Writing this month in the eminent intellectual journal Modern Age, Alexander Riley, Senior Fellow, The Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization (AHI), recommends a book that brings strong historical evidence to bear on America’s ability to remain a functioning nation. Dr. Riley also voices concerns, as a sociologist, about the grave challenge ahead.
In his review of Out of the Melting Pot, Into the Fire: Multiculturalism in the World’s Past and America’s Future by Jens Heycke (Encounter Books, 2023), Dr. Riley praises it for grappling closely with assimilation and multiculturalism as two of the keys to understanding civilizations’ and nations’ fates. A professor of sociology at Bucknell University, he cites the book’s timeliness: “No question is more urgent in contemporary America: should we assimilate immigrants with an interest in social unity or … embrace multiculturalism and allow cultural difference to run rampant? The multiculturalists who form the elite of American society daily hasten to find further ways to impose on us just the kind of anti-integrative regime of ethnically exclusive identities and interests that this book argues will inevitably produce chaos.”
Heycke, an independent researcher, examines the Roman Empire and the Aztec civilization in Mexico, then considers the results of assimilation and multiculturalism in the early Islamic world, Sri Lanka, the Balkans, and two African countries. His conclusion, Dr. Riley writes, is that whenever “the fragmentation of diverse identities was opposed by a staunch political effort to build a unified national identity … ethnic conflict was minimized and the economic benefits for the entire society were bountiful.”
While America’s record of assimilation has historically been fairly good, Dr. Riley observes, the problem of ethnic conflict lies very deep: “the reason human beings default to ethnic fractionalization so easily, and often so violently, reaches far back into our history as a species” and indeed to human evolution.
“None of this makes the phenomenon morally desirable or defensible … [it] simply explains why it exists and suggests how difficult it will likely be to chip away at its staying power. Heycke’s book effectively describes a few historical examples that show how societies with ethnic differences can benefit collectively from deemphasizing those differences, rather than embracing them as contemporary multiculturalism tells us to do.”
Because America has, since the 1960s, “largely given up that assimilationist ethic … conflicts have again become endemic and potentially lethal to the whole national project.” Heycke sounds a clarion call to the dangers of our plight.
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