Andrew Hagen

Think of culture as a meal that you are preparing. Do you take exactly one teaspoon of every item you’ve got in the pantry, and put it into the pot and heat it? Or do you carefully select the ingredients? A culture is a mix of different ingredients, and not just any mix works.

Think of culture as a field of crops. You’ve got the crops in the field, and you’ve got weeds. You have to get rid of the weeds. Do you kill everything growing in the field to get at the weeds—sterlization—or do you just try to get rid of the weeds, leaving the crops to grow? If there is racism or another problem in a culture, you target that problem. You don’t get rid of the whole culture.

Think of culture as physical matter. It might be a gold nugget, or a chunk of ice. It’s made up of only one or two elements. It’s boring. Now add some diversity. Instead of something boring and entirely uniform, it’s interesting. As a mix of elements, it might be a rock, a pond, or a tree. Now add more and more diversity. Eventually you have nothing but sludge, entropy, or primordial ooze. Some diversity is beneficial, but an unlimited amount of diversity results in uselessness and death. Thus, diversity is important to life and culture, but diversity cannot be the highest goal of life or culture.

Multiculturalism takes cultures and turns them into mulch. That’s why a good nickname for multiculturalism would be “multure.”

Today, the official policy of the US and other Western countries is multiculturalism. There is no simple definition of multiculturalism, because the various parts of it contradict the other parts. All cultures are equal, and all should be free, except that Christianity and European culture should die. And so on.

Multiculturalism does not make logical sense unless you think of it as the ideology of reverse imperialism. In the imperialist age, Europeans were required go forth to the “uncivilized” world and set the people there on the path of “enlightenment.” Now, the situation is reversed. The non-European, “enlightened” world is required to go forth into Europe and America and teach us respect for “diversity” and generally to “enrich” us.

It should not be difficult to see that not only was imperialism wrong, but that reverse imperialism is wrong, too.

The plain fact is that we can learn about and respect other cultures without destroying our own. As that is the fact that multiculturalism at its heart must deny, multiculturalism must be cast aside, or our cultures will die.

Instead of multiculturalism and diversity, the leading goals of cultural, racial, and ethnic interactions should be equality and respect. We can have equality and respect without multiculturalism or diversity. European-derived cultures cannot survive if their highest goal remains diversity. No culture can. Every culture is worthy of respect and survival.

I oppose racism, imperialism, and multiculturalism. I support equality, the free exchange of ideas, liberty, and the survival of my culture. I hope other people agree with me on these basic premises, substituting their own culture if it differs from mine, but realistically, some will disagree.

Part of my culture is improving my culture. That means solving problems in my culture like, for example, racism. It doesn’t mean destroying my culture. My culture has a right to exist, just like every other culture.

Lawrence Auster has a critical four-part series on multiculturalism. Part One (*) Part Two (†) Part Three (‡) Part Four (§)

Tom Krannawitter takes a good stab at multiculturalism. (**)

Varsha Bosle has a critical commentary on how expansionist-minded Muslims exploit multiculturalism. (††)

Lawrence Auster has a separate, interesting article about “anti-racism.” (‡‡) If “anti-racism” means opposing racism, then I’m for anti-racism. If “anti-racism” means “multiculturalism,” then I’m against it.

What Auster describes in that article seems to be reverse imperialism. The supposed “enlightened” person teaches the people of European descent how to be “better” human beings by abandoning their culture.

It’s the mirror reverse of what occurred when Europeans invaded and colonized the lands and cultures of the people they called “savages” so many years ago during the age of imperialism. Except that instead of European imperialists teaching the European version of table manners and Christianity to the “savages,” the new regime is a non-European college professor teaching the “enlightenment” of multiculturalism to the “racist white savages.” It’s still wrong, no matter who is the imperialist, and who is the victim. Imperialism and reverse imperialism are both wrong.

Our cultures are being chopped to bits and heaped on the mulch pile. Perhaps one day the remnants will serve as fertilizer, to “enrich” some other culture entirely different from our own.

I do not look forward to that day of multure. I look forward to the day when humanity will steer a different course, when we all respect one another and our distinct cultures.

Update: 20 July 2004. One Fine Jay disagrees. (§§)

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 18th, 2004 at 14:44 and is filed under Multiculturalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.