These are issues that, IMHO, help form the backdrop to the current political climate. American politics, in any macro sense, are stunningly complex. One of the methods I use to get to the heart of a complex issue is to try to identify point(s) of failure in an issue. That is, the one or few parts or features of an issue that would cause the the issue to simply disappear if that core feature were not there.
For example: What happens to racial divide and social stratification if humans were to consider understanding and acceptance of each other more expedient than condemning and rejecting each other? Clearly, these social issues vanish.
But then there is the question of what would make understanding more expedient than rejection. And this opens a rabbit hole down which one can follow cause and effect to the very bottom. Near the bottom of every rabbit hole you will find the reason all these dark, painful things exist in our society is that vast majority of people, as they become adults, are comfortable with these things being sufficient so that the people do not question them. In other words, they are satisfied with their training and education.
And as one continues to go down these rabbit holes to their very bottom, one finds that all of these layers of issues begin with training1in the earliest years of life, which is nothing other than what one should expect to find.
Every society grows and survives on the basis of one fundamental ethic: That parents rear their infant and toddler children trained to the peculiarities of that society, i.e., as members of that society. It is the acceptance and observance of these peculiarities that form the basis of personal honor in the society’s members. That is, it is considered honorable to be true to one’s “roots”. It is considered dishonorable to not be true to one’s roots.
The strength of a society, on the other hand, increases as the rearing of children to be honorable members of the society becomes itself a point of honor among parents. That is, the expectation that parents rear their children to be honorable members of the society becomes the social norm. The strength of the society also decreases as the rearing of children as honorable members of a society fades as a point of honor among parents.
The greatest weakness of a society with a diverse cultural history is that it is usually considered more expedient to reject the social norms of another culture or society than it is to understand and or accept them, which, of course, is vanishingly little different than the basis of social divide and stratification.
And so this is where the reasoning comes full circle. The downside is, since the reasoning is circular, that it is self-perpetuating without any reliable tether to the realities of life and the passing of time. The upside is, since the reasoning is circular, there is no objective starting or ending point so that one may step out of the loop, like stepping off a merry-go-round, at any time with precisely the same advantage.
But the more immediate point here is that if a culturally diverse society is to be strong, then it must be a point of honor among parents to train and teach their children to understand and accept–perhaps even adapt to in an appropriately acceptable manner–diverse social norms.
Footnotes
- The word, “training”, has taken on connotations in recent years in regards to young children that are simply unreasonable. There seems to be a growing perversion of the word to mean something more akin to brainwashing. I suspect this comes about in a bi-polar-esque over-reaction to the increase in the number of stories in which children seem to have been indoctrinated to an ideology in a way that is intended to overtake and supplant, rather than respect and observe, social norms.
The training of children in the early years of life is just that. It is the repetitive encouragement and reinforcement of the notion that people are expected to behave according to the accepted norms of the society they live in. This is where a child’s journey into society as a member of that society begins. As a child’s cognitive ability to understanding the world about him or her supersedes his or her emotional ability to understand the world, training can give way to teaching, conversation and reflection. It is the author’s firm belief that this early training across all societies has vastly more in common across all societies than it doesn’t. To illustrate: In what society is it acceptable for a child to leave a mess, have careless manners with adults or at meals, to dress carelessly or sloppily, to skip school, to not do homework, spend too much time with children “not their age”, etc., etc., ad infinitum?
The reality less noted is that the features of societies typically cited to show their differences like, for example, the degree of tailoring in a society’s normal styles of clothing, fade to near insignificance in comparison to the features the societies have in common.