Scruton on Multiculturalism

The prescient warnings of Roger Scruton:

Back in 2014 the great English conservative philosopher and Christian Roger Scruton (1944-2020), penned the important book How to Be a Conservative (Bloomsbury). Being such a deep and incisive thinker, he was able to pinpoint just where the West was heading – and he greatly feared what he saw.

Let me share his thoughts on what is found in Chapter 7: “The Truth About Multiculturalism,” given how relevant this topic is today. He begins by noting how conservatism arose during the Enlightenment, but the latter is crumbling, turning into a “culture of repudiation”. The West has developed a ‘down with us’ mentality as it supports and extols all other cultures but its own.

All cultures are now to be embraced and promoted, while ‘diversity’ is being extolled along with criticising Western ‘exclusiveness’. And all this ties in nicely with the push for mass migration we find happening throughout the West. Writes Scruton:

The Enlightenment vision of human nature was based on the idea that human beings everywhere enjoy the same reasoning powers, and that these powers lead of their own accord towards a common morality and a common repertoire of passions. Works of art from the European Enlightenment took as their subject matter other cultures, other countries and other climes, so as expressly to profile the shared humanity of the different peoples of the world….

 

The long-term effect of this has been to open Western societies to immigration, and to impart an ideal citizenship that, it is hoped, will enable people of disparate origins and backgrounds to live together, recognizing that the real source of their obligations lies not in that which divides them – race and religion in particular – but in that which unites them – territory, good government, the day-to-day routines of neighbourliness, the institutions of civil society, and the workings of the law. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t….

 

But this virtue of our civilization, so clearly manifest in America, has been used precisely to repudiate that civilization’s claim on us, to argue, in the name of multiculturalism, that we need to marginalize our inherited customs and beliefs, even to cast them off, in order to become an ‘inclusive’ society in which all our newcomers feel at home, regardless of any effort to adapt to their new surroundings. (pp. 81-82)

This push to flood the West with those of other cultures who may not at all actually like our own culture is of course aided and abetted by Western education which has long ago decided that the West is worst, and other cultures must be elevated and glorified. Says Scruton:

The culture of repudiation therefore reminds us that free enquiry is not a normal exercise of the human mind, and is attractive only when seen as an avenue to membership. When the experience of membership can no longer be obtained in such a way, a new kind of enquiry takes over, one explicitly directed towards a promised social goal and a substitute for the old and rejected forms of attachment. A single theme runs through the humanities as they are regularly taught in American and European universities, which is that of the illegitimacy of Western civilization, and of the artificial nature of the distinctions on which it has been based. All distinctions are ‘cultural; therefore ‘constructed; therefore ‘ideological; in the sense defined by Marx – manufactured by the ruling groups or classes in order to serve their interests and bolster their power. Western civilization is simply the record of that oppressive process, and the principal purpose of studying it is to deconstruct its claim to our membership. This is the core belief that a great many students in the humanities are required to ingest, preferably before they have the intellectual discipline to question it, or to set it against the literature that shows it to be untenable.

 

To put the point in another way, the Enlightenment displaced theology from the heart of the curriculum, in order to put the disinterested pursuit of truth in place of it. Within a very short time, however, we find the university dominated by theology of another kind – a godless theology, to be sure, but one no less insistent upon unquestioning submission to doctrine, and no less ardent in its pursuit of heretics, sceptics and debunkers. People are no longer burned at the stake for their views: they simply fail to get tenure, or, if they are students, they flunk the course. But the effect is similar, namely to reinforce an orthodoxy in which nobody really believes. (pp. 88-89)

All this helps to explain so much about what is happening in the West today. In the light of what we just recently saw with the death of Henry Nowak in the UK – and thousands of similar examples – consider this spot-on paragraph from the chapter:

Perhaps the worst aspect of this nihilism is the routine accusation of ‘racism’, levelled against anyone who offers to endorse, to teach and to uphold the values of Western civilization. Fear of the charge of racism has led commentators, politicians and police forces all across the Western world to refrain from criticizing or taking action against many of the overtly criminal customs that have installed themselves in our midst – customs such as forced marriage, female circumcision and ‘honour’ killing, and the growing intimidation from Islamists of anyone remotely critical of their faith. (p. 89)

He goes on to say this:

The charge of ‘racism represents an attempt to turn the culture of repudiation in a religious direction – to make the posture of not belonging into a new kind of belonging, with enemies, banners and an onward march to victory over the status quo. But it depends upon a deep untruth – the untruth that race and culture are the same thing, whereas in fact they have nothing to do with each other…

 

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 judgement, and therefore to deny the fundamental experience of community….

 

For what is being brought home to us, through painful experiences that we might have avoided had it been permitted before now to say the truth, is that we, like everyone else, depend upon a shared culture for our security, our prosperity and our freedom to be. We don’t require everyone to have the same faith, to lead the same kind of family life or to participate in the same festivals. But we have a shared civic culture, a shared language and a shared public sphere. Our societies are built upon the Judeo-Christian ideal of neighbour-love, according to which strangers and intimates deserve equal concern…. (pp. 90-91)

And predating Pauline Hanson’s talk about the importance of a ‘monoculture’ (with various ethnicities and so on included), Scruton says this:

Over time immigrants can come to share these things with us: the experience of America bears ample witness to this. And they more easily do so when they recognize that, in any meaningful sense of the word, our culture is also a multiculture, incorporating elements absorbed in ancient times from all around the Mediterranean basin and in modern times from the adventures of European traders and explorers across the world. But this kaleidoscopic culture is still one thing, with a set of inviolable principles at its core; and it is the source of social cohesion across Europe and America. Our culture allows for a great range of ways of life; it enables people to privatize their religion and their family customs, while still belonging to the public realm of open dealings and shared allegiance. For it defines that public realm in legal and territorial terms, and not in terms of creed or kinship.

 

So what happens when people whose identity is fixed by creed or kinship immigrate into places settled by Western culture? The multiculturalists say that we must make room for them, and that we do this by relinquishing the space in which their culture can flourish. Our political class has at last recognized that this is a recipe for disaster, and that we can welcome immigrants only if we welcome them into our culture, and not beside and against it. But that means telling them to accept rules, customs, and procedures that may be alien to their old way of life. Is this an injustice? I do not think that it is. If immigrants come it is because they gain by doing so. It is therefore reasonable to remind them that there is also a cost. Only now, however, is our political class prepared to say so, and to insist that the cost be paid. (pp. 91-92)

Scruton certainly nailed it when he wrote this a dozen years ago. If he were alive today he would be even more shocked to see how the West is intent on destroying itself while mouthing useless platitudes about inclusion, tolerance and the equality of all cultures.

He tried to warn us. But we failed to heed his words. How long the West can continue to survive as it heads down this suicidal path remains to be seen.

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