What better day of the year to be seditious than the public holiday celebrating all things nation state?
The problem with having grown up in many different places is that I’ve just seen it all one too many times. The whole strange ritual of building up some mythical national identity, the worship at the altar of culture… at no time in history could the whole concept be more farcial than today, when Globalisation has (for better or worse, on this issue I am certainly divided tending towards ‘for better’) replaced insular national cultures with a bland, uniform proto-culture to be adjusted and tinkered with according to local needs.
It’s probably the realisation that there is no fundamental difference whatsoever between ourselves and at the very least the hundreds of millions of people living in the Industrialised West that strengthens jingoist resolve. As a matter of fact, there is less difference between people of any developed or developing region in the world today than ever before, and that’s something your average< enter country name here>-prider finds very difficult to deal with.
The consensus on the right seems to be that limited migration is OK if and only if migrants accept total assimilation into <enter country name here> culture.
Let me challenge that train of thought. Aside from the fact that it’s kind of strange for nations that displaced their original populations (without adopting their culture or customs, I might add) to make such demands, what does it say about Western culture? Is it really as weak as all that? And if it is, is it really right to keep it around?
Let me suggest a radical alternative; let’s have an honest discussion about cultural values; let’s try to keep the ones that are good, no matter what culture they’re from, and let’s ditch the shitty ones. This might be news to some, but I think we have plenty of dead cultural weight on our own shoulders at the moment.
The appeal to centrist support for culture wars congeals around issues of women’s rights, religious freedom, tolerance towards different views and similar values which I share. On the other hand, our own culture is chock full of bigotry and negative role models of all sorts. I think that there’s fertile common ground on those liberal values we hold dear, especially among second-plus generation migrants. But just maybe shoving fake superiority into other people’s faces has gotten their hackles up, and they’ve taken to acting just as jingoist as their born-’n'-bred sisters and brothers.
We could spend the foreseeable future arguing about who has the splinter and who the beam, but that won’t resolve the optical issues surrounding having foreign objects lodged in our see-holes.