The ingredients of culture are people, place, and time. The people are the progenitors and (later) agents of culture, whereas location and time are the formative and accommodating contexts. A culture arises wherever these three materials meet, hence we see not only "African culture" and more minute sectors such as "traditional south Sudanese culture", but also cultures abstracted from a set geography such as "sport culture", "internet culture" and the many respective sub-groups of both. In the latter it can seem that "place" is supplanted in some way by "activity", but the activity, ultimately, survives by the existence of a physical, habitable place for it to be practiced in.
Where culture has arisen, it is unique to that people, that geography, and the given period of maturation. To supplant this elsewhere is to place it into a climate which it is, by its very nature, unfit to exist in, as it did not develop there naturally. This is not to say it cannot - merely that it does not naturally and therefore requires some form of mutation.
If a cultures values are to be sustained, they must remain dominant in the law and governance of that region. Hence, if culture were sentient, it would find its best interests suited by remaining in its geographic origin. This conclusion is arrived at by accepting the initial premises of what defines and creates culture. When geography is shared by two or more cultures, the value systems of the population are in some form of dispute (be it overt or hidden) and if this dispute is socially encouraged, then the original culture of that region has effectively given up its claim to existence. The social encouragement of moral dispute is called Multiculturalism, an idea whereby a host culture with predefined standards and values is subjected to foreign standards and values with no goal of mutation for those alien elements.
It is this masochistic act which causes social unrest, and urge for legal or social reform to accommodate these other systems. Often these urges are unrecognised by the population who have assimilated into the original culture, and are agitated by smaller groups who do not recognise the foundational translation that their value system must contend with - it does not exist in its natural habitat, yet it is now staking claim to rights which may not exist in another culture's habitat. Multiculturalism, in common parlance, asks itself whether or not it should legislate on behalf of imported values. Does it allow a redefinition of theft? Does it allow a redefinition of free speech? Or of marriage? These are fundamental questions and do not even address the linked issues of affirmative action and proxied segregation that often occur.
The true road for the multiculturalist does not lie in a conservative or liberal answer to any given reformation of law, nor in Islamic or Christian, nor hetero- or homosexual. Because multiculturalism has removed any claim on precedence for the host culture, it cannot continue to legislate in its natural manner. No, the road that multiculturalists must ask to tread is as far away from any culture, any set of values, as can be given. In order to have true multiculturalism, one must ask for a base of "aculturalism". Let us take the example of marriage. To a religious person, this is the dedication of loving union before a deity. To the irreligious, it is simply a step that is taken for social recognition - there is no higher authority to appease. In the eyes of the acultural state, there should be no such institution as marriage. The outcry to extend the definition of marriage in western countries is based largely on a moral dispute between arrogant host cultures and equally arrogant agitators. In times when recognising God or an objective set of values was considered basic and universal to western culture, marriage could be recognised in the "traditional" manner. However, in order to obtain the equal social standing and taxation/legislative benefits available, a foreigner to this value system must assimilate in some way. An acultural alternative would be to simply treat marriage as a form of legal and financial union, completely ignorant of the parties involved. What separates three friends living together with shared finances is then no different legally than a husband and wife. The distinction now is recognised in religious rites, for it is not the states concern to recognise the elements of such arrangements that are not relevant to its function.
In this way, perhaps the right wing or traditionalist commentator is closer to the truth; but has failed to take it to its ultimate conclusion. Where the left wing, self styled as a "progressive", asks for reformation of the existing system and another canopy of laws to subject society to, the traditionalist first identifies with the rights of the host culture and defends this existent structure. What the traditionalist has failed to grasp, and (similar to the previous failure) the progressive has identified without conclusion or goal, is that the host culture has invalidated itself by calling assimilation an evil. The coy Marxist cries out, "European culture is dead! The white man no longer exists!" But he feels no such pleasure in declaring the same for any culture but his own, and he has provided no step toward further stabilisation - for stabilisation is not the goal of the left. They thrive on upset and noise, the crashing din of protest is their aim. Change in their favour provides no satisfaction.
But the traditionalist, in furious steadfastness to his host culture, respects also the right of foreign cultures. This is a weakness if not examined within the asserted framework of cultural origin, because so normal and acclimatised is the fertile ground beneath his feet that he fails to maintain it. Where multiculturalism has been encouraged, a host culture has given rights to foreigners who would not reciprocate if under converse circumstances. And so it is that such a culture will be undermined from within, the well poisoned by its own citizens, and not through narrow worldview but by the typical resistance to change that most conservatives hold. Change in their favour is an untread territory, and therefore shunned.
But the abstract idyll of equality, so resplendent in the sunset of our Western civilization, stands lofty in the minds of moralists. The constitutions of modern democracy are written in such a generalised tone that they appeal to all mankind, yet no single group. But even given this, they assume a prescribed moral order. Where Jefferson gave absolute, unalienable truth to his rights, he bowed still to his own moral climate - the assumption of rights, the assumption of good and evil, and the ordainment of such by a Creator. Being so unable to predict the vacuum of Christianity and theism in general, his declaration appealed succinctly to his own culture. Today it is twisted by the very sects that grew in this blindspot. But Jefferson lived in a time when right and wrong were unassailable; who could have seen mankind give himself a sponge to wipe away the horizon? What purpose could there have been in blotting out the sun that we should light torches in its stead? This consideration to context is not given by modern arguments - it is too inconvenient. It makes evident the moral decline that precedes social decline, and that social decline which precedes the fall of our civilization.
Unlike Rome, we do not live in a web of loosely connected cultural nodes - if anything, we are too tightly connected. There was no safety net for Rome's glory to be caught by - some went north to the Germanic peoples, some south or west to Spain and Africa, and more yet in the east to Byzantium. But if "the West" falls, as it has threatened to many times in the last century, who will take it under their care? Will it be adopted, co-opted, adapted, or bolstered by its saviour? Will it fall at all in our diplomatic age? Cultural decline of this scale has never been witnessed. Perhaps, one day, when the solar system or even the galaxy looks at itself and groans under the same conflicts, it will look to the precedents set by Babylon, Egypt, Rome, Europe, the West, and Earth - for regardless of our fate, mankind will see this struggle until the New Heavens are hung in their place.
