By Robert Field
In columnist David Brook’s opinion piece “We Take Care of Our Own” published in the New York Time and re-published by LNP, he brings to our attention:
“People committed to coherent communities will fight to defend the norms that hold communities together. They accept immigrants who assimilate to existing culture, but they’ll be suspicious of those who they feel bring in incompatible customs and tear at the social fabric.
“For eons, this was more or less the traditional moral system for most of the human race. But as the N.Y.U. social psychologist Jonathan Haidt points out in an outstanding essay in The American Interest, over the past several decades a different mind-set has emerged.
“People with this mind-set value the emancipated individual above the cohesive community. They value, or at least try to value, self-expression, social freedom and diversity. Their morality is not based on loyalty to people close to them; it’s based on a universal equality for all humans everywhere…”
This is an important observation deserving a lot of thought Whether we individually identify with family, ancestry, religious group, locality, state, nation or world is a subject NewsLanc has addressed in the past and is very important in determining our future.
But then Brooks concludes as follows:
“The tragedy of this election is that America already solved this problem. Unlike France and China, we were founded as a universalist nation. You can be fiercely patriotic and relatively open because America was founded to take in people from around the globe and unite them around something new.”
A perception that our predecessors were receptive of other cultures is erroneous. Ethnic groups always clustered together in their own communities. Moreover, they expressed considerable contempt for and hostility towards others. Part of the American success was attributable to the country being large enough to provide their own space for each group to indulge their prejudices.
As a youth, I marveled how one could walk from the Southern tip of New York City up past Central Park and pass through neighborhoods every two or three blocks largely inhabited by a different ethnic group with shops catering to their own culture. Think in terms of today’s Korean and Chinese neighborhoods. Of course that has radically changed over the past half century in part because of flight to the suburbs and a more mobile society.
It is the inherent, natural order for societies to resist dilution by outsiders. Appreciation for a multi-cultural world has to be learned. Our country has made progress towards that goal, especially since the leveling impact of military and civic service during World War II. But yet much tension exists, even if it has not been ‘politically correct’ to express it publicly.
Accepting the ways of others needs to be especially encouraged given the shrunken nature of the world that we share.
Donald Trump appeals to basic human nature especially of the lesser educated, dissatisfied, economically deprived, and those steeped in misinformation. He is exploiting raw feelings long suppressed.
The David Brooks of this world, of which we include ourselves, tend to talk to one another and think we reflect the mood of the people. Come November, we all may be in for a harsh awakening and tragedies soon to follow.
