Islamism has exploited our culture of political confusion
When Pauline Hanson told the National Press Club in June that Australia “cannot be a multicultural society. We must be monocultural. Australians must live under the one cultural umbrella”, she sparked a political bushfire.
Anthony Albanese answered emphatically: “Modern Australia is not a monoculture, and it never has been … It’s really a nonsense argument to go back to (a monoculture) that was actually never there.” He offered the Socceroos – a 26-man World Cup squad from 15 cultural backgrounds – as proof of Australia’s “rich culture”.
But Hanson reached for the same example to prove the opposite: “When we actually go to the Olympics, we represent our nation, like the Socceroos. It’s all under one flag.”
Meanwhile, the Coalition was at sixes and sevens. Angus Taylor said he did not know what “monoculture” meant, then called it “vague” and conceded he believed in “a version of multiculturalism”.
Nationals leader Matt Canavan admitted he had never heard the word “monoculturalism” before Hanson used it, and reached instead for “a common culture that unites us all”.
Liberal MP Garth Hamilton denounced monoculturalism outright: “I celebrate the cultural divide of my Irish Catholic side as much as my Scottish Protestant side. I will not deny either.”
Yet none of the warring parties paused to define the word on which the whole argument depended: culture. That matters because every position in the dispute shares one buried assumption: that culture is a fixed object – something a society can possess in the singular or plural, count, add or subtract.
Hanson wants one cultural object for everybody. Albanese counts 15 on a football roster and calls the result “rich”. Hamilton finds two within his own inheritance and celebrates them both. Taylor and Canavan cannot say what kind of object they mean at all, which is at least honest.
Nobody in this argument is wrong to think culture matters. But everybody is wrong about what culture is.
The correction is embedded in the word itself. “Culture” descends from the Latin colere – to cultivate – and Hannah Arendt pointed out that cultivation was traditionally understood as the opposite of “fabrication”. A carpenter fabricates a table according to a fixed design. A farmer cultivates a field in accordance with its capacity to grow, and the process is never complete. What is cultivated grows; it is not manufactured.
Yet political argument has increasingly made “culture” mean almost the reverse: a thing, complete on arrival, to be protected beneath a single umbrella or arranged, item by item, in an ever-expanding exhibition – in the Prime Minister’s image, tallied on a roster. Each is a picture of fabrication masquerading as cultivation.
That is what makes the Socceroos such a good example – just not for the reason either side supposes. The team does not vindicate Hanson’s umbrella, clamped over everyone regardless of what lies beneath it; still less does it vindicate Albanese’s tally of 15 backgrounds. A roster is merely a list until its members train together, submit to common rules and disciplines, and, without losing their individuality, unite around a shared goal. Only then does co-operation become second nature.
The roster can be assembled; the team must be cultivated. Nor is the result ever final. Without ceasing to be that team, the team changes as it encounters new opponents and as new members learn to work and strive together respecting the rules they have inherited.
Tocqueville, asking what sustained American self-government, found the same pattern at the level of an entire nation. It rested not on a possession but on “the whole moral and intellectual state of a people”: its “habits of the heart”, absorbed rather than proclaimed. Ludwig Wittgenstein, asking what makes shared understanding possible at all, called it a form of life – the “bedrock” guiding the flow of a people’s myriad purposes, yet one that slowly but incessantly shifts, like a riverbed beneath the current.
The nearest word for the process by which such a bedrock takes shape among people who did not all inherit it is neither monoculturalism nor multiculturalism. It is acculturation: the reciprocal adjustment of habits and expectations that sustains a cohesive, diverse society.
That process, rather than any official doctrine, is what built modern Australia.
The English, Scots and Irish, and later successive waves of migrants, did not automatically become a people who could plausibly say “we”. The achievement was partly the spontaneous result of mixing. But it was also deliberate: equal rights were extended and enforced, common institutions built and defended, a shared national story taught and sectarian provocations contained. It demanded hard, reciprocal work, and it succeeded.
Yet the present debate has ceased even to acknowledge that work, for two equally damaging reasons.
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