Which metaphor is a better goal: melting pot or salad bowl? The melting pot is a metaphor for assimilation. Let us incorporate your cultural distinctiveness int

Which metaphor is a better goal: melting pot or salad bowl? The melting pot is a metaphor for assimilation. Let us incorporate your cultural distinctiveness into our collective. The salad bowl isn't about assimilation, but diversification. It's anti-Borg: Keep your cultural distinctiveness intact within a shared framework, enriching a diverse collective. Thirty-one flavors are better than one blended combination. There is no uniform answer to which approach is better. It depends on the details. But we should recognize that while they can both be useful at the same time, they are still fundamentally at odds. We cannot both maintain our diversity and assimilate our differences. "Cultural appropriation" seems to be about supporting the salad bowl. It is a demand to not assimilate the elements of another culture but to allow them to remain distinct. It's not hard to recognize the value of this. The more homogeneous we are, the lower our potential to adapt and evolve to a changing environment. On other hand, diversity creates conflict and disharmony that can reduce our collective fitness if the environment does not change more than some threshold. An assimilated society has more trust and cohesion. One would expect Borg internal politics to be less contentious than ours. So which approach should be valued more may be a matter of how much change is expected, and how fast. I think the right answer is a lot, and fast, and so I tend to value diversity over cohesion. But that isn't the right answer at all places and levels. It is far from cut and dry. My big problem with the "cultural appropriation" meme is that it tends to focus on the more trivial parts of culture, like dress and music, while being hostile to the more substantial parts, like distinct, often irreconcilable cultural values. On the other hand, a salad that contains irreconcilable flavors would be a lousy salad. There is no easy answer to whether a melting pot or a salad bowl is a better goal, and we shouldn't pretend there is.