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One of the remarkable lessons about the British grooming gangs scandal is how dismissive ideologues are of first principles and the concept of natural consequences.One of the remarkable lessons about the British grooming gangs scandal is how dismissive ideologues are of first principles and the concept of natural consequences.
The idea that sexual crimes by immigrant communities should be concealed, or even abetted by government officials in the interest of “community relations” or some abstract multicultural ideal is dismissive of the of the nature of and minimal requirements for functioning human societies.
The grooming scandals highlight some very basic attributes of cultures and societies. At a very basic level a society is a group of people who live among and interact with each other, and who share at least some common interests.
Cultures are, at base, those collections of habits, manners and values that influence the interactions among members of a society. Cultures and societies may be much more complex and involve many more facets than described here, but these basic criteria are essential. Societies may contain subcultures, but it is the dominant culture that provides stability.
A common trait, often a defining one, of ideologues is that they are unconcerned about the nature of things, such as societies and cultures. To say that something has a nature means that it behaves and changes in characteristic ways in response to its environment and circumstances, and these changes are not always intended or desired. Cultures are the result of adaptations of a society’s mores, values, and habits over long periods of time.
As a result, cultures tend to evolve to accommodate their environment, and result more from the lessons of experience than from abstract ideals. A common trait of ideologues is to discount the possibility of natural consequences and to disdain human nature.
The defining elements of a society are human interactions, and the defining attributes of a culture are found in the list of things that such a culture does and does not respect. Some cultures respect authority and others do not. Some respect women, elders, property, or privacy and others have different priorities. The objects of respect in a society determine both the level of trust and who is and is not trusted in that society.
Societies with a greater degree of consensus as to what should and should not be respected are more cohesive. If half of the members of society respect vows and the rest do not, or if a similar proportion respects the property of others as respect only their own immediate interests, that society is unlikely to flourish.
If some members of a society respect human dignity and individual rights regardless of a person’s race, tribe, religion or political philosophy and a substantial number of others do not, such a society will likely stagnate in a state of festering resentments.
Culture is one of the most significant determinants of trust within a society. Cultures that respect human dignity, property, the rule of law, civic mindedness, and the rights of others tend to instill higher levels of trust, and high trust societies tend to be more adaptable, innovative, and successful. It is the nature of more respectful cultures to produce more trusting societies and it is the nature of high trust societies to be less corrupt, more open, and more humane than low trust societies.
Cultures that differ widely in what they do and do not respect are unlikely to coexist peacefully in the same society. If one were to infiltrate a culture that believes that people have dignity regardless of class or religion with a culture that believes otherwise, the resulting disparities in expectations and standards of acceptable conduct will lead to conflict. A culture that respects the rule of law is incompatible with one that respects only violence.
A society that tries to accommodate both a culture that respects women generally and one that does so only in prescribed circumstances is not multicultural; it is fractured. It is not tolerant but rather, it is deluded.
In addition to the objects of respect that a society recognizes, culture affects the notion of responsibility in a society. Cultures that disdain the idea of human agency in favor of some notion of fate, or that minimize individual responsibility in deference to group affiliation are unlikely to harmonize with cultures that believe that individuals have responsibility for their own actions and circumstances.
The catastrophic folly of multiculturalism is the belief that cultures that arise in significantly different environments, and from significantly different histories, can exist unchanged in a new environment if afforded sufficient tolerance. In practice, a new culture introduces a new environment and the interacting cultures will change each other in unpredictable and often undesirable ways. Introducing a culture that has little respect for property, for example, will not reliably make the host culture more accommodating of pilfering, but may instead provoke more aggressiveness in defending property.
When multicultural ideologues are confronted with this natural circumstance the response is, as was seen in Britain, bafflingly unjust and tyrannical resorts to government obfuscation and use of force for refusing to indulge in an ideological fantasy. It is not possible to manage “community relations” by suppressing information regarding crimes within that community. Human nature will not yield to the desire that people will believe only what authorities want them to believe, hear what they want them to hear, or behave as though they cannot decide for themselves what is important to them.
Not all cultures are compatible within the same society or geographic region. These are basic realities that apply to societies and cultures all over the world. They are natural consequences of humans living among and interacting with one another and do not yield readily to arrogant theories or deluded hubris.
Cultures are not only natural, but also valuable and, in unsentimental terms, precious. Western culture, with its notion of the dignity of the human person, individual rights, regard for reason, respect for the rule of law and appreciation of knowledge and the arts is a glory of human history. It is not something that should be trifled with by ideology-addled activists out of a flabby and incoherent sense of “compassion.”
What makes the ideologue dangerous is disregard of the inherent fact that ideals have no unintended consequences; otherwise they would not be ideal. To the ideologue, the results of ideological causes can only be those envisioned by the dreamers. Ideologues seldom concern themselves with cost/benefit analyses. The natural result of such circumstances is that ideological crusades, such as the practical impossibility of an unconstrained yet stable multicultural society, will produce tragedies and outrages, as is seen in the case of the British grooming gangs.
There is one other observation that is highlighted by British grooming gang travesty: cultures are not self-sustaining.
They are inheritances derived from the sacrifices, triumphs, failures, and values of our predecessors. Some are, like our own tenuous culture, the legacy of great civilizations. They must be maintained, defended and nurtured and, importantly must not be taken for granted.
Cultures do evolve and change, and hopefully improve. These processes are slow and deliberate; they cannot be hastened or improved by the wishful thinking of government functionaries or dogmatic.
Culture determines the fates of civilizations. It must be protected from the whims of ideologues with great conviction but little understanding.
