E Pluribus ...

Of the 20th century's many tragedies, the 'ethnic cleansing' of thriving multicultural communities throughout the former Ottoman Empire is not the least. I'm no expert, and I suspect these regions in North Africa, Mesopotamia, and the Balkans saw their share of tensions, hatred, and ethnic violence over the centuries. Nonetheless the top-down administrative structure of the Ottomans seemed to allow for communities to co-exist side by side despite fundamental differences in religion, culture, language, and history. Much of this pattern of settlement survived the break-up of the empire after WWI, but in our own time, for various reasons, the multi-cultural model has given way to intolerance, removal, and even genocide.

In North Africa, Jews who had lived alongside their Muslim neighbors symbiotically since the expulsion from Spain left en masse for Israel in the 1950s and 60s, partly because of local independence struggles and partly tensions between Israel and its Arab neighbors. In Iran the 1979 theocratic revolution hastened the expatriation of a thriving Jewish community, while the collapse of the secular regime in Iraq following the US invasion in 2003 has left a trail of dislocations among Christians and Jews, Shia and Sunnis, Yazidis, Zoroastrians ... an amazing patchwork of cultures, groups, clans, uprooted with little chance of restoration. A decade of civil wars and ethnic aggressions in the Balkans following the collapse of Yugoslavia has wreaked similar destruction on the multiculturalism of that region. And now something similar is happening in Syria, where the multiplicity of cultures held in a kind of suspension by a secular despotism has collapsed under the weight of Arab liberalism, environmental depredation, and Islamist terror.

In the ecology of human settlement, these impositions of monoculture on what was once a vibrant and fertile system of cultural interchange is as great a disaster as the vast tracts of agriculturally depleted soil, or the sterile river deltas devastated by effluents--another way we humans are impoverishing our eco-systems and mortgaging our future.

I reflect on this tragic sequence of events as I hear about nationalist parties in Europe campaigning to exclude immigrants, take away citizenship from foreigners, build barriers at the borders, preserve the 'Christian culture' of certain localities in a world that is irrepressibly plural. And now as the American presidential campaign accelerates, I hear the same sorts of demands here, in what has been one of the world's most successful experiments in multiculturalism. And yet the siren call to exclude the Muslims, wall off the Mexicans, deport the foreigners, return America to the homogeneous, small-town culture it never was--that call is resonating widely and dangerously. The America of E Pluribus Unum wasn't just 13 colonies; it was a patchwork of cultures speaking Spanish, French, German, Dutch, and a host of native languages as well as English. It was as black as it was white, with Jews, atheists, Quakers, and even Muslims among its early inhabitants.

It has been heartening to see clergy of many faiths rise in defense of America's Muslims. The Chief Justice of Massachusetts's Supreme Judicial Court distinguished himself by assuring Boston's Muslim community of its protections under the rule of law. For all its excesses the #BlackLivesMatter movement and its many campus affiliates make clear the accommodations the white majority needs to make in order to achieve the full value of our multicultural legacy. In an increasingly intolerant and dangerous world, this simple message mustn't be taken for granted.