Mixing the teams up

British multiculturalism is losing its way. Attacks are plentiful, whereas its defenders seem to have gone very quiet of late. Even the ghost of Christmas past Norman Tebbit can take a side swipe at it and fail to sound controversial.

The following heavy handed quote is from an article about Michael Howards views on the subject, and it bangs in the nails to the coffin:

"Multiculturalism means making no judgments about another’s chosen way of life. At its worst it means accepting Polygamy, Female Circumcision, Forced Marriage and a host of other wonderful ideas, from cultures whose value is apparently equal to our own."

These examples provide shock value and more practically a clash between foreign culture and local law. But the basic point is true enough - there is no future in little cultural bubbles that are sacrosanct and do not interact. People come to the UK to share the genius of Protestant work culture, combined with a relatively liberal social environment. Of course, some clearly don't buy into it, as we have seen recently. But the bottom line is that most residents of any country want to express the host culture in the way they choose. Multiethnic yes, Beer and curry definitely, multicultural probably not.

Many Londoners may have thought that multiculturalism was seriously harmed by 7/7. But remember what happened the day before. One of the unique aspects of the successful London Olympic bid compared with Paris was indeed the M word. It probably would have figured in the minds of some Muslim committee voters. Which country had recently banned its students from wearing religious garb? Not Britain.

Now of course, we will likely see the acceleration of the integrationist agenda in the UK. I note that New Labour's ethnic rebranding exercise just involved adding "- British" on the end of any grouping. Clerics have already been asked to preach in English. Faith schools will have their syllabus plans carefully examined. The un-British will be increasingly encouraged to leave the country. Sven Goran Eriksson will be asked to wed quietly and to get excited about watching England instead.

This gives us integration as the alternative way to make the alien acceptable - but there is one issue: inter racial relationships. It is, after all, the most complete form of integration, but its not a much discussed topic.

If there is one problem with talking about "race", its the lack of agreement about what it means. We recognise persistent racial characteristics, because the human brain is a great pattern matching machine. Our innate ability to quickly recognise faces gives us more power than we need. It is vital to be able to recognise a human from a lion. It is vital for a child to recognise its mother from any other woman. Its useful to recognise members of your tribe or clan from those outside. But given that racial characteristics account for about 0.01% of genetic variation, its a fairly limited mechanism in the modern world.

This matters only in that some consider that inter racial marriages create diversity in the form of mixed race progeny, wheras others believe it breaks racial heritage by admixture. Natuarlly, few scientists want to go anywhere near this debate. Some current research basically goes along with the accepted ideas; a racial mix introduces "vigour" in the gene pool reducing dangerous inbred traits, but may lead to unexpected gene pairings which could impact health.

From the political aspect, we recognise that racial communities don't mix that much. While it remains a utopian solution to racism, (everyone is brown, like in the last human city in The Matrix) miscegenation is only a practical issue in large urban communities. Indeed, a more relevant problem for small towns and villages is failure to keep apart members of the same family.

In previous times miscegenation was encouraged occasionally, specifically during colonization - the Portugeause policy helped build Brazil. Usually it is either tolerated, or not. In the "melting pot" of the US. anti-miscegenation laws were not ruled unconstitutional until 1967.

Recently, a popular stress on cultural identity, has worked to apply fresh paint on racial boundaries. Whether this is some form of reactionary force due to greater travel and a smaller world, or a requirement for minority communities under attack, the effect is that communities seek to retain "ownership" of things that help to define them. From this point of view, to mix is to lose. Thus a potential white American president will now hire a black Secreatry of State, but not marry his hispanic maid in order to grab votes. (I'm not sure where oral sex with a Jewish intern figures here.)

Countering this, traditionally conservative Christians are now happier to re-examine scripture to ensure Christians marry other Christians regardless of race. This is quite a volte-face from church views in the previous century.

Perhaps the future lies not between two competings systems, but in how things are at the moment, with the cities maintaining diversity and the regions retaining traditional values. But this is a little prescriptive. For most people the balance is simply between security and freedom of expression. The question for now is what to do when the needs of one corrupt the needs of the other.