Let them eat cake: a love letter to multiculturalists.

Among the folks who call themselves multiculturalists, there are three varieties, the playful, the grave, and an intermediate type, the pseudo-grave.

The playful multiculturalists (PMs) are those who like to utter the rhetoric of multiculturalism while not really believing it. Using this rhetoric puts them in a position where nobody who really matters can trump them morally, while allowing them to pull moral rank on everyone else. Their actual feeling is that a little bit of cultural diversity is great fun, at the same time trusting that everyone has enough good sense not to carry things to extremes.

Their patron saint, the patron of all those who play with fire, is Marie Antoinette, who, with her friends, would occasionally milk a cow while pretending to be a peasant woman. Poor Marie! She never intended of course that everyone should really be equal; that the distinction of the orders should be abolished; that aristocracy and royalty should be done away with. She was only playing. Peasants and shepherds were cute and lovable, to be sure, at least when seen through the eyes of Francois Boucher. But in the last analysis, peasants were peasants and aristocrats aristocrats, and never the twain should meet. Bent playfully under the cow, Marie would have been shocked to think that others would eventually become deadly serious about the game she was engaged in, even to the point of cutting off a few heads (including, alas, Marie's own), the better to guarantee that there would be no essential distinction in the world between peasants and queens.

The grave multiculturalists (GMs) are those prepared to go all the way. Their patron saint, the patron of all who pursue abstract principles to their logical conclusion, even when that conclusion is insane, is Maximilien Robespierre. Robespierre was a bright, serious, well-intentioned young man with a remarkable capacity for sinking his teeth into the fashionable wisdom of his age and not letting go. If he became one of history's great serial killers, it was not because of a sadistic bent in his character. It was because he had a clear head; he saw better than others that one who says A must say B; he understood what was entailed by the adoption of a certain theory of republican freedom and virtue.

The PMs are at heart monoculturalists who get great pleasure out of talking the multiculturalist game. To be fair to them, they are not totally disingenuous about this. Themselves masters of mainstream culture, they know how to have fun on weekends with cultural diversity, making brief excursions into the subcultural fringe. How drab life would be if it contained nothing but Wall Street, computers, and the New York Times. Thank God for Mexican restaurants, Cajun music, and Colombian cocaine.

But the GMs, who are not socially so well situated as the better-educated and higher-income PMs, do not recognize this distinction between the mainstream and the fringe; or if they do recognize it, it is only to turn it on its head--placing diversity at the heart of things, while permitting a degree of uniformity on superficial matters. Unlike the PMs, but very much like Saint Robespierre, they have no lightness of touch, no sense of humor. They are terribly in earnest. They are a new edition of the terrible simplifiers Burckhardt warned us about. If for the PMs multiculturalism is a game, for the GMs it is a religion.

To complete the typology, let us note the intermediate variety: the pseudo-GMs, who are PMs that imagine they are GMs. These people live under the illusion that they are prepared to go all the way with multiculturalism, but only because they have no clear idea what "going all the way" really means. We may confidently predict that they will recoil in horror once they understand. Their patron saint is the chaplain in Shaw's Saint Joan, who was very eager to have Joan put to death until he actually witnessed the burning, only then realizing its horrendous nature; whereupon he repented of his fiery, punitive zeal and reformed his life; leading another character to remark, "Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination?"

All three varieties have adopted the ideology of multiculturalism, which proclaims that the more cultural diversity American society has, the better. But this proposition is lunacy. If you want to see cultural diversity run rampant, look at the former Yugoslavia. Look at the Serbs and the Croats and the Muslims. There is multiculturalism for you, pressed down and running over.

"No, no," I shall be told. "You don't understand. When we talk about multiculturalism, we mean cultural diversity accompanied by tolerance. Mere diversity all by itself isn't the point. And diversity accompanied by intolerance is exactly the opposite of what we have in mind. The trouble in Yugoslavia is not too much multiculturalism but too little. If only the Serbs, Croats, and Muslims would accept our ideology (as you call it), they could live in peace together."

This sounds a bit like saying that if only everyone were honest, then we could do away with locks and police officers; or if wishes were horses, then beggars would fide. Such assertions are true but meaningless. The question is, how do we create conditions that will make it possible--better still, probable--that culturally diverse groups can live in peace within a single society?

There is room in America for a certain amount of cultural diversity, as the entire history of the United States demonstrates. This nation has had a plentiful supply of diversity based on religion, region, education, social class, race, ethnicity, age, and a few other factors. But at the same time we have had an immense amount of consensus: common language, common political theory, common spirit of business enterprise, common work ethic, common idea of education, common forms of recreation and entertainment, even something approaching a vague common religion (what Robert Bellah calls the American "civil religion"). The diversity has been possible only because the consensus has been so powerful. In fact this strong cultural consensus has made diversity not merely endurable but notably beneficial in many respects.

Yet if we heed the siren call of the radical multiculturalists and decide to push for cultural diversity on a whole-hog basis, we'll have to dismantle this broad cultural consensus. And of course once we dismantle it, peaceful diversity will have become impossible, for the culturally diverse among us will have no common ground on which to stand.

For a society to live in peace with itself, for its members to be able to cooperate with one another in a productive fashion, its agreements have to be of primary importance, while its disagreements are of only secondary importance. And these agreements have to be of a more positive content than a mere agreement to disagree; that is, we have to agree on something more than mere tolerance for diversity. This need for consensus is, or at least should be, the most obvious of sociological truths. Yet this obvious truth is being ignored today in America. It is being ignored not only by the GMs, those Robespierres of multiculturalism; it is being ignored too by a lot of people who should know better, including many present-day Marie Antoinettes, who (if I may mix, or rather churn, metaphors) are milking cows while American culture burns.