Website owner: James Miller
The Multiculturalism Cult
The following is from Thomas Sowell. Barbarians inside the Gates. pp. 17 - 19
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The Multiculturalism Cult
THE WORLD HAS BEEN MULTICULTURAL for centuries before this word was coined. Moreover, it has been multicultural in a very real and practical way, directly the opposite of the way being urged by to-day's "multiculturalism" cult.
The very paper on which these words are written was invented in China, as was the art of printing. The letters come from ancient Rome and the numbers from India, via the Arabs. All this is being written by a man whose ancestors came from Africa, while listening to music by a Russian composer.
Even leaders of nations are not necessarily from those nations themselves. Napoleon was not French, Stalin was not Russian and Hitler was not German.
Crops have been as multicultural as people. Much of the world's rubber comes from Malaysia, but the Malaysian rubber trees themselves came from seeds brought from Brazil. The cocoa grown in Nigeria and the potatoes grown in Ireland likewise both originated in the Western Hemisphere before Columbus arrived.
A list of all the crops, technology and ideas that have spread from one people or one nation to another would be a list of most of the crops, technology or ideas in the world. The reason why all these things spread was, quite simply, that some things were considered better than others—and people wanted the best they could get.
This is completely the contrary to the philosophy of the "multiculturalism" cult, where things are not better or worse, but just different. Yet people around the world do not simply "celebrate diversity," they pick and choose which of their own cultural features they want to keep and which they want to dump in favor of something better from somebody else.
When Europeans first discovered paper and printing from China, they did not "celebrate diversity," they stopped giving themselves writers' cramp from copying scrolls and started letting the printing presses do the work. When American Indians saw horses for the first time after Europeans brought them here, they did not "celebrate diversity," they started riding off to hunt instead of walking.
Everything from automobiles to antibiotics has spread around the world because people wanted the best they could get, not the inefficient ways that the multiculturalist cult calls "living in harmony with nature." Too often, before modern medicine was accepted, that meant dying young instead of living to a healthy old age. People preferred to live, even if it wasn't "in harmony with nature."
The issue is not what I say or what the multiculturalists say. The issue is what millions of human beings actually do when they have a choice. Around the world, they treat cultural features as things that help them cope with life, not museum pieces to oooh and aaah over.
When they find their own ways of doing some things better, they keep them. When they find someone else's ways of doing other things better, they use them and drop what they used before. What they do not do is what the multiculturalists do—say that it is all just a matter of "perceptions," that nothing is better or worse than anything else.
Multiculturalism is one of those affectations that people can indulge in when they are enjoying all the fruits of modern technology and can grandly disdain the processes that produced them. None of this would be anything more than another of the many foibles of the human race, except that the cult of multiculturalism has become the new religion of our schools and colleges, contributing to the mushing of America. It has become part of the unexamined assumptions underlying public policy and even decisions in courts of law.
Who would be surprised that people from different cultural backgrounds are "represented" differently in different jobs, colleges, or income levels, except for the unspoken assumption that these different cultures are equally effective for all things?
Yet you need only turn on the television set and watch professional basketball to realize that one segment of the population plays the game a lot better than others. If you watch the commercials that sponsor these events, you are often watching ads for beer companies that were almost invariably established by people of German ancestry.
Since Germans have been brewing beer since the days of the Roman Empire, should we be surprised that they excel as much in this as blacks excel in basketball? Any standard based on quality will have "over-representation" and "under-representation" of different groups, however much such "disparate impact" may shock the editorial writers and provoke judges to rush in where angels fear to tread.
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2 June 2024
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