03. Practice Article - Scruton, Roger (2010.12) Multiculturalism, RIP. American Spectator (Dec-Jan 2010). Race, Culture, Society

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THE PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE

Multiculturalism, R.I.P.

By Roger Scruton from the December 2010 - January 2011 issue

Throughout my adult life governments around the Western world have been propagatingthe gospel of multiculturalism, which tells us that immigrants, from whatever part of the

world and whatever way of life, are a welcome part of our "multicultural" society.Differences of language, religion, custom, and attachment don't matter, they havereassured us, since all can form part of the colorful tapestry of the modern state. Anybodywho publicly disagreed with that claim invited the attentions of the thought police, alwaysready with the charge of racism, and never so scrupulous as to think it a sin to destroy thecareer of someone, provided he was white, indigenous, and male. To be quite honest,living through this period of organized mendacity has been one of the least agreeableordeals that we conservatives have had to undergo. Keeping your head down is badenough; but filling your head with official lies means sacrificing thought as well asfreedom.

But now, quite suddenly, the oppression has ceased. Even Angelika Merkel, chancellor of acountry whose reputation for political correctness is more carefully nurtured than anyother cultural asset, has just told us that multiculturalism is dead -- quite dead. PresidentSarkozy has for some time been saying the same, whileProspect, Britain's leadingleft-wing intellectual monthly, currently carries the caption "re-thinking race: hasmulticulturalism had its day?" This caption is in many ways the most revealing of thecurrent attempts to put multiculti at a distance. For it manages simultaneously to deny andto affirm the original message, which is that to discriminate among cultures is todiscriminate on grounds of race -- in other words, to be a racist. This is perhaps the mostpernicious of the lies that we have been required to swallow during these years ofoppression, since it is one that compares all defense of the majority culture, and all

attempts to integrate minorities, with some of the greatest crimes of recent history.

So let's be clear from the outset: culture and race have nothing to do with each other. Thereis no contradiction in the idea that Felix Mendelssohn was Jewish by race and German byculture -- or indeed that he was the most public-spirited representative of German culturein his day. Nor is there any contradiction in saying that a single person belongs to twocultures. Felix's grandfather Moses was a great Rabbi, upstanding representative of theJewish cultural inheritance, and also founding father of the German Enlightenment. Many

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of the German philologists to which the Enlightenment gave rise were as multicultural asMoses Mendelssohn -- Max Mller, for example, German by race, English by adoption, andmore steeped in the culture of India than virtually anyone alive today. Wagner had to twistand turn his thoughts into every kind of absurd contortion in order to discover"Jewishness" in the music of Felix Mendelssohn, from whom he took so much. (How couldhe have got to the music ofLohengrin without the help of Mendelssohn's music forAMidsummer Night's Dream?) And Wagner's repugnant essay on Judaism in music is oneof the first instances of the lie that we have had to live through -- the lie that sees race andculture as the same idea, and which tells us that in demanding a measure of culturaluniformity, we are also affirming the dominance of a single race.

Once we distinguish race and culture, the way is open to acknowledge that not all culturesare equally admirable, and that not all cultures can exist comfortably side-by-side. To denythis is to forgo the very possibility of moral judgment, and therefore to deny thefundamental experience of community. It is precisely this that has caused themulticulturalists to hesitate. Rightly enjoying the polytheistic festivals of the Hindus, theCarnivals of Caribbean blacks, and the celebrations of the Chinese New Year, they have led

us to believe that cultural difference is always an addition to social life, and never a threatto it. Anyone who discriminates between cultures, therefore, really must have somethingmore dangerous at the back of his mind -- a desire to exclude on grounds of strangeness,which is the first step towards the racist mindset.

But experience has finally prevailed over wishful thinking. It is culture, not nature, thattells a family that their daughter who has fallen in love outside the permitted circle mustbe killed, that girls must undergo genital mutilation if they are to be respectable, that theinfidel must be destroyed when Allah commands it. You can read about those things andthink that they belong to the pre-history of our world. But when suddenly they arehappening in your midst, you are apt to wake up to the truth about the culture that

advocates them. You are apt to say, that is not our culture, and it has no businesshere. Thatis what Europeans are now saying -- not just a few crazies, but everyone. And themulticulturalists are reluctantly compelled to agree with them.

FOR WHAT IS BEING brought home to us, through painful experiences that we mighthave avoided had it been permitted before now to say the truth, is that we, like everyoneelse, depend upon a shared culture for our security, our prosperity and our freedom to be.We don't require everyone to have the same faith, to lead the same kind of family life, orto participate in the same festivals. But we have a shared moral and legal inheritance, ashared language, and a shared public sphere. Our societies are built upon the Judeo-Christian ideal of neighbor-love, according to which strangers and intimates deserve equal

concern. They require each of us to respect the freedom and sovereignty of every other,and to acknowledge the threshold of privacy beyond which it is a trespass to go unlessinvited. Our societies depend upon a culture of law-abidingness and open contracts, andthey reinforce these things through the educational traditions that have shaped ourcommon curriculum. It is not an arbitrary cultural imperialism that leads us to valueGreek philosophy and literature, the Hebrew Bible, Roman law, and the medieval epicsand romances, and to teach these things in our schools. They are ours, in just the way thatthe legal order and the political institutions are ours: they form part of what made us, and


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convey the message that it is right to be what we are.

Over time immigrants can come to share these things with us: the experience of Americabears ample witness to this. And they the more easily do so when they recognize that, inany meaningful sense of the word, our culture is also a multiculture, incorporatingelements absorbed in ancient times from all around the Mediterranean basin and inmodern times from the adventures of European traders and explorers across the world.But this kaleidoscopic culture is still one thing, with a set of inviolable principles at itscore; and it is the source of social cohesion across Europe and America. Our culture allowsfor a great range of ways of life; it enables people to privatize their religion and theirfamily customs, while still belonging to the public realm of open dealings and sharedallegiance. For it defines that public realm in legal and territorial terms, and not in termsof creed or kinship.

So what happens when people whose identity is fixed by creed or kinship immigrate intoplaces settled by Western culture? The multiculturalists say that we must make room forthem, and that we do this by relinquishing the space in which their culture can flourish.

Our political class has at last recognized that this is a recipe for disaster, and that we canwelcome immigrants only if we welcome them intoour culture, and not beside and againstit. But that means telling them to accept rules, customs, and procedures that may be aliento their old way of life. Is this an injustice? Surely not. If immigrants come it is becausethey gain by doing so. It is therefore reasonable to remind them that there is also a cost.Only now, however, is our political class prepared to say so, and to insist that the cost bepaid. And it may be that this change of heart comes too late.

Roger Scruton is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His latest book isThe Uses of

Pessimism (Oxford University Press).


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Documents

03. Practice Article - Scruton, Roger (2010.12) Multiculturalism, RIP. American Spectator (Dec-Jan 2010). Race, Culture, Society