What Price Assimilation?

The sad thing about writing early in the morning is that the mind plays strange tricks on you.

Thus, it's quite possible to find oneself in the midst of an article on the tension between European "leitkultur" and the wave of Muslim immigration that threatens to overwhelm it within the next generation, Jonny Lang playing on the CD player and the dog snoring softly over in the corner, when all of a sudden (for no apparent reason) an old Blue Oyster Cult song you haven't heard for years, 'Dominance & Submission' pops into your head like a surreal popup ad from Hell, and you can't get it out. It's hard to keep from laughing when things like that happen. Your train of thought has just gone completely off the rails and its time to call the paramedics.

Erik at NoPasaran has a great post on the pressures placed on Europe by the wave of Muslim immigration:

About nine months ago, Francis Fukuyama, the historian, said that one of the big things distinguishing America from Europe was that, while the United States had staged its great debate on race, Europe hid from dealing frontally with how much Islam it could live with inside its borders.

Now, Fukuyama, author of the celebrated essay "The End of History," has taken this message to the Europeans. In a speech in Germany about two weeks ago, he urged Europe to stop being intimidated about using its right to defend its own humanist culture. He even employed the expression "leitkultur," or leading culture - touchy among Germans because of its supposed elitist resonance - to describe the legitimacy of shoring up a distinctly European identity.

Those wacky Euros - they're so touchy about so many things... as though not talking about it will somehow make the problem go away. Simply avert the eyes at the necessary moment and pretend it doesn't exist. But Europe is clearly showing signs of strain.

It is strange, too, this different attitude to racial and ethnic issues. When the Unit and I were in France for just a few days, we saw no less than three extremely hostile confrontations between native Frenchmen and immigrants: one Oriental, one Black, and one Arab. I have lived in America all my life, moving all over the country and living in both large cities and rural areas, and have never seen this kind of aggression erupt with such frequency. In each case the scenario was exactly the same: traffic altercations where some minor (in two cases imagined) transgression was blown out of proportion by the Frenchman.

We were only there two days.

It's not as though racism does not exist anywhere else - of course it does. But I think Europe suffers more from population pressure and the clash of cultures than from racism. Often people are over-quick to attribute hostility to racism, when in reality the problem is the clash of cultures rather than any antipathy attributable to race or skin color. To be fair, America, which has had to contend with its own overwhelming wave of Hispanic immigration, has had a much easier time of it. There is less of a schism between Hispanic culture and American culture, and we don't have the difference in religion to contend with.

That said, it is Western values that have allowed people of different religions, cultures, and ethnicities to live together peaceably. It was Western mores (and Christian values in particular) that crusaded against slavery, which is still practiced in the Muslim world today. It has become fashionable of late to conflate all cultures, all philosophies, all religions: as though they all can boast the same tradition of tolerance.

This is a dangerous mistake, and one that is perpetrated by an academic elite who are purging our history books of references to Communist purges and eliminating the study of Western civilization: the cornerstone of our laws, our morality, and indeed life as we know it. Without an understanding of why things came to be as they are today, our children will lack the compelling arguments needed to resist changing laws put into place for very good reasons by men who, in turn, relied on the wisdom of those who came before them. Each generation builds on what has gone before. For the first time in history, we are in danger of throwing that all away in a policy of false tolerance or political correctness.

In a conversation here, Fukuyama said it would be a mistake, with dangerous exclusionary overtones, for Europe to hold up Christianity as its sole defining mark.

"There is a European culture," he said. "It's subscribing to a broader culture of tolerance. It's not unreasonable for European culture to say, 'You have to accept this.' The Europeans have to end their political correctness and take seriously what's going on."

Each culture must decide what its core values are to be. This is, indeed, not unreasonable. To do otherwise is chaos, and anarchy. It is core values which allow us the freedom, and ensure the tolerance, needed to live peacefully with people of different faiths and skin colors. Let us hope we choose rightly, and with deliberation - not in some false attempt to be "inclusive". For it is the content of the ideas we choose to model our society upon, not whether they are Muslim, Christian, Western, or Eastern, that matters.

On such depends the future of our society.

Cross posted at I Love Jet Noise