George Rebane
As we await this week’s vote for Scotland’s independence, my thoughts again turn to culture and its role in shaping a people and structuring a society. Reviewing some of these notions with you at this time might even pique some discussion. The basic idea here is that what a society can/will or cannot/will not do is constrained and guided by its culture. Today Scotland is not alone in the desire for its culturally cohesive population to have a country where Scots can work and live according to their own laws and traditions, and according to their own values and mores, speaking their own language. This is an ancient desire shared by all people around the world who have grown up in strong culture-defined communities. Such life has given rise to powerful sentiments expressed in art and literature, and sentiments that have also led to revolutions, wars, and migrations.
Today, perhaps more than ever before, we see such movements of people wanting to relearn their heritage and band together with those like-minded to see if they too could improve their lot by mutually embracing their roots and working together in closer harmony. The Scots are not alone. Since the Treaty of Versailles (end of WW1), and again since the Cold War ended, we have seen dozens of culturally cohesive peoples gather together to work toward their ultimate mono-cultural independence. Here the Scots are joined by the Catalans, Basques, Flemish, Kurds, Shias, Sunnis, …, and cohorts of USSR transplanted Russian speakers living in Russia’s ‘near abroad’.
From the opposite perspective, one of the lures of collectivism (especially in its Marxist-Leninist form) was the gathering of all peoples into one peaceful and productive global society to create an undifferentiated amalgam of humanity. This would be achieved by the shedding of multitudes of discriminating and chafing cultures, and in their place adopting one common social contract that would be dictated by the over-arching state and imposed equally on all. But again it has turned out that this is not how the realworld works.
It is obvious to all but the ideologically blindered that the form and function of multi-culturalism as promoted by progressives is grossly in error, and a stifling of all societies that have attempted to implement it. Penning in different cultures on the same land mass, and then keeping them ‘peacefully’ in line by the government gun has satisfied no one. Instead such autocratic cum tyrannical governance has exacerbated the cultural and ethnic divisions in these forcefully amalgamated populations. As Chancellor Angela Merkel said, after years of Germany’s heroic attempts to assimilate its recently imported ethnicities from Eastern Europe, the Mideast, and Africa, “Multi-kulti does not work.”
The progressives counter such strong feelings as being misogynous, racist, generally evil, and somehow hearkening back to the dark ages. But that argument turns out to be an intellectually bankrupt ruse. Today, small culturally cohesive countries and similarly composed jurisdictions within sovereign nation-states have no problem living in harmony with their immediate neighbors and the world’s community of nations. The guiding principle seems to be that everyone can experience, enjoy, and do business with people of other cultures without having to abandon the proximity and comforts of their own culture nor allowing it to be deconstructed by uncontrolled influx of other cultures.
Multi-culture’s problems arise when a state must use voluminous, uniformly applied, always amended and ever expanded codes of conduct that in one way or another violate the sensibilities of everyone in their jurisdiction. The result of such policies is soon apparent and easy to understand – the dominant population segment starts making ever more dysfunctional rules to limit behaviors (freedoms) of others in the vain hope that somehow they will finally compile that magic rule book under which all live happily with minimum strife (and minimum policing). But long before such a blessed future arrives, all measures of economic productivity and quality of life to inform public policy will have been abandoned for ideological purity. The result is that the sub-dominant (minority) cultures and ethnicities will sink into a permanent under-class of citizens. And this is doubly so when the state touts and adopts the more encompassing forms of democracy in which the malleable masses can vote on everything permitted by their then ‘stabilizing’ state. (A visible example of that is the rump population of conservatives in California whose voices no longer count in Sacramento.)
Sociologists tell us that the solution to this sorry state of affairs is in the formation of smaller culturally less diverse jurisdictions. In such lands – Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, the Baltics, Ireland, … – the only disturbances to social amiability come from foreign ethnic minorities who don’t share the resident traditional culture. And sadly, due to the current pervasive pandemic of pandered progressive pabulum, many of these formerly harmonious cultural enclaves have invited their own multi-cultural maladies in the quest to be hailed in the modern manner as sensitive, ‘non-discriminating’, and inclusive peoples, while in the practice never seeing what awaits them. Norway and Sweden are now in the early stages of showing such pathologic symptoms with their Muslim imports each demanding, you guessed it, their own insular enclaves wherein their laws and customs are supreme (more here). Across the Baltic, the Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians are also being subjected to the ravages of Russians who remained behind when the USSR collapsed. These people wanted to stay within more enlightened societies yet have refused to learn their hosts’ languages or adopt their customs. These have become the ‘little Russias’ which Putin, in the manner of Ukraine, will agitate before launching new aggressions to reinstate the past glories of Greater Russia. To those who will but listen, Dr Merkel’s words are echoing across the world.
In the US, somewhere during the Great Society years we gave up on the notion of maintaining America’s dominant European culture, the one that founded and built the country, and which had become the de facto American culture celebrated from main street to the silver screen. Until mid-20th century it was this American culture that we immigrants were ushered into when we got off the boats and attended our citizenship classes. This is no more.
In the United States today all cultures are taught to be of equal worth and invited to maintain their cohesive enclaves save for those (Asians, blacks, and whites) who had embraced the American culture which rapidly became the racially inclusive mainstream during the post-war years. But in the late 1960s massive class warfare movements were launched by the Left which structured our society into recognized classes of ‘minorities’ that were expected to be more or less permanently in opposition to those (again of all races) who still embraced the Europe-derived American culture.
This cleaving into classes has impacted many aspects of America’s life in the 21st century. One with the most significant portents is the growth of systemic unemployment (much discussed here), especially among the generation of working age young people. Alternative paths into the work force (e.g. through trades apprenticeships) are both popular and effective in countries with cultures that instill an early work ethic and respect for learning from the older and established experts in a field. Germany is one such country, and uses such apprenticeship programs to develop their workforce for non-academic trades such as in manufacturing. But German companies that manufacture in the US have concluded that implementing such programs here doesn’t work because of the cultural differences in our youth. In the meanwhile, millions of jobs go unfilled in America (more here and here). There is much more to be said about this, but here we’ll come back to it later.
I admit that such a brief look at the impact of culture in today’s world is necessarily incomplete. Nevertheless it attempts to summarize and establish the thrust and direction of social change that we have witnessed over the last half century and highlights how and why we have fragmented into cultural minorities with the formerly dominant culture being under constant attack in progressive legislatures, progressive government schools, and the progressive media.
[15sep14 update] Stratfor has published an excellent (free) article analyzing the various pros and cons of Scottish independence – ‘Scotland Approaches Its Hour Upon the Stage’.
[16sep14 update] Strafor’s George Friedman contributes this thoughtful and important essay germain to our broader consideration of cultural solidarity. In it he says –
Nationalism, the remembrance and love of history and culture, is not a trivial thing. It has driven Europe and even the world for more than two centuries in ever-increasing waves. The upcoming Scottish election, whichever way it goes, demonstrates the enormous power of the desire for national self-determination. If it can corrode the British union, it can corrode anything.
You can read the whole piece here – http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/origins-and-implications-scottish-referendum
rebanesruminations.com 
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