As much as multiculturalism is touted as the better future for the West (a borderless, nation-less land-mass, across whose surface all humanity will be free to roam, while wealth, stability and peace somehow keep getting “produced”) – there yet resides in this ideology a hideous perversion of all that builds civilization. And Canada has not only bought into this perversion, but it actively promotes and defends it. The monster in multiculturalism is the failed state.
One aspect of this failure is hyper-ethnicity, or romanticized tribalism, whereby people cling the harder to identity-politics and proudly transform themselves into “billboards” that advertise their “culture.” Such displays are not in the manner of dress, or exotic food fests, but in the habit of mind. Hyper-ethnicity means the construction of an imagined “homeland,” which is anywhere but in Canada, and which demands full allegiance.
Canada no longer contains an essential, timeless core, that innate vision of destiny peculiar to all nations. Instead, it has a top-heavy ideology of plurality (multiculturalism), which offers a life split into two – an economic one lived in the Canadian workplace, and a private one lived in a romanticized homeland; and it is this private life which provides both values and meaning (the proper role of culture).
It is curious how intent Canada seems to be in becoming an empty space, Voltaire’s infamous, “quelques arpents de neige,” a few acres of snow. A vacuous place good only for making money. But can economic vitality long continue when the culture that enabled it shrivels and dies?
Nearly a decade ago, the Spanish philosopher, José Antonio Marina, the foremost thinker in the area of culture, published a book, entitled, Las culturas fracasadas, or “Failed Cultures” (which yet awaits an English translation).
Culture, as Marina points out, enables thinking; it molds and fashions the mind. And, it is the mind that creates the world, the only fit habitation for humanity. And here a truism is worth repeating – there is no world without the mind. Thus, culture is a set of ideas created by particular communities, which yield that essential ethos and ethic that defines who and what individuals are, and how they think.
But in multicultural Canada, it is the cultures of distant lands which determine the thinking of its citizens. Therefore, the minds being created belong to worlds other than Canada – and the worlds that such minds are conditioned and able to create will also be other than Canada.
It is here that a crucial consideration emerges – the world is filled with failed cultures.
Marina details nine fundamental components of culture – the value of life, the production and possession of goods, participation in power, the relationship of the individual with society, conflict resolution, sexuality and family, caring for the weak, dealing with foreigners, and dealing with the hereafter.
Successful cultures provide good and intelligent answers and solutions to each of these nine fundamental needs of human life. Failed cultures not only fail to provide good solutions and answers, but in the process destroy human capital, by limiting or suppressing the creativity of their people, thereby engendering newer problems that they again do not know how to solve.
In effect, failed cultures are unintelligent (Marina is blunt, and uses the term, “stupid”) – because they cannot help but bring about societies in which oppression and tyranny are the only viable methods to maintain cohesion. People living in failed cultures have no interest in furthering the betterment of society – because they are too busy surviving the tyranny, or contriving means of escape.
Unintelligent cultures have built the Third World, while intelligent cultures have built the First World. This has nothing to do with DNA – and everything to do with good ideas versus bad ideas.
The ideas which created the First World also nurture a different habit of mind, which knows how to sustain that which has been created. The Third World fashions another sort of mindset, which knows only self-interest because it is about survival. In other words, successful cultures teach giving. Failed cultures teach taking.
When people vaunt unintelligent, failed cultures, they are idealizing the prison from which they yearned to break free. Gazing upon it from a safe distance, and through the romantic lens of progressive ideologies, they grow wistful, ever detached from the land of their economic welfare. Man, truly, does not live by bread alone.
Multiculturalism is destructive in another way, for it is unintelligible without the notion of race. In fact, multiculturalism needs racism to justify its existence. This is why it so easily melds culture with race (hence the outrage at “cultural appropriation”). That which belongs to one tribe is off-limits to another. Here, then, is the unvarnished definition of multiculturalism – culture fulfills racial needs.
Marina points out that successful cultures understand the need to maintain good ideas, for these alone provide “the best social tool to protect the wealth of nations, their creativity, their peculiarities, their social capital.” Canada can no longer muster such a need.
As failed cultures continue to strengthen, and First World ideas grow weak and vanish, it can only be a matter of time before Canada achieves the multicultural ideal – it will become a failed state, devoured by the monster that it created and nurtured
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