David Goodhart Quotes
The diversity, individualism and mobility that characterize developed economies -- especially in the era of globalization -- mean that more of our lives is spent among strangers …. in a developed country such as Britain is that we not only live among stranger citizens but we must share with them. We share public services and parts of our income in the welfare state, we share public spaces in towns and cities where we are squashed together on buses, trains and tubes, and we share in a democratic conversation .… All such acts of sharing are more smoothly and generously negotiated if we can take for granted a limited set of common values and assumptions. But as Britain becomes more diverse that common culture is being eroded.
David Goodhart, Founding Editor, British Prospect, The Guardian, February 24, 2004
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1st Baron Verulam. Bacon credited the Roman’s ability to absorb different people’s into the empire as a key to their success and argued that this was a critical practice if a nation would become an empire.
In revolutionary America, not only were the colonists divided into revolutionists and loyalists to Britain, but among the revolutionists, there was no uniformity of manners, ideas, norms, beliefs or any other element of politics and unity. The great challenge to America and one of its great strengths is its diversity which is not a consequence of recent immigration, but has been a characteristic of the American body politic even in the Revolutionary War. Even English was not spoken by everyone as there were French, German, Scandinavian and other immigrants who had settled in the frontier and rarely came into contact with people other than those of their own family and community. The notion of a specific American culture to which which some today believe that we should return, never existed to begin with.
This is the origin of the “melting pot” term. Although British, Zangwill wrote this play for America and it was first produced in Washinton DC with Theodore Roosevelt in attendance. The theme was just the concept that most Americans think of relative to the large immigration of so many peoples to America.
He was born in the Azerbaijan province of the Soviet Union and did most of his academic work in the United States. He is an example of a globalized scientist.
David Goodhart is a British journalist, commentator and author. He is the founder and a former editor of Prospect magazine.
