A Quote for Our Times . . .
Roger Scruton
Occasioned by Russell Kirk's book America's British Culture, Roger Scruton writes:
[The multiculturalists' program] derives less from the love of other cultures, than from the rejection of their own.For more, see "The Plague of Multiculturalism" (The Imaginative Conservative, October 25. 2015; republished from The Intercollegiate Review, Fall 1994).
Hat Tip to Malcolm Pollack . . .
Labels: Paleoconservatism, Roger Scruton
posted by Horace Jeffery Hodges @ 7:56 AM
6 comments
6 Comments:
[The multiculturalists' program] derives less from the love of other cultures, than from the rejection of their own.
I would add a corollary:
[The multiculturalists' program] derives less from the love of other cultures, than from the misunderstanding and ignorance of their own.
And I should add misunderstanding or being ignorant of the admired culture. Thinking British culture is all about Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Tennyson, for example. Stranger things have happened in American English departments...
Curiouser and curiouser . . .
Jeffery Hodges
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Beneath his veneer of 'culture', Scrotum is a thoroughly nasty piece of work:
'We must recuperate yet another Victorian value: that of child labour. Many a 14-year-old, set to work as a builder's apprentice, an electrician's mate or a stable hand, will learn far more than he could ever learn at school, while acquiring independence, responsibility and self-respect. If the pay were sufficiently low - and children are willing to work for quite paltry sums - there would be no lack of employers ready to offer it.' (The Guardian, 13 February 1990).
Back in the 'Sixties and 'Seventies when I was growing up in the Ozarks, I did a lot of farm work for pretty meager pay, and I also worked for the Youth Corps, a New Deal jobs program with hard work and again meager pay, and I had a paper route to earn a little extra money for walking all over town with a load of newspapers, so I guess I was doing child labor, but that was the only way I had for getting any spending money.
Jeffery Hodges
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My parents both started work at 14. Nowadays, in order to massage the unemployment figures and maintain the illusion of a "knowledge economy", most young people in Britain are kept infantilised in pointless Further Education courses until the age of 18, when they are told that they will need a degree to go busking. Now that the Tory government in its wisdom want to turn the country into a Chinese sweatshop, this may be reversed.
Back to the substantive point (and apologies for going off-topic), multiculturalism has had bad consequences in terms of 'community cohesion', but I believe that, for most of its proponents, it was driven by a genuine, naive hope that differences between groups could be reduced to quaint folk customs and tasty new recipes. In other words, it was a 'cunning plan' that didn't recognise how the situation could be manipulated by devious 'community leaders' to build their power bases, let alone anticipate that a fundamental clash of ideologies might ensue. Liberal Democracy has made the same mistake as Communism in seeing itself as The End of History, a victory that is by no means guaranteed.
I was a multiculturalist in the 'Nineties - back when I thought it meant tasty food - but when I discovered that it meant no culture was better than any other, I realized I didn't agree, so I now distinguish between moderate and radical multiculturalism.
Jeffery Hodges
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