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The Tribalization of America
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19844 |
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EDITORIAL
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| Issue
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5 / 1991 |
1,794 Words |
| Author
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Morton A. Kaplan
Editor and Publisher |
The Point/Counterpoint feature in Currents in Modern Thought this month features an exchange on the issue of group rights between Wayne Allen and Bernard Bell. Although Bell makes an eloquent case for group rights, I find his position unacceptable in principle and ultimately self-defeating in practice.
Yes, there is prejudice in America, much of it against blacks. But none is more damaging to the interests of the nation than that enacted into law by partisans of group rights. In California today, state law applies a numerical quota to ethnic groups that prevents Oriental (and also white) students from gaining admission to Berkeley unless they have nearly an A average and quite high boards. Young Orientals, the Chinese in particular, are some of our best and brightest, as demonstrated repeatedly in the Westinghouse science projects. They are the hope of a nation in which virtually half the graduate students in science, mathematics, and engineering are foreign.
Bell refers to the natural law presuppositions in the Declaration of Independence as a justification for group rights. I shall not dwell on the difficulties of asserting the existence of natural law in a twentieth-century intellectual context or of establishing what it would be or how it would apply to a situation of fact if there were such a phenomenon. The Declaration of Independence, independently of its natural law ground, does state the American ideal, which has had a transformative effect over time on national behavior. This ideal is that we are individuals with equal rights regardless of social class, ethnicity, religion, or sex, and that we are not dependent upon group membership for those rights. The Declaration referred to all men, not all groups.
Yes, our founders fell short of the ideal, as we also do. Yes, slavery was a crime against our common humanity. I would not want Mr. Bell to forget slavery any more than I wish to forget the Holocaust or the pogroms in my ancestral home. But a caution is warranted against excessive emphasis. Jesse Jackson may have been uncharitable and even un-Christian when, on a visit to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Israel, a number of years ago, he told Holocaust survivors that he was tired of hearing about the Holocaust. However, he was relating a human truth: that these who did not commit the crimes against us tire of hearing our complaints to them. This increases as time passes and as those who complain about those crimes neither experienced them nor know anyone who did.
Furthermore, it is a mistake to publicize
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