Amerika

If we examine the concepts behind words and their concrete meaning, we may assert that to be anti-multiculturalist is to be multiculturalist, and to be multiculturalist is to be anti-multiculturalist.

As contradictory as it may seem, the struggle for a community’s homogeneity — something akin to cultural poverty, since there would be only one — constitutes a step forward toward a more diverse, multicolored, and rich world. Through small yet sustainable homogeneous nuclei, that is, human groups small enough to preserve a particular culture, with their own battery of values and a unique genetic stock, but large enough to ensure continuity over time, the diversity of human identities may truly manifest itself through a multitude of cultures, races, and ethnicities.

Totalitarian humanism, disguised as political correctness and all its derivatives, constantly speaks to us of a richer, more diverse, and inclusive society — one supposedly achieved through an ever more varied environment, where, merely by looking out the window, we should behold all the races, cultures, and colors the world has to offer.

If we recall Miguel de Unamuno’s famous phrase, we know that “fascism is cured by reading, and racism is cured by traveling” — something not far removed from truth. If we consider what the writer truly meant, we understand that for him “racism” is synonymous with racial prejudice, that odious condition that makes us antagonistic toward people we do not know personally, since we place our reservations upon an entire group.

Unamuno was right in suggesting that prejudice vanishes through travel—and indeed, by traveling and coming to know other cultures and their people in their daily lives, one dismantles those hateful comparisons with one’s own culture, learning to understand others within their own context, without judging or attempting to measure them by means of a selfish and unobjective standardization.

Where liberals fail gravely is in forcing Unamuno’s saying into a stationary reality, for the fact that something is cured by traveling does not mean it is cured by not traveling. This reasoning may appear basic, yet it is not the same to travel and learn about other cultures as to have those cultures travel to our neighborhoods and remain there permanently.

When multiculturalism is instantaneous, stationary, and synchronic — that is, bound to the same moment and place — it invariably produces results opposite to those expected by liberalism: racial violence (e.g., the riots in France), ethnic violence (the many genocides within sub-Saharan Africa), supremacy and domination (the Israeli wall and wire fences isolating the Palestinian people), miscegenation with loss of identity (indigenous peoples begging in Western cities), and an overwhelming increase in prejudice and hatred (every day, endlessly).

Evidently, an immediate “diverse” environment — culturally rich in appearance — results in a poor future, where diversity is reduced to the strongest culture that succeeds in dominating, denying, and imposing itself upon the others, whereas immediate cultural poverty (a single place, a homogeneous community) may secure a richer, more diverse, and even more human future.

The liberal rainbow fantasy seems to have only two colors: the red of the blood that follows violence and domination, and the brown that remains once races disappear, fused into one.

Local homogeneity is global heterogeneity. Local heterogeneity is global homogeneity.

Tags: diversity, homogeneity, localism, miguel de unamuno, multiculturalism