An astounding success

For those who think that multiculturalism is a failure because large numbers of immigrants arrive in their country, of whom a significant number have trouble adapting and end up on welfare, not to mention those who cause trouble and commit crimes, the truth may be a surprise. Multiculturalism has been one of the most epic successes in human history. Yet, it is all about the time horizon. You don’t observe that trend over decades. Centuries may not even suffice. Yet if you think in millennia, then the trend becomes obvious. It didn’t happen all peacefully. There have been quite a few casualties along the road. They were the roadkill on the way to unity. That is only because humans are such a violent species, which makes unity an absolute necessity, no matter the fatalities. Otherwise, we will fight until we are all dead. And so, there is no alternative. It is unity or death.

As far as the supposed failure of multiculturalism goes, I wouldn’t have known about it had I not had access to the news and social media. Where I live, people from different ethnic groups mingle and live together peacefully, a bit like a multicultural fairy tale. I suspect a setup by the Great Planner to show me that it can be that way, as our belief in fairy tales can make them come true. There may be more of these places, but they hardly attract attention. Social media is filled with stories about crimes, violence and sexual abuse. It seems that every incident involving minorities that comes in the news gets copied on multiple feeds and sometimes multiple times. Still, the place I live in looks like how the world could be, and should be.

In Europe, you are far more likely to die in a car accident than from violent crime. The fear of the fascists concerns not today, but the future. There are reasons to worry. It can go wrong, as it has many times before. And we live today. The greater trend in history is not our concern. Worse yet, we might end up as roadkill on the road to unity, or our children could. Our genes wish to survive and multiply, and if necessary, at the expense of world peace. Still, overall, multiculturalism has been a tremendous success. Successful empires allowed people from various cultures to coexist peacefully under a single government. These were multicultural states. As long as the state is stronger than the identities of the people living in it, those people will gradually develop a common identity.

Cultures don’t change overnight, so for an empire to achieve political stability, it allowed subjugated peoples to retain their customs and religions as long as they didn’t threaten the political and social order. Multiculturalism was a tool of the ruler, so figuratively, the One Ring to Rule Them All, as in The Lord of the Rings. One of the first successful multicultural emperors was Cyrus the Great, who ruled around 550 BC and respected various faiths and traditions in his empire. He helped the Jews return to their homeland and rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. Today, the Jews are still thankful that God sent them that leader.

The Romans were also tolerant people. Conquered peoples could keep their gods, languages, and customs as long as they respected Roman authorities and paid tribute to Roman gods and godlike emperors, which only troublemakers like the Jews and Christians refused to do because of their uncompromising belief systems that allowed worship of only one Creator. Paying Roman taxes was not a problem for them, but venerating Roman emperors and gods was. The Jews fought to the death in two major uprisings, hoping that God would come to their rescue, but the Christians eventually succeeded in taking over the Roman Empire. It shows that uncompromising belief systems are the primary obstacle to unity, and that we can have permanent peace only under a single belief system.

Lasting achievement of empires

If the empire lasted long enough, the nations in it integrated into a common culture. The Roman Empire is an example. Conquered peoples could keep their gods, languages and customs as long as they respected the Roman authorities. Greek culture spread in the east, and Roman culture in the west. Several later Roman emperors came from the provinces such as France, Africa or Arabia. After the empire collapsed, the conquered peoples, like the Gauls, didn’t reappear as independent nations,¹ despite the brave resistance of that one village where Asterix and Obelix lived.

The Chinese standardised their writing with pictures, allowing people who spoke different languages to read one another’s writing. The Chinese could read each other’s books while not understanding one another in conversation. China was a vast empire, and there were no mass media, so developing a common spoken language was unthinkable. The writing helped China form a national identity that has lasted for over 2,000 years. In Europe, Latin, the language of the Roman Empire, remained the written language, but the phonetic script proved to have a fatal design flaw. Hardly anyone spoke Latin, so the language couldn’t unify Europe. The Russian, Turkish and Austrian empires failed to form a lasting common identity, so they collapsed after World War I.

Sharing a language is not enough, as the Bosnian civil war exemplifies. For over 500 years, Roman Catholics, Muslims, and Orthodox Christians lived relatively peacefully together in three successive multicultural states: the Ottoman Empire, the Austrian Habsburg Empire, and Yugoslavia. That was until the 1990s, when identity politics turned them into Croats, Bosnian Muslims and Serbs, and they began murdering each other in a frenzy. Religion became the divisive factor, as they shared an ethnicity, history, culture and language. The Soviet Union was another multicultural empire. Still, it didn’t last, and it failed to wipe out the national identities. After it collapsed, there have been several nationalist wars in the former Soviet Union.

Multicultural empires, such as the Roman Empire, allowed for gradual assimilation. It led towards greater unity. The Chinese standardised pictographic script played a similar role. In these cases, multiculturalism was a transitional phase towards unity. Over time, the number of cultures in the world declined as smaller groups merged into larger ones. There have been temporary reversions as empires collapsed. Still, the long-term trend is clear. The world gradually became more integrated. Today, the world is closely interconnected so that a global culture may emerge and existing cultures may become folklore.

Identity politics

Today, identity politics and individualism have changed multiculturalism. Every individual, including minorities, needs recognition and their feelings acknowledged. And so, rather than peaceful coexistence and acceptance of the social order, modern multiculturalism is about respecting and accommodating other cultures. That promotes conflict rather than unity, as identity politics involves flags, marches, pride and hatred. And uncompromising belief systems stand in the way. Jews have long lived in Christian and Islamic countries as a minority group. It led to multicultural tensions as they strictly kept to their religion and culture, and eventually to the Holocaust, giving us a 2,000-year body of evidence that non-assimilation and clinging to separate fairy tales cause never-ending trouble.

Jews and Christians kept fighting over their myths, like whether or not Yahweh had a son named Jesus. In the Roman Empire, and also in China, such uncompromising beliefs didn’t stand in the way of unity. In uncompromising belief systems, even small differences can be problematic. Protestants and Catholics have fought several bloody religious wars despite largely agreeing on the nature of Jesus and his relationship to God. So, if people in Europe think that it is better not to have Muslims around, despite Muslims, like Christians, believing that Jesus will return, they have good reasons, because Muslims, like Jews, don’t believe that God has a son. That seemingly insignificant disagreement has produced millions of fatalities in the past and may do so once again.

Borders are arbitrary. They will crumble under the pressure of competition, or civilisation will break down. The extreme nationalists are right. They have already lost, unless they are willing to wage a race war. That is going to be shitty, and it is not going to solve anything, for two white Christian Slavic nations are fighting a bloody nationalist war. Both are desperately looking for foreigners to fight that war for them, not to mention the lazy Americans and Western Europeans who do not wish to bring in their harvests. Nation-states and businesses need immigrants to remain ahead of the competition. It has to end, and the world needs to become a more agreeable place for everyone. Yet, humans are religious creatures, so that requires a wonderful fairy tale that unites us all.

Us and them

Us and them
And after all, we’re only ordinary men
Me and you

Pink Floyd, Us and Them

We divide humanity between ‘us’ and ‘them’. We are good people with superb beliefs and a superior civilisation. In contrast, the others are the inferior ones with dodgy habits who act oddly, look different, have funny accents, wear peculiar outfits, and believe in strange fairy tales you can’t take seriously, like the one about Jesus dying for our sins, and that by believing that, we will be saved and play the harp in heaven forever instead of being fried eternally in Satan’s ovens. We differ in skin colour, religion, sexual preferences, political views, and other qualities. Even when you think you are open-minded, you may hate those inferior, narrow-minded bigots and racists who are not like you.

Welcome to human nature. We are xenophobic creatures. Evolution did that to us. Fear of the unknown protects us from harm, such as poisonous foods or the cannibalistic tribe next door. It can be a powerful emotion. Human violence has long been one of the top causes of death among humans until states grew tyrannical and began to repress our violent human nature, thereby reducing murders by over 99%. Trusting strangers was dangerous indeed, and it is still risky, so it is something adventurous people would do. Living in peace with others and trusting them also brings tremendous benefits, enabling us to overcome these feelings and roll the dice of fortune.

Discrimination doesn’t always come from xenophobia. We are social animals who cooperate in groups. It requires a shared understanding of our rules and methods for handling various situations. A shared culture can make the group achieve optimal efficiency in this competitive world. Otherwise, there can be confusion, discomfort and conflict. You want to bow your head to Mecca when going gets tough? In critical situations, we depend on each other, so we must understand and trust each other. It is why sports teams in competitions train and work on team spirit. The atmosphere in teams can differ, depending on who is in them. That is culture.

Culture has wider implications. Imagine you like to barbecue in a neighbourhood where militant animal rights activists live. In that case, you should be careful not to end up on the barbecue yourself. And so, we prefer the company of like-minded individuals. Those who do not fit in can tell personal stories about bullying, physical violence and exclusion. It is a wider phenomenon than racism. Many societies have anti-discrimination laws saying things like that discrimination on the grounds of religion, political opinion, race, sex, disability, sexual orientation or on other grounds is not permitted. So, you can’t barbecue a person for loving meat. That would be discrimination.

The world is interconnected

In September 2023, a flood killed over 10,000 people in Libya. Climate change may have contributed to this disaster. And so did the overthrow of the Libyan regime with the help of NATO in 2011. During the ensuing civil war, critical infrastructure, such as dams, became neglected. No one in the NATO countries voted for the military intervention, nor did most people in Europe support immigration from non-Western countries. Is someone to blame? In the case of Libya, the ultimate cause could be you and me driving cars, thereby generating oil demand. Oil played a major role in the wars in the Middle East, as oil revenues gave the dictator Moammar al-Khadaffi the funds to sponsor terrorism, making the West eager to take him out. It also motivated the United States to invade Iraq, even though the country had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. Everything in the world is interconnected.

What we do has consequences for other people far away. Had it not been that might makes right, and had there been true justice instead, and had we all had the right to self-defence, those who see their harvests fail due to climate change would have the right to kill those who drive their fossil-fuel-powered vehicles towards their bullshit jobs in marketing and information technology, wasting energy and resources in the suicidal rat race that is going to terminate humanity. So, if these suicide terrorists are going to die anyhow, then why not pre-emptively kill them to let the rest of us survive? Sadly, the one with the biggest gun is always right, and that is usually the one who wastes the most energy and resources and murders the most people. Yet, if we are to have a future, this arrangement can’t continue. We need a new social contract for humanity.

Cultural progress

Cultural exchange goes in multiple directions. We use Arabic numerals, pray to a Jewish deity, eat a dish of Native American potatoes, and listen to Jazz inspired by African rhythms. Maybe we think that rap music sucks, but the Chinese, the Muslims, the Native Americans and Africans were also not particularly thrilled by the cultural enrichment that the West has brought them. Cultural exchange is an ongoing process, and cultures change as they respond to their environment, including other cultures. And culture is not tied to ethnicity, but to life experiences. And new cultures can emerge. In the United States, a cultural divide has emerged between urban and rural populations. You now have two Americas, a liberal-socialist and a conservative-fascist one. And there is a distinction between organised society and gang life. And that affects cultures as well.

Adaptation takes time and sacrifice. The small town where I grew up had a sizeable Ambonese community. The Ambonese were soldiers who fought for the Dutch in Indonesia, and when Indonesia became independent, they had to leave their homes and settle in a country on the other side of the world with their families, where they were initially treated poorly. The Dutch also had to put up with them and their troubles, which included violent incidents. The Ambonese could not return, so the Dutch and the Ambonese were stuck with each other. The people of Nijverdal have never chosen for their presence, but have accepted the burden for decades. Most people didn’t suffer, only those who happened to be the subject of the violent incidents. The troubles gradually diminished.

If your culture is dominant, you enjoy advantages you may not realise that you have. Societies in Western Europe and the United States may be multicultural, but Western culture is dominant. Having that dominant culture is a privilege. If you aren’t from that dominant culture, you are at a disadvantage. The damage your cultural group inflicts on the dominant culture can lead to the repression of your group, while the damage the dominant culture does to your group may go unpunished. It is how history has always worked, so you might call it a law. Discrimination is not the decisive factor in an ethnic group’s success. Culture is more important, and the strength of their community. In the United States, blacks do relatively poorly, while Jews do well. If we are equal before the law, privilege is less critical than upbringing and community.

If you are not from the dominant culture, you may be equal before the law but not equal in reality. You may not get a fair chance, or your attitude could be the cause, or it may be both. When I was forced to leave the dormitory, I had never had a fair chance, but I wouldn’t have fit in anyway, so that chance would have been wasted on me. I came from a different culture than the prevailing culture in the dormitory. And being autistic, I was also unaware of the harm my conduct caused, so that came to me as a total surprise. Cultural differences divide us and blind us to the harm we do to others. Yet, as we are barreling towards the apocalypse, there are no excuses left.

Replacing the dominant culture in the West with another existing culture is problematic. Part of Western culture is a quest for absolute truth, so it spawned science and ideologies. And Western culture socially progressed towards God’s vision of Paradise with the help of Hegelian dialectic. Many countries have anti-discrimination laws, but that in itself doesn’t create an agreeable society. South Africa has progressive laws, but it is also one of the most dangerous places on Earth. Something is missing. These progressive values originated in Europe, in bourgeois societies. In South Africa, there has never been a black bourgeois society. If we are to survive, we must progress further by detailing what the future requires of us and making that the foundation of the future world society. The truth will be brutal for all of us, for few are fit to enter God’s kingdom.

Latest revision: 8 July 2025

Featured image: One Ring to Rule Them All. Xander (2007). Public Domain.

1. A Brief History Of Humankind. Yuval Noah Harari (2014). Harvil Secker.