Muticultural Madness 1

Multicultural Madness Pt1

Multicultural-ism has been in recent decades, the sacred cow of the “new” Western countries. The “old” European countries now seem to be taking this madness to its limit with uncontrolled borders.

Multicultural-ism is the doctrine whereby you have high immigration but instead of promoting integration of these new arrivals into the dominant culture you encourage them to maintain their old ways. In essence it is the end point of cultural cringe – you are in effect telling the new arrivals that they are coming to a land devoid of any customary ways of working together, devoid of a world view about what is right and wrong, and devoid of social customs and mores. It is for all parties a cruel lie!

Let me stress here “culture” is so much more than food and folk dancing! You can dress up in tartan kilts and do Scottish Country dancing, Irish feet-only dancing, put on a ten gallon hat and do American Country & Western, be a fan of the Waltz, or saucy South American dances and so on and still belong to the dominant culture. In fact these just become “add-ons” of choice. You can cook in exotic food styles, and still belong to the dominant culture – in fact you will find all these food styles just go mainline and even get improved. When I tried pizza in Italy I was quite disappointed! I kept thinking: “They should come to Australia and learn how to do a real pizza.”

When we allow ourselves to think of these things as “culture” we are only scratching the surface. We are also making a huge mistake. These superficial things have spread through the entire country – regardless of actual ethnic origin. They have been a real boon. But it is a very different story if we look deeper into what “culture” actually entails.

Culture proper consists of things like the ways of thinking which are built in to our language, our view of the rule of law, how we value human life, “manners” - that social lubricant of day to day dealings with other people, and the actual rules (written and unwritten) which have evolved to make our particular society function as well as it does.

People want to come to live ion our country presumably because they think it is better than their own. One reason for this is that our society functions better. (Another of course could be – as in the case of an invasion – because they want to plunder it!) But let's stick with first one for now.

If the people in our own country who have been so loudly advocating multiculturalism have not understood the implications one can hardly expect the immigrants to. So, unlike the immigrant waves of the past who integrated and took on our culture (in the true sense) and worked hard to give their children a start in the land of opportunity, these modern immigrants hear us saying that they should carry on just as they did in the old country, there are no new customs, ideals or rules here, and will destroy rather than build up our countries.

The old way of integration worked.

In one parish I had there was a very large Italian population. Often there were four generations. The old grandmother who had been brought out by her family – dressed in black and probably didn't speak English. The the ones who had come as adults, Italian names, dark skinned, still had an accent. Their children probably born here, still Italian given name, no accent, often risen the ladder through education and enterprise and as likely as not married a non-Italian. Then their children, with the currently popular Aussie names and indistinguishable from other European origin people. Sure in the early post WWII times there were real racial tensions. The “Dagos” used knives in fights which then was un-Australian. Italian boys were violently protective of their sisters, but conversely mis-understood Australian female fashions as indicating loose morals. But they learned to fit in over time. Melbourne is said to have a Greek population second only to Athens, but they are all thoroughly Australianised.

There is a gorgeous scene in the film “Kindergarten Cop” where the very young class of children are at the festival picnic and all reciting the Gettysburg address: “Four-score and seven years ago our fathers …..” and then when the camera scans the group you see an incredibly diverse ethnic mix! Every time I have seen that film it has struck me that it illustrates the proper way to treat immigrants : “You are one of us now, and this is our shared heritage, and this is how we behave”

More next time

Truth Telling & Multiculturalism

We have been assuming that moralists who may debate our conclusions at least start from an afterglow of Judeo-Christian ethics where lying (however defined) is bad and truth telling is good.

Now lets step into the real world! Our Western culture is increasingly being invaded by other world views. In some of these views truth telling is not valued, and lying is considered normal, even admirable .

In this post and the next I will talk about two of these invading influences. Multiculturalism today and the trickle-down effect of Nietzsche next time.

Multiculturalism has been the buzz-word in Australia for the last few decades. Now we are facing some serious unintended consequences.

1. “Multiculturalism” involved lies

Fault on both sides. On our side we have acted like over indulgent parents who never correct or discipline their children. The children grow up spoilt brats.

Our programs of “Multiculturalism” did not tell the truth. Not all the truth. We promoted acceptance and tolerance – which was good. We applauded diversity in minor cultural traits – dress codes, food and so forth – which was good. BUT we failed to say: “We have written and unwritten codes of conduct, and we have expectations of loyalty to your adopted nation – and these are not negotiable!” …. in short we lied to them!

We should have acted like good parents: our message should have been: “You are one of us now – and this is how we behave!” and enforced our social and moral values from the start.

On the other side some migrant groups have fully acted out the part of spoilt children. You might say they have lied to themselves, denying the inevitable social consequences of their behaviour.

The Bible says of us and God: “Or do you think lightly of his wealth of kindness, tolerance and patience, without recognizing that God's kindness is meant to lead you to a change of heart...” (Romans 2:4 NEB translation). Some communities of immigrants have – to their shame – failed to recognize that the wealth of tolerance and goodwill they have been shown was meant to win them over to the “Australian” way of behaving. The Moslem community and the recent outbreak of Islamist terror threats is a good example. Rather than Muslims being the most zealous to weed out terrorists from their midst, they complain publicly of discrimination whenever the police arrest a terror suspect or raid properties and seize weapons and terrorist propaganda.

I have no wish to see discrimination, let alone persecution anywhere! I am like a doctor trying to convince a diabetic patient that if they don't change their diet they will die. The doctor doesn't want the patient to die – I don't want racism to rear its ugly head. But I know human nature and I have been to countries where there is racial strife.

The text from Romans 2 continues “In the rigid obstinacy of your heart you are laying up for yourself a store of retribution for the day of retribution...” Like it not not, we do reap what we sow! We have been silly about multiculturalism and it is going to bite us. Moslem communities (for example) are acting like spoilt children and it will come back to bit them if they keep doing that. We need to acknowledge this fact ourselves and reflect the truth of it to others – it may just save them.

2. Other cultures view lying and truth telling differently.

Some cultures do not promote truth telling to everyone.

The recent calls by Islamic State fanatics for war against the world have opened our eyes to many things. One is that these people confine the duty of truth telling to their own group. For these Muslims to lie to an “unbeliever” is not considered wrong. This is a very sharp contrast to the Biblical ideal, where truth telling is an attempt as humans to be imitators of God – who is God of all the world, does not play favorites among nations and even "sends the rain on the just and the unjust alike". So it is wrong to make two groups: one to whom you must tell the truth (whether that be family, or comrades, or co-religionists) and another (the outsiders) to whom you may tell lies.

For the Christian, the obligation to tell the truth may not rule all situations (see last blog) but where it does it applies to all people.

I keep getting phone calls aimed at defrauding me. A very common one is this: “Hello, I am (insert Australian sounding name). I am from the technical department of Microsoft. There is a problem with your computer ...” I hang up about then, but more gullible people have given the caller their computer access codes and been robbed! The real Microsoft does not ring people! Always these would be thieves have foreign and I think “Indian sub-continent” accents. Of course there are many, many Australians who are lying thieves – but experiences such as these phone calls do suggest that in another culture the problem is even more endemic.

How do we deal with this? Jesus said: “be wise as serpents; but as innocent as doves.”

We must be alert to the fact that there are cultures where they believe there is nothing at all wrong about lying to us. Be cautious about believing what they say!

But we must still tell the truth to them – because that is who we are. More importantly that is like God, who we are trying to imitate!

Thirdly: we have to teach our standards of truth telling: because those standards are right!