Multiculturalism and Human Rights

21st Century Western Civilisations, Immigration, Multiculturalism and Human Rights
By Joe Mintsa

The uncontrollable steady build-up of variegated societies in the west, and which has been going on from the time when the Europeans first felt the economic need to engage in massive imports of domitable manpower 500 years ago from Africa and the Middle East, has resulted in such unexpected social slants in a politically changing world that, unfortunately, does not seem to be stepping away from its basic protectionist principles. And this has been aggravated by more recent influxes of economic and political migrants from the third world, in search of a better life, and has ended up causing various social and judiciary concerns that now touch the most deprived and disfranchised social strata of these nations, vastly composed by both the descendents of former human imports and the current immigrants, all of whom now seem to be categorised on similar social classes if not the same class. As a consequence, psychological tensions have permanently settled in and have overpowered the humanistic aspirations of the resulting so-called ‘multicultural societies’ that, yet, were so copiously endorsed by these Western nations at the time of need. It, therefore, seems that there is now an imperative necessity to enforce new types of subtle institutional injustice onto these types of human species that still do not seem to fit even in diversity.

These problems are sharply manifest in issues of discrimination and phobia towards race, faith and even ideology, which affect very much of our daily lives today in these Western nations. As a human soul, I take these issues quite seriously. this is even why I take trouble writing this type of articles – I have also resolved many of such difficult issues in my recent book: Third Mind (2006) – because not only do these difficult issues cramp our sense of social cohesion and national consolidation in whatever political structure to which we ‘belong’ in the West, they also impinge on individuals’ ability, skills and good will to play their part and fulfil themselves in their respective societies for being unfortunate enough to carry the stigma of new fascist definitions of the term ‘immigrant’.

Somebody once made a sarcastic remark to me during a conversation in which we were discussing this subject by saying that in Britain today, many people spend 80% of their time fighting for their rights; the remaining 20% of their time can only help them achieve a sad, rebellious and sloppy subsistence. And most of the reasons that turn a great number of people into that regrettable breed are racial, religious and ideological differences, which many of us see as relevant factors for cultural distinctiveness and, therefore, social incompatibility between humans. And, in the mind of many of us, it seems that the right culprit to charge for this societal dis-ease is what i may call the ‘uncultivable seeds of multiculturalism’.

What I want to do in this article – the length of which, I am afraid, might be quite annoying to you, dear reader, but probably worth taking a look at – is to argue that if there is anything at all that may lead people to feel different from one another to the point of being unable to share the same society harmoniously, it is most certainly not ‘multiculturalism’; and, if it is, it must have very little or nothing to do with religion, race or ideology; because none of these three concepts has itself much to do with ‘culture’. In fact, what I am going to try and show here is that the concept of ‘culture’ has been so increasingly ill-defined and misapprehended over the past century by media agents, scholars and politicians so much so that it has resulted very easy for people to raise cultural arguments in issues that are not cultural at all, because just anything is now seen as culture. I will take shortcuts all the way through the article to make it a bit easy, although these shortcuts themselves may take a few paragraphs to be made intelligible.