You’re right to point to Stove’s attack on ‘cultural relativism’ as an attack on a sort of cringing parody of ‘multiculturalism’. I withdraw my objection now I better understand your target. You have my vote in Kimball’s challenge: although, I would probably vote for any statistician quoting Montaigne

Best,

Peter

I agree with you that that definition of multiculturalism is to be embraced. Recall Montaigne on custom:

[T]he principal effect of the power of custom is to seize and ensnare us in such a way that it is hardly within out power to get ourselves back out its grip and return into ourselves to reflect and reason about its ordinances…Nations brought up to liberty and to ruling themselves consider any other form of government monstrous and contrary to nature. Those who are accustomed to monarchy do the same.

He also said that the habit, which leads to custom, is “a violent and treacherous schoolmistress.”

And of course, Stove many times reminded his readers of David Hume’s warnings about how easy “is becomes ought.”

But blind acceptance and adherence to custom is not the opposite of the standard definition of multiculturalism as it’s used today. Instead, multiculturalism is loosely defined as “approbation of any custom that is different than Western because it is different.” As Stove said in The Plato Cult (quoted in the Franklin essay linked above)

The cultural-relativist, for example, inveighs bitterly against our science-based, white-male cultural perspective. She says that it is not only injurious but cognitively limiting. Injurious it may be; or again it may not. But why does she believe that it is cognitively limiting? Why, for no other reason in the world, except this one: that it is ours. Everyone really understands, too, that this is the only reason. But since this reason is also generally accepted as a sufficient one, no other is felt to be needed. (Stove, 1991, 167)

Thus, multiculturalism does not overly emphasize the adoption of other culture’s habits (hence my example of the fair), but it never passes up on an opportunity to disparage habits of our own culture.

You’re on the money with the class “Creative Robbery.” I just looked it up. At the Harvard Law School it goes by the name “Tax and Social Policy.” The syllabus states in part

The tax code is increasingly used as an instrument of social policy…This intensive writing course will explore legal, economic, and political considerations relevant to the formulation and design of social policies implemented, in whole or in part, through federal tax policy.

If that’s not creative, then I don’t know what is.

As a one-time student of David Stove’s I’m going to offer a mild defense of multiculturalism and even of ‘diversity’ in his name. David was nothing if not a compassionate man. I frequently heard him skewer the pompous and the merely wrong. But he was kind, as much as he was impatient of stupidity. So I think he’d disagree with you if you meant ‘multiculturalism’ in the sense that it was meant in Sydney in the 1970s when Stove like many other Australians was hopeful that our then mono-cultural society would be changed by a more humane immigration policy (as it was). The motto of Sydney University, that I think David endorsed was “Sidere mens eadem mutato”: roughly, ‘the same spirit under a different sky’. But it would have been perverse to say it applied only to minds formed by the ’superior’ Anglo culture that then dominated our society.

As to diversity. I’m pretty sure David thought of quotas in the same way you do. But then, he was intellectually curious, so I doubt he would have ruled out courses on “creative robbery”.

I was planning to get a second bachelor’s degree, but my father suggested I try to go straight for a master’s. Wonder of wonders, it all worked out, despite the fact that I was not exactly the motivated researcher. I admitted to everyone (except my advisor) that all I was interested in was a piece of paper that said “Computer Science” on it, and I did exactly the amount of work necessary to accomplish that goal.

Lazy or shrewd? I hope my post-graduation employers would say the latter!

Literary criticism that places the evaluation writings in a cultural context is extensible to the evaluation of scientific and philosophical theories (Post-Modernism).

(Looking back this is pretty close to the worst argument of of Stove - but I’m sticking with it.)

This thesis has led to arguments that the conclusions arrived at by the scientific method need to be evaluated in terms of the culture that produced those theories. More idiotically, you have arguments that scientific truth is entirely based on the source culture.

If this is an example of today’s serious academic research, then the decline and extinction of the species is inevitable.