MONOCULTURE | A Recent History

I’m baffled by the term ‘monoculture’ which makes no sense to me, except in agriculture. To explain why, let’s look at the term ‘culture’. Among the many definitions, I limit myself to two because they apply here.
The first is ‘the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement’. Nature is immutable. Culture on the other hand has been, since the dawn of human history, a momentous adventure of change, to make life more comfortable, more inspiring, more diverse. Culture in that sense has a positive connotation, and moreover, was never ‘mono’ but developed by constant cross fertilisation.
When the convenors for this debate speak of “the homogeneous expression of the culture of a single social or ethnic group”, they adopt another definition, that of culture as ‘the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular people or society’. In that sense, the term culture is purely descriptive and value free, as a set of shared values which holds societies together. There again, the term ‘monoculture’ rarely applies. The paramount question today is whether these sets of values are freely adopted or imposed by force.

BIO: Mia Doornaert is a Belgian newspaper columnist and independent expert on international and cultural affairs. She is the president of Flanders Literature, a foundation which financially supports literary creativity in the broadest sense in Dutch language Belgium. From 1970 to 2008 she was successively foreign correspondent, diplomatic editor and editorial writer of De Standaard, where she still has a bi-weekly column on alternate Thursdays. She has chaired the UNESCO Consultative Group on press freedom, and the jury of the UNESCO worldwide Press Freedom Prize (1998–2000). In 1986–1992 she was the president of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), the world wide federation of journalists’ unions committed to the defense of press freedom, and decent working conditions for journalists. In 1983–1986 she was the president of the Belgian Journalists’ Association. She is the author and co-author of several books, among them a bestselling book on France. In 2003, she was made a Baroness by King Albert II for her work as a journalist and her international engagement for press freedom and human rights.