The
Tragedy of Multiculturalism
Augusto Zimmermann, July 2004
Multiculturalism,
an idea that started out in the sixties and early seventies, initially had the
reasonable goal of including minority groups in Western societies. Nowadays,
however, it is difficult to talk candidly about the idea, since the
multicultural project has become nothing but an aggressive ideology against the
religious and moral values of Western societies. Multiculturalism is not just
the fair understanding of other cultures, but also an ideological project for
the deconstruction of Western civilization.
When cultural
relativists demand the utilization of public money to indoctrinate
homosexuality as a morally acceptable behaviour, the
hidden truth about multiculturalism is automatically revealed. According to
Irving Kristal, multi-culturalism
is currently “propagated on college campuses by a coalition of
nationalist-racist blacks, radical feminists, gays and lesbians, and a handful
of aspiring demagogues who claim to represent various ethnic minorities. This
coalition’s multi-culturalism is an ideology whose
educational program is subordinated to a political program, that is, above all,
anti-American and Anti-Western. What these radicals blandly call
multiculturalism is as much ‘a war against the West’ as Nazism and Stalinism
ever were”.1
Rather than a
fair debate on the merits of different cultures, radical multiculturalists
falsely sustain the completely absurd premise that all cultures are equal in
value. In practice, such relativism of values has generated not only the
increase of criminal behaviour and pornography in the
West, but also a form of apartheid that causes nations to fragment into
enclaves of ethnicity.
According to
Roger Scruton, people gain nothing from the amorphous
atmosphere of multiculturalism “save bewilderment and the loss of any sense of
cultural identity. If they come from immigrant backgrounds that preserve the
memory of a religious law, they will often revert to a religious experience of
membership, and define themselves in opposition to the territorial jurisdiction
by which they are ostensibly governed”.2
The pretence
of tolerance that is postulated by multiculturalists has existed only for
multiculturalists themselves. After all, they are the first to support the
suppression of any criticism of culture and moral values. A paradox of
multiculturalism is precisely that such tolerance towards different cultures
and moral behaviour has completely polluted the
democratic environment of Western societies with racial suspicion and
ideological closed-mindedness. To be ‘tolerant’ in a so-called ‘multicultural
society’ is basically to support anti-democratic legislation against freedom of
speech. And so, any serious debate on moral values is automatically censored
out of public debate, for the one who does not agree with cultural (and moral)
relativism is brought to the judicial system and cowardly accused of ‘racism’,
‘sexism’, ‘homophobia’, and so on.
Multiculturalists
who demand respect for all cultures tend to exhibit a blatant disrespect for
the Western one. Above all, most multiculturalists are moral relativists who do
not admit that culture and religion produce either a democratic society or
oppression against minority groups in non-democratic ones; for democracy is as
much a cultural achievement as it is a legal one. In brief, democracy cannot be
legally imposed; it depends on cultural values transmitted to citizens from
generation to generation.
If popular
elections were held in certain countries, they could even facilitate the coming
to power of fanatical groups appealing to indigenous ethnic and religious
loyalties that would be likely be against the rights of women and minority
groups.3 To
a greater extent, democracy is nothing but a matter of culture, since it
depends on certain values of freedom and equality that may be intolerable to
peoples living under cultures that are not able to accept them.
Ultimately,
democracy rests on the capacity of a certain culture to recognize basic rights
of human beings. In explaining why democracy is not just a matter of legal
design, the great liberal John Stuart Mill observed that certain cultures might
be incompatible with democracy. As he put it, it would be unrealistic to
believe that all cultures agree with democratic values, or that societies might
not decide to create ‘insurmountable obstacles’ for the realization of
democratic government.4
Generally
speaking, legal-democratic frameworks do not produce forbearance when cultural
patterns of behaviour are too violent to accept the
moral implications of democracy. As Lord Bryce commented, “not less than any
other form of government does democracy need to cherish individual liberty. It
is like oxygen in the air, a life-giving spirit. Political liberty will have
seen one of its fairest fruits wither on the bough if that spirit should decline”.5 For
instance, democracy flourished in the West because the Judeo-Christian culture
accepts freedom of choice and allows the legal system to reflect the equality
of souls in the eyes of God.6 Yet even in the West, democracy
may not persist if the culture and religion that gave birth to it are
abandoned.
A recent
survey conducted by Freedom House, an organization that promotes democracy and
human rights in the world, has shown that the most democratic countries in the
world consist of majority-Protestant populations. In contrast, Islam and
Marxism, the latter a secular religion, constitute the most serious obstacles
to democracy and human rights. In fact, the denial of the broadest range of
rights comes exactly from Marxist and majority-Muslim countries. The worst nine
violators of human rights are Libya, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Iraq,
Turkmenistan, and the one-party Marxist regimes of Cuba and North Korea.7
If there is not a single democracy amongst Marxist and Islamic nations, there
must be something about Islam and Marxism that is clearly anti-democratic.8
The survey
conducted by Freedom House shows the comparative advantage of Christianity for
democracy and the protection of human rights to flourish. However, the same
survey goes on to indicate that both these values are rare in the Islamic
world. According to Bassam Tibi,
a Muslim Professor of Islamic Studies at
In contrast
to Islam, the Judeo-Christian ethos has democratized political manners in the
West. For the French philosopher Montesquieu, “the Christian religion is a
stranger to mere despotic power. The mildness so frequently recommended in the
Gospel is ultimately incompatible with despotic rage with which a prince
punishes his subjects, and exercises himself in cruelty”. Montesquieu
concluded: “How admirable this religion, which, while it seems only to have in
view the felicity of the other life, constitutes its own happiness! ... We owe
to Christianity, in government a certain political law, and in war a certain
law of nations; benefits which human nature can never sufficiently
acknowledge”.12
In reality,
cultural relativists who enjoy the extraordinary benefits of living in a
democratic society based on the religious ethos of Christianity, but cannot recognise the importance of this religious ethos for the
protection of their own legal rights, are, in Montesquieu’s
words, “like savage beasts that growl and bite the chain which prevents them
flying at those who come near them”.
Montesquieu,
the great philosopher and ‘father’ of modern legal sociology, concluded that
one who lives in a Christian society such as Australia but nonetheless hates
the religion of Christianity could be compared with a “terrible animal who
perceives his liberty only when he tears this in pieces, and when he devours
it”.13
1 Kristal,
Irving; Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea.
2 Scruton, Roger; The West and the Rest: Globalization
and the Terrorist Threat.
3 Huntigton, Samuel; ‘Democracy for the
Long Haul’. Text from Consolidating
the Third Wave Democracies. Edited
by L. Diamond, Marc F. Plattner, Y. Chu, and H. Tien. Baltmore/London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997, p.7.
4 Mill, John Stuart; Considerations
on Representative Government.
5 Lord Bryce, in “Modern
Democracies” - vol.1, p.67.
6
7 Freedom in the World 2003: The Annual Survey
of Political Rights & Civil Liberties. Edited by A. Karatnycky, A.
Piano, and A. Puddington.
8 Przerworski, Adam; Political Parties and Results of Elections, p.126.
9 Bachori,
Mochtar; Secularisation: An Extension of the Idea of the
Primary of Reason. Jakarta Post, 22
December 1998, p.5.
10
Bryce, James; Modern
Democracies.
11 See: Bernholz, Peter; Supreme Values, Tolerance and the Constitution of
12 Montesquieu; The Spirit of Laws. Book XXIV, Chapter 3.
13 Op. cit.. Book XXIV, Chapter 1.