MULTICULTURALISM NEED NOT BE NEGATIVE

The usual "alternative" that Leftists offer to racial, ethnic or national consciousness is multiculturalism. Though what is inadequate about awareness of oneself as being simply an individual rather escapes me.

Leftists have undoubtedly given multiculturalism a bad name but I would argue that moderate versions of the idea are perfectly reasonable. There is surely a middle way between rejecting everything that is "foreign" and regarding Western civilization as little better than a criminal conspiracy. Multiculturalism is firmly entrenched in Australian politics as just such a middle way. There is general agreement that other cultures should be generally accepted and that we should all be open to whatever good might be in them.

And I fully accept that. What I do NOT accept is the claim that all cultures are equal or of equal value. I believe it to be pretty obvious that modern Western culture does best at delivering generally desired outcomes to its adherents. And it is also historically undisputable that, from early roots in the Mediterranean area, that culture has mainly been developed by a small group of interrelated peoples with origins on the fringes of North Western Europe. And those of us who are part of one or more of those peoples have every reason to celebrate it. And I am and I do. I am happy with who and what I am.

Critics of multicultural excesses are often portrayed as uneducated redneck yokels by the Left. But are Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr or Harvard's Samuel P. Huntington rednecks? Huntington sums up rather well the excesses that the chronic anger of the Left leads to:

"Historically American national identity has been defined culturally by the heritage of Western civilization and politically by the principles of the American Creed on which Americans overwhelmingly agree: liberty, democracy, individualism, equality before the law, constitutionalism, private property. In the late twentieth century both components of American identity have come under concentrated and sustained onslaught from a small but influential number of intellectuals and publicists. In the name of multiculturalism they have attacked the identification of the United States with Western civilization, denied the existence of a common American culture, and promoted racial, ethnic, and other subnational cultural identities and groupings. They have denounced, in the words of one of their reports, the "systematic bias toward European culture and its derivatives" in education and "the dominance of the European-American monocultural perspective." The multiculturalists are, as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., said, "very often ethnocentric separatists who see little in the Western heritage other than Western crimes." Their "mood is one of divesting Americans of the sinful European inheritance and seeking redemptive infusions from non-Western cultures."

Clearly, there is absolutely no need for multiculturalism to be so negative. Only the chronic hatred of Leftists for the ordinary people around them can explain such negativity.

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