Scruton on race, culture, and the death of multiculturalism

From an essay, "Multiculturalism, R.I.P.", by philosopher Roger Scruton, from the December 2010 issue of American Spectator:

So let's be clear from the outset: culture and race have nothing to do with each other. There is no contradiction in the idea that Felix Mendelssohn was Jewish by race and German by culture -- or indeed that he was the most public-spirited representative of German culture in his day. Nor is there any contradiction in saying that a single person belongs to two cultures. Felix's grandfather Moses was a great Rabbi, upstanding representative of the Jewish cultural inheritance, and also founding father of the German Enlightenment. Many of the German philologists to which the Enlightenment gave rise were as multicultural as Moses Mendelssohn -- Max Müller, for example, German by race, English by adoption, and more steeped in the culture of India than virtually anyone alive today. Wagner had to twist and turn his thoughts into every kind of absurd contortion in order to discover "Jewishness" in the music of Felix Mendelssohn, from whom he took so much. (How could he have got to the music ofLohengrin without the help of Mendelssohn's music for A Midsummer Night's Dream?) And Wagner's repugnant essay on Judaism in music is one of the first instances of the lie that we have had to live through -- the lie that sees race and culture as the same idea, and which tells us that in demanding a measure of cultural uniformity, we are also affirming the dominance of a single race.

Once we distinguish race and culture, the way is open to acknowledge that not all cultures are equally admirable, and that not all cultures can exist comfortably side-by-side. To deny this is to forgo the very possibility of moral judgment, and therefore to deny the fundamental experience of community. It is precisely this that has caused the multiculturalists to hesitate. Rightly enjoying the polytheistic festivals of the Hindus, the Carnivals of Caribbean blacks, and the celebrations of the Chinese New Year, they have led us to believe that cultural difference is always an addition to social life, and never a threat to it. Anyone who discriminates between cultures, therefore, really must have something more dangerous at the back of his mind -- a desire to exclude on grounds of strangeness, which is the first step towards the racist mindset.

But experience has finally prevailed over wishful thinking. It is culture, not nature, that tells a family that their daughter who has fallen in love outside the permitted circle must be killed, that girls must undergo genital mutilation if they are to be respectable, that the infidel must be destroyed when Allah commands it. You can read about those things and think that they belong to the pre-history of our world. But when suddenly they are happening in your midst, you are apt to wake up to the truth about the culture that advocates them. You are apt to say, that is not our culture, and it has no businesshere. That is what Europeans are now saying -- not just a few crazies, but everyone. And the multiculturalists are reluctantly compelled to agree with them.

Read the entire piece. I'm a bit surprised that Scruton believes that Europeans, in general, have turned the corner on multiculturalism, but he surely knows better than I do (my guess is that many folks would disagree with his uncharacteristicaly optimistic take on the matter). The problem, it seems to me, is that the very same politically-correct silliness that Europe is starting to recognize as a lethal sham is being pushed and promoted as heavily as ever here in the United States.

However that might be, Scuton's distinction between race and culture is an important one. It reminds me of an incident a number of years ago, when my wife and I were out and about with our newly adopted daughter, who was just a few months old at that time. A woman came up to us and said, "Oh, she's so darling. What is her nationality?" I replied, "She's American; she was born in Oregon." The woman appeared to be  momentarily confused, then said, "Okay, but she's clearly Hispanic, right?" I said, "Yes, she is, but that's her ethnicity, not her nationality." This peeved her a little bit, and she said, a bit huffily, "Well, are you going to raise her with an awareness of her culture?" I said, "Yes, of course: she is both Catholic and American, and she will learn plenty about both." Needless to say, that wasn't what the woman expected or wanted to hear, in large part because she equated race with culture.

Comments

[Dan Deeny]

Yes, I read Scruton's article. And your response to the Oregon lady was a good one.

[Fernando Umberto Garcia de Nicaragua, Prefectus Minimus: The Jacksonian Institute]

Fans of Scruton will enjoy this excellent BBC video essay of his, "Why Beauty Matters":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65YpzZrwKI4

[Mark]

I've worn a red rose on St. George's Day (an old tradition) since I was a teenager, and am the only person I know who ever has. The responses I normally get, from incomprehension to hostility, always remind of that line from 'Henry V' when he confronts the traitors: "See you, my princes and my noble peers, these English monsters..." It's hard to resist the pressure of others cultures when you can't promote your own because you don't know what it is. Perhaps the more 'nationalistic' French and Spanish will find it easier?