I was reading the news this morning and I ran across a quote from a Chinese official who says, “Hostile Western forces have never abandoned their strategic schemes to Westernize and divide us, and they are stepping up ideological and cultural infiltration.”

This sound bite sounds as though it could have been uttered during the Cold War; but no, it was this year. It seems that the more globalized we, all of earth’s inhabitants, become, the more insular some of us become.

America is the greatest nation on earth, a wonderful hodge-podge of people, cultures and society. It truly is the great melting pot. Sure, there are some tin-foil-hat-wearing isolationists out there, but by and large we all get along pretty well here. Ronald Reagan said it best when he said something to the effect that you can go to France and never become French; you can go to Germany and never become German; you can go to China and never become Chinese; but anyone from anywhere can come to America and become American. The diversity of our backgrounds makes us strong.

Part of the reason it all works is that there is no original American culture, per se. Everything was imported. We have a slew of northern European holidays, plus St. Patrick’s Day, Kwanzaa, Chinese New Year, Ramadan, Rosh Hashanah, Cinco De Mayo, All Soul’s Day, and so on.

The world becomes smaller each day. Poor nations want to join the rich ones, and rightly so. They should. But they also want to cling to the old cultural ways. They want the money but not the modernization that comes along with it. It seems to me that in order to join the modern world, more traditional countries will have to let go of some of the more stringent aspects of their culture. I don’t advocate wholesale abandonment of the old ways. Often, the old cultural ways developed over thousands of years and were effective in their time and place. But the social mores that worked in the hill country of near-Asia probably don’t have a place in a modern society.

To bring this back around, the Chinese official’s quote seems fearful of unbridled change and a movement away from the familiar into a new and unpredictable future. Change can be scary, especially if you have a billion constituents who may move in ways that the central government cannot foresee. But give the people some credit. We humans are creatures of habit. We’ll stick with what’s familiar and still manage to soak up the best bits of what the rest of the world has to offer.

China will still be China and the Chinese will remain Chinese, of that you can be sure. But culture is not something that can be force-fed. It’s more like a buffet where people will try things as they come along, keep what they like and discard the rest. There is no ideological and cultural infiltration. There is only progress’s inevitable march. Get on the bus, China. Have some faith in your people.