Interleaved reply... <snip> dmb: It almost seems weird to ask about the limits of multi-culturalism. Are there limits? Can too much variety can weaken a society?
mel: I guess that is part of my question. Are there limits? How do we characterize those limits? By number? Distribution? Internecene conflict? Is multi-culturalism working in Israel? What is the implication of a lack of respect for the dynamic range of a majority or of a minority culture? By analogy, there is a 'dynamic stasis' in many systems, oscillations that keep within a certain range. Exceed the range of, say internal temperature, and a human ceases to be a viable organism. dmb: I mean, there is a fear-based premise to the question and I'm honesty not sure if I find such a threat plausible. Can you think of an historical example of any such weakening? Can you think of a hypothetical scenario in which the presence of alternative cultural values would cause damage to the society as a whole? As I understand it, there is a need for cohesion in a society and the values that we're supposed to share in common as Americans are a certain set of ideals which have nothing to do with race, ethnicity, language, religion or anything else that depends on being a member of a particular culture. Its hard to see how pluralism could be a threat to those common ideals. mel: Good Questions, (except for the fear based part) and they point directly at historical research I was doing over the last year or so. ROME. The "fall" of Rome was a complex thing, every historian had a pet idea, but sift the mass of accounts and one of the major pieces of data is the growth of socio-ethnic variation in the territories of the Empire. The largest city in the Empire, for most of its history was Alexandria, not Rome, a city in the Greek-east--very cosmopolitan. Rome, the city, was more inward looking and more cohesive for much of the time, so much so that the powerful families lived in perpetual struggle with themselves to the point of an almost inbred ferrociousness. The legal-cultural-economic life of the Empire benefited from variety that had the privilege of CITIZENSHIP extended to people outside of just the lands of the Latin Tribe. It seems to argue for a multiplicity of cultures coming together. By the first tetrarchy, late 200's early 300's the mass of cultures within the empire were already pulling themselves apart and under threat of being swamped by innumerable cultures ready to sweep in from beyond the borders. Dozens of mutually antagonistic Germanic tribes wanted inside, similarly disharmonious tribes from Asia wanted in, and the treaties that let many in, allowed them to set up as semi-autonomous, inside the empire. Two centuries later they had set themselves up as separate kingdoms in all but name. Christianity, once legal, became both a part of society and part of government. Constantine used religion as the opposite of what the American founding generation did. He used it as a uniting factor and entrusted certain courts and welfare duties to it. But the Empire split. In the West, the Empire shattered into kingdoms and the Church served at times as a uniting force and at times as a separate kingdom of it's own. In the Eastern Empire the Church remained wedded to Government. The characters of the church changed and reflected the social and governmental differences. The multiplicity of cultures in the west became so pervasive that all Classical thought disapppeared from the west, subsumed by the folk knowledge and revolutionary agricultural and new military, trade, technical, and governmental practices. The East retained the Classical Learning, but often its own territories united for so long, began to similarly pull away, but at a far slower rate than the west. In Alexandria, waves of greatly devout Christians from outside the city brought newly energized urgency to their belief. Their new cultured did not reflect any respect for what came before and they perpetrated one of the three great destructions of knowledge in human history. The second burning of the library. Long-story-short, Rome was stabilized by early Cultural Variety and destroyed by later Cultural Variety. Early cultures wanted to participate in the Empire later ones merely looked for protection from other tribes and went their own day in developing a separate society Not quite the same, but it is similar. Early migrants to America wanted to become Americans. Some later immigrants, say some New Jersey Imams, preach death to America, replacing its laws with Arabian Tribal laws, and contrary policy to female equality in civil rights. Between these extremes there are lesser differences. But like diluting a paint, at what point does it no longer stick to the wood? dmb: Multiculturalism doesn't mix very well with things like racial purity, religious uniformity or a monolithic culture, but who isn't already opposed to those things? I realize that there is much fear and suspicion among those who oppose multiculturalism, but I don't get it. Can mel or anyone else give me a good reason to fear multiculturalism or pluralism? mel: Wherever humans breed, racial purity is a laughable myth. History, however, seems to show that too little Cultural variation is fatal and too much is as well. Which leaves the question unanswered. It seems, for me at least, that I don't understand it well enough. Thanks for the opportunity to think anout this. thanks--mel _________________________________________________________________ It’s the same Hotmail®. 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