order to give due recognition to the hitherto excluded. The
background premise of these demands is that recognition
forges identity, particularly in its Fanonist application: dominant
groups tend to entrench their hegemony by inculcating
an image of inferiority in the subjugated. The struggle for
freedom and equality must therefore pass through a revision
of these images. Multicultural curricula are meant to help in
this process of revision.
Although it is not often stated clearly, the logic behind
some of these demands seems to depend upon a premise
that we owe equal respect to all cultures. This emerges from
the nature of the reproach made to the designers of traditional
curricula. The claim is that the judgments of worth on
which these latter were supposedly based were in fact corrupt,
were marred by narrowness or insensitivity or, even
worse, a desire to downgrade the excluded. The implication
seems to be that absent these distorting factors, true judgments
of value of different works would place all cultures
more or less on the same footing. Of course, the attack could
come from a more radical, neo-Nietzschean standpoint,
which questions the very status of judgments of worth as
such, but short of this extreme step (whose coherence I
doubt), the presumption seems to be of equal worth.
I would like to maintain that there is something valid in
this presumption, but that the presumption is by no means
unproblematic, and involves something like an act of faith.
As a presumption, the claim is that all human cultures that
have animated whole societies over some considerable
stretch of time have something important to say to all human
beings. I have worded it in this way to exclude partial cultural
milieux within a society, as well as short phases of a
major culture. There is no reason to believe that, for instance,
the different art forms of a given culture should all be
of equal, or even of considerable, value; and every culture
can go through phases of decadence.
But when I call this claim a “presumption,” I mean that it
is a starting hypothesis with which we ought to approach the
order to give due recognition to the hitherto excluded. The
background premise of these demands is that recognition
forges identity, particularly in its Fanonist application: dominant
groups tend to entrench their hegemony by inculcating
an image of inferiority in the subjugated. The struggle for
freedom and equality must therefore pass through a revision
of these images. Multicultural curricula are meant to help in
this process of revision.
Although it is not often stated clearly, the logic behind
some of these demands seems to depend upon a premise
that we owe equal respect to all cultures. This emerges from
the nature of the reproach made to the designers of traditional
curricula. The claim is that the judgments of worth on
which these latter were supposedly based were in fact corrupt,
were marred by narrowness or insensitivity or, even
worse, a desire to downgrade the excluded. The implication
seems to be that absent these distorting factors, true judgments
of value of different works would place all cultures
more or less on the same footing. Of course, the attack could
come from a more radical, neo-Nietzschean standpoint,
which questions the very status of judgments of worth as
such, but short of this extreme step (whose coherence I
doubt), the presumption seems to be of equal worth.
I would like to maintain that there is something valid in
this presumption, but that the presumption is by no means
unproblematic, and involves something like an act of faith.
As a presumption, the claim is that all human cultures that
have animated whole societies over some considerable
stretch of time have something important to say to all human
beings. I have worded it in this way to exclude partial cultural
milieux within a society, as well as short phases of a
major culture. There is no reason to believe that, for instance,
the different art forms of a given culture should all be
of equal, or even of considerable, value; and every culture
can go through phases of decadence.
But when I call this claim a “presumption,” I mean that it
is a starting hypothesis with which we ought to approach the
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