Mens Sana Foundation

seems that I can’t read anything in the paper these days involving college students without running across the word "multiculturalism." Not having the foggiest notion of what it means, I tried looking it up in Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th Edition. It turns out that "multiculturalism" is the noun form of "multicultural," which means, according to Merriam Webster "of, relating to, reflecting, or adapted to diverse cultures." No help there.

So I broke the word down into "multi" and "culture," and looked up both. The "multi" part was easy. It means "many" or "much" or "multiple." The "culture" part was anything but easy.

Here’s what I found. "Culture" is "the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group." By this time, I was beginning to get a headache. So I gave up.

Then it occurred to me that those of you on campuses who are always talking about "multiculturalism" could probably put me straight on the subject.

So here’s my question. I take you into a room in which there are 100 college students chosen at random from the Cal Berkeley student body (or from the student body of any other university deemed in general to have a "multicultural" makeup) and I ask you to identify the culture of each. What procedure would you use that could be replicated by others and still produce the same results?

If you come up empty-handed, perhaps it’s because you haven’t as yet learned that people are the only beings on the planet who produce verbal phantoms in their head and then project them upon the world outside, all the while being completely unaware that that’s what they’re doing. In that respect, they’re very much like the kitten who jabs and pokes at its image in a mirror, totally unaware that it’s jousting with a creature of its own making.

So much for multiculturalism.

Think about it.