No one in the West wants to live in a multicultural society

They just want the cute folkways and funky cuisine.

Supporting the joys of a multicultural society has been a marker of being enlightened and progressive for decades now. It got repackaged as “diversity is our strength”, but it is an extension of the same underlying idea.

Now, lots of folk have pointed out that the diversity-is-our-strength folk are typically very much against diversity in views. Indeed, one of the uses of “diversity is our strength” is to sort the good people—who endorse diversity is our strength—from the bad people, who disagree or raise awkward questions.

Lots of folk have also pointed out that the diversity-is-our-strength folk are very much against noticing any inconveniently substantive diversity between groups. Any hint, for example, that there might be different distributions of genetic traits between human populations in ways that have consequences is very much a bad take on diversity. But exactly the same adversity to substantive diversity applies to noticing awkward cultural differences between groups.

That Denmark keeps serious records might have something to do with their turn against immigration.

Over a whole range of phenomena, the diversity-is-our-strength folks are also there-is-no-such-diversity folks. They want “diversity” as a performative moral marker, and no more. They want multi-ethnic—like my local cafe—but not multicultural. (So, like my local cafe.)

They may want it, but reality does not work like that. The “multiculturalism is great” folk do not want any inconvenient multiculturalism. Which means they do not want substantive multiculturalism at all, they just want the cute folkways and funky cuisines.

They don’t want female genital mutilation. They don’t want violent clan feuds in their neighbourhood. They don’t want their daughters to be sexually targeted because kaffir girls who go unchaperoned and don’t wear headscarves have shown themselves to be sluts and so fair game. They don’t want to ripped off by clannish cultural collectivists who regard deceiving outsiders in order to benefit themselves and their clan as just normal behaviour.

There are all sorts of cultural traits they do not want to have to deal with. They do not want multiculturalism at all. They just want the convenient-to-them funky bits.

That is all pretty standard—if contemptible—progressive moral posturing. (Though for sheer entitled arrogance, it is hard to go past the Lord Finkelstein’s of the world, who think it fine for Israel to preserve its Jewish identity, but diversity is morally compulsory for everyone else.)

What is worse is when ostentatious multiculturalists are functionally just fine with all the bad bits, as long as it is not in their neighbourhoods: not their raped daughters; not their knifed sons; not their ripped-off services. Which is precisely how you see progressives behaving in the UK, in the US, in Western Europe.

They still do not want to live with substantive multiculturalism. No one of any sense does. But they demonstrably do not care if their social lessers do. Multiculturalism, “diversity is our strength”, becomes a classic luxury belief insulated from reality-tests, adopted for social status or other reasons, imposing costs on others lower down the social scale.

And then they wonder why such people vote for Donald Trump, for Nigel Farage, for Marine Le Pen, for AfD, for Sweden Democrats, for … . The serious-multiculturalism-for-thee-but-not-for-me people are beyond contemptible.

References

Peter McLoughlin, Easy Meat: Inside Britain’s Grooming Gang Scandal, New English Review Press, 2016.