Multi-cultural dancers

                 (credit: Lance Cpl. Jackeline Perez Rivera, via Wikimedia Commons)

Sociodiversity

A concept that has been drifting around the borders of my thinking for years now is the concept of sociodiversity. A nation is sociodiverse if there are several different clearly identifiable sub-groups within its borders that have sets of morés and customs largely alien or unrecognizable to other sub-groups within its population. Innu hunter/trappers in Canada can meet, interact with, and pass among, Hutterite farmers, Quebecois truck drivers, Russian-Canadian laborers, Mexican-Canadian farm workers, and Scottish-Canadian welders. Any of these groups can have children who mingle, and form relationships with, any of the others. Immigrants from Somalia come to Canada as farm workers, stay as landed immigrants, apply for, and obtain, citizenship, and see their children graduate from universities with degrees in English Literature.

My belief is that Canada, and for that matter, any other nation, is stronger and more resilient when it is composed in this way. The stresses of blending cultures are documented often in newspapers, magazines, ezines, and t.v. news reports. Maybe some Cuban restaurant workers don’t understand and don’t like the way that policemen in a Canadian city come to tell them that their party has to shut down. The guests are violating the noise bylaws. Yes, your father has been allowed to leave Cuba, and come to Canada. Yes, he arrived today, and that is a good thing. A happy thing. No, you can’t celebrate and keep your apartment building’s residents awake till 3 in the morning. We all have to live together. But those Cuban workers may very well come around and apologize to several people in the building the next day. In Spanish. To neighbors that immigrated to Canada from El Salvador. The neighbors may then translate the apology into English and pass it on to twenty or more other residents in the building. The Cubans accept that we all need sleep. Some human expectations are universal.  

It is very important to note here that there are enormous strengths to this design for a society. The Mexican farm workers may have among their numbers a man who trained for a short while to be a bullfighter. If a bull somehow gets released into a field where many people from many cultures are working, the bullfighter apprentice may save two Scots teens, a Russian musician, a Somali cartoonist, and an Innu cook from injury or death on the horns of an angry bull.

The concept of sociodiversity extends much further as well.

When a town contains a homosexual couple who create a moving company with 17 employees on the payroll, the whole community is enriched by that venture. When a 19 year old computer programmer writes, develops, and markets a computer game, she may create dozens or even hundreds of jobs for her town. She may also have just provided kids from many of the town’s diverse households with a way to share their leisure time. Build community spirit. Our team is going to the world finals this year in Seoul! There are hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money.

Then a Scottish-Somali-Canadian boy finds a cure for sickle cell anemia. Some Mexican workers buy their own farms and breed a variety of corn with nearly twice the yields of the corn B.C. farmers used to grow. And so on.

Yes, sometimes it’s hard to mingle many sub-cultures and still keep the peace of the whole nation. But compared to the benefits of the mingling, these drawbacks do not matter. Or at least, to be accurate, they don’t matter nearly as much as the benefits of the intermingling for the whole nation.

By a simple extrapolation, we can see that sociodiversity is an asset for any society. It’s just useful and survival oriented over the long haul to have a lot of different kinds of people interacting and exchanging ideas in your nation all the time. The future always contains unforeseeable challenges for any nation or individual. The nation has better chances of meeting every challenge, pandemic, famine, and even war if it contains a wide variety of people with a wide variety of knowledge sets and talents. 

Biodiversity makes an ecosystem strong. Resilient. But humans don't evolve by that genetically-driven means any more. We evolve and adapt through changes to our cultures. We don't get 99% wiped out by a pandemic anymore as other species do. We find vaccines. Biodiversity is good for an ecosystem; in an analogous way, sociodiversity is good for a human nation. 

There are a lot of bulls out in the world. They leave evidence of their existences all over. We need a lot of different kinds of bullfighters.

How much sociodiversity can a society stand before it begins to break into mutually hostile sub-cultures? We have no idea. We have now built in several different parts of the world societies based on the ideas of tolerance and respect. Even mutual support. Democracies are built around this vision. Mutual respect. Diversity. Pluralism. The experiment is still in progress, and we are it. 

Therefore, love your neighbor. The very "ways" that he practices and that strike you as strange ...may one day save your life. 

I believe, very deeply, that this is the direction in which our species must go if we are to survive at all. We can do this. The evidence says we can. 

                 NAEM (National Association for Environmental Management) team  

                                       (credit: Wikimedia Commons)