Australian culture damaged by multiculturalism, especially Islamism

Australian culture damaged by multiculturalism, especially Islamism. By Henry Ergas in The Australian.

“Culture” descends from the Latin colere — to cultivate — and Hannah Arendt pointed out that cultivation was traditionally understood as the opposite of “fabrication”. A carpenter fabricates a table according to a fixed design. A farmer cultivates a field in accordance with its capacity to grow, and the process is never complete. What is cultivated grows; it is not manufactured.

Yet political argument has increasingly made “culture” mean almost the reverse: a thing, complete on arrival, to be protected beneath a single umbrella or arranged, item by item, in an ever-expanding exhibition — in the Prime Minister’s image [of the Australian soccer team, tallied on a roster [from 15 different cultures]. Each is a picture of fabrication masquerading as cultivation.

 

2026 Socceroos:  a 26-man World Cup squad from 15 cultural backgrounds

 

That is what makes the Socceroos such a good example — just not for the reason either side supposes. The team does not vindicate Hanson’s umbrella, clamped over everyone regardless of what lies beneath it; still less does it vindicate Albanese’s tally of 15 backgrounds. A roster is merely a list until its members train together, submit to common rules and disciplines, and, without losing their individuality, unite around a shared goal. Only then does co-operation become second nature.

The roster can be assembled; the team must be cultivated. Nor is the result ever final. Without ceasing to be that team, the team changes as it encounters new opponents and as new members learn to work and strive together respecting the rules they have inherited.

A nation’s culture:

Tocqueville, asking what sustained American self-government, found the same pattern at the level of an entire nation. It rested not on a possession but on “the whole moral and intellectual state of a people”: its “habits of the heart”, absorbed rather than proclaimed. Ludwig Wittgenstein, asking what makes shared understanding possible at all, called it a form of life — the “bedrock” guiding the flow of a people’s myriad purposes, yet one that slowly but incessantly shifts, like a riverbed beneath the current.

The nearest word for the process by which such a bedrock takes shape among people who did not all inherit it is neither monoculturalism nor multiculturalism. It is acculturation: the reciprocal adjustment of habits and expectations that sustains a cohesive, diverse society.

That process, rather than any official doctrine, is what built modern Australia. The English, Scots and Irish, and later successive waves of migrants, did not automatically become a people who could plausibly say “we”. The achievement was partly the spontaneous result of mixing. But it was also deliberate: equal rights were extended and enforced, common institutions built and defended, a shared national story taught and sectarian provocations contained. It demanded hard, reciprocal work, and it succeeded.

In Australia:

Yet the present debate has ceased even to acknowledge that work, for two equally damaging reasons.

The first is a multiculturalism that measures its success as the Prime Minister measured the Socceroos — by the length of the list — while quietly abandoning the older expectation that a shared civic life must be cultivated and sustained, not merely tallied.

The second is an intellectually incoherent cultural relativism. If stoning adulterers and amputating thieves’ hands are barbaric, then a culture that has abandoned those practices is, in that respect, better than one that retains them. To deny even that turns humility in judging other cultures into a prohibition on moral judgment — and therefore on moral progress, which necessarily implies that some ways of life are preferable to those they supersede.

Relativism exacts a further, even steeper, cost. Reflecting on French society, Lucien Febvre observed that successful acculturation requires a “complicity of sentiment” — an aspiration by newcomers to belong. But a society trained to claim no more for its own way of life than that it is one option among equally valid others has little with which to attract that aspiration. It can still compel obedience to its laws. It cannot credibly ask to be joined. And now that the “tyranny of distance” no longer forces newcomers to adapt, joining must be chosen — and choice requires compelling reasons.

Australian “multiculturalism” fails to cultivate cohesion:

Yet instead of providing those reasons, multiculturalism has supplied powerful incentives to remain apart: subsidising organisations devoted to preserving separateness and then hailing its persistence as evidence of the policy’s success.

The result is utterly predictable: the roster Albanese glorifies masquerading as a team, increasingly at war with itself.

That is the ground on which Islamism has become entrenched: present in Australia’s largest cities in the census sense, but resident in Beirut in every sense that matters, and organised around social norms that reject acculturation as a matter of principle. It is a way of life deliberately constructed to keep its adherents at odds with the wider society while drawing on that society’s welfare state.

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