[H]is skepticism toward universalism gives him much in common with forms of multiculturalism today’s conservatives say they oppose. ~Alan Wolfe

I have said pretty much all I intend to say about Wolfe’s original article here, but this item begs for special attention.  Since Wolfe is terribly concerned with originality, it might be worth noting that this criticism of conservative particularism is not new.  There are plenty of fairly universalist people on the right who find particularism offensive for the very reason that it seems to lend support to multiculturalism.  They make points that I have found no more persuasive.  The criticism is not new, and it does not become any more accurate with the passing of time.  The universalist will often refer to religion to shame the particularist, who will often be religious to one degree or another: why, if a religion is in some sense truly universal, how can someone opposed to universalism be religious?  (This is also the essence of Wolfe’s weak point about Kirk and Catholicism.)  Well, he might begin by not deliberately conflating concepts that have nothing to do with each other.  Rational, man-made universalism is misguided both in its hubris and its ahistorical nature.  Revelation will be applicable to all times and places, since it comes from God, Who is eternal and immaterial.    

Those of us who are generally working in the same tradition as Kirk was believe that cultural diversity is a product of historical change.  To a certain extent, traditional conservatives are open to the post-modern critique of Enlightenment rationality, because we find the latter limited, one-sided and defined in such a way as to set man’s reason against his adherence to “irrational” customs and traditions.  (For another rightist who praised diversity and identified uniformity as a preferred trait of the left, Wolfe might read Kuehnelt-Leddihn, whose enthusiasm for Catholicism will not leave him in doubt as to where K-L stood.)  Where particularists and multicultis tend to part ways is over the multicultis’ preference for encouraging and building up every other culture except their own (assuming that they believe that they have a culture of their own).  A conservative particularist is not terribly bothered if there are other cultures that have evolved differently, and he will usually be more aware of the significance of those differences than his universalist rivals.  

The particularist does not share the multicultis’ belief that his culture should have to be undermined or ridiculed to accommodate the cultures of others, and he tends to not think that the most stable and well-ordered polities are not those with the greatest number of different cultures.  In the end, multiculturalism does not offend these conservatives because of its interest in diversity, but because it has no real interest in diversity as such (and these people tend to be embarrassingly ignorant and naive about foreign cultures), only in the subversion of their own cultural norms.  Traditional conservatives accept cultural diversity as the result of natural historical development–it is something that can only be eliminated by coercion and ideology.  Multiculturalists seem interested in using other cultures as means to their own ideological goal of transforming their own society into something entirely different from what it has been.

In short, this point about multiculturalism is not a real criticism of Kirk.  It is not even that interesting of a point.  One might even call it an irritated gesture rather than an idea.