What is the alternative?
Who decides which of many cultural possibilities should be the Monoculture, and which of the many others should be Multi?
Has there ever been a civilization or empire that has thrived without multiculturalism? It seems that the richest countries and societies, like the richest estuaries, benefit from the best of all contributing cultures.
Is not multiculturalism simply the cultural extension of a free market of ideas, each competing and blending in an evolutionary, dynamic process, so that most of us today are unaware that the potatoes we eat are a recent import from Peru, our coffee and chocolate are imports from American indigenous culture and horses (if you live in America) are a contribution by Spanish culture a few centuries ago to a continent that had no horses (their closest American relatives seemed to have been hunted to extinction thousands of years earlier)?
Should we not use paper, eat pasta, or use compasses simply because these are developments of Chinese culture?
Do we eschew maps because they were invented in Iraq?
Or do we avoid Hindu-Arabic numbers (as Florentine bankers were forbidden to do in a spasm of anti-multiculturalism in the 1200s) because they are non-European in origin? Do we mandate a return to the Roman numeral system that had neither decimal points nor zero, not to mention negative numbers or any capacity to do complex calculations by lining up digits on papyrus or paper?
Do we forbid Judaism or its outgrowths, Christianity and Islam, because they are all Mediterranean imports that crowded out Norse and other native religions?
Do we ban democracy, a Greek import, or the Christmas tree (a German import), or the Yuletide log (a Scandinavian import)?
Do we ban firearms, since they were invented by Chinese culture, or cars, the internal combustion engine, jet planes, rockets, submarines, interstate highways, or Volkswagens, since they were invented by Germans?
Should we forego stock exchanges, since common stocks were invented by the Dutch? And should we prevent our military forces from continuing to use the metric system since this system was created and standardized during the French revolutionary in protest of the idea of a using measuring anything in the the length of a king's "foot"?
I do not know what development we will be foregoing in the name of stamping out multiculturalism, but we would live in a grayer, poorer, more miserable society if we spurned all advances and developments not home-grown.
Who decides which of many cultural possibilities should be the Monoculture, and which of the many others should be Multi?
Has there ever been a civilization or empire that has thrived without multiculturalism? It seems that the richest countries and societies, like the richest estuaries, benefit from the best of all contributing cultures.
Is not multiculturalism simply the cultural extension of a free market of ideas, each competing and blending in an evolutionary, dynamic process, so that most of us today are unaware that the potatoes we eat are a recent import from Peru, our coffee and chocolate are imports from American indigenous culture and horses (if you live in America) are a contribution by Spanish culture a few centuries ago to a continent that had no horses (their closest American relatives seemed to have been hunted to extinction thousands of years earlier)?
Should we not use paper, eat pasta, or use compasses simply because these are developments of Chinese culture?
Do we eschew maps because they were invented in Iraq?
Or do we avoid Hindu-Arabic numbers (as Florentine bankers were forbidden to do in a spasm of anti-multiculturalism in the 1200s) because they are non-European in origin? Do we mandate a return to the Roman numeral system that had neither decimal points nor zero, not to mention negative numbers or any capacity to do complex calculations by lining up digits on papyrus or paper?
Do we forbid Judaism or its outgrowths, Christianity and Islam, because they are all Mediterranean imports that crowded out Norse and other native religions?
Do we ban democracy, a Greek import, or the Christmas tree (a German import), or the Yuletide log (a Scandinavian import)?
Do we ban firearms, since they were invented by Chinese culture, or cars, the internal combustion engine, jet planes, rockets, submarines, interstate highways, or Volkswagens, since they were invented by Germans?
Should we forego stock exchanges, since common stocks were invented by the Dutch? And should we prevent our military forces from continuing to use the metric system since this system was created and standardized during the French revolutionary in protest of the idea of a using measuring anything in the the length of a king's "foot"?
I do not know what development we will be foregoing in the name of stamping out multiculturalism, but we would live in a grayer, poorer, more miserable society if we spurned all advances and developments not home-grown.
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