Ethnic Memory: Why Societies Should Be Monoethnic

The title of this article may immediately invite accusations of racism. Since nothing could be further from the truth, in my case, than such an accusation, let me begin with a crucial distinction, which I shall then explain: that between racial realism and what I will call ethnic memory. This distinction can help clarify a number of political disputes. Leftists will argue, for instance, that the United States and even European countries have always been multicultural. There is some truth to this in the American case, but ‘multicultural’ meant something different in the late 18th century than it does today. In those times, ‘multicultural’—the physical reality, not the later term—might mean Englishmen and Frenchmen, rather than Englishmen and Pakistanis, living side by side and creating a new nation. So one must be precise in one’s use of terms.

This then leads to the question of what it means to be an American, Englishman, Australian, and so on. And here we find that there must be, in these cases, a dominant Anglo culture for such identities to have any meaning. But that is not all: one must also understand the role that ethnicity plays in the formation and maintenance of national identity. People may acknowledge the importance of culture but wonder what the color of one’s skin could possibly have to do with it. In and of itself, it ought to have nothing to do with it, but de facto it does, and for quite cogent, defendable reasons. An example of the confusion caused by unclear use of terms took place recently during a discussion in the UK between journalist Julia Hartley-Brewer and Restore Britain spokesman Charlie Downes, which made the rounds on social media. Hartley-Brewer, while sharing Downes’ concern about the Islamization of Britain, seemed to reject the notion that whiteness was a part of British identity, while Downes felt that preserving the white nature of Britain was important. When Hartley-Brewer wondered why whiteness would be a determining factor in who should be a part of the British fabric, Downes seemed incapable of offering a clear answer. Had Downes been able to explain the philosophical basis underlying (one may hope) his position, Hartley-Brewer might have been more receptive. Instead, the exchange devolved into the usual insults. The subject has become increasingly topical, especially as waves of immigration have transformed Western societies, particularly in Europe. 

So let me explain the philosophical distinction. Racial realism is the racist notion that a person’s race is the deciding factor of his character, that it makes him in some way intrinsically better or worse than a person of another race. Defenders of racial realism will sometimes point out, for example, that the average black person scores lower than the average white person in the United States on IQ tests (although the average white person scores lower than the average American of Asian or Jewish Ashkenazi extraction). The answer is that, although the IQ scores of some ethnic groups cluster higher or lower than those of others, there is considerable overlap between them. Many individuals in a lower-scoring group will score higher than many individuals in a higher-scoring group. This is why, for example, the black ethnicity in the United States, while having a lower cluster of IQ data points than many other ethnicities, still produces men like Frederick Douglass, Thomas Sowell, and Clarence Thomas. And so regardless of differently located clusters of data points, one should still treat people of various ethnicities as individuals and reject the racial realism that would seek to definitively define them.

Then we get to ‘ethnic memory.’ By this term, I mean that different ethnicities bring with them various memories, or stories, about themselves. Some are based on real events and things, while others are imagined or invented, but all can function as important identity markers. These memories often compete with those of other groups, and when they do, social cohesion can begin to disintegrate. Groups can become so attached to their own memories and heritage that they define themselves in opposition to other parts of society or simply become less able to form a cohesive polity with them. So when politicians say that they are fine with multiethnic or multiracial communities but want monocultural ones—as, for instance, Pauline Hanson, leader of the Australian One Nation party, recently said—they miss the fact that multiethnic communities lead to multicultural communities. But advocating for a monoethnic community is then confused with racial realism by both Right and Left. The latter assume that everything is crass racism, while the former either slip into actual racism or are unable to explain why their essentially sound sense of social and demographic self-preservation is legitimate. The distinction between racial realism and ethnic memory is thus lost on both sides. Ethnic memory is more than outward expressions of culture; it is a feeling of difference that a group’s surface ethnicity will so often call forth and that, by dint of that immutable surface, will continue to insist upon itself. So, while it may be an unpleasant truth that some do not wish to hear, a well-ordered Western society does de facto need a predominant ethnicity in order to survive.

In these contexts, the terms ‘cultural memory,’ ‘collective memory,’ and ‘social memory’ have often been used in the scholarly literature to describe the sets of traditions that different groups keep alive across generations. These terms are certainly legitimate and hermeneutically useful, but the term ‘ethnic memory’ should grow in acceptance, because the former three sometimes obscure what the latter reveals, namely that ethnicity itself often plays a formative role in the perpetuation of such memories. Making this point explicit is required for us to understand contemporary social issues.

A further distinction, namely that between politics and ethics, is also important here. Ethics is about individual behavior; politics is about mass behavior. It is true that a particular individual of a minority ethnicity in a society can be perfectly in tune, culturally speaking, with the majority of that society. Ethically, such an individual is therefore no different from the majority or from society as a whole. A monoethnic society does not therefore mean that subgroups cannot exist. It means only that they must remain relatively small minorities within a predominantly monoethnic society. But on a mass level, politically, it nonetheless happens that the different subgroups, especially when present in sufficient numbers, will insist on their ethnic memories, on their own historical roles and trajectories, and will over time grow suspicious of the broader community. Many members of the subgroup, even when born in the society of a different ethnic majority, will often hearken unto a perceived past that will turn against the host society, as we see with ease all over the Western world.

When we talk about these various ethnic memories, we are of course dealing with a continuum and not with absolutes. The ethnic memory of an Irishman will generally be closer to that of the Anglophone society in which he lives, given their shared history and religious overlap. An Italian’s may be somewhat more distant but still much closer to Anglo-ethnic memory than that of, say, a Papua New Guinean. The smaller cultural differences among these European groups are also easier to overlook when differences in surface ethnicity are smaller. So when proponents of multiculturalism point out, for example, that Americans used to be up in arms about Irish or Italian or Slavic immigration and that being concerned about Islamic or African immigration is therefore also overblown, they ignore the fact that ethnic memories fall on a spectrum and are in some cases so far removed from those of the host civilization that, on a mass level, rapprochement becomes difficult. (Why Islam, specifically, is incompatible with Western civilization I have discussed in philosophical detail elsewhere.)

People will sometimes hold up Israel as a counterexample of a flourishing multicultural and multiethnic Western society. Indeed, even though Judaism is ethno-religious as opposed to purely creedal, it has over time still found space for many ethnicities, and Israel is multiethnic: there are Russian Jews, Ethiopian Jews, and everything in between. But the members of these various ethnicities are Jews, and religion is the strongest force, bar none, of communal cohesion in the world. So the fact that Israel is multiethnic is outweighed by the fact that it is monoreligious, with non-Jews being confined to a relatively small minority of about 20%. As long as a society is predominantly monoreligious, it can ‘ afford’ to be multiethnic (although one does sometimes also find tension among different ethnicities of co-religionists).

This state of affairs no longer obtains in other Western countries. The United States, for instance, used to be a Protestant country but is today in large parts hardly recognizable as such. The decline of Christian faith is even more pronounced in western and northern Europe. In Israel, not only is the religious proportion of the population growing, much to the chagrin of the Israeli Left, but even among secular Israeli Jews there is still a prevailing sense of being part of an island of Jewish identity in a sea of hostility. Israel is thus ultimately not a counterexample—or at least is an explainable counterexample—to the importance of social monoethnicity. That is, Israel demonstrates that religion can ensure the sort of social integration that otherwise only ethnicity provides. When a democratic, Western society has neither of these, social upheaval follows. 

A better understanding of the distinction between racial realism and ethnic memory could clarify much of the debate around these issues. The Left will always, of course, call anything it does not like ‘racist,’ but at least it would be useful for thoughtful and intellectually open members of the Right to sort out their own philosophical confusion and for moderates to understand that it need not entail any perniciousness to advocate for the predominantly monoethnic character of one’s own society.