The Tired "Homogeneous Society" Crapola is Back! Time to Blow It Up!
The first time I heard the “homogeneous” argument was in the 1980s, when a conservative college undergrad insisted to me that the United States couldn’t have universal healthcare because the country was not “homogeneous” like Sweden, Holland, or Norway. No definition of “homogeneous” was offered but it was insinuated: Homogeneous meant one skin color (preferably “white”), one nationality, one culture, and/or one language.
Buy the homogeneous argument and the success of the Scandinavian democratic socialist model is due to the “purity” of each country’s make-up, not because their systems were designed to work a certain way. When challenged that universal healthcare didn’t just evolve from a “homogeneous” culture or a single language, the argument shifts to the reductive, “Well, the reason it works is because everyone is the same.” Again, though only the most extreme homogenist will say it out loud, the success of society is due to a certain kind of purity.
As with the Italian School of Criminology, many of those who push the homogeneous argument claim to be supported by science. It’s no shocker that the “science” claimed by the homogenist is the same that Lombroso and crew practiced, eugenics, the idea that human success is due the “survival of the fittest,” fittest measured by things like size, strength, gender, and race (and the notion that we can selectively breed ourselves to superiority).
When asked how the fittest achieved the size, strength, gender, and race to succeed the answer depends on how frank the eugenicist is. The evasive eugenicist goes circular, “The strong succeed because they are strong, etc.” The “straight-shooter” will state, “The bigger in size, the more successful; the stronger in stature, the more successful; the more manly, the more successful; the whiter, the more successful” – or, “Evolutionary success is determined by the purity of a people.”
As noted, my intro to the homogeneous argument was in the 1980s. Eugenics became a formal academic study in the 1880s. In the hundred-year gap between the birth of Eugenics and my hearing crackpot “sociology” for the first time, we’ve had Jim Crow, Nazism, and apartheid, though the racist/xenophobic nonsense behind this bullshit has been around for centuries.
Terrorism such as the Inquisition was fueled by religious bigotry, with a strong undercurrent of racism and xenophobia. Colonialism and imperialism are both based on the belief of racial and cultural superiority. The European-led genocide of the America’s indigenous people was race-based, as was the practice of chattel slavery.
The US Constitution is a race-based document. Its original provisions regarding slavery and citizenship, as well as language preventing women and Native People the from voting, are based on the same arguments that fueled eugenicists and are ditto’d by homogenists. And every argument against expanding the franchise so that the diversity of the United States’ population is reflected in politics and policy is an extension of the purity ideology.
Call it the Bell Curve, name it the Great Replacement Theory, see it in ethnic cleansing under the guise of “immigration enforcement,” and hear it in arguments against things like universal healthcare, public education, and a real social safety net The homogeneous argument is not only alive and well in the United States, it gets regular run in the mainstream and continues as a common conservative talking point, repeated by people who either ignorantly repeat received wisdom or careful cloak their supremacist beliefs.
In 1847, the great European diplomat Count Metternich wrote a French colleague,
The word 'Italy' is a geographical expression, a description which is useful shorthand, but has none of the political significance the efforts of the revolutionary ideologues try to put on it, and which is full of dangers for the very existence of the states which make up the peninsula.
At the time, Metternich was writing the truth. Fourteen years before Italian unification, Italy was a revolutionary idea nursed by Giuseppe Mazzini and instigated by Giuseppe Garibaldi. The “geographic expression” was a series of states, republics, kingdoms, and fragments of empires. Italians were ruled by popes, parliaments, dictators and doges (the leader of the Republic of Venice), as well as by Austria, Spain, England, France, and others.
From the 1200s to the 1800s, Sicily and south of Rome went through a series of dictatorships, most of which did not represent or reflect the majority of the “kingdom’s” population. Sicilian kings ruled Neapolitans, Neapolitans ruled Sicilians, and then there were the Spanish, French, and Austrians. Bourbons, Hapsburgs, and even a Bonaparte controlled the Kingdom, as did merchants from Piedmont and the North. If Italy was a “geographic expression,” the South was a geographic expression of a geographic expression, a colony that suppressed and impoverished the “native” population, a polyglot people from the Mediterranean and afar.
Though Italy was unified as a single nation-state in 1861, there is still some truth to Metternich’s description of the peninsula. It’s no secret that Italians see themselves as either Northerners or Southerners, but that’s the last of all of the country’s divisions. Nearly all Italians identify primarily – in order - with their family, clan, village of origin, neighborhood, village-town-city, province, region, and then north/south with allowances for Rome and central Italy, the islands of Sardinia and Sicily, and east/west, not to mention areas in the north where the native language is not Italian.
Though Italy is 95% “white,” with a culture of racism, the way whiteness and racism plays out is not so straight forward. Italian racism can be reduced to three kinds: Virulent, opportunistic, and ignorant (each overlapping and influencing each other). Virulent is basic white supremacy, seen at its most crude when Italian ultras throw bananas at Black football (soccer) players. The opportunistic racist is both political and xenophobic, much like the go-alongs in the GOP.
The ignorant racist is best illustrated by the Italian use of Black face. Common on national television, Black face is most often used by entertainers emulating Black musicians and actors. Rather than mocking, those in Black face see themselves as paying tribute to the people they are imitating. A contestant on a singing show will don Black face (and swaying) to honor Stevie Wonder. When challenged, contestant (and TV producers) will not only deny Black face as racist, they refuse to see it as racially insensitive. “I’m not offended, why should anyone else be?” – a combination of cluelessness and stubbornness.
Moreover, Italian racism is not reserved for non-white Italians or foreigners. Some northern Italians consider southerners not-European, which they also see as not-white. Northern nationalists see Calabria (the “toe”) and Sicily as “expressions” of Africa, with southern “blood” being tainted. And, while, southerners don’t look at northerners as non-European, many do not see them as brethren.
As far as language goes, official Italian is Florentine, a dialect that most Italians speak or at least understand. Most Italians also have a handle on their regional and/or local dialect, of which there are many. It’s not rare that someone from Trieste can’t understand a dialect from the south of Sicily, that a Sardinian draws a blank when spoken to by someone from Matera (just as a Northern Californian will hear a thick Scottish brogue as “not-English”). It’s also common for Italians to speak in mixed dialects, spiking formal Italian with phrases and words from their native dialect.
Many non-Italians reduce Italian food to pizza and pasta without realizing that, while you can get a great slice in Genoa and tasty lasagna in Milan, pizza and pasta are foods of the south, while rice in the form of risotto is of northern origin. Butter rules the north, olive oil the south. Tomatoes – which came to Italy from the Americas – are a staple of the south, where some regions count horse as meat. Talk to an Italian about food and you will very rarely hear the words “Italy” and “Italian.” Food is much more intimate than that. It is Neapolitan, Genoese, Roman, or Barese.
Food, language, region, village of origin, etc. – all these things inform politics, which are as much an expression of geography (particularly north and south) as ideology. And then there is the Italian government, defined by the post-WWII, anti-fascist constitution, which deliberately makes single-person rule difficult if not impossible.
The ignorant point to the routine collapse of Italian governments as proof of the country’s chaos and instability, not realizing that Italian governments “crash by design.” To keep a leader from establishing total rule, Italy’s constitution requires that when a president wants to replace cabinet members (or ruling coalition partners), they must dissolve the government to give the citizens input into the change. If the people are fine with the change, they keep the president (and their new cabinet members) by voting them in, which is most often the case. If they don’t like it, they chose someone else.
Meanwhile, Italy keeps puttering along, with the world’s eighth largest economy and a political stability rating better than England, France, and the United States. It’s got a universal healthcare system, which ranks a but under the United States’ until factors such as accessibility and affordability are accounted for. Italians have a great public education system, which almost all Italians use. The university system is tops.
Italy has a very low level of gun violence, with no school shootings in its history. Violence associated with organized crime almost always stays within crime circles. While Italy has a high level of corruption, the infrastructure is well maintained. The rail system is one of Europe’s best, public transportation is excellent, and the roads are taken care of (our drives in rural Puglia were absent of the potholes I experience driving the freeway from San Francisco to Sacramento).
Travel the country with little illusions and you will feel the divisions from region to region and from town to town. Talk to Italians and it won’t take long before you hear some regional pride, either for the place they are living or where they are from. Get on the subject of football and there will be no confusion that Napoli’s Series A win over AC Milan is more than just sports. It’s the south’s defeat of the north, and both sides feel it intensely.
Despite all the contradictions, corruption, and “chaos,” Italy works as a country, and, despite its reputation, it works much better than the United States does at this point in our history. Italy’s stability has nothing to do with being “homogonous,” just as the United States’ shitshow has zilch to do with “diversity.” Our present state – wherever we are – is due to choices we’ve made, direct choices or choices made by people we chose to rule us.
Whether we chose to participate in politics and policy making is a choice. Whether we embrace cynicism and apathy is a choice. The systems we use – chattel slavery, colonialism, free-market capitalism, democratic socialism, single payer healthcare, mass incarceration, etc. – didn’t just appear. We chose to create and maintain them. And they will thrive or die when we – no matter our skin color, language, lovers, or what exists between our legs - chose to support or get rid of them.