Custom History

[from 10/20/10]

This week Angela Merkel, the hot Chancellor of Germany that George W Bush couldn’t keep his hands off, said multiCulturalism has failed in Germany. She didn’t say it has failed elsewhere, raising the possibility that it might rather be Germany that has failed multiCulturalism.

I am going to prove that neither has happened. The sentences “MultiCulturalism has failed Germany” and “Germany has failed multiCulturalism” are both logically equivalent to “We lost in Vietnam because the Earth is as flat as a plate and held aloft by a giant French waiter.”

We need to understand what German-ness and “A Culture” are. We’ll look back into history and see how those things were invented.

It started when some tribes overran sort-of northern Europe from the even-more northern Europe and were caught by the Romans in the midst of doing it. The Romans said, hey, this is OUR Europe. They named the land the tribes had already overrun Germania, because they felt like it. To this day, Germans don’t really call themselves Germans, but that’s beside the point.

The Romans were all about kicking the “Germans” out of Germania, and the “Germans” were all about sneaking around into Austria and other places like that, whose spellings I don’t feel like looking up right now. Then the Roman Empire fell, and what was left was a whole bunch of little countries where people spoke German types of languages and enjoyed oom-pa music and ate too much sausage.

Around 1815 these little countries formed a confederation. This was way hard. They had to confederate not only Austria and Hungary but an additional 4 “kingdoms”, 10 “principalities”, 14 “duchies”, 6 “grand duchies”, 4 “free cities”, 1 “electorate”, 1 “landgraviate”, and a partridge in a pear tree.

In order to pull off this confederation all involved had to be convinced that they were all in one club. This provided work for philosophers just at a time when it was getting hard to make a living philosophizing, what with the Industrial Revolution and science getting all the glory.

Where would this club come from? Going on many years, the big idea was the Holy Roman Empire, modeled on the Profane Roman Empire, based on the idea of citizenship. You were expected to know Latin for formal occasions and hearings and such, but you could speak anything you liked at home, and people did.

So came the big breakthrough: Kultur. I mean, A Culture.

Long before all this, you grew stuff in cultures. Then people started using it metaphorically. There was the social culture, consisting of language, literature and customs, that children grew up in that made them who they were. But that was still a local thing. I grew up in a culture. That guy, who lives in that village over that hill, grew up in a different culture. No two people could experience exactly the same social soil.

Thus the great idea was, hey, we’ll pretend that all of these artifacts of culture, spread throughout all of these lands, are all manifestations of One Culture, A German Culture, characterized by One Language, but including disparate non-linguistic cultural characteristics as well (because simple linguistic identification wasn’t considered enough, especially in view of the fact that some of their dialects were so far apart that not all “German” speakers could understand each other.)

German-ness and the concept of A Culture (as distinct from cultural influences) were thus born together, and the latter idea was the export version of the package.

It was accepted all around the world, though embellished. The United States didn’t leap back into England’s arms just because we all spoke English here. It was figured that because of a revolution, we had created A New Culture, better than English Culture.

But wherever the idea has been adopted it’s been as stupid as it was in the beginning. There is no such thing as A Culture. So, no such thing as multiCulturalism. So of course it fails. It gets a big fat goose-egg.