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Reflections on a Multicultural Society. In his work, Illiberal Education , [82] Dinesh D'Souza argues that the entrenchment of multiculturalism in American universities undermined the universalist values that liberal education once attempted to foster. In particular, he was disturbed by the growth of ethnic studies programs e. The late Samuel P. Huntington , political scientist and author, known for his Clash of Civilizations theory, described multiculturalism as "basically an anti-Western ideology.
The Challenges to America's National Identity. Criticism of multiculturalism in the US was not always synonymous with opposition to immigration. Some politicians did address both themes, notably Patrick Buchanan , who in described multiculturalism as "an across-the-board assault on our Anglo-American heritage. It acts in the name of abstract goals, such as equality or positive rights, and uses its claim of moral superiority, power of taxation and wealth redistribution to keep itself in power.
This practice inevitably creates distrust and predictable cultural clashes. While I agree with your analysis of multiculturalism, when it comes to judging 'cultural superiority' things get complicated alarmingly fast given you have to judge a society based on reality of how it actually operates. Well, other than among most First Nations, but that lid was held down, surreptitiously. Archived from the original PDF on 5 July In both the United Kingdom and Germany, governments failed to recognize the complexity, elasticity, and sheer contrariness of identity.
We are attempting to convert a republic, European and Christian in its origins and character, into an egalitarian democracy of all the races, religions, cultures and tribes of planet Earth. We are turning America into a gargantuan replica of the U. General Assembly, a continental conclave of the most disparate and diverse peoples in all of history, who will have no common faith, no common moral code, no common language and no common culture.
What, then, will hold us together? Multiculturalism has also been attacked through satire, such as the following proposition by John Derbyshire. Groups of people from anywhere in the world, mixed together in any numbers and proportions whatsoever, will eventually settle down as a harmonious society, appreciating—nay, celebrating! This theorem is held to be false by Derbyshire and other paleoconservatives.
The late Lawrence Auster , another conservative critic of multiculturalism, argued that although multiculturalism was meant to promote the value of each culture, its real tendency had been to undermine US traditional majority culture. In Auster's view, multiculturalism tended to "downgrade our national culture while raising the status and power of other cultures.
The formal meaning of "diversity," "cultural equity," "gorgeous mosaic" and so on is a society in which many different cultures will live together in perfect equality and peace i. In other words the U.
In demanding that non-European cultures, as cultures, be given the same importance as the European-American national culture, the multiculturalists are declaring that the non-European groups are unable or unwilling to assimilate as European immigrants have in the past, and that for the sake of these non-assimilating groups American society must be radically transformed. This ethnically and racially based rejection of the common American culture should lead thoughtful Americans to re-evaluate some contemporary assumptions about ethnicity and assimilation.
Another critic of multiculturalism is the political theorist Brian Barry. In his book Culture and Equality: An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism , [87] he argues that some forms of multiculturalism can divide people, although they need to unite in order to fight for social justice. Roth , Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Dowling College , has argued that multiculturalism is "profoundly undemocratic" and that multicultural countries can only be held together through state coercion.
In his book The Perils of Diversity: Immigration and Human Nature , Roth writes:. From the perspective of inclusive fitness, unfamiliar others are potential free-riders and, out of a concern that they will be exploited by others, people reduce considerably their altruistic attitudes and behavior in a general way in more diverse communities. This loss of trust is a symptom of a breakdown in social cohesion and is surely a forerunner of the sort of ethnic conflict that is always likely to break out if allowed to do so.
This is undoubtedly the reason why multicultural nation-states are forever promoting tolerance and ever more punitive sanctions for the expression of ethnic hostility, even going so far to as to discourage the expression of opinion about the reality of ethnic and racial differences.
Currently these measures are directed at the host population when they express reservations about the wisdom of mass immigration, but this will surely change as it becomes ever more obvious that it is the presence of competing ethnic groups that is creating the tension and not the expressed reservations of the majority population. The real danger for modern democracies is that in their zeal to promote multicultural societies, they will be forced to resort to the means that have characterized all empires attempting to maintain their hegemony over disparate peoples.
It is also extreme in the viciousness with which it attacks those who differ on this issue. These attacks are accompanied by a very generalized and one-sided denigration of Western traditions and Western accomplishments, and claims that a collective guilt should be assumed by all Europeans whites for the sins of their forebears In the semireligious formulation of this view, expiation of these sins can only come through an absolute benevolence toward the poor of the world whose suffering is claimed to be the result of the white race and its depredations.
In practical terms this can only be accomplished through aid to Third World peoples and generous immigration policies that allow large numbers of people to escape the poverty of the Third World. MacDonald , a professor of psychology at California State University, Long Beach, has argued in his trilogy of books on Judaism that Jews have been prominent as main ideologues and promoters of multiculturalism in an attempt to end anti-semitism. The future, then, like the past, will inevitably be a Darwinian competition in which ethnicity plays a very large role.
The alternative faced by Europeans throughout the Western world is to place themselves in a position of enormous vulnerability in which their destinies will be determined by other peoples, many of whom hold deep historically conditioned hatreds toward them. Europeans' promotion of their own displacement is the ultimate foolishness—an historical mistake of catastrophic proportions.
Finally, multiculturalism and cultural relativism have been fiercely attacked by American social thinker Lloyd deMause , founder of psychohistory. DeMause's central argument is that, in the past, the astronomical infanticidal ratios among the tribes gives the lie to the claim that the diverse cultures are basically equal. Harvard professor of political science Robert D. Putnam conducted a nearly decade long study on how diversity affects social trust.
People in diverse communities "don't trust the local mayor, they don't trust the local paper, they don't trust other people and they don't trust institutions," writes Putnam.
We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it's not just that we don't trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don't trust people who do look like us. Relatively homogeneous societies invest more in public goods, indicating a higher level of public altruism. For example, the degree of ethnic homogeneity correlates with the government's share of gross domestic product as well as the average wealth of citizens.
Case studies of the United States A recent multi-city study of municipal spending on public goods in the United States found that ethnically or racially diverse cities spend a smaller portion of their budgets and less per capita on public services than do the more homogeneous cities. Before World War II, major tensions arose from the last, monarchist Yugoslavia 's multi-ethnic makeup and absolute political and demographic domination of the Serbs. The Yugoslav wars that took place between and were characterized by bitter ethnic conflicts between the peoples of the former Yugoslavia , mostly between Serbs on the one side and Croats , Bosniaks or Albanians on the other; but also between Bosniaks and Croats in Bosnia and Macedonians and Albanians in the Republic of Macedonia.
The conflict had its roots in various underlying political, economic and cultural problems, which provided justifications for political and religious leaders, and manifested itself through often provoked and artificial created ethnic and religious tensions. In an article in the Hudson Review , Bruce Bawer writes about what he sees as a developing distaste toward the idea and policies of multiculturalism in Europe, especially, as stated earlier, in the Netherlands , Denmark , United Kingdom , Norway , Sweden , Austria and Germany.
The belief behind this backlash on multiculturalism is that it creates friction within society. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For the related issue of criticism of immigration, see, see Opposition to immigration. This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources.
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Archived from the original on 10 May Retrieved 1 February Archived from the original on 2 January Foreign Affairs, The Magazine. Council on Foreign Relations. Multicultural policies accept that societies are diverse, yet they implicitly assume that such diversity ends at the edges of minority communities. By forcing people into ethnic and cultural boxes, they help create the very divisions they were meant to manage. Archived from the original PDF on 5 July Retrieved 18 August In Katharine Gelber, Adrienne Stone. Hate Speech and Freedom of Speech in Australia.
Immigration, Population and Social Cohesion Policy ". Archived from the original on 29 June National identity in spotlight, 28 November [1]. Australian Journal of Political Science. Overview of the citizenship test". Department of Immigration and Citizenship. Archived from the original on 8 December Retrieved 9 February Negotiating Diversity in Canada and Europe. Identity and Participation in Culturally Diverse Societies: Archived from the original PDF on 13 February Retrieved 20 October Prato 6 August University of Toronto Press.
Postulations on the Fragmentary Effects of Multiculturalism in Canada. Retrieved 30 January Immigration, Education and the Labour Market. Archived from the original on 20 October — via news. Retrieved 10 August De filosofie van mensenrechten. Immigration and the Idea of Citizenship in France and Britain. Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. Retrieved 7 October Archived from the original on 5 June Retrieved 30 April Retrieved 31 January Retrieved 29 August The racial weather vane changes direction".
Archived from the original on 18 March Retrieved 8 November Archived from the original on 8 November Retrieved 29 September The Government has been accused of pursuing a secret policy of encouraging mass immigration for its own political ends". Archived from the original on 16 August Retrieved 21 September — via The Seattle Times. Archived from the original on 26 May Beneath the surface, Americans are deeply ambivalent about diversity".
Archived from the original on 23 September The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. Archived from the original on 15 March An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism. Under Islamic law, in some countries, female adulterers face death by stoning, and thieves are punished by having their hand severed. In some African and Middle Eastern countries, homosexuality is a crime, in some cases punishable by death. Are all these cultural values morally equivalent to those of the West?
The vital achievement of the West was the concept of individual rights, which saw its birth with the Magna Carta in The idea emerged that individuals have certain inalienable rights. Individuals do not exist to serve government; governments exist to protect their rights. But it was not until the 19th century that ideas of liberty received broad recognition. Personal liberty implies toleration of differences among people, whether those differences are racial, sexual, ideological or political.
Liberty also implies a willingness to permit others who disagree with you to go their separate ways.
This is not the vision of the new immigrants. In some parts of Britain, Christians are threatened with violence for merely handing out Bibles. Trying to convert Muslims to Christianity is seen as a hate crime. Many women are sexually assaulted. Both in Europe and in the U.
Criticism of multiculturalism questions the ideal of the maintenance of distinct ethnic cultures . He argued that "the evidence is clear that many multicultural societies have failed and that the human cost of the failure has been high" and warned. On the other hand, Multiculturalism (hereafter capitalized) in the first sense of the term is more than merely a failed political philosophy. It is a central cause of the.
The intellectual elite, courts and government agencies push an agenda that is anything but a defense of individual rights, freedom from conformity and a live-and-let-live philosophy. Part of that lesson is nonjudgmentalism, where one is taught that one lifestyle is just as worthy as another and all cultures and their values are morally equivalent.