Favouring open immigration into integrationist societies within the context of an eventual end to the welfare state and strengthening of civil society is a view widely shared in these parts. But I can also say will little fear of contradiction that not one of the regular writers for Samizdata would describe themselves as a multiculturalist.
The term did once have some appeal but in the end what it has come to mean is someone who thinks all (non-western) cultures are as desirable as each other. However I do not believe that all cultures are equally worthy and I doubt that in reality all too many other people really think that either is you dig deep enough. For all its many and varied flaws, the modern dynamic, secular and above all tolerant western civilisation of the early 21st Century is considerably superior to the alternatives. But of course even within the west, not all the societies that make up that great civilisation are as dynamic and successful as each other.
But what is a society? Definitions vary. In the crudest sence it is a group of people who interact with each other by simple virtue of their proximity (something the internet may change), and as a result follow broad (but often loose) cultural norms which have evolved to facilitate interaction and order. So by this very simple (prehaps even simplistic) definition is also pointless to pretend that having long term un-assimilated communities with certain key antithetical values within western societies is anything but a recipe for catastrophic strife.
The stunning and very under-reported race riot by Arabs and North Africans in France last month shows what happens when the state interferes for decades by subsidising parasitic behaviour based on identity politics and pretending that state fiats can either enforce or obviate the need for integration. When the French state bans chadors and all other religious symbols in French educational conscription centres (schools), it is not a case of France ‘defending western culture’ but rather admitting that civil society has so decayed under the weight of generations of politicization that natural social mechanisms no longer exist to integrate newcomers as effectively as once was the case. In the end nothing gets done in France without it being planned and implemented politically by the enarques in Paris and racial no-go areas are the result.
The solution in the end may be less government so that civil society can actually regenerate but in the short to medium term it is hard to see how the French political class, not a group known for frank introspection and honest analysis, can prevent France gradually sliding into ever more atavistic violence. Even Britain, which has far better race relations than France, learned in 2001 that playing identity politics and handing out other people’s money based on ethnicity is a dangerous thing to do. But whereas in the USA the 1992 Los Angeles riots spurred some soul searching in the USA and the emergence of excellent bipartisan social organizations aiming at economic and social integration, in France a significent race riot barely makes it into the press and in Britain, far from looking to enhance integration and the adoption of western cultural norms, we find that we now risk prosecution for making critical remarks about Islamic culture.
Is it any wonder so many Americans react to the European political classes’ pretensions of moral superiority with little more than a contemptuous and well deserved sneer?
Perry, well said.
The problem with multiculturalism is that its focus is on pointing out the differences between people – “celebrating diversity” – so it’s not really surprising some people see themselves as different based on their skin colour. I highly recommend Kenan Malik’s documentary “Disunited Kingdom” if it comes on channel 4 again sometime. It featured a diversity day at Ford, where staff had to talk to an asian woman and a lesbian and talk about how they’re not like the rest of us. He interviewed Nick Griffin, who said the BNP believed in multiculturalism, just with an emphasis on white culture, so segregation should be enforced in schools to ensure white people are allowed to maintain their culture. Then Malik went to see Lee Jasper, Ken Livingstone’s race relations advisor, supporter of multiculturalism, who watched the Griffin tape and agreed that segregation should be enforced in schools to preserve people’s identity – and then as he left, gave a black power salute. One of them is a racist, one of them a multiculturalist. Apparantly, there’s a difference
On Tim Blair recently, I learned of a speech given by Sheikh Feiz Muhammad, a teacher at the Global Islamic Youth Centre in Sydney, Australia. His most notable statement was”‘Every minute in the world a woman is raped, and she has no one to blame but herself, for she has displayed her beauty to the whole world,”. Apparently his rant received “frequent applause”.
I don’t need to comment on the logic behind such a statement – it’s clearly bonkers. And I don’t think that most Muslims think this way. However, it would seem to be a logical extrapolation of Purdah, which is, of course, prescribed in the Koran. With multicultural outcomes in mind, we are not encouraged to contradict the good sheikh’s words, nor are we to act against those in our society that agree with him, despite the fact that they completely oppose ideas that currently hold our society together.
The previous federal Labor government made a big deal about our multiculturalism. Look where it’s got us. In at least one Australian state, I could be convicted (good old “religious vilification” laws) for saying that the sheikh’s interpretation of his religion is sickening and his odious beliefs require constant denunciation. What are the odds that he’d ever be tapped on the shoulder for asserting that women who aren’t in Purdah deserve to be raped, not to mention his accompanying lampooning, deriding and ridiculing of the Western culture of his adopted country. As someone on the thread said, multiculturalism is one culture’s tolerance of another culture’s intolerance. Enforcing that tolerance by criminalising types of expression – bye-bye freedom of speech – also seems to be in multiculturalism’s brief. Scary.
Multiculturism is the latest variation of collectivist group politics. The individual is subsumed in the collective, all his or her characteristics and beliefs allegedly defined by the tribal mass identity.
It is no accident that the left promotes this disaster, nor that the end result is the diminution of the individual by a relentless campaign against the exercise of individual rights.
Can I be put down as a cultural pluralist, then?
There’s a sharp piece by a novelist Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal in yesterday’s Times [can’t link – getting this from dead tree]:
“[T]he liberal elite has arrived late at Britain’s multicultural street party and is keen to get in on the action. But by declaiming its PC trendiness so loudly it is elbowing aside those at the bedrock of a multicultural society who couldn’t care less about other people’s race and don’t make a fuss about it.”
I thought these attacks on white high-school students on the 8th of March in Paris had not been noticed. The historical event is that “Le Monde” admitted “anti-white violence” and insults for the first time, but most of the media went on with the usual “suburban youngsters” victim of segregation, provoked by the expensive mobiles of young bourgeois. For the first time “Le Monde” wrote that these mobiles were pretext to assault those white young people, but were often left or broken under the eyes of the victim. What is more, the assailant wore expensive cloths as usual, so “Le Monde” and a few blogs then started calling them “lumpen proletariat”. Our intellectuals feel better when using marxist vocabulary.
As you probably know, in France, there are no “identity politics” but “quartiers” politics (no business taxes and renovation for groups of buildings). Racial statistics are illegal but family allowances are given under (declared) income conditions. Little declared incomes and the number of children allow single mothers or numerous families to leave comfortably without ever pretending to work. While to a classical French family even above the minimum wage, life is more and more difficult, since social charges increase regularly to apply the same rules to the new-comers (the last increase was on January 1st 2005). In 2004, more than half of the costs of an employee (masse salariale) were already social charges (including 12% of our net salary to finance family allowances). On the net income left, we pay the income tax on the following year (because our vast tax administration is maybe the last one unable to collect it from our employer), that is, more than a month salary for technicians without children, and nothing for a majority of households, because of the children. Our income tax is inferior to the English and the American one, but social charges are the real weight on employment and avoiding them with quiet employees (because they have no papers or more and more often because their work permit are bought to the administration) is the guaranty of a very successful business.
Thank you for your post, Perry.
France is only reaping what its ‘social model’ has sowed. I lived there throughout the 80s and remember the constant media barrage against racism. No racist incident against Arab immigrants – ‘beurs’ was a hot new nickname back then – was to small to make the news, and one leader or another of the SOS Racisme organization would invariably be invited to opine, huff, puff and generally pontificate on some talk show, oozing platitudes and moralizing blather an hour of state television at at time.
Back then, I was young and dumb enough to think that made us really cool. I grew up a bit – I think – and next thing you know the new millenium comes and the Jews get on the receiving end of that treatment….again (maybe that’s what they really mean by ‘cultural exception’).
And the usual condescending officials all came out on TV and in the press – page 11, bottom-right corner – to tell us the situation should not be overly ‘dramatized’. I guess it was all pure coincidence that all of sudden the riot police of every city happened to prefer parking in front of the local synagogue. Odd, that.
And then it turned out that a couple of anti-semitic attacks had been invented by their respective plaintiffs. This, you probably guessed, made the front pages the very next day. Even though a decade or so earlier, similar fabrications by various members of North African ethnic groups were deliberately not given the same prominent treatment – in fact, they were essentially ignored at the national level – so as to avoid condoning racism by implying racist attacks were imaginary.
It is all too saddening and I wish I could be surprised by all this. There is something deeply rotten in the self-styled country of human rights.
Show me today’s mulicultural society and I will show you tomorrow’s war zone.
“Favouring open immigration into integrationist societies within the context of an eventual end to the welfare state and strengthening of civil society”
Yes those immigrants are such libertarians arent they?
Weird view SteveM. I could not care less if they are libertarians or not. I tolerate you and I doubt you are a libertarian either.
Re: Perry’s comment about state intervention in the process of integration of immigrants – California voters recently voted out a bilingual education law aimed at helping non-English-speaking kids get up to grade level before being thrust intoan immersion environemtn to drown. Of course this requirement immediately became an iron rice bowl for a whole sub-caste of bilingual teachers. The law was voted out when the Mexican immigrant parents of these kids, not amused that their children were neither performing at grade level nor learning English, realized they actually had a voice in the matter. Their votes are believd to be what put the intiiative over the top.
In this case it took a political action, an election, to overturn a political action. Where people in these families were actually learning English was on the job, informally. These days quite a percentage of Mexican immigrants along the West Caost speak Spanish as a second language, and that made the “bilingual” program even more of an affront.