Being a monocultural society

is not possible is it?  The redheaded politician has been accused of calling for that. 

Dig a little deeper into what she is actually saying and it is not that but it might easily be taken that way. There are apparently a good number of people who want it too. 

I do not believe any society is "mono-cultural". There have been attempts of course but have they really succeeded? I suspect that even in the last outposts of ultra-communist countries there are differences. There will be regional history, a regional custom, a regional word in use and so on. People who live along a border will share commonalities with people who live on the other side of the border.  The idea that you can simply stop sharply at a border and have a completely different culture just does not work for me. People have been taking on language, food and all sorts of cultural practices from those around them for as long as we have existed. Trying to stop that does not work even in China or Cuba or North Korea. A tiny country like Bhutan is not immune to change any more than a large one.

Of course change was once much slower. Perhaps it was so slow we did not really believe it was taking place - but it was. 

When I was a mere kitten a trip to Europe was a major undertaking. It was the sort of thing for which people saved for many years and almost certainly only did once. Many people never did it.  They never moved off the massive island on which we live. There were a great many people who never went to another state. There were people with whom I went to school who had never been to the capital city. Some had not even been into the big fishing port at the base of the peninsula. 

An outsider might have looked at that and said "mono-cultural". They would have been wrong. There were subtle differences in language and pronunciation even there. People who lived inland did not eat fish unless they happened to be visiting that port or the other major town on the coast. People who lived along the coastline did but transporting fish inland was not done for lack of refrigeration. Now you can buy frozen fish in the nearest township which has a "supermarket". You can add a packet of frozen chips too along with and the "Chinese" or "Greek" or "Italian" ready meals. Nothing is going to change that. Our food choices are not mono-cultural. It is unlikely they have ever been that. 

As a child I ate quan dong pies because the quan dongs grew where we lived. It was "free" food and people were not wealthy. Eating kangaroo or wallaby meat was common for many people. It was food you did not need to buy. (I have tasted it and cannot handle the strong flavour of it.) Now it is an expensive "healthy" alternative you buy at a specialist butcher in the city.

More than one area in this state was settled by German migrants very far back. Go into those areas now and it is not just the names which are different but the food often is as well. There are cook books based on it. Even when I was at school there were children who came from families where German was spoken at home and they had to learn English at school. Sundays, whether you were Catholic or Lutheran, were spent at church and in communal gatherings. That has changed now but it still influences life there. 

We were never mono-cultural. We could not become mono-cultural. I can see where there is need for change however. There have been calls for "sharia law" and that concerns me. A country needs just one legal system and ours is, rightly, regarded as a good one. There are schools which have been set up for minority groups but these can be a means of isolating children from the mainstream of society. There are government funded programs designed to retain other languages and other cultures. Those things can do harm if they are used to isolate people. We need to be aware of the potential harm which can be done even when we are told to "celebrate diversity", 

Getting the balance right and doing it in the way that does the most good is what matters. We are never going to be mono-cultural.