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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This is historically ignorant. Homogeneous populations have killed their own kind, oppressed their own kind, raped and murdered their own kind, divided into clans and sects and waged civil wars and revolutions against their own kind. Have you read Dickens or Hugo or Dostoevsky or anything else written about how shitty and dangerous those homogeneous societies were for most of the population? That’s why they came to America, because being poor in Europe was horrible. [/quote]

It depends on how you define homogenous. The mistake, as is often make by modern woke progressives, is treating everyone of a certain race as one homogenous population.

17th century Europeans didn't define themselves as white. They defined themselves by religion and then by region. You were Catholic or Protestant. Then German or French or or English whatever. The same thinking persists in much of Africa today, where Africans define themselves by tribal loyalty, not skin color, despite everyone being black. They don't see themselves homogenous in being black.

It's easy to pick out the samples of Dickens or Dostoevsky while ignoring that these societies also perpetuated, for [i]centuries[/i], a dominant cultural ethos that was a synthesis of religion, culture, and class (feudal societies, for example), which provided a great deal of solidarity and identity for its people. The Islamic world still has similar approaches, they are uniform in being Muslim and that dominant shared heritage is the glue that binds their society despite any ills within in. I've spent time in various Islamic nations and it's striking how despite enormous income disparities and certainly elements of oppression, they are singularly peaceful and safe places (almost all the time doesn't rule out the periodic exception). They see a strong solidarity in being Muslim that transcends everything else (and also allows various irascible people to become leaders).

This is *not* an argument against diversity at all. But an acknowledgment that diversity does present challenges in fostering solidarity and fellowship, much more so than the woke progressives will want to admit, while homogenous societies find it easier to develop the larger community trust as we see in the Nordic nations or countries like Japan and South Korea. But I do not see it impossible. The US has always been diverse and has carried that diversity successfully by balancing the wishes and desires of smaller communities to their own identities while establishing a neutral playing field for these communities to coexist. It wasn't always perfect (Jim Crow), and at points nearly destroyed the US (civil war) but by and large it was remarkably successful in bringing tremendously diverse groups of people together into a nation. Something I trust it will continue to do so but both the alt right and the woke progressives pose their own dangers to the American liberalism that allowed this flourishing.

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It’s still historically ignorant. People are divided wherever they are, no matter their racial or ethnic identity. They divide into clans and sects and have every division imaginable except race. The U.S. is a very violent country and always has been. Period. It isn’t mostly racially motivated violence. There has always been a culture of violence in the South and West as a male response to any grievance, real or imagined. The Hatfields and McCoys were homogenous.

My point about Dickens & similar authors is there is a 200 year history of packing poor desperate people on top of each other in urban slums and then expressing phony alarm when some of the young males become violent criminals, mostly against each other. Depending on the place and population, they might divide over turf, race, ethnicity, religion, or some other category, but it’s almost guaranteed there will be rival gangs/clans/tribes. Homogeneity doesn’t change any of that. [/quote]

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