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I think most of the issue is a problem that’s really based on the idea that there’s no gradation to ideas, and that no ideas are inherently better or worse than any other ideas. It’s lead us to become the culture of the indulgent parent who cannot help but give the children in their home exactly what they want exactly when and how they want it. That’s probably the biggest difference between the Great Assimilations of the past and now.
If you moved to America or Sweden or anywhere in Western Europe, you were expected to assimilate. You had to speak English in America, you had to learn to dress like Americans, to like American culture (or at least be okay with it). You had to send your kids to American schools where they would absolutely learn American culture. The same sort of process happened in other countries. I don’t think that a Muslim immigrant in 1900 would have been permitted to wear a Hijab or skullcap. They certainly wouldn’t have been able to demand that schools and workplaces install ritual baths or schedule their work/school day around prayer times. That forced them to assimilate.
We’re honestly doing the opposite, and not only not forcing new immigrants to join the mainstream, but actually unassimilating our native populations by allowing various “lobby ethnics” to simply carve out accommodations for whatever weird fetish, weird dress or hairstyles they want to wear, or practices they want to do. And the rest of us are taugh very early on that raising any objections to weird thing people do is wrong. It’s even wrong to express the idea that there is or should be a norm. Teaching the old books, talking about the old religious heritage, all of this is simply thought crime.
And thus we’re creating a cultural chaos where you can never exactly trust that anyone around you shares anything with you. Maybe he has a pooping on the floor fetish. Maybe he believes in jihad. Maybe he just meditates all day. Maybe they’ll wear pajamas, maybe he’ll dress in a Muslim robe or wear Tizit, or a suit. They might speak English or not. It’s impossible to share a culture.
Really? Could not all sorts of languages be heard on the streets of the large cities (and in some cases elsewhere) for decades and decades after the immigration took off, whether it be Yiddish, German, Polish or something else? Indeed one occasionally reads those stories about the remnants of an immigrant community in some place or other where the old-timers still speak another European language.
True, but if you for some reason want to go out into the wider world — for work, for recreation, for education, whatever it might be, you had to at least get onboard with the dress, customs, and language of America. You couldn’t get a job and expect them to accommodate your cultural or religious garb. You wouldn’t be allowed to continue to speak your native language outside the enclave especially at work or school. This forced people to eventually assimilate.
Some of the difference is technology. I have Google translate and I can thus understand at a basic level, most languages well enough to do a very basic interaction. The rest is a sort of malaise that assumes that a country can actually survive as a cohesive unit without at least some baseline of a shared culture. The idea that one should be permitted to “let their freak flag fly” is corrosive because it’s precisely those shared expectations, morals, and folkways that produce social trust. I can’t really know that a person who behaves wildly out of the mainstream shares any of my values. I don’t know what would and wouldn’t offend them. This leads to less social interaction and often much shallower interactions because I can’t know what’s safe for polite conversation.
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Yeah, non-English, native language institutions and schools were the norm for most of American history, and were even legally codified in many states. That only reversed during our WW1 xenophobic fervor, and even then the Supreme Court ruled its illegal to forbid native language schools.
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To be precise, they would have been legally permitted, but people would have been permitted to deny them employment or services on those grounds. In at least some respects, it was a freer time all around.
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I mean, unless they were in a Muslim-heavy immigrant community. You certainly had thatt sort of... not quite enclave, but significant presence, in some areas, I believe down to things like German-language newspapers, for instance.
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