Monday, April 18, 2011

Has Multiculturalism Failed?

No. It was always a delusion, the delusion that cultures are all the same except for holidays, headgear, and cuisine, founded upon the underlying delusion that Western Civilization is the scourge of the world, and should henceforth adopt a permanent cultural cringe towards peoples of the developing world. A delusion cannot succeed or fail, it can only persist or be dispelled.

There's a difference between international people and multicultural people. International people appreciate other cultures--they can discuss wine with the waiter in French, participate in a Japanese tea ceremony without help, know their way around off the beaten tourist path, etc.--but are still proud citizens of their own lands. Multiculturalists are alienated from their country and/or their fellow citizens, and seek to disappear into a romanticized mish-mash of exotica. By acting as though the world's multitudes are an anonymous mass of little brown people for them to make pets of, mere symbols of Western sin, multiculturalist demean those people's full humanity as much as colonialists in earlier ages did, by regarding them as mere savages.