Fred Reed laments the destruction of the national culture of the United States.
Countries are happiest when they have one national culture, or at least one dominant culture to which all must perforce conform. We see this in countries like Japan and Korea, homogeneous societies which, because homogeneous, have no race riots or religious wars. It was largely true in, for example, Sweden and France until they began admitting immigrants from incompatible cultures. Today, most of the news from such countries deals with the consequences.
Diversity, never a good idea. is in fact the cause of most of the world’s conflicts: Shia and Sunni, Jew and Arab, Hutu and Tutsi, Tamil and Sinhalese, Hindu and Muslim and, in America, black, white, and brown. Diversityis the cause of the dissolution of American society.
Until roughly the Sixties, America was homogeneous enough, overwhelmingly white, European, Anglophone, and Christian. This provided sufficient commonalty that people all regarded themselves as Americans. At the same time, there were many geographically separated subcultures which had little in common and didn’t like each other, or wouldn’t have if they had come into contact. Massachusetts, Montana, Alabama, West Virginia, and New York were different civilizations….
Then everything changed. Diversity began, not at first of people so much as of ideas. Reasons were several. Communications improved. Interstates appeared. The federal government gained in power and reach. The Supreme Court began making sweeping decisions on manners, morals and faith–that is, on culture and values–which it had not done before. Now Washington–New York, really–could enforce these decisions.
The result was unwanted cultural diversity. The Court decided in decision after decision that increasingly explicit pornography enjoyed protection as free speech, imposing an alien ideology on small towns in Kansas. This culminated in internet porn accessible to children of ten, uncontrolled and uncontrollable. Obscene music poured out of New York as local stations were bought by Manhattan, from which rap came–unfit, in most regions, for a toilet wall. Towns could not defend themselves because of the doctrine of free speech and the massively increased power of the northeast. Television became national with similar trampling of local values of faith, propriety, and race.
Particularly invasive was the newly invented doctrine of separation of church and state. For at least a hundred and fifty years no one, neither court nor individual, had noticed that the Constitution forbade manger scenes on the town square at Christmas, or the singing of carols on public streets, or mention of the Bible in schools. It was yet more compelled cultural diversity.
One hardly needs William of Ockham to discern the central problem. The United States of America worked when it was American and Christian. It no longer works because it is now saddled with a government that is not-American and not-Christian as well as a substantial minority population that is not-American and not-Christian. These days, the US government is essentially an Athenian-style empire, albeit one with an emperor who is heavily influenced by a foreign grand vizier who is hostile to Christianity and far more concerned with those foreign interests than with American interests.
And the fact that both the emperor and the grand vizier are collectives rather than individuals does not change either the relevance of the observations or the probable outcome. Lament this reality if you will. Hurl accusations and labels if you want. None of that is going to alter, in the slightest, the way the inevitable patterns of history are going to play out.
Only the most foolish of fools can be stupid enough to claim temporal exceptionalism will somehow inure themselves to the great waves of history. If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, read Tolstoy, specifically, War and Peace. There are very sound reasons that we see the same events play out again and again and again across the centuries.
