Multiculturalism - the unspoken ideology sweeping our post-modern world. This piece from across the Atlantic helps us to think carefully . . .
Some would-be regulators of home schools are promoting rules that all homeschoolers must give evidence that their children have received instruction, not in reading, writing and arithmetic, but in multiculturalism.
As a mantra for progressive thought, multiculturalism is overhauling college curricula, determining what gets published and what does not. It is shaping public policies and social discourse. Certainly the study and appreciation of other cultures is a good thing. The problem with multiculturalism is that it is not what it pretends to be. It is not 'multi'- rather it enforces strict intellectual and even cultural uniformity, the much-vaunted 'political correctness' which trumps all diversity of expression and opinion. It is not cultural, in that it seriously distorts actual cultural issues. It is, however, an 'ism', an ideology as thoroughly Western and imperialistic as the Western civilisation it seeks to trash.
Exaggerating culture
A hidden assumption of the multicultural movement is that literally everything human beings think, do, create and believe is nothing more than a cultural artefact. Nothing is outside the scope of culture. Truth-claims of every kind - religious doctrines, metaphysical speculations, even scientific discoveries - are seen as essentially 'social constructions'. Science, for example, is analysed in terms of Western (male) oppression of (mother) Nature, in many ways inferior to cultures with a more mystical and ecologically correct way of thinking about the natural order. In the same way, moral truths are reduced to 'cultural values'. Ethical principles are a culture's way of organising its social relations, but there is no 'higher law' applicable to all cultures.
Certainly, many cultures, particularly those with totalitarian rulers, do connect their social system inextricably to nature and to the gods, ruling out any possibility of a transcendent frame of reference within which its practices could be judged and the society could be changed. Cultures will try to divinise themselves. The great cultural contribution of the Judeo-Christian worldview was its insistence that God transcends both nature and culture.
According to the Bible, culture is not absolute. Nature is separate from both culture and religion (making objective science possible), and religion is separately from nature and culture (making possible a whole range of transcendent, extra-cultural truths). Moral principles have the status of objective truth, grounded in God, so that kings, customs and cultural institutions fall under His judgment. Because culture is not absolute, there is a conceptual framework according to which culture can be criticised and changed. In rejecting the notion that some realms transcend culture, multiculturalism presents itself as progressive and liberating, but its view of culture is actually a formula for stagnation and totalitarianism.
Trivialising culture
Ironically, the multiculturalist movement exalts culture in theory, but in practice trivialises it. If culture is as all-encompassing as it claims, is it even possible to study, much less transmit, a culture other than one's own? In academic circles, white scholars who presume to write about African-Americans are finding themselves shouted down: as outsiders, they cannot possibly understand the 'black experience'. If the culture totalists are correct, then studying other cultures - and being multicultural - would be impossible.
It is, however, possible and desirable to study other cultures precisely because there really is a transcultural, universal human nature. Multiculturalists tend to emphasise the differences between cultures, skimming over completely the much more important similarities. For example, all cultures, with the possible exception of our own, maintain what could only be described as 'strong family values'. Sexual taboos, kinship obligations, parental authority, and family identity are at the core of any culture, as anthropologists demonstrate. This suggests that human beings and societies cannot do without such things. In response to the claim that 'different cultures have different moral values', C.S. Lewis wrote The Abolition of Man, which lists the basic moral teachings of a wide range of cultures and found them exactly the same. No culture says that courage, honesty, kindness or fidelity are bad things, nor that cowardice, theft, cruelty or promiscuity - although people of all cultures practice them - are good things. A genuine study of other cultures would reveal what is essentially human, yet most multiculturalists ignore the signs of universal humanness and, perversely, use the study of other cultures to undercut our common humanness in the name of relativism.
Cultures, though they embrace common human themes, are also fallible and sometimes oppressive. Multiculturalists are curiously blind to every culture's weaknesses except for their own. If they were consistent, those who believe that other cultures' values are just as valid as those of contemporary Western society might be expected to criticise Western feminism. Tribal and less-developed cultures do not tend to treat their women particularly well. Who are we to say that our way is best? Again, multiculturalists tend to ignore such issues. Christians can hold up a transcendent moral principle - women should not be mistreated - and work to change the culture (improving the treatment of women, has been, in fact, a common concern of missionaries). Multiculturalists want to have their cake and eat it too, to be both feminists and relativists, but it cannot honestly be done.
Falsifying culture
A frustrating habit of multiculturalists is their habit of distorting both culture and facts. Of course, that should not be surprising for those who believe that truth is relative, but the flagrant manipulation of evidence to advance an ideological agenda is breathtaking. For example, I recently read the comment, in an academic publication, that Western civilisation is responsible for the institution of slavery. The fact is, slavery has been endemic throughout the world - Native Americans, from the Aztecs to the Comanche, kept slaves, as did pre-colonial Africans, Arab merchants, and Asian warlords. It would be closer to the truth to say that the West was the only society to abolish slavery, to come to see its own practices as immoral and to change its institutions accordingly. Why do multiculturalists, who are ostensibly concerned about oppression, not address such issues in an honest way?
A particularly dangerous way of falsifying culture is the habit of multiculturalists to identify culture with race. To assume that someone's culture is determined by the colour of his or her skin is, in the most technical sense of the term, fascist. Just as there are hosts of cultures for those with white skin - as if 'Western Europe' constituted only one culture and as if there were not light-skinned people on the other continents - were a unified category - there are hosts of cultures for those with dark skin. People from Algeria, Mozambique, Cuba, Haiti, Brazil, Atlanta, Harlem and Beverley Hills may all be black, but they do not have the same culture. This confusion of race with culture manifests itself most cruelly in efforts to prevent white couples from adopting black children, in the name of protecting multiculturalism.
Multiculturalists today often take all kinds of diversity as being cultural diversity. Thus, women and gays are spoken of as constituting a different culture from 'white, male heterosexuals'. Anthropologically, this is nonsense. Women, far from making up a different culture, are usually the main cultural transmitters, in their influence on child-raising. Homosexuals, or, for that matter, teenagers or Harley-Davidson owners or 'Star Trek' fans, may constitute something of a sub-culture - a distinctive group within a larger group - but these common interests, which typically change with a person changing roles from group to group, do not make up a different culture.
Multiculturalists often act as if America is the one place that has no culture of its own. Certainly, American culture has been composed of many different strands, but it still has a shape of its own. African-Americans are eminently Americans, as they discover if they go to Africa. If black people have been and continue to be an oppressed minority, that does not change the fact that American music - from blues to jazz to rock 'n' roll - is almost entirely the creation of black artists. The multiculturalist habit of breaking America apart into its constituent groups constitutes a new ghettoisation that ends up denying those of African or Asian or Hispanic descent the right to be an integral part of American culture. Historically, America welcomed people of all ethnicities who were attracted by the distinctly American political ideals of freedom, equality and individualism. If all Americans were not always treated equally, in time the fundamental American principle has a way of asserting itself. Such ideals, though, like those of all cultures, need to be transmitted, but this is impossible if they are demonised or ignored in the name of multiculturalism.
Too Western
The final irony is that while multiculturalism attempts to go beyond the viewpoint of Western civilisation, it is actually nothing more than the Western ideology of the 20th-century post-modernism. No other culture tries to transmit a culture other than its own - only the West feels free enough of culture to do so. No other culture has the ability to criticise itself as the West does, that alienating sense of a moral law above us that even those who deny it insist on using.
Multiculturalism rests on post-Marxist assumptions about power and oppression, Western notions that have analogues in no other culture. Besides Western self-loathing, multiculturalism exhibits an intrusive Western consciousness in the way it views other societies. They are treated as 'noble savages', innocents in a natural paradise. Instead of treating other cultures as mature equals - capable of both good and evil - multiculturalism romanticises them in a way that is ultimately patronising and limiting.
I have an African friend who goes ballistic by the condescension of well-meaning American intellectuals. He heard a university lecture that lauded the simple African villagers, who are supposedly closer to nature because they do not wear shoes. 'My people do not wear shoes,' he said, 'because they are poor!' Africans need economic development, improved health care, better technology, and democracy. Westerners have all of these things, he says, but want to keep them from Africans. They are doing so in the name of multiculturalism.
My friend is also grateful to missionaries. He does not blame them for upsetting tribal customs and for teaching that Christianity is better than tribal religions. Multiculturalists cannot abide missionaries. My African friend, though, credits them for opening schools and hospitals, saving lives and bringing knowledge. He is especially grateful to missionaries for bringing the gospel of Jesus Christ, a message that my friend - and millions of Africans - found profoundly liberating and, in the only way that really matters, truly multicultural.
Reprinted with permission from Critique, published by Ransom Fellowship, 1150 West Centre Street, Rochester, MN 55902, USA. Copyright G.E. Veith.
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