Pragmatism versus Multiculturalism
DO WE NEED the word multiculturalism? The federal government is looking to scrap it. Parliamentary Secretary for Multicultural Affairs, Andrew Robb, says the word “is not often helpful because different people listen to it and give it different meanings”. So, what new word are we going to embrace? A former Council of Multicultural Australia member, Yasser Soliman, suggested “Multiculturalism II”. That won’t help us much. The chatter of “multiculturalism” is usually about how the law, the state and educational systems should treat minority cultures. The law and its practitioners provide a lot of this chatter’s text.
Melbourne writer Peter Craven wrote recently, “the multiculturalism introduced by Malcolm Fraser always presupposed that … the many cultures were simply the different colours and accents, the variegations of a culture based on a belief in liberty and the rule of law to protect it, which we all shared”. The former Liberal prime minister himself says, “Many years ago I … believed that the rule of law was absolute and that all people in positions of political authority would respect the law and work to protect the rights of all citizens”. But for the pin-up boy of the sentimentalists that was long, long ago: “I now know that to be naive and incorrect ... Today, for a variety of reasons, but not least because the government has sought to set Muslims aside, discrimination and defamation against Muslims has been rising dramatically. The government’s contention [is] that Muslims aren’t like us and therefore it doesn’t matter if discrimination occurs and if access to the law does not apply.” So Malcolm Fraser is now enamoured of the sound bites of “difference” a la Jacques Derrida.
But if the former prime minister does hold that the absolute rule of law for all ought to be a core value then he and his fans should consider the following unpleasant and largely unreported fact. Over the past year, obstetricians and gynaecologists at Sydney’s Auburn Hospital have treated thirty-eight female patients who have been circumcised. Canterbury Hospital treats between ten and fifteen patients a year. These are the official figures. Unreported cases could be much higher. All those officially identified say they had the procedure done “overseas”. But it is a criminal offence to remove a child from an Australian state or territory and go abroad to procure the procedure known, clinically, as FGM, “female genital mutilation”. The maximum penalty in New South Wales is seven years jail.
Ms Samia Baho, who co-ordinates a local family and reproductive rights education program says, “I am very concerned about communities not knowing about this legislation and taking young girls overseas to have the procedure done.” The immigrants’ ignorance—compounded by bureaucratic laziness—has produced a multicultural dilemma. A New South Wales state parliamentarian has called on the state government to compel medical staff to report cases of FGM to police. Should this view be supported? Some will reply emphatically in the affirmative arguing, correctly, that the mutilation of a young girl must not be ignored and that FGM is a criminal offence. But there is a problem regarding when these mutilations occur. Many patients, mutilated as young girls, only present with the symptoms years later during pre-natal examinations. The evil that has been done to them is obvious. The brutality of amputating the clitoris and sometimes sewing together the labia, often without anaesthetic, cannot be denied. The harmful long-term effects for pregnant women cannot be ignored. But how does one respond to this evil?
Some may conclude that forcing doctors and nurses to “dob in” is a very “un-Australian” thing to do. It may further be argued that “dobbing in” would create an unacceptable level of social harm—parents in jail, kids fostered out, families destroyed. And racial invective would spin out from the shock jocks in our community. Imagine how they would cover the court cases.
So how do we solve this specific dilemma of multiculturalism, a clash between the rule of law and the cultural practice of FGM? In attempting an answer to this, consider what Andrew Robb said recently about increasing citizenship residency from two to four years: “Over 200,000 people in the past ten years have come from the Middle East and Africa [the geographical areas where FGM is an accepted cultural practice]. It is just a fact that they need more time to get some understanding of what makes us tick.”
The phrase, “what makes us tick” is refreshingly un-academic. It’s not a legal term. It doesn’t have any ideological baggage. It’s a country mile away from that awkward term “Australian values” but it does point to what we value. And that is pragmatism. Australian voters are interested primarily in what works. So what would be a pragmatic approach to “multiculturalism” in general and a particular clash between culture and law? First, get rid of this ugly word. It was imposed from above. It is overloaded with baggage, quangos and bureaucrats. And no two people can agree on what it means.
But everyone can understand the rule of law. It provides the cohesion that allows what makes us tick to keep on ticking. Potential immigrants and refugees don’t need to be given multicultural gobbledegook. They simply need to know the law because ignorance, in this instance, surely is not bliss.
Aristotle foresaw this dilemma. In Book One of Politics he tells us that by nature we are political animals. Further that we are the only animals with the power of speech, which enables us to debate and decide what is just and unjust. Consequently we are the only animals that have any sense of morality and justice. Aristotle concludes that it is the association of living beings who share a sense of justice which makes a state. This would suggest that any political goal of “unity within diversity” is strengthened by a shared sense of justice. Aristotle also warns us that the language-using animal when separated from law and justice is the worst of all. “He is the most unholy and the most savage of animals, and the most full of lust and gluttony.”
This would imply that without a shared sense of justice an individual residing in a state degenerates into animality. It further implies that a shared language is essential, so that we can all know what “justice” means. A bilingual citizen has access, a non-English-speaker suffers exclusion. An ideology of “multiculturalism” that undermines a common sense of justice and undervalues the importance of a shared language is not only bad politics, it is shady ethics. The usual suspects will howl about the dumping of this silly word multiculturalism. The semi-educated will pout lemon-mouthed and stamp their feet. But Andrew Robb talks moderately in plain language about matters that are usually sullied with passionate cant and career-boosting mob behaviour.
For the cant we need look no further than to the column-inches of the Grumpy Old Man of the Canberra press gallery, Alan Ramsey. He recently quoted, at length, from Hansard’s record of the citizenship debate. Melbourne’s Anna Burke got a good run. Prepare to laugh: “The notion of ‘other’—that we need to be wary of ‘other’—is whipping up anti-Muslim hysteria and sentiment … Instead of going with decent policies, [the government] is going to whip up the notion of ‘other’.”
THE PHILOSOPHER Simon Blackburn has an interesting historical perspective to offer on the hissy fits of conspicuous compassion. In his 2001 review of Ben Rogers’ biography of notorious pants man and distinguished philosopher A.J. Ayer he writes:
Melbourne writer Peter Craven wrote recently, “the multiculturalism introduced by Malcolm Fraser always presupposed that … the many cultures were simply the different colours and accents, the variegations of a culture based on a belief in liberty and the rule of law to protect it, which we all shared”. The former Liberal prime minister himself says, “Many years ago I … believed that the rule of law was absolute and that all people in positions of political authority would respect the law and work to protect the rights of all citizens”. But for the pin-up boy of the sentimentalists that was long, long ago: “I now know that to be naive and incorrect ... Today, for a variety of reasons, but not least because the government has sought to set Muslims aside, discrimination and defamation against Muslims has been rising dramatically. The government’s contention [is] that Muslims aren’t like us and therefore it doesn’t matter if discrimination occurs and if access to the law does not apply.” So Malcolm Fraser is now enamoured of the sound bites of “difference” a la Jacques Derrida.
But if the former prime minister does hold that the absolute rule of law for all ought to be a core value then he and his fans should consider the following unpleasant and largely unreported fact. Over the past year, obstetricians and gynaecologists at Sydney’s Auburn Hospital have treated thirty-eight female patients who have been circumcised. Canterbury Hospital treats between ten and fifteen patients a year. These are the official figures. Unreported cases could be much higher. All those officially identified say they had the procedure done “overseas”. But it is a criminal offence to remove a child from an Australian state or territory and go abroad to procure the procedure known, clinically, as FGM, “female genital mutilation”. The maximum penalty in New South Wales is seven years jail.
Ms Samia Baho, who co-ordinates a local family and reproductive rights education program says, “I am very concerned about communities not knowing about this legislation and taking young girls overseas to have the procedure done.” The immigrants’ ignorance—compounded by bureaucratic laziness—has produced a multicultural dilemma. A New South Wales state parliamentarian has called on the state government to compel medical staff to report cases of FGM to police. Should this view be supported? Some will reply emphatically in the affirmative arguing, correctly, that the mutilation of a young girl must not be ignored and that FGM is a criminal offence. But there is a problem regarding when these mutilations occur. Many patients, mutilated as young girls, only present with the symptoms years later during pre-natal examinations. The evil that has been done to them is obvious. The brutality of amputating the clitoris and sometimes sewing together the labia, often without anaesthetic, cannot be denied. The harmful long-term effects for pregnant women cannot be ignored. But how does one respond to this evil?
Some may conclude that forcing doctors and nurses to “dob in” is a very “un-Australian” thing to do. It may further be argued that “dobbing in” would create an unacceptable level of social harm—parents in jail, kids fostered out, families destroyed. And racial invective would spin out from the shock jocks in our community. Imagine how they would cover the court cases.
So how do we solve this specific dilemma of multiculturalism, a clash between the rule of law and the cultural practice of FGM? In attempting an answer to this, consider what Andrew Robb said recently about increasing citizenship residency from two to four years: “Over 200,000 people in the past ten years have come from the Middle East and Africa [the geographical areas where FGM is an accepted cultural practice]. It is just a fact that they need more time to get some understanding of what makes us tick.”
The phrase, “what makes us tick” is refreshingly un-academic. It’s not a legal term. It doesn’t have any ideological baggage. It’s a country mile away from that awkward term “Australian values” but it does point to what we value. And that is pragmatism. Australian voters are interested primarily in what works. So what would be a pragmatic approach to “multiculturalism” in general and a particular clash between culture and law? First, get rid of this ugly word. It was imposed from above. It is overloaded with baggage, quangos and bureaucrats. And no two people can agree on what it means.
But everyone can understand the rule of law. It provides the cohesion that allows what makes us tick to keep on ticking. Potential immigrants and refugees don’t need to be given multicultural gobbledegook. They simply need to know the law because ignorance, in this instance, surely is not bliss.
Aristotle foresaw this dilemma. In Book One of Politics he tells us that by nature we are political animals. Further that we are the only animals with the power of speech, which enables us to debate and decide what is just and unjust. Consequently we are the only animals that have any sense of morality and justice. Aristotle concludes that it is the association of living beings who share a sense of justice which makes a state. This would suggest that any political goal of “unity within diversity” is strengthened by a shared sense of justice. Aristotle also warns us that the language-using animal when separated from law and justice is the worst of all. “He is the most unholy and the most savage of animals, and the most full of lust and gluttony.”
This would imply that without a shared sense of justice an individual residing in a state degenerates into animality. It further implies that a shared language is essential, so that we can all know what “justice” means. A bilingual citizen has access, a non-English-speaker suffers exclusion. An ideology of “multiculturalism” that undermines a common sense of justice and undervalues the importance of a shared language is not only bad politics, it is shady ethics. The usual suspects will howl about the dumping of this silly word multiculturalism. The semi-educated will pout lemon-mouthed and stamp their feet. But Andrew Robb talks moderately in plain language about matters that are usually sullied with passionate cant and career-boosting mob behaviour.
For the cant we need look no further than to the column-inches of the Grumpy Old Man of the Canberra press gallery, Alan Ramsey. He recently quoted, at length, from Hansard’s record of the citizenship debate. Melbourne’s Anna Burke got a good run. Prepare to laugh: “The notion of ‘other’—that we need to be wary of ‘other’—is whipping up anti-Muslim hysteria and sentiment … Instead of going with decent policies, [the government] is going to whip up the notion of ‘other’.”
THE PHILOSOPHER Simon Blackburn has an interesting historical perspective to offer on the hissy fits of conspicuous compassion. In his 2001 review of Ben Rogers’ biography of notorious pants man and distinguished philosopher A.J. Ayer he writes:
“Personally, I find the appetite less in bad taste than the boasting—even Don Giovanni needed Leporello to do that for him; but Ayer was never one to hide his light under a bushel. From our present vantage point, when it requires the permission from a couple of lawyers, the Board of Trustees, and the entire faculty of Women’s Studies for university inmates to nod at each other, those times seem very primitive. In those olden days wit and intelligence were still aphrodisiacs and few women had discovered that the energetic indulgence of indignation and resentment provides their supreme sexual pleasure.”
Ressentiment the ultimate aphrodisiac? One is taken aback at times when the doctors’ wives of our community blurt out—without any sense of silliness—how much they love it when Kerry O’Brien gets “stuck into” Prime Minister Howard. And the bile directed towards Janette Howard by educated (often highly educated) Labor-voting women does not admit to straightforward empirical analysis. The phenomenon is there to be observed though, in spades.
The predilection of partisans for “gotcha” interrogations accompanied by the sneer and snarl which are embraced as signs of moral conviction and ethical correctness are patterns of behaviour often observed in adolescents. They resent their lack of omnipotence but are addicted to a fantasy of omniscience. Thus as Aristotle observed, “intelligent young people do not seem to be found”. His argument, in the Nicomachean Ethics, is that intelligence is concerned with particulars as well as universals, and particulars become known from experience, but a young person lacks experience, since some length of time is needed to produce it.
An intelligent person perceives the facts of a situation. A rigorous search for historical particulars—for facts—usually results in the balloons of ideological rigidity being pricked. Malcolm Fraser seems to hold to the belief that there is an ideological base for the utterance, “Muslims aren’t like us”. But a particular problem that exists in south-western Sydney is not one of ideology. It is about the mess that is the result of particular political decisions made thirty-one years ago, as Fraser well knows.
In 1975 the then Department of Immigration implemented what was called the “Lebanese Concession”. As civil war raged in Lebanon the newly-elected Fraser government agreed to modify criteria for entry into Australia for thousands of Lebanese. Good intentions produced bad results. The Syrian army had a large say in who was allowed to come to Australia. Consequently Lebanese Christians were largely excluded. Furthermore the normal insistence on some level of English was abandoned, on humanitarian grounds. Vetting for work skills was ignored. Poor Muslim farmers with no language skills came in large numbers. The problem was compounded by federal government policies in the 1980s. The Hawke Labor government ramped up the family reunion program to levels that the newly deregulated economy just could not accommodate. What was the result? In 1998 Sydney’s Canterbury Council surveyed the local workforce; it revealed that 61 per cent of Lebanese older than fifteen had no qualifications.
Related to this is the fact that Arabic is the preferred language of many in Sydney’s south-west. However, earlier this year when Mr Robb stated that migrants seeking Australian citizenship should understand local language and culture, the usual suspects labelled his proposals a throwback to the White Australia policy. Language tests, it was said, were “about exclusion, about creating barriers to immigration … to those with very different cultural norms and practices”. But reciting the slogans of “difference” won’t create jobs—except for the sloganeers.
The problem is not unique to a Lebanese sub-culture. Last year in Sydney a twenty-seven-year-old Pakistani used “Islamic culture” as a defence against rape. He said he had no idea it was an offence to rape girls. He believed any woman not covered head to toe in a burqa was fair game. “I believe that at the time when I committed these offences that she had no right to say no,” he pleaded in court. His barrister submitted to the court that his client was a victim of “cultural conditioning”. This phenomenon is not unique. In March this year a twenty-four-year-old Sydney woman was placed on a good behaviour bond for making bomb threats to a Carlingford shopping centre. The excuse she offered to the court was that she was labouring under “psycho-social stress” disorder, brought about by the fact that she could not tell her devout Muslim mother she was in love with her non-Muslim boyfriend.
The English philosopher Roger Scruton, who has been writing about Lebanon and the West for more than twenty years, offers a stern caveat:
“Arab societies are stiff with obligations: obligations to family, to friends, to tribe; obligations which criss-cross and overlap through competing networks of kinship and hospitality … Yet in such societies the interests of strangers go comparatively disregarded, and the law proves incompetent to resolve conflicts between people who have never met, or who do not subscribe to the official or majority religion.”
In a society based on citizenship there is an assumption, says Scruton, that I am committed to the strangers who surround me. “This is how citizenship is, and must be, understood, and it is one reason why massive and unprepared immigration of people with no sympathy for the traditional customs can blow a society apart.”
Over the coming months, as Andrew Robb addresses the pragmatics of immigration, he will cop his share of resentment and silliness. Like the following, from The War on Democracy by Niall Lucy and Steve Mickler:
“According to the brutal logic of conservatism, if you’re not on the side of the right you must be a communist sympathizer … and of course “communism”, as everyone is supposed to know, is code for “Stalinism”. There could be no better illustration of this point than the Alec Baldwin character in the adult puppet movie, Team America: World Police (by ... Matt Stone and Trey Parker), who is nothing but a conservative caricature of a liberal. Because the real-life Alec Baldwin has spoken out, like other Hollywood liberals against the invasion of Iraq, then according to the brutal logic of conservatism he must be a militant, un-American, anti-democratic extremist. And that’s exactly what Stone and Parker turn the Baldwin puppet into in the film—a machine-gun toting “red”-lover, fighting side by side with the puppet of North Korean “commie” dictator Kim Jong-il against the puppets of Team America, a clandestine squad of God’s own patriots whose utter disregard for difference is a product of the jingoistic hogwash they speak and the power bestowed on them by their state-of-the-art weaponry. Conservatives don’t get the joke, of course, failing to see the Baldwin figure as a projection of their own strategic fantasy.”
But it is the conservatives and the pragmatists who are committed, as citizens, to the stranger, or “other”. Or as Andrew Robb might express the same thought, new arrivals from the Middle East and Africa need time to get some understanding of what makes us tick.
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