What is it that you enjoy about travel?
If you are an educated westerner there is a good chance that, beyond the different climate and landscapes, a major attraction is being able to experience a foreign culture. Learning about, and immersing yourself in, a foreign culture can be intensely stimulating and enriching.
But have you ever wondered how it came to be that countries have different and unique cultures?
Put simply it’s because humans have tribal tendencies. They prefer the familiar to the unfamiliar. Over the course of hundreds, if not thousands of years, the act of people preserving their own way of doing things has led to distinct cultures.
That is not to say these cultures didn’t evolve over time - of course they did. For there is a Darwinian selection pressure on all cultures when they come into contact with new ideas. And it’s not to say there is no overlap between cultures either - for all human culture is a big Venn diagram, with at least a small number of ideas being universal.
And yet populations with distinct cultures still arose, and in the 20th century many of these congregated into nation states AKA countries.
Humans have no trouble at all recognizing foreign culture, whether that’s the small differences when an Englishman travels to Wales, or the huge differences when he travels to Somalia.
This heterogeneity of cultures around the world and our ability to recognize their differences is precisely what brings joy when traveling.
So preserving cultures must be good right? After all we enjoy travel (experiencing foreign cultures)? We are against colonization (imposing our culture on another)? We are against cultural appropriation (stealing from another culture)?
Or at least these are the set of principles that left liberals seem to have adopted. Yet there is a contradiction at the heart of it:
While all of these ideas seem to apply abroad, for some reason they do not seem to apply at home.
For if anyone is suggest that British culture is maintained they are immediately outed as the worst kind of racist. All foreign cultures present in Britain must be embraced if not uplifted. In fact there is no such thing as a foreign culture. After all Britain is multicultural - everything is British.
This is a major contradiction at the heart of left liberalism: promoting diversity at home but cultural distinction abroad.
Many committed left wingers (e.g. academics, intellectuals) are fully aware of this contradiction and justify it in terms of revenge: reverse colonization. “You did this to us so we’re gonna do it to you.”
But most ordinary empathetic Western left liberals simply have never considered this paradox. Likely reading this they consider I’m playing a Jedi mind trick on them. They will experience cognitive dissonance as their mind searches for justifications for why this contradiction exists.
Think about this: would you like Spain to be less Spanish? Japan to be less Japanese? Peruvians to be less Peruvian?
You know the answer is no. You know it would lead to a worse world. A homogeneous world is not one you want to live in. Travel would lose its appeal. The very thing you claim to value - diversity - would disappear.
So why is it so wrong to want to keep Britain British? Why does reading this make your hair stand on end? Why does it inexplicably make you want to scream racist? Yet at the same you feel emphatically comfortable about the idea of keeping Jamaica Jamaican? Or Palestine Palestinian?
Mahatma Gandhi once said:
“I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the culture of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.”
In today’s climate Gandhi would be called a racist. Yet all he is saying is there’s nothing wrong with cultures maintaining their own ways, while still enjoying all the world has to offer.