Geoff's Blog

Since the early 1970s, multiculturalism has been an official policy of the Canadian government.

Why?

The bill which brought that policy into law was really just a ploy by our fox-in-the-henhouse Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (when his flower-girl wife wasn’t busy partying with the Rolling Stones) to diminish the “distinct society” claims of the French-speakers in Quebec, by encouraging/enshrining the distinctiveness of all cultures. Trudeau actually thought so little of the “accomplishment” that he didn’t even mention it in his memoirs. (I’m doing that mostly from memory, based on Bissoondath’s and Stoffman’s books on the flaws of multiculturalism and Canada’s immigration policy. Incidentally, since the mid-1980s, our Immigration Review Board has approved 90% of the “refugee” claims made to it. The global average is 15%. A lot of the “refugees” who wind up in Canada, then, not only are not fleeing for their lives from oppression, they’re just using Canada as an easy way to enter the United States: Show up with no documentation, claim refugee status, maybe draw welfare for awhile, and then head south to plot how to blow up Washington, DC. If you wonder why Canada is indeed a “safe haven for terrorists,” that’s the reason. Don’t blame me, though: I didn’t vote for the lying bastard who screwed this country over just to reward some political buddies of his with six-figure patronage appointments, in creating the IRB. If I recall correctly, Canada is actually the only country in the world today that accepts refugee claims for people “fleeing” from the United States!)

The American “melting pot” idea was always a better way of doing things, even if it only “really worked” for WASPs immigrating to the U.S., and even then for much lower annual percentages of immigration than the United States and Canada currently have, forcing people to assimilate and learn English rather than taking easy refuge in their transplanted “traditional” communities. But neither approach can work to produce an integrated society if the country’s level of immigration is too high, as Canada’s is, at ~1% annually. (In Vancouver right now, there are Chinese enclaves where the parents commute to work in other parts of the city, being very well integrated into the existing society. But their children still all go to the local school, where they talk to each other only in Chinese. So, we have second-generation Canadians growing up today who aren’t learning English in school. What kind of future do they have in this country … unless they want to try and grow that Chinese-only enclave even larger?)

Our Liberal Party supports high levels of immigration because they think it ups their voter base. The Conservative Party supports high levels because it drives wages down. And the feel-good, socialist/union-supporting New Democratic Party likes it because they’re so economically incompetent they don’t even realize that companies will contract-out to cheap labor rather than deal with unions full of people who are too stupid and too lazy to work real jobs for a competitive wage. (If there’s one group I can’t stand even more than lazy, stupid, overpaid union members and their leaders … it would have to be upper management, i.e., MBAs and CEOs. At least they’re not typically lazy, though. Incompetent, yes; in spades. But at least they’re not Toronto [TTC] bus drivers making an average of $46K per year, while computer programmers—including myself—get paid less.)

So, it’s not just the I.T. industry in Canada that’s gotten fucked by our politicians; it’s happening right across the board. In fact, only around 30% of new immigrants to Canada today are skilled workers; the rest are unskilled family and grandparents (“family reunification”), etc. And if you factor out the percentage of Ph.D.’s who end up driving cabs—meaning not that they’re not being given a fair chance to be employed in their areas of expertise, but rather that the market for their skills is already saturated, so they obviously should never have been allowed to enter the country to work in the first place…

If you want to know why multiculturalism, even in principle, creates conflict rather than tolerance among its groups, just read up on Sherif’s Robbers Cave experiment:

In 1954, Muzafer and Carolyn Sherif studied the origin of prejudice in social groups in a classic study called the Robbers Cave Experiment. He conducted his research in a 200 acre (0.8 km²) Boy Scouts of America camp which was completely surrounded by Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma.

During the study, Sherif posed as a camp janitor. The study team screened a group of 22 eleven year-old boys with similar backgrounds. They were picked up by two buses carrying eleven boys each. Neither group knew of the other’s existence. The boys were assigned to two living areas far enough apart that each group remained ignorant of the other’s presence for the first few days. The Sherifs had broken up pre-existing friendships to the extent they could, so that each boy’s identification with his new group could happen faster. Asked to choose names for their groups, one chose “The Rattlers”, the other “The Eagles.” Within two or three days, the two groups spontaneously developed internal social hierarchies.

The experiment was broken into three phases.

• In-group formation, as described above.
• A Friction Phase, which included first contact between groups, sports competitions, etc.
• An Integration Phase (reducing friction).

None of the boys were previously acquainted before the experiment, but hostility between the groups was observed within days of first contact. Phase Two activities proceeded as planned, but soon proved overly successful. Hostility between the groups escalated to the point where the study team concluded the friction-producing activities could not continue safely. Phase Two was terminated and Phase Three commenced.

To lessen friction and promote unity between the Rattlers and Eagles, Sherif devised and introduced tasks that required cooperation between the two groups. These tasks are referred to in the study as superordinate goals. A superordinate goal is a desire, challenge, predicament or peril that both parties in a conflict need to get resolved, and that neither party can resolve alone. Challenges set up by the Sherifs included a water shortage problem, a “broken down” camp truck that needed enough “man” power to be pulled back to camp, and finding a movie to show. These and other necessary collaborations caused hostile behavior to subside. The groups bonded to the point that, by the end of the experiment, the boys unanimously insisted they all ride back home on the same bus.

As David Berreby then notes, in Us And Them:

Even though they had never heard of Rattlers and Eagles until they invented the names, the boys attached a full array of moral feelings to the human kinds they’d made. At the height of their war, campers in each group saw their enemies as cheaters and cowards—not as kids from another team but as kids from a different morality….

Robbers Cave was a microcosmic version of twentieth-century political life, its two cabins arranged like the two races of America’s color line or the two sides of the Cold War.

All you have to do is replace the “Rattlers” and “Eagles” groups with “Red and Yellow, Black and White” ones, to see how little sense it makes to encourage them to retain their group-identities as points of pride, when that will only create conflict. That has nothing to do with race or ethnicity or culture as such; it’s just inherent in-group/out-group dynamics. (Any racial, ethnic or cultural tensions will certainly make the situation worse, but it was already more than bad enough in Sherif’s experiment even just with a couple of groups of Boy Scouts!) All of that has been known since the mid-1950s!

It is said that the British Labour party [formed in 1906] was born only after representatives of its warring factions spent an hour moving their conference table into a larger room. (Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions)

See? People working together to achieve a common goal where everyone wins, rather than styling themselves as “warring factions,” each out to maximize the benefits for their particular “group” at the expense of the others. (Of course, there it was presumably just a bunch of white males cooperating, so they didn’t need to face any additional hurdles in racial or sexual diversity.)

Yet, there’s still more to it than that:

[In the 1950s, Gordon] Allport proposed that prejudices could be reduced if people from different human kinds met as equals, had some shared goal to work for, and had support—or at least no opposition—from the law….

Allport never said mere “goodwill contact” could overcome prejudice; in fact, he said exactly the opposite, warning that successful contact required the conditions he specified. Nonetheless, his idea led to today’s conventional wisdom that contact among different human kinds—diversity—is in itself good for mind and soul.

Yet scholars now agree the contact hypothesis is a muddle. Some studies suggest that prejudice goes down with contact, but others find the opposite. Actual contact sometimes makes people more prejudiced. On many American college campuses, for example, the emphasis on diversity has led students to join one of these diverse human kinds and shun much contact with the others….

More successful than telling children not to be prejudiced against, say, the Christian kids, is persuading them not to see Christian kids, because another set of human kinds—say, Blue Ghosts and Red Genies—is more relevant. In the 1970s, the American social psychologist Elliot Aronson devised the “Jigsaw classroom.” His approach places students in small groups and forces them to work together on tasks, for example, learning about twentieth-century history. Racial, ethnic, gender, and school-clique boundaries don’t count for the task: The kids must work together to master their subject. The idea is that these preclass human kinds fade in importance and the kids’ shared work comes to the fore….

In long-standing political conflicts, exactly the opposite happens. Life is organized in a number of ways to prevent alternative human kinds [i.e., alternative group-boundary drawings] from forming in anyone’s mind. (Berreby, Us And Them)

One of the few places in this world where you get an approximately “Jigsaw classroom” approach is on the sports field—where no one on any given team can win unless everyone on that team does well, and where people are seen foremost as the human-kind of “football players,” etc., and only secondarily in terms of their ethnic background or otherwise. (That outward show of cooperation of course neglects the fact that the second-stringers on a team can’t really be completely

hoping that the first-stringers do well, as the latter’s success would only decrease their own playing time. Still, among the players on the field at any given time, you can’t win the game if other members of your team play poorly.) That sort of thing is the only way to reliably build cooperation rather than in-group/out-group competition.

If you want to find the landmarks in racial integral in North America, look for when the color bar was broken in each of the major sports. That may even have begun as just a rich white team-owner figuring out that he could win more games with the best (e.g.) second-baseman from the Negro Leagues this season than with the old, marginally skilled white guy at the same position. (Dodgers’ manager Leo Durocher: “I don’t care if the guy is yellow or black, or if he has stripes like a fuckin’ zebra. I’m the manager of this team, and I say he plays. What’s more, I say he can make us all rich. And if any of you can’t use the money, I’ll see that you are all traded.”) But it also brought the sports fans (and what male in North America isn’t a fan of some sport?) into a position where, if their team was to win, the “black guy at second base” had to do his job well—so, to cheer against him, or hope for him to fail, would have been a case of them “cutting off their noses to spite their face.” They had to hope that the black guy did well, if their team was going to win. The nation-wide effects of that cooperation (and of “our team” human-kind-categorizing among both the players and the fans) on the sports field cannot be overestimated.

In contrast to the Jigsaw classroom and the sports field, and far from teaching us not to see Christians, Jews, blacks, Chinese and Muslim people (etc.) in the world around us, one of the essential points of multiculturalism (as also in “long-standing political conflicts”) is that we should see each one of those groups … and then simply appreciate/tolerate/celebrate (or make war on) them all equally. Well, good luck with that dream! Obviously, it’s not going to work!

Equally obviously, one could draw the in-group/out-group boundary based on any shared/excluded characteristic. But the very first impressions we get about others typically come through our sense of vision—we see them on the street or across the room before we hear, smell, touch or (after a few dates, if all goes well) taste them—and include their skin color, ethnic group, sex, and body type. And when your country has an official policy which actually encourages you to see and celebrate others in terms of any of those shallow attributes, it is basically a policy of “first impressions,” which immediately gets in the way of looking beyond those external characteristics to see an individual rather than a stereotypical member of a group:

A person meeting a stranger can feel, because of the signs the stranger displays, that this unknown person is one of “us.” His skin is the same color as ours, even if he doesn’t speak our language. He speaks our language, even though his skin is a different color. He is not of our color or language, but look, he’s carrying a soccer ball. He’s playing our game…. [cf. this]

Sherif … suggests that we don’t believe in racial and religious and national divisions because we’re told to but rather because our daily experiences are organized to make those categories relevant and useful—and to make other ways of sorting people useless [or at least less useful]. (Berreby, Us And Them)

Of course, in an officially multicultural society we are told to believe in racial and religious divisions; but that only reinforces our de facto way of “sorting people.” You’re not even “Canadian,” you’re rather “Chinese-Canadian” or “Caribbean-Canadian,” i.e., it’s based on your ethnicity (which you can’t do anything about, even if you wanted to), not your nationality. Cf. this:

Nationalism must have been a much punier thing before cheap rapid travel, because whatever you were was the default thing to be.

Paradoxically, it meant less (i.e., it was “punier”) for being your default identity, which you couldn’t do much about unless you wanted to emigrate to somewhere else and “start over”; but (in other contexts) it also meant more, precisely for being something you could fall back on even when all other shifting “identities” and in-groups failed.

Ah, and here’s another completely predictable outcome of multicultural policy coupled with excessive levels of immigration:

[A]ccording to a 2007 University of Toronto study, many recent non-white citizens [esp. from China, South Asia and the Caribbean] do not identify themselves as being “Canadian.”  (Wikipedia)

And what follows next from that?

Canada, long considered a model of integration, won’t be forever immune from the kind of social disruption that has plagued Europe, where marginalized immigrant communities have erupted in discontent, with riots in the Paris suburbs in the fall of 2005. (Globe & Mail)

To which one can only wonder out loud: “What Would Ann Coulter Do?”

Honestly, when new minority immigrants are being encouraged to retain their traditional “Rattler” cultural identities in the midst of a majority “Eagle” group at our national “summer camp,” rather than to identify as all being “Camp Woebegoners,” how much knowledge of half-century-old social psychology does it take to predict that they’ll end up feeling excluded and marginalized? Out-group exclusion and marginalization are significant enough problems with human beings in any context. But when your country’s official policy can only act to support those same dynamics, you really are asking for trouble.

In the world as it stands today, levels of immigration approaching 1% per year (i.e., a whopping 23% over 25 years, or roughly one generation, in Canada) are a guaranteed way to end up with a very conflicted and non-integrated society, particularly when the bulk of new immigrants are sadly unskilled. (Canada has the highest per-capita immigration rate in the world, but the “23%” above is actually a deceptively low figure, since most new immigrants move to only one of three major cities: Vancouver, Montreal, or Toronto … with 43% of immigrants moving to the Greater Toronto Area, thus simultaneously driving housing prices up, and wages down for both skilled and unskilled workers.)

[I]n the early 1990s, the old [right-wing] Reform Party was branded “racist” for suggesting that immigration levels be lowered from 250,000 to 150,000.

Yeah, but you know what? The Party was absolutely right to make that suggestion. And the country would have been wise to act on it, rather than screaming hysterically about the supposed “racism” of a Very Sensible And Much-Needed Idea. (Never mind that such a reduction would surely have applied as much to Caucasians coming here from England, etc.—such as the one who took over my job [for lower wages] as a programmer back in the middle of 2003—as to other races from elsewhere.) “Road to hell, good intentions, bleeding-heart liberals,” etc.

In the long run, though, as the very entertaining Canadian comedian Russell Peters has observed, there won’t be any white-skinned or black-skinned or yellow-skinned people anymore. Rather, the whole species will end up as a pleasing shade of light brown (like the Anglo-Indian Peters himself!). That is, over the next few hundred years intermarriage will rightfully dissolve the whole idea of distinct cultures and races; thus ironically producing, in its own way, the precise opposite of multiculturalism.

Consider the actress Vanessa Hudgens: “Hudgens’s father is an American of Irish and Native American descent, and her mother, who grew up in Manila, is a Filipino-born of Filipino, Spanish and Chinese ancestry.” With what “distinct culture” could Hudgens possibly identify? And with what traditional culture or race or even cuisine could her children possibly identify?

So you see, once again, “Love will conquer all.” Or at least, sex will. You can see that on any warm summer evening on the streets around the U of Toronto campus, where testosterone and estrogen rightfully matter far more than do skin color or ethnic background.

“Darwin would have wanted it that way.”