The "old imperial cultural tradition" was in no position to recognise anything, as nothing at that time foretold today...Gary, this is anachronism on your part, the historians' worst sin!

However Britain IS indeed the foundation of Australia's "culture and values" in a majoritarian sense. Who has "defined" the culture as "multicultural"? An elite who have a political bias against what they see as quasi-imperialist echos, but not the people or majority of them.

What that elite cannot explain is: in the forthcoming theatre of competing "Australian values", in which those stepping down the gangway of the 747 (or more likely Airbus 380) are as valid actors as those who actually founded Australia, which values will be seen as the core ones, should values conflict?

The problem with multiculturalism is it is very likely to breed a kind of Fascism in the end. All values are equal. All cultures are equal. All cultures are a priori self-validating in equality. The alternative will be miltancy or force to push "your" culture against "theirs". Muslims are already doing it. Others will follow.

However all of human experience and history tells us that cultures and values compete for status primus inter partes. They also tell us they are not equal or at least not in people's eyes, or else Australia would permit clitordectomy,polyandry,polygamy, first cousin marriage, multiple national languages and widow mutilation.

What Australia should be aiming for is what America has. America is uni-cultural and defiantly so. After one or two generations, nearly all Americans cleave to the universalist values of Anglo-American common law and Judeo-Christian majoritarian ideology (even when secularized, many of our laws have basis in Summa Theologica and other unlikey places). No matter where they (the immigrants) came from originally.

Their "multiculturalism" now conssits of an annual day when they watch auntie doing the polka and eat a lot of Polish sausage..or all become Irish for the New York St.Patricks parade. In other words, a tame relict culturalism pervades.

I have the notion that you are a different sort of multiculturalist, a post modern one. Not for them the relict culturalism of the assimilated Americans. No, every Australian will come to the future table girded in the immutability of their culture.

Like Fascism, soon it will be decreed that one really is (inescapably) one's culture and we will enter the weird territority where one is not even allowed to transcend one's culture. Everything will come from a primacy of race,sexual gender,linguistic origin and so on. The elite will 'fix" these proportions, the way the Soviets gerrymandered "culture" under the old USSR.

When the lid came off that, we saw that force was the only language, the "fist of culture", that prevailed and certainly not liberal reason.

Far better to insist on an Australian identity and stream people into that identity ( I did not say racial identity), wether the roots be British or not.

You are a philosopher. I prefer history. There never has been and never will be a "multicultural state". In every state, one culture predominates and must so do, or all things will fall apart.

I do not hold culture is immutable, nor unchangeable indeed I see it as dynamic and adaptive, at a slow pace. However, that does not make multiculuralism less than a social Tower of Babel, of which we already have very ominous signs not only in Australia, but most of the post-European world.

Orwell, What Australia should be aiming for is what America has. America is uni-cultural and defiantly so.

I live and work in the US atm. It is definately not monocultural.

After one or two generations, nearly all Americans cleave to the universalist values of Anglo-American common law and Judeo-Christian majoritarian ideology

Firstly, common-law is not a "value". It is a legal system. So claiming the "law" is an Australian value is specious.

The US has strong protections on liberty, and freedom of the individual. Basically secular liberal democracy with protected rights - which the people have a strong affinity for. Nothing to do with judeo-christian culture. If anything in the US it is the religious nutjobs that are polluting liberal democracy by trying to destroy the seperation between church and state.

The US's strength is it defines its cohesion through liberty, not culture. And multiculturalism is an outgrowth of liberty, making a more stable society.

Monoculturalism demands assimilation or the nationalist benefits, privileges and status are with-held. One is weaker than the other, and as Saudi Arabia and Iran show - it is monoculturalism which is the weakest.

OG,
an anachronism? Is not this kind of Britishness an aspect of Australian conservatism.

I've introduiced this theme because Greg Melleuish characterises Australian conservatism as consisting of:
--a Burkean strand that preserves the best of the British inheritance;
--- a cultural strand that appeals to values that transcend the here and now;
---and a populist strand that contrasts the sober, realstic and traditional values of ordinary Australians with the decadent and nihilistic values of the educated cultural elites.

Britishness is part of the Burkean strand. But that strand would include the utilitarian liberalism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill.

OG,
As noted above one of the strands of Australian conservatism is the populist strand that contrasts the sober, realstic and traditional values of ordinary Australians with the decadent and nihilistic values of the educated cultural elites.

It would appear from your comments that the content of the 'decadent and nihilistic values of the educated cultural elites' is multiculturalism. You write:

"The problem with multiculturalism is it is very likely to breed a kind of Fascism in the end. All values are equal. All cultures are equal. All cultures are a priori self-validating in equality. The alternative will be miltancy or force to push "your" culture against "theirs". Muslims are already doing it. Others will follow."

This interpretation misses out on two things:

--the values of multiculturalism are contained within, and work within a liberal polity that has a written constitution.I do not see any multiculturalists tearing up the constitution, and most of them strike me as liberals.

----the process of nihilism is one that devalues our highest values---ie what you call traditional Aussie values--- and Christianity.

Cameron holds that common law is not a "value" but merely a legal system. This is not so. No legal system can be divorced from the values of the society or powergroup, (in illiberal cases),that generates it. So the laws of the USSR were not reflective of the values of Russian Communists? Sharia law is "just a legal system" but has nothing to do with the culture and values of Islam? In fact, "common law" is precisely derived from common values and traditions. It mean, "The Law Common To All", that is the people, not a culture-free legal regime in vacuo.

It is inarguable that many common law principles have a Judeo-Christian basis. Just two examples. The legal defense in common law of insanity, and of proportional self-defence, are directly derived from arguments by Aquinas in Summa Theologica some 700 years ago.

I have to strongly disagree that "multiculturalism" is an solely outgrowth of traditional American values of "liberty".

It is inarguable that America is an assimilationist culture and always has been. Your multicultural construction is, if anything, a few decades old.

As my American grandfather once told me when I asked him why, despite French as a first language, he never spoke a word of French in all the years I knew him, he replied, "I left France to become American, not to stay French."

Leftist elites have concocted multiculturalism of late as a way they hope to gain control of culture and politics by ellipsis, after the collapse of collectivist/anti-individualist ideologies. These have otherwise been been consigned to the dustbin of history.

The proponents of multiculturalism are always left-wing and are unaware, or possibly some are, that multiculturalism is used as a Trojan Horse to undermine liberal individualism, in similar ways to how Lenin theorised against Imperial regimes, in his papers on the 'nationality problem'. I would certainly prefer Burke as my intellectual grounding than the Tartar absolutism of Lenin.

My humble grandfather had it right.

Thanks for the debate, though.

Gary, I mean "anachronism" in the narrow historical sense. You stated that comments made in 1944 could not "recognise" a certain future.

Your Burkean exposition is a delightful synopsis, for which I thank you, and for your time in replying to my humble posts. I am merely a safari guide in Africa, not a philosopher.

However, what I would have liked both you and Cameron to comment on is, in the theatre of competing multicultural values, which will have primacy? For example, how do we square common law derived ( yes, painfully and slow) values of feminine equality with demands in Britain and Canada, that Muslims be allowed a parallel set of practises, in which female property rights alimony are automatically 1/4 of male rights, in quantum?

How would you react to the ACLU in the US taking a case to the Supreme Court to allow polygamy to replace the common-law monogamy?

If you hold than no cultural values will have primacy, how do you remove the possibility of a socio-legal Tower of Babel, in which force will become the predominant arbiter?

Can you point to a single example in history, or anthropological history, a true multiculural polity (I hope you won't try and use the false example of the Ottoman Empire, or else one will have to admit the british Empire into the same room) and if so, can it resonate however many centuries later to today? I would say when all the theorizing is done, you can't. Multiculturalism is the enemy of liberalism, not the friend, when all is said and done.

Gary I would agree with you party on this:

"the values of multiculturalism are contained within, and work within a liberal polity that has a written constitution.I do not see any multiculturalists tearing up the constitution, and most of them strike me as liberals."

I precisely see a number of "multicultralists" wishing to tear up a liberal constitution. Britain has about 15% of a large Muslim population that think that way and France a lot more, as just one example. No doubt isolated Christians and UFO watchers have a similar idea. None of them can make the powerful claims of "victim" and "racist" which immediatly render Western leftists into jello and, as their demography progresses, and their non-assimilation is guaranteed by the multicultralist elites, you can expect them to assert values which are far and away from liberal.

Indeed in Britain HM Tax Inspectorate are inviting Muslims to re-write the tax laws on inheritance in line with the 1/4 quantum I mentioned earlier.

There will be more. Post-modernism will end in a form of fascism we have yet to glimpse or flesh out. Take my word for it, the horizon is glowing already. Post-modernist pretensions were skewered by the knife that killed Theo Van Gough, among other knives now being sharpened.

OG
you ask:

"How would you react to the ACLU in the US taking a case to the Supreme Court to allow polygamy to replace the common-law monogamy?"

Fine. That's the job of the judiciary to adjudicate on in relation to the Constitution and the common law.Why cannot people challenge the law though a legal process in a democracy?

Why should values be supreme not the rule of law? For liberals values are personal preferences; dispositions that enable individuals to make choices within the rule of law.

The rule of law is the common ground in a liberal nation-state. So I do not see your Tower of Babel.

OG,
there are lots of people within a liberal polity whose values disagree with those of liberalism.

That does not mean the end of liberalism or that there is no multicultural liberalism.

Multicultural Australia is not an assimlationist France.

Public law holds in Australia and I guess that Islam in Australia comes to terms with liberal modernity. It will have to if it is to continue have relevance to Australian Muslims who accept modernity.

Thanks Gary, but there seems decidedly less enthusiasm to take up my practical arguments as there is for theory. My asking where in history or anthropolgy we can find a "multicultural" society (as broadly meant today) has not produced an example. As suspected, the multi exponents are actually conducting an contemporaray experiment in political/social theory. More power to them, if they can see it's inherent limits.

Here is the future, if you allow unrestricted and unassimilated immigration of Muslims into Australia ot anywhere:

"Toronto, Canada Monday, December 19, 2005 - On December 2, the Liberal candidate for Mississauga-Erindale, Omar Alghabra, made his victory speech after winning the nomination. In that speech, he reportedly exhorted his audience, “This is a victory for Islam! Islam won! Islam Won! ... Islamic power is extending into Canadian politics”.

Paul Martin presumably fails to see the irony.

As to the matter of the ALCU's fantasy case, I think you misread me. Polygamy is notoriously repressive for women, because it allows for greater extension of male control over them. I asked the question to see if you would support basic and permanent illiberality (as opposed to an emergency measure like a wartime curb of certain rights) introduced into a liberal polity, by law. It appears you would. Or maybe I have this wrong?

Would you hold the same for a group proposing laws to supress free speech? In a notorious case of religious defamation in Victoria, the defense was not allowed to quote in court passages of the Koran it felt were helpful to it's case, because, the Muslim lawyers held, doing so "would offend Muslims in the courtroom". Well, the judge upheld this and of course we all know the British tried to introduce a law to criminalize free speech regarding religion.

One can mention the amazing case in which Cherie Blair actually argued against a moderate Muslim school dress code in UK on behalf of a radicalist student, and defeated the moderate Muslims in High Court(I have a post about that called "Cherie The Sheep" that can be googled)! It seems our elites are busy doing the illiberal work for us.

I wish I shared your confidence the the strength of the multicultural sponge to soak up every illiberality thrown at it, seemingly without effort. Here in Kenya we have a society that is mutlicultural due to traditional tribal ways that are incompatible, but all enlightened people are struggling hard to replace these with a national assimilated identity that is modern. The genies we would let out of the bottle by encouraging true multiculturalism are not worth the risk.

You continually assert that Australia is not an assimilationist society like France. I have never visited there, but I presume the tipping point has not been reached yet whereby incoming groups outnumber those born there? In this case most immigrants will assimilate.

In Holland, by the year 2015/2020, 70% of children under 16 will be Muslims and many will not speak Dutch. Let's see how far tolerance of gays, free speech ( well, we know that one!), artistic license and a host of other things progresses then. It appears the murder of Fortyn and Van Gogh, with the astounding canvas or ironies and contraditions in each character killed, have simply sent multicultis into denial.

OG,
Australia is not Kenya, as you point out.

You missed my point. You say:

"where in history or anthropolgy we can find a "multicultural" society (as broadly meant today) has not produced an example. As suspected, the multi exponents are actually conducting an contemporaray experiment in political/social theory."

I'm not just talking about conservatives challenging multiculturalism in the name of traditional Aussie values and traditions. I'm arguing that Australia is both a liberal polity and a multicultural society.

Australia is a multicultural society with a limited immigration system, so its future is nothing like what you describe. It works okay with some rough edges and internal explosions.

It is not a case where incoming groups outnumber those born there.The majority of those born here have come from immigrant backgrounds. It is a nation of immigrants where the public education can teach second generation immmigrants (the children of the immigrants)English.

It's future is about an Islam coming to terms with modernity and a liberal Islam distinquishing itself from a fundamentalist Islam. The former is in the process of becoming a privatised religion. Liberalism has a series of mecahnisms to deal with religious conflicts.

So what if fundamentalists challenge the law of the land through the legal process and ask the High Court to adjudicate on polygamy? That is the courts to decide not me--given the separation of powers--even though I may, as a citizen, disagree with polygamy.

If you have a bunch of fundamentalist Christian pastors challenging free speech through the legal process---fine. They'd be wasting their time given the Australian constitution, but they are welcome to do so. How the court proceeds in the case is up to the court to decide surely. We have higher courts that can be appealed to if the lower court does not engage in due process.

You seem to want to disempower the court, do away with the separation of powers and place all authority and power in the hands of the social security state.

In short you want to do away with liberalism and a liberal polity.