A century ago, if a traveller had awakened on board a train steaming into Beijing, or Delhi, or Buenos Aires and looked out of the window he would immediately have recognized where he was; not, perhaps, the precise location, but certainly the region. The surrounding architecture, the common ethnicity of the inhabitants, their dress, the spoken language and a thousand cultural attributes would have proclaimed national identity. Such was the universal experience of travellers throughout history.
Today, arriving in a foreign city of any magnitude is an anticlimactic experience. With the exception of certain totemic buildings and, sometimes, entire quarters conserved as cultural heritage, the townscape at one’s destination will be identical to that at one’s point of departure. That means towering, brutalist-functional structures of steel and glass, reducing their inhabitants to antlike insignificance, the urban jungle made more lurid by garish neon – an environment alien to humanity, to culture, to aesthetics, to everything except the making of money.
The problem is that a developed world increasingly implies a monocultural world. International contractors erect the ugly buildings in which a deracinated humanity is hived. Easy accessibility of air travel is shrinking the planet and accelerating migration. With no conscious irony, liberals preach the virtue of “multiculturalism”. It has not impinged on their blinkered imagination that when every city eventually hosts an innumerable variety of ethnicities housed in buildings indistinguishable from one urban hell to another, what will have been created will not be “diversity” but global uniformity.
The drive for so-called diversity is the most potent engine of uniformity ever devised. It is promoted by an unholy alliance of doctrinaire one-world liberals and cosmopolitan capitalists who have embraced the healthy objective of wealth creation but filleted it of all societal context and cultural responsibility. The victims of this deadly pincer movement are national and regional cultures, aesthetics and identities. Genuine and beneficial diversity would be founded upon the conservation of the cultural integrity of individual countries, with permanent immigration kept below a ceiling of five per cent of the population, the point beyond which Aristotle believed any nation would lose its culture.
Technology has aggravated the evils of globalization. Never in the history of mankind have we had more effective means of communication; never have we had preoccupations less worth communicating. The collective prejudices promoted by social media have atrophied original thought. People now are largely incapable of thinking, equipped only to emote. Disrespect for classical culture, wisdom and religion is complemented by absurd deference towards alien notions and a cretinous “youth culture”. This last phenomenon has created a destructive generational apartheid unique in human history. Inexperience is valued as a source of wisdom, as rationality is displaced by modish partialities.
Everywhere outside their homes (and, it is to be feared, frequently inside too) people are kept in an enervated state by the relentless blaring of trashy music in all public places, even nowadays in bookshops. That music will often be identical in London, New York and Bangkok. The emergence of the term “vibrant” as a keyword in the lexicon of praise denotes the desire to deploy febrile activity as a preferred alternative to thought.
Diversity is similarly imposed as a moral ideal, but in reality it means the reverse of what it supposedly intends. When an English town comes to be populated by people of thirty different ethnicities, with the same number of languages spoken in its schools, it undoubtedly is diverse. However, as more and more towns, all across Europe, take on the same multicultural configuration the end result is uniformity. Moreover, it is a synthetically created, problematic uniformity, incorporating innumerable tensions and seeds of conflict.
The identities of all European nations are gravely endangered by immigration; but so are the identities of all Asian, African and other nations by globalization. We in the developed world have exported technology and innumerable other aspects of globalization to other continents; now the boomerang has come back to us. The populations of Third World countries are translating themselves, with no conceivable voluntary limit on numbers, to the West where the gates have long been held open for them by politicians whose irresponsibility will astound historians.
In Britain, the scale of that criminal irresponsibility was exposed by Andrew Neather, a former speechwriter to Tony Blair, who revealed that New Labour’s open-doors immigration policy was intended “to rub the Right’s nose in diversity”. What a jape. To devise policy affecting the demography, economy, culture, public services and core identity of the nation on the basis of spiting political opponents – what does that tell us about the mentality of those who have governed us?
Of course immigration will have to be drastically curtailed: the debate on that issue is over, only the implementation remains and the public will enforce its will. Yet there is a corollary that must be addressed too. If economic migrants have damaged Britain, the whole of the West has greatly damaged the emerging nations. Anyone who imagines colonialism ended on the stroke of that midnight when the imperial flag was lowered is sadly deluded. Cultural colonialism continues to flourish.
The built heritage of developing nations is being destroyed as well as that of Europe. We have encouraged other societies to follow us in mistaking amenity for civilization. We are within sight of the time when only mammoth and immovable features such as the Pyramids or the Great Wall of China will securely identify places and cultures that quite recently, in the perspective of history, proclaimed their identity to the most casual observer.
Aided by technology, the primary motor of this vandalism has been capitalism. This suggests we need a more culturally discriminating version of capitalism; a form of wealth creation that accepts sometimes it is necessary to forgo a decimal point on the profit margin, otherwise we shall grow rich in a world where there is nothing of worth to enjoy. In tandem with such a reappraisal, the imminent death of liberalism, its crass social engineering mania rejected by the peoples that have suffered from it, affords an opportunity to end the irresponsible transfer of human populations in pursuit of Utopian fantasies and allow individual nations to recover their identity, along with the stability that cultural homogeneity confers.
