Are multicultural books a must for your beach bag?

As the lucky among us are packing their books for the beach, it’s time to ask: Is multiculturalism just a benign way to broaden our horizons or is multiculturalism, as defined by its advocates, positively pernicious?

Naturally, you’ll want to answer this question before deciding which books to toss into your portmanteau. 

New Criterion editor Roger Kimball argues that multiculturalism, far from pleasant and improving, is hostile to western values.

In a piece headlined “Institutionalizing Our Demise: America versus Multiculturalism,” Kimball  that “what generally travels under the name of ’multiculturalism’ is really a form of mono-cultural animus directed against the dominant culture.”

“In essence,” Kimball continues, “as [historian Samuel] Huntington notes, multiculturalism is ’anti-European’ civilization. ’It is basically an anti-Western ideology.’ The multiculturalists claim to be fostering a progressive cultural cosmopolitanism distinguished by superior sensitivity to the downtrodden and dispossessed. In fact, they encourage an orgy of self-flagellating liberal guilt as impotent as it is insatiable. The ’sensitivity’ of the multiculturalist is an index not of moral refinement but of moral vacuousness. As the French essayist Pascal Bruckner observed, “An overblown conscience is an empty conscience.”

Kimball’s piece is the tenth in a series on America and American institutions in the twenty-first century that will be published as collection this fall by Encounter Books.

Not in time for the beach, alas, but the thoughtful folks at Encounterhttp already have the ideal beach bag book for Inkwell readers–the tantalizingly entitled “Anti-Chomsky Reader,” edited by David Horowitz and Peter Collier.

From the promo copy: “According to the Chicago Tribune, Chomsky is ‘the most cited living author’ and ranks just below Plato and Sigmund Freud among the most cited authors of all time. While acknowledging that he is reviled in some quarters for his ferocious anti-Americanism and cavalier relationship with the factual record, a recent New Yorker profile calls Chomsky ‘one of the greatest minds of the 20th century.'”  

Inkwell loves the idea of an anti-reader about an anti-American!