The triumph of 'asymmetrical multiculturalism'

Sometimes it's better to be the far-group than the out-group

‘The eager Anglo-Saxon who goes to a vivid American university to-day [finds] his true friends not among his own race but among the acclimatized German or Austrian, the acclimatized Jew, the acclimatized Scandinavian or Italian. In them he finds the cosmopolitan note. In these youths, foreign-born or the children of foreign-born parents, he is likely to find many of his old inbred morbid problems washed away. These friends are oblivious to the repressions of that tight little society in which he so provincially grew up.’

So wrote the Greenwich Village intellectual Randolph Bourne in a groundbreaking article for The Atlantic magazine in July 1916. Bourne was a core part of the liberal Progressive movement of the 1910s, a group which was to have a far-reaching influence on the western, especially English-speaking world. Most importantly, they were to help influence what is now termed ‘asymmetrical multiculturalism’, the system by which modern democracies manage their increasingly diverse population — a system filled with contradictions and inconsistencies.

‘Asymmetrical multiculturalism’ was first coined by demographer Eric Kaufmann in his 2004 book The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, and later developed in his more recent Whiteshift, in a chapter charting Bourne’s circle, the ‘first recognisably modern left-liberal open borders movement’. 

Kaufmann wrote how asymmetrical multiculturalism ‘may be precisely dated’ to the article where Bourne, ‘a member of the left-wing modernist Young Intellectuals of Greenwich Village and an avatar of the new bohemian youth culture,’ declared ‘ that immigrants should retain their ethnicity while Anglo-Saxons should forsake their uptight heritage for cosmopolitanism.’

Kaufmann suggested that: ‘Bourne’s desire to see the majority slough off its poisoned heritage while minorities retained theirs blossomed into an ideology that slowly grew in popularity. From the Lost Generation in the 1920s to the Beats in the ’50s, ostensibly “exotic” immigrants and black jazz were held up as expressive and liberating contrasts to a puritanical, square WASPdom. So began the dehumanizing de-culturation of the ethnic majority that has culminated in the sentiment behind, among other things, the viral hashtag #cancelwhitepeople.’

The hope, as John Dewey said of his New England congregationalist denomination around the same time as Bourne, was that America’s Anglo-Saxon core population would ‘universalise itself out of existence’ while leading the world towards universal civilisation.

The problem, as the system was put into effect in the closing decades of the 20th century, was the asymmetry, not just in the way that group identities were treated but in the taboos and repressions groups were expected to absorb; this asymmetry reflected both confident upper-class tolerance, but also (certainly in Bourne’s case) confident upper-class superiority and snobbery.

While in the 19th century the West’s intellectual leaders had often expressed their moral and intellectual superiority over the lesser races, by the 1920s the intelligentsia were more concerned with superiority over their own people, the less educated and sophisticated lumpen middle Americans they often despised.

These co-ethnics were the out-group, while the foreigners, with their ‘cosmopolitan note’, were the far-group; the out-groups it is permitted to dislike, to make the source of hostility or butt of one’s humour, but the far-group is to be protected and feted.

And this division held true as multiculturalism came to be implemented in the 1960s, both in the US and, under Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, in Britain. Just as the post-Edwardian intellectuals had imagined it, multiculturalism was asymmetrical from the start; some cultures were to be prized and patronised, while others were downplayed; ethnic modesty if not shame was to be encouraged in some groups and ethnic narcissism in others; and some forms of prejudice were far more stigmatised than others.

There was a distinct absence of logic in the system where asymmetry was somehow accepted; after all, many of the arguments made for multiculturalism (in its hard sense) are also arguments for ethnic separatism, in particular the argument often made that minority status, and the absence of high-ranking authority figures from the same race, contributes to greater anxiety, stress or mental illness (which it almost certainly does). As an example, the most recent EDI report from my son’s school listed among its recommendations or aspirations that black children would do better if they had more black teachers — and, while maybe that’s true, no one could deny that this is an idea which can only be applied asymmetrically.

This makes sense if one believes that there is a power imbalance between groups — and there clearly is, both in terms of Britain’s own history but also globally because of the recent existence of European empires. There are obviously different standards to be applied to majorities and minorities, because one is clearly more vulnerable.

The problem with this system is that humans have a deeply ingrained sense of fairness, and the most successful legal systems in the world have as a founding principle the idea that the law must be applied to everyone equally. Multiculturalism can’t really work if we don’t treat people the same, and that also means treating groups the same. Everyone on some level knows this — they just think the problem will somehow resolve itself somehow. 

But until that resolution happens, and assuming it will, the consequences of this asymmetry can be brutal.

Late last year I wrote about the tragedy of Telford, a town in the English midlands where huge numbers of young girls had been sexually abused. Telford, along with Rotherham in South Yorkshire, had become synonymous with this form of sexual abuse, mostly committed by men of Kashmiri origin against girls who were poor, white and English. 

This is the subject of an upcoming GB News documentary by journalist Charlie Peters, and it is quite clear, from all the various reports, that grooming had been allowed to carry on in part because of the different ways the system treats different groups.

Had the races of the perpetrators and victims been reversed, this tragedy would almost certainly be the subject of countless documentaries, plays, films and even official days of commemoration. But it wouldn’t have come to that, because the authorities would have intervened earlier, and more journalists would have been on the case.

Sex crime is perhaps the most explosive source of conflict between communities, and most recently the 2005 Lozells riots began over such a rumour. It is understandable why journalists and reporters were nervous about this subject; less forgivable is the way that, away from the public eye, those in charge signal how gravely they view what happened.

Until Peters revealed the story, Labour had planned to make the former head of Rotherham council its candidate for Rother Valley; this week Peters revealed that one of the councillors named in a report into the town’s failures to deal with the grooming gangs scandal has gone onto become a senior Diversity & Inclusion Manager working for the NHS. Presumably the people who hired Mahroof Hussain knew about his previous job, and still felt that it was appropriate to have him in a ‘diversity and inclusion’ position. Again, were things different, would a Mr Smith whose council had been condemned for its handling of the gang rape of Asian girls have landed that job? The whole thing seems as morbidly comic as Rotherham becoming Children’s Capital of Culture.

Such a clear inconsistency can only exist because of socially-enforced taboos and norms which have developed over race. In Whiteshift, Kaufmann cited sociologist Kai Erikson’s description of norms as the ‘accumulation of decisions made by the community over a long time’ and that ‘each time the community censures some act of deviance… it sharpens the authority of the violated norm and re-establishes the boundaries of the group.’ Every time an individual is punished for violating the anti-racism norm, it strengthens society’s taboo around the subject, to the point where it begins to overwhelm other moral imperatives.

Then there is regalisation, the name for the process ‘in which adherents of an ideology use moralistic politics to entrench new social norms and punish deviance’, in Kaufmann’s words. This has proved incredibly effective; after paedophilia or sexual abuse, racism is perhaps the most damaging allegation that can be made.

Few people wish to be accused of deviance, which perhaps explains why Peters’s story has received so little coverage in the press this week. Again, were the roles reversed, it’s not wild speculation to suggest that it would feature on the Today programme, seen as clear evidence of racism at the heart of Britain. When the Telford story broke, it did not even feature on the BBC’s Shropshire home page.

I concede that complaining about BBC coverage is inherently tedious and low status, and I am guilty as charged, but the caginess towards this subject is felt across the media, even in the conservative press, a result of decades of regalisation. Taboo enforcement works, even when this taboo is applied inconsistently.

Asymmetrical multiculturalism exists because (mostly white) elites tend to view whites and minorities differently, as having differing levels of agency and power. This is not to say that ‘libs are the real racists’, because that’s not true, and among groups the power imbalance was and is most certainly real — but among individuals it is not. The people most affected by the grooming gangs were among the least powerful people in Britain, not just powerless in themselves but without any friends in high places. 

They had no community representatives within the machine, no champions in government and certainly not many sympathisers in the media. As the weakest members of the most powerful group, they were always going to be asymmetrical multiculturalism’s fall guys, the sacrificial lambs to equity and inclusion. The out-group, in other words.