MEXIFORNIA Victor Davis Hanson 116

F I V E

The New Gods That Failed

WHAT ACCOUNTS FOR THE erosion of the civic educa-

tion so necessary to sustain a unified nation that has no

common race or religion? The first reason for a rejection

of assimilation in our schools was ideological. We have

not yet experienced all the consequences of the big bang of multi-

culturalism, authoritarian utopianism and cultural relativism�"the

isms that tell young people that facts, dates, people and hard data

are either irrelevant or biased, or simply not facts at all, and that

to question such a dogma could be �śracist.” I have had too many

young students who mouthed clichés like, �śWe don’t need to study

the West,” but when asked what �śthe West” was, were speechless

and could not provide even a wrong answer. We have experienced

enough of the assorted isms to know that all such ideology is

antithetical to the notion of civic education, which historically has

been national, realistic and in some way tragic rather than thera-

peutic. The old idea was that we were humans, not gods, and so we

did not regard history as an exercise in deconstructing the past by

retroactively apportioning blame and praise according to present

standards of morality.

In the fourth grade we were asked to memorize the names of

all the California missions. Protestant and Catholic alike learned

that Father Serra was a civilizing, if flawed figure who tried to

introduce agriculture, transportation and some refinement to a

barren California landscape. In contrast, later generations have

been told that the friar was a martinet who whipped Indians

and forced them to convert to Catholicism. Surely the truth lies

somewhere between the romanticism of my own education and

the cynicism of the current indoctrination. But what is missing

in the new dispensation is any sense that the world in which we







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