This is indeed one of the most important general traits of a modern society: cultural homogeneity, the capacity for context-free communication, the s… - Ernest Gellner

This is Disenchantment: the Faustian purchase of cognitive, technological and administrative power, by the surrender of our previous meaningful, humanly suffused, humanly responsive, if often also menacing or capricious world.

In practice, those who espouse this universal cultural tolerance are indeed inevitably selective; what they mean is nice, cosy, traditional cultures, not as they exist, but as they are pictured in the romantic imagination. And above all, they are interested in selective preservation within their own society. Not surprisingly, they dislike scientism, positivism, rationalism in their own society, and rather ignore the fact that these traits also constitute a culture, and one which, from the viewpoint of their initial and rather abstract starting point, has at least as good a claim as the cosiest of closed societies.

Obstruction of mobility, where it occurs, is one of the most serious and intractable problems of industrial society.