Building A Balanced World

Author - Falodun Adeola

The WORLD is very beautiful and very diversified with 248 nations and roughly 6,500 spoken languages. Each nation has its own unique cultures attributed to it and people behave differently depending on the kind of culture they imbibe and assimilate. This could be in the way we relate with one another, raise a family, make a living, deal with expectations and express emotions. This uniqueness can as well be in terms of artefacts peculiar to a society, religion, social activities e.t.c. However, culture and behaviour is susceptible to change especially with the effect of migration. Appiah K.A in is publication titled 'The case for Contamination' says "Cultures are made of continuities and changes, and the identity of a society can survive through these changes. Societies without change are not authentic; they are just dead."


The world has often been likened to a book with several pages, all with different but unique contents. The people who move around and live in different geographical locations are said to be well read as they flip through the pages of this book called World while those who do not, are only reading and judging from just a page of the book. There are a number of reasons why people migrate some of which could be borne out of curiosity for other people's culture and ethnicity while some could be based on various push and pull factors of the society such as economy, poverty, employment, wealth, safety, climate, risk of natural hazards, war, e.t.c.

Whatever the reason, every nation needs to be opened and to be prepared for the influx of migrants. There is need to establish a city vision which emphasises the welcoming of outsiders as part of the society while giving enough time to migrants to integrate; a need to establish a society that celebrates and recognises the normality of diversity, promotes equality and human rights and challenges unfair discrimination. The citizens have to be properly educated on the positive impacts of migration rather than see it as a form of rivalry or competition for limited resources or a form of dispossession or displacement.

At different times in our lives we either play hosts or guests in a given environment, hence the need to be interculturally literate in order to strengthen interaction. Intercultural literacy is the understandings, attitudes, competencies and identities which enable effective participation in a cross-cultural setting. This ability enables the inhabitants of a given society to communicate effectively and appropriately with people of other cultures. As such, it is presented as a crucial literacy for the globalised world of the twenty-first century. This way there will be no room for tribalism, racism, xenophobia, apartheid, bigotry, discrimination, e.t.c.

To achieve this, everyone especially children needs to be educated on how to have a global perspective on every aspect of life, how to be receptive to people from different backgrounds knowing well that there are similarities in our differences and also understanding the positive impacts of interculturalism to the society. In addition, the governing system of each society should be one that does not tag the successes or failures of its inhabitants to their tribes, races or religions. Also, development of the different areas in a society should be considered even, as selective development encourages segregation. Moreover, less restrictive rules in various societies will encourage innovations and help maximize the society's potentials.

By doing this, we would have successfully built a balanced world in different places all around the globe, thus writing a new book for the world. As such, we may not necessarily have to flip through the several pages of the book to get a glimpse of the world but each page would be a good representation of the world itself.