Multiple Cults to Multiple Deities

He is writing about Great Britain, but Frank Furedi’s analysis of a fractured and fragmented society applies well to today’s America.

By his lights,multiculturalism has caused the fracture. By pretending that all cultures are of equal value, it encourages people to reject a unifying national culture. 

From a slightly different angle, multiculturalism involves worshiping multiple deities at multiple cults. It is a return to pagan idolatry, in defiance of the One God who founded Western civilization. The One God produced a unified nation, a community of laws, not an empire.

To describe multicultural society, Furedi quotes the recently deposed British Home Secretary, Suella Braverman. Among Braverman’s problems, she rejected multiculturalism:

She argued that multicultural policies have fuelled this fracturing of society into sometimes antagonistic identity groups. ‘Multiculturalism makes no demands of the incomer to integrate’, she said. ‘It has failed because it allowed people to come to our society and live parallel lives in it.’ She added that, in some extreme cases, certain groups of people can ‘pursue lives aimed at undermining the stability and threatening the security of society’.

The new British Foreign Secretary, David Cameron, offered a similar critique:

Cameron’s statement was certainly milder in tone to Braverman’s speech. But the content was strikingly similar. He said that the ‘doctrine of state multiculturalism’ had encouraged people of different cultures to live separate lives, and had ‘failed to provide a vision of society to which they feel they want to belong’. As a result, Cameron argued, ‘we have even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run counter to our values’. In response to the failure of state multiculturalism, Cameron called for the cultivation of a stronger national identity that could ‘prevent people turning to all kinds of extremism’.

Of course, migration patterns are the problem. The more members of a minority group settle in a nation, the more likely they are to maintain their cultural identities and to refuse to integrate-- because they refuse to offend the spirit of their ancestors:

Advocates of multiculturalism try to silence their critics, chucking out accusations of racism. And as they do so, they consciously avert their eyes to the profound social tensions in our midst, from gangs of Muslim and Hindu youths fighting each other on the streets of Leicester last year to the anti-Israel protesters marching through European cities this year.

Political leaders, in Great Britain and even at times in America, have lost a sense of national purpose and having given up on assimilating everyone into a unifying and encompassing culture.

Multiculturalist dogma tells them that they need not assimilate. But when it says that no culture is better or worse than any others it is defying the notion of the clash of civilizations. By Samuel Huntington’s theory, cultures compete to see which ones are better at protecting and providing for their people.

Of course, people who migrate to Britain and America are showing that they believe their native cultures to be inferior.

Indeed, the ideology of multiculturalism thrives in the absence of a vision for society to which everyone feels they can belong. The absence of such a vision is not accidental. It is due to multiculturalism’s insistence that no set of values can be regarded as superior to any other, or looked upon as the desirable norm. The absence of a cohering national vision for society, of a coherent sense of a nation’s shared values and traditions, should therefore be regarded as a direct achievement of multiculturalism.

According to Furedi, it all began with the counterculture that grew up during the Vietnam War. It was a sustained and systematic attack on Western civilization:

But it was the emergence of the so-called counterculture in the 1950s and especially the 1960s that proved pivotal. This challenged mainstream norms and values and, by politicising certain identities, began to give rise to what we now know as identity politics. And in doing so, the counterculture exposed European elites’ loss of belief, their depletion of moral and political capital. They effectively found themselves unable to respond to the challenge posed by the counterculture and provide a persuasive account of their nations’ way of life. The question of what it is to be British, German or Dutch had become very difficult for them to answer.

In Great Britain, Furedi explains, the establishment has openly rejected national identity. One might imagine that politicians, in particular, have wanted to cultivate minority voters, and have done so by pretending to respect their cultures. 

Indeed, it is the British establishment’s estrangement from its own nation’s historical legacy, traditions and values that has created the cultural terrain on which the divisive politics of identity and multiculturalism can flourish. As a result, multiculturalism and identity politics have faced very few obstacles in their rise to become today’s ruling ideologies.

Correctly, Furedi explains that the cure for multiculturalism is patriotism. In Great Britain this seems to be a daunting task, though many places in America have similarly rejected the value of patriotism:

Britain’s main public institutions now seem embarrassed by any display of patriotism. The arrogant imperial attitudes of the past have given way to a sense of shame about Britain’s history and its present. Those still given to displays of patriotism are marginalised as relics or, worse still, condemned as racists and xenophobes.

Feeling an attachment to one’s wider national community is now treated as something to be ashamed of. These sentiments have flourished in higher education, schools and cultural institutions like the BBC. Sneering at the Union flag has become de rigueur for members of the British cultural elites.

And also,

But no one was left in any doubt that a significant section of Britain’s cultural establishment regards symbols of national identity with a sense of amused contempt.

Multiculturalism diminishes and demeans patriotism and national pride. But, it must also diminish and demean personal pride, thereby giving rise to pervasive depression:

The consequences of this grievance culture have been profound. By cultivating and politicising group identities, multiculturalism has estranged people from the nation they inhabit. Continually encouraged to celebrate their difference, members of identity groups have become psychically distant from other members of society. Little wonder some now seem to have more attachment to national and ethnic conflicts far away than they do to the communities in which they actually live.

So, weak-kneed and weak-willed politicians, unwilling to risk losing minority votes, have rejected national pride in favor of multiple cults to multiple pagan deities. Is this the downside of democracy?

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