asian american history
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Cultural Pluralism
Probably all the non-English immigrants who came to American shores in any significant numbers from colonial times onward—settling either in the forbidding wilderness, the lonely prairie, or in some accessible urban slum—created ethnic enclaves and looked forward to the preservation of at least some of their native cultural patterns. Such a development, natural as breathing, was supported by the later accretion of friends, relatives, and countrymen seeking out oases of familiarity in a strange land, by the desire of the settlers to rebuild (necessarily in miniature) a society in which they could communicate in the familiar tongue and maintain familiar institutions, and, finally, by the necessity to band together for mutual aid and mutual protection against the uncertainties of a strange and frequently hostile environment. This was as true of the “old” immigrants as of the “new.” In fact, some of the liberal intellectuals who fled to America from the inhospitable political climate in Germany in the 1830’s, 1840’s and 1850’s looked forward to the creation of an all-German state within the union, or, even more hopefully, to the eventual formation of a separate German nation, as soon as the expected dissolution of the union under the impact of the slavery controversy should have taken place. Oscar Handlin, writing of the sons in Erin in mid-nineteenth-century Boston, recent refugees from famine and economic degradation in their homeland, points out: “Unable to participate in the normal associational affairs of the community, the Irish felt obliged to erect a society within a society, to act together in their own way. In every contact therefore the group, acting apart from other sections of the community, became intensely aware of its peculiar and exclusive identity.” Thus cultural pluralism was a fact in American society before it became a theory—a theory with explicit relevance for the nation as a whole, and articulated and discussed in the English-speaking circles of American intellectual life.
Early in 1915 there appeared in the pages of The Nation two articles under the title “Democracy versus the Melting-Pot.” Their author was Horace Kallen, a Harvard-educated philosopher with a concern for the application of philosophy to societal affairs, and, as an American Jew, himself derivative of an ethnic background which was the subject to the contemporary pressures for dissolution implicit in the “Americanization,” or Anglo-conformity, and the melting-pot theories. In these articles Kallen vigorously rejected the usefulness of these theories as models of what was actually transpiring in American life or as ideals for the future. Rather he was impressed by the way in which the various ethnic groups in America were coincident with particular area and regions, and with the tendency for each group to preserve its own language, religion, communal institution, and ancestral culture. All the while, he pointed out, the immigrant has been learning to speak English as the language of general communication, and has participated in the over-all economic and political life of the nation. These developments in which “the United States are in the process of becoming a federal state not merely as a union of geographical and administrative unities, but also as a cooperation of cultural diversities, as a federation or commonwealth of national cultures,” the author argued, far from constituting a violation of historic American political principles, as the “Americanizers” claimed, actually represented the inevitable consequences of democratic ideals, since individuals are implicated in groups, and since democracy for the individual must by extension also mean democracy for his group.
The processes just described, however, as Kallen develops his argument, are far from having been thoroughly realized. They are menaced by “Americanization” programs, assumptions of Anglo-Saxon superiority, and misguided attempts to promote “racial” amalgamation. Thus America stands at a kind of cultural crossroads. It can attempt to impose by force an artificial, Anglo-Saxon oriented uniformity of its peoples, or it can consciously allow and encourage its ethnic groups to develop democratically, each emphasizing its particular cultural heritage. If the latter course is followed, as Kallen puts it at the close of his essay, then,
The outlines of a possible great and truly democratic commonwealth become discernible. Its form would be that of the federal republic; its substance a democracy of nationalities, cooperating voluntarily and autonomously through common institutions in the enterprise of self realization through the perfection of men according to their kind. The common language of the commonwealth, the language of its great tradition, would be English, but each nationality would have for its emotional and involuntary life its own peculiar dialect or speech, its own individual and inevitable esthetic and intellectual forms. The political and economic life of the commonwealth is a single unit and serves as the foundation and background for the realization of the distinctive individuality of each nation that composes it and of the pooling of these in a harmony above them all. Thus “American civilization” may come to mean the perfection of the cooperative harmonies of “European civilization”—the waste, the squalor and the distress of Europe being eliminated—a multiplicity in a unity, an orchestration of mankind.
Solution Preview
Cultural Pluralism is theory used to highlight on how small groups within a society maintain their distinctive cultural identities whereby their practices and values are accepted by the larger cultural values of the society and conform to the values and norms of this society (Cotterrell, 2017). Cultural pluralism can be explained by the notion “Light and dark: each was unaware that the other existed.” This denotes on how both the dark and light have co-existed and maintained their unique identities. Besides, Cultural pluralism is best described with the quote “The secular state is the guarantee of religious pluralism.
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