There’s no culture in multiculturalism

As children, we all played the silly game of endlessly repeating the same word until it lost all its meaning. That was quite innocent, but it’s not innocent when grown-ups do it, especially with words that denote ideas leading to actions.

Newly meaningless words always denote feeble ideas, and indeed may be responsible for enfeebling ideas in the first place. Any subsequent action is then guaranteed to fail, sometimes on a socially destructive scale.

Culture is one such word. It’s repeated ceaselessly, and its meaning is constantly broadened, to a point where the word stops denoting anything at all. It thus becomes useless as a building block for ideas, but a regular boon for any ideology. Ideologies thrive on words that have lost their meaning, if they had any to begin with.

People forget to follow Descartes’s advice to agree on definitions first. That’s why they talk about things like pop culture, black culture, white culture, women’s culture, drinking culture, Asian culture, drug culture – you name it.

Culture becomes the common denominator at which all the diverse numerators equalise, making multiculturalism not only acceptable but inevitable. Such mayhem comes from a word so inflated that it bursts like a balloon with too much hot air pumped in.

What is culture? Since the question may be too difficult to answer, let’s simplify it. What is a cultured man? If we agree on that definition, the definition of culture will follow, for a cultured man is one who possesses culture. So what kind of animal is he?

I’d suggest he is defined by three attributes: manners, learning and aesthetic sensitivity. A cultured man has to possess all three. If he doesn’t, he isn’t cultured.

By manners I don’t just mean using the right fork or taking one’s hat off indoors, although such things are important. Cultured manners are above all defined by consideration for others, an intuitive or acquired sensitivity to other people’s feelings, comfort and security.

Thus a man who has read everything of note and can tell a Vermeer from a de Hooch at a glance is still not cultured if he beats his wife, breaks wind in public or, through his neglect of personal hygiene, makes other people in the room pinch their nostrils.

By the same token, an impeccable English gentleman who can’t tell Bach from Beethoven may be a very good man, but not a cultured one. Nor will the same chap qualify if he can tell the Goldberg Variations from the Diabelli Variations after the first note, but confuses Emily Dickinson with Emil Durkheim and thinks George Eliot was a man.

We may argue about the odd particular here or there, but in the end we’ll agree that this triad of manners, learning and aesthetic understanding defines a cultured man, not to be confused with a good one. A cultured man may or may not be good, and vice versa.

As a by-product of this exercise, we’ve stumbled on a workable definition of culture, as an aggregate of those three components. However, each of them differs from one place to another.

A cultured Englishman may not have heard of, say, de Vigny or Batyushkov, whereas, respectively, a cultured Frenchman or Russian will know their work, while being ignorant of William Cowper’s.

However, the behavioural, intellectual and aesthetic components of culture differ little from one Western country to another, and practically not at all within each country. Cultured people everywhere in the West behave in more or less the same way, and share more or less the same corpus of book knowledge and aesthetic understanding.

How culture is acquired is too complex a subject. All sorts of factors of nature and nurture combine: genetic predisposition, intelligence, upbringing, education – above all, a lifelong effort to develop one’s mind, hone one’s senses and cultivate proper behaviour.

However, as we move farther and farther from the West, known formerly and more appropriately as Christendom, we’ll notice all our three components assuming a different, often unrecognisable shape.

We notice that an Iranian, justifiably regarded as cultured at home, mistreats his wife (wives) and knows nothing about de Vigny, Batyushkov or Cowper, although he can recite every line by Saadi or Hafiz. A cultured Chinese sees nothing wrong in asking strangers how much money they make and thinks all Western music sounds like marching tunes. And a cultured African may horoscope every step he takes and only respond emotionally to percussive music.

The difference has nothing to do with race. Provided they are innately intelligent and sensitive, the same Iranian, Chinese or African will become cultured Englishmen if born, raised and properly educated in England – and provided they set their minds on becoming cultured Englishmen.

Where does all that leave multiculturalism? Especially if it gets to imply, as it does these days, some fundamental equality among all cultures?

In the same place where all useless concepts are kept, I’d suggest. No matter how cultured an Iranian, Chinese or African may be in his native habitat, his culture won’t be recognised as such in a Western country unless he meets the conditions I’ve specified.

Now, cultural tolerance is a different matter. A cultured Englishman by definition can’t despise a cultured (or for that matter any decent) outlander, nor especially persecute him for his culture. Yet the very word ‘tolerance’ implies grudging acceptance of something alien and potentially suspect.

No tolerance is required when one meets a cultured Englishman, and very little when one runs into a cultured Frenchman or Dutchman. One doesn’t tolerate them; one just feels intuitive Mowgli-style cultural kinship: We be of one culture, ye and I (sorry about the paraphrase, Mr Kipling).

Multiculturalism, some kind of crucible in which all kinds of alien elements can be boiled together to produce an edible stew, is a figment of an ideologically inflamed imagination. The stew is bound to come out tasteless, lacking in nutritional value, perhaps even toxic.

Sooner or later our champions of multiculturalism will choke on it. The problem is, they may take us all with them.