Page 17 [17]
MULTICULTURALISM AS A DISCOURSE OF DISGUISE: A POSSIBLE CANADIAN SOLUTION
Culture
Roger Scruton, in An Intelligent Persons Guide to Modern Culture," explains
that a shared religious figure (e.g. God), shared stories and rituals mark out ways
in which cultures are differentiated from one another. This explanation is not
one I intend to pursue. It presumes that the world is understood only through
the histories and beliefs that we pass from one to another and that realities
which are marked out by them are somehow established facts about the world
we experience. But we do not share the same world. Consciousness shared by
individuals in communities creates multiple worlds and multiple meanings.
I will adopt the definition of culture from Faces of Reason, Philosophy and
Culture in English Speaking Canada 1850-1950: “As a rule one knows there
are two cultures when there are two groups of people who, characteristically
and repeatedly, assign different meanings to the same act or event.” Consider
the following example: The Queen of England arrives by boat in Quebec City
and disembarks. What this event means to the separatists and to the royalists
living in Quebec will be very different, and their responses will reveal different
cultural values. Royalists may welcome the Queen as a symbol of their values
and traditions. The Separatists will likely see her as an intruder, possibly
denying their freedom to self-determine their future social developments:
To welcome the Queen in Quebec is to know that others will not welcome her. It
is to stand beside dissenters and not push them off the dock when her boat arrives
[...] After all, the protesters have made the same effort to participate in the same
freedoms, thereby confirming the same unifying worldview — disagreements can
co-exist without confrontation and without an adversarial insistence that someone
must be right and someone wrong.”
Both cultures (royalists and separatists) would agree that a female human
being got off a boat. Though they inhabit the same world, different meanings
prompting different reactions to that event will occur.
The concepts that structure meanings
When many people do share the same reactions, their doing so reflects a culture
—aset of conceptual tools for determining meanings — with which they identify.
Roger Scruton, An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture, South Bend Indiana,
St Augustine’s, 2000, 1-3.
Leslie Armour — Elizabeth Trott, The Faces of Reason, An Essay on Philosophy and Culture in
English-Speaking Canada, 1850-1950, Waterloo, Wilfred Laurier University, 1981, xxiii-xxiv.
2 Elizabeth Trott, Western Mindscapes: A Philosophical Challenge, The American Review of
Canadian Studies (Winter 2001), 643.