MONOCULTURE V. MULTICULTURE

People Like Us: We all pay lip service to the melting pot, but we really prefer the congealing pot (David Brooks, September 2003, The Atlantic Monthly)

Maybe it's time to admit the obvious. We don't really care about diversity all that much in America, even though we talk about it a great deal. Maybe somewhere in this country there is a truly diverse neighborhood in which a black Pentecostal minister lives next to a white anti-globalization activist, who lives next to an Asian short-order cook, who lives next to a professional golfer, who lives next to a postmodern-literature professor and a cardiovascular surgeon. But I have never been to or heard of that neighborhood. Instead, what I have seen all around the country is people making strenuous efforts to group themselves with people who are basically like themselves.

Human beings are capable of drawing amazingly subtle social distinctions and then shaping their lives around them. In the Washington, D.C., area Democratic lawyers tend to live in suburban Maryland, and Republican lawyers tend to live in suburban Virginia. If you asked a Democratic lawyer to move from her $750,000 house in Bethesda, Maryland, to a $750,000 house in Great Falls, Virginia, she'd look at you as if you had just asked her to buy a pickup truck with a gun rack and to shove chewing tobacco in her kid's mouth. In Manhattan the owner of a $3 million SoHo loft would feel out of place moving into a $3 million Fifth Avenue apartment. A West Hollywood interior decorator would feel dislocated if you asked him to move to Orange County. In Georgia a barista from Athens would probably not fit in serving coffee in Americus.

It is a common complaint that every place is starting to look the same. But in the information age, the late writer James Chapin once told me, every place becomes more like itself. People are less often tied down to factories and mills, and they can search for places to live on the basis of cultural affinity. Once they find a town in which people share their values, they flock there, and reinforce whatever was distinctive about the town in the first place. Once Boulder, Colorado, became known as congenial to politically progressive mountain bikers, half the politically progressive mountain bikers in the country (it seems) moved there; they made the place so culturally pure that it has become practically a parody of itself.

But people love it. Make no mistake-we are increasing our happiness by segmenting off so rigorously. We are finding places where we are comfortable and where we feel we can flourish. But the choices we make toward that end lead to the very opposite of diversity. The United States might be a diverse nation when considered as a whole, but block by block and institution by institution it is a relatively homogeneous nation.

I don't get it. Isn't that the point of the melting pot, that you mix all the ingredients together and you get one undifferentiated thing? You get white bread, not fruitcake. Our motto is after all E Pluribus Unum or "Out of Many, One". The genius of America is that it doesn't much matter who you are or where you're from; you can come here, accept a few universal values, and maybe you won't be the same as your neighbor, but your kid will be the same as his. The key here--sorry to all you secularists--is than one of those universal beliefs we impose is that Man is a Created being, that he is Created in God's own image, and that he therefore has inherent dignity and a set of rights. America proceeds from an assumption of our similarity to one another.

Compare this to Europe, which has just adopted the opposite for its motto: "One in diversity". What could be more foolish than the belief that you can create a unified society if you try to maintain the things that make you different from one another? The problem for Europeans is that they don't have any universal beliefs any more, certainly not the belief that we're all Created by God in His image. This bodes ill for the attempt at Union, because in the absence of an organic extra-governmental unity they'll be reduced to imposing artificial unity via the mechanisms of the State. This statism, which requires a central authority to define the parameters of each and every interaction between peoples who can not be assumed to share any commonalities, must render a system that is so deliberate and sclerotic as to stifle the human soul, a problem that's easy to underestimate when you don't even believe in the soul. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 24, 2003 11:03 AM