The Conflict at Home - How do you like your multiculturalism now?

National Review, Oct 15, 2001 by Theodore Dalrymple

Multiculturalists hold these truths to be self-evident: that all cultures are created equal and are endowed by their creators with equal and compatible virtues. There can thus be no fundamental conflict between cultures. The lion can truly lie down with the lamb, not at some unspecified time in the future, but here and now, in the gardens of the West.

The shallowness of this view should require no exposition: any more than the barfly's oceanic feeling after a couple of drinks that all men are his brothers requires refutation. The fact that it does is not a sign of our broad-mindedness or generosity of spirit, but of our deliberate failure to make proper distinctions. This mental flabbiness is decadence, and at the same time a manifestation of the arrogant assumption that nothing can destroy us. Only those who feel themselves to be omnipotent are omni-tolerant.

The cowardly failure to recognize that cultural values may clash irreconcilably has allowed practices to flourish in our midst that would earn (and deservedly so) prison sentences were they practiced by natives of our society. Nowadays no surrender is too abject for our bureaucratic multiculturalists, whose sadomasochistic delight must have known no bounds when, for example, they subsidized from public funds the construction of a car park at the President Saddam Hussein Mosque, one of the two largest in the city in which I live.

One conflict between two liberal shibboleths-feminism, even of the mildest and most reasonable kind, and multiculturalism-has been passed over with a silence that can only be described as deafening. Liberals who mistake pieties for thought can keep their orthodoxies intact only by averting their gaze from the most elementary reality.

It is perfectly clear from my clinical experience in the hospital in which I work that large numbers of Muslim girls of Pakistani descent are being betrothed at or soon after birth to first cousins in villages back "home," whom they are subsequently inveigled into marrying by psychological pressure, subterfuge, or outright force, including the credible threat of death.

The following story is typical: I hear it once a week, and have done so for the past ten years. A girl aged between 14 and 17 is told by her parents that she is going to Pakistan for a holiday. Once she arrives back in her ancestral village, she is told that she is to be married almost at once, to a young man whom she has never met, who speaks no English, has no skills or education, and has no conception of the world outside the village. Resistance, she knows, is either pointless or dangerous: I have never met such a girl who did not know of at least one case of someone in her position who was hanged by her parents, shot by them, or who fell fatally from a roof, after attempting to evade her parents' marriage plans. Official investigation of such a death, never very vigorous, can be brought to an end by the payment of about five pounds.

After the marriage, the struggle begins to obtain the husband's entry into Britain. When it is granted, he behaves himself for the probationary year during which his wife's complaint against his conduct could lead to his deportation back to Pakistan: but the very day after he is granted permanent leave to stay, he exacts his revenge for having suffered the terrible humiliation of having had to treat his wife with reasonable respect for a full twelve months. The violence and degradation then begin and do not end.

True, I am made aware of this system only when it leads to misery and even disaster. No social system is without its casualties, and perhaps there are many thousands of infantine betrothals that result in blissful happiness. I have a numerator, but no denominator, a common problem in assessing the true significance of a social problem. There is nonetheless good reason for supposing that both the pattern and the misery this system engenders are widespread: because the girls, or young women, who complain to me accept that the root of their unhappiness is the culture in which they have been reared, but whose demands they do not, indeed cannot, accept. Their own fate, though tragic, does not strike them as being in the least unusual or unexpected. They accept it as perfectly normal because it is what they have always seen around them, in their peer group and among their older sisters.

Given the exquisite tenderness of feminists on such matters as the replacement of the word "chairman" by "chair," one might have supposed that the existence of the customs I have mentioned would excite their ire, arouse their righteous indignation (in this case truly righteous), and fire their eloquence.

On the contrary, such customs go almost completely unremarked and uncommented upon.

The silence is partly accounted for by the intensity of the feminists' navel-gazing, which is itself typical of modern culture. But this is only a portion of the explanation. Most of the feminists are also multiculturalists, because they do not want to have to admit that Western society is so far the only large-scale society that has proved compatible with some, at least, of their demands. Thus feminism and multiculturalism go together-in the words of the song-like a horse and carriage (of love and marriage it is perhaps best no longer to speak). And the feminists are also good Wittgensteinians, at least of the Tractatus period: Whereof they cannot speak, thereof they must be silent.