COLUMN LEFT / GEORGE BLACK : 1492 and the Burden of the White Man : What are the myths of a diverse society, and who controls their creation?

A year ago, the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa saw his campaign for the country’s presidency go down to a humiliating defeat. Now he’s recuperating back at his typewriter, where he says he feels more at home.

He has published two long political essays--one in Harpers, the other in the trendy British literary magazine Granta. Anyone who reads these pieces may well understand why next year’s celebration of the quincentennial of Columbus’ landfall in the Americas has touched off such righteous anger among those we have come to call the “politically correct.”

In the new issue of Granta, Vargas Llosa concludes that his bid for the presidency failed because he was on a loftier moral plane than the grubby political hacks who dominate the Peruvian scene. His Harpers piece, an essay on Columbus and the conquest, says that Latin America’s “modernization is possible only with the eradication of the Indian cultures.” (This contemporary version of the White Man’s Burden may be a better explanation of why he lost the election.)

The two articles place Vargas Llosa in the vanguard of the debate about cultural diversity in the New World, which is a growing part of the whole PC flap. What are the myths that hold an ethnically diverse society together? And who controls the creation of those myths?

For some years now, the Peruvian novelist has been embraced in elite circles in the United States as something of an official interpreter of the mysteries of Latin America. His articulate neo-conservative views, though increasingly strident, find a ready home in our best magazines.

Yet one should not blame only rightists like Vargas Llosa for infecting the debate with such a nasty and intolerant tone. Take Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., whose name is a virtual byword for civilized Kennedy-era liberalism. Schlesinger recently offered a dissenting opinion on a new multicultural social-studies program for schools in New York state. He was particularly incensed at the suggestion that current history textbooks paid insufficient attention to the Europeans’ “eradication of many varieties of traditional culture and knowledge.”

“Like infanticide?” the professor sneered. “Slavery? Polygamy? Subjection of women? Suttee? Veil-wearing? Foot-binding? Clitoridectomies?”

While the smug assumption of white cultural supremacy runs across the mainstream political spectrum, the small pockets of dissent over the quincentennial seem to be locked in debilitating myths of their own. The standard text here is Kirkpatrick Sale’s recent book, “The Conquest of Paradise.” The title says it all: The story of the last 500 years is of the relentless victimization of an impossibly innocent Arcadia.

There is little scope for dialogue here, and neither side shows much interest in building a future for the Americas out of a synthesis of the best of the cultures that collided in 1492. The left denies the distinctive contribution of European culture--the rule of law and the assertion of universal human rights, however imperfectly observed. The right has never acknowledged the value of the communal agriculture of the Inca empire, which eradicated hunger.

The debate about 1492 may be a dialogue of the deaf, but there should be no doubt about who is primarily responsible. In the same issue of Granta with Vargas Llosa’s self-serving political memoir are two shorter pieces on the Peruvian election. One is by the novelist’s son, Alvaro, who served as his press secretary. The other is by Mark Malloch Brown, a political consultant with the New York firm of Sawyer-Miller, which ran the campaign.

What is extraordinary about these three men is their sublime sense of their own superiority, their collective inability ever to admit responsibility. Someone else is always to blame for the tragedy of Peru: Vargas Llosa’s scapegoats are the traditional pols and the stupid voters. His spiteful son blames the fainthearts who failed to learn purity of purpose from his idol, Margaret Thatcher. Brown pins the failure on the candidate himself, for his unwillingness to change his image overnight in accordance with the sacred rules of the focus group, the computer survey and the negative campaign ad. They can barely muster a thought for Peru’s Indian poor, who cling tenaciously to their culture after five centuries of an apartheid more absolute and more vicious than South Africa’s.

The few dissenting voices raised against the official celebrations of Columbus may be stranded on the political fringes. But it is not hard to see how they got there, forced for five centuries to listen to the voices of these powerful white men, so arrogant, so impenitent.