(Splitting from sex ed video thread so as not to hijack)
I really don’t know where to begin on a response, here.
One of the average 'Murrican’s worst lazy habits is to assume that all countries are just like the US (maybe under a layer of superficial differences, like speaking French) and that a solution to a civic or cultural problem would or should work just as well on either side. The American Way works for everyone… except when we’re talking about Japanese education, or Scandanavian sense of morality, or Canada’s general ability to do the “American” thing better than we do it… and then it becomes a huffy, fraught cry of “Why can’t WE do it exactly that same way?”
I don’t think most Americans can even begin to conceive of being a citizen of a country that is 90% or more, sometimes close to 100% ONE population in language, ancestry, history, religion and traditions. I don’t think most can grasp that when you have such a deeply homogenous population, you can do things that simply will not ever work in a more mixed population - even, say, modern Britain. You certainly can’t do them in a culture that prizes stubborn individuality and “our ways” above all else, even when those are illusions or utterly counterproductive ideas.
Saying “all Americans” is almost a self-canceling phrase, whereas saying “all Japanese” or “all Norwegians” or “all ______” (fill in quite a few other such nations and populations) actually means something.
Can we look at Norway, or Japan, or China, or even Canada, and find things to aspire to in the way of cultural improvement and civic… harmony? Certainly. Can we take one of their solutions and transplant it into our barren soil, a la the great Japanese Way of Business in the 1980s or any of several panicky educational reform systems? No. And to me, it really doesn’t take any great leap of genius to understand why.
If one argues that heterogeneity is the reason that the U.S. can’t have nice things, then the hidden assumption must be either than other ethnicities are ruining things for everyone or that Americans (presumably white people) are permanently intolerant/racist/whatever. There’s no other ways I can square that circle.
I kinda see where the OP is coming from, but I wouldn’t call China or Canada “homogenous”. Social programs are, I think, easier to implement in smaller, more homogenous countries than in larger herterogenous ones.
Not in any way. We can have the same things. (Puffs out chest, waves flag) We can even have better things. We just can’t have the same things the same way. What works in and for a homogenous culture is almost certain to be a poor fit, or a nonstarter, in the crazy-ass, me-first, we’re-best, screw-those-other-guys US.
I don’t see how America’s heterogeneity means that someone is “other” or a spoiler, or a damn ferriner. Heterogeneous means all mixed up and varied. It doesn’t imply an outside force coming in and ruining everything.
For example one way the US is heterogeneous is with respect to its climate. The Eastern and western portions of the US have completely different laws about water use and water distribution that arise from being temperate in the east vs. arid in the west. If someone tries to propose a single nationwide water use law, there will be strenuous objections from the Western states if the law universalizes the Eastern scheme, and vice versa. You might reasonably conclude that a nationwide water use law is impossible because of the US’s inherent climactic heterogeneity.
Some call the power of states to try different things to suit their needs “the laboratory of the states” and its usually considered a feature, not a bug. However, it is a great obstacle in the creation of homogeneous law; essentially the US was never intended to have homogeneous laws at all except on the limited subjects delegated to the Federal government (for example: diplomacy, interstate commerce, immigration, and currency).
While other nations are also physically large and ethnically diverse (such as China and Russia) they are organized on a strong central/totalitarian system, not a Federalist system; The US is comprised of 50 equal sovereigns, each more fundamentally powerful in the day to day lives of its citizens than the Federal government.
Edit: Canada’s government is more similar to our own however operates on “weak federalism” in which the federal government has more powers than the provinces (powers not delegated to the provinces are reserved for the federal government).
My problem is that it’s never put forth as a fleshed-out argument. It’s usually just lobbed into a conversation like a non-sequitur. I’m still waiting to hear from you why “homogeneity” would explain why Norway is able to produce a frank sex-ed video. Or what wealth has anything to do with it.
It’s like if I were to ask Mommy and Daddy why we can’t have a swimming pool like the family next door has, and they say: “The family next door is vegetarian, that’s why.”
If we assume that the US is the pinnacle of heterogeneity (it’s not, but let’s say it is), then how can we account for the things we do have? How is it possible that we have sex education at all given how different we are in terms of politics, race/ethnicity, class, and religion?
Is the quality of the sex education a function of how diverse the population is? Because I’m pretty sure I can find a global backwater with low diversity and even worse sex education.
Bringing up homogeneity without explaining how it is revelant to the discussion is a rhetorical cop-out. Hence, my response to the OP in that other thread.
It isn’t necessarily that “homogeneity” is why Norway can do a frank sex-ed video. The cause and effect are more loosely linked than that.
Don’t misread the argument here, either. I am not saying homogeneity is desirable or any overall positive. Not all aspects and results of a homogenous culture are “good” or desirable, even. Look at the very rigid and oppressive aspects of Japanese society, for example, with what we would regard as intolerable racism integrated at its core, and the overwhelming pressure to conform or leave.
For whatever reasons, Scandinavians have very different notions about sexuality from most of the rest of the world - the sort of 1970s very casual and relaxed and normal and natural notions that seem to have to be forced onto every other culture, and which are always under attack from “moralists.” That video exists because of this attitude, which may or may not have anything to do with “homogeneity” but is far easier to make a national policy - nationally funded, nationally implemented, nationally accepted because it is a homogenous, wealthy, largely “liberal” and accepting population. Consistency makes civic and cultural choices easier and (in many ways) cheaper. Wealth brings the ability to buy and communally have things that other countries can’t reach. The willingness to spend collective wealth on community improvements comes from wealth+homegeneity; the Scandinavian “welfare” state is not seen as the rich supporting a bunch of losers but in the (correct, IMVHO) view of “we’re all in this together and any deprived life diminishes us all.” You are simply never going to get that in a culture proud of thinking it’s a bunch of hardy, self-supporting, self-responsible Yankee individualists, no matter how much that’s deluded bullshit and how much societal improvement we’re talking about.
Homogeneity makes it all much simpler. Often better. Not always. But the one thing you can’t do is cherry-pick a desirable trait that’s supported by that sameness and believe/expect/demand that it work in a completely different cultural matrix.
Specificaly, now: why not? What is the specific cultural impediment to implementing a certain policy in a country with more, as opposed to fewer, cultures and races?
You are basically saying that a factual claim (whether diversity reduces civic participation, trust, and quality of life) cannot possibly be true because it would contradict one of your ideological tenets (that racial diversity is always beneficial). I hope you can understand how absurd this is.
And for what it’s worth, there isevidence that diversity is in fact to blame for why policies that can be implemented in Europe cannot be implemented in the US.
The smaller the group of people, the more common culture they share, the less they mingle with other ideas and cultures, the less difference of opinion on any given subject they are likely to have.
Norway can make a frank sex-ed video because within its localized unit that shares a history and culture, most people there think its a good idea. Whereas, across the whole of Europe there is no particular consensus on frank sexual education, just like in the US.
Its basically asking why NY can legalize gay marriage legislatively, but you can’t just do the same thing in Arkansas. The people there don’t have the same views. Edit: and that has little or nothing to do with racial diversity; religion is more the cause but OTOH religion is often quite tied to race in the US.
Population A is ten million people from generations of the same ancestry, same history, same political pressures, same culture. They all speak the same language. Their familial indexes are through the roof - everyone is related to everyone else within a few dozen generations. Their world is what all their voters or other decision makers have made from generations of consistent, shared mindset and goals. ETA: Their nation is likely small enough that there is little variation in how their lives play out, in good times and bad.
Population B is ten million people from more than a dozen nations, from first-gen immigrants to tenth-generation ‘founders.’ Not only do they come from hundreds of different cultures over time, speak dozens of different languages, came to adulthood under the spectrum of political possibilities, but - here’s the icing - thye all live under the rubric of Individualism Trumps All. ETA: And they probably sprawl all over a wide nation that is effectively a different one every few hundred miles, with utterly different epochs.
Which one is going to be able to make better collective decisions - better in that the need and outcome and goals are likely to be realistic and attainable? Which one is going to be willing to commit more personal wealth to collective needs? Which one is going to have higher acceptance of group decisions about taxes and education and mores and “direction”?
And which one is going to squabble endlessly and reverse group decisions from week to week, year to year, admnistration to administration, generation to generation, and thus accomplish far less on a collective basis to allow some subset who thrive in those conditions to “succeed” - at the expense of some equivalent segment of the population?
I’m not saying either is superior. But if you can’t see the difference between how Norway or Japan accomplishes things and the way the US - or even Canada - does, I don’t know how to make the situation any clearer.
Which country will deal better? The one with a better government that has respect for the rule of law, civil society, equality for all, strong educational systems, and opportunities for people to advance their station in life.
In other words, well-run countries aren’t set back by immigration or diversity.
We *can *have “nice things”. For those set of nice things that *most *of us agree with.
The wider the diversity, the greater the likelihood we can’t muster a majority in favor of any particular nice thing. That’s just math, not politics.
Once we add politics, where many people define what they are for as simply being against whatever those people are for, it becomes totally self-defeating. We couldn’t even enact today even half of the laws and regs that exist today that we all accept as givens. Not even going into the more controversial ones that are perpetually under attack by one group or another.
A polity with a “we’re all in this together” attitude is very different from one with an “every man for himself” attitude. And as the OP says, that statement is so flaming obvious it’s a wonder it needs to be repeated. But there are a bunch of Americans that seem to be so blinkered they can’t even conceive of the possibility of such a difference between polities.
Last of all, overlaying the larger question of “why can’t we change X into Y” …
When a lot of people say “America is the best country in the world”, what they really mean is “America’s the best it could possibly be; any change in any direction would be worse.” Or more accurately “I believe that the odds are overwhelming that change will make things worse, especially change offered by those people.”
IOW, “we’re best” doesn’t mean we’re in first place; it means we can’t/won’t be improved by proposed change X.
Bottom line: It’s sloppy speechifying in the service of sloppy thinking.
The first example I Googled was Sweden. I discovered that 15% of the Swedish population was foreign-born; that doesn’t even include 2nd-generation immigrants. 130,000 Swedes were born in Iraq. (That would be 4.3 million Iraqis if scaled up to U.S. population.) Many Swedes were also born in Poland, Syria, Turkey, Yugoslavia, etc. Yet AFAIK, Swedes don’t feel they need guns to protect themselves from the Other. And the country now offers subsidized healthcare even to undocumented immigrants.
Of course there are grains of truth in the “U.S. can’t do it because of the … Other” argument. Yet fundamentally much of the problem derives from the U.S. deliberately embracing racism.
Studying a culture with deep and long-running problems with racism and intolerance and finding that such a culture has problems with diversity isn’t novel research, it’s a tautology.
Wouldn’t the analogous case to taking a Norwegian program and applying it to the US be taking a Norwegian program and applying it to the EU?
While there are plenty of stats about religion in the US at the national level, are there stats that compare religion affiliation and participation between states? Stats that compare the ore idiotic religious beliefs* between US states? It wouldn’t be that surprising if some parts of the US were more backward than the Maghreb.
E.g.: Creationism, abstinence-only sex ed, criminality of homosexuality
ETA: A big part of why the US is held back is because large swaths of the US tend strongly toward traditional and survival values as opposed to secular-rational and self-expression values* and those areas tend to be overrepresented politically, especially in the US Senate.
Stop trying to make this about race and immigration when its not. it’s about diversity of ideas and what different people think “good” means. Until a lot of people can agree that something is good, its not going to happen in a widespread way, because our laws are for the most part not imposed from a central authority… It may grow upwards from localities that adopt those ideas as policy. That’s why we use the terms “grassroots” and “marketplace of ideas” to explain how different policy ideas emerge and spread in the US. The power of the US is the power to try out different ideas, to control your society at the local level for good and for ill.
Among a community of orthodox jews, all the stores will not sell pork. Why? In that community, pork is unclean, pork is unfit for Jews and moreover, pork isn’t purchased by Jews and only Jews within walking distance so what’s the point? Well if almost all the Jews in this community agree that pork is not a product fit for sale, why is it that we can’t scale this up and outlaw bacon everywhere?
Well not everyone agrees there’s anything wrong with pork! (or being gay, or celebrating birthdays, or sex before marriage, or sagging your pants, or… anything that humans have different views on) In US society, ideas held by small homogenous groups don’t scale up at all, nor are they meant to unless and until others "buy’ that idea in the “marketplace of ideas.” Different experiences and varied cultures mean that there are more ideas competing in the marketplace. That means less agreement.
Serious question: but you are associating cultural diversity with political diversity, are you not?
And if we were to plot countries on a scale of best governed to least-well governed, would you expect that those countries would have some general pattern to their homogeneity? Like, if we took North America - the U.S., Canada, and Mexico - What would the relative cultural homogeneity or heterogeneity mean for the ability to govern those three countries?
