76. Multicultures – communities of familiar strangers

Thor May
Bris­bane, 2014

 

Pref­ace: This is a dis­cus­sion paper, not a researched aca­d­e­mic doc­u­ment. In par­tic­u­lar, it includes a fair amount of per­sonal com­ment. Where a topic is of broad gen­eral inter­est comes up with friends, I have adopted the prac­tice of post­ing dis­cus­sion starters like the present one on Academia.edu in the hope that oth­ers might also find them worth think­ing about. The base ref­er­ence points in this arti­cle relate to Aus­tralia, but the impli­ca­tions are much wider. The read­ing list at the end is mostly a col­lec­tion of con­tem­po­rary links from the Inter­net and pretty acci­den­tal, not edited for qual­ity.


 

A Start­ing Thought

 

In 1991 I for­mu­lated a kind of per­sonal tem­plate for deal­ing with the scary human world. Per­haps I should have had this sorted out by the tra­di­tional age of major­ity, twenty-one. I’m appar­ently a late devel­oper, so it took until forty-six. Any­way, that guid­ing leit­mo­tif has seemed par­tic­u­larly use­ful in deal­ing with the topic of this essay, mul­ti­cul­tures, or sticky clumps of human minds. There­fore I repeat it here, with apolo­gies to any who are aller­gic to intri­cate solil­o­quies.

I don’t care what you believe in, so long as you don’t believe in it too strongly. A belief is a weapon in the armory of your heart, and its razor edge will mur­der the inno­cent. The ice, the fire of your pas­sion will seduce mun­dane men and women. Your clar­ity will excite respect. And the first dem­a­gogue who comes along with a key to your heart’s armory will wrest the weapon from your moral grasp. The first cause which wears the colours of your belief will enlist you as a sol­dier in rav­aging cru­sades. Peace friend. Keep your pas­sion to doubt with. Our civ­i­liza­tion is a sim­ple mat­ter of live and let live, of giv­ing dreams a go, but step­ping back with a wry smile when we get it wrong. Let the fun­da­men­tal­ists per­ish in their own pil­lars of fire. Spare a dol­lar for the liv­ing, and have a nice day. Doubt well, do what you can, then let it be. Pres­i­dents, priests, wage slaves, hus­tlers, men and women, kids, we all live by the grace of those we love to despise…  Lei­den­schaft ist, was Lei­den schafft (pas­sion is what makes you suf­fer – Ger­man Proverb).
–  Thor May @1 Novem­ber 1991

 

  1. The state of our mul­ti­ple iden­ti­ties in a 21st Cen­tury world

 

multicultural1.jpgThis is the Wikipedia 2014 expla­na­tion (and entire entry) of what pluri­cul­tur­al­ism is:

Pluri­cul­tur­al­ism is an approach to the self and oth­ers as com­plex rich beings which act and react from the per­spec­tive of mul­ti­ple iden­ti­fi­ca­tions. In this case, iden­tity or iden­ti­ties are the by-prod­ucts of expe­ri­ences in dif­fer­ent cul­tures. As an effect, mul­ti­ple iden­ti­fi­ca­tions cre­ate a unique per­son­al­ity instead of or more than a sta­tic iden­tity. It is based on mul­ti­ple-iden­tity, wherein peo­ple have mul­ti­ple iden­ti­ties who belong to mul­ti­ple groups with dif­fer­ent degrees of iden­ti­fi­ca­tion. The term pluri­cul­tural com­pe­tence is a con­se­quence of the idea of plurilin­gual­ism. There is a dis­tinc­tion between pluri­cul­tur­al­ism and mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism.

Although pluri­cul­tur­al­ism doesn’t get much shelf-space in the chat­ter annals of our day, Wikipedia seems to have summed up pretty well where I am at as a 69 year old Aus­tralian, though I am by no means a typ­i­cal Aus­tralian, even if such a crea­ture exists. It is not an ide­o­log­i­cal pos­ture, not an opin­ion, but sim­ply a descrip­tion of where I find my iden­tity (or iden­ti­ties) after a life­time of work­ing and liv­ing across cul­tures in seven coun­tries.

Even if I had not trav­elled, a quar­ter of my Aus­tralian com­pa­tri­ots were born in other coun­tries, and another quar­ter have par­ents who hailed from some­where else, so avoid­ing com­ing to terms with their many pat­terns of behav­iour would have been rather dif­fi­cult. Nor is it sim­ply a mat­ter of inter­ac­tion with peo­ples of var­i­ous national ori­gins.

I have been a dock­yard labourer and an office clerk, a uni­ver­sity lec­turer, a high school teacher, a sales­man, an air­port dis­patch offi­cer, a writer, an edi­tor, a taxi dri­ver, a poet, a researcher and heaven knows what between (nor in that order). I have been a cus­tomer and a rev­eller,  a hos­pi­tal patient and a con­sul­tant … and so it goes on. I have been a rich for­eigner in poor coun­tries and the despair of banks in my home­town. When a stranger asks “what do you do”, as he fishes for the right stereo­type to pin on my chest as a mark of admi­ra­tion or secret con­tempt, I am at a loss to answer. That is, I am a man of my age, a chameleon crea­ture accus­tomed to slip­ping amongst a kalei­do­scope of roles.

This plu­ral­ity of role plays does not mean that I am “val­ues free”. I have val­ues, but they are not a tribal col­lec­tion like “watches cricket” (actu­ally I dis­like cricket..), or “bar­racks for the national flag, right or wrong”. My val­ues are more in the nature of bound­ary mark­ers on behav­iour that I look for in myself and those I meet. I don’t care if you wear a hijab or burn incense in a Bud­dhist tem­ple. I do care for a marker such as “above all, do no harm” – not always achiev­able per­haps, but at least a nav­i­ga­tion bea­con.

It is of cen­tral impor­tance to the dis­cus­sion which fol­lows that my way is not everyone’s way. We all make sense of the world as best we can, then have a habit of pro­ject­ing our under­stand­ing as uni­ver­sal truths. The sense we make of things is partly an acci­dent of expe­ri­ence. It also has a lot to do with the kind of per­son we are. “Per­son­al­ity types” are a bit hard to pin down with any pre­ci­sion, but for daily sur­vival we have heuris­tics for fit­ting peo­ple into these men­tal boxes. The per­son­al­ity type men­tal boxes I use to sort peo­ple seem to more or less work across cul­tures, though I notice that var­i­ous cul­tures give par­tic­u­lar per­son­al­ity types more respect, or space to play out their poten­tials.

In every group­ing, there are indi­vid­u­als who cleave to a core iden­tity in their sub-cul­ture and oth­ers in a penum­bra who are hap­pier mov­ing across bound­aries in var­i­ous roles. From the begin­ning of time, there have been women who have been sold, traded or just jumped their cul­tural  bound­aries. There have been men who left way­ward sperm trails.

 

  1. About cul­tural bound­aries and their muta­tions

 

Cul­tural bound­aries have some­times been social or eco­nomic, and over the last few cen­turies the shift­ing social bar­ri­ers in Eng­land, for exam­ple, have caused much abra­sion. A part of that change has been that those empow­ered to enforce what they saw as “core val­ues” (e.g. the divine right of kings, or the divine right of elites to vio­lently oppress any chal­lenge) have come to yield more space to those who seek to move across bound­aries. The per­son­al­ity types who insist on “core val­ues” (i.e. theirs) and those per­son­al­ity types more amenable to cul­tural adap­ta­tion still jostle against each other. The arena how­ever has broad­ened, so that today the com­pet­ing sub­cul­tures in many coun­tries, includ­ing Eng­land, Aus­tralia and the United States, include large num­bers of immi­grants from hith­erto remote eth­nic and lin­guis­tic groups. Thus, although the con­test has sharp­ened and become more com­plex, the under­ly­ing psy­cho­log­i­cal fac­tors remain much the same as they were in ear­lier cen­turies.

There are a few lessons we can learn from his­tory, not that learn­ing from his­tory has ever found much favour. One lesson has been that the more rigid cul­tural, reli­gious and legal bar­ri­ers are made, the greater the poten­tial for con­flict and per­se­cu­tion, espe­cially in times of stress. In the case of immi­grant set­tle­ment, that is a recipe for pogroms.

Where a major­ity in some immi­grant groups insist on rigid bar­ri­ers against out­siders them­selves (e.g. against inter­mar­riage), or fol­low prac­tices which vio­late national laws (e.g. gen­i­tal muti­la­tion), there is a case for ques­tion­ing their best fit in an envi­ron­ment like Australia’s.  There will always be more flex­i­ble indi­vid­u­als within those groups.  Sim­i­larly some cul­tural pat­terns may entail bar­ri­ers to edu­ca­tion or income achieve­ment.  How­ever, regard­less of obsta­cles, par­tic­u­lar indi­vid­u­als start­ing from a low base achieve great things, given oppor­tu­nity. Some­times polit­i­cal deci­sions are made to reg­u­late the influx of whole immi­grant groups into a host soci­ety. To avoid tragedy and injus­tice in real per­sonal sit­u­a­tions, such cri­te­ria need to be applied intel­li­gently, which on past evi­dence is a big ask for harassed immi­gra­tion offi­cials. The process will always be imper­fect.

 

  1. The trans­for­ma­tional effects over time of inter­nal and exter­nal migra­tion

 

The huge inter­nal migra­tions which occur when nations indus­tri­al­ize force equally dra­matic changes in cul­tural mores. The widely accepted social val­ues (“core val­ues”) found in more or less homo­ge­neous tra­di­tional rural and fish­ing com­mu­ni­ties are thrown into flux and may take sev­eral gen­er­a­tions to find any kind of bal­ance. Even then the out­come is likely to be a pro­lif­er­a­tion of sub­cul­tures, some with widely diver­gent expec­ta­tions. This is exactly what hap­pened through­out the indus­trial rev­o­lu­tion in Europe, and what is hap­pen­ing in China at the moment as it strug­gles with the largest rural to urban migra­tion in human his­tory.

As with his­tor­i­cal inter­nal migra­tions, inter­na­tional migra­tion and 2nd lan­guage acqui­si­tion are processes whose effects evolve over time. There is ample evi­dence that some indi­vid­u­als in some cur­rent immi­grant groups have felt suf­fi­ciently alien­ated from new host cul­tures to reject them vio­lently. This can occur, espe­cially amongst young adults, even when the more vis­i­ble attrib­utes of a host cul­ture – lan­guage, cloth­ing, music etc – seem to have trans­ferred to incom­ers. In the break­ing news of 2014, we see “Islamic State” jihadists wreak­ing havoc in Iraq. Some grew up in Eng­land, sport a Lon­don accent and might well score highly on tests for Eng­lish lan­guage com­pe­tence.

Those seek­ing a con­tem­po­rary rea­son for this kind of vio­lent rejec­tion of an immi­grant host nation some­times attrib­ute it to over-tol­er­ant mul­ti­cul­tural poli­cies leav­ing too much space for cul­tural dif­fer­ences to fes­ter. The argu­ment seems dubi­ous as a causus belli. There have been numer­ous his­tor­i­cal exam­ples of force­ful (even mur­der­ous) assim­i­la­tion­ist poli­cies in ter­ri­to­ries of immi­gra­tion (over most of the planet at var­i­ous times) which have also resulted in vio­lent reac­tions from a pro­por­tion of the new­com­ers.

Ear­lier in this essay I pro­posed a per­sonal value nav­i­ga­tion point of “do no harm”, or more flex­i­bly, “do the least harm”. That is an eas­ier prin­ci­ple for an indi­vid­ual to abide by than for a gov­ern­ment which must always cater to numer­ous con­stituen­cies. In the very least its appli­ca­tion implies the need to adapt as we learn more and as sit­u­a­tions evolve.

When it comes to gen­er­a­tional processes like immi­gra­tion, gov­ern­ments need to be alert for signs of emerg­ing harm, both due to their own actions and from those cit­i­zens who are still find­ing a cul­tural niche. For immi­grants (inter­nal rural to migrant immi­grants as well as inter­na­tional immi­grants), the first gen­er­a­tion always have their hearts in two places. Usu­ally, but not always, the new host cul­ture steals the hearts of their chil­dren. Intel­li­gent gov­er­nance will make that tran­si­tion as effec­tive as pos­si­ble, while keep­ing in mind that pre­scrip­tive require­ments on human devel­op­ment have a way of back­fir­ing.

 

  1. A lit­tle (more or less) mono­cul­tural his­tory

 

If pluri­cul­tur­al­ism is mat­ter-of-fact descrip­tion, polit­i­cal mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism today is a gar­ish Multicultural2.jpgneon sign of many pos­si­ble colours, but fre­quently pow­ered with the non-speak of politi­cians and the bland assur­ances of offi­cials schooled in the blood­less con­tor­tions of legal “com­pli­ance”. Some­where in an Aus­tralian town hall meet­ing a gen­er­a­tion or so ago, there must have been good inten­tions to fash­ion offi­cial approval for the Ital­ian fruit shop across the road. There must have been an urgent need to bury mem­o­ries of Australia’s pos­ture in 1947, when its immi­gra­tion min­is­ter declared in ring­ing tones: “I can promise the Aus­tralian peo­ple that we will never have a choco­late coloured Aus­tralia”.  The Aus­tralian pub­lic  mind­set in 1947 was remark­ably close to what became insti­tu­tion­al­ized apartheid in white South Africa, and the Aus­tralian pop­u­la­tion at the time was per­haps 97% Anglo-Celtic. Indeed, Aus­tralians did not have their own pass­port until 1948 (although the coun­try was effec­tively an inde­pen­dent coun­try from the time of fed­er­a­tion in 1901, if not before). So given the more or less mono­cul­tural start­ing point of Aus­tralia in 1947, and given the tsunami of peo­ples from 200 cul­tures who were about to be inte­grated in the com­ing years, it was indeed a for­tu­nate neces­sity to give offi­cial impri­matur to the real sit­u­a­tion. Mas­sag­ing pub­lic opin­ion in a warm and fuzzy pro­pa­ganda bath of mul­ti­cul­tural nice­ness was espe­cially needed after the wartime blitz of racist pro­pa­ganda about the invad­ing yel­low peril (Japan­ese et al), and the treach­er­ous huns (Ger­mans) who wanted to destroy the Aus­tralian way of life. Yes it was nec­es­sary, but it would have been entirely out of char­ac­ter with sar­donic Aus­tralian humour on the street not to notice the con­tra­dic­tions.

As yesterday’s ene­mies began turn­ing up on local build­ing sites, in ‘dago’ del­i­catessens, and played ‘wog’ types of foot­ball (soc­cer), the local pubs rever­ber­ated with racist jokes which would have curled the toe­nails of a race rela­tions com­mis­sioner. The tone was some­times indig­nant, but usu­ally not vicious. My father, a car­pen­ter, would slan­der for­eign­ers with rel­ish, but make gen­er­ous con­ces­sions for those he hap­pened to know, Con the Ital­ian labourer, or Bruno who came from some­where in Rus­sia, or that poor bas­tard of a Ger­man who used a tim­ber cut­ting tool my father hadn’t seen before, a short adze, with such skill that he could almost shave with it.

 

  1. The mul­ti­cul­tural idea becomes embed­ded in offi­cial Aus­tralian dis­course and laws

 

All soci­eties go through cycles of action and reac­tion, not least in what is con­sid­ered civ­i­lized behav­iour. This has a lot to do with the revolt of each new gen­er­a­tion of teenagers against the dic­tates and val­ues of their par­ents. In two party major­ity demo­c­ra­tic states it is influ­enced by the elec­tion cycle as the for­tunes of con­ser­v­a­tive and pro­gres­sive gov­ern­ments see-saw in the elec­torate. It is influ­enced by world­wide social trends (behead­ing had a ho-hum famil­iar­ity about it 200 years ago in Europe, but now elic­its shock and hor­ror). It is influ­enced by the accu­mu­la­tion of leg­is­la­tion and reg­u­la­tions in a soci­ety, as well as the enforce­ment of the same. Not least, the eco­nomic for­tunes of the day have a marked influ­ence on the broad pub­lic tone of social tol­er­ance or intol­er­ance.

The gen­er­a­tion who rep­re­sented the norm in Aus­tralia after World War II were marked by short back and sides hair­cuts for the men, flo­ral knee length dresses for the women. Men in respectable office jobs wore ties & pol­ished shoes. Smok­ing was fash­ion­able, and claimed by some doc­tors in adver­tise­ments to be healthy. There was an accepted belief that shops should be closed on Sun­days (the resid­ual Chris­tian ethic). Vis­i­ble trends were the mass acqui­si­tion of motor cars and wash­ing machi­nes, util­i­tar­ian archi­tec­ture, a sunny belief in pro­gress, and not too much self-doubt about the mean­ing of life. This was the world of my child­hood, though I was always an out­sider on its mar­gins.

The Aus­tralia I came to matu­rity in from the 1960s to the 1980s was marked by a gen­eral advance of pro­gres­sive social forces, a reac­tion to what had pre­ceded. The rude exu­ber­ance of rock and roll turned pop­u­lar music on its head. Long hair, beards, jeans, became de rigueur.  To the hor­ror of office man­agers (and my delight) miniskirts became the daily work­ing norm for city girls. The heroes returned from the last World War were now gray­ing men drink­ing them­selves to obliv­ion in derided RSL clubs, while the young marched in their thou­sands against involve­ment in the Viet­nam war, and lam­basted the stu­pid­ity of shrill warn­ings from Wash­ing­ton about a com­mu­nist ‘domino effect’ that would engulf Aus­tralia in red rev­o­lu­tion if we did not stem the tide in Asian jun­gles.

The rev­o­lu­tion in Aus­tralian social norms reached a crescendo with the (brief) arrival of a national Labor gov­ern­ment in 1972. Social exper­i­ment of all kinds, not least in sex, seemed fresh and excit­ing. Ter­tiary edu­ca­tion was made free (alas, too brief a win­dow) and the gov­er­nance of uni­ver­si­ties increas­ingly made space for seri­ous input by stu­dents them­selves (I was directly involved as a found­ing mem­ber, then sec­re­tary of a post­grad­u­ate asso­ci­a­tion). The embar­rass­ing White Aus­tralia Act (circa 1901) had already become a dead let­ter and was for­mally con­signed to his­tory. Aus­tralians looked around and noticed that the place was no longer mono­cul­tural. There was for the first time a widely noticed need to make space for peo­ple from other cul­tural tra­di­tions, includ­ing the indige­nous Abo­rig­i­nals. The dom­i­nant Anglo-Irish them­selves had frac­tured across gen­er­a­tions, and in a dozen other direc­tions.

As the ‘hippy gen­er­a­tion’ of the 1970s them­selves matured, then acquired posi­tions of author­ity, the val­ues and prac­tices they had pio­neered as 20-some­things began to be embed­ded in legal codes and com­pany reg­u­la­tions. That is, offi­cial atti­tudes to national diver­sity became more for­mal­ized in many ways. Banks, hos­pi­tals and other pub­lic insti­tu­tions began to pub­lish mul­ti­lin­gual mate­rial and hire mul­ti­lin­gual staff. Reg­u­lar fes­ti­vals to cel­e­brate the pres­ence of var­i­ous cul­tural groups became an annual fea­ture in the major cities and were gen­er­ally wel­comed as an inter­est­ing day’s out­ing by every­body.

 

  1. The seeds of doubt – should there be hard­ened bound­aries around mul­ti­cul­tural dif­fer­ences?

 

Less widely accepted in Aus­tralia was the emer­gence in the major cities of sub­urbs which had a very vis­i­ble pres­ence of par­tic­u­lar eth­nic­i­ties. It was nat­u­ral for peo­ple from sim­i­lar back­grounds to seek out like com­pany, but there was some worry that such con­cen­tra­tions might be the har­bin­ger of eth­nic ghet­toes which had caused such grief in Europe, Asia and other parts of the world through pogroms over the cen­turies.

When the con­cen­tra­tion of such a group in one loca­tion reached a cer­tain tip­ping point it might become socially and eco­nom­i­cally self sus­tain­ing, with only lim­ited incen­tives to mix into the wider soci­ety, even lin­guis­ti­cally. The estab­lish­ment of spe­cial­ized eth­nic or reli­gious schools to serve such more or less self sus­tain­ing groups would fur­ther iso­late them across gen­er­a­tions. In fact immi­grants from some places, notably the Mid­dle East and South Asia, had tra­di­tions of com­mu­ni­ties sep­a­rated by cul­ture and reli­gion but liv­ing side by side, tra­di­tions which stretched back cen­turies. Many such immi­grants may have expected the pat­tern to trans­plant auto­mat­i­cally to New World des­ti­na­tions like Aus­tralia. Not sur­pris­ingly this was met with wider com­mu­nity resis­tance.

We can see then that there are at least three con­tra­dic­tory ten­den­cies influ­enc­ing con­tem­po­rary Aus­tralian atti­tudes towards mul­ti­cul­tural com­mu­nity liv­ing. On the one hand most Aus­tralian born indi­vid­u­als wel­come the diver­sity of expe­ri­ence which has become avail­able to them in shop­ping, din­ing, fes­ti­vals etc. On the other hand, many are dubi­ous about rigid “com­pli­ance” pat­terns in offi­cial reg­u­la­tions, forms and state­ments, which they often see as hyp­o­crit­i­cal. Many find “eth­nic sub­ur­ban shop­ping cen­tres” quite inter­est­ing to visit, but feel an under­ly­ing unease that some groups, espe­cially those with rules of reli­gious and mar­riage exclu­sion, might develop embed­ded val­ues which diverge seri­ously from main­stream Aus­tralian tol­er­ance.

For exam­ple, there seems to have been major alien­ation among some young men of Mid­dle East­ern eth­nic origin, who have grown up in Aus­tralia, Amer­ica or Europe but rejected core val­ues of those soci­eties, even to the point of vio­lence. The obverse of this coin of course is that if group bound­aries harden, indi­vid­u­als in the dom­i­nant cul­tural group (Anglo-Celtic in the Aus­tralian case) may reject what they see as core val­ues of cer­tain immi­grant groups, again to the point of vio­lence. There has been some evi­dence of this kind of polar­iza­tion in usual gen­der con­tests amongst young men in south­ern areas of Syd­ney (for exam­ple), and also in some school play­grounds. This kind of sec­tar­ian social abra­sion is by no means a dom­i­nant social or polit­i­cal theme in Aus­tralian soci­ety, but there is always a poten­tial for it to be inflamed by oppor­tunists.

 

  1. Unity in diver­sity, or enclaves of dif­fer­ence, or some­thing more hybrid?

 

When Indone­sia achieved inde­pen­dence from the Nether­lands in 1947 its new rulers were faced with a dilemma. The new nation had no national iden­tity or national lan­guage. Javanese had tra­di­tion­ally con­trolled the arch­i­pel­ago, but Javanese are widely dis­liked in Indonesia’s 13,000 other islands, and over 200 lan­guages were spo­ken. It was real­ized that to forcibly impose Javanese cul­ture and lan­guage on the oth­ers would lead to end­less con­flict. The solu­tion was an ide­ol­ogy of “pan­casila” – unity in diver­sity. The idea was to respect local dif­fer­ences while fos­ter­ing the idea of belong­ing to a greater, encom­pass­ing fam­ily called Indone­sia. A widely spo­ken, low sta­tus mar­ket lan­guage (mar­ket Malay) was con­sciously devel­oped as a national lan­guage. It was a wise choice. Indone­sia is still more or less whole, and per­haps has lessons for the rest of us.

Abso­lutist solu­tions to cul­tural dif­fer­ences have a long, world­wide his­tory of cat­a­stro­phe. The worst case is so-called eth­nic cleans­ing, but ascen­dant reli­gions have an equally shame­ful his­tory of per­se­cut­ing those who don’t con­form to their view of the world. In most such cases the under­ly­ing drive comes from psy­cho­pathic indi­vid­u­als or asso­ci­a­tions in pur­suit of power at any cost. They mobi­lize and sway less crit­i­cal mem­bers of soci­ety and cre­ate an envi­ron­ment where extrem­ism pre­vails.

The poles between ide­o­log­i­cal polit­i­cal mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism and ide­o­log­i­cal or reli­gious extrem­ism are not binary, they are not sim­ple switches. There is a gra­da­tion of tol­er­ance, both legal and pop­u­lar, within which we find most soci­eties. That gra­da­tion fluc­tu­ates over time, but usu­ally leaves suf­fi­cient space for most cul­tural diver­sity to be tol­er­ated. The tol­er­a­tion may be for­mally expressed, or it may just be com­mon prac­tice. In a coun­try like Aus­tralia, still three-quar­ters Anglo-Celtic in origin (though locally diverse in lifestyle), but with a huge diver­sity of for­eign born immi­grants, we need a con­stant process of adjust­ment and good judge­ment. Indeed, the Anglo-Celtic pro­por­tion of ori­gins is pro­jected to drop to 62% by 2025 (Wikipedia 2014). The process of change is never entirely seam­less, but it need not be antag­o­nis­tic. In my view, our judge­ments on diver­sity will func­tion best on a case by case assess­ment. It is all too com­pli­cated and dynamic to work with sim­ple stereo­types.

 

  1. The gate­way to a new Aus­tralian life – the immi­gra­tion pol­icy

 

The actual mech­a­nism for mod­u­lat­ing Australia’s cul­tural mix over time con­tin­ues to be its immi­gra­tion pol­icy. Australia’s immi­gra­tion intake is a mix of skilled immi­grants (skills the coun­try is said to need), with a capped addi­tion of refugees and fam­ily reunions. Sec­ondary immi­gra­tion paths have emerged with some over­seas ter­tiary stu­dents being allowed to set­tle after grad­u­a­tion, and (more con­tro­ver­sially) cat­e­gory 457 visa hold­ers obtain­ing per­mis­sion for per­ma­nent res­i­dence. Cat­e­gory 457 visa hold­ers are sup­posed to be skilled pro­fes­sion­als given tem­po­rary work access to the coun­try where equiv­a­lent local skills are not avail­able (there is evi­dence, and polit­i­cal dis­quiet, that the 457 pro­vi­sions have been abused). Bypass­ing all of these visa require­ments there is also a much smaller group of very wealthy immi­grants who are offered so-called busi­ness entry by invest­ing a large sum of money in the coun­try. This last cat­e­gory has recently been dom­i­nated by wealthy Chi­nese.

Sec­ond guess­ing the suc­cess­ful adap­ta­tion of immi­grants into Aus­tralia (or any other coun­try) is a very inex­act process. For nor­mal skilled immi­gra­tion, the gov­ern­ment employs a points sys­tem which cov­ers things like edu­ca­tion, employ­ment expe­ri­ence, age, Eng­lish lan­guage skills, and so on. In prac­tice, indi­vid­u­als vary hugely in their energy, open­ness to new expe­ri­ence, per­sis­tence in over­com­ing dif­fi­cul­ties, hon­esty, and many other met­rics. An immi­gra­tion appli­ca­tion or inter­view can hardly assess or pre­dict such effects con­sis­tently. In fact, any­one with an inside knowl­edge of how the immi­gra­tion process actu­ally works knows very well that it is often arbi­trary and unfair. Some immi­gra­tion offi­cers are help­ful, some are frankly hos­tile and prej­u­dice comes with the ter­ri­tory.

The bot­tom line is that the appli­ca­tion of immi­gra­tion rules world­wide is highly incon­sis­tent regard­less of elab­o­rate bureau­cratic reg­u­la­tions. At ground zero, the inter­pre­ta­tion of rules mainly comes from human (and some­times very unpleas­ant) immi­gra­tion offi­cers. Legal pro­vi­sions are evaded by some appli­cants who are dis­hon­est, and often inter­preted dis­hon­estly by polit­i­cal actors, includ­ing in Aus­tralia.

In Aus­tralia itself, inter­nal immi­gra­tion depart­men­tal processes involve a com­plex net­work of com­pli­ance require­ments, and the abil­ity to nav­i­gate these both by appli­cants and depart­men­tal offi­cers varies widely. As with the tax­a­tion sys­tem, a whole sub-class of agents has emerged to increase the suc­cess rate for immi­grant appli­cants, and not infre­quently to game the sys­tem.

In other words, the actual qual­ity and char­ac­ter of the over­all immi­grant intake only resem­bles very approx­i­mately what leg­is­la­tors had in mind when they framed the reg­u­la­tions. In many ways, immi­grant selec­tion resem­bles other human selec­tion processes. For exam­ple, there seems to be lit­tle evi­dence that fancy selec­tion pro­ce­dures by HR depart­ments in indus­try has led to any over­all improve­ment in the qual­ity of the work­force.

 

  1. Liv­ing with the Aus­tralian real­i­ties

 

Aus­tralia is already a salad bowl, and noth­ing is going to change that, even if there are indi­vid­u­als who wish to return to a pre-1947 “golden age” of rel­a­tive cul­tural homo­gene­ity. In the real world, Australia’s diver­sity today adds greatly to its poten­tial strength and resilience, if we can man­age to take a ‘glass half full’ (not half empty) view of our place in the world. Every­one here has links to other cul­tures and coun­tries, and a quar­ter of Aus­tralians were born over­seas. Used wisely, those links are of immense value to all of us. We can get by per­fectly well with core pan-human val­ues like “do no harm”, which we can insist every­one abide by. You can still go to your favourite Irish pub or mosque.

 

  1. Eng­lish lan­guage as a selec­tor for Aus­tralian res­i­dence

 

Since lan­guage is my trade, I will take a bit of space at this point to look at the role of lan­guage in the immi­gra­tion process. Quite often Eng­lish lan­guage com­pe­tence is pro­posed as an absolute gate-keep­ing pro­tec­tion against immi­grants who “won’t fit in”. Empir­i­cally this is a very dubi­ous argu­ment. Includ­ing Eng­lish lan­guage com­pe­tence in a points test for entry is rea­son­able as one con­di­tion amongst a num­ber. How­ever, Eng­lish lan­guage abil­ity is a tem­po­rary marker at the entry moment of immi­gra­tion.  Immi­gra­tion is a long term process over time dur­ing which lan­guage facil­ity improves, and becomes irrel­e­vant by the sec­ond gen­er­a­tion, or much sooner for most immi­grant chil­dren.

Native born Aus­tralians tend to be over­whelm­ingly Eng­lish mono­lin­guals (like native Eng­lish speak­ers world­wide). This nar­row lin­guis­tic expe­ri­ence does much to explain the view that native speaker com­pe­tence in Eng­lish should be an absolute require­ment for Aus­tralian set­tle­ment. The atti­tude is not as rigid as when I was a child in the 1950s. Then any­one speak­ing another lan­guage in pub­lic would be frankly stared at, and some­times crit­i­cized openly. Nowa­days it is com­mon enough to hear other voices. There is no doubt that effec­tive sur­vival in most cor­ners of Aus­tralian soci­ety requires a func­tional com­mand of spo­ken Eng­lish. In prac­tice imper­fec­tions (for­eign accent, gram­mat­i­cal errors etc) will be noticed but in the end suc­cess­ful com­mu­ni­ca­tion ensues unless the lis­tener is doggedly hos­tile. The odd thing is that, as in other ‘advanced’ OECD coun­tries, almost half of Aus­tralians are func­tion­ally illit­er­ate. Also, as in every lan­guage com­mu­nity world­wide, even spo­ken lan­guage com­pe­tence is hugely vari­able.

When inter­na­tional stu­dents are con­tem­plat­ing study in Aus­tralia, espe­cially at ter­tiary level, it is essen­tial that their Eng­lish lan­guage skills be assessed in some way. For aca­d­e­mic envi­ron­ments this kind of assess­ment is much more pre­dic­tive than it is for nor­mal life activ­i­ties. How­ever, even the best lan­guage level assess­ments are very crude instru­ments. Both amongst offi­cials and the gen­eral pub­lic, there is a gen­eral mis­un­der­stand­ing that lan­guage assess­ment tests like IELTS and TOEFL are pre­cise diag­nos­tic tools as well as accu­rate pre­dic­tors of later lan­guage accom­plish­ment. The com­pa­nies behind these tests are multi-mil­lion enter­prises, and work hard to fos­ter images of white lab­o­ra­tory coat sci­en­tific accu­racy. Well, I have taught for years on the front line of this stuff and know bet­ter. In any teach­ing envi­ron­ment, a closed cur­ricu­lum with test­ing that requires exactly mea­sur­able responses might have a fair chance of assess­ing stu­dent learn­ing. Assess­ments like IELTS have no seri­ous resem­blance to such cur­ricu­lums.

IELTS is an esti­ma­tion of global lan­guage achieve­ment (i.e. abil­ity in uncon­trolled and unpre­dictable envi­ron­ments). The test­ing per­son­nel have to make sub­jec­tive assess­ments of actual lan­guage pro­duc­tion. That is, mul­ti­ple choice tests etc. are not effec­tive indi­ca­tors for lan­guage flu­ency. Asses­sors try to achieve con­sis­tency by mod­er­at­ing each other, but in truth there are so many asses­sors with so many back­grounds, oper­at­ing in so many coun­tries, that the out­comes show a good deal of vari­abil­ity (the test­ing com­pa­nies will do their best to deny this). Nor is assess­ment con­sis­tent across skill lev­els in speak­ing, lis­ten­ing, read­ing and writ­ing. The closer a can­di­date is to Level 10 (sup­pos­edly edu­cated native speaker level), the flakier the assess­ment is likely to be. There are com­plex rea­sons for this which I won’t go into here.

Well, even if assess­ments like IELTS are vari­able at the mar­gins, how well do they pre­dict user suc­cess in Eng­lish lan­guage com­mu­ni­ties? Unfor­tu­nately not ter­ri­bly well. As already noted, they are more pre­dic­tive for suc­cess in ter­tiary aca­d­e­mic envi­ron­ments, but even there the cor­re­la­tions are not won­der­ful. They are poor pre­dic­tors for life suc­cess, or even lin­guis­tic suc­cess in daily Aus­tralian liv­ing. There are mul­ti­ple rea­sons for this. One of the most impor­tant rea­sons is that dif­fer­ent peo­ple learn sec­ond lan­guages suc­cess­fully in very dif­fer­ent ways. For exam­ple, at one time I taught Eng­lish to motor mechan­ics from all over the world. Some of these men were happy enough in a class­room envi­ron­ment (the kind of place where you would swat for IELTS), but the major­ity were uncom­fort­able there. I would take them to a work­shop to pull down an engine and the entire atmos­phere would change. There most would quickly pick up what­ever lan­guage was nec­es­sary for the task. Putting it roughly, you could say that there are class­room learn­ers and there are street learn­ers. The street learn­ers get a poor deal from for­mal immi­gra­tion eval­u­a­tions, but might very well be fast achiev­ers in a nor­mal Aus­tralian com­mu­nity.

 

  1. The restau­rant at the end of the uni­verse

 

In an ear­lier essay (May 2010) I explored the con­cept of cul­tures as con­scious and uncon­scious designs. I made the point that in a glob­al­ized, instantly con­nected world, the nature of cul­ture itself was chang­ing. This is of great rel­e­vance to the pre­ced­ing dis­cus­sion, so I will extract a lit­tle of that essay into the present con­text:

 

 

Open and closed sys­tems: I like to com­pare cul­tures to com­puter oper­at­ing sys­tems. Cul­tures, like nat­u­ral lan­guages, are gen­er­ally unplanned emer­gent phe­nom­ena, while com­puter oper­at­ing sys­tems are mostly con­sciously designed arte­facts. How­ever, con­scious atti­tudes towards chang­ing cul­tures have some sim­i­lar­i­ties with con­scious atti­tudes towards con­struct­ing com­puter oper­at­ing sys­tems.

In com­put­ing, you can have closed pro­pri­etary sys­tems, like the Apple Cor­po­ra­tion o/s. At their best, these closed sys­tems can achieve ele­gant solu­tions and be very attrac­tive. The other extreme is an Open Access o/s phi­los­o­phy, like Linux. Linux has end­less groups of enthu­si­asts. Many of the Linux dialects never achieve wide accep­tance. Some achieve com­mer­cial suc­cess and some become semi-pro­pri­etary. How­ever, while closed sys­tems like Apple’s can make money for a while, they are always at risk of going out of busi­ness. The open sys­tems are messy, but they have tremen­dous strength. In some form, they will con­tinue. The Open move­ment will never die. The ubiq­ui­tous Google is an astound­ing exam­ple of partly open sys­tem gen­eros­ity (together with some canny pro­pri­etary algo­rithms) suc­ceed­ing where its more closed pro­pri­etary com­peti­tors have faded.

New world cul­ture: Now let us con­sider so-called “West­ern cul­ture”. Recently I debated with a Korean friend who was dubi­ous about South Korea’s faux West­ern baubles, and expressed some envy of the Japan­ese capac­ity for adapt­ing to exter­nal mar­kets with­out los­ing the Japan­ese essence. As Laozi, the ancient Chi­nese philoso­pher put it so long ago, water is admirable because it can adapt to the shape of its con­tainer, but doesn’t change its nature. I was less taken than my friend by this argu­ment for cul­tural purity. It is true, I put it to him, that the clothes you wear, the fill­ings in your teeth, the build­ings you live in, and even increas­ingly the food you eat are not ‘native Korean’. The water in the Korean con­tainer is already laced with other dyes. Is this bad? Imports are often said to be “Amer­i­can”, but that is only partly the case (and I think less and less true).

You could think of “Amer­i­can cul­ture” as one par­tic­u­lar dialect of a new “world cul­ture”, just as Ubuntu is a kind of dialect of Linux. The more oth­ers join in with gen­eral world cul­ture, the less influ­ence the Amer­i­can form will have.

This world cul­ture crosses the bar­rier of nat­u­ral lan­guages. You will find it amongst Ger­man speak­ers and Korean speak­ers, and Ara­bic speak­ers and Hindi speak­ers. You can now find this ‘world cul­ture’ from Lagos in Africa, to Moscow, to Syd­ney, to Buenos Aires, to New Delhi to Bangkok, and of course to Seoul. All of these places have their own dialects of the world cul­ture, but they also have a great deal in com­mon. The local pen­e­tra­tion of world cul­ture is also always var­ied amongst pop­u­la­tions (yet another bell curve). It is a more urban than rural phe­nom­e­non, but its pres­ence is inescapable.

Those things regions across the world have in com­mon make it pos­si­ble for a man like me to be a ‘cit­i­zen of the world’, and more or less at home in any of these places. I love the vari­ety that each of the ‘cul­tural dialects’ offers me, but I also see great hope for human­ity in their shared base.

Like the Open Sys­tems phi­los­o­phy of com­puter pro­gram­ming, I think this new world com­mon cul­ture has great strength and dynamism. Bet­ter, the very adap­ta­tions that enable it to cross old clan and cul­tural bar­ri­ers make it less sus­cep­ti­ble to the Ape-like pat­terns of male dom­i­nance bru­tal­ity and sex­ual aggres­sion (though not of course imper­vi­ous to them). I think the new par­a­digm can­not be eas­ily destroyed, although it may some­times be forced into tac­ti­cal retreats with the flux of world affairs.

To those who wish to keep their “cul­tural oper­at­ing sys­tems”, like the Korean or Rus­sian or Thai or French, “pure”, closed, pro­pri­etary, with­out out­side influ­ence, I say you are in great dan­ger. Maybe your closed cul­tural sys­tem was ele­gant and refined. Maybe it has a glo­ri­ous past his­tory. But it ulti­mately comes from an ear­lier human civ­i­liza­tion of small, sav­age tribal groups. Now we humans are many, crowded on a small planet, and com­mu­ni­cat­ing with every­one instantly. We need a dif­fer­ent design, and that has to be an Open Sys­tem.


 

 Ref­er­ences & Read­ing List(Note that the writ­ers in these links are express­ing their own views. We don’t nec­es­sar­ily share them). 

Agence France-Presse; Telegraph, Lon­don; Reuters (Sep­tem­ber 8, 2014) “Far-right National Front at ‘gates of power’ in France, says Prime Min­is­ter Manuel Valls”. Syd­ney Morn­ing Her­ald online @ http://www.smh.com.au/world/farright-national-front-at-gates-of-power-in-france-says-prime-minister-manuel-valls-20140908-10dsrl.html#ixzz3Cmk49Biu

AP, AFP (August 28, 2014) “”Immi­gra­tion: the Rother­ham sex abuse scan­dal con­sumes UK”. Syd­ney Morn­ing Her­ald online @ http://www.smh.com.au/world/race-religion-immigration-the-rotherham-sex-abuse-scandal-consumes-uk-20140828-109acs.html#ixzz3BdakIXjd

Arm­strong, Karen (25 Sep­tem­ber 2014) “The myth of reli­gious vio­lence – The pop­u­lar belief that reli­gion is the cause of the world’s blood­i­est con­flicts is cen­tral to our mod­ern con­vic­tion that faith and pol­i­tics should never mix. But the messy his­tory of their sep­a­ra­tion sug­gests it was never so sim­ple”. The Guardian online @ http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/25/-sp-karen-armstrong-religious-violence-myth-secularAus­tralian Government(2014) “What is mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism?”. Depart­ment of Social Ser­vices, online @ http://www.dss.gov.au/our-responsibilities/settlement-and-multicultural-affairs/programs-policy/a-multicultural-australia/national-agenda-for-a-multicultural-australia/what-is-multiculturalism

Aus­tralian Gov­ern­ment (2014) “Mul­ti­cul­tural com­mu­ni­ties”. web­site of the Aus­tralian Gov­ern­ment, online @ http://australia.gov.au/topics/culture-history-and-sport/multicultural-communities

Bing­ham, John(29 Jun 2014) “”Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism in reverse as teenagers buck the trend towards inte­gra­tion”. The Telegraph, UK, online @ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/10931854/Multiculturalism-in-reverse-as-teenagers-buck-the-trend-towards-integration.html

Crooke, Alis­tair (08/27/2014 ) “You Can’t Under­stand ISIS If You Don’t Know the His­tory of Wah­habism in Saudi Ara­bia”. Huff­in­g­ton Post online @ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alastair-crooke/isis-wahhabism-saudi-arabia_b_5717157.html

Crooke, Alis­tair [Fmr. MI-6 agent; Author, ‘Resis­tance: The Essence of Islamic Rev­o­lu­tion’] (09/02/2014) “Mid­dle East Time Bomb: The Real Aim of ISIS Is to Replace the Saud Fam­ily as the New Emirs of Ara­bia”. Huff­in­g­ton Post online @ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alastair-crooke/isis-aim-saudi-arabia_b_5748744.html?utm_hp_ref=world

Duman­cic, Marko (09/08/2014) “Is Rus­sia a Block of Ice Float­ing Back Into the 16th Cen­tury?” Huff­in­g­ton Post online @ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marko-dumanaeiae/russia-stuck-in-past_b_5782186.html?utm_hp_ref=world

Fair­fax Media (12 August 2014). Syd­ney Morn­ing Her­ald, online @ “Aus­tralian Islamic State sup­porter walks off the set of Insight”. http://www.smh.com.au/national/australian-islamic-state-supporter-walks-off-the-set-of-insight-20140813-103eex.html

FECCA (2014) Aus­tralian Mosaic. Jour­nal of the Fed­er­a­tion of Eth­nic Com­mu­ni­ties’ Coun­cil of Aus­tralia (funded by the Aus­tralian gov­ern­ment); online @ http://www.fecca.org.au/resources/australian-mosaic

Gam­age, Siri (Autumn 2014) “Per­spec­tives on mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism and mono­cul­tur­al­ism in Aus­tralia: Expe­ri­ences of immi­grant and Indige­nous Aus­tralians”. Aus­tralian Mosaic jour­nal, online @ http://www.fecca.org.au/mosaic/articles/item/543-perspectives-on-multiculturalism-and-monoculturalism-in-australia-experiences-of-immigrant-and-indigenous-australians

Jakubow­icz, Andrew (n.d.) “Mak­ing Mul­ti­cul­tural Aus­tralia”. [3000 pages of resource mate­ri­als for school stu­dents] Uni­ver­sity of Tech­nol­ogy, Syd­ney, online @ http://www.multiculturalaustralia.edu.au/

Jus­tice Laws Web­site (1988 – 2014) “Cana­dian Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism Act”. Jus­tice Laws Web­site online @ http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-18.7/page-1.html

Kaplan, Sarah (Sep­tem­ber 11, 2014) “‘Jihadi Brides’: British young women are among Islamic State’s newest recruits”. Syd­ney Morn­ing Her­ald, online @ http://www.smh.com.au/world/jihadi-brides-british-young-women-are-among-islamic-states-newest-recruits-20140911-10f7um.html#ixzz3CxSaojon

Kishore, Mohit (Octo­ber 13, 2008) “Organ­i­sa­tional cul­ture as an emer­gent phe­nom­e­non” The Hindu, online @ http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/todays-paper/tp-new-manager/organisational-culture-as-an-emergent-phenomenon/article1116183.ece

Kym­licka, Will (Feb­ru­ary 2012) “Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism: Suc­cess, Fail­ure, and the Future”. Migra­tion Pol­icy Insti­tute, online @ http://www.migrationpolicy.org/research/TCM-multiculturalism-success-failure

McClean, Matthew (2014) “Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism is a flawed doc­trine”. Dis­cus­sion Top­ics online @ http://thormay.net/unwiseideas/DiscussionTopics/Multiculturalism-MattMclean.htm

May, Thor (2014) “How Can We Treat Refugees Humanely?”. Academia.edu web­site, online @ https://www.academia.edu/6051758/How_Can_We_Treat_Refugees_Humanely_-_An_Australian_Perspective

May, Thor (2014) “Mono­lin­gual­ism and How to Fix It (if it needs fix­ing)”. Academia.edu online @ http://www.academia.edu/2641229/Monolingualism_and_How_to_Fix_It_if_it_needs_fixing_

May, Thor (5 Sep­tem­ber 2010)”Cultural Oper­at­ing Sys­tems – Thoughts on Design­ing Cul­tures”. The Pas­sion­ate Skep­tic web­site, online @ http://thormay.net/unwiseideas/cultural-operating-systems.html

May, Thor (2005) “Lan­guage Main­te­nance and Lan­guage Shift – a Con­trar­ian View­point”. Academia.edu online @ https://www.academia.edu/1555956/Language_Maintenance_and_Language_Shift_-_a_Contrarian_Viewpoint

May, Thor (2004) “Sub­mis­sion to the Aus­tralian Par­lia­men­tary Sen­ate Inquiry on the Sta­tus of Aus­tralian Expa­tri­ates , 2004”. Online at https://www.academia.edu/1830250/Inquiry_into_the_Status_of_Australian_Expatriates This doc­u­ment has been tabled in the Aus­tralian Par­lia­ment andt can also be viewed on the web­site of that par­lia­ment at http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/legcon_ctte/expats03/submissions/sub437.pdf2

May, Thor (1993) “Learn­ing to be Aus­tralian”. [This was writ­ten as a let­ter to The Aus­tralian (news­pa­per), 17 Feb­ru­ary 1993. The news­pa­per declined to pub­lish it. It sets a scene which read­ers might like to com­pare with today ]. The Pas­sion­ate Skep­tic web­site, online at http://thormay.net/lxesl/teach3a.html

McLean, Math­hew (2014) “Notes on mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism”. Active Think­ing mee­tup @ http://thormay.net/unwiseideas/DiscussionTopics/Multiculturalism-MattMclean.htm

Matos, Angel Daniel (Decem­ber 3, 2013) “On the Devel­op­ment and Evo­lu­tion of Cul­ture – Ray­mond Williams’ The Soci­ol­ogy of Cul­ture”. The Ever & Ever That Fic­tion Allows blog, online @ http://angelmatos.net/2013/12/03/raymond-williams-the-sociology-of-culture/

Mayeda, David and Raagini Vijayku­mar (09 Aug 2014) “Neo­colo­nial­ism, mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism and set­tler states”. AlJaz­erra online @ http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/08/neocolonialism-multiculturalism-s-2014898239712276.html

Meta­pe­dia (n.d.)”Diversity and Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism”. Meta­pe­dia online @ http://en.metapedia.org/wiki/Multiculturalism

Phillips, Trevor (5 April, 2004) “So what exactly is mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism?”. British Broad­cast­ing Com­mis­sion, online @ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3600791.stm

Pidd, Helen (Wednes­day 27 August) “Report says fail­ings in polit­i­cal and police lead­er­ship con­tributed to gang rape and traf­fick­ing in South York­shire”. [con­cerns a preda­tory cul­ture amongst young Anglo-Pak­istani men in Eng­land]. The Guardian online @ http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/aug/26/rotherham-sexual-abuse-children

Queens Uni­ver­sity (n.d.) “Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism Pol­icy Index”. Queens Uni­ver­sity, Ontario, Canada, online @ http://www.queensu.ca/mcp/index.html

Ratio­nal­Wiki (n.d.)”Multiculturalism”. Ratio­nal­Wiki web­site online @ http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Multiculturalism

Sawa­mura, Wataru (09/10/2014) “Why Japan Mis­reads China — And What To Do About It”. Huff­in­g­ton Post syn­di­cated from Asahi Shim­bun, online @ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/10/why-japan-misreads-china_n_5788896.html?utm_hp_ref=world

Scru­ton, Roger (Decem­ber 2010 – Jan­u­ary 2011) “Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism, R.I.P.”. The Amer­i­can Spec­ta­tor online @ http://spectator.org/articles/38473/multiculturalism-rip

Solare, Rohaan (2011) “Emer­gent Cul­ture as Regen­er­a­tive Dynamic of Cul­ture”. Emer­gent Cul­ture web­site, online @ http://emergent-culture.com/emergent-culture-as-regenerative-dynamic-of-culture/#sthash.lglp5pgp.dpuf

Song, Sarah (Sep 24, 2010) “Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism”. Stan­ford Ency­clo­pe­dia of Phi­los­o­phy online @ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/multiculturalism/

Spe­cial Broad­cast­ing Ser­vice, Aus­tralia (2014) “Liv­ing With The Enemy”. [tagline: Liv­ing With The Enemy is a provoca­tive six-part doc­u­men­tary series explor­ing the fault lines of social cohe­sion in Aus­tralia. Each episode explores a dif­fer­ent topic divid­ing Aus­tralian opin­ion by ask­ing peo­ple to live with oth­ers whose lifestyles and beliefs directly con­tra­dict their own]. SBS videos, online @ http://www.sbs.com.au/programs/living-with-the-enemy

Vic­to­rian Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism Com­mis­sion (2014). [Aus­tralia] Web­site online @ http://www.multicultural.vic.gov.au/

Wikipedia (2014) “Inter­cul­tur­al­ism”. Wikipedia online @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interculturalism

Wikipedia (2014) “ Inter­ra­cial mar­riage”. Wikipedia online @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interracial_marriage

Wikipedia (2014) “Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism”. Wikipedia online @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiculturalism

Wikipedia (2014) “Crit­i­cism of Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism”. Wikipedia online @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_multiculturalism

Wikipedia (2014) “Cul­tural Assim­i­la­tion”. Wikipedia online @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_assimilation

Wikipedia (2014) “Mono­cul­tur­al­ism”. Wikipedia online @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoculturalism

Wikipedia (2014) “Pluri­cul­tur­al­ism”. Wikipedia online @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluriculturalism

Wikipedia (2014) “Taip­ing Rebel­lion”. Wikipedia online @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion

Wikipedia (2014) “Anglo-Celtic Aus­tralian”. Wikipedia online @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Celtic_Australian

 


 

Sup­ple­men­tary Links 

 

The essay pub­lished here was sourced in a Bris­bane mee­tup dis­cus­sion on a topic pro­posed by Matthew McClean, “Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism is a flawed doc­trine” (see the ref­er­ence to his piece in the read­ing list). In fact I found myself dis­agree­ing with many of the explicit pro­pos­als put by Matthew in the dis­cus­sion, par­tic­u­larly rigid asser­tions of what mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism might imply, and the idea that giv­ing some cul­tural space to other world­views was some­how treach­er­ous. Nev­er­the­less Matthew did take the trou­ble to pre­pare some notes with an attached reading/viewing list. In the inter­est of offer­ing max­i­mum per­spec­tive, I have appended his ref­er­ences below (the for­mat and explana­tory com­ments are his).

 

  1. a) Videos of per­spec­tives against mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism

 

  1. i) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-eNXWtXRQI 8 mins 

Con­ser­v­a­tive critic Mark Steyn on mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism . Key themes:  Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ists don’t immi­grate to devel­op­ing coun­tries thus expos­ing a per­ceived hypocrisy, one way immi­grant flows to the west indi­cate dom­i­nant, valu­able cul­ture.   

  1. ii) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNjHayK3C-o 12 mins 

Right wing can­di­date Paul Weston on Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism. Key themes:  Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism is equiv­a­lent to inva­sion, ter­ri­to­rial aggres­sion. The West has responded with appease­ment.

 iii) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ESlS2jrhXY 15mins 

Con­ser­v­a­tive econ­o­mist Thomas Sow­ell on Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism. Key themes: Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism means under­per­form­ing groups are not excused from blame on cul­tural grounds for under­per­for­mance; Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism has been insti­tuted with­out evi­dence as to its ben­e­fits or risks 

  1. iv) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzkmxJlS5yk 18 mins 

Reli­gious polit­i­cal can­di­date and Chris­tian min­istry leader Daniel Nal­liah on mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism. Key themes: Hypocrisy for immi­grants to value their own cul­ture while choos­ing to live in another, Leav­ing a coun­try implies an infe­ri­or­ity of that sys­tem; Free speech is cur­tailed nec­es­sar­ily under mul­ti­cul­tural regimes. Dis­cus­sion of anti-offence laws in Vic­to­ria.  

  1. v) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SReDcW0fokE 7mins 

Come­dian and you tube critic Pat Con­dell on Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism.  Key themes: Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism cedes way to the strongest minor­ity pref­er­en­tially, i.e., Islam. 

 

  1. b) More bal­anced

 

The Guardian’s Jonathan Freed­land and Matthias Matussek of Der Spiegel talk about the def­i­n­i­tion and sup­port for mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism after the com­ments of “The fail­ure of mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism” by Angela Merkel and David Cameron 17 mins 

  1. i) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddQo-KQnyj4
  2. c) Videos on other ele­ments of the mul­ti­cul­tural debate 
  3. i) Insight – I’m Not Racist, But… 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfTUMc7yS54 1hr 

Key themes: Assim­i­lated Aus­tralians eg. 2nd gen­er­a­tion immi­grants feel ham­pered by eth­nic stereo­types, stereo­types and dis­crim­i­na­tion

 

  1. d) An attempt at some evi­dence on the effects of Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism vs. Mono­cul­tur­al­ism  

 

  1. i) http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/05/16/a-revealing-map-of-the-worlds-most-and-least-ethnically-diverse-countries/
  •          Strong democ­racy cor­re­lates with eth­nic homo­gene­ity.
  •          Diver­sity cor­re­lates with lat­i­tude and low GDP per cap­ita.
  •          Diver­sity cor­re­lates with inter­nal con­flicts.

 

  1. ii) “Frac­tion­al­iza­tion”. Alberto Alesina, Arnaud Devleeschauwer, William East­erly, Ser­gio Kurlat and Romain Wacziarg. Har­vard Insti­tute of Eco­nomic Research Dis­cus­sion Paper Num­ber 1959 

http://post.economics.harvard.edu/hier/2002papers/2002list.html  

  •          Eth­nic frac­tion­al­i­sa­tion low­ers

o    GDP growth, 

o    Pro­vi­sion of pub­lic goods, 

o    Good gov­er­nance

o    City growth rates grow less quickly, 

o    Par­tic­i­pa­tion in social activ­i­ties and trust 

 

iii) “Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism and Eco­nomic Growth”. Ger­ald W. Scully N CPA Pol­icy Report No. 196 August 1995 

  •          Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism retards eco­nomic growth inde­pen­dent of other fac­tors. Sev­eral mech­a­nisms are dis­cussed. Dated paper. 

 

  1. e) Inter­est­ing read­ing

 

Barry, Brian (2001) “ Cul­ture & Equal­ity: An Egal­i­tar­ian Cri­tique of Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism”. 

Klymicka, Will. 1995, “ Mul­ti­cul­tural Cit­i­zen­ship: A Lib­eral The­ory of Minor­ity Rights ” . Oxford: Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press. 

Mansur, Salim (2011) “ Delec­table Lie: a lib­eral repu­di­a­tion of mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism”.  

Put­nam, Robert “Diver­sity and trust within com­mu­ni­ties”. [Robert Putnam’s points on trust in highly diverse areas] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Putnam#Diversity_and_trust_within_communities  

Schelling, Thomas C. (1969) “Mod­els of seg­re­ga­tion”, Amer­i­can Eco­nomic Review, 1969, 59(2), 488–493 .

Schelling, Thomas C. (1971). “Dynamic Mod­els of Seg­re­ga­tion,” Jour­nal of Math­e­mat­i­cal Soci­ol­ogy, 1(2), pp. 143–186 .

The Stan­ford Ency­clo­pe­dia of Phi­los­o­phy: – many links to argu­ments and ref­er­ences in the aca­d­e­mic lit­er­a­ture dis­cus­sion of mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/multiculturalism/   

War­raq, Ibn (2011) “ Why the West is Best: A Mus­lim Apostate’s Defense of Lib­eral Democ­racy” .

Zhang, Junfu (2009) “Tip­ping and Res­i­den­tial Seg­re­ga­tion”.  A Uni­fied Schelling Model IZA DP No. 4413 

 

  1. f) Ref­er­ences and a good dis­cus­sion  are avail­able here regard­ing cul­ture in gen­eral:  

Baber, H. E. Uni­ver­sity of San Diego, Pro­fes­sor of Phi­los­o­phy. [An online essay dis­cussing how “eth­nic scripts” for minor­ity indi­vid­u­als are ulti­mately lim­it­ing.] www.csus.edu/org/pswip/Papers/ Plu­ral %20 Mono­cul­tur­al­ism .doc 

Kurti, Peter (2013) Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism and the fetish of diver­sity”. CIS [Good crit­i­cal analy­sis of Aus­tralian mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism].  

Spencer-Oatey, H. (2012) “What is cul­ture A com­pi­la­tion of quo­ta­tions”. Glob­al­PAD Core Con­cepts. 

 


 

Source of this essay 

mee­tup group: Bris­bane Active Think­ing Mee­tup http://www.meetup.com/Brisbane-Active-Thinking-Meetup/

top­ics already dis­cussed: http://thormay.net/unwiseideas/DiscussionTopics/DiscussionIndex.htm

com­ments: Thor May – thormay@yahoo.com


 

 

Pro­fes­sional bio: Thor May has a core pro­fes­sional inter­est in cog­ni­tive lin­guis­tics, at which he has rarely suc­ceeded in mak­ing a liv­ing. He has also, per­haps fatally in a career sense, cul­ti­vated an inter­est in how things work – peo­ple, brains, sys­tems, coun­tries, machi­nes, what­ever… In the world of daily employ­ment he has mostly taught Eng­lish as a for­eign lan­guage, a stim­u­lat­ing activ­ity though rarely regarded as a pro­fes­sion by the world at large. His PhD dis­ser­ta­tion, Lan­guage Tan­gle, dealt with lan­guage teach­ing pro­duc­tiv­ity. Thor has been teach­ing Eng­lish to non-native speak­ers, train­ing teach­ers and lec­tur­ing lin­guis­tics, since 1976. This work has taken him to seven coun­tries in Ocea­nia and East Asia, mostly with ter­tiary stu­dents, but with a cou­ple of detours to teach sec­ondary stu­dents and young chil­dren. He has trained teach­ers in Aus­tralia, Fiji and South Korea. In an ear­lier life, prior to becom­ing a teacher, he had a decade of find­ing his way out of work­ing class ori­gins, through unskilled jobs in Aus­tralia, New Zealand and finally Eng­land (after back­pack­ing across Asia in 1972).

con­tact: http://thormay.net thormay@yahoo.com

aca­d­e­mic repos­i­tory: Academia.edu at http://independent.academia.edu/ThorMay

dis­cus­sion: Thor’s Unwise Ideas at http://thormay.net/unwiseideas/unwisendx.html

 


Mul­ti­cul­tures – com­mu­ni­ties of famil­iar strangers © Thor May 2014

This entry was posted in China, culture, economics, ethics, evidence, ideology, individualism, intellectuals, Language learning, law, lifestyle, merit, politics, reciprocation, refugees, regulations, religion, rules, value, war, wealth. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply