The other day I was on the margins of a conversation about "the refugee problem", biting my tongue as one does. (Deep breath: No, it's not the people who are the problem, it's whatever is making refugees of them. You don't solve anything by shoving people into concentration camps or leaving them to perish from drowning or heat exhaustion.)
I was feeling sorry for the couple of Asian people present, but I'm afraid to say also relieved that for once I wasn't the elephant in the room. The conversation then turned to the specific difficulty of assimilating a large number of people from a different culture in a short period of time.
Again: why should this be a problem? Or more pointedly, why is the difficulty situated wholly within the incoming contingent rather than the resident population? Is building walls and turning back boats any sane sort of cure, or just a symptom of another, more serious, problem?
One of our token Asian representatives finally cracked under the pressure and presented a spirited argument that a perceived failure to assimilate does not indicate a lack of effort to do so. Certainly, English is a fiendishly tricky language to acquire late in life. And traditional Anglo cooking is an acquired taste, if "taste" is quite the right word to use in this context.
However I'm not entirely sure that this is a defence that needs presenting. Is assimilation such an unalloyed virtue? Certainly it's something that's reasonable to expect of somebody immersed in a foreign culture, in the sense that it's hard not to "go native" to some degree, even if one is determined to do otherwise. But is cultural conformity something that is reasonable to demand or even desirable as an aim?
I grew up in a strikingly homogenous area of Sydney; ethnically, culturally, and practically every other way. You could support St. George rather than Cronulla in the footy, or prefer to drive a Ford rather than a Holden, but that was about as far as tolerance would extend. You have to draw the line somewhere.
In a word, it was dull. In a slightly longer and more pointed word, it was repressive. Among the young, cruelly and often violently so. As a youth with quite an abundance of eccentricities, it was no picnic. For the rare child with some visible marker of difference, it must have been hellish and relentless.
Even now, when I find myself in a uniformly Anglo-Australian neighbourhood I get jittery. I start to glance over my shoulder to see who might be running up to give the weirdo a community-spirited blow to the head, just to show that we don't stand for any of that weirdo nonsense around here.
Demographically rich places aren't just more interesting, more lively, more likely to get a feature article in the weekend colour supplements, and so on.
They feel safe.
When I first moved to regional Australia, after some years in Western Sydney, it took me a while to work out what felt not-quite-right about my new home, in a way that I couldn't quite put my finger on. (And oh, as I quickly discovered, it was so dull!)
I think that's the way one should feel whenever in a social monoculture. A biological monoculture is (these days) readily recognised as a problem. It's not healthy, resilient, or productive; something has clearly gone awry to produce this state of affairs. In the social world, we should certainly not be thinking of rigid social conformity as some sort of utopia that we can reach if only we are prepared to make some tough choices.
I've never willingly assimilated to anything in my life, and I'm too old to start now. I'm certainly not going to force it upon anybody else. It's cruel, perverse, and ultimately harmful to everybody.