The uncontrollable steady build-up of variegated societies in the west, and which has been going on from the time when the Europeans first felt the economic need to engage in massive imports of domitable manpower 500 years ago from Africa and the Middle East, has resulted in such unexpected social slants in a politically changing world that, unfortunately, does not seem to be stepping away from its basic protectionist principles. And this has been aggravated by more recent influxes of economic and political migrants from the third world, in search of a better life, and has ended up causing various social and judiciary concerns that now touch the most deprived and disfranchised social strata of these nations, vastly composed by both the descendents of former human imports and the current immigrants, all of whom now seem to be categorised on similar social classes if not the same class. As a consequence, psychological tensions have permanently settled in and have overpowered the humanistic aspirations of the resulting so-called 'multicultural societies' that, yet, were so copiously endorsed by these Western nations at the time of need. It, therefore, seems that there is now an imperative necessity to enforce new types of subtle institutional injustice onto these types of human species that still do not seem to fit even in diversity.
These problems are sharply manifest in issues of discrimination and phobia towards race, faith and even ideology, which affect very much of our daily lives today in these Western nations. As a human soul, I take these issues quite seriously. this is even why I take trouble writing this type of articles - I have also resolved many of such difficult issues in my recent book: Third Mind (2006) - because not only do these difficult issues cramp our sense of social cohesion and national consolidation in whatever political structure to which we 'belong' in the West, they also impinge on individuals' ability, skills and good will to play their part and fulfil themselves in their respective societies for being unfortunate enough to carry the stigma of new fascist definitions of the term 'immigrant'.
Somebody once made a sarcastic remark to me during a conversation in which we were discussing this subject by saying that in Britain today, many people spend 80% of their time fighting for their rights; the remaining 20% of their time can only help them achieve a sad, rebellious and sloppy subsistence. And most of the reasons that turn a great number of people into that regrettable breed are racial, religious and ideological differences, which many of us see as relevant factors for cultural distinctiveness and, therefore, social incompatibility between humans. And, in the mind of many of us, it seems that the right culprit to charge for this societal dis-ease is what i may call the 'uncultivable seeds of multiculturalism'.
What I want to do in this article - the length of which, I am afraid, might be quite annoying to you, dear reader, but probably worth taking a look at - is to argue that if there is anything at all that may lead people to feel different from one another to the point of being unable to share the same society harmoniously, it is most certainly not 'multiculturalism'; and, if it is, it must have very little or nothing to do with religion, race or ideology; because none of these three concepts has itself much to do with 'culture'. In fact, what I am going to try and show here is that the concept of 'culture' has been so increasingly ill-defined and misapprehended over the past century by media agents, scholars and politicians so much so that it has resulted very easy for people to raise cultural arguments in issues that are not cultural at all, because just anything is now seen as culture. I will take shortcuts all the way through the article to make it a bit easy, although these shortcuts themselves may take a few paragraphs to be made intelligible.
So, take the concept of religion, as my first shortcut, and just think of some politicians and journalists who appear on your television screen almost every evening and who, quite insistently, seem to be adamant to publicise the sense of tolerance that they have shown in allowing their countries to become multicultural, not least of all that these countries are actually multicultural, but because the adjacent plant of a mosque to a church in Birmingham City is, very often, for them, an outstanding factor of 'multicultural' Britain.
My objective here is to suggest, probably against your expectation, that the coexistence of a Muslim and a Christian in Birmingham does actually not imply that Britain is multicultural. What I mean is that there is a big difference between the concept of culture and the concept of religion. A multi-religious society is not a multicultural society, because religion does really not equal culture. Many of us may be surprised at this declaration. But I am going to show why I say this.
A religion is an order of faith centred on a spiritual wisdom or an ideology and practised through a number of ritual acts and social attitudes. This is surely where the problem lies. Religious practices do display a certain number of social attitudes. And because, for some people, social attitudes and ways of life are often seen as cultural features, then religion ends up vetting the wrong label: culture.
Just take these benign examples of social attitudes and ways of life that happen to overlap with the concept of culture in order to understand what I am trying to say here. You will find, for example, many Latin-Americans who see their cultural identity through the steps of a Salsa dancer, not least that Salsa is a culture but because Salsa is part of their way of life, that is to say, an outstanding feature of their social behaviour. And they end up calling it culture. You could also think of the case of binge drinking, which is part of the English society's way of life and that is often referred to as a culture by some people in England.
Now, the reason why social attitudes and ways of life cannot, in my approach, be confounded with the notion of cultural identity is simply because it is perfectly practical for different societies to display similar social attitudes and ways of life whilst they themselves do not come under the same cultural identity at all. Dr Jeremy Narby had already pointed this anthropological fallacy in The Cosmic Serpent (2001) by noting that different cultures can perfectly make similar discoveries and display similar ways of life either out of a mere chanceful coincidence or due to emulation (because societies do copy from others). For example, the fact that many English people dance Salsa today does not force them to sharing the same cultural identity as the Cubans; they just happened to like and therefore copy this amazing dance from a different society that has its own cultural identity. And this is a characteristic that religions also display: they can be practised by people from very diametrically divergent cultural identities either because of the fact that religions are held from some basic moral principles that most human societies coincidentally share or because they are most often exported from society to society where they end up incurring some similar attitudes shared between all those who practice them irrespective or their basic different cultural identities. The fact that English Catholic priests and French Catholic priests display similar attitudes does not imply that the French culture and the English culture are the same. It simply means that they practise the same religious tradition whilst remaining 'culturally' different.
And not only that, religious traditions, like any other traditions, are mostly inventions that often spring from within societies that already have their own attitudes and ways of life that then end up interfering in the way in which these religions are to be practised; therefore, the practice of a religion invented and worked out in Arabia, for example, will ineluctably display some of the social features that are typically inherent to the Arab way of life and that may have existed even before the invention of the said religion. And these social features may happen to be shared between different societies that would, yet, be under different cultural identities in essence, because these societies themselves may either be geographical contiguous (which often lead cultures to borrowing from one another's way of life even before they happen to practise any religion at all) or due to the fact that once a religion is born in a determined society, some of that society's attitudes that end up being incorporated into the practice of that religion - now seen by some people as inherent to that religion - may end up being shared between all societies that end up adopting that religion even though not only would these societies themselves be under different cultural identities in essence, but also the social attitudes that they may end up sharing thorough the sharing of that religion may themselves not have been invented for the sole purpose of practising that religion, but rather as the result of a mere chanceful incorporation of these pre-existing social attitudes into that religion once invented.
If one takes Islam, which is the case to which I am intending to refer here, one will see that there is an incredible number of attitudes that are now seen as typically Islamic attitudes even though they actually have nothing to do with Islam but rather with the Arab way of life and that did exist far before Muhammad himself was born. For example, if one takes a closer look at a typical catholic Madonna one might be surprised that the Holy Virgin Mary looks very much like a Muslim woman, not least that she was, but because women from many Middle Eastern societies, including Jewish and Arab women, have often shared similar ways of life, including the covering of their head with a scarf of some particular shape, and this had prevailed even before Islam and Christianity were invented. So, even the idea that the Arab woman's scarf is an Islamic symbol can be an absolute absurdity, otherwise an Essenian, Carmelian woman like Mary would not have had worn a scarf.
Such common attitudes between different societies that are themselves under different cultural identities are often held from geographical proximity, as I have just said, and sometimes a case for traditional proximity too whereas the concept of tradition is also frequently confounded with the concept of cultural identity. Yet, traditions have more to do with the practice of customs, whereas customs are habitual practices and usages that establish familiarity and constitute a common law between individuals or societies that have some specific historical links from particular historical events. The Thanksgiving celebration or even the Pancake Day, for example, can stand for illustration as far as the concept of tradition is concerned. Even individual families have particular family traditions. Commemorating the anniversary of a special ancestor in a particular way can be a family tradition.
Now, because some traditions are formed out of historical events, they can be shared between different societies, because different societies can share a common history. The remembrance of the Holocaust by all nations that shared the misadventures of the Jews in Germany is a good example of this. But this would not mean that the English and the Jews belong to the same cultural identity. They only share one specific historical event that has resulted in a common tradition between them.
Religions themselves often display a number of traditional aspects about them that different individuals from different cultural identities can happen to share and that will have nothing to do with their different cultural identities. For example, the fact that the Spanish and the Zulu share the Christmas tradition today has nothing to do with a common cultural identity between the two. Christmas in itself has become more secular than religious to the point that even pagans celebrate it out of a purely Christian context. Obviously, it has nothing to do with cultural identity.
The connection between religion and a cultural or national identity is, thus, only a matter of philosophical misconception and, sometimes, only a case for some coincidental superfetation. One of these outstanding cases of coincidence is that of the war between the English and the Irish in Northern Ireland and of which modern politicians and journalists quite often refer to as a war between Catholics and Protestants - let alone the paradoxical fact that they both read the same Bible and, therefore, share the same spiritual wisdom.
But the fundamental reasons for the war are not due to some sort of ideological clash between these two Christian trends; otherwise Catholics and Protestants would be at war everywhere in the world. The reasons for the Northern Irish war are strictly connected to such or such a cultural or national identity at odds with another on some historical and political issues. The unfortunate coincidence lies in the fact that some are mainly Catholics whereas others are mainly Protestants. It is only a coincidence not a factor for the war. The Northern Irish war would still have been launched if both of the parties did not practice any religion at all.
And likewise, there are politicians and journalists who, today, speak so relentlessly of 'Muslim countries', and especially since the war on terror was launched by the English and the Americans. Yet, the concept of 'Muslim country' is not tenable in any technical way. Of course, some people may have strong feelings about Islam, and some other people may be sympathetic or express their solidarity to those with whom they share the same faith or even the same ideology. The western part of Ukraine is sympathetic to Western Europe, and vice versa, on the grounds of democracy, which is only a political ideology not a cultural feature.
Indeed, like religious convictions, political ideologies too have the characteristic of bearing a system of thinking that one or some people may have very strong feelings about and even end up seeing in them some form of identity to be fought for or against. Joe McCarty himself - the famous American senator - saw communism that way in the 1950s. But this would not be to say that any nation or part of a nation's identity would hold from the idea of some political ideology or some religion, because none of these is any matter for identity. And perhaps the fact that some countries happen to call themselves 'Democratic Republic of X' or 'Islamic Republic of Y' is misleading many of us. But if we look carefully, we will see that most of such countries fall in the category of countries that do not actually have a true cultural identity, or that they have lost it after being politically or spiritually colonised by some other nations (because this is what colonisation does: kill local cultural identities). So, these countries have to try and build a vacuous identity around some ideology or some religion, in most cases, invented by their political or spiritual colonisers. And sometimes it is a case for political scam: either to cover up the cultural identity vacuum of the country or to instigate some type of provocative propaganda.
Such a country as Iran does quite perfectly fit in this category. The fact that today's Iran calls itself 'Islamic Republic of Iran' cannot have any better technical explanation than the almost total loss of its true cultural identity after the complete erasure of the original Elamite culture that founded that nation by waves of invasions that began with the influence of neighbouring Sumerians and Mesopotamians as well as the Akkadian invasion all the way through to the arrival of the Indo-European Aryan conquerors including the Persians, the Greek, the Turks, the Arabs and the Mongolians - which even caused the region to be called Iran (Indo-European Aryan). So, what today's Iran represents is only an amalgamated mixture of colonial legacies bequeathed by its conquerors, which combine Persian features with those of Assyria and Urartu Turkish and Soviet Armenian, Farsi, Greek, and a strong Arab influence whereby Islam comes in. If we add to this original cultural identity loss and amalgamation the anti-Christian and anti-Jewish propaganda that has animated Iranian politics from the past century, it becomes quite easy to figure out the reason for such an empty provocative name to be endorsed onto the country. And the point that I am trying to make here is that occupational and colonial legacies as well as traditions, ideologies and religions do not constitute cultural or national identities at all. Any citizen or group of citizens from any nation with its own cultural identity can cherish any ideology and practise any religion; and conversely, any nation can practise different political systems and religions.
What has mostly happened throughout history is that some strong leaders, converted in some religion, have often despotically tried to impose their faith onto their people, leaving open the impression, in the long run, that such or such a national identity should be fundamentally connected to such or such a religion.
For example, there are some French right-wing politicians who cry out so constantly that 'France is a Christian nation' (another type of political scam: anti-Muslim propaganda). But they don't notice that the Franks, as a people, did not know anything about Christianity until they were conquered by the Romans and influenced by the Greeks, who both had imported Christianity from Judea. I mean, if French people happen to be Christians today, this is not because the French identity is connected to Christianity in any possible way. It is just that Christianity was exported into France when France was under Roman occupation.
A conqueror's religion, way of life or traditions, can even influence many other aspects of the mode of existence of the conquered. The Western suit, mostly worn in all Negro territories that were influenced by the English or the French, has nothing to do with Christianity or some sort of cultural sameness between the Negroes who wear it and the English or the French, no less than the Arabic jibba, mostly worn in parts of Africa that were conquered or influenced by the Arabs would have anything to do with any mark of cultural sameness between the Negroes who wear it and the Arabs. It has everything to do with sharing lifestyles between different societies whose members admire each other or are influenced by each other in some possible way - whereas the concept of lifestyle in itself is another thing that has more to do with 'tastes' and 'standards of living'. An Englishman can have a Chinese lifestyle by the type of food he eats.
So, neither a way of life, lifestyle, tradition nor a faith is any matter for cultural identity. That is why some of these concepts, especially the imported ones, often bear the danger of causing cultural and identity dislocation in individuals when they are misunderstood and mishandled. This is the case of the poignant issue of faith education, mostly promoted by faith schools. One may be quite surprised to find that it is a vastly marginalizing idea vis-à-vis the standard requirements of education in a dynamic society. It is, for instant, the kind of schools that would discriminate women from higher aspirations in their cultural and political context, or restrict men from a sharper exploration of human intelligence, both of which descend to the abyss of mediocrity and cultural dislocation.
I know English people who, because of their uncontrolled infatuation for Christianity, give old Jewish names to their children instead of English names or, at least, English forms of these names. Such children are, quite unconsciously, meant to believe, to some possible extent, that Christianity is their primary identity or that it is for them a parallel identity to their English identity: not too different from the disturbing issue of Muslims whose English Identity constantly comes into question today for being Muslims.
I know that some people will always force themselves into maintaining that ideologies and religions are paramount to culture or that ways of life and lifestyles are tantamount to identity. But there is no culture or identity called Islam or Christianity or Salsa in this world. Culture is not a social attitude or an ideology or a tradition. Culture - the definition of the identity of a people - has its fundamental basis on language, with all the artistic genius inherent to it: its ability to express art, philosophy, science, technology, politics and spiritual wisdom, all of which ascend to the heavens of human affirmation and are accessible only to native speakers, whatever their beliefs or attitudes. And this is what constitutes nation.
Peace to All
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Joe Mintsa was born in the present Gabon, central Africa, on May 1st 1974. After completing his studies of philology and American history at the University of Libreville in 1998, he immediately migrated to England for further studies – a sojourn that then turned into a painful journey of reflection on the moral and political crises of his world. After the publication of The Sum of all Doubts (2004) – an essentially aphoristic but extremely sagacious work of fiction on religion and politics – and the release in Paris of his French title: Les Mythes Du Recaptif (2005), Third Mind (2006) is now the book that features his outmost incisive delivery on the subject of the distressing struggles of the most deprived human species of the world, and more particularly African species. Joe Mintsa is a philologist, historian and an accomplished freelance investigator in the field of Political Anthropology. He currently lives in Brighton (UK).