Which is better? A society characterized by cultural diversity? Or a society in which its many different kinds of people are assimilated into a single nation characterized by cultural unity? Today, the former view dominates, but the goal through most of history throughout the world has been the latter. More to the point, cultural diversity has always been the characteristic of an empire. Republics have always been built around national unity. The Claremont Review of Books discusses a new book on diversity, William H. Frey’s Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics are Remaking America
, delving into these topics and other provocative questions: such as, how will affirmative action laws work when white people become the minority?
From Christopher Caldwell, The Browning of America, the Claremont Review of Books:
Christopher Caldwell
“We believe our diversity, our differences, when joined together by a common set of ideals, makes us stronger, makes us more creative, makes us different,” Barack Obama pronounced at a citizenship ceremony last Fourth of July. Until half a century ago most serious historians would have called such an opinion ignorant or naïve. Ethnic diversity implies cultural diversity—if it did not, ethnic diversity would soon disappear. Cultural diversity means division, division means weakness, and weakness means, eventually, unfreedom. Such, at least, is the traditional view, and history appears to vindicate it. “Diversity” has been an attribute of subject populations: medieval elites communicated in Latin, laborers in various vernaculars. Diversity has been the form of belonging that typifies empires, just as nationality has been the form that typifies republics. The British Empire, the Roman Empire, and the Habsburg Empire—these were diverse. England, Italy, and Austria, until recently, were not. The motto E pluribus unum is a sign that the founders saw diversity as a challenge to be mastered, not a resource to be tapped.
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