How Multiculturalism Kills Culture

News From Macquarie University

(photo source)

Is the average university graduate more urbane, cultured, and sophisticated than thirty years ago?

Multiculturalism has been official federal and state policy in Australia for as long as I’ve been alive, but I was not surprised when I read last week that Macquarie University is “considering discontinuing several languages, including Modern Greek, Croatian, German, Italian, and Russian. This aligns with their plan to move away from the Languages and Cultures discipline and establish a Discipline of Global Studies.” The new “Global Studies” programme will only offer four languages (Chinese, Japanese, French, and Spanish.)

I’ve previously argued that our politicians and educators promote a fake worldliness, employing buzzwords like “diversity” and “inclusion” while discouraging the study of foreign cultures, because such research doesn’t fit well with the modern university’s ethos, which is to make money.

I did not go to university to make money. I went there to learn about the world. When I was an undergraduate, my heroes were Edmund Wilson and Clive James: extramural writers who never stopped learning. Their mountainous knowledge would have been enough to sink most writers, but instead they soared, and made it look easy. Today, they risk being underestimated because they were often funny and always clear. Had they the requisite avoirdupois, they would probably be taken more seriously as literary critics.

But they learned languages instead of Theory, eschewing the dull, abstruse jargon which is proof of a critic’s seriousness and (bafflingly) left-wing credentials. For Wilson and James, literature was always an international, cooperative pursuit. They learned languages not just out of curiosity but out of a sense of duty, becoming acquainted with whole literatures in the same way that today’s graduates memorise the Netflix catalogue. Working outside the university, Wilson and James read widely because they wanted to further their appreciation of human achievement, not further their careers (James went on television to do that.) By studying languages, one can better appreciate the riches of the world’s many cultures – but to truly understand a culture’s art, you must have some knowledge of its religion, which is where all art began.

Despite their cosmopolitanism, neither Wilson nor James spent much time writing about religion (though Wilson did write an essay about the Hebrew Bible.) This is the weak point of their work. Universities began as religious schools: the academic robes and regalia are a reminder of this medieval past (the Oxbridge colleges still say Latin prayers at formal dinners.) The Hippies and Beatniks failed to persuade the universities to expand their research into Indian and Asian religions. Perversely, the official policy of multiculturalism led the academy to import the atheistic and politicised theories of American critics. This is the new religion taught to undergraduates, with its mantras and its saints, but there the similarities end.

Unlike the major religious traditions, it hasn’t produced any good art. Its cynical formulas cut people off from metaphysical, moral, and aesthetic truths, leaving them isolated from each other and from most people who have ever lived. Despite its pretension, it’s less rigorous and interesting than what you find in (for example) the Kyoto School or medieval Scholasticism. A bachelor’s degree and an allegiance to “multiculturalism” gives graduates the arrogance to deride religious traditions which are far more self-scrutinising and honest about their limitations than most university departments.

The subordination of art to ideology, and the reduction of everything to the material have produced university graduates who fail to understand most of history and what it is that actually makes other cultures different. Despite the intellectuals’ insistence that we live in a godless age, religion is as potent a cultural force as it ever was. Even in the largely secular countries of Northern Europe and the Anglosphere, religious belief and practice remain far stronger than you would expect if the religious impulse were an accidental part of human nature or merely a way of explaining natural phenomena before the development of the modern scientific method.

But a belief in democratic multiculturalism usually assumes that religious pluralism is possible only if religion is a private affair and has no role in the development and articulation of policy. This is unreasonable – it is even tyrannical if enforced by coercive laws, as it was during the Covid-19 shutdowns.

Ethical convictions don’t arise from thin air: religious devotion is an essential part of how many people (including most immigrants) develop a view of social responsibility and a common good. To marginalise religious claims is, for many people, to silence their conscience and reduce their participation in civic life.

The major religious traditions free the mind from social silos and the insular thinking of partisan politics: they provide ways of rejecting the modern slavery to triviality and ugliness. This is why the modern technocratic state promotes multiculturalism without promoting religion: everyone is welcome so long as they worship in the glass temples of commerce.

Until Australian universities prioritise the study and teaching of foreign languages and religions, my response to “multiculturalism” will be what Gandhi supposedly said of Western civilisation: I think it would be a good idea.