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On Multiculturalism

On Multiculturalism

Last updated on: January 24, 2025 at 6:00 am by Gene Veith

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On Multiculturalism 2025-01-19T18:20:42-05:00 Gene Veith

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We blogged about the scandal in the UK of Pakistani sex gangs preying on working class white girls and how law enforcement and the media often ignored these crimes for fear of being considered “racist” or “Islamophobic.”

British commentator Douglas Murray took up the question of how this happened. He writes about it in The Free Press in an essay entitled The Dangers of Multiculturalism.

“There are some terrible things that society wants to deal with,” he writes, “and there are some it refuses to deal with, and the things it refuses to deal with tend to be those crimes that go against some deep narrative of the age.” That narrative, he says, is the “doctrine of multiculturalism.”

In an era of mass legal and illegal migration, most developed countries have tried some form of this doctrine. But in Britain it runs especially deep. “Strength in diversity” was the mantra of modern Britain, as it has been of Justin Trudeau’s Canada, among other ailing Western states. Any story that runs against the narrative—and threatens to bring the cathedral crashing down—has to be suppressed.

That is why so many elements of British society, from much (though not all) of the media, to local councillors, the police, and many (though again, not all) members of Parliament, had to try to make the story disappear. Many people actually told victims and their families that their accounts of abuse could not come out because it would cause tension in their communities and risk social cohesiveness. And so a great evil was allowed, under the guise of doing good. Which is how evil often manifests.

The United States certainly has citizens from many different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. In Houston, driving to Memorial Lutheran Church where my son-in-law is pastor on Westheimer Road, I counted over twenty different ethnic restaurants in just a few blocks. In addition to the usual Mexican, Chinese, Italian, and Thai restaurants, there were Ethiopian, Assyrian, Caribbean, Pakistani, Peruvian, Brazilian, Argentinian, Nigerian, Peruvian, and more and more. I think that’s very cool and I’d like to try them all.

It seems to me, though, that in order to appreciate all of these cultures, we must get rid of “the doctrine of multiculturalism” as it has been applied in the West for the last several decades. Postmodernists invoke “multiculturalism” as an argument for relativism. All cultures are different, we are told, and they all have different values. You believe the way you do because of your culture. Other cultures have their own beliefs. There is nothing that is true for everyone. What you think is real is culturally determined. To think your culture has the only truth is to be ethnocentric. Instead, we need to embrace human diversity and be multicultural.

The irony is that the only culture that believes in relativistic multiculturalism is contemporary European-American elite culture. Ethiopians, Assyrians, Caribbean, and the other ethnic groups represented on Westheimer Road don’t think that way. Multiculturalism doesn’t actually say that all cultures are equally valid; rather, it says that all cultures are equally wrong.

Actual cultures believe in moral values, and those moral values actually are quite similar across cultures. UK authorities who tip-toe around enforcing the laws against sexual abuse so that they can’t be accused of Islamophobia perhaps don’t realize that Islam opposes sex outside of marriage, and that their associating Islam with these crimes and protecting Muslim perpetrators is itself patronizing and ultimately racist. One of the problems of immigrants from conservative societies is that when they come to the West, their young people are met with overwhelming sexual temptations that they never faced in the old country. Our culture, or perhaps better our anti-culture, is the outlier. We need to change our climate of permissiveness for everyone.

Multiculturalism as relativism can never bring harmony between people of different cultures. It can only sort people out into incompatible tribes, often–since the postmodernist view of culture reduces it all to power struggles–tribes that war against each other.

What we need to accept people of different ethnicities and cultures is not relativism but universalism. That is, the notion that human beings, for all of our variety, have things in common. We all have families that we love, similar kinds of problems, experience the same suffering, share the same pleasures. When our bodies aren’t working right, the same kind of medicine helps us no matter what culture we are from. Back to Westheimer Road, we can even enjoy each others’ restaurants, and do so without the multiculturalist worry that we are committing “cultural appropriation.”

Part of our common humanity is the need for a strong sense of right and wrong, the need for law and order, and the need for spiritual meaning.

Illustration: Feast of Flavors via StockCake, Public Domain, CC0 1.0 Universal [AI generated, not by the author]

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