Celebrating Cultural Diversity

The Problem: Monoculturism

Reflections by Mike Seymour

• By the year 2050, trends predict that almost 50% of the US population will be what are now called minorities.
• And yet the US government (as do most governments) promotes a monoculture in which all people become Americans, not just legally but in mind and spirit as well.
• “Hispanics want to belong to America without betraying the past. Yet we fear losing ground in any negotiation with America. Our fear, most of all, is of losing our culture.” Richard Rodriguez, “Fear of Losing Our Culture” Time/CNN
• “As part of assimilation policies in France, the French government has been zealous in making North African and other Muslim women give up wearing their chadors, or veils, and, in the schools, instilling a disdain for North African and Muslim culture in their children.”

“Who am I?” “What do I want to do with my life?” “What am I passionate about?”

These are questions we all deal with at some time—and often many times—in our lives.  I have found that knowing where I came from—my family history and the meanings I can tease out of that to better understand myself—has been a critical part of my own self-discovery. It is in this sense that I welcome a diversity of cultures, because I know that when we lack a sense of roots, culture and tradition, we can easily become lost by putting too much of our identity in things, people and ways that are not who we are.

I’m not advocating being bound to our culture and past. Some societies try to function that way, but it is much too difficult and unrealistic, especially in a modern globalized society where other cultures and peoples are all over the TV shows, videos, news articles and products you live with on a daily basis. Nor certainly do I advocate a cut and run—forget the past and where I came from.  I think that kind of rampant individualism, as in you do your thing and I’ll do mine, makes the world fall apart quickly. I think there’s a happy middle way, where I can be an American, perhaps a citizen of the world, even, and still have a keen awareness of the history, values, traditions and meaning of my culture and ancestry.  I can invite where I came from to inform who I am and where I go in life, without feeling like culture and the past are a mandate or block to my individuality.

In fact authentic individualism is only found in people who have a sense of roots and allow their branches and leaves to grow in unique ways towards their individual passions and talents-their callings in life. To my way of thinking, this is why cultural diversity is so important. It’s a question of whether or not we want a society of authentic people, or one in which people are encouraged to scrub their cultural identity away and become like everyone else. There is a concern in much of the world today that this loss of cultural identity is exactly what is happening, as people adopt clothing, movies, cars and things of the modern globalized society and leave their pasts behind.

Assimilation & Monoculture

Mention the word assimilation and I can’t help but think of the Borg, a robot-like group of beings in the TV series Star Trek whose mission was to conquer and assimilate other species into their collective. No doubt the creators of Star Trek were making with the Borg a critique of cultural assimilation policies which the US and many other countries practice as a way to integrate immigrants into their society.  The melting pot idea has been touted as a benefit. “We’re a melting pot” also implies not only loss of cultural distinctiveness, but also of differences which are seen as potentially troublesome.  Here the concept of “otherness,” or people “not like us” is viewed as a problem to be gotten rid of, and not an asset to be celebrated.

Movements to make everyone the same are being criticized as monoculture. This is a term

that comes from the world of agriculture and refers to the way most crops are grown today, which is the practice of growing one crop over a very large area. Examples are wheat fields, soybean fields and apple orchards. Its strengths are that you can get greater yields, because it’s easier to plant, fertilize and harvest large quantities when it’s all the same crop. The downside of monoculture is that crops are vulnerable to massive failure if invaded by some disease organism which spreads quickly. Also, growing lots of one crop over and over again tends to tire the soil out quickly. Polyculture is the opposite of monoculture and uses multiple crops in the same space, as well as crop rotation. While this requires more labor and is less efficient, disease and soil depletion are far lower in polyculture environments. 

The comparison between food and people is an enticing one. Can we learn about human society from natural patterns and the way we grow our food? Environmentalist and social progressives share a belief that we can. They cite convincing evidence from evolutionary biology, for example, showing that genetic and species diversity were critically important contexts for the possibility of human life to evolve on Earth. Many scientists who have studied the human genome and the chemistry of early life on Earth have gone to great lengths with mathematical calculations showing the improbability of human life arising on this planet. Most of the numbers involved I can’t even pronounce, and would be so long they would fill more than several pages.

One key condition has been to have a lot of different elements and, therefore, many unique kinds of combinations. It is one of these combinations, in fact, out of which human life eventually did arise.

Diversity in the Natural World

It’s important to remember that humans came from and are a part of nature. We hardly think of ourselves that way, because it seems on a daily basis the world people have made around them seems to be how we think of the world—as created by mankind.

So we look at our homes, cars, roads, food, office buildings, schools and all the things about human thought, culture and tradition, and it seems most everything in our world is made up of things with a human signature on them. Nature appears to most people as merely a backdrop to the so-called “real world” of human affairs. It’s like the border on a postcard, with the center picture consisting of human activity.

However, nature is in fact primary and our first teacher. Ecologist are telling us today that we need a revolution in our way of thinking about ourselves if we expect to survive in harmony with this planet, our home. This has tremendous implications in all spheres of humanity activity. One of those is in this area of multi-cultural vs. monocultrural thinking. Some want to solve problems of world conflict and differences by gradually making all people the same. Many others for varying reasons want to maintain and even strengthen the cultural diversity and uniqueness in the world today.

This makes sense from the ecological point of view. The natural world we see about us  is a storybook of diversity, without which nature as we know it would die very quickly. Go into any woods nearby your home, look at the trees, dig in the soil and start classifying how many different life forms there are without which that particular ecosystem would not be as it is. There are fungi on trees which deposit nutrients into the soil, and nitrogen-fixing plants that do the same. Hundreds of insects, worms, spiders, frogs, salamanders, birds and animal species live off and die back into this eco-soup, and each one provides some ecosystem service that keeps the whole going.

Human Diversity and Sustainability

Now translate this to the world of humans. The first thing we might think of  is how beautiful it is to have this very rich array of different cultures. We appreciate cultural diversity from an aesthetic point of view. The world is more fascinating when there are Greeks, Chinese, San Bushmen and other exotic peoples.

But there is something deeper going on as well, and I think it has something to do with our ability to sustain ourselves as a species.  We need cultural diversity to keep going in much the same way that the diversity of elements early on in Earth history was necessary for human life to arise. We might say that different peoples and their cultures are not totally complete in themselves until they join together with others. This may not be immediately apparent to many of us who live in our own culture most of the time, separated from other cultures, but let’s consider a few perspectives.

For example, my wife and I recently were driving to Seattle and listening to a  really great African American  blues singer on the radio, and we were both sort of rocking in our seats because we like soul music. I commented how much of what we think of as American culture is made from the black experience and the unique contribution of African Americans.  Then my wife said something like “Black culture IS the ONLY American culture.” Now that kind of stopped me a bit, because however wishy-washy white American culture is, it is culture nonetheless. But I think what Maggie was saying was that the heart and soul of American culture—what  is really distinct about America that no other country has—is the culture that rose in triumph and spiritual dignity from slavery to leave its powerful and unique mark on American life. And this spiritual strength which resonates through so much black soul music has grounded Americans in something very strong and real.

So here we have case in which the conquerors and enslavers were profoundly affected and made more human by the inclusion of Africans in a formerly all-European culture.

A Native American Prophecy

In the early days of Youth for a New World when I first traveled to Burundi, I really didn’t know  fully why I was going, and I was looking for some answers. That took me on a quest for meaning and two pieces of writing showed up which shed some light on this whole issue of cultural diversity and its importance.

First I found a prophecy which was in a talk given by Cherokee elder Lee Brown at the 1986  Continental Indigenous Council in Fairbanks, Alaska. In it Brown said that the Great Spirit gave the people four different colors and to each color also gave a different wisdom, or original teaching. It was the responsibility of each of the four peoples to develop and safeguard the teaching given to them. This also meant that that humanity would not be whole until all the different colored people came together and shared all their teachings with one another.

It was said that the Great Spirit made white, black, red and yellow colored people. To the white was given the wisdom of fire, or imagination and technology. To the black was given the wisdom of water or community, because water connects everything. To the red was given the wisdom of the Earth, plants and how to grow things for food. The yellow peoples were given guardianship of the wind so they would learn about the sky and breath and their role in spiritual advancement.

When you think about it, there’s a lot of wisdom in this prophecy. In fact, our times are the first in human history that it has been possible for these different peoples and wisdoms to really come together—and none too soon, as humanity has reach a real point of risk in its history. The European peoples, representing the white—have in fact been the leaders of technology, and this has made them not only all-powerful, but a connector for all the other races. But we also know that the dominance of the white power of fire is one of the reasons for global warming, wars and divisions because a huge imbalance has evolved in humanity.

When we can look at the movements that have counter-balanced that cultural domination, we see the influence of Asian and indigenous peoples, their cultures and thought . Certainly the spiritual revolution of the last 50 years has been largely spurred by Westerners going to India, Japan and SE Asia. So too the environmental movement was strongly influenced by the Native American and other indigenous cultures whose wisdom was being sought as we saw the problems in modern society we knew we lacked the wisdom to deal with.

That left one other people and color to deal with, and that was the black people, or Africa. And as far as I could tell, including most people I talked with, the wisdom of Africa had not been fully assimilated into world culture. In fact, of all the continents in the modern world, Africa is most left behind, and most at risk of falling even further behind in an age of rapid technology development as well as well as global warming which takes its worst toll in hotter climates.

Now I had an inkling why I was being drawn to Africa. There was something to be discovered here that was important for world health and unity.

Africa-The soul of the World

Nigerian writer Ben Okri wrote a piece for volume 16 in Ode magazine titled Healing the Africa Within Us,” which I consider to be one of the more profound statements I have heard recently. In his opening statement, Okri writes:

“Heart-shaped Africa is the feeling centre of the world. Continents are  metaphors as much as they are places. And a people are spiritual states of humanity as distinguishable in what they represent as lilies and roses and daffodils.”

Later on he says:

“We have to heal the Africa in us if we are going to be whole again. We have to heal the Africa outside us if the human race is going to be at peace again in a new dynamic way. There is a relationship between the troubles in a people and the troubles in the world, in the atmosphere. The troubles of Africa contribute immensely to the sheer weight and size of world suffering. And this world suffering affects everyone on this planet, affects children and their health, affects our sleep, our anxiety, our unknown suffering; for it is possible to suffer without knowing it.”

Inside myself I heard a big “Wow” go off, because I immediately knew the truth of what Okri was say. Everything in the world is tied to everything else. We can’t just go on happily living our lives of pleasure and privelege when people in Africa—or  anywhere in the world for that matter—are dying needlessly of starvation. Okri is saying that the suffering here in the USA and elsewhere is linked to the suffering in Africa.  And until we wake up to our compassionate heart and the wisdom of the black or water people, the world would not be whole. We would lack a soul, or a sense of feeling and connection to others of which peoples of African descent are wisdom-holders.

After reading Okri and Lee Brown, my mission in Africa and any other place in the world was clear. We are being called today to see one another as a family and to live like that, caring for one another.

This is the heart of the celebration of cultural diversity which is going on in the world today. It is the knowledge—held most dearly by peoples of African descent—that humanity is really all one family.

Our survival depends upon our living into this profound insight.

What You Can Do

Steps You Can Take

1. Do research on your family history. Start by interviewing the oldest relatives on both your mother and father’s side of the family. Ask for old photos, letters or any kinds of documents they might have which you could reproduce. If they are hesitant about writing their own history, you could interview them using a tape recorder.  Then you could expand your search by using any one of a number of online genealogical search sites. As you find ways to order and make sense of the information, several key questions to pursue are: (1) What are the inter-generational themes that characterize my mother’s family and my father’s family? (2) Is there anything about each family, their values, beliefs and experience that would predispose my mother and father coming together? (3) As I ponder this material, what are the lessons for me to learn today? How can I benefit from knowing what I now know?
2. Find out about your cultural background from novels and history books. If you are Mexican, for example, you could read some of the works of Octavio Paz or Carolos Fuentes, Or perhaps you could read about Emiliano Zapata, a leading figure in the Mexican revolution.

Resources

These are all genealogical sites where you can search for your family ancestry.

www.ancestry.com

www.familyhistory.com

www.geneology.com

MultiCultural Pavillion, resources for education has a lot of multicultural resources for teachers including activities, workshops, listserves, songs, definitions etc.

http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/