The Integrationist Fantasy

E pluribus unum? Out of many, one? It can work, and it did work for a time, though not perfectly. But thanks to ‘progressives,’ regression has set in. Whether a One can be made of Many depends on the nature of the Many.

A viable One cannot be made out of just any Many.

To think otherwise is to succumb to what I call the Integrationist Fantasy. This is the dangerous conceit that people can be brought together peacefully and productively despite deep differences in their languages, religions, cultures, traditions, and values.

To integrate is to bring together into a whole. But a functioning whole, whether political, social, or of any sort, cannot be assembled from any old assortment of parts. To advert to an outworn metaphor from yesteryear, there have to be some constraints on the range of ingredients thrown into the melting pot. Your stew will not be improved by the addition of ground-up spark plugs or enhanced by a liberal dose of WD-40.

Keeping with the gustatory metaphor, wide-open borders is a recipe for disaster.

I recently came across the following quotation from an anthropologist hitherto unknown to me:

One of the broadest and surest generalizations . . . about human beings is that no society is healthy or creative or strong unless that society has a set of common values that give meaning and purpose to group life, that can be symbolically expressed, that fit with the situation of the time as well as being linked to the historical past, and that do not outrage men’s reason, and at the same time appeal to their emotions. (Clyde Kluckhohn, “Culture and Behavior,” Collected Essays of Clyde Kluckhohn, New York: Free Press, 1962, 297-8. Quoted from John Kekes, The Nature of Philosophy, Rowman and Littlefield, 1980, 186)

Exactly right. Ignorance of these truths has brought us to the eve of destruction. Next week will bring the dawn of correction. (Aficionados of the ‘sixties will appreciate my allusion to two well-known songs from that era.)