Not too long ago, David Goodhart, the editor of the left-wing magazine Prospect, had an epiphany.
Rather less romantically, he must have had one of those “oh..umm, hang on a minute” moments when he realised that his movement was not just heading off in two different directions but that those directions are mutually exclusive:
And therein lies one of the central dilemmas of political life in developed societies: sharing and solidarity can conflict with diversity. This is an especially acute dilemma for progressives who want plenty of both solidarity (high social cohesion and generous welfare paid out of a progressive tax system) and diversity (equal respect for a wide range of peoples, values and ways of life). The tension between the two values is a reminder that serious politics is about trade-offs. It also suggests that the left’s recent love affair with diversity may come at the expense of the values and even the people that it once championed.
Mr Goodhart calls this the ‘progressives dillema’ which, in a nutshell, means that for the want of the diversity, the solidarity may be lost.
[It is worth digressing here for a moment to note how Mr. Goodhart, along with the rest of his ideological bedfellows now insist on referring to themselves as ‘progressives’, a painfully sanctimonious but revealing bit of re-branding. It is as if they no longer want to be publicly associated with the contaminated ‘S’-word. There is much satisfaction to be had here for people like me. Indeed, it is something I may have mentioned on previous occasions but I cannot be bothered to go trawling through the archives and, in any event, it is an observation that merits virtually no end of repetition.] Anyhow, Mr Goodhart has at least sufficient integrity to admit that the cracks have opened up in his head. Indeed, he has poured the contents of that head (well, some of them at any rate) out into two rambling great essays both of appeared in the Guardian earlier this week. The link above is to the first of them.
I bet Mr. Goodhart struggled for some time to bring his thoughts into sufficient focus to write them down with a degree of candour now so uncommon among the bien-pensant. The nagging doubts must have been gnawing away at him like woodbeetles until he could stand it no longer. Before he burst, he just had to stand up and tell all his complacent little chums exactly what was what.
He must have guessed that this was going to go down like the Hindenberg. And if he did, he was right because it has.
And to mark this seminal event the Daily Social Worker has set today aside as an Official Day of Angst:
His articles are littered with assumptions about “us” and “them” and peppered with references to a “common culture” and “homogeneity”, as though such terms are not only universally agreed but eternally static. No wonder he concludes that “National citizenship is inherently exclusionary”. Of course it is, if defined by race and frozen in time.
Says Gary Younge.
So there is such a thing as British society after all, and it is worth preserving. Great thanks are due to David Goodhart, perhaps more thanks than he wants, for grasping that a country cannot long retain consent, freedom and order unless it defends and respects its own culture.
Trumpets specially-drafted-in-Conservative Peter Hitchens.
The pity of it all is that what Goodhart and the liberal intelligentsia refuse to see is that Britain, despite Blunkett, is far more progressive than the rest of Europe in the way it has handled diversity and racism and put institutional racism on the map. In doing so, it has tacitly acknowledged the contributions of African-Caribbeans and Asians, as a people and as a class, to that process. What Britain is still failing to see, though, is that, today, the presence of refugees and asylum seekers reflects and veils, at the same time, the decline of the welfare state in terms of public services, housing provision and so on, and ignores the contribution that they, like the immigrants before them, can make to shore up and rebuild the welfare state, and so generate a political culture of unity in diversity.
Bleats somebody called ‘A Sivanandan’.
Diversity is a challenge to social solidarity, but there is nothing inevitable or mechanical that links the scale of diversity with the weakness of solidarity. We need to recognise that there are two rather different problems, and we have ways of tackling both.
Insists Labour MP, John Denham.
While paying lip service to diversity, Goodhart shows little appreciation of its value and fragility. Diversity fosters new sources of energy, creativity and imagination, and enables us to see the strengths and limitations of our own way of life. He is wrong to think that diversity can look after itself. There is increasing pressure towards assimilation, and diversity can easily wither away unless it is nurtured.
Opines Bhiku Parekh.
So does diversity threaten the solidarity underpinning the welfare state? Public hostility, surely, is to the undeserving: as much for the welfare scrounger unwilling to work as for the asylum seeker (who is not allowed to work). Ethnicity is not the determining factor. How do we create the sense of belonging and mutual obligation?
Asks Sarah Spencer.
Well, what a lot of ruffled feathers and spluttering indignation. But that is usually the result of telling people that they have to give one of their two sacred cows the big chop. That is what David Goodhart has had the audacity to tell them and, from within his own worldview, he is absolutely correct. The trouble is that his worldview is dead wrong.
Like all other ‘progressives’ (chuckle, snicker) Mr Goodhart believes that a convivial and decent civil society cannot possibly happen without a sustained top-down effort of a government filled to the brim with people like him. Similarly, if the great unwashed public was merely left alone to exercise their own choices they will invariably make stupid, cruel and malevolent decisions. This is the same blindness that leads people into believing that without state schools there will be no education.
Ironically, in a state of affairs that the ‘progressives’ would like to see, ‘diversity’ and ‘solidarity’ are not polar opposites. ‘Solidarity’ means a whole population forced into a universal state of monochromatic immiseration under the stewardship of a dull, earnest and condescending ruling elite. ‘Diversity’ means exactly the same thing with the addition of some brown people.
[I am sorry but I have digress again for a moment just to emphasise how much I loathe the word ‘solidarity’. It is one of the many semantic horrors born out of the French Revolution and I will forever associate it with student barricades, industrial strife, bedsit Che Guevarras, clenched fists and collectivist poverty. I suppose the ‘progressives’ associate it with those things too, which is exactly why they love the word.]
The truth is that there is no dilemma here at all for anyone with a clear head. ‘Diversity’ and ‘solidarity’ are two merely two parallel streams of the same thematic programme of social engineering and the very best thing anyone can do with both concepts is to piss all over them until they fizzle and melt.
But, for those on the left, this dilemma is real enough despite all the harrumphing and denial. The state can mandate uniformity OR the state can mandate differences but it cannot possibly mandate both regardless of all heartfelt beliefs to the contrary. Mr Goodhart’s confreres are standing with him at that fork in the road whether they recognise the fact or not. I suspect that some will and some won’t which is why I can see them all getting into a very big, very public and very brutal bust-up very soon.
I intend to sit back and watch the entertainment. Tickets, anyone?
I liked Gary Younge’s closing comments:
“There is indeed a progressive dilemma. It’s the dilemma of what to do with people who pose as progressives and preach like reactionaries.”
Is it just me or is there a whiff of the gulag about these remarks?
The main problem with “diversity” and “solidarity” as seen by the Left is that they are selective. Only a few benefit, usually at the expense of the many. And the moral diktats apply absolutely to some, and none at all to others.
For recent evidence, see http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/state/8040153.htm.
Maybe it’s my Polish background speaking, but I think of entirely different things when I hear the word Solidarity.
As an American who read (also with some bemusement) Mr. Goodhart’s essays in the Guardian, allow me to point out that the entire thing rests on a shaky intellectual premise. That is, Goodhart states as fact that Americans are reluctant to turn government into a redistributive arm a la Europe because of our racial diversity (more specifically, he insinuates that rich white people don’t want their wealth appropriated for use by poor dark people). This is something of a calumny. Americans, the vast majority of whom are hard-working by world-historical standards, do not wish to see the fruits of their labor given to laggards and lay-abouts. No skin color involved, really.
In fact, as much as Europeans marvel at Americans’ legendary greed, Americans marvel at Europeans’ insouciance towards having their money withheld by an all-wise state, which returns a pittance as an “allowance” and gives the rest to people who work less hard than themselves. Try getting anyone to work 60 hour weeks with that kind of “incentive” in the offing.
Really, Mr. Goodhart, if you want to reign in the authority of the state, don’t use half-baked analyses of U.S. social policy to justify it.
Good post. It is interesting that the Prospect article focused mainly on the threat to the welfare state that diversity poses. But importing people with incompatible value systems and insufficient loyalty to the social contract poses a risk to far more important institutions than the welfare state, which the Prospect article doesn’t (or more likely, is unwilling) to discuss.
Imcompatible values at the political level are a recipe for Civil War and all that it entails. The “diversity” industry promotes group rights over individual rights; by doing this it is simply storing up troubles for massive bloodshed to come.
Westerners, look at the Indian Sub-continent, Lebanon or the Balkans, and that is our future unless something can be done to reverse the tragic course taken by the “progressives.”
(PS I loathe that word too. How twee and p-w-wecious can you get? I call them “regressives” because they are trying to replace the nation state with tribalism, a regression of civilization and not a progression.)
You make a number of good points Kelli. I’ve always thought that American hostility toward the welfare state had mostly to do with the different way we view social and economic class. To an American, a crappy job or low social status is just something a person is transitting through on their way to a better life for themselves, or if not for themselves, for their children. No one thinks of social class as something you are born into and are stuck with for all eternity, which tends to mitigate class resentment. This relative lack of class resentment is why socialism found very unfertile ground in the US, IMHO.
That said, if I were a Brit or European right now, I’d be fuming at being asked to pay fat social benefits to the numerous radicals imported from the Middle East and given “asylum” in Western Europe: the Mullah Krekars, the Omar Bakris, the Abu Jah-Jahs and the Captain Hooks. These people are openly plotting to subvert European law and society at best and violently harm European people at worst, and Europeans are being asked to pay for the privilige of being targetted in this manner In that sense the Prospect article does have a very good point.
(PS I loathe that word too. How twee and p-w-wecious can you get? I call them “regressives” because they are trying to replace the nation state with tribalism, a regression of civilization and not a progression.)
I’ve expressed this sentiment before without getting any agreement or disagreement but here goes:
I don’t believe in the concept of ‘progress’ at all, which perhaps why I’m basically 180* from the Progressive position. Judging progress itself is a process of value judging the past and the future from a static present. Who knows how people will judge certain aspects in the future? We can’t even get a small portion of the population to agree about any one issue today. In my opinion, most ‘advances’ are soon forgotten and taken for granted by future generations and they’ll find new things to worry about (perhaps as a result of ‘dread’ inherent in the human existence from an existential point of view; how can progress be deemed to have occured if mankind still finds an equal amount of dread in existence no matter what?). So, generally, as with any time on a conceived timeline there will be people, resources, force, and most importantly, value judgements. I can’t hope to control peoples value judgements to any great effect today, I’m going to worry about one hundred years from now? One last notion about progress, does anyone think if we were to dump a person from the year 1,000 A.D. in the middle of our society today, without massive reconditioning, they’s actually want to stay here (setting aside familial bonds)? I think they’d want to go back in a heartbeat.
The concept of progress presumes to diminish the past and brighten the future. This to me is theocratic in a sense. It is a form the same dangling carrot that is the beginning construction of religions and collectivism. In the end I don’t care about ‘mankind’s progress’ I care about my progress and the type of civilization I expect to exist around me in my attempts to improve my position unfettered.
My reading of this debate is a little different. I think David Goodhart still doesn’t get it, though he comes closer to getting it than say Gary Younge. (Who BTW always astonishes me: a beautiful writer, humane and sensible when talking about specifics and reporting his own experience, but suddenly and fiercely unhinged when operating in the abstract.)
Goodhart can’t get over the cant use of “diversity” by billiard-ball multiculturalists for their vision of a bundle of immiscible humanities bound together only by explicit state-mediated obligations. But his virtue is that he does follow through on the postulates of social relativity to grant the “native” or “host” culture the same status of ball not baize. He has grasped that culture and race are not the same thing, but still sees “cultures” as distinct and bounded, to be managed and capable of management by a godlike greater society that’s merely falling down on the job of social engineering.
So his problem is the same as that of doctrinaire “community leaders” protecting their chosen culture against the effrontery of individual choice, but at a different level. He still thinks someone should be in charge, in order to protect the institutions he believes in. The logical consequence is fascism. There’s the rub.
Neither Goodhart nor his opponents is willing to drop cultural protectionism and accept that individuals may make their own choices and compromises with cultural belonging in a society that more resembles a fruit punch than a game of pool. It really doesn’t matter if you lose sight of the original ingredients, they aren’t all equally pleasant and dilution to taste might be quite a good thing.
Susan – I have tried many times to explain this fundamental difference between the US (and probably Australia, too) and Britain and Europe, but the Europeans and Brits, unable to get their heads round it, can seldom resist a superior sneer. A poor job is something you’re “just transitting through on the way to a better life” – vivid and illuminating expression, BTW! It says it all about the social and career fluidity of the US. It also explains the egalitarian social underpinnings, which baffle many Brits (always excepting Samizdats!) and Europeans: no one looks down on anyone doing an inferior level job in the US, and the person doing the job doesn’t feel trapped in a class he can never climb out of. Americans have their faces turned toward the sun and, save C&W singers, are always looking forward to improving their circumstances.
I also think that the tradition of working their way through college – being responsible for themselves and their ambitions from the moment they hit adulthood – plays a large part. When Americans see a young waitress or waiter, they don’t see someone trapped an a tedious and physically demanding job for life; they subconsciously assume that the kid’s working their way through college, or going to night school or going through a divorce and getting back on their feet, or something.
The differenc in attitude is such a chasm.
I was infuriated to read (and yes, I mean the item made me really angry) a couple of months ago that some German students had “streaked” through some German city to protest cuts in their student grants. The towering self-indulgence of the assumption that working Germans somehow owed these young adults, who want to extend dependent childhood through the age of 22, an education to help them forward their careers is negative enough. That they felt that taking their clothes off and running naked through the city was a real protest rather adolescent attention-seeking was another. That they expected anyone to give a stuff was another. American kids mature faster and accept self-reliance earlier, which is why the US is more successful than Europe and always, always will be.
Kelli, this echoes your post as well, of course. Nice to see you back.
There is a number of factors involved here. It should be noted that when America was being settled, the aristocracy stayed home. Who would leavea beautiful mansion, servants, grounds and status for the backwoods on the other side of the planet? It was the peasant class and the bourgeois that settled this country, while the aristocracy stayed home.
But the bourgeois does not play within the same bi-polar paradigm that is the hallmark of the peasant/aristocracy dynamics. And one of Marx’s biggest mistakes is assuming that the new bourgeois were essentially the same as absentee land holding aristocracy of an earlier era. They do different things, act differently, and perform completely different functions.
And, what is more important, is that a bourgeois class does not need or depend on any other class. It is really outside the former class system. It can employ other would be members of its own class, or members of any class that is willing to work. But a proletariat factory worker has more rights and less responsibilities to their “lords” than the landed peasants do.
Plus, the bourgeios class is far more attactive, and obtainable to peasants or prols. The aristocracy may have status and political power, but the peasants are locked out. To become a member of the bourgeios, all you gotta do is sock some money away for a bit, and invest it, start your own business, etc. It ain’t easy, but far easier to go from prol to bourgeios, than from peasant to aristocracy.
America never had a class system. Maybe we missed out on the concept of nobleses oblige, but that does not seem to hinder us, nor stop us from being one of the most generous nations on earth.
That is a very interesting post, Ben. Yes, that the aristocracy stayed home must have been an important factor in the development of raging egalitarianism and optimism of America and Australia. In both of those countries, any motivated person can climb into the upper stratum by being single-minded and energetic. But the only ways you could get into the top class in Europe and Britain were to be born into or marry into it. Interesting point.
Also, of course, it was the brave and motivated people who upped sticks and gambled their meagre savings to immigrate to a country they’d never seen. Everyone who got on one of those cattle boats and slept next to the engines for three weeks was a risk-taker. It is interesting that 250 years later, risk-taking is still seen as a completely normal part of life in the US, and failure isn’t punished with disapproval.
Also, everyone who embarked on that awful voyage across the Atlantic into the unknown was an optimist, and America is still the land of optimism and second (and third, fourth and fifth) chances.
What a melange of opinon. I can scarcely credit “arch-conservative” Peter Hitchen’s insanely Orwellian declaration for unity in diversity. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he’s angling after something too mysterious for my literal mind. I cleave to the simplicities, like Goodhart’s view that solidarity in a racially devided nation is achievable only through (complete) assimilation, and diversity only though multiculturalism.
Goodhart is essentially raising one more question mark over the future of the latter. There have been a few lately. He may not win the argument. John Denham, a man in the ascendent within the Labour PP and much nearer the beating heart of the movement than the editor of Prospect, still believes in multiculturalism. The minorities spokesman certainly do. And that’s a good indicator that their cousins are unwilling to relinquish cultural identity to Guy Herbert’s completely assimilated fruit salad (sorry, Guy!).
The formidable Verity and Susan argue for the American experience. But ladies, it is irrelavent to Europe because the will to relinquish one identity and to join another is absent – and so, never forget, is the will to be joined.
In fact, the future for the ancient states of Europe is, on current trends, neither the assimilation of aliens nor a Parekhian multicultural nirvana. It is, as I tend to point out rather often, the slow and ineluctable replacement of white people, white culture and white civilisation. This is driven by on-going third-world immigration and a below-replacement white birthrate. These things, in turn, are driven by complex social and political factors (many of which are welcomed by Libertarians). BTW, it is precisely the difficulty of re-focussing the aforesaid political factors that keeps Denham multicultural.
In the end, though, assimilation versus multiculturalism is all hot air. This is an issue of the life and death of races. What matters is how Europe’s native peoples can fashion the opportunity to choose their destiny. If it’s denied them because their choice would be politically illiberal they may take it unto themselves anyway, and in a wholly illiberal way.
Hello all,
Wow… what can I say. I really enjoyed the response to David Goodheart’s article because it really brought out the “true colours” of the leftist elite of this country. Trev Phillips and Gazza Younge immediatly attacked poor Davey as racist spreading vile BNP propaganda, calling for a lynch mob to burn Davey alive in the bondfire of political correctness.
So much for mature, civilised, debtate, eh? The reponses were purely emotional, burning anger and hatred directed towards someone who just had the audacity to question of the feasibility of socialist multicultural welfare state utopia.
And they call themselves the intelligentisia, right? Well last time I checked you needed some intelligence to be part of it.
PS. Just a thought – how come the mainstream media has developed this notion that “diversity” brings massive benefits and encourages innovation, etc? Has anyone actually done any empirical research regarding this – because I certainly have never seen anything published. As corporate drone, I question the value of having a diverse staff over having a professional staff – what edge does a team of one-legged circus worker, Tibetian monk and Alaskan eskimo fisherman have over bunch of guys having PhD’s, I do not know.
Actually, the point of the fruit-salad metaphor is precisely that it isn’t completely assimilated. You can still recognised most of the ingredients, but the bits of fruit are not unaffected by their immersion in the common liquor.
That “community leaders” who have most of all to gain from keeping their communities in multicultural segregation support the billiard-ball approach is scarcely surprising, so why assume they actually do speak for everyone they claim to?
If pluralism (rather than box-checking “diversity”) brings benefits (as I suspect it does), it may not be much on the level of the individual enterprise but more in social and economic life as a whole–by giving us more options and angles from which improvements can emerge.
As for Front4uk’s imaginary team, it rather depends what you are trying to do. A PhD is to some people and in some circumstances more of a handicap than any amount of circus skills.
Guy,
Lovely image. Do you have any evidence to show that:-
a) People in this country want to be mixed up in this way,
b) They CAN be mixed up in this way by some form of social engineering, without immediately re-segregating.
Regarding the community leaders I agree that they will their have personal agendas. But their constituencies are deeply enculturated. It hardly needs to be said that many of them are deeply conservative on religious and cultural issues. Will all this suitable and conveniently dissolve into nothingness “in the common licquor.” No offence, Guy, but I always wonder at the effortlessness with which urbane intellectuals draw their conclusions about human nature.
Pluralism is an odd choice of phrase to use. The issue is about culture and race, not political expression. Assimilation brings concrete benefits but, in time, still runs up against the rock of racial difference. There’s no way around that. Some folk on this blog try to go through it by claiming it doesn’t matter. I think they are profoundly wrong. They think I am.
Front4uk: The indisputable and entirely welcome benefit of diversity is … good ethnic restaurants.
Verity, Ben, Guy, great posts.
Verity — I ‘ve given up trying to explain to the average European why Americans don’t feel the need to immitate their socialist ways. They just don’t get it.
Ben — great insights. I’ve always thought that the truest and brightest hatred of the Left is reserved for the middle class, not the uber rich or the aristocracy. But you’re wrong that America has never had a class system –we’re getting one today. Elitism is creeping into our institutions every day now, thanks to tranzi progressivism.
Guessedworker — sorry, but the ultimate fight in the West is for culture, not for race. If you go down the race ideology chute you will lose. Today, some of the clearest and most effective defenders of the best of Western ideals are not white — Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ibn Warraq, Thomas Sowell, Dinesh D’Souza — while many of the worst betrayers of Western ideals are white. I’d rather live next to a brown non-tranzi than a white tranzi anyday. Or a brown athiest rather than a white Islamist anyday too.
Verity again — yeah, the average American immigrant was tough. My great-grandfather joined the Union Army infantry at age 18 and marched all the way from Missouri to Tennesse and then down to Alabama on foot, taking in the Battle of Shiloh and the Vicksburg campaign en route. After the war he homesteaded a farm on the Kansas prairie, building a house that was made out of sod — hard-packed soil cut in slabs directly out of the ground. That’s where my grandmother was born.
Guessedworker – You are right. The American experience is not relevant to Europe.
And yes, the civilisations of Britain and Europe are being intentionally killed off, although for the life of me I cannot figure out why.
How the people currently in office have managed to shoehorn “diversity” into monocultures is also a mystery, although the tool they used to bludgeon the populations, intentional misuse of the word racist, is a blunt and effective instrument.
And how they could preach, with a straight face, that people who were recently crouching over camel dung to do their cooking and crapping in the sandunes (wow! – imagine being born left-handed out there! What kind of social hell would that be?), and whose customs include female genital mutilation, burying adulterers and homosexuals up to the neck in the sand and stoning them to death and blinding people for crimes are somehow the equal of the peoples who devised the systems of legislature, architecture, music and the arts, medicine and science of Britain and Europe is a bit of a boggle for the old mind.
I hope it’s not wishful thinking when I say I think the tide may be turning. Mainstream columnists like Melanie Phillips, who has the credentials of a former lefty, are commenting on the multicultis with a nice line in cool, rational argument.
And also, during this extraordinary month alone, Chirac’s party voted to ban the wearing of the hijab on school property, calling it “an act of aggression against the host society”, which phrase has a certain encouraging ring to it. Germany’s passing a law to ban teachers and civil servants swanning around state property wearing serge curtains on their heads. Holland’s sending back 26,000 failed “asylum seekers” and has shut the immigration gate for four years. Denmark is passing a law to ensure that imams trying to move there will be able to speak Danish (uh …), are familar with Danish democracy and culture (say wha’?), have actually had a real education somewhere and have independent means so they won’t be a burden to Danish taxpayers (ouch!). Oh, and the Dutch have withdrawn from their asylum treaty obligations “temporarily”.
All this in one month – obviously at the behest of angry electorates. Certainly, the multiculti elites aren’t doing it of their own free will. They’re frit!
Susan – Your great-grandfather sounds like someone to be very proud of. But I wasn’t referring to “tough”. I was referring to the spirit of American immigrants. The optimism, the willingness to bet everything and endure whatever hardships came their way because it may pay off in a better life in the future. These are the spiritual characteristics which powered the US to greatness.
Of course, the US is vast and it’s fertile. But without the derring-do and the will to risk everything for a reward some time in the future, it wouldn’t have worked.
I see these same American characteristics at work today – the discipline to sacrifice current pleasure for future reward. Working their way through school – postponing fun in the cause of getting ahead. That is very American. In British universities, the majority (not all) want their fun now, mainly on the taxpayer tit, although some nowadays do take jobs as well. I hope this culture becomes more embedded.
But Guessedworker is correct. The American experience is totally different from the British and European experience and doesn’t apply… although very clever and ambitious Indian students have suddenly concentrated a few minds …
Incidentally, before anyone accuses me of – sigh – racism, I was one who argued for us taking the entire population of Hong Kong who wanted to come. Much of the flight capital had already gone to Vancouver, Australia and the US, but if we had had the vision, we could have got around 3m of the brightest, most ambitious, most energetic and commercially savvy people on the face of the earth and given them British citizenship. Somewhat better than the couple of million third world, uppity, illegal dregs we’ve got floating around Britain, thousands of them expecting free treatment for their AIDS, now.
A far-sighted lord – can’t remember name – wanted to give them a Scottish island to settle on and British passports. Had we had the nerve, that island today would have been one of the entrepreneurial hubs of Europe. Instead we have Bradford and Leicester, “honour” killings of young girls, giving refuge to and hiding thousands of illegals and a sullen sense of entitlement.
Verity, agree with you — you should have taken in the Hong Kong Chinese. Wherever Chinese go they always do well. You can see this in North America, Malaysia, Indonesia, anywhere there was a Chinese diaspora. North America has been getting rich off of Europe’s rejects for 200 years — you’d think Europe would have noticed at some point the treasure they thought they were throwing away as dross.
I agree that the US experience is not applicable to Europe with its entrenched ethnicities. But I also agree that culture and race are not inseperable.
Guessedworker would like evidence that:
(a) People in this country want to be mixed up in this way,
Different people will want different things. Real attitudes on the subject are hard to elicit, because betraying views that might be deemed “racist” is now so much of a taboo, but also because what people want is often at variance with what they say they want. Consumer purchases indicate that lots of people genuinely do want Afro-american music and Indian food, so certain elements of cultural mixing are demonstrably popular.
But whether you want to be mixed up with the rest of the world, is irrelevant to whether they are entitled or capable to stop the process, by telling other people where they may live or cutting off media and trade contacts. The Saudi approach to cultural protectionism doesn’t work even with extremely fierce enforcement, which is why the Cnut-ish Islamists are so pissed off.
b) They CAN be mixed up in this way by some form of social engineering, without immediately re-segregating.
It doesn’t require social engineering. I’m saying that cultural diffusion and mingling is a natural, normal social process, that’s been a lot eased and speeded up of late by cars, aeroplanes, and telecommunications. I don’t know where you live, but the evidence is all around me. People in cities all over the world, particularly port cities and imperial cities, from as far back as we have any accounts, have found themselves living and working with all sorts of strangers and generally got along because that’s the easiest way of living their lives.
People adopt cultural patterns from their neighbours if they like them and don’t if they don’t. I’m reasonably confident that liberal individualism is tending to dominate in practice but it doesn’t mean everyone likes that. There are a lot of native westerners who don’t. The anti-individualists of all sorts do organise: it is the extension of political process into civil life that’s the threat not foreigners. And it has happened thanks to the bien pensant social engineers.
Susan,
Culture is the expression of a people’s act of living. While we live so shall our culture. Should we cease to do so our culture will be compressed into history like a dried oakleaf left long ago in a little-read book. If you love and treasure occidental culture you should also love and treasure the occidental peoples. Love of one’s own is natural and right (as is the will to survive).
I feel obliged to ask you from whence came the notion that transmission of our culture intactus to others is an acceptable conclusion to the European racial story? To my mind it is acceptance only of suicide – and misguided anyway, for the reason I have just set out.
Take courage, Susan, and don’t drop from the equasion the one element – your own element – without which it no longer adds up.
Guy,
I was brought up in Sarf London, mate. So I understand your meaning. Liberal individualism I support, and Hayekian economics too. But there is a caveat. These are matters of social organisation. Some varieties are more condign than others. But blood and land exist on an entirely different paradigm, one where absolutes all too readily apply.
I am reminded of an Israeli government spokesman who appeared on the news several months back. He was pressed by his BBC interviewer on the attitude among his countrymen to the issue of the Palestinians’ right of return. “The Israeli people,” he explained, “will never vote for racial suicide.” Quite so.
Guessed and others, interestingly, Melanie Phillips wrote a very good piece on racial suicide – she referred to it as social suicide – and it’s on her site, melaniephillips.com
Catch it fast though because I think it will be replaced with her Sunday piece sometime tomorrow.
Guy,
In your secind para I think you mean “whether or not you want to be mixed up with the rest of the world is irrelavent to whether you are entitled to stop, or capable of stopping, the process by telling other people where they may live or cutting of media or trade contacts.”
But Guy, we ARE entitled to control our borders. We are entitled to seek our own survival, should we one day determine that to be under threat. Our borders do not belong to the rest of the world’s people. Our survival will not be protected by anyone other than ourselves.
What you are really saying, I guess, is that we, the English, don’t have the right to mess with economics in the form of the free flow of trade and people. Economics has it’s place. But it isn’t everything. We, the English, are more important than economics and more important to ourselves than almost anything else.
Guessedworker: You have my mistyped point correct, but mistake what I intend by it.
I approve of the free market because I want freedom, not because I think markets are a moral good. (There are always markets, though often heavily disguised and shackled.)
A democratic polity may be entitled to do all sorts of things, but that doesn’t mean it should do them. I’d like borders clearly demarcated, so we know where the country ends. But I don’t think I’d really want to stop law- abiding people going in or out. (Even if, being English too, I’d sneakingly hope for a bit of restraint on those Scots and Welsh who make our lives such a misery by coming over here and running our government…)
Verity,
I read the MP article again. Thank you. What strikes me yet again about it is this question of race and culture. In particular, why do virtually all intellectuals obviously feel more comfortable if they excise the product of our nature and capacities from the fact of our nature and capacities? It is very strange but also, I think, revealing.
Melanie, to be sure, does a clumsy job of wielding the intellectual scalpel. She redefines culture as a medium over which we have “responsibility”. Over skin colour, which means the accident of our birth, we have none. Now, this is a sophistry. She might have used the word “choice”, which is more usually employed about the accident of birth. But choice and culture just don’t work together. So she seized upon something else to make her wider view stand up. Mistake.
Belonging to a race – basically, self-identifying – is more than just the accident of birth. It entails very clear and undeniable responsibilities. Read any history book, for pete’s sake. We ARE responsible for our race, our own people, precisely because of the accident of our birth. It would be a complete nonsense to claim that we should not defend our nation in wartime because we didn’t ask to be born here. And this, incidentally, is the geneueine solidarity that Mr Goodhart should have been writing about.
So, let’s label things clearly. RACE IS AN EXTEMELY EXTENDED FAMILY. That’s Steve Sailor’s definition. I like it. The expressed way of life of that family is its culture. It’s connectivity to the inherent nature of the family is direct. White men may learn basketball but they sure can’t jump (and they looked truly self-conscious and ridiculous trying to groove among all those mind-blown soul brothas n’sistas in Matrix 2).
And there, suddenly, we have it – the distasteful, unreformed, unforgivable sin of racism. That’s the reason the Melanie’s of this world squirm away into positions of intellectual purity, however untenable. A lifetime of relentless, one-sided conditioning is too much for their tender hearts and weak stomachs. They cannot support the burden of their revealed bigotry, xenophobia and/or extremism should they even once stray from the path of righteousness.
I don’t really mean to be hard on Melanie. She winds up the article well enough, although she has to get in the “decency” of the Dutch in rejecting racial suicide (or social suicide, which again sounds so much nicer, doesn’t it?).
Well, it’s absolutely plain to me now that we’ll never get on, Guy. I’ve always been a big admirer of Teddy Taylor. And of that Labour culture chappie who called the Turner Prize art “total crap” – my kind of Welshman!
I agree, though, it’s a bloody shame he’s not a Tory.
If I understand most commentators here correctly, they disagree with Goodheart’s analysis of a diversity-solidarity dilemma.
Does this mean we should spend as much on development aid than the NHS? Or even rather *more* on development aid than the NHS because the world’s poor are more numerous than the British.
If they do not think this is a correct statement, then why not?
Can anyone come up with an answer that does not confirm Goodheart’s very basic and obvious observation?
If I understand most commentators here correctly, they disagree with Goodheart’s analysis of a diversity-solidarity dilemma.
Does this mean we should spend as much on development aid than the NHS? Or even rather *more* on development aid than the NHS because the world’s poor are more numerous than the British.
If they do not think this is a correct statement, then why not?
Can anyone come up with an answer that does not confirm Goodheart’s very basic and obvious observation?