More on Culture and Multiculturalism

Malcolm Pollack has an excellent piece on the error of multiculturalism here--a must read.  I reproduce most of it below.  I will add only this.  Some people conflate being against multiculturalism with advocating a society with a single race and with being against a "melting pot" with a total freeze on immigration.  That is a strawman.  One shouldn't confuse culture with race, ethnicity, and country of origin.  I say some things about that here.

MP:
The error of these [multicultural] beliefs [such faith in "human universalism"] is that they overlook both the origin and importance of culture. To be harmoniously embedded and contextualized in one’s own culture is, as everyone everywhere seems to have understood until the latter half of the last century, the foundation and bedrock of normal human experience, and is generally a precondition for individual happiness and flourishing. Furthermore, the variety of human cultures is not a superficial fact, nor is it a matter of contingent historical accident; cultures do not simply fall from the sky and land, haphazardly, upon whichever human population happens to be passing below. I believe they are best understood, instead, as what Richard Dawkins has called “extended phenotypes."

The idea is a simple one: a biological organism has both a genotype, which is the sum of its genetic information, and a phenotype, which is the physical result of the expression of the genotype — the term “phenotype” usually being understood to refer to the organism’s body. Dawkins’s fertile insight was that the phenotype extends beyond the body, into the wider world.

For example: a beaver has a beaver genome. This expresses itself in the usual beavery way: big front teeth, webby feet, and a broad, flat tail. But the “extended” phenotype is much more than that: it consists of felled trees, a dam, a lodge, and a pond. In this view, that pond is as much a part of the beaver’s gene-expression as its teeth. Bird’s nests, spiderwebs, and honeycombs — things in the world that themselves contain no genetic information — are as much a manifestation of genomes as wings and stingers.

In H. sapiens, the social animal par excellence, the extended phenotype quite naturally includes culture. And just as we see variation among subspecies for, say, bowerbird nests, we should expect to see that long-isolated human populations, whose genomes have been subject to widely varying selection pressures throughout their history, will create different, often very different, cultures — cultures as distinct as their physical appearance. And so we do.

In an earlier post, Culture and Metaculture, I quoted Lezek Kolakowski on the impossibility of genuine multicultural synthesis, which creates a problem that worsens in proportion both to the number of cultures to be blended, and their dissimilarity. An extended-phenotype model — which understands culture not as something contingently and exogenously grafted onto individuals and populations, but rather as an endogenous, organic, and wholly natural expression of the innate characteristics of a distinct subpopulation — should make even clearer why high levels of “diversity” lead so reliably to faction and strife.

Multiculturalism is SOCIETAL Suicide

Hillary Clinton ‏@HillaryClinton 1h1 hour ago                     

Preguntamos a varios neoyorquinos sobre Donald Trump—y estas fueron sus reacciones.

Hillary Clinton Tweet

No argument is promising that English is an intrinsically better language than Spanish or vice versa. And each seems to serve its purposes equally well.  Further, there is no reason why the U.S.'s main language for most of its history must have been English.  It is English because of the historically contingent events which lead to the nation's creation; the same is true of course with (e.g.) Spanish in Mexico.  But a common language helps promote a common culture, and a common culture facilitates economic transactions, political transactions, racial diversity in churches, and less strife and more commonality between people groups in a nation.  As one who embraces federalism, I would oppose a national law mandating a national language.  Nonetheless, it seems to me foolish of the Hillary Clintons not to encourage the use of English in political discourse in the United States.  Sending Tweets and other messages in Spanish only encourages the balkanization of people groups and the lack of a common culture (the same would be true of a politician in a Spanish speaking country not speaking in Spanish).  Without a common language, a common culture is very unlikely.  And without a common culture, a society is fragmented.  Unity in some diversity should be the motto, not unity by diversity which is one of the incoherent maxims of progressivism.  Diversity for diversity's sake is entirely worthless.

More on Multiculturalism:
[M]ulticulturalism takes people seeking a new start and, indirectly, tells them it’s okay to harbour old habits, beliefs and grudges from their homeland. Multiculturalism says it’s acceptable to live in ethnic and linguistic communities cut off from the mainstream. It gives official encouragement to ghettoization over integration. That’s because it is politically incorrect to suggest that our own culture is superior in anyway or has anything to offer newcomers.

If this is the case – that our [British] culture has no claim on superior political values – why is immigration largely a one-way street: from there (wherever there is) to here?

But increasingly, multiculturalism also encourages (and even funds) the formation of radical ideologies. While the Internet seems to be the #1 recruiter of Muslim youth into radical causes, the funding [in Britain] of Muslim centres, schools, newspapers and websites contributes.

Extremists will use our own tolerance against us. As a libertarian, I would not ban intolerant views from designated religious or cultural groups. But, like David Cameron, I see no reason to force taxpayers to subsidize radical groups and ideologies. If you are made to preach jihad and Sharia law on your own dime, you will find it very slow going, which is a good thing.

Read the rest on "Britain's Bold Stance Against Squishy Multiculturalism"

How a Generation Lost Its Common Culture

A good piece on the destructive force of multiculturalism by Patrick Deneen, Associate Professor of Constitutional Studies at Notre Dame.  Excerpt:

Our students’ ignorance is not a failing of the educational system – it is its crowning achievement. Efforts by several generations of philosophers and reformers and public policy experts — whom our students (and most of us) know nothing about — have combined to produce a generation of know-nothings. The pervasive ignorance of our students is not a mere accident or unfortunate but correctible outcome, if only we hire better teachers or tweak the reading lists in high school. It is the consequence of a civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide. The end of history for our students signals the End of History for the West.

[...]

We have fallen into the bad and unquestioned habit of thinking that our educational system is broken, but it is working on all cylinders. What our educational system aims to produce is cultural amnesia, a wholesale lack of curiosity, history-less free agents, and educational goals composed of content-free processes and unexamined buzz-words like “critical thinking,” “diversity,” “ways of knowing,” “social justice,” and “cultural competence.”

Our students are the achievement of a systemic commitment to producing individuals without a past for whom the future is a foreign country, cultureless ciphers who can live anywhere and perform any kind of work without inquiring about its purposes or ends, perfected tools for an economic system that prizes “flexibility” (geographic, interpersonal, ethical).

In such a world, possessing a culture, a history, an inheritance, a commitment to a place and particular people, specific forms of gratitude and indebtedness (rather than a generalized and deracinated commitment to “social justice”), a strong set of ethical and moral norms that assert definite limits to what one ought and ought not to do (aside from being “judgmental”) are hindrances and handicaps.

Regardless of major or course of study, the main object of modern education is to sand off remnants of any cultural or historical specificity and identity that might still stick to our students, to make them perfect company men and women for a modern polity and economy that penalizes deep commitments. Efforts first to foster appreciation for “multi-culturalism” signaled a dedication to eviscerate any particular cultural inheritance, while the current fad of “diversity” signals thoroughgoing commitment to de-cultured and relentless homogenization.

Quick Solution to the Syrian Immigration Question

If there's no problem (it helps the economy, etc.), Democratic governors (California, New York, Illinois, Washington, Oregon, Massachusetts, Maine, etc.) should just get out in front and volunteer to take all the immigrants* no questions asked.

*Immigrants, not necessarily refugees.  For all anyone knows some of those migrating are not seeking refuge but are instead seeking terror.

Do We Want Mexifornia?

Native Californian, Victor Davis Hanson, has some interesting thoughts on the matter here.  A few quotes:

To contrast the Selma I live in today with the Selma I grew up in will doubtless seem hopelessly nostalgic. But the point of the contrast is not that 40 years ago our community was only 40 or 50 percent Mexican, but rather that the immigrants then were mostly here legally. Crime was far rarer: the hit-and-run accidents, auto theft, drug manufacturing and sale, murders, rapes, and armed robberies that are now customary were then nearly nonexistent. Fights that now end in semi-automatic-weapon fire were settled with knives then.

I used to worry over the theft of a tractor battery. Yet in the last decade, I have run off at gunpoint three gang members trying to force their way into our house at 3 am. Last year, four patrol cars—accompanied by a helicopter whirling overhead—chased drug dealers in hot pursuit through our driveway. One suspect escaped and turned up two hours later hiding behind a hedge on our lawn, vainly seeking sanctuary from a sure prison term. When a carload of thieves tried to steal oranges from our yard, I soon found myself outmanned and outgunned—and decided that 100 pounds of pilfered fruit is not worth your life.
....
Most of the kids I saw each day then—just as most of the adults I see daily now around the same farm—were from Mexico. Skin color and national origin were quite out in the open. We five Anglos in our class of 40 at our rural elementary school were labeled “white boys” and “gringos”; in turn, we knew the majority as “Mexicans,” their parents more respectfully as “Mexican-Americans.” Most fights, however, were not racial. We in the white minority fought beside and against Mexican-Americans; the great dividing line of most rumbles was whether you were born in Selma or Fresno. We had our fringe racists, of course: Mr. Martinez, the fourth-grade teacher, told me in 1963 that “whitey was through in California,” even as Mrs. Wilson, a Texas native, complimented those in the art class who were “lighter than most from Mexico.” There was nothing of the contemporary multicultural model—no bilingual aides, written and spoken communication with parents in Spanish, textbooks highlighting the Aztecs and the theft of northern Mexico, or federally funded counselors to remind students that “the borders crossed us, not we the borders.” Excused absences for catechism classes at the Catholic church emptied our classrooms, giving us five Anglo Protestants a much-welcomed three-hour recess. We all suffered fish sticks on Friday, the public school’s concession to the vast Catholic majority.
....
I often think that if I did not particularly like my Mexican-American students (who make up the majority of my classics classes), and if I wanted them to fail, I would not continue to teach them Latin (much less Greek), English composition, or Western history and culture. Nor would I insist on essays free of grammatical error or demand oral reports that employ classical rhetorical tropes.

No, if I did not like them or did not wish to live among thousands of illegal and legal immigrants and wish them married into my family, I would keep them distant by teaching them therapy, letting them speak poor English—or no English at all—and insisting on the superiority of the Mexican culture that they or their parents had fled. If I did not like my students and wished them to remain in the fields—or when they were employed in the office to be snickered at behind closed doors by their white benefactors—I would move from the west side of Selma to an exclusive white suburb in north Fresno, and then as penance teach them during the day about the glory of the Aztecs, the need for government entitlement, and the idea that grammar is but a “construct.” I would insist that white racism and capitalist brutality alone explain Mexican-American crime rates, and I would explain why they need someone like me to champion their cause to the wealthy and educated. If I really wished to be distant from my students, I would insist that they attend our university’s separate Hispanic graduation assemblies to remind them that they are intrinsically different from, rather than inherently equal to me. I would be more like the sensitive teachers who teach today than the insensitive ones who once taught me.

So I have made my choice on the great question that California must decide: whether we will remain multiracial or become America’s first truly multicultural state. For our future, will we all return to an imperfect, insensitive, but honest assimilationist past that nevertheless worked, or stay with the utopian and deceitful multiculturalist present that is clearly failing? Unchecked illegal immigration and multiculturalism are a lethal mix. California—if it is to stay as California—might have coped with one or even the other, but surely not both at once.