Education and the Racist Road to Barbarism; G. Reisman

In an effort to eliminatesuch allegedWestern and European "bias," schools are altering the Dr. Reisman is professor of economics at Pepperdine University's School of Business and Management in Los Angeles, and is the author of The Government Against the Economy. This article is reprinted by permission from the April 30, 1990, issue of The Intel lectual Activist,RD. Box 582, Murray Hill Station, New York, NY 10156. Copyright © 1990, The Intellectual Activist. way in which history,literature, and the arts are beingtaught.Recentchangesat StanfordUniver sity, where a course on Western civilizationwas replacedbyoneinwhichnon-Westernideashadto be included,are only one case in point.The revi sionsin the historycurriculumin California'spub licschoolsystem,to emphasizeIndianandAfrican cultures,are another.Curriculaand textbooksare being widely rewritten, and, as evidence of the depthofthechanges,the Timesreportsthatefforts are under way "to reconstruct the history of Africantribes,going beyondrelYingon accounts of Western travelers to examining indigenous sources,often oral, and adaptinganthropological approaches."

The implications of these changes are enor mous. The acceptanceof the "Eurocentrism"cri tique and its denial of such propositions as "ColumbusdiscoveredAmerica"speaksvolumes aboutthe stateofthe educationalestablishmentin the United States and the intellectualestablish mentin general. Inorderto understandtheimplications,itis first necessaryto remindoneselfwhatWesternciviliza tion is. From a historical perspective, Western civilizationembracestwo mainperiods:the era of Greco-Roman civilizationand the era of modern Westerncivilization,whichlater encompassesthe rediscoveryof Greco-Roman civilizationin the late MiddleAges, and the periodsof the Renais sance,the Enlightenment,and the IndustrialRev olution. Modern Western civilizationcontinues down to the present moment, of course, as the dominant force in the culture of the countries of Western Europe and the United States and the other countriessettledby the descendantsof West Europeans. It is an increasinglypowerfulforce in the rapidlyprogressingcountriesof the Far East, such as Japan, Taiwan,and South Korea, whose economiesrest on "Western"foundationsin every essentialrespect.

Fromthe perspectiveofintellectualand cultural content,Westerncivilizationrepresentsan under standingand acceptanceof the following:the laws oflogic;the conceptofcausalityand,consequently, of a universeruled by natural laws intelligibleto man; on these foundations,the whole knowncor pus of the laws of mathematics and science;the individual'sself-responsibilitybasedonhisfreewill to choosebetweengoodand evil;the valueof man above all other specieson the basis of his unique possessionof the power of reason; the value and competenceof the individualhumanbeingand his corollary possessionof individual rights, among themthe rightto life,liberty,property,and the pur suitof happiness;the need for limitedgovernment and for the individual'sfreedomfrom the state;on this entire preceding foundation, the validity of capitalism,with its unprecedentedand continuing progress, capital accumulation, and rising living standards;in addition,the importanceofvisualarts and literature depictingman as capable of facing the worldwithconfidencein his powerto succeed, and musicfeaturingharmonyand melody.

WesternCivilization Is Opento Everyone Once one recalls what Western civilizationis, the most vital thing to realize about it is that it is open to everyone.Indeed,importantelements of "Western"civilizationdid not even originatein the West. The civilization of the Greeks and Romans incorporated significant aspects of sci ence that were handed down from Egypt and Babylon.Modern "Western"civilizationincludes contributions from people living in the Middle East and China during the Dark Ages, when WesternEuropehadrevertedto virtualbarbarism. Indeed,duringthe Dark Ages,"Western"civiliza tionresidedmuchmorein the MiddleEast than in WesternEurope. (It is conceivablethat if present trends continue,in another centuryit mightreside more in the Far East than in the West.) 365 The truth is that just as one does not have to be from France to like French-fried potatoes or from New York to like a New York steak, one does not have to be born in Western Europe or be of West European descent to admire Western civilization,or, indeed,even to helpbuildit. West ern civilization is not a product of geography.

It is a bodyof knowledgeand values. Any individ ual, any society,is potentiallycapableof adopting it and thereby becoming "Westernized." The rapidlyprogressingeconomiesof the Far East are all "Western"insofaras they rest on a foundation of logic, mathematics, science, technology, and capitalism-exactly the same logic, mathematics, science,technology,and capitalismthat are essen tial features of "Western"civilization. For the caseof a Westernizedindividual,I must think of myself. I am not of West European descent.All four of my grandparentscame to the United States from Russia, about a century ago. Modern Westerncivilizationdid not originate in Russiaand hardlytouchedit. The onlyconnection my more remote ancestors had with the civiliza tion of Greece and Rome was probablyto help in lootingand plunderingit. Nevertheless,I am thor oughlya Westerner.I am a Westernerbecauseof the ideas and values I hold. I have thoroughly internalizedall of the leadingfeatures of Western civilization.Theyare nowmy ideasandmy values.

Holdingthese ideasand valuesas I do, I wouldbe a WesternerwhereverI livedand wheneverI was born. I identifywith Greece and Rome, and not withmy ancestorsofthat time,becauseI share the ideasandvaluesofGreeceand Rome,not thoseof my ancestors.To put it bluntly,my ancestorswere savages-certainly up to about a thousand years ago, and, for all practical purposes, probably as recentlyas four or five generationsago. I know nothing for certain about my great grandparents, but if they lived in rural Russia in the middleof the 19th century,they were almost certainlytotallyilliterate,highlysuperstitious,and primitive in every way. On winter nights, they probably slept with farm animals in their hut to keep warm, as was once a common practice in Northern Europe, and were personallyfilthy and lice-infested.I see absolutelynothing of value in their "wayof life,"if it can be calleda way of life, and I am immeasurablygratefulthat my grandpar ents had the goodsenseto abandonit and cometo America,so that I could have the opportunityof 366 THE FREEMAN • OCTOBER 1990 becoming a "Westerner" and, better still, an American "Westerner," because, in most respects, since colonial times, the United States has always been, intellectually and culturally, the most West ern of the Western countries.

Thus, I am a descendant of savages who dwelt in Eastern Europeand before that probably the steppes of Asia-who has been Westernized and now sees the world entirely through a Western "lens," to use the term of the critics of "Eurocen trism." Of course, it is not really a lens through which I see the world. It is much more fundamen tal than that. I have developed a Western mind, a mind enlightened and thoroughly transformed by the enormous body of knowledge that represents the substance of Western civilization, and I now see the world entirely on the basis of that knowl edge. For example, I see the world on the foundation of the laws of logic, mathematics, and science that I have learned. And whenever something new or unexpected happens, which I do not understand, I know that it must nevertheless have a cause which I am capable of discovering. In these respects, I differ profoundly from my savage ancestors, who lacked the knowledge to see the world from a sci entific perspective and who probably felt helpless and terrified in the face of anything new or un known because, lacking the principle of causality and knowledge of the laws of logic, they simply had no basis for expecting to be able to come to an understanding of it.

It is on the basis of the same foundation of knowledge that I regard the discoverer of the Western hemisphere to be Columbus, rather than the very first human beings to arrive on the North American continent (probably across a land bridge from Asia), and rather than the Norwegian Leif Ericson. I consider Columbus to be the dis coverer not because of any such absurd reason as a preference for Europeans over Asiatics (Leif Ericson was as much a European as Columbus), but because it was Columbus who opened the Western hemisphere to the civilization I have made my own. Columbus was the man who made it possible to bring to these shores my ideas and values.It is not from the perspective of the resi dence of my ancestors, who were certainly not Ital ian or Spanish or even West European, that I regard Columbus as the discoverer of America, but from the perspective of the residence of my ideas and values. Just as at an earlier time, they resided in Greece and Rome rather than in the Russia of my ancestors, so in the 15th and 16th cen turies, the home of my ideas and values was in Western Europe. I hold Columbus to have been the discoverer of America from that perspective.

This is the perspective that any educated person would hold. There is no need for me to dwell any further on my own savage ancestors. The plain truth is that everyone's ancestors were savages-indeed, at least 99.5 percent of everyone's ancestors were savages, even in the case of descendants of the founders of the world's oldest civilizations. For mankind has existed on earth for a million years, yet the very oldest of civilizationsas judged by the criterion of having possessed a written lan guage-did not appear until less than 5,000years ago. The ancestors of those who today live in Britain or France or most of Spain were savages as recently as the time of Julius Caesar, slightly more than 2,000 years ago. Thus, on the scale of mankind's total presence on earth, today's Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Spaniards earn an ancestral savagery rating of 99.8 percent. The ancestors of present-day Germans and Scandina vians were savages even more recently, and thus today's Germans and Scandinavians probably deserve an ancestral savagery rating of at least 99.9 percent.

It is important to stress these facts to be aware how little significance is to be attached to the members of any race or linguistic group achieving civilization sooner rather than later. Between the I descendants of the world's oldest civilizationsand those who might first aspire to civilization at the present moment, there is a difference of at most one-half of one percent on the time scale of man's existence on earth. The Standardfor Judginga Civilization These observations should confirm the fact that there is no reason for believing that civilization is in any way a property of any particular race or ethnic group. It is strictly an intellectualmatter -ultimately, a matter of the presence or absence of certain fundamental ideas underlying the acquisition of further knowledge. Those peoples who possess a written language EDUCATION AND THE RACIST ROAD TO BARBARISM 367 may be called civilized, inasmuch as writing is an indispensable means for the transmission of sub stantial knowledge, and thus for the accumulation of knowledge from generation to generation.

Those who possess not only a written language but also knowledge of the laws of logic and the princi ple of causality are in a position to accumulate and transmit incomparably more knowledge than peo ple who possess merely the art of writing alone. On this basis, Greco-Roman civilizationis on a higher plane than any that had preceded it. Finally, a civilization which possesses still fur ther fundamental applications of human reason, such as the far more extensive development and elaboration of the principles of mathematics and science, the existence of the freedoms of speech and press, and the development of a division of labor economy, is a higher civilization than even that of Greece and Rome. (The freedoms of speech and press are an essential guarantee of the individual's right to disseminate knowledge with out being stopped by the fears or superstitions of any group backed by the coercive power of the state. A division of labor economy makes possible a corresponding multiplication of the amount of knowledge applied to production and to meeting the needs of human life, for such knowledge exists essentially in proportion to the number of separate occupations being practiced, each with its own spe cialized body of knowledge. Equally or even more important, a division of labor economy means that geniuses can devote their talents full time to such fields as science, education, invention, and busi ness, with a corresponding progressive increase in knowledge and improvement in human life.) Such a civilization, of course, is our very own, modern Western civilization-incomparably the greatest civilization which has ever existed, and which, until fairly recently, had repeatedly been carried to its very highest points in most respects right here in the United States.

The fact that civilization is an intellectual mat ter is not known to the critics of "Eurocentrism." In their view, Western civilization is a matter not even so much of geography as it is of racialmem bership.It is, as they see it, the civilization of the whiteman. In reporting the changes in California's world history curriculum, the Times notes, signif icantly, that Hispanic, Asian, and black students now make up a majority of the 4.4 million pupils in the state. It quotes the coauthor of the new curriculum as saying many educators believe that "people who have non-European backgrounds don't feel their antecedents lie in Europe." Another critic of "Eurocentrism," who is de scribed as "heading an overhauling of the public school curriculum of Camden, N.J., to stress ... a more' Afrocentric and Latinocentric' approach," is quoted as saying: "We are not living in a Western country. The American project is not yet completed. It is only in the eyes of the Euro centrists who see it as a Western project, which means to hell with the rest of the people who have yet to create the project."

In these statements, Western civilization is clearly identified with people of a certain type, namely, the West Europeans and their descen dants, who are white. Students descended from Asiatjcs or Africans, it is assumed, can feel at home only to the extent that the curriculum is revised to give greater stress to "the ancient civi lizations of China, India and Africa, the growth of Islam and the development of sub-Saharan Africa." The critics of "Eurocentrism" proclaim themselves to be opponents of racism. In fact, they accept exactly the same false premise they claim to oppose-namely, that civilization,or the lack of it, is racially determined. In earlier centuries, men of European descent observed the marked cultural inferiority of the native populations of Africa, Asia, and the West ern hemisphere, and assumed that the explanation lay in a racial inferiority of these peoples. In pass ing this judgment, they forgot the cultural state of their own ancestors, which was as much below their own as was that of any of these peoples. They also overlooked the very primitive cultural state of many Europeans then living in the eastern part of the continent, and of Caucasians livingin the Mid dle East. Even more important, they failed to see how in accepting racism, they contradicted· the essential "Western" doctrine of individual free will and individual responsibility for choices made.

For in condemning people as inferior on the basis of their race, they were holding individuals morally responsible for circumstances over which they had absolutely no control. At the same time, they credited themselves with accomplishments which were hardly their creations, but those of a comparative handful of other individuals, most of whom had happened to be of the same race and who, ironically enough, had had to struggle against 368 THE FREEMAN • OCTOBER 1990 the indifference or even outright hostility of the great majority of the members of their own race in order to create civilization. The New Racismand the Devaluationof Knowledge Today, the critics of "Eurocentrism" rightly refuse to accept any form of condemnation for their racial membership. They claim to hold that race is irrelevant to morality and that therefore people of every race are as good as people of every other race. But then they assume that if people of all races are equally good, all civilizationsand cul turesmustbe equallygood. They derive civilization and culture from race, just as the European racists did. And this is why they too must be called racists.

They differ from the European racists only in that while the latter started with the judgment of an inferior civilizationor culture and proceeded back wards to the conclusion of an inferior race, the for mer begin with the judgment of an equally good race and proceed forward to the conclusion of an equally. good civilization or culture. The error of both sets of racists is the same: the belief that civi lization and culture are racially determined. The racism of these newer racists, which is now being imposed on the educational system, implies a radical devaluation of civilization, knowledge, and education. The new racists do not want stu dents to study non-Western civilizations and the conditions of primitive peoples from the perspec tive of seeing how they lag behind Western civiliza tion and what they might do to catch up. Study from that perspective would be denounced as see ing the world through a "Western lens." It would be considered offensive to people of non-West European origin.

No, what they want is to conduct the study of the various civilizations and even the state of out right savagery itself in a way that makes all appear equal. It is assumed, for example, that black students can feel themselves to be the equal of white students only if their sub-Saharan ances tors are presented as, in a fundamental sense, cul turally equivalentto modern West Europeans or Americans. Now such a program means the explicit oblit eration of distinctions among levels of civiliza tion, and between civilization and savagery. It presents ignorance as the equivalent of knowledge, and superstition as the equivalent of sci ence. Everything-logic, philosophy, science, law, technology-is to be ignored, and a culture limited to the level of making dugout canoes is to be regarded as the equivalent of one capable of launching space ships. And all this is for the alleged sake of not offending anyone who sup posedly must feel inferior if such a monumental fraud is not committed.

I believe, contrary to the expectations of the new racists, that their program must be grossly offensive to the very students it is designed to reas sure. I know that I would be personally outraged if I were told that my intellectual capacities and per sonal values had been irrevocably defined for me by my ancestors and that now I was to think of myself in terms of the folkways of Russian peas ants. I believe that if my ancestors had been Africans and, for example, I wanted to be an artist, I could readily accept the fact that art produced on the basis of a knowledge of perspective, geometry, human anatomy, and the refraction of light was a higher form of art than that produced in ignorance of such considerations. I would readily accept the fact that the latter type of art was, indeed, primi tive. I would not feel that I was unable to learn these disciplines merely because my ancestors or other contemporary members of my race had not.

I would feel the utmost contempt for the deliber ate, chosen primitiveness of those "artists" (almost allwhite) who had reverted to the level of art of my (and their) primitive ancestors. Race is not the determinant of culture. Not only is Western civilization open to the members of every race, but its present possessors are also potentially capable of losing it, just as the people of the Western Roman Empire once lost the high degree of civilization they had achieved. What makes the acceptance of the "Eurocentrism" cri tique so significant is that it so clearly reveals just how tenuous our ability to maintain Western civi lization has become. WesternCivilizationand the Stateof Education The preservation of Western civilization is not automatic. In the span of less than a century, virtu ally the entire population at the end consists of people who were not alive at the beginning. West ern civilization, or any civilization, can continue EDUCATION AND THE RACIST ROAD TO BARBARISM 369 only insofar as its intellectual substance lives on in the minds of new generations.

And it can do so only if it is imparted to young minds through education. Educationis theformal processoftransmittingthe intellectualsubstanceof civilizationfrom one generationto the next and therebydevelopingthe uncultivatedminds of chil dren intothoseofcivilizedadults.Western civiliza tion is imparted to young minds in the teaching of Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics, no less than in the teaching of the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle or the plays of Shakespeare. It is imparted in the teaching of every significant subject, from arithmetic to nuclear physics, from reading and writing to the causes of the rise and fall of civilizations.Wherever the intellectual sub stance of Western civilization is known, its trans mission to the minds of students is virtually coex tensivewith theprocessofeducation.For the intel lectual substance of Western civilizationis nothing other than the fundamentals underlying the high est levels of knowledge attained anywhere on earth, and if the purpose of education is to impart knowledge, then its purpose is to impart Western civilization.

Thus, to the extent that the process of education is undermined, the whole of civilization must also be undermined, starting a generation later. These results will appear more and more striking as time goes on and as more and more defectively educat ed people take the place of those whose education was better. The worsening effects willlikely be fur ther intensified as those whose own education was defective become educators themselves and thus cause succeeding generations to be still more poorly educated. Education in the United States has been in obvi ous decline for decades, and, in some waysthat are critical but not obvious, perhaps for generations. The decline has become visiblein such phenomena as the rewriting of college textbooks to conform with the more limited vocabularies of present-day students. It is visible in the functional illiteracy of large numbers of high school and even college graduates, in their inability to articulate their thoughts or to solve relatively simple problems in mathematics or even plain arithmetic, and in their profound lack of elementary knowledge of science and history.

I believe that the decline in education isprobably responsible for the widespread use of drugs.To live in the midst of a civilized society with a level of knowledge closer perhaps to that of primitive man than to what a civilized adult requires (which, regrettably, is the intellectual state of many of today's students and graduates) must be a terrifying experience, urgently callingfor some kind of relief, and drugs may appear to many to be the solution. I believe that this also accounts for the relative ly recent phenomenon of the public's fear of sci ence and technology. Science and technology are increasingly viewed in reality as they used to be humorously depicted in Boris Karloff or Bela Lugosi movies, namely, as frightening "experi ments" going on in Frankenstein's castle, with large numbers of present-day American citizens casting themselves in a real-life role of terrified and angry Transylvanian peasants seeking to smash whatever emerges from such laboratories.

This attitude is the result not only of lack of edu cation in science, but more fundamentally, loss of the ability to think critically-an ability which contemporary education provides little or no basis for developing. Because of their growing lack of knowledge and ability to think, people are becoming increasingly credulous and quick to panic. Thus the critique of "Eurocentrism"-and any changes in curricula that may result from it-ean hardly be blamed for inaugurating the decline in American education. On the contrary, it is a prod uct of that decline. The fact that it is being accepted almost without opposition is evidence of how far the decline has already gone. Why CulturalRelativismPrevails The equivalence of all cultures, the equivalence of civilization and savagery,is the avowed claim of the doctrine of cultural relativism, which has long been accepted by practically the whole of the edu cational establishment. It in turn is a consequence of the still older, more fundamental doctrine that there is·no objective foundation for values-that all value-judgments are arbitrary and subjective.

The new racists are now merely cashing in on this view and attempting to apply it on the largest pos sible scale, in the process substantially altering the manner in which subjects are taught. Today's edu cational establishment has fewer compunctions about putting absurd ideas into practice, probably because of the deteriorated state of its own educa370 THE FREEMAN • OCTOBER 1990 tion. (Many of its members were educated in the 1960s, in the environment of the "student rebel lion.") The fact that the educational and intellectual establishments are fullyin agreement with the fun damental premises of the new racists helps to explain why even when their members are opposed to the "Eurocentrism" critique, they have nothing of substance to say against it. As reported by the Times, the objections raised amounted to nothing more than complaints about the difficulty of finding non-European writers, philosophers, and artists to replace the European ones dropped from the curricula, and grumblings about the lack of Americans able to teach authoritatively about non-European cultures.

In capitulating to the "Eurocentrism" critique, the educational establishment has reached the point of reducing education to a level below that of ordinary ward politics: education is now to be a matter of pressuregroup politics based on the totally false assumptions of racism. If there is a majority of black, Hispanic, or Asian students in an area, then that fact is to be allowed to deter mine the substance of education, in the belief that these groups somehow "secrete," as it were, a dif ferent kind of civilization and culture than do whites and require a correspondingly different kind of education. Colleges in the United States have demonstrat ed such utter philosophical corruption in connec tion with this subject that if there were a group of students willing to assert with pride their descent from the Vandals or Huns and to demand courses on the cultural contributions of their ancestors, the schools would provide such courses. All that the students would have to do to get their way is to threaten to burn down the campus.

But what best sums up everything involved is this: from now on, in the state of California, a stu dent is to go through 12 years of public school, and the explicit goal of his education is that at the end of it, if he envisions Columbus being greeted by spear-carrying savages, and he happens not to be white, he should identify with the savages-and if he does happen to be white, and therefore is allowed to identify with Columbus, he should not have any idea of why it is any better to identify with Columbus than with the savages. This is no longer an educational system. Its char acter has been completely transformed and it now clearly reveals itself to be what for many decades it has been in the process of becoming: namely, an agency working for the barbarization of youth. The value of education is derived from the value of civilization, whose guardian and perpetuator education is supposed to be. An educational sys tem dedicated to the barbarization of youth is a self-contradictory monstrosity that must be cast out and replaced with a true educational system.

But this can be done only by those who genuinely understand, and are able to defend, the objective value of Western civilization. D 371 Where Are the Sons of Liberty? by Norman S. Ream T he year was 1748 and Virginia, under a regulation of the Crown, was required to grant every Anglican clergyman in that colony an annual salary of 17,000pounds of tobac co. During the following decade there was asharp increase in the price of tobacco due to several crop failures. The Virginia Assembly, desiring no doubt that the clergy remain properly poor, passed what were referred to as the Two Penny Acts. These Acts set the value of the clergy's to bacco at twopence a pound, far below the market price. As could be expected, the clergy objected and brought suit. The dispute became known as the Parson's Cause and was appealed to the King's Privy Council which promptly annulled the law. Reverend James Maury brought suit in Virginia and won his case because the judges were bound by the Privy Council's decision. After the jury had heard Patrick Henry's defense, it awarded the Reverend Mr. Maury one penny in damages.