E pluribus unum.
The motto found on the Great Seal of the United States has often been taken to be a reference to the states comprising the union: Out of several sovereign, independent states, there is formed a union working together for mutual benefit as a federation.
But there is another application of the phrase that is just as pertinent today, when our country is being torn apart by racial tensions and identity politics:
If we wish to preserve social order and prevent the collapse of our country under the weight of unrestrained pluralism, we must foster a national identity — a chief ingredient to a stable society that historically had been considered a given prior to this modern age of multiculturalism.
We often use the word “nation” to refer to the United States, and yet the populace at large has lost track of what the word even means.
The word nation is not merely a state or political entity. Rather, a nation is “a race of people, large group of people with common ancestry and language.” The word comes from the Latin natio, meaning “birth, origin; breed, stock, kind, species; race of people, tribe.”
One of the great follies of modern politics has been removing the concept of “nation” from this logical origin, and forgetting that the political is merely an extension of the cultural.
Nations evolved from families, and the governments of nations evolved from the family hierarchies that governed them in their primitive states.
When you separate the state from the nation, conflict erupts. Just look at the Middle East. Part of the reason there is so much bloodshed in that region of the world is because of political boundaries that were arbitrarily concocted, pitting various ethnic groups — nations — against each other within the same country.
We have seen the same thing in modern European history. The Yugoslav Wars were the inevitable result of trying to force Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, Montenegrins, Macedonians, and Slovenes to live together instead of allowing them to live separately and independently.
Of course, we don’t even need to get started with European history from the Middle Ages to the early modern period, which is a never-ending series of wars, many of which were fought by ethnic groups wanting autonomy from the rule of others.
In modern America, multiculturalism is effectively creating within our borders the same tensions that exist in the Middle East or that existed in Yugoslavia.
Why does multiculturalism cause these tensions? The Left would have us believe that multiculturalism is merely about trying different kinds of foods and celebrating Cinco de Mayo or the Chinese New Year. But multiculturalism as they promote it goes beyond that — and therein lies the danger.
The multiculturalism the Left has forced on the country, the kind that has led to violence and chaos in so many places throughout history, has to do with conflicting, incompatible worldviews and value systems competing against each other in one place.
Sam Blumenfeld wrote that “multicultural education embraces much more than mere cultural pluralism or ethnic diversity. It legitimizes different lifestyles and values systems, thereby legitimizing moral diversity — which is simply moral anarchy. The concept of moral diversity directly contradicts the Biblical concept of moral absolutes based on the Ten Commandments, on which this nation was founded.”
He then added:
The idea that there exists a common value system known as Americanism no longer prevails in American public schools. Yet we know that Americanism does exist and does constitute the basis of American consciousness: the conviction that this nation was created with God’s help and blessings to demonstrate to the world that with the true God all good things are possible, and that without Him we will be consigned to the same tyranny and misery that now afflicts the millions of people who live under paganism, atheism and communism.
George Mason University Professor Walter E. Williams correctly noted that, “both in Europe and in the U.S., multiculturalism is a leftist elitist vision with its roots in academia.”
The schools, along with the media and entertainment, have been the biggest proponents of multiculturalism. This is why Republicans’ efforts to turn the tide of propaganda in government schools are important. The fight to get rid of critical race theory in classrooms and replace it with pro-American history is a major step in the right direction.
But there is more that can and should be done. One crucial action is to ensure that our people learn proper English, as a shared language is one of the most basic binding factors in any nation.
Obviously, we must ensure immigrants and their children are fluent in English. There must also be greater effort to inculcate blacks with functional English fluency; far too many find their communication limited because they only know Ebonics — a virtual pidgin language that keeps them ignorant, culturally separate, and locked in a victim mentality.
