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> need to speak English to function in US society (at least in most parts, I guess). But the data doesn't seem to point to this, at least any more than other countries. More households, almost definitely by absolute numbers but also in percentage, in the US are predominantly speaking a language other than the official language of the country than almost anywhere in Europe. The fact that Europe has a history of strife among culturally similar people seems to, if anything, prove my point? A lot of Europe is culturally similar, and yes, often the dividing lines are arbitrary and strange, but that diversity is a little different than the US. It's not as if Oregon is just all of the people in one cultural minority in the US, whereas sub-groups in Europe are often geographically distinct to some degree. Scotland, Calalan, plenty of bits of Eastern Europe, while a part of a larger country legally, are distinct cultural units. In the US, there's almost never that stark of a division larger than a specific neighborhood in a larger city. Yes, Swedes live in Finland and countries like Austria have multiple official languages, but my original point is that, culturally, most people in Finland and Austria have more cultural similarity to their neighbors than I do with the 2nd generation Chinese immigrants that live on one side of me and the French-Creole couple on the other side. I feel like we've gotten a bit afield from the original dispute though. The OP was implying that the US was being ignorant for not seeking counsel from other countries about cultural topics like gender differences. My issue with that is that it implies that there's an obvious solution to the US's cultural problems in some other country, when it's likely that the reason men or women may be struggling in the European/Protestant immigrant community may be different from why they're having issues in the Indian/Hindu immigrant community, which is likely different from the Indian/Muslim community and the Central American/Catholic community or the 5th generation Gen Z Caucasian Atheist community. Handling and diagnosing each of those are likely different, and at a whole-country level, the US probably can't just try to import a solution that worked in the UK and think it will work broadly here. On the other end, I'd imagine groups in the US probably are looking at what groups in the home country of various immigrant populations are doing and sharing ideas, but that's likely happening at a level you won't know about unless you're in those communities. In general, the US, even regionally or locally, isn't as close to being a monoculture in the same way many of the towns and regions in Europe or Asia are. I don't mean this to say that either way is better or worse, but that when it comes to values and culture, there's often much less of a shared understanding and history, which can make sharing large-scale social initiatives harder. |
Do you think there are no Chinese immigrants in European countries?
My examples were about people who have been living natively in certain areas for centuries. Of course, on top of that, we have had immigrants from all over the world in recent decades: Turkish people came to Germany in large numbers in the 50s, Tamil people fleed Sri Lanka in the 90s and came also to Europe, then all the refugees from the Balkan Wars and more recently from Syria and Ukraine, ...
Is NYC more ethnically and culturally diverse than a random mountain village in Austria? Yes, for sure. But Berlin is also more diverse than some random town in Montana. That's just a feature of big cities.
As a whole, though, I feel you're severely underestimating the cultural diversity in Europe.
We have the exact same problems with different cultural segments of the population having distinct discourses about important issues such as gender roles, LGBTQ, COVID, the war in Ukraine, etc.