Luke McGuff
Project Z
P.O. Box 31848
Seattle, WA 98103-1848
Towards a Multicultural Future
By Luke McGuff
Conservatives want to see the United States as a monoculture, inherited from Europe. But wait--not all of Europe, actually: very little of Marx or Bakunin is taught in our schools at any level. Nor do we generally acknowledge the Enlightenment's descendants in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
True monocultures, such as medieval Europe, resist change because the absoluteness of their world views prevents knowledge more than promotes it. They have no concept of the other that allows them to change and adapt. For example, the nova that produced the Crab Nebula, visible around the world and the brightest nova in written history, went unrecorded in Europe because of the dominating Roman Catholic ideal of the perfection and immutability of God's skies. European culture didn't become truly dynamic until the Enlightenment and the Reformation crumbled the Roman Catholic Church's hegemony.
With these movements, a number of different operating systems were articulated: Francis Bacon, the scientific method; Rene Descartes, philosophical method; Galileo Galilei, empirical method; Adam Smith, pre-industrial capitalist economic method; Niccolo Machiavelli, political method. The important aspect of these articulations is that they are all METHODS, tools that can be applied to achieve a goal--understanding nature, thought, science, commerce or politics. Because these methods question as they examine, they are inherently disruptive of the status quo, whether their progenitors intended that or not. It's easy to imagine Galileo, for instance, feeling sincere regret that his observations violated the dictates of the church.
Today, we might think some of these methods naive or even harmful. But in 17th and 18th century Europe, it was the conflict and rearticulation of these ideas that gave them the power, rightly or wrongly, to expand European culture around the world. Just as today, the conflict and rearticulation of multiple ways of seeing and interpreting the world will give Americans the power to wrest control of our culture away from the dominant Eurocentric conservatives.
This is possibly one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world, but democratic ideals transcend language and heritage. Yes, America is a melting pot; yes, America is best when we can work across our differences towards a common American future of genuine political and economic democracy. We speak English in the workplace and in the schools, but many hundreds of different languages in our homes and neighborhood.
The conservatives (members of older immigrant groups) chide members of more recent immigrant groups for "refusing to assimilate." My immigrant forebears, for example, came to America during the potato famine. Do you think they said "Let's go to America and assimilate" or "Let's go to America and eat"? Did people immigrate here to assimilate or to grab an opportunity? It was not uncommon for farming communities to be settled almost entirely by people from one region or country in Europe, like Spillville, IA, settled by Czechs or Red Cloud, NE settled by Swedes. Every large city has neighborhoods like Ballard in Seattle, or Bucktown in Chicago, originally settled by immigrant groups from one country. They were there to make a living; assimilation came second. The same is true of current immigrants, whether Hispanic, Asian or Caribbean. It's likely that the grandparents of those who sniff about current immigrant groups themselves formed tight neighborhoods and communities.
Some conservatives object to our polyglot culture by singling out the Quebecois and the Basques as examples of linguistic minorities whose refusal to assimilate threatens the dominant culture. Equally specific counter-examples would be Gaelic for the Irish, Sioux for Native Americans and Welsh for the Welsh (that is, destroying an indigenous language did not create a desire to assimilate nor an acceptance of the native by the exploiting majority). However, suppressing any culture just destroys all cultures. A culture is weakened to the extent that it does not absorb the strengths of other cultures, and it stagnates. True assimilation would involve all cultures melding their strengths together, creating a new culture unforeseeable by the participants. Conservatives seem to miss this important fact. Assimilation, to them, is making everyone pass for pseudo-Caucasian.
The problem with ethnic plurality is not that it exists, and certainly not that by being proud of our heritage we immediately "Balkanize" our culture. When people speak of multiculturality "Balkanizing" the United States, they make two mistakes: they see culture as inherited, not created day-to-day; and they assume there will be no communication, no cross-pollination among the multicultural peoples. (They also make a metaphorical mistake, in that to Balkanize refers to political disunity imposed from without, not a cultural diversity grown from within.)
America offers us the chance to create our own culture. My culture comes very little from my heritage as Irish Catholic. A lot more of it comes from Chicago where I grew up: "The city of broad shoulders" and blues music. Most of my culture comes from jazz, beat poetry, science fiction: all primarily 20th century art forms, all created (to varying degrees) in rejection of the dominant monoculture. The ideas that I take from European history are generally not talked about by conservatives: Cesare Beccaria, who opposed capital punishment in 18th century Italy; Anoine de Condorcet, who advocated social security and women's suffrage in revolutionary France; Mikhail Bakunin, who struggled with the peasants of central Europe in the 19th century to throw off the chains of capitalism and central government.
The major problem in refusing to acknowledge our plurality is that we refuse to acknowledge our future. We refuse to work towards a common future, involving all Americans. Whoever we are--Gay, Black, White, Native, Asian, Disabled, whatever our abilities and viewpoints--our entire culture is strengthened to the extent that we encourage, develop and promote the strengths of all people working, living and playing in America.
When we acknowledge that, we realize that destroying (or allowing to be destroyed) any part of our culture through drugs, lack of opportunity, poverty, or disease destroys our future--our individual personal future, no matter how remote we might think we are from those problems. It is that common future that draws us together, through and beyond our diverse heritages.
Link:
216.173.196.221 |
