Mortimer Adler on Multiculturalism
“The world, certainly, is multicultural, and so we should be taught about its cultural diversity. But this, it seems to me, is the time to ask whether society as a whole or its educational institutions should be multicultural in all respects, or only in some.
If only in some, I propose that the word transculturalism should be employed for those respects in which multiculturalism or cultural pluralism should not be safeguarded or promoted….
For example, Chicago is multicultural in its restaurants but not in its hardware stores. A ruler or tape measure, in centimeters or inches, does not differ from one ethnically special neighborhood to another; nor does the candlepower of a light bulb and the difference between direct and alternating electric current.
There …are differences in French, Italian, Japanese, and Thai cuisines. Clocks and calendars are the same in all sections of the city. They are the same everywhere in the world.”
(To read Mortimer Adler’s full account go HERE)
Adler is correct about this (and, in my opinion, about most things). For there is a fundamental and substantial sameness in the lives of men, including not only the measures we take of the sizes of things, but also the values we give them. It is this sameness that we ought to be promoting in all our contacts, not only with our neighbors of differing ethnic and national origins at home, but also abroad, throughout the world, in our encounters with people of other cultures and civilizations.
The answer to the multiculturalists is that sure, there are many cultures of equal worth, reflecting the myriad ways that men and women have dressed themselves up to meet the world and live their different lives.
But these differences are only skin deep. They do not extend into our hearts and minds, the two vital organs that most make us what we are and that under a microscope are indistinguishable among us.
Finally, the sharing of our thoughts and feelings, when we are free to do so, as in public in a liberal democracy, or as in private in a totalitarian society such as today in Iran or earlier about a kitchen table in the Soviet Union, far surpasses in significance the great differences of clothes, customs, language, and even beliefs, that the multiculturalists would use to draw us apart.
