After Cologne: the great unquestioning of multicultural ideology

The New Year’s Eve mass-sexual assaults in Cologne, together with similar outrages in other parts of Europe, should have marked the death knell of the contradictory multicultural ideology that says greater diversity is always a good thing and all cultures are equal. Since the 1960s, multicultural theorists have argued the major issue regarding immigration policy is the systemic racism that migrants are said to perpetually confront in western countries. Rather than the problem being what ‘we’ think about the ‘other’, Cologne has demonstrated the crucial issue is, and always should be, what migrants think about the norms and values of the new society they are entering, and thus whether they are capable of integrating successfully.

But despite what seems to be staring us in the face about the dangers of the open border refugee policies enthusiastically embraced by the German Government of Chancellor Angela Merkel, multiculturalism is proving a resilient ideology that continues to enjoy largely unquestioned support among political elites and the echo chamber that is the university-educated Twittering classes. This is not surprising, for as history shows, it takes a lot of reality to overcome ideology. We only need to recall those intellectuals who were fellow travelers and moral equivocators throughout the Cold War and ignored the truth about repression and poverty in communist countries.

In a similar fashion, the significance of Cologne has also been denied and downplayed, especially by much of the media, in order to maintain the ‘progressive’ line on refugees. Most notably, this has encompassed the hypocrisy and double standards displayed by the vast majority of feminists who have remained silent and abandoned any pretense to sisterly solidarity with the victims of blatant misogyny. Yet I fear that more than cynical, politically-motivated, cognitive dissonance lies behind the great unquestioning that has followed in the wake of Cologne. If gangs of foreign men repeatedly violating young native women in the shadow of the spires of Cologne Cathedral will not force supposedly right-thinking people to question the pieties of multiculturalism, then one struggles to envisage any circumstances that would force such a reassessment.

The unwillingness to entertain any second thoughts points, I think, to a deeper and more alarming cultural problem that limits enquiry into, and discussion, of contentious topics. Paradoxically, the growth of higher education since the end of the Cold War has spread the intellectual maladies that beset the intelligentsia in the twentieth century down into the less-exalted ranks of the university-educated in the twenty-first century. The remorseless expansion of the universities has transformed what used to be many jobs or vocations into professions. More importantly, a university degree has become a status symbol signifying that the holder is an educated ‘thought worker’. Unfortunately, this has not made us a more inquisitive and smarter society. The problem is that to dispute what has been learned at university is to cast into doubt many an individual’s status and self-perception as the bearer of special knowledge of universal importance and utility to society.

Much of what is taught at universities, in the humanities at least, is also highly politicised, to say nothing of often being flat out wrong, due to the entrenched bias of most academics. For example, the number of sociologists, historians, or political scientists working in Australian universities who are critical of multiculturalism can be counted on one hand, or maybe less. Add the post-modern turn – the notion that there’s no such thing as objective reality only certain beliefs about the world that are socially constructed according to prevailing political values – and it is increasingly difficult to have a reasoned debate about as important an issue as refugees and Muslim integration.

Post modernism and status anxiety have both been evident in the defensive reactions to Cologne. Few who welcomed Merkel’s decision to open Germany’s borders to unprecedented numbers of (mostly male and mostly Muslim) refugees have bothered to honestly explore what the mounting, horrifying evidence of cultural incompatibility means for the immigration and multicultural policies they support. Instead, most discussion focused on worrying about the way the events in Cologne might be politically exploited by anti-refugee forces. What actually happened didn’t matter; what mattered was what allegedly bigoted plebs thought about what happened.

I used to think supporters of open borders were lucky the experiment had never been tried as the results would thoroughly discredit the principle. But after Cologne, I’m not so sure. Rational analysis of events that ought to mark a turning point in the tide of progressive opinion hasn’t appeared to put much of a dint in the multicultural ideology. Ironically, it seems that the more highly educated western societies have become, the more rigid has become the commitment to an ideology that appears to be impervious to reason and challenge based on facts, logic, and evidence. What isn’t sufficiently understood, however, is that trying to keep immigration and multiculturalism off the political agenda by ignoring the uncomfortable truths about what occurred in Cologne is highly likely to prove self-defeating.

The unwillingness to discuss these politically incorrect subjects cuts across left-right party lines. Politicians on the right, almost as much as on the left, find it difficult speak openly, and hence most continue to toe the progressive line. But when this line is being so obviously mugged by the reality of what’s happening throughout Europe, the persistent mouthing of multicultural platitudes serves only to widen the disconnect between political elites and ordinary people. Politics, moreover, abhors such a vacuum. When responsible leaders refuse to engage in frank discussion, it is little wonder that populists rush to fill the void, as the Presidential campaign of Donald Trump appears to have done in the US.

Serving politicians everywhere and of all party shades should beware the rising tide of popular support for Trump. If they refuse to articulate and address the well-founded concerns about immigration and multiculturalism borne out by Cologne, they should not be surprised if they too are trumped by opportunists prepared to say what the people are thinking.

Jeremy Sammut is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.