Humanising Language Teaching
Year 4; Issue 1; January 2002

Preview

1. Introduction
2. Diversity and assimilation, diversity with and without integration
3. The concept of diversity
4. Diversity in practice
5. Do history and current events tell us anything about diversity?
6. Diversity and mass immigration, immigration and arithmetic
7. Immigration—what's the hurry?
8. Diversity and democracy
9. Everything hunky-dory, is it?
10. Towards sensible policies
11. Getting back to TESOL

1 Introduction

When I read through journals and conference papers in applied linguistics, I often end up thinking, "Linguistics? Where?" So much of it all seems to be political advocacy, thoughts on national curricula…that kind of thing. TESOL periodicals too will stray off centre from time to time, for ill or good. For instance, in November's issue of the EL Gazette Roger Bowers offers opinions on diversity (2001, p. 7, 'The diversity dividend'). Over his article is the following blurb—

"Inter-racial disturbances in some UK cities this summer provoked calls for more linguistic integration of asylum seekers. Roger Bowers thinks that's missing the point and that the UK is committed to finding solutions in linguistic diversity not discrimination."

Since the topic is already in the air—diversity in language and in all things cultural—I will say something about it as well. But I don't want to talk about diversity yes or no. Diversity is inescapable. Rather, my subject is the importance of there being open discussion about how much diversity. Can there be too much?

2 Diversity and assimilation, diversity with and without integration

People who see little possibility for interesting diversity in a more or less mono-ethnic society dislike the idea of assimilation since that, by definition, means becoming part of the host culture. In Britain, there is relatively little advocacy for the complete assimilation of members of minority ethnic groups, not even on the right of the political spectrum. But argument is building up between those who favour diversity with integration and others who think asking for even a little integration may lead to intolerable violations of human rights. But British small 'l' liberals have had a big fright lately what with the recent riots at home, the attacks on New York, and demonstrations at home and abroad of bitter anti-Westernism. Even in the left of centre Guardian one can find an article or two by such undoubted liberal humanitarians as Hugo Young and Polly Toynbee. The latter, for instance, has pointed out the grave risks that the British government would run if it increased the number of schools run by and for students of a single religion. Something it had been planning to do prior to the events of September 11^th. Here is the cardinal danger, in my own words:

Suppose…just imagine…there were a religious bloc permeated with religious zealotry and anti-Westernism, that is, permeated with opposition to: religious tolerance, freedom of speech, and women's rights, just for starters. Religious schools would make it much easier for this bloc to maintain a parallel society—or, worse yet, a society that was on a collision course with the host culture. Some people, even people on the political left, say this has already happened to a very worrying degree.

3 The concept of diversity

Diversity enthusiasts are prone to assuming that there can be little diversity unless there is substantial immigration followed by government sponsored programmes for the maintenance of immigrant cultures. On the BBC World Service the other day I head Imran Khan, a pro-immigration lawyer, refer to British people who have been living without these things as "clones". But if I think of the few houses along the lane in front of my house—all inhabited by English people in the everyday sense of the term English—I don't see this at all. These people are nothing if not diverse in manner, habits, jobs, class, wealth, background, look and on and on. The idea that diversity only comes through immigration is a queerly ironic version of the "They all look alike" sentiment imputed to the stereotypical John Bull or Yankee Doodle abroad.

Actually, liberal humanitarian diversity enthusiasts here in Britain (for example) tend to close their eyes to diversity in other ways. They assume, for instance, that—unless protected from the incredible power of Western civilization--in-comers are bound to lose their native attitudes, values and so forth. Our humanitarians assume, specifically, that incomers must not be pressed, however lightly, to learn English. They seem to believe that non-Western cultures are that fragile. This is pretty much like thinking I might turn Arabic by using Arabic numbers. OK, a not quite perfect analogy. Still, there are numerous examples of people whose allegiance to their native culture has been diminished not one whit by learning English. I expect that Osama bin Laden can speak English reasonably well if he wants to. The alleged leader of the Sept 11^th hijackers spoke it very well.

As it happens, the attractiveness of Western civilization world-wide has been in decline since the 1920's. (Attractiveness is not the same thing as wealth.) No longer do you see statesmen such as the Meiji reformers of Japan and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk of Turkey who thought that not just modernism but also Westernism was a prerequisite to development. The Meiji reformers imported Western institutions and practices by the score. Atatürk did much the same. But in Asia today the talk is of 'Asian values'. Islamism is on the rise in Turkey as it is throughout the Islamic world. Key values of the modern West, such as radical individualism and practically unbounded freedom of speech, are viewed with deep skepticism by most of the rest of the world's population which, to be clear, is the other 90%…and rising. Diversity fans here in the West assume that every sane person on the planet would eventually take on these 'humanitarian' values, if only there could be peace and discussion. The same assumption underlies utopian fantasies of a democratic world government. But none of this is going to happen. The trend is going the other way. In short, diversity is more profound and intractable that diversity enthusiasts seem to have an inkling of. In short, it cannot be taken for granted that non-Westerners who settle in the West, or even their descendants, will ever accept key Western values. Human civilizations are too diverse for that. It cannot be too strongly emphasized that Western values are values of the West. They are quite unlike mathematical truths that every thinking person must eventually accept. Well, I should now confess that I know that when multiculturalists use the word diversity, they do not have in mind its former everyday sense. Nowadays, diversity is a euphemism for this: a state of affairs in which quite a few people belonging to various ethnic groups have remained substantially unassimilated into the host society.

Let's look at diversity from another angle. Imagine a smallish land such as the Denmark of not long ago (or Ireland or Bhutan…). Culturally, this imaginary country is markedly though not completely homogeneous, regional differences notwithstanding. Its inhabitants may answer to the same name (Dane, Bhutanese or whatever). They speak the same language, albeit in different accents and dialects, they practise similar traditions, share a religion, and so on. If you went there, you would immediately see that it was different from where you had just come from.

Consider now a different country of about the same size. In this hypothetical land there reside a few million in-comers from around the world along with other folks who are descended from more or less recent in-comers. Let's suppose that this imaginary land is, to use a common collocation, vibrantly multicultural. Perhaps people of foreign background have not merely been allowed but been encouraged to keep their own languages, traditions and, of course, religions. Up have gone religious edifices of all sorts. You may see street signs in two or in several languages as you roam around. During elections politicians don yarmulkas and saris and, for the camera, eat couscous, hotdogs, blini and dim sung. You may hear Tamil, Chinese, Kurdish and of course English. And you could almost be in London, New York, or Vancouver, or somewhere else instead of where you really are—except for an amount of local colour.

In these imaginings, we have two worlds—one in which there are many rather distinct cultural units and another in which people have not only moved around a lot, but have maintained a great deal of their homeland cultures. In the second world, each individual country is diverse in the multiculturalists' sense. But which world is more diverse in the everyday sense? I say it's the first. I say that mass immigration is another face of the globalization that is so corrosive of local distinctness.

4 Diversity in practice

Multiculturalism is not simply a matter of having a wide variety of restaurants and musics to choose from. It is about these things too, and about any possibility of reconciling them—

• · scripture based antipathy to homosexuals / gay rights, including homosexual marriages, · MLI> child slavery / strict child labour laws, ·
• animal sacrifice, hunting, scientific experimentation on animals / the animal rights movement, ·
• forced marriages / radical individualism, ·
• the obligation to care for ones aged parents / radical individualism, ·
• female circumcision and codes which sanction the killing of a daughter who marries against the father's choice / feminism, ·
• strict interpretation of scripture / science, ·
• a religion whose scripture says some very harsh things about non-believers and which also states that apostates are best killed / extreme religious tolerance, ·
• religious absolutism / ecumenalism, ·
• deadly serious moral absolutism / moral relativism. ·
• extreme sensitivity about one's religion / freedom of speech ·
• theocracy / secularism ·
• a belief that Western values have led to a degenerate society / the human rights movement

As a kind of thought experiment, choose from the list above all of the things you dislike. Now think of the population of your country. Suppose a certain percentage of the population espoused and tried to practice all of the things you have decided are bad. At approximately what percentage do you reckon your society would begin to change into one that you might not like so much? Now, unless you think almost any kind of behaviour is just fine, you will have to choose some percentage greater than 0. The only question is—is your percentage low or high? And you agree that in principle there can be too much diversity.

As far as Britain is concerned, none of the things in my list are made up—some are home grown, some are not.

• · I read on the BBC Ceefax news recently that child slavery is rife in Britain among central Africans who exploit the tradition of sending children out from home at a very early age to live and work with a relative or with a stranger.
• · One reads periodically of some hundreds or thousands of female servants in the UK (typically brought in legally [!] by wealthy Middle Easterners) who live in conditions of appalling servitude. ·
• A respected broadsheet reports that perhaps 2,000 women in Britain underwent genital mutilation in the past year, at the behest of their parents. ·
• Each year brings its crop of newspaper articles on the routine of forced marriages in at least one minority community.

There is much more.

Anyone who doesn't wish to accept either these practices or the beliefs which underlie them,…

• must then decide where to draw the line between what is acceptable and what isn't, ·
• should think about who they are thereby going to offend, in today's parlance, 'discriminate against', ·
• and decide whether merely to make a law or whether actually to enforce it.

5 Do history and current events tell us anything about diversity? The extreme form of a multicultural, or multi-ethnic state is one that is multi-national. Such states strongly tend to lack stability and resilience in crises. In the past, they have generally been possible only through despotic central control. When central control lapses, the states may fall apart with a speed that astonishes all witnesses. An early example--Alexander the Great's Macedonians cut through the Persian Empire like butter and it fell apart. A more recent one--Tito died; Yugoslavia fell into separatism and war…just like that. The highly multi-national Roman Empire lasted for a long time, but wasn't exactly a velvet glove democracy.

Less well appreciated than the volatility of multi-national and multi-ethnic states is the fact that multi-ethnic states can transform into multi-national ones which may then tend towards bitter internal strife. Such transformations can happen in half a lifetime or less. One example is modern Palestine—in 1900, sleepily multicultural under the not too onerous Ottoman yoke; now, as Israel + The West Bank + Gaza, it is at least bi-national. Everyone knows how that is working out.

The affair of Palestine/Israel also shows how mass immigration on one side of a demographic equation can lead to a change in power relations which the other side can rightly consider catastrophic. There have been many cases of this. Immigration promoted by Britain sowed the seeds of rancour and strife in more than a few places—e.g., Northern Ireland, Fiji, Sri Lanka and Uganda. State sponsored migration of Javanese has resulted in hideous wars between Muslims and Christians in Sulawesi and the Moluccas and between Muslims and everybody in Irian Jaya. (I've kept the list short.) Relations between Latvians and Russians (sluiced into Latvia by Stalin) are problematic. And so on.

Not long ago, one of the most peaceful places on the planet, Canada, came within a hair of breaking into at least two parts. Disproportionate immigration on the anglophone side of the equation was a contributing factor to the malaise of the Quebec francophones which keeps so many of them dreaming about a divorce.

Even in prosperous post-war Europe strife periodically raises it head in one or another of Europe's multi-national states for reasons that may be difficult for an outsider to comprehend. The more one learns about the relations between the Flemish and the French-speaking parts of Belgium, the more surprising it seems that they did not split up long ago. Tri- or quadri-national Switzerland works not despite but because of its division into strongly autonomous cantons. A change in the established order of things, such as that which occurred during the formation of the new canton of Jura may provide glimpses of the underlying potential for serious discord.

In the multi-ethnic inner cities of the United States and Britain, all it can take to cause members of one group to run riot is a power cut or an unpopular verdict in the courts.

All around the globe there is evidence of the volatility inherent to multi-ethnic states—viz., much of sub-Saharan Africa and the Horn, Mexico and Guatamala, south-central Asia, the Near and Middle East, the Balkans, Burma, Assam, Indonesia, Micronesia…

NB-- Immigration into the West and the generally higher birth-rates of non-Western ethnic groups have transformed large and even medium-sized cities. The majority of children enrolled in London schools will soon be of non-European background. According to some sources this is already the case. (It depends on what one means by non-Western.) According to some estimates, by 2050 (not that far in the future) Islam will be the dominant religion in France (e.g., Bächtold and Egger. 2001). People of Western background will not form the majority in the United States for much longer. In California, I believe, they have recently ceased to do so. If significant numbers of such incomers (and their descendents) should unite in rejecting core values of Western civilization (which is a distinct possibility as recent events have shown), then all hell could break loose.

The stakes are not small, but the fact that there are stakes at all seems little appreciated by people who feel that the West has these responsibilities—

• · to accept virtually all the immigrants who claim asylum in addition to taking in substantial numbers (foreign spouses of British citizens and so on) ·
• to make no attempt to try to get them to integrate into the host culture except to that degree necessary for them to plug into the benefits and entitlements system (for which purpose the state or aid agencies may in any case provide them with translators).

Again, liberal humanitarians seem unaware of the fact that the influence of the West, as opposed to its material wealth, has been in decline for more than two generations. Liberal Western values have increasingly been rejected either in toto (in much of the Islamic world) or in part (as in the well-run, prosperous Asian state of Singapore, to give but one example). Non-Western immigrants into the West are therefore increasingly likely to be people who are unsympathetic to Western values. Mrs Cryer's suggestions about a language requirement may not be exactly on the mark, but to pretend there is no problem is a bad and a dangerous option.

6 Diversity and mass immigration, immigration and arithmetic

Proponents of multiculturalism seem virtually always to like the idea of mass immigration. They may not like the word mass. That is because they don't seem to like counting. I often read a particular BBC TV letterboard (Ceefax). The following is typical. A viewer writes wondering why people complain about asylum seekers since there are only 75,000 of them. Actually, that should be 75,000 per year. But really even that figure results from a government counting method that doesn't include dependents. Or, of course, people who never show up in a particular part of the system; since clandestine entrants may well fail to show up, the numbers here may not be small. So the figure is more like 100,000 a year, minimum. And that doesn't include through-channels immigration of all those other thousands of immigrants who don't come as refugees. Further, of the total number of asylum seekers that come in yearly, few leave for the reason that there is no effective mechanism for deporting more than a handful of those whose applications are turned down.

All this is by way of saying that the annual total of immigrants is high enough to make a very big number by the time one generation has passed. One hundred thousand a year for ten years is a million. In thirty years that's three million, or about 5% of the present population of Britain. The equivalent of a very large city added somewhere onto the landscape of a crowded isle. And nearly 10% of the British population is already non-Western in origin. These are facts than anyone can verify through a bit of reading. At some percentage, a fairly sudden socio-political change is likely to occur. This percentage in question need not be particularly close to 50% if it includes many people who are dead set against liberal values.

7 Immigration—what's the hurry?

Speed matters. It matters in history no less than on the road. A process such as immigration that happens at a manageable rate can be highly beneficial for all concerned. More or less the same occurrence, speeded up, can cause serious problems. An example--

Immigration powerfully tends to introduce children with special needs into any educational system. In the United States the pace of legal and, especially, illegal immigration has been so great that hundreds, if not thousands of school districts have been utterly overwhelmed. (The US Census Bureau estimates the number illegal residents alone at about 11 million.) I have read lately that in Britain there may soon be a shortfall of 30,000 to 40,000 teachers. I leave it to the reader to reason out a likely causal chain. (Think 'special needs'.)

8 Diversity and democracy

In the U.S.A, Britain and elsewhere in the West, the question of mass immigration has been banished from the political process even though the demographic and social changes entailed are of almost unique scale and import. The British electorate was offered a referendum on joining the EU. So far as I know, there has never been a hint of one on the far more fundamental issue of multiculturalism. This fact alone is enough to make me look at diversity with a questioning eye. There are good reasons why representative democracy will not work in the long term if it a political elite feels it can deliver or withhold it as it deems fit.

9 Everything hunky-dory, is it?

On top of the hostility of some native Westerners to certain non-Western ethnic groups, there are certain complications. A recent news item—

"Twenty young Afghan men were arrested at the freight depot near Folkestone after travelling through the Channel Tunnel by clinging to freight trains for the journey... The refugees, who boarded the train at Fréthun near Calais, taunted police as they were held." (The Times, 6.11.2001, p. 8.)

As an immigrant, one can come like almost all immigrants used to and like many still do. Or one can come like Cortés and Pizarro. A society which takes in too many of the latter is looking for trouble.

More items—