in the United States.

This work follows upon Prof. Gottfried's AFTER LIBERALISM, which is also highly recommended.

Much cant has been written about "multiculturalism" both by its supporters and its enemies. Paul Gottfried is no friend of multiculturalism, but his book is not the sort of thoughtless griping that often comes from conservative critics. Instead he takes a hard look at the historical force from which multiculturalism derives, and where those forces are ultimately leading those of us in the United States and Europe. Gottfried's subtitle is even more apropros than his main title, because his subject matter really is a newly emerging "secular theocracy."

It's a theocracy, as Gottfried explains, in part because of its concern with reforming and reshaping the individual conscience. The cultural preconditions for this have been within Western civilization for some time, Gottfried shows, but it is now, with the rise of the managerial-therapeutic state, that they have become truly virulent. Multiculturalism is not simply an attitude or a set of beliefs, but a policy that governments are enforcing upon unwilling invdividuals.

Gottfried is a careful scholar whose work cannot be reduced to an easy ideological pigeon-hole. He's a firm conservative whose analysis can be apprecaited by thoughtful readers of any persuasion. The depth of analysis in *Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt* makes it more profoundly politically incorrect than any of the more superficial, sensationalistic treatments of multiculturalism offered by most other writers.

Professor Paul Gottfried wrote _Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt_ as an extension of his earlier book, _After Liberalism_. Let's face it, society is under fire from political correctness, diversity schemes, and anti-discrimination fascism handed down from the political elite and their appointed "experts" that are running rampant trying to micro-manage the State's progressive agenda. The Managerial State has moved from economic redistributionist schemes and welfare economics to total Thought Control, where every aspect of individual attitudes and behavior comes under fire by the Feds and their appointed "experts." Behavioral policies are set forth upon unwilling "subjects" by the ruling regime when and where it is advantageous to its identititarian political schemes. Hence, we have the modern Therapeutic State.

The Protestant Deformation movement (liberal Protestantism), Gottfried says, is one of the major players in the progressive self-destruction of European and American traditionalist institutions. He warns that the new internationalism put into practice by modern leaders "aims at nothing less than a transformation of human consciousness."

This excellent book is perhaps the most courageous one of its kind, and certainly, the only book to so deftly challenge the therapeutic statists on their own turf.

Professor Gottfried's book might well be titled "On Our Present Discontents." He provides an erudite analysis of multiculturalism and its causes, many of which Gottfried locates in a secularized version of the religious impulse for reform. The topic has drawn many authors, but Gottfried's work stands apart on many levels. It is openly conservative and deeply critical of multicultualism, while displaying a more sophisticated view and greater knowledge than others on the right who gained fame from talk shows or think tanks. Gottfried avoids the jargon that clots most academic writing, and makes a clearer case than such defenders of multiculturalism as Martha Nussbaum and Amy Guttmann. Unlike almost all other writers on both sides of the question, he places the American experience in a wider context and compares it with similar trends in Europe and Canada. Widely read in German, French, and Italian, he has a solid grasp of European politics. Few others works discuss multuculturalism in Europe so well or explain the populist movements that have arisen in reaction to it. For that perspective alone, the book is worth the price of admission.

The relationship between religion--particularly the "Protestant Deformation" Gottfried cites--deserves more attention than it receives. Historians have noted the role of the 19th century "Social Gospel" and Finneyite Christianity, while theologians have described many 20th century political movements as basically religious in their motivation. Gottfried describes multiculturalism as an American export, but he also discusses how the decline of traditional Christianity in Europe and European-derived societies provided fertile ground. On this point too, the book makes an important contribution that neither side of the debate can afford to neglect.

Gottfried describes this book as a follow up to After Liberalism, a more philosophical and historical work that addressed the question of how liberalism shifted from the "juste milieu" of 19th century Europeans like Francois Guizot and William Gladstone to the late 20th century welfare state. That volume was a modern classic of conservative thought, and the current book is a worthy successor.

...I first heard of Gottfried when a Jewish Neoconservative called him a 'self-hating' Jew. Leftist Jews and Neoconservative Jews call each other 'self-hating' Jews who know nothing about Jewish history, and both so label the Gottfrieds and Rothbards.

Unlike journalistic popularizers of Neoconservative ideas that support the Managerial State in all its Big Brother growth, Gottfried is a scholar who writes not for the seventh grade reading levels of most recent college graduates but for others who also have the ability to follow ideas. If you think that Jonah Goldberg is intelligent and well read and writes well about complex issues, then Gottfried will be over your head.

Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt is a must read for anyone wishing to know how and why we have come to have a centralized Welfare State that uses its powers to wage cultural war against middle American values and identities. All those who have a stake in that Big Government and profit by it if only to escalate themsleves at the expense of traditional values, small government-inclined middle America (Marxists, socialists, Feminists, Afrocentrists, Queer Theorists, Randians, Neoconservatives, military-industrial complex profiteers, soccer moms with good intentions, etc.) also have a vested interest in making certain Gottfried's ideas remain known only by a few who have looked outside the box as defined by the powers-that-be in the two political parties and in liberal academia and journalism.

If you are unwilling to accept the consensus passively, you need to read, to purchase, both Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt and After Liberalism.

This richly-learned and thought-provoking book seeks to explain how and why multiculturalism has acquired an iron grip on the governments, schools, churches, and so on of the West. Building on his earlier After Liberalism, Professor Gottfried describes how increasingly Orwellian welfare states in America, Europe, Canada, and Australia are cramming political correctness down the throats of their subjects, literally at the point of a gun. Gottfried illustrates with a wealth of chilling anecdotes. Thousands of German journalists are tried every year, and thousands are in prison, for expressing their opinions. Canadian courts enforce hate speech codes. And so on. All too clearly, modern liberalism has nothing to do with liberty. Rather, it's all about social engineering, seeking to work a permanent revolution in the soul. This naturally raises the question, why do Westerners stand for this self-righteous bullying? Gottfried advances a provocative explanation: Protestant culture, with its long stress on social guilt, individual shame, and public confession of sins and guilt, predisposes Westerners to swallow multiculturalism's will-corroding poison of unearned guilt and meekly submit to oppression and humiliation. Mainstream Protestant Christianity's long history of sympathy for the "oppressed," the Social Gospel, and guilt-ridden but self-righteous crusades to reform other people make Gottfried's thesis plausible. A true scholar rather than a slapdash neoconservative journalist doing a little shallowly-researched, skin-deep PC-bashing to push his career along, Gottfried is thorougly well-informed about political developments at home and abroad, and is at home in foreign-language newspapers and scholarly literature. Not only does his erudition give his critique persuasive authority, he writes at a high conceptual level with considerable skill and occasional bite. Being administered by true believers, multiculturalist regimes, he maintains, may not be able to control immigration, hence may import a hostile population which may one day bring them down. At this distance, Gottfried's pessimism about our prospects unfortunately looks justified. A penetrating, illuminating, and sobering book unafraid to call attention to politically incorrect truths, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt is not for the fainthearted seeking to be jollied along with pap.

In this book, Paul Gottfried analyses a pattern now common to all western democratic (formally, at least) societies: the evolution of the State, from its classical role to a managerial (therapeutic) one, intending to realize not the marxist utopia - collectivism, nationalizations, agrarian reformation, central planification and egalitarianism -, but its substitutive and heir, the multicultural utopia.

To achieve it, the therapeutic State doesn't hesitate to have resource to the same methods of social engineering formerly used by marxists, in order to change and constrain its citizens to accept without resistence the new reality, showing towards the opponents of this one an intense intolerance and a high level of dogmaticism, interfering and even restraining their freedoms, very especially, freedom of speech, forcing such citizens to be "good" from a multicultural point of view, to be sensitive and uncritic with issues like third world immigration, the devaluation of european historical past or the exaltation of non-european cultural achievements, everything under pain of severe fines or prision terms.

Obviously, in this task the therapeutic State has its allies: left political parties and also, quite surprisingly, center-right parties (they pretend to look politically sophisticated), academia, liberal protestant christianism (although I think, contrarily to Paul Gottfried, that multicultural sectarianism is much more owed to the survival and persistence of marxism spirit and political practice among western lofty minded intellectuality, that was not affected by the ideological bankrupcy of the eastern european real socialism, than to liberal protestant christianism - this last one being no more than a subproduct of that first one) and media - a "de facto" thought police.

The book is very interesting and quite accurately describes the not so soft totalitarianism that now is embracing North America and the entire Europe.

The oppression many of us feel comes, Mr. Gottried ponderously explains, from an Orwellian therapeutic state apparatus, determined to forcefully mold its guilty subjects into a subdued, penitent mass that not only behaves with all political correctness, but thinks only the pure thoughts of the virtues of diversity and the desirability of unconstrained immigration. He correctly sees that the welfare state has now become the transformative force throughout the West, using its powerful coercive tools of affirmative action, the school system, and the penal code to force all white European societies to strive toward a sort of utopian multicultural society, where "we all just get along."

After giving many examples illustrating the trends, he launches into his explanation. As far as I can make out, his argument is that secularism has weakened Protestantism, with all its rituals of guilt, penance and salvation, which, to satisfy our innate psychological imperitives, was transformed into a public expression of expunging our historical guilts with charitable acts toward the unfortunates of the third world--especially by letting them into our territories where they have full access to the cash in our welfare system.

The truth of his observations on the prevalent trends is clear to anyone who reads a newspaper.

And, I suppose, there may be something to this theory, ably set forth in this work, but I think Mr. Gottfried is plain wrong about the cause of the trends. My own inclination is to exonerate Protestants, and instead point the finger at the dominating force of the mass media, which Gottfried almost totally ignores. I don't think he watches TV much. The government, in realistic day to day terms, hardly ever talks to me, nor do the Protestant elite, but the media hammers away at me every day.

It seems to me that Kevin MacDonald has a much firmer grip on this. The cause is Jewish group solidarity, the tool is the media that they dominate, and their goal is weakening the West. They feel more safe and comfortable in a society with several other minoriities, rather than one with an overwhelmingly White, European culture. Pretty simple, really.

Like Pat Buchanan, Paul Gottfried understands that Western civilization is dying from within. There is the matter of low birth rates and high third world immigration. But behind all this, is a lack of faith in the very survival of the West, not just among the ruling elies, but from an easily cowered public as well. This does not only mean a lack of religious faith, but a belief that Western civilization stands only for an evil past and as such, is not worth saving. After reading The Death of the West, I did not think any book could match Buchanan's opus. For its power and originality, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt is a book that does just that.

Whilst the observation is hardly original, it still deserves emphasizing: America's finest, most courageous university presses are the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries' nearest equivalent to those medieval monks who kept civilized scholarship's lamp burning while, outside the cloisters, Goths and Huns rampaged. Such presses have placed all of us who care for the life of the mind into an intellectual and moral debt that we have no chances of repaying. As a good example of what they can achieve - not just in terms of disseminating sharp and astute prose, but in conveying it via fine, clear, typo-free print on satisfyingly opaque paper - we need only examine MULTICULTURALISM AND THE POLITICS OF GUILT.

This quietly and learnedly devastating appraisal of Political Correctness in all its forms is an authoritative - indeed, indispensable - survey of intellectual corruption, if not from China to Peru, then at least in Europe and the Western Hemisphere (by no means the United States alone). There should be no doubt about Paul Gottfried's expertise, breadth of reading, courtesy towards antagonists as well as towards allies, and diagnostic skill. His latest book is not cheap, but it represents very good value for money.