Heritage Lost III

Historically, what happens when a nation becomes truly diverse—multi-lingual, made up of widely different cultures and religions? Historically? They, more often than not, start shooting at one another. A classic case is the early United States.
One section of the nation remained resolutely medieval. It was championed by men like Jefferson and Calhoun—who viewed common folk as “dogs”. Its foundation was essentially agricultural, with an upper class that lived on large estates serviced by peasants/slaves.
Land and the peasants/slaves attached to it was the basis of wealth. It was a slow paced often elegant way of life in which gentlemen, like their English upper class equivalents, did not dirty their hands by doing any money making work.
Factories, and the accoutrements of an industrial society, were considered—at best—déclassé. Education was deemed to be the exclusive prerogative of the “better sort”. Whites in that society dreamed of a day when they too might rise—like Andrew Jackson—to the level of society that rode to hounds and lived in substantial manor houses.
North of the Pennsylvania border was a wholly different nation—as diverse as a country could be from the antebellum South. It was something new, unlike almost anything the world had ever seen before. It had become one of the first societies on earth to figure out a way to create a middle class without the necessity of slave labor to maintain it.
The basis of its wealth was industrial production, railroads, increasingly mechanized farms and great clipper ships that bought and sold in every quarter of the globe. It was perhaps the first society on earth in which real wealth was counted in cash money.
In its newness, reveling in the produce of its factories and businesses—or of its sole proprietor farms—it looked with distain on its Southern half, imagining itself to be morally superior because its labor force (slaving at a dollar a day for six twelve hour days a week without benefits) was nominally “free”. The contempt was richly returned by the South.
The diversity became so total that by mid-century they became utterly unable to communicate with one another. While the British and French empires were able to work out the slavery issue without firing a shot, Americans couldn’t even talk about it.
Post Masters in the South were forbidden to deliver mail from addresses in the North suspected of having abolitionist leanings. Not even in the throes of the McCarthy witch hunts was free speech so limited.
As early as 1775, a Pennsylvania delegate to the First Continental Congress (Joseph Galloway) remained loyal to England, explaining that the differences between North and South were so great, that if the British Army were withdrawn, civil war would be inevitable. He was right.
Oh, but you, say—that’s an extreme example. Has no French Canadian ever sent a mail bomb to some one in Canada whose chief crime was that he spoke English? Have Spanish Basques ever tried to kill Spaniards who speak Spanish? Ever notice how well the Walloons and Flemings of Belgium get along? Or the Frisians and Hollanders of the Netherlands?
How about the tribes of Sri Lanka? Or the warring tribes of Nigeria. What of the Muslim and Hindu sections of India—now divided into two separate nations? To celebrate the initial division, a Hindu radical assassinated Gandhi. Now they merely threaten one another with nuclear weapons. Or there is always Rwanda.
Diverse human tribes have a long history—oh, they’re starting to make hostile noises in Northern Ireland again and little love is lost between Israel and the Palestinians—of not getting along too well. They just should not be made to share the same sandbox.
Now let’s look at why this country—uniquely—has worked. Up to now.