There are many ideas espoused by the intellectual elites that are fraudulent. Things that not only fail to stand up even to the slightest scrutiny, but have piles of evidence to the contrary. Despite this, their godlike status among gullible students, and leftest, allows them to get away with stating the absurd to applause from their adoring echo chamber denizens. This is true even if it is hurtful and counter productive.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the “science” of eugenics, an offshoot of Darwinism, was marked by the worship of the educated. The idea that those with PhDs (Particularity Whites) were somehow genetically superior stoked their egos. Regurgitating the earlier belief that rulers were born superior to their subjects, and the two should not mix for fear of contaminating aristocratic bloodlines, the new belief was racial purity was necessary for future advancement of the species.

Today’s push for cultural purity, and separate but equal cultures, has many disturbing parallels to both eugenics, and Jim Crow laws of the old south. Just add race in place of culture, and substitute appropriation for mixing, and the similarities become all too clear. Like previous claims against mixing classes, and races, this newest form of segregation is absurd. In fact, intercultural exchanges are both necessary and unavoidable.

In Africa, a man was asked if he knew the language of his tribe said no, and added most Africans do not respect or honor the old ways of our tribes. When asked why, he basically said nobody wants to live in a hut. In another exchange, Anthony Bourdain was filmed talking to a Amazon tribesman. The man was complaining that the government, by restricting things they could trade for, was treating his people as zoo specimens. Each of these men understood that not all cultures are equal, and if they wanted to get ahead they had to choose whose to emulate, or borrow from. In so doing, these men showed more wisdom than the whole of liberal Western academia combined. This situation is not unique, as many people have had to make that choice. For those that have chosen cultural isolation, or had it forced upon them, the results have measured in stagnation, misery, and occasionally extinction.

Ancient China and Medieval Islamic countries were once leaders in science and knowledge. China barricaded itself off from “corrupting” influences of outsiders. Islamic empires, bent on world domination and religious intolerance, walled off the west and turned the once mighty Islamic centers of learning into backwaters of ignorance. Isolation turned each into time capsules of arrested development. For other places, topography created natural barriers to trade and the exchange in ideas. For Stone Age Amazon tribes, Pacific Islanders, and almost all of Africa, cultural isolation meant thousands of years of stagnation. In contrast, societies that were both willing and able to embrace new ideas advanced tremendously.

The question is often asked, why are those people, or that nation poor? Rarely is it contemplated what makes some groups and countries richer. Poverty is a natural state of mankind, and has been for millennia. It is success that has been rare, and those that obtain it that have stuck out. This makes the remarkable reduction of poverty across the globe, over the last half century, all the more so. It was not leveling schemes, or mass wealth redistribution, that has made this possible, but the acceptance by ever greater parts of the population of Western concepts of markets, property rights, and rule of law. Ideas that have pushed aside much older systems deeply linked to the cultures in which they resided. Inevitably, those that embrace the ideas of successful cultures become successful themselves. Given this undeniable fact, the continued insistence that people stay in their boxes, even when their boxes are likely keeping them back, is unconscionable.

The truth is, the economic differences between areas can most often be explained by the cultures inhabiting them. In many cases, two peoples inhabiting the same places with the same opportunities end up with totally different outcomes. While poor native born American blacks lament the lack of opportunity, and complain of systemic racism, Nigerian immigrants excel. The difference is obvious not color, or racism, but the culture of the two communities.

Beyond the obvious necessity of cultural exchange to advance economically, there is the social aspect of sharing cultures. While a white man wearing a traditional African shirt at Berkley would be attacked, he would be greeted with smiles in the land of its origin. Sharing cultures is one of the best ways of bring people together. This is true whether eating with chop sticks in China, saying gracious instead of thank you in Spain, or wearing a traditional shirt in Ghana. In contrast, refusing to culturally appropriate is seen as a sign of rejection and even divisive. It is only in the troubled mind of liberals that such a thing as sharing a culture becomes bad, while walling people off from each other is considered good.

Lastly, the concept of a pure culture is itself absurd. Except for extreme remote tribes, nobodies’ culture is truly unique. They are compilations of cultural interactions and sharing over centuries. Blends of various influences; a natural mixing that has been occurring as long as mankind has walked the earth. Not only is it immoral to box people int cultural cages, and divisive to prohibit cross cultural exchanges, it is lunacy to suggest it can be stopped.