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 What
Happened to Assimilation?
Overrun by “multiculturalism”…
[by Bruce S. Thornton] 7/19/05
The news that the London terrorist attacks were carried out
by second- generation Muslim immigrants should not surprise us.
For years now we in the West have indulged a whole set of destructive
ideas whose bitter fruit we will all continue to harvest, as
more and more unassimilated and disaffected immigrant children
turn against the countries that welcomed their parents and provided
them with a prosperity and freedom unknown in their countries
of origin.
This baneful
idea goes by the name of multiculturalism. Don't be fooled
by marketing:
multiculturalism is not simply a call
to respect cultures different from one's own. In reality multiculturalism
is a therapeutic melodrama of Western crimes against peaceful
peoples “of color” who were subjected to racism,
sexism, slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and environmental
degradation. Given its record of evil, the West owes reparations
to all those victims, especially those who emigrate to the West.
There these victims will be given public assistance and soothed
with repeated public assertions and recognitions of their culture's
superiority, coupled with ritualistic confessions of Western
guilt and dysfunction.
Some consider
this “cultural relativism,” but it
isn't really. A genuine cultural relativism would hold that there
are no universal standards by which to judge any culture. But
most of the time, those who claim that cultures can be judged
only in their own terms have no compunction in judging and condemning
the West. Nor will they accept that Nazi Germany or the antebellum
South or apartheid South Africa were just “different” and
so beyond our judgment. And of course, if you pin them down on
the standards and values and principles on which they base their
condemnations, these will all turn out to be ideals like freedom
or human rights or equality that have their origins and most
complete development in the West.
This intellectual
contradiction suggests that something other than coherent principle
lies behind “Occidentalism,” the
multicultural caricature of Western culture. Mythic ideas like
the Noble Savage account for some of multiculturalism's allure:
ever since the Greeks, visions of peoples living simpler, more
spontaneous lives have attracted those living in more complex
and sophisticated societies. The Romantic fascination with the
exotic explains too the West's relentless appropriation of non-Western
cultural artifacts. More important, I think, is the Communist
ideology that made colonialism and imperialism into Capitalism's
fiendish survival mechanisms. Since the Western proletarians
weren't going to play their appointed historical role-- they
were too busy improving their standard of living in free market
economies--the Third World became the new proletariat that would
rise up and overthrow the evil Capitalist order. Thus anti-colonialism
and revolution became the Communist tool for attacking the West
and its ideals. That's why the anti-globalization movement--
a species of debased Romantic dissatisfaction with modern civilization--
finds some of its strongest allies among the European communist
and socialist parties.
Likewise,
the Arab jihad against Israel, having failed to destroy her
by military
force, has been adept at camouflaging its war
of extermination as anti-colonial resistance on the part of dark-skinned “others” oppressed
by an outpost of Western imperialism. So too with the larger
jihad against the West, which is explained as a response to continuing
neo-colonial incursions against the religion of “peace
and tolerance.” This propaganda gains traction from the
readiness of many Westerners to accept a false history that denigrates
their own culture and explains away its phenomenal success at
providing the most freedom and prosperity for the greatest number
of people. This self-loathing has become a banal received idea,
visible everywhere in our culture, from movies and Disney cartoons
to grade-school history textbooks and university GE courses.
Whether people sincerely believe this distortion of history,
or adopt it as an intellectual pose they think sophisticated,
the net result is to weaken the pride in and love for one's own
culture and country necessary for both to survive.
More important, if we Westerners proclaim in both our popular
and high culture that our way of life is not the best, that it
is tainted by historical crimes, that other ways are in critical
respects superior, why then should we be surprised that immigrants
agree with what many of our cultural and intellectual elites
have been telling the world for decades now? At the same time
the West has welcomed immigrants we have abandoned the one thing
that can make immigration work: the requirement that the immigrant
assimilate to our culture and acknowledge that by virtue of his
making it his home he thinks it is superior to the culture he
left. In the U.S. this meant learning English, learning American
history, American political ideals, American heroes and stories.
It meant making America his home, the object of his affection
he would fight and die for, as many immigrants have done and
continue to do. If the immigrant wanted to keep something of
his own culture, he could do that privately, through fraternal
organizations or his church. But American public education and
culture were not obligated to celebrate the numerous cultures
immigrants had abandoned and, by doing so, had proclaimed to
be inferior to America at some fundamental level.
Today, however, our public culture and education are supposed
not just to acknowledge but to celebrate as superior these cultures
the immigrant has abandoned, and to allow him to create a separatist
enclave in which that old culture lives on no matter how much
it contradicts Western political ideals. In the case of Muslims
in England, this process has been allowed to go on for decades,
resulting in a widespread distaste, if not hatred, for the country
that has given them freedom and opportunity. Huddled in ethnic
enclaves, many Muslims indulge and nourish a hatred of the West
and its ideals even as these provide them freedom, opportunity,
and in many cases social welfare subsidies. And if anyone should
protest and suggest that the immigrant should assimilate to the
culture that has provided him these goods, he will be accused
of xenophobia or jingoism or ethnocentrism or racism or some
other heinous crime, not just by the ethnic lobbies but by other
Westerners.
We have allowed a dangerous virus to infect the West. No nation,
no people can survive if they think their way of life is no better
than any other, or if they scorn and slight their national ideals
and values. Ultimately, such people will always be vulnerable
to those who do think their way is better--just as we see today
with many Muslim immigrants in Europe. Indulging our multicultural
fantasies, we have subsidized, coddled, and abased ourselves
before people who, as the attacks in London demonstrate, are
willing, on behalf of the culture that had failed their parents,
to murder and terrorize the culture that has given them a freedom
and opportunity that hardly exist in most Islamic countries.
To demand that immigrants assimilate and pledge allegiance to
their new homes is not xenophobia or racism; it is rather to
demand that those who choose to come to the West and enjoy its
political and economic goods respect, honor, and embrace the
ideals and principles that created those goods in the first place.
And it is to recognize that yes, a price must be paid: the discarding
of those old ways and ideals that contradict or compromise the
new values. After all, by coming to the West the immigrant has
already voted with his feet for the Western way. If he now finds
that he made the wrong choice and that he believes the culture
he left is in fact superior, then he is free to go back. tOR
copyright
2005 Bruce S. Thornton
Searching for Joaquin
by Bruce S. Thornton |
Greek Ways
by Bruce S. Thornton |
Bonfire of the Humanities
by Victor Davis Hanson, John Heath, Bruce S. Thornton |
Plagues of the Mind
by Bruce S. Thornton |
Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek
Sexuality
by Bruce S. Thornton |
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