The Myth of Beneficent Multiculturalism

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has stated on his official website: “Diversity is strength; tolerance is natural.” This is a nice message, but it is entirely questionable if this statement is supported by the historical evidence which teaches us that too much ‘cultural diversity’ may well lead to more intolerance,  the loss of national identity nation and the fragmentation into enclaves defined by religion and/or ethnicity.

Robert A. Dahl, the late emeritus professor of political science at Yale, identified underlying cultural conditions that lead to freedom, democracy and the rule of law. “Where these conditions are weakly absent, democracy is unlikely to exist, or if it does, its existence is likely to be precarious”, he wrote in his 1998 book On Democracy. Among conditions that are “essential for the stability of democracy”, he identified “weak sub-cultural pluralism” and “democratic beliefs and political culture”. Thus, Professor Dahl concludes that “democratic political institutions are more likely to develop and endure in a country that is culturally fairly homogeneous”, Dahl concluded, “and less likely in a country with sharply differentiated and conflicting sub-cultures”. Worse, as he oldo observed, cultural diversity could actually “generate intractable social conflicts whereby democratic institutions would be simply impossible to be maintained”.

As with Albanese, former prime minister Scott Morrison buys into the notion that defining our differences brings us together: “What do Australia’s founding fathers and cultural diversity have in common? Both celebrate this country’s great multiculturalism”. He believes in the strength of Australia as a multicultural nation, where all cultures must be celebrated and promoted by the government.

Multiculturalism, an idea that started out in the Sixties and early Seventies, initially had the laudable goal of including ethnic minorities in Western societies. Nowadays, however, it is difficult to talk candidly about such an idea, since the multicultural project has now been used as an aggressive ideology against the once predominant moral, legal, and religious traditions of the West. According to the British historian, Paul Johnson,

Multiculturalism has been, and will be, exploited by a few social engineers to dismember the elements of existing societies, especially those of the West with their deep Christian underpinnings, and reconstruct them according to new blueprints – to provide legal accommodation, for example, to practices such as polygamy.

Multiculturalism is in essence an ideological movement opposed to the Western principles, culture, and identity. Indeed, multiculturalists look forward to a time when Australia may never again be culturally united in beliefs and practice, and to a time when Australians will be less a culturally definable group. Such a concept of “multiculturalism” denounces the idea of integration as “un-Australian” and it encourages immigrants to maintain the cultures and religion of their country of birth. 

The combined effect of these efforts is to promote the deconstruction of the Australian cultural identity.  This loss may cause our nation to fragment into enclaves of religion and/or ethnicity. Take for instance the “cultural” manifestation of the Islamic religion, sections of which are inimical to free speech and religious freedom. If a Muslim immigrant is told to “celebrate” certain aspects of the Islamic culture, then he may almost certainly revert to some form of religious intolerance that is hostile and antagonistic to the trad values of western democracy.

Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington argued in the 1990s that future wars would be fought not necessarily between nations but different cultures, and that Islamic extremism would eventually become one of the biggest threats to world peace. He also predicted, correctly, that if democratic elections were held in most Muslim-majority countries of the Middle East they would be most likely to bring religious extremists into power who, by appealing to their own religious loyalties, would be most willing to deny a broad range of fundamental human rights to religious minorities. His predictions have been fulfilled. The fact is that culture matters, and that culture is an important element for the protection of basic human rights.

In the United Kingdom, a study commissioned by the Policy Exchange reveals that, as a result of celebrating “cultural diversity”, four out of ten young British Muslims wish to live under Sharia law. In answer to the question, “Do you personally have any sympathy with the feelings and motives of those who carried out terrorist attacks?”, 24 per cent answered in the affirmative, with a further 13 per cent expressing ‘a lot’ of sympathy for the terrorists. In answer to the question, “How loyal would you say you personally feel towards Britain?”, 16 per cent of these young British Muslims felt ‘not at all loyal’ or ‘not very loyal’. According to Dr Munira Mirza, the academic who conducted that survey,

The emergence of a strong Muslim identity in Britain is, in part, a result of multicultural policies implemented since the 1980s which have emphasized difference at the expense of shared national identity, and divided people along ethnic, religious and cultural lines.

Australians gains very little from the amorphous atmosphere of multiculturalism apart from bewilderment and the loss of a sense of national identity. To make it worse, says Roger Scruton, “if people come from immigrant backgrounds that preserve the memory of a religious law, they will often revert to a religious experience of membership, and define themselves in opposition to the territorial jurisdiction by which they are ostensibly governed.”

According to John Gray, a retired politics professor at Oxford, no functional democracy can be truly multicultural since it “depends for its successful renewal across the generations on an undergirding culture that is held in common”. This common culture, Professor Gray continues, “need not encompass a shared religion and it certainly need not to presuppose ethnic homogeneity, but it does demand widespread acceptance of certain norms and conventions of behavior and, in our times, it typically expressed a shared sense of nationality.”

Of course, some may claim that immigrants would be the first to support state-sponsored “multiculturalism”. As an immigrant myself, I couldn’t disagree more. As a matter of fact, the main impetus for multicultural policies does not come from good immigrants but from the nation’s illiberal ruling classes who advocate group rights over individual rights that are absolutely essential to the survival of liberal democracy. As noted by political commentator Tammy Bruce,

By defining society not as an entity made up of individual people but as a collection of cultures – such as white culture, black culture, [Asian] culture – the Left effectively isolates us, whether we like it or not, into special-interest groups. The culture has the identity, eclipsing the individual. We’re no longer individuals with unique minds and talents; we’re defined instead by the color of our skin, by the country in which we were born, by the religion we practice.

In his June 2020 National Press Club address, then PM Scott Morrison spoke passionately about “celebrating diversity” and “the multicultural miracle of modern Australia”. Of course, in a certain way Morrison was entirely right: it was indeed a great miracle that Australia has survived such a deconstructionist postmodern project. As noted by French philosopher Pascal Bruchner:

The ambiguity of multiculturalism proceeds from the fact that it imprisons men, women, and children in ways of life and in traditions from which they often aspire to free themselves. The politics of identity in fact reaffirm difference at the very moment when we are trying to establish equality, and lead, in the name of antiracism, back to the old commitments connected with race or ethnicity. 

Australia’s social fabric and legal-democratic institutions are therefore at the great risk of being obliterated by cultural/moral relativists who think they know what they are doing and who are absolutely ruthless in the doing of it. The artificial imposition of multiculturalism by an oppressive ruling class is never dissociated from a form of moral relativism that is always conducive to moral confusion, then social disintegration, and then national fragmentation into enclaves of religion and/or ethnicity. It’s time to resist such a dreadful concept before it is actually too late.

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Augusto Zimmermann is professor and head of law at Sheridan Institute of Higher Education and served as associate dean at Murdoch University. He is also a former commissioner with the Law Reform Commission of Western Australia. Zimmermann is the co-author of ‘The Unlucky Country’ (Locke Press, 2024), available at https://lockepress.com/product/the-unlucky-country/