CASE STUDY: MULTI OR CENTERED CULTURE

To remind the reader, this blog is currently focusing on the polarization that has befallen the body politic of the nation.  There are various sources feeding this situation and the last posting presented one such source:  the incubation of problems the body politic had not addressed over extended periods of time. 

The point was made that such a condition did not necessarily arise from incompetence but can be the product of competent people doing competent things, at least as competency is defined by a given people at a given place.  This posting addresses an example of incubation.  This example refers to how the nation views and accommodates immigration or, stated another way, how Americans of different cultural backgrounds interact with each other. 

This issue is further divisive in that it addresses the lack of accommodation among people from different races.  How Americans see this issue has evolved and this posting seeks to take a historical view.  That is, how did the national debate over public policies to address the disruptions caused by the steady stream of immigrating groups whether they be groups of various nationalities, ethnicities, and/or races, develop? 

The history of how Americans have dealt with the upheavals associated with this amalgamation of lifestyles, language challenges, and other diverse cultural traits is one of evolution.  And reactions to that continuing aspect of the American story has also been varied – many Hollywood storylines have been based on those challenges.

For example, there has been those who take a nationalist view that to varying degrees seeks to maintain the “American way” of life that they associate with the Anglo-Saxon base.  Of course, that base was initially established when British colonists brought over their culture and were naturally able to establish it as dominant during the early days of colonization. 

The nation’s culture has remained colorized by that cultural strain but has drifted away from its purer version.  But to the extent it has maintained any dominance, those who adhere to it have been blind to any dissention that exists among those who promote a more diverse culture.  They are attracted by a singular sense to such calls as “Make America Great Again,” again to an earlier time in which their culture held sway.

To varying degrees, these right of center ideologues believe in immigration restraints and the immigration they would allow would predominantly come from Western European nations.  They also do not recognize that minorities, be they of other nationalities, ethnicities, or races, suffer from undue discriminatory practices.  For example, the current Black Lives Matter movement is judged to be unjustified since they do not see systemic prejudice among the nation’s police forces.

Those who think that way populate the right or conservative side of the polarized divide.  But there is another side and this posting focuses on a short historical account of how the left side finds itself where it is in terms of the current national divide.  Its current development provides a revelatory example of what the last two postings call polarization and why it exists.

The left side of the polar landscape fought against itself between those who argued for assimilation (centered pluralism) and those who advocated multiculturalism (diverse or individual pluralism).  This posting and others to follow will flesh out the differences between these two positions. 

Under the more polarized environment of today, these differences within each side have been downplayed since the current alliances within each side call for overlooking such fissures.  Indicating that these amalgamations exist but are currently ignored is the fact that this writer, in his preparation for this posting, could not find a published work on this issue – multiculturalism – of a recent date.  The most recent citation is from the year, 2012. 

That citation is an article that describes what it calls critical multiculturalism – a multiculturalism based on critical theory.  It states, in part:

In some ways Critical multiculturalism is leaning towards the original idea of popularist education as a tool of emancipation for the economically downtrodden, but it goes much further, [it] is much wider in scope and is rooted in critical theory.  Critical multiculturalism is an enabling form of education that instils in its students the ability to bring about social change, it has been described by Neoliberal thinkers as a “Political education” because it exposes issues relating to why students are in the economic situation they [are] in, why streaming exists, in effect it exposes the mechanisms of inequality to those who are themselves victims of inequality. 

Politically critical Multiculturalism leans toward Anarchism, Marxist and Feminist thought.  It is able to expose the system that enslaves them by looking through the lens of critical theory.  Critical theory is a critique of our society and the culture that emanates from it, this critique draws from a broad and varied spectrum of ideas from social science and humanities.  By employing critical theory students learn how to be both critical and analytical; these tools enable the autonomy of the student to come to fruition.[1]

Today, critical theorists and neoliberals need each other since the opposition is not each other but the alliance of all right-wing groups; that’s the reality of the nation’s polarized political arena.

          But as a historical case study, one that might shed light on how incubation of a problem manifests itself among limited numbers, the fight over multiculturalism can be helpful in understanding how things get out of hand.  How this concern over varied cultural groups in the 1980s and 1990s, with the inability to coalesce into a single political position, made solutions more elusive.  By understanding this, one gains insight into why polarization exists and helps one deal with it. 

          So, what did multiculturalists argue?  A recurring theme in their literature was to attack the dominant culture’s institutions.  These institutions are described as oppressive on various groups including immigrant groups or people in general who do not belong to the dominant Anglo-Saxon cultural group.  One institution of concern is that of education.

          More specifically, a lot of their ire was aimed at public schools – it should be remembered that a lot of this writing took place before “choice” options became a serious challenge to the very existence of public schools.  In those days, public schools were seen, at least by critical theorists, as part of the overall exploiting superstructure that held back disadvantaged groups in the population.

          The next posting will pick up this topic and further explain the makeup of this case of incubating a political problem.

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[1] Michael, “Exploring Models of Education:  Critical Multiculturalism, Permanent Culture Now, May 22, 2012, accessed July 16, 2020, https://www.permanentculturenow.com/exploring-models-of-education-critical-multiculturalism/ .  Apparently, this posting is by an anarchist organization.  This article can be described as a fairly objective report.  It contains British spelling.

POLARIZATION BEGETS POLARIZATION

The last posting made an observation.  That was that successfully run enterprises – either public or private – can, because of their competencies, land up committing serious blunders that lead to extremely costly even terminal results for that entity.  The posting cites a social scientist that has pointed out this possibility; that being Sidney Dekker with the assistance of Shawn Pruchnicki.[1]  If the reader has not read that posting, he/she is encouraged to do so.

But for those who do not or those who need a bit of a reminder, here are the reasons these two writers give for their overall conclusion:

·       Larger, successful organizations usually operate in environments of pressures due to (1) scarcity of resources and competition against other entities, (2) an imposed lack of transparency with sprawling, complex structures, (3) information being pre-formatted in a developed style or language, and (4) the usual incremental pacing of decision-making becoming more incremental over time. 

·       Accepted ways and beliefs that develop to protect the organization (e.g., risk assessment or risk management strategies and personnel) encourage false confidence in them and serve to obstruct seeing what “is not known.”

·       Structural elements that seek the “unknown” have counter forces, i.e., costs involved with uncertain technologies and un or underdeveloped knowledge and technologies associated with change.  These potential costs tend to be compared to the incremental nature of incubating problems. 

·       If needed, transformational change (calling for changes in beliefs, attitudes, and/or values) is judged against the pressures of scarcity and competition, making needed change appear to be impossible – even when they are not – or just too expensive. 

·       And

Organisations incubate accident not because they are doing all kinds of things wrong, but because they are doing most things right.  And what they measure, count, record, tabulate and learn, even inside of their own safety management system, regulatory approval, auditing systems or loss prevention systems, might suggest nothing to the contrary.[2]

These are the conditions that lead to problems developing and going unnoticed.  Dekker and Pruchnicki call the time in which those problems are not detected as incubation. 

That posting makes the further claim that all this has to do with the creation and maintenance of the current state of polarization the nation is suffering from in its politics.  The posting left the reader with the promise that this posting will indicate what the connection between “incubation” and polarization is.  The journalist Ezra Klein makes that connection.[3] 

The national set of problems, the ones over which the populous is more and more divided, has mushroomed because of their link to one another.  Two webs of problems have resulted in short order but after a long-lasting incubation had taken place.  The issues range from race to taxes to religion to abortion to firearms, etc.  And these are only the ones that come readily to this writer’s mind.

Outside of the people who had been affected directly by each of these problems, they, individually, were mostly ignored for decades; they grew and were linked to more and more adjacent or related problems.  But they are now more than visible, they are riotously blaring on people’s consciousness.  They are visible and measured as being of such magnitude and complexity they elude single targeted “solutions.”  They have burrowed themselves into such depths that they have become systemic.  And as such, are immune to reductionist study or reductionist solutions.

In part, that is so because the whole complex of problems has become so intermingled that one does not derive a position in one without finding oneself taking sides in a multitude of issues.  As Klein states,

[T]he story … is the logic of polarization.  That logic, put simply, is this:  to appeal to a more polarized public, political institutions and political actors behave in more polarized ways.  As political institutions and actors become more polarized, they further polarize the public.  This sets off a feedback cycle to appeal to a yet more polarized public, institutions must polarize further; when faced with yet more polarized institutions, the public polarizes further, and so on.

          Understanding that we exist in relationship with our political institutions, that they are changed by us and we are changed by them, is the key to this story.  We don’t just use politics for our own ends.  Politics uses us for its own ends.[4]

As Dekker and Pruchnicki point out, the systemic ways hinder or obstruct the entity, be it a person, an organization, or a nation, from seeing what is.  In the case of polarization, the systemic way is its politics or political mode of behavior and thinking. 

The case is that polarization in this issue or that one began to be chained together.  The natural tendency is to make alliances unless one has enormous resources (then the opposite happens – those actors seek isolation).  But if the numbers get so big, enormity loses its relative meaning – all are in need of allies because no one is facing a single opponent or competitor.

          This politicization finds, therefore, a person falling in one side of the divide or the other.  Therefore, one finds Evangelicals teaming with police associations and with large corporate heads that seek tax reductions.  Or one has Black Lives Matter advocates teaming with socialists seeking socialized medicine and with those who simply want to raise the minimum wage. 

And the thing is, this characterization has grown to such a magnitude, that all politically active actors find it necessary to fall within one of the two grand alliances – polarization leads to more polarization.  And to an advocate of a federated citizenry, this becomes a political landscape of enormous challenge (or is it a political nightmare?).

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[1] Sidney Dekker and Shawn Pruchnicki, “Drifting into Failure:  Theorising the Dynamics of Disaster Incubation,” Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science, 2013, accessed 7/8/2020, https://safetydifferently.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/SDDriftPaper.pdf , 1-11.

[2] Ibid., 8 (Australian spelling).

[3] Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized (New York, NY:  Avid Reader Press).

[4] Ibid., xix.