The Political Correctness of Multiculturalism / Mark Steyn

As I was writing the previous post I came across the video I've embedded below of an interview with Mark Steyn on the subject of The Fraud of Multiculturalism. He's doing a good job on the subject but the interviewer obviously doesn't get what Multiculturalism means, and Steyn doesn't seem to grasp that he's confused.

In fact he contributes to the confusion by failing to make a crucial distinction between melting-pot style mingling of the colorful aspects of multiethnicity, and the insistence of the Politically Correct ideology of Multiculturalism that practices contrary to western democracy must be absorbed by the host culture.

To the interviewer it means the benign multiethnicity that characterizes the melting pot:  that you can come to a western society from any other culture and be treated with respect, which you can't expect by moving to any tribal culture. He's thinking of the melting pot in which a plurality of cultural practices are given free play and doesn't understand why anyone would object to that.

The problem here is what the word "cultural" means. I don't think there is a better term than Multiculturalism for what it refers to, but it makes people think of ethnic foods and colorful festivals and racial differences and languages and other distinctions between cultures that we enjoy, rather than what it's meant to mean, which I think boil down to the laws that govern a culture.

The reason the west can welcome so many different cultures is that we don't operate by tribal laws, but by laws intentionally hammered out over centuries toward the greatest good for the greatest number, for the highest justice for all. Historically it has been acknowledged that the west, and particularly America, have arrived at the best form of justice. No, not perfect, but it does have a consistent character from which ideally imperfections can be corrected over time. The American Constitution even anticipates the need for such change and provides guidelines for bringing it about.

Every kind of ethnic lifestyle from exotic foods and celebrations to the different racial types, can all find a place within this legal system, but the foreigners do have to learn the basic laws and institutions that have formed the larger culture into which they are expected to assimilate. But foreign forms of law cannot be assimilated, and should not. Tribal law is usually oppressive. Yet what Multiculturalism does is invite such alien legal systems to corrupt our own, the very laws that make multiethnic expression possible in the first place.

As Steyn says, MC thinking for instance makes an equivalence between the Common Law inheritance of Canada and the tribal law practiced on any small patch of jungle somewhere. It goes beyond that into proposing that these primitive systems be incorporated into our own, or "tolerating" them in their separate enclaves. And if we argue that foreigners need to adapt to the host culture, and that our system is a better form of justice, we're accused, usually, of racism. So what we have here is one of the many forms of Political Correctness that are designed to destroy western civilization. See the video of Bill Lind on the general history of Political Correctness in the previous post.



More Steyn on Multiculturalism:

Culture Wars: The Pilgrims and the Indians

The Culture Revisionists are going full steam these days. Just ran across another example.

Started watching a documentary on Netflix, The American Experience about the Indian tribes of America, "We Shall Remain," and right away the Indians are the good guys and the Europeans the bad guys. I suppose there's some poetic justice in this up to a point, since earlier treatments of such subjects were awfully one-sided in the opposite direction.

Now in the politically correct multicultural view (more accurately it should be known as the anti-western-cultural view) the Indians are subtly presented as more civilized than the whites in a way, in little things -- expressions, manner, bearing etc., -- the Indians have dignity and family feeling, the whites appear to be a rather scruffy wild crew. And the narrator describes them in such terms:

In December of 1620, after 66 days at sea, and five uneasy weeks on the northern tip of Cape Cod, a SCRAGGLY CULT from England anchored its sailing vessel, the Mayflower, off the mainland coast and sent a small party of men to scout the wooded shores. RADICAL RELIGIOUS VIEWS HAD MADE THE PILGRIMS UNWELCOME AND UNWANTED IN ENGLAND. They had no home to go back to if they failed to make one in this new world. [my emphases of course]

It's all in the point of view, right? This is an outsider point of view, not the American point of view, certainly not the Christian point of view. There's no hint in this characterization of a people coming across the ocean on a noble enterprise with the noble ideas about government that became the Mayflower Compact and ultimately influenced the greatest nation ever to exist, with a true understanding of the cause of Christ, or anything of the sort.

Soon after they arrive they come across a mostly abandoned and destroyed Indian village --Patuxit -- where the population had been drastically reduced by disease, and "they attributed this devastation to God looking out and clearing the way for His chosen people." Which of course in the context of the miserable sufferings of the people who died there sounds quite ignoble.

And in the whole presentation there's no hint of a genuine Christian faith that rises above fallen human nature.

Then the film does show the efforts at good will between the peoples and their success, while continuing to picture the whites as just a little less than noble and the Indians a little better than.

I had to stop watching.

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Later edit: By the way, I started this film because I had just watched one about the Navajo code talkers who played such a big role in WWII against the Japanese, and was very touched by their patriotism. I hurt for them that they weren't given the recognition they so deserved, especially when it was mentioned this was at least partly because the army was still racist then. I'm far from insensitive to this problem in other words, but it's terribly wrong when the "solution" is an attack on white culture and an elevation of the Indian, whose culture is NOT to be compared to Christian culture whatever its merits. It's sad our history is so rocky, with so much lack of respect for the American Indians, but the solution is NOT "multiculturalism."