When Multiculturalism Hits The Wall

WE should all avoid ethnocentrism and phallocentrism and logocentrism. That is to say, we should recognize that our own viewpoint on the world is not the only one.

That’s easy to say, easy to demand on a talking head show, easy to write in a blog. But what about when cultures actually clash in the real world, as in Asian forced marriages in Britain?

Theodore Dalrymple (and it’s high time he was appointed an RMC Chappie) raises the question in reviewing Shame by Jaswinder Sangheera.

Sangheera is the child of Punjabi Sikh parents in Derby, England.

The author’s parents arranged a marriage for her when she was 15 years old, and in order to escape it she ran away with the boyfriend she was not supposed to have. Unusually in this situation, he stuck by her, and tried his best to support her.

The dark side of all this, of course, is that these girls of Asian parents who resist a forced marriage are subject to very heavy-handed persuasion. Sometimes it ends in death.

When Dalrymple was an inner-city hospital physician in Birmingham, England, he writes, he used to interview young women like Sangheera “several times a week.”

I know of no suffering, short of civil war, greater than that of girls and young women put in the situation the author describes.

But let us look at the big picture. Arranged marriage was the norm before the industrial revolution everywhere in the world, at least among anyone with property, because the preservation of property (i.e. land) from generation to generation was critical to survival. But the industrial revolution changed all that. In Marxian terms, it changed the productive forces, and the social superstructure had to adapt. Freed from the land, young people can marry anyone they like because in the industrial world anyone can get a job and support themselves. Land doesn’t matter.

All young women emerging from traditional society into the modern world face this situation. Socialized into the modern world by their schools and their peers they find that they must rebel against their traditional parents.

It is said that the Broadway musical is precisely about the problem of the American immigrant girl wondering whether to “marry out” of her ethnic identity into the enticing world beyond the ghetto.

Beyond the trite gargling of multiculturalism, “we,” that is you and me, the enlightened, common-sense people of the west, could start doing some serious thinking about how we frame the situation of young women emerging into the modern west from their traditional families. How much do we say: these are the rules of the west and if you violate them you are going to jail, diversity or no diversity, multiculturalism or no multiculturalism? And how much do we accommodate people still seeking the safety of their traditional, premodern culture?

If we make up our minds, we could spare a lot of suffering.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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