The Integration Paradox

I. A Just So Story

Once upon a time, O Best Beloved, some New Peoples came to the Land of the Right People and the Left People.

The Right People said, "They must follow our ways! How else can we live together happily?"

But the Left People said, "No. Let them live their own ways. We shall live in our ways, and they shall live in their ways, and there shall be so many ways that everyone will be happy!"

And the Right People said, "But then we shall not be One People any more."

And the Left People said, "Good. We shall be Many Peoples."

So the Right People went back to their houses and their ways. In quiet, among themselves, they said that the New Peoples were very welcome to become Right People. Many of the New Peoples wanted to become Right People. They knew the difference between leg spin and off spin, and they knew all the words to "Immortal, Invisible". They knew about afternoon tea and Guy Fawkes and the Magna Carta and fair play and Oxbridge and lawyers' wigs and Dadabhai Naoroji. They thought that all sounded rather nice. But the Right People stayed in their houses and the New Peoples stayed in theirs: Right People (even the New People who were secretly Right People) like staying in their houses.

In quiet, among themselves, the Left People said that the New Peoples must not become Left People or Right People at all but must carry on doing things in very different ways, which will involve eating strange foods, dancing strange dances to strange music and wearing strange clothes. They said it would be quite wrong to make them do things like the Left People.

But the Left People did not stay in their houses. They busied about among the New Peoples telling them about people called Huguenots or Flemish weavers (although no one ever got to meet any of these people). They ate the foods of the New Peoples, but did not learn their dances, and they made up rules to explain why eating the New People's food was Good, learning their dances was Optional and wearing their clothes was Bad. They made up lots of rules for how Left People and Right People and New Peoples have to talk to each other. They made up new words to describe the New People. They made up new taboos and new heroes.

In the end, some of the New Peoples learned all the ways of the Left People and all the words of the Left People and all the taboos of the Left People and all the heroes of the Left People. They forgot all the ways of the New Peoples, and forgot the ways and words and taboos and heroes of their fathers. They became One People.

Then the Right People came out of their houses and said to the Left People, "You have become One People! You do not want Many Peoples at all. You just want One People who all follow the same ways!"

And the Left People said, "Yes, we must all be One People who follow the same ways, or how else can we live together happily?"

II. After the Just So Story

There is a paradox here. It is a standard right-wing objection to (what I would now regard as) old-fashioned multiculturalism that, by requiring no more of citizens than an adherence to 'tolerance', it produces a culture too thin and unappealing to deserve the loyalty or respect of immigrant communities. The host community, so the right-winger says, is not offering a real culture for the immigrant community to integrate into: contrast that situation with the Huguenots (who have the privilege, afforded also to Nazis, terrorists susceptible to torture and 'terminally ill people who are going to die anyway', of finding themselves usefully employed in any armchair-thinker's arguments), who came to England to practice the same religion as the host community and eventually assimilated into it.

That objection might make sense in theory, but it's becoming much less plausible in practice. (That is bad for a right-wing argument: such arguments need not work in theory, but they must work in practice.) A sufficiently thick culture has now grown up around what started out as mere 'tolerance' such that there is a host community culture, entirely different from the cultures of (say) Jamaica, Nigeria or India, that can plausibly demand the loyalty of people descended from immigrants.

Traditional culture has complicated rules, for example, about the order of precedence between the Lord Privy Seal and the Lord Great Chamberlain, or about whether mediatised princesses can marry royalty. These rules can be tricky to learn. But the same is true of the new rules. So you can change gender without making any changes to your body but you cannot change race no matter what you do to your body - got it? It is not cultural appropriation to eat curry (I am pretty sure), it might be cultural appropriation to make up your own jerk rice, and as for wearing ethnic clothes ... who knows?  I genuinely have no idea what the correct reaction is to the revelation that Elizabeth Warren's DNA test shows her to be between one one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth and one one-thousand-and-twenty-fourth Native American: Mark Steyn commented, "I know the old-school Democrats kept careful track of their quadroons and octoroons, but I don't think even they got up to centum-viginti-octoroons, never mind mille-viginti-quadroons", which is sort of my point - the new order of precedence is every bit as tricky as the old ones. There are complicated taboos to navigate that go well beyond simple 'tolerance' or just being nice to people.

Again, terms like 'BAME' or 'minority' or 'brown': these are (a) loaded words that have to be employed correctly and (b) entirely alien to the ancestral cultures of the people to whom they are applied. To be at home in the rules and terminology of the new ruling classes is to have left traditional cultures, whether indigenous or immigrant, well behind and to have integrated (or even assimilated) into a new, English-speaking and Anglosphere-based, elite group.

The Right does see this, albeit through a glass darkly. They point out that modern 'diversity' recruitment does not mean having people with different political opinions or different socio-economic backgrounds in the same workplace, it just means people who are all expensively-educated and believe the same things, but who might have different colour skins or enjoy different activities in the privacy of their own bedrooms. But isn't that near enough exactly what the Right wanted in the first place? Everyone believing the same things, with different skin tones and different activities in the privacy of their own kitchens? The Right had its chance to make its beliefs the ones that everyone shared -  books like Small Island show that easy it would have been - cricket and Christianity and Royalty were pretty easy to sell. The Right had its chance - and blew it.

Equally, the Left sees, again through a glass darkly, that it is destroying the diversity it sought to preserve. That is why questions of cultural appropriation are so fraught: the melting pot is very hot, and few cultures can withstand it. But maintaining the divisions of caste, or the rules of purdah, or the West Indian attitudes to homosexuality, is simply not compatible with what is now meant by 'tolerance'. You can try to belong to both - you can try 'code-switching', or keeping your new lifestyle secret from your grandparents - but that's hard. It's easier just to conform to the new ways.

Perhaps the moral is just that, as has been the case before, what the conservatives said was right and what the liberals did was right.