The Wages of Multiculturalism

Today's New York Times runs an article about an attempt by the Canadian Society of Muslims to apply Sharia law to various aspects of civil law in Canada. At first blush, this does not seem like such an outlandish desire, after all, its voluntary and it would only apply to civil disputes. However, it is much more serious of an issue than it initially appears, relating to the sociopolitical thrust of multiculturalism and the attempt at the gradual dismantling of Western culture. It is an example of the new problem of immigration to the West (Europe, the US and Canada) - the inability or refusal of immigrants, mostly from Muslim countries, to assimilate and integrate into their new homelands.

In an excellent essay in The New Criterion, Roger Kimball discusses the problems that multiculturalism creates in America, although the same arguments are applicable to at least Canada. In some ways they are less applicable to Western Europe simply because the countries of Europe were not founded by immigrants. Still, they suffer - arguably more than the US - from the non-assimilation of Muslim immigrants. (Theodore Dalrymple, in City Journal, describes the multicultural invasion of Britain.)
As Kimball points out

As if in revenge for this injustice, however, multiculturalism also weakens the social bonds of the community at large. The price of imperfect assimilation is imperfect loyalty.

The firing of a woman in Florida for eating pork at work perfectly illustrates his point that

“liberalism permits Western civilization to be reconciled to dissolution.” For what we have witnessed with the triumph of multiculturalism is a kind of hypertrophy or perversion of liberalism, as its core doctrines are pursued to the point of caricature. As the Australian philosopher David Stove pointed out, we in the West “set ourselves to achieve a society which would be maximally-tolerant. But that resolve not only gives maximum scope to the activities of those who have set themselves to achieve the maximally-intolerant society.

The West needs to figure out its identity going forward.

America also faces numerous internal threats, from the rise of immigration without assimilation to the dissolute forces of cultural decadence and radical multiculturalism. The forces of multiculturalism preach the dogma of bureaucratic cosmopolitanism. They encourage us to shed what is distinctively American in order to accommodate the quivering sensitivities of “humanity”—that imperious abstraction whose exigent mandates are updated regularly by such bodies as the United Nations, the World Court, and their allies in the professoriate and the liberal media. Huntington is right that “America cannot become the world and still be America.” We face a choice between a multicultural future and an American future. Which will it be?

In the past few years there were many comparisons made between the US and the Roman Empire. But the barbarians that brought about one empire's extinction are not at the gate of this new "empire", they are within the society itself and are considered its "progressive" forces. They argue for its disintegration and dissolution. They slaughter its sacred founding myths on the altar of cultural and moral equivalence, not realizing - or even worse, fully realizing - that with the Muslim world such "tolerance" will not go un-abused.