The least that can be said is that there are Islamic values which are recognisable by Christians and compatible with those of a Christian culture. This poses an interesting question, directly relevant to the lessons we need to learn from all this. Is Tariq Jahan’s noble behaviour a victory for multiculturalism? Or is it the direct opposite, a refutation of it, a demonstration that it is only by appealing to common values that we can forge a decent society? Melanie Phillips yesterday argued strongly and to me persuasively that multiculturalism has driven us all apart….
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100100087/london-riots-this-is-what-happens-when-multiculturalists-turn-a-blind-eye-to-gang-culture/
Another take on the nature of multi-culturalism and it’s impact on society. Please note that I am not advocating for or against Thompson’s claims, only noting the complementary nature of the two pieces.
Well written. I agree with the premise.
“You can ignore reality, but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.â€
–Ayn Rand
While wondering if the post title is in fact an accurate call, i.e., that multiculturalism should be blamed for these events in Britain last week, I happened to read some excerpts from Mark Steyn’s new book, including this [blockquote]“For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ’s Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population.â€[/blockquote] Note that the LBJ-era reference is to a mono-culture, and not multiculturalism.
This strikes me as an even more accurate explanation for Britain’s modern sociological woes, and it is perhaps an indictment of all bleeding-heart do-gooder liberalism, mostly on the part of Protestants and non-believers in the UK. In other words, by evolving at the governing level (which largely excluded Catholics and Jews until recently) the economic and social framework in which multiculturalism could then espoused and even hailed as a positive development for society, even when it was harming individuals, the architects of Britain’s welfare state are the ones to blame for last week’s events. (Of course Steyn did not say this last, it is my own extrapolation.) In a similar way Communist party bosses, not their proletariat, are culpable for the failings of Communism.
Having grown up during LBJ’s times I have no difficulty apprehending this, and can recall many adults with long experience expressing their concerns about where the Great Society was headed. But it concerns me that those 45 and younger, say, may not believe the stark truth of it since the ideologies of public education and the lofty but ungrounded aims of the liberals in US government have frequently outpaced the steady march of reality in the 45+ years since LBJ. With the O in office we may be seeing the derailing of the ‘progress’ train driven by those ideologies and aims. It is the culmination and downfall of a whiggish interpretation of history. Building and evolving a Christian, even a Judeo-Christian, let alone a Catholic, culture in the US has not been a national project, although it was a by-product of settlement in the colonial era and for about 75 years after the Revolutionary War. But industrial progress soon led to the nationalized ambition of building a corporatist, essentially non-religious because materialistic US culture (though many religious aspirations have harnessed to that cause). Multiculturalism is imposed on the fruits of this misdirection.
A place where it looks to me, perhaps a blissfully ignorant outsider, as if multiculturalism can be beneficial is Singapore. But I personally would not want to live in Singapore.