Multiple Cultures
Posted by John Jay on July 23rd, 2007 (All posts by John Jay)
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After Ralph's thought-provoking post below, I'd like to take another pot-shot at the multicultural elites who seem to value any other culture more than our own.
One of the things that persistently puzzles me about the multi-cultural crowd is that, at least when I was a TA, they shied away from intellectually rigorous activity such as studying a foreign language. One would think that actually learning to speak a non-Western tongue would do more for true inter-cultural understanding than any pastiche of factoids, half-truths and generalized misinformation about other cultures that is the general Introduction to Foreign Culture claptrap at most Universities.
The cynic in me says that most multi-culturalists don't go in for a detailed study of a foreign language for three reasons – it would take away the focus from their departments, it's hard (non-Western languages generally come with non-Western writing systems, and in my experience, students run from those like the plague), and, to Ralph's point, the more in-depth you study some cultures, the more you are thankful you weren't born into them. Hardly conducive to the facile moral relativism of the multi-culti crowd.
Instead of useful work, power-hungry multi-culturalists try to enflame the bringing embers of racism into the flames of political gain. Long before Jesse Jackson's "hymietown" remark, I've long suspected that those who scream the most about racism in this current society are either closet racists, cynical opportunists, or both. Not to say that racism doesn't exist in America, it certainly does. Racism smolders everywhere people of more than one skin hue congregate together. But to think that one can legislate away the moderately low level we have now in the US is dangerous. Like unemployment, there will always be a natural (hopefully low) level of racism in a given society. Eliminating it entirely, requires - as did eliminating unemployment – Soviet methods...
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