From: Francesca S. Alcorn (unicorn@greenepa.net)
Date: Tue 09 Mar 2004 - 00:16:26 GMT
>While I'm not in agreement with this book review, it does bring up a lot of
>issues we've been tossing about lately. From *Skeptic,* Vol. 10, No. 3.
>
>--TD
It's going on *my* wishlist.
I have been dabbling in politics these past few months, and one thing
I am running across from critics of the democratic party is a
criticism of "identity politics" and "hyphenated americans". These
are from people with basically humanistic values who feel that the
democratic party has lost the mandate of the "common man" - and that
is why the republicans (whose values they decry) have won the last
elections. They say that multiculturalism is a failure and that we
need to have a single cultural identity - as Americans - (maybe even
Christians) - in order to have real social cohesiveness (kind of like
this book suggests). My concern is that this argument is really
stealth racism/ethnocentrism - and that these people should know
better. Is there any research which correlates group cohesiveness to
multiculturalism - a sort of multinational survey? Are there other
memes which can perform the same function of social cohesion? And
has anyone got a real concrete definition of what a "civil society"
is?
frankie
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue 09 Mar 2004 - 00:27:08 GMT