The antidote of multiculturalism - Page 4
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 15: Divided Nation
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Geoffrey Brahm Levey
THIS PICTURE OF INTEGRATION IS JUST AS UNREALISTIC as the assimilationist model. In Australia, as in other liberal democracies, there are myriad interactions among migrant groups and between them and the dominant cultural majority that result in cultural absorption and integration of one form or another. For obvious reasons, this absorption is mostly in the direction of the patterns of the dominant culture. John Hirst cites the stories of a Greek husband rejecting his wife's request for the family to acquire a goat as un-Australian, and of a proud Sri Lankan, Bekaboru Kiyanahati Balapan Koyako, coming to the realisation, in meeting other Australians, that he badly needed a shorter name (he chose Kojak). These are great examples of how national cultural integration is mediated in civil society, beyond the state. There are many other examples of the inductive power of Anglo-Australian culture at work in civil society, including the norms governing queue-forming, social space, voice-raising, speech turn-taking, spitting and belching, and the polite reluctance to use the car horn on anything but the most urgent occasions.
The mistake, of course, is to think that the integration is always in the direction of the cultural majority. The impact of Aboriginal culture on AngloAustralian culture – including vocabulary, motifs and art – is clear, if too little appreciated. Anglo-Australian culture also has been changed in various ways by successive waves of migrants, from the rise of soccer as a popular sport, to so-called "new Australian cuisine", to the now national preference for coffee over tea and wine over beer. Judging by the entries in metropolitan telephone directories, the conventions regarding the complexity of surnames have also been greatly extended.
So a national culture is forged in the hurly-burly of civil society, as well as in the institutions overseen by the state. In Australia, Anglo-Australian culture remains dominant, and one cannot begin to make sense of Australian institutions and life without understanding this. Still, in many ways the Anglo-Celtic Australian culture of old is increasingly becoming an "Anglomeltic" one in terms of the general patterns of Australian life. That is, Anglo-Australian culture – while still dominant – is being modified.
The continued and overwhelming dominance of "Anglo-Australia" on the country's institutions and norms helps to explain, why the metaphor of the "melting pot" has had such limited currency here. After all, one might assume, given claims about the highly integrationist nature of Australian society, that the "melting pot" better captures the prevailing circumstances in Australia than in the United States. Indeed, Hirst concludes his lecture on exactly this note: "The marrying and partnering of people of all sorts across all boundaries is the great unifying force in Australia. The United States of America never saw such a rapidly melting melting pot. It will produce before too long a new people, who will have darker skins, much better suited to this place and our sun."
In its traditional meaning, as made popular in the United States in the early twentieth century by the English-Jewish immigrant playwright Israel Zangwill, the "melting pot" stood for a kind of democratic assimilation in which all the various immigrant cultures would combine to produce a "new American" identity. Hirst certainly suggests this meaning by his vision of a "new [Australian] people". And yet, while he entertains a changed skin colour, all but one of his examples of cultural absorption involve migrants accepting the established Anglo-Australian way of life. The one exception involves a Vietnamese busker in downtown Sydney playing the didgeridoo. Unimagined, and perhaps unimaginable, are true-blue Australians playing the sitar. As Hirst himself notes, "new Australian" was the standard term bestowed on recent migrants in the postwar period, and it presumed their acceptance of the Australian way of life as they found it. For Zangwill and the "melting pot", the idea of a "new American" involved a genuinely new identity; Down Under, being a "new Australian" meant that one was on route to becoming an "old Australian".
Multiculturalism in Australia has relaxed some of the pressures and expectations on migrants to travel this route. However, pace many of its critics, multiculturalism has not radically transformed the landscape of Australian national identity. If there are changes in the future, they will have little to do with multicultural policy, and everything to do with the thinking and feeling of Australians at the time. In the meantime, we would do well to remember – or learn – that national identity is multifaceted and has different domains.
Some years ago, the American political philosopher Michael Walzer (Political Theory, vol. 12, 1984) described liberalism as the "art of separation". We in Australia need to master this art a bit better than we have. There are aspects of national identity having to do with Australian character that will naturally affect the way we govern ourselves, but which we can scarcely do anything about without warping them. There are aspects of national identity which are duly the province of government, such as the inculcation and transmission of a national language, the teaching of the nation's history, and the establishment of national institutions, holidays and memorials. And there are aspects of national identity that properly belong in the realm of civil society and beyond the business of government, such as how people dress, call themselves, or spend their leisure, what languages they speak to each other, and even in what accent they speak their English. Here, among the myriad relations of Australians, will also be forged the habits and sentiments and character of the Australian people.
Most of the time, our political leaders intuitively respect these different boundaries of national identity. The recent campaign to tie Australian citizenship more tightly to English language proficiency, however justified or efficacious such a move might be, treats an aspect of national identity that is properly the prerogative of government. Too often, however, our leaders entertain ideas of legislating the Australian character rather than national identity, and thus brook corrupting both. Or, with shades of Orwell, they seek to dictate the cultural choices of Australians in civil society in the name of "our values" when they are decidedly not our values. Multiculturalism, understood as a set of policies integrating a culturally diverse society based on liberal democratic norms, helps to preserve the liberal art of separation. It is the antidote and not the poison. ♦