Victor Davis Hanson - Premodern Diversity vs. Civilizational Unity | RealClearPolitics

Premodern Diversity vs. Civilizational Unity | RealClearPolitics - Victor Davis Hanson

"...marauding Goths, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Huns, and Vandals...crossed the unsecured Rhine and Danube borders to harvest Roman bounty...focused on destroying the civilization they overran rather than peacefully integrating into and perpetuating the Empire...

• The unity of these diverse peoples fused into a single culture that empowered Rome. 
• In contrast, the later disunity of hundreds of thousands of tribal people flooding into and dividing Rome doomed it.

To meet the challenge of a multiracial society, the only viable pathway to a stable civilization of racially and ethnically different people is a single, shared culture...

• Some nations can find collective success as a single homogenous people like Japan or Switzerland.
• Or equally, but with more difficulty, nations can prosper with heterodox peoples -- but only if united by a single, inclusive culture as the American melting-pot once attested.
• But a baleful third option -- a multicultural society of diverse, unassimilated, and often rival tribes -- historically is a prescription for collective suicide.

We are beginning to see just that in America, as it sheds the melting pot, and adopts the salad bowl of unassimilated and warring tribes...