“This (multicultural) approach has failed, utterly failed,” Merkel told the meeting in Potsdam, south of Berlin.Americans (and Canadians, Australians), who have the most experience of people who are actually quite different getting along, could have told her that it is nonetheless very hard. Except that even many Americans seem to have forgotten this recently. Tribes do not naturally get along with other tribes very well. What seems to work best is that they trade and do business with each other for a while, testing each other out. Trade and business also gives each of them a focus and distraction from sitting around thinking how evil those other guys are. They are too busy earning a living to put much energy into that.
The more common modern belief is that people would just naturally get along if they weren't taught to hate. They know this from living in all-white places like Vermont and Sweden, tut-tutting about the bad behavior of those who actually live with other races, religions, and classes. Our betters have been teaching us this crap all of my life.
Reminds me of Tom Lehrer's song "National Brotherhood Week." Some people forget that we learned how to live together in spite of our differences, and even then it was a crapshoot.
ReplyDeleteGive credit to Angela Merkel for finally admitting her mistake.
ReplyDeleteI doubt that those in the US who push the multi-culti narrative will ever admit their mistake.
Even in the lily-white area I grew up in, I had seen enough cultural clashing before I got out of high school to be inoculated against the multi-culti narrative that appeared some years later. Early on I saw that "our betters" - at least that is how they viewed themselves- were just as capable of bigotry as those whom were later labeled as "deplorables."
A later inoculation against the multi-culti narrative was that having lived and worked overseas, I didn't view foreign cultures as inherently superior to American culture, as many of the multi-cultis implicitly do. Having both more experience in Latin America and also having acquired much more book-learning about Latin America than the likes of Bernie Sanders, I was immune to his attempts to shame Americans into emulating what those great Latin lefties were doing.
That quote is from 2010. Not sure why it’s making the rounds tonight.
ReplyDeleteHmm...
ReplyDeleteThere may be something to "you've got to be taught" for groups you've never actually encountered. I had a hard time understanding the premise in "South Pacific" when I saw it as a kid, because no one had thought to mention to me that there were white people who had a problem with Asians. I thought ethnic strife was 100% limited to white-on-black racism. Later I learned that it included Jews, from studying the Holocaust. Only much later did I grasp that it was Arabs, you name it, basically anyone but your tribe. It's just that I was practically never around anyone but my tribe.
ReplyDeleteI'd be the first to admit that I'm capable of having a problem with any culture not my own if I have to rub up against it often and there's even the most ordinary, predictable friction. That's not the same as virulent racism, of course, but it's one of the steps for getting there, and it happens organically, without "teaching."