"So let's be clear from the outset: culture and race have nothing to do with each other. There is no contradiction in the idea that Felix Mendelssohn was Jewish by race and German by culture -- or indeed that he was the most public-spirited representative of German culture in his day. Nor is there any contradiction in saying that a single person belongs to two cultures."
"And Wagner's repugnant essay on Judaism in music is one of the first instances of the lie that we have had to live through -- the lie that sees race and culture as the same idea, and which tells us that in demanding a measure of cultural uniformity, we are also affirming the dominance of a single race. Once we distinguish race and culture, the way is open to acknowledge that not all cultures are equally admirable, and that not all cultures can exist comfortably side-by-side. To deny this is to forgo the very possibility of moral judgment, and therefore to deny the fundamental experience of community. It is precisely this that has caused the multiculturalists to hesitate."
"Over time immigrants can come to share these things with us: the experience of America bears ample witness to this. And they the more easily do so when they recognize that, in any meaningful sense of the word, our culture is also a multiculture, incorporating elements absorbed in ancient times from all around the Mediterranean basin and in modern times from the adventures of European traders and explorers across the world. But this kaleidoscopic culture is still one thing, with a set of inviolable principles at its core; and it is the source of social cohesion across Europe and America. Our culture allows for a great range of ways of life; it enables people to privatize their religion and their family customs, while still belonging to the public realm of open dealings and shared allegiance. For it defines that public realm in legal and territorial terms, and not in terms of creed or kinship."
So the question becomes, "what is culture really?" We see Scruton resisting multicultural decentering, but to what extent ought uni-culturalism be re-centered? Obviously there is something to be said for distinguishing between immoral and moral culture (toward keeping mine moral and keeping what is immoral of yours from poisioning mine), but in regards to the political movement to relax Western borders (which this article is directed at), what amount, or better yet which parts, of a person's culture do we label as bad and to be left at home? To be more specific, what does this say for the American immigration question? What parts of the culture to the south (holidays, language, chaeuvenism (?)) do we call unfit to be brought to America? Should the state resist inconvenient culture, costly culture, violent culture, mystical culture--what culture? In other words, when is the state responsible for accommodating and when is it jusitifed in allowing immigrants to fend entirely for themselves, or barring them from crossing in the first place? Is this an argument, ulitmately, for closing borders to all instances of cultural difference? Scruton has well undermined the multicultural fallacy, but seems to have offered little in the realm of policy.
