Cultural unity is a bond between people. To understand a people you have to understand their culture. In Britain we seem to want to turn this centuries old cultural observation on its head.
The
concept of Multiculturalism is a mixing of cultures, each culture
adding its best to the mix and in essence provide a stronger richer
culture. There is no doubt that in certain areas other cultures to ones
own provide an extension, an enrichment, food is a perfect example. But
in many ways cultures do not meld into one another and there is a
competition for ascendency to be the dominant one. The more cohesive a
culture is the more likely it will predominate and therefore a more
disciplined, more focused, more decisive a culture is then it's people
feel more at home following its dictates.
We in Britain have been guilty of taking our culture for granted of even finding fault in having a cultural indices to call our own and easily being persuaded that this identification with long established historical norms is in some ways racist. We beat ourselves up, or at least the chattering classes do by their control of the establishment and media to make us feel unworthy of our past and our history. We feel the pressure to apologise for things done in a very different time, in a world that didn't tread lightly afraid of its own shadow but believed rightly or wrongly in its purpose which at that time was colonisation. Not a bad thing, as is now suggested but in many cases a liberating glimpse of how civilisation as it stood at that time could bring the benefits of architecture transport and a system of governance based on law to other people and cultures throughout the world. There had been other great colonisers, the Romans for instance who laid a similar footprint with similar structures and I don't hear the call for apology there.
If we don't pull ourselves together we will dissolve into not what the politically correct soothsayers wish, a better society but we will fall under the sway of a stronger more determined culture who would find it ridiculous to question their way of life as other than the only one.
We in Britain have been guilty of taking our culture for granted of even finding fault in having a cultural indices to call our own and easily being persuaded that this identification with long established historical norms is in some ways racist. We beat ourselves up, or at least the chattering classes do by their control of the establishment and media to make us feel unworthy of our past and our history. We feel the pressure to apologise for things done in a very different time, in a world that didn't tread lightly afraid of its own shadow but believed rightly or wrongly in its purpose which at that time was colonisation. Not a bad thing, as is now suggested but in many cases a liberating glimpse of how civilisation as it stood at that time could bring the benefits of architecture transport and a system of governance based on law to other people and cultures throughout the world. There had been other great colonisers, the Romans for instance who laid a similar footprint with similar structures and I don't hear the call for apology there.
If we don't pull ourselves together we will dissolve into not what the politically correct soothsayers wish, a better society but we will fall under the sway of a stronger more determined culture who would find it ridiculous to question their way of life as other than the only one.
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