Multiculturalism as propaganda

There wouldn’t be many words in our vocabulary more guaranteed to divide the Australian community, than “multicultural”, yet even those who hold it in reverential awe do not have a clear understanding of its meaning.

“I know what it means,” I hear you say. “‘Multi’ means many; ‘multicultural’ means many cultures. Multicultural Australia is an Australia in which we celebrate many cultures. Too easy!”

But is it that easy? An examination of the history of the word “culture” shows a seismic shift in meaning in the recent past, a shift that resulted from the de-rationalisation of human beings. Today, it is used to describe a people’s way of life, perhaps their national soul (if a collective soul makes any sense at all).

Culture comes from the Latin, cultura, meaning to till or care for the soil, principally, agriculture. Originally, it described a gentleman, a man whose mind had been cultivated by his education, specifically, by a liberal education. We used to look at the rational individual; now we look only at the abstraction.

In fact, so pervasive has the remodeled meaning become, that culture might now be defined as any pattern of conduct common to any human group: we even talk of such things as the “culture of suburbia” and the criminal “gang cultures”.

From next year, if a New South Wales school child were to ask his teacher for the meaning of the word, “culture” he can officially be directed to the website, Making Multicultural Australia. This site contains a plethora of material promoting multiculturalism. It has been named as one of the new multimedia references for the NSW HSC English curriculum. Why the English curriculum, one might well ask. No explanation is given.

Material on the site, we are told, is copyright to the Board of Studies NSW, and is based on research directed by, and copyrighted to, Professor Andrew Jakubowicz from the University of Technology Sydney.

At first glance, as an educational site in multiculturalism, it is objectionable because it preaches rather than teaches. It does not argue the case for multiculturalism, nor does it explain that multiculturalism covers a wide range of practices from the objectionable (which even the advocates agree must be stopped) to the trite: for example, ethnic food and folk festivals - as if a culture should be defined by its belly or its costume. Rather, the site assumes multiculturalism as a given - which may, of course, be true, but education is different from propaganda.

Naming the site as an English educational site is probably more objectionable, since it assumes that there can be objective analysis of the use of English words without objective analysis of their meanings. The site is also objectionable because it pretends a scientific basis for saccharine opinions which are either too simple to be useful or are blatant propaganda.

The Making Multicultural Australia web site states that its purpose is to, “explore new strategies to promote cultural diversity and tolerance” (stress added). It aims to “assist young people of upper primary and high school … explore our cultural diversity”.

What must be embarrassing for Professor Jakubowicz, as a professor of sociology, is that he knows that sociology and every other social science, teaches that all values are subjective. He can not, therefore, prove scientifically that cultural diversity and tolerance ought to be promoted. In fact, he knows that, scientifically, it is as valid to promote their opposites.

A good student, one not content with a saccharine diet that such platitudes offer, might want to know if the research reveals when tolerance is virtuous and hence worthy of pursuit. A better read student might point out that what was a virtue for Hamlet at Wittenberg University, was also a vice when he was called to political life at Elsinore. Is tolerance always a virtue or is it, sometimes, a vice?

Any social science professor worth his salt would reply by asking the student, “What is virtue? What is vice?”

The student, believing these to be worthwhile questions (the fact that Socrates asked them over two millennia ago is not on the website) would try to give his own opinions about them. In the end, he would be told that these are all value judgments and that science can not prove that virtues are preferable to vices.

“Is the truth worth pursuing?” a bright student would ask.

“Scientifically speaking? No!”

If given an opportunity to engage in a debate with the copyright owner from the web site, another student might ask for proof that cultural diversity and tolerance can co-exist, as claimed.

The copyright owner would smile triumphantly and point to where the web site says: Coexistence of people from diverse cultures is feasible when there is common agreement about basic principles such as respect for the rights and property of others, a commitment to democratic ideals and the rule of law.

Then the student would say, “I’m confused. Co-existence depends on a common agreement about four issues one of which is the rule of law. Why shouldn’t the rule of law be the rule of Sharia law? And why does the agreement have to be about democratic ideals? Are they better than the ideals of Sharia?”

The copyright owner’s face would smile again. “Look at the website where it says ‘Human rights are not granted by others or governments but come by virtue of birth. They are not the preserve of minority groups. They are not privileges of majority groups. Human rights transcend all borders, cultures and notions of difference’.”

The student would ask, “If they are not given to us by other humans, do they come from God? And who discovered these human rights?”

A little shaken, the copyright owner would point to the website: Over the past 300 years European societies have developed a set of ideas about right that have now spread throughout the world.

The student (not knowing that it was not human rights but natural rights given by God as stated by The Declaration of Independence), would shake his head and say “These rights, then are only Western European rights, part of European culture. Aren’t you forcing your Western rights on other cultures and contradicting your multicultural policy?”

These are the sort of questions that enquiring students might ask if they were given the education with which the Board of Studies NSW ought to be concerned.

It is not the purpose of this article to set out the details of an English curriculum for students from upper primary and high school except to say it should not include propaganda.

The single purpose of a school English curriculum is to teach children to be literate, which means to be able to read and write and understand what others have written. Teaching literacy to children is a gradual process that takes all of a child’s school years. It involves an instruction in all the formalities of the English language while simultaneously introducing the children to increasingly more complicated literature. But it does not stop there.

Its culmination, for the brightest minds, is in the dialogue that it permits between the student and the greatest authors, those men who are the real teachers for they are the teachers of the teachers of the teachers. That dialogue is what is known as a liberal education.

What might such a student find, by reading the works of men like Rousseau Kant and Hegal?

In his book, Giants and Dwarfs, the late Professor Allan Bloom states: “The notion of ‘culture’ was formed in response to the rise of commercial society. So far as I know, Kant was the first to use the word in its modern sense.”

He develops this further in his best seller, The Closing of the American Mind. Kant used the word, culture to describe the dignity of man in the context of modern natural science, a science which reduced everything to matter or atoms in motion. Bloom argues that what now passes for culture is merely differences in food and clothing: this attempt to preserve old cultures in the New World is superficial because it ignores the fact that real differences among men are based on real differences in fundamental beliefs about good and evil, about what is highest, about God.

Even so, the one thing missing from multicultural discussion is multicultural politics, the very thing which for Aristotle and the ancients is the determinative of people’s understanding of right and wrong.

Professor Harry Jaffa in his book on Abraham Lincoln, A New Birth of Freedom, states that it is the Aristotelian view of man that guided the founding of the American Republic. The great principle of republican government is set down in The Declaration of Independence. “All men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” This principle was, according to Lincoln, applicable to all human beings, everywhere and at all times.

This principle (which was accepted unquestioningly by the Australian founders) makes it clear that a democratic regime can only exist among those who recognise the unalienable rights of their equal, fellow citizens.

Multiculturalism which, at its most practical and basic level, promotes the cultures of all peoples including those who do not embrace the equality of their fellow citizens, is not only fundamentally inconsistent with, but is destructive of, republican, that is, democratic, government.

We suspect that the copyright owner of Multicultural Australia agrees since the website states that co-existence (tolerance) between cultures is only possible provided there is respect for others’ rights and an agreement about ends. In saying this he is, without knowing it, conceding that Aristotle not Kant was correct.

At its highest, participation in a democratic republic requires an abandonment of every political opinion inconsistent with liberal democracy and it is in the family where those opinions linger on whatever the law might say.

It is not unknown in this country to find old men exercising absolute control over their families and many years after their arrival. Some men would rather kill their daughters than allow an adult woman to go where she chooses or to marry whom she chooses. Democracy requires that the parents exercise a kind of democratic rule of equals.

Ironically, it has been the Australian family which has been the focus of ethnic criticism, as Stephen FitzGerald the chairman of the Committee to Advise on Australia’s Immigration Policies during Bob Hawke’s government points out in his book, Is Australia an Asian Country:

It was the daily fare of disparagement of Australia as having no culture, as never having had a sense of family or family values, of being overall an entirely worthless place.

In fact, if Australians have one great virtue (and they have many), it is their willingness to defend liberty as the natural right of every people. The blood of thousands of young Australians who died fighting for freedom on foreign shores is ample testimony to it.

And it is the Turkish people and their government who witness this virtue by allowing a memorial to be erected on their shores to honour the Australians who died invading Turkey on April 25, 1915. Although the Turks would eventually be defeated, they would, in their defeat free themselves from the oppression of the Ottoman Caliphate and march the world stage as a secular republic.

That is a multicultural fact worth learning: but it will never be a proper part of an English curriculum.