I have talked to several people who knew Fraser well, and all admit to being baffled as to what made him tick. Anyway, whatever was originally meant by multiculturalism, it has come to mean a presumption that all cultures are equal, or must be regarded as equal. This flies in the face of sense, and of considerations of national development and security. As one of the Naipaul brothers put it, there is an objective difference between a culture which cannot repair a bicycle-pump and one which can put a man on the moon; between a culture which obtains its drinking water in summer by sucking it through a hollow reed and one which builds the Hoover Dam. It is to the point that Jews, numbering a small fraction of one per cent of the world’s population, have won about a quarter of all the Nobel Prizes in the ‘hard’ sciences, and that tiny beleaguered Israel is the best governed, best educated, most advanced and stable country in the Middle East.
The diversity-crazed, taxpayer-funded Clemson University in the US says it is unacceptably Eurocentric to expect students from other cultures to attend lectures on time. Deeper than these differences in technology, however, are moral differences in showing that all cultures are not equal. Female genital mutilation is a case in point. As is well-known, the object of FGM is to deprive women of the possibility of sexual pleasure, one of life’s most joyous experiences, and keep them faithful to the men whose property they are. The possibility that they might remain faithful voluntarily is ruled out, as they are not credited with capacity for moral strength or choice. In addition, FGM is an agonising, terrifying experience, and often condemns the women who undergo it to a lifetime of pain and infection. The cultures that do this are treating women as sub-human.
Muslim men in India can divorce their wives by saying the word talaq three times. The divorce is instant and unilateral; for the woman it may mean starvation. Another quaint example of cultural diversity for Australia to copy? Still, it is fairly mild compared to stoning women to death for the crime of having been raped.
Of course, Fraser did not mean these things for Australia when pioneering the multiculturalism industry here. But vague ideas in politics sometimes have a way of being taken over by the unforeseen. Now, opposition to FGM is condemned as Eurocentric cultural imperialism, its defenders including some western intellectuals apparently driven mad with hatred for their own liberal-democratic culture and prepared to endorse any proposition, however insane, that might tend to delegitimise it. It is even suggested that FGM is the equivalent of male circumcision. It is incredible that some who put forward this proposition can expect to be taken seriously. They cannot usually be argued with. As G.K. Chesterton said, if you argue with a mad person you will probaby get the worst of it, for your opponent’s mind is unhampered by humour or proportion or common sense.
There are objective differences between a culture which mandates mutilation of women and one that neither permits nor wishes it, as there are differences between cultures which permit freedom of speech and ones that do not, and between cultures of economic freedom and economic un-freedom. A ‘multiculturalism’ which seriously holds that all cultures should be imported holus-bolus into our so far exceptionally unified continent, and welcomed, is mad.
Unassimilable migrants, with cultural conditioning to treat their hosts as conquered helots and rape-meat, are literally destroying Scandinavia, with France and Germany not far behind. It is a perversion of the proposition that many cultures have something to offer, and insofar as they do, they should be valued.
This ignores the difficult question of how culture is defined. Are the works of Dante, Goethe and Mozart, the bravery of the Vikings or the wisdom of Confucius, the achievements of the ancient Greeks, Romans and (certainly not least) Jews, part of ‘our’ culture? Sane and civilised cultures do share some important values.
Miranda Devine recently interviewed a former teacher about extremism spreading in Australia among Muslim children at State Schools:
‘Until she was hounded out of the predominantly Muslim school in Sydney’s southwest two years ago, Mrs A. was forced to stand by helplessly as students brought Isis-style flags to school, made threatening “beheading” gestures to her, wrote abusive graffiti about her family, bailed her up to chant the Koran in Arabic in her face, and demanded she remove the cross around her neck.’
Have we lost the courage or moral fibre to say features of some cultures are objectively bad, and instead of being subsidised, should be stamped out? Now multiculturalism is mutating into the Left’s latest madness of attacking ‘cultural appropriation’. Wait for the banning of Kipling’s tales of Indians and Eskimos.
