As I continue to address that Jake made on a previous post, today I will tackle multiculturalism.
Jake is in blue, I am in green:
I like your post on multiculturalism. However, I found myself wondering when I was done reading it, it is obvious that you don’t like multiculturalism, but you seem to assume it is bad as opposed to posting a substantive argument as to why this should be the case. Surely for conservative readers of your blog this is not a large assumption to make and will likely go unnoticed, but as an anthropologist (and one who claims to know a few things about culture), I still found myself scratching my head and thinking, why is this message to Iranian citizens such a bad thing, because it was phony and contrived. How should the avowed disciple of multiculturalism engage the other who doesn’t share the same multicultural paradigm? Where multiculturalism is a useful, historically located social construct for Western academics in the liberal arts to gain their fair share of grant money, since they can politicize an otherwise apolitical field of inquiry, unfortunately not all cultures have the same social constructs to encourage them to participate in this cult. Despite its best intentions, multiculturalism is a very one-sided engagement with the other, and is therefore inherently and irreparably flawed. and more so why is multiculturalism such a bad thing? because of its strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest (notice the lack of pluralization on the word interest). And why is it such a bad thing particularly in a country as diverse as ours, where just about everyone who claims to have a culture disagrees fundamentally with at least someone else’s view from their “culture” why would we want to encourage a recipe for a melting pot of whiners? Multiculturalism inflates the value of the cultural currency of minority groups and creates value where there is none., Mormons With what essentializing compass do you reductively circumscribe Mormonism as a monocultural phenomenon? certainly not being the most popular of these groups. Many southerners still talk about “the war of northern aggression,” for example. I am assuming you have some field research to back this up, because it feels like a stereotype to me. Honestly, if identifying a monocultural identity is so difficult how is drawing ever smaller circles around multiple cultures in any way a redemptive alternative? At what point do you stop drawing smaller circles? Ultimately, doesn’t the whole multicultural project become an exercise in arbitrary capriciousness? Is this not cultural difference? Cogito ergo sum. Are not two individuals islands of cultural difference? If you don’t think so, many of them certainly tend to think so, and also many of them don’t. When we look to such a rich history of immigration from diverse places of the world that populated this country not to mention the dynamics of time, history, syncretism, adaptation, it seems difficult for me to even begin to imagine whose monocultural stance we are going to adopt as “American.” I would have to begin to imagine that that there is a monocultural American identity that these diverse immigrants are adopting either through a process of assimilation or accommodation. I would also have to begin to imagine that this monocultural American identity is largely the product of cultural discourses and narratives that are mostly rooted if not exemplified by the founding texts of America. My short list of the founding texts of American culture are 1. The Constitution 2. The Bill of Rights 3. The Bible and 4. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. I will grant that to their benefit these founding documents do create a space for multicultural exchange. However, I would hesitate to essentialize America as a multicultural country. In other words, I wouldn’t adopt the monocultural stance that we are a multicultural society. This is a small part of American cultural identity usually made more important by liberals who exploit it for political purposes. I am going to take a wild guess that, if this is ever going to happen I don’t think of cultural identity as an event, it is most likely not to be that of the average person in Utah valley however, your average person in Utah Valley probably has no problem adapting their multicultural proclivities to the hegemonic American culture that is rooted in America’s founding texts. Also on another note, your average person in Utah Valley is probably more “multicultural” than your average American. Most Americans haven’t immersed themselves in a foreign culture to the extent that the majority of average Utahns have. So for you to essentialize America as multicultural and then use one of its most multicultural sub-cultures as an antithesis to your claim seems to be something of a paradox. So, again, I ask, why not multiculturalism? On further reflection, I am not opposed to multiculturalism, but I am opposed to the phony, half-assed multiculturalism that liberals use to advance questionable political agendas. What is so bad about it? What parts of multiculturalism (as vague of a concept as it may be so framed) don’t you care for? And why is it so bad that our president should be considerate of the diversity of religious and cultural perspectives not only in our country but among the nations with whom we hope to engage diplomatically? I guess I don’t see engaging someone self-righteously through your own social constructs as considerate. I also don’t overestimate the value of “being considerate” when it comes to international foreign policy. Really, honestly, I can’t seem to figure out why you think multiculturalism is such a bad thing I can’t argue that it is a bad thing, but it certainly isn’t a good or viable or just solution to the world’s problems, except perhaps form a perspective of some type of massive group identity threat, which I don’t think to be the case.
