“If you tell me that a man plucked from Eritrea, who paid a people smuggler to ferry him across the Channel, who arrived on our shores yesterday, and has opinions that my fiancé, my sister, and my mum should wear a bedsheet lest his sexual impulses be unleashed upon them — If you tell me that man is as indistinguishably British as me, by the very virtue of him standing on our soil, I think I might point out some holes in that narrative.”
Britain’s integration narrative is not a “miracle,” but a dangerous myth.
Our ruling class, who believe in the false Enlightenment anthropology of the Blank Slate as an article of religious faith, peddle the fiction that, by cultural osmosis, the bland Blairite platitudes of “British values” will convert anyone from anywhere in any quantity into being indistinguishable from the beleaguered host majority.
“Because of the Second World War narrative that, ‘If you’re a racist, you’re Literally Hitler; Hitler killed lots and lots of people, therefore you don’t want to be Hitler; therefore, the most moral thing to do in the world is not to consult your own conscience, but to think, what did Hitler do, and do the opposite,’ we now pretend — or, at least, act as if it is true as a matter of government policy — that there are no such thing as cultural differences. Everything is arbirtrary, people are just pried apart by the cruel injustice of geography, and that any difference in education, economic attainment, or cultural preference can be eradicated by just taking a man from Mogadishu and dropping him in Manchester.”
What they fail to understand is that the givens underpinning secular liberalism and human rights — the default assumption that every human person has inalienable worth and dignity, as if they were made in the image of God — are culturally particular to the Christian West. They are neither universal nor self-evident, and so cannot be cast like an ineluctable spell over all of those who pass through the passport gates at Heathrow and Gatwick airports.
I discussed the crisis of meaning, the quiet revival of Christianity, how immigration has fractured culture, and the perverse incentives for conservative content creators in British politics with my friend Elliot Bewick on The Next Generation podcast.
In the rest of the world, every action is allocated a moral valence according to the advantage it confers to the family, clan, ethnic in-group, or Ummah. If admitting to wrongdoing will disadvantage your kin, then most feel no qualms about lying, cheating, and stealing to avoid consequences and procure resources.
By promoting this anachronistic rendition of national identity and belonging, liberals have unilaterally disarmed Britain and Western democracies against being hijacked by virulent, tribal, indigestible diasporas imported from regions where honesty, fairness, and the lives of others have no value in and of themselves.
As such, multiculturalism is not a melting pot, but a blender that liquidates everything in its container, producing only indigestible sludge in which the strongest ingredient leaves a bitter aftertaste.
“I don’t think that we should continue to perpetuate the narrative that a bland scouts’ pledge of ‘British values’ — which means tolerance, and liberalism, and a general love of humanity — is sufficient to bind everyone together from all corners of the world.”
My previous episode with Elliot, released late last year, is available here:
“Without a shared and binding narrative, you cannot have a cohesive culture. But one does not exist at the moment, which makes me concerned for our ability to dig ourselves out of this particular hole.”
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