DEALING WITH MERITOCRACY IN DEMOCRACY
477
concurred, all in their own prose: "The great end should not have been to
teach Hindu learning or Mohammedan teaching, but useful learning."
The virtues of multiculturalism slide imperceptibly into its vices. The
requisite tolerance is an aspect of the failure of Macaulay's "universal con–
fession." Equality here means the maintenance of a number of lowest
common denominators. There are now Afro-Caribbean families who pre–
fer to return to the West Indies to make sure that their children will learn
to read and write functionally. Among other negative consequences is polit–
ical correctness, for instance the embarrassment expressed by a headmaster
at singing the national anthem, or refusal to mention in the classroom the
Battle of Britain, because, as one teacher put it, "I'm not sure Pakistanis and
people of West Indian origin would feel involved." (Almost certain not to
be the case, in peoples rightly proud of a warrior past.)
Here is a letter recently published in a national newspaper: "My 11-
year-old son has been ordered by his teacher at Beverley Grammar School,
East Yorkshire, to write out 'I must not make racist remarks' on two sides
of a piece of paper. He was also threatened wi th suspension by the deputy
head. His 'racist crime' was to say 'G'day sport' to an Australian classmate,
who happens to be a friend." Recently Dr. Nicholas Tate, chief executive
of yet another quango, the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority,
provoked headlines when he said that children in schools should be taught
what it means to be British; they should be familiar with Christianity,
British history, and English literature. A father writes in the press that his
three-year-old child has been taught about prayer in a mosque, synagogue,
and gundwara, and asked to draw these places too.
Multiculturalism helps to foster separatism. If people are encouraged
to suppose that their religions and culture are equal and undifferentiated in
all respects, some of them will refuse to make the concessions necessary in
democratic societies, insisting instead that their particularity is an absolute.
Black Power flared momentarily in the person and career of Michael de
Freitas, otherwise Michael X, who modeled himself closely on the
American Malcolm X . But he was executed in his home country of
Trinidad for murder, and the movement was then revealed to have no base
in society.
Black Power may be a spent force, but Islamic fundamentalism remains a
thriving offipring of multiculturalism, fashioning a separatist identity beyond
questioning,
akin
to manifest destiny. The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss
observed in
Tristes Tropiques,
"The truth is that contact with non-Muslims dis–
tresses Muslims. Their provincial way of life survives, but under constant
threat from other life-styles freer and more flexible than their own, and
which may affect it through the mere fact of propinquity." Muslims, he went
on, are "incapable of tolerating the existence of others as others:'
