I've written about it multiple times, but - thanks to lots of reading and thinking - I can show exactly why different cultures can't live together. At first, let's look at the World:
The little blue guy is me, sitting in the center of my universe. The green zone are people close enough so they can be my friends. Maybe some family too, because our common upbringing helps with having things in common. In the orange zone, there are the "strange ones". People who are different enough to not be my friends, but close enough that we have common grounds. Coworkers, "internet friends", guys I say hello to. In the red zone there are the "bad ones". I don't like them, because their ways are too far from mine, and as my ways are perfect - by definition - they are wrong. Islamists, communists and people who spam anal jokes while standing in the fire.
Secondly, let's understand why I agree with my friend that Joe from marketing is a dumbass:
As you can see, Joe is in the "weird" zone for both of us, far from us, while we are close. But let's see something nastier, why my best friend and girlfriend can't get along:
Let's move to a more interesting topic: society. In this case, I'm not in the center. The stereotypical "real countryman" is. As socials are products of their culture, they are mostly close to this norm:
Those who get close enough to the norm are the "decent guys". Those who are in the "weird-zone" of the ideal are ... the weird ones: punks, vegans, followers of some 5% party, very fat guys, people with many piercings and tattoos and so on. The red zone is for criminals. They are so far from the norm that there are formal laws against them. You can be a communist party member (weird), but you can't steal from the rich (criminal). You can babble about animal rights, but you can't break into a farm to liberate the pigs.
It would be nice and shiny, if we wouldn't have the best friend-girlfriend problem again:
This is the viewpoint of Fiona about the same society. On the previous picture you could see her as weird according to the society for being a tree-hugging animal rights activists. In her views, the meat-eater mainstream is weird. So far, so good. Mike is considered flat out criminal by the society for attacking slaughterhouses. But look that Mike is just weird in the eyes of Fiona. While she doesn't support the attacks, she doesn't consider them worse than working in the slaughterhouse, which is considered a normal job by the society. She finds it unjust that Mike is getting jail time while those who "murder" animals are getting salary and welcomed to parties and have friends. Actually more friends than Fiona herself, as she has less people in her range due to being different from the society norm.
It's crucial to understand that Fiona is not responsible for her "distorted" viewpoint and her viewpoint is actually not more distorted than the viewpoint of any of us. After all, she is a law-abiding citizen like every one of us and her distance from the imaginary blue guy is not measurable. It's not like there is an office that give out "cultural conformity badges". While a bunch of people might tell her she is weird, but that's not an objective position and their argument is not more valid than the opinion of Fiona. Still, Fiona is out of luck, merely because she is not conforming to an unwritten, somewhat fluid norm. Mike is flat out breaking the written law (that's an objective thing, regardless of the morality of the law), so he deserves his jail time, but that doesn't help Fiona coping with the perceived injustice.
However there is nothing she can do about it. She is just one person against the system if she stands up for Mike. Besides changing her position (radicalizing or giving up and conforming) she only have the option of becoming more political: she learns to condemn Mike (despite she considers this unfair) and try to persuade people in her green zone to come closer to her and further from the blue guy. Save puppies, petition against slaughterhouses and farm where animals are in pain, things that are both mainstream and Fiona-ish.
Let's see now Fatima, who is an enlightened and educated Muslim and Mohammad who is an extremist:
Oh wait, it's the same picture. So the solution is the same, as before, right? Mohammad will be the new cellmate of Mike and Fatima just has to live with it, like Fiona. Except, there are awful lot of Muslims in the country:
If you didn't notice, it's simply the original picture copy-pasted on itself with the blue guy placed on Fatima (in accordance with my belief that they aren't having more extremists than we do). Please note that the green zones are pretty close to each other, just as a liberal would say "we are not so apart from each other". Indeed not. But there are the two sections next to the intersection. On the Muslim side there are people - lots of people - who are considered somewhat weird by mainstream Muslims, but outright criminal by mainstream Westerns. For example those who perform child marriage, female genital mutilation, cover their whole face disallowing identification, want to ban women from public places and so on. On the Western side, there are people - lots of people - who are considered weird by mainstream Westerns but outright criminal by Muslims: those who make offensive cartoons, openly gays, pot-smokers, slutwalker feminists and so on (please note that none of these are anti-Muslim per se, yet completely unacceptable to Muslims). Both sides will move against the opposite weirdos with force, considering them criminals and they have the force to do it. Both sides will protect their own weirdos since they are just weird, but OK people and they have the force tho do it. This creates a violent conflict. When cops go to the Muslim district to arrest a husband of a child as rapist, Muslims will be out with force to stop it. When Muslim activists vandalize a gay bar, the police will come out with force to stop it.
There can be only two solutions for that:
The little blue guy is me, sitting in the center of my universe. The green zone are people close enough so they can be my friends. Maybe some family too, because our common upbringing helps with having things in common. In the orange zone, there are the "strange ones". People who are different enough to not be my friends, but close enough that we have common grounds. Coworkers, "internet friends", guys I say hello to. In the red zone there are the "bad ones". I don't like them, because their ways are too far from mine, and as my ways are perfect - by definition - they are wrong. Islamists, communists and people who spam anal jokes while standing in the fire.
Secondly, let's understand why I agree with my friend that Joe from marketing is a dumbass:
As you can see, Joe is in the "weird" zone for both of us, far from us, while we are close. But let's see something nastier, why my best friend and girlfriend can't get along:
Let's move to a more interesting topic: society. In this case, I'm not in the center. The stereotypical "real countryman" is. As socials are products of their culture, they are mostly close to this norm:
Those who get close enough to the norm are the "decent guys". Those who are in the "weird-zone" of the ideal are ... the weird ones: punks, vegans, followers of some 5% party, very fat guys, people with many piercings and tattoos and so on. The red zone is for criminals. They are so far from the norm that there are formal laws against them. You can be a communist party member (weird), but you can't steal from the rich (criminal). You can babble about animal rights, but you can't break into a farm to liberate the pigs.
It would be nice and shiny, if we wouldn't have the best friend-girlfriend problem again:
It's crucial to understand that Fiona is not responsible for her "distorted" viewpoint and her viewpoint is actually not more distorted than the viewpoint of any of us. After all, she is a law-abiding citizen like every one of us and her distance from the imaginary blue guy is not measurable. It's not like there is an office that give out "cultural conformity badges". While a bunch of people might tell her she is weird, but that's not an objective position and their argument is not more valid than the opinion of Fiona. Still, Fiona is out of luck, merely because she is not conforming to an unwritten, somewhat fluid norm. Mike is flat out breaking the written law (that's an objective thing, regardless of the morality of the law), so he deserves his jail time, but that doesn't help Fiona coping with the perceived injustice.
However there is nothing she can do about it. She is just one person against the system if she stands up for Mike. Besides changing her position (radicalizing or giving up and conforming) she only have the option of becoming more political: she learns to condemn Mike (despite she considers this unfair) and try to persuade people in her green zone to come closer to her and further from the blue guy. Save puppies, petition against slaughterhouses and farm where animals are in pain, things that are both mainstream and Fiona-ish.
Let's see now Fatima, who is an enlightened and educated Muslim and Mohammad who is an extremist:
If you didn't notice, it's simply the original picture copy-pasted on itself with the blue guy placed on Fatima (in accordance with my belief that they aren't having more extremists than we do). Please note that the green zones are pretty close to each other, just as a liberal would say "we are not so apart from each other". Indeed not. But there are the two sections next to the intersection. On the Muslim side there are people - lots of people - who are considered somewhat weird by mainstream Muslims, but outright criminal by mainstream Westerns. For example those who perform child marriage, female genital mutilation, cover their whole face disallowing identification, want to ban women from public places and so on. On the Western side, there are people - lots of people - who are considered weird by mainstream Westerns but outright criminal by Muslims: those who make offensive cartoons, openly gays, pot-smokers, slutwalker feminists and so on (please note that none of these are anti-Muslim per se, yet completely unacceptable to Muslims). Both sides will move against the opposite weirdos with force, considering them criminals and they have the force to do it. Both sides will protect their own weirdos since they are just weird, but OK people and they have the force tho do it. This creates a violent conflict. When cops go to the Muslim district to arrest a husband of a child as rapist, Muslims will be out with force to stop it. When Muslim activists vandalize a gay bar, the police will come out with force to stop it.
There can be only two solutions for that:
- Deportation: the bigger and stronger sides evict the weaker one from the common living space
- Melting pot: a new, common identity is created (like when "American" identity was made from the various European migrants of the colonies) and all people are accepting this new identity.
13 comments:
On the Muslim side there are people - lots of people - who are considered somewhat weird by mainstream Muslims
And than there is definition. what is a "mainstream muslim"? our western abomination docile and ignorant muslims that the commands of allah would purge without a second thought? and what is "weird"? They all should obey the commands, they wish they had the conviction of the 'M's that do jihad.
what do mainstream muslims think?
you don't need polls and ask people. it is like asking USSR back in the day and getting the communist subversion message. Core philosophy is more than enough to extrapolate that this idea as state doctrine might go wrong very fast and Islam (quran, hadith, sunna) doesn't hide like communist doctrine. In fact they are very straight forward ... and only the ignorant will be mislead by taqqiya.
who are considered weird by mainstream Westerns but outright criminal by Muslims
your list could be simpler and more tribal. being Kufr a disbeliever. and you are dead or maybe you can live a slave life as Dhimi.
the difference is in the end we have law and secularism. if a muslim so desire to live among us haraam living Kufr. he has to obey the law and by that definition is forced to be secular. if that means that he's deadmeat in the eyes of his faith buddies. He should reconsider being a muslim or reconsider living among us. tolerance goes both ways, has a strict rule set and only goes so far.
Melting pot: a new, common identity is created (like when "American" identity was made from the various European migrants of the colonies) and all people are accepting this new identity.
by force. what europeans brought where diseases, horses and christian doctrine. they where technical superior and their DNA was hardened thanks to hundreds years of septic middle ages and sickness. Our peace loving far relatives nearly wiped the country.
Members of two cultures will always violently clash
I have to disagree. It took some time but we as western society abstracted conflict into "law" and "due process", as corrupt and broken this systems seems it is the best we got. We have this to avoid unnecessary bloodshed and it does a good enough job at that. Also we have debates to argue points of view. We don't need this high energy and brain involving mechanism if we could instead simply kill each other. we value this so much that we learn to read and value research and articulation very highly.
History is a messy and bloody thing with a small fragile thread of hope, that at any time can be cut and dissolves into violent chaos.
Since I happen to be writing from Toronto presently, I feel obligated to bring up Canada. Mosaic as opposed to melting pot - shouldn't there be a civil war here by now?
@Anon: mainstream Muslim is the same as mainstream Christian. Someone who can put the secular laws ahead of religious doctrines. Please note that Christian faith and the Bible aren't much different from Muslim about gays (kill them), adulterers (stone them) and democracy (obey the church). We just learned to consider these commandments archaic and - except for weirdo evangelicals picketing front of abortion clinics - ignore them.
While I agree with the rule of law, you forget how many of our secular laws consider Christian customs. For example the weekends (in the labor laws) are Saturday and Sunday (Jewish and Christian holidays) while Friday (Muslim holiday) is a workday. Or that the US dollar bills contain the "in God we trust" religious phrase. We don't even recognize these because we grew up between them, but they annoy Muslims. Sure, the mainstream Muslims just live with it, but the weirdoes won't.
@Esteban: mosaic of various Western groups, like the EU meant to be. Some cultures happens to be compatible.
Wait until you get enough Muslims or South-Americans.
About four percent of them (Canadians) are Muslim. Still no civil war, or much in the way of takfiri terrorism.
Since this is now demonstrated as the 'safe' level, may we count on Hungary to catch up to it by taking in, oh, say, 300,000 internally-displaced Syrian refugees?
@Esteban: nope. While I'm surprised by your numbers, all it proves that the Canadian culture is compatible with Muslim. Just like there are lots of Chinese in Hungary with zero problems. I wish you luck with your peaceful coexistence, I really do.
Please note that Christian faith and the Bible aren't much different from Muslim about[..]
muslims don't obey their church, they don't really have one to begin with. If they did, reforming it would be cake like with christians (with much blood and death, but it was worth it, right?). You know they pride themselves that the quran isn't corrupted like the scriptures (Bible, Torah) (witch is false of course even if they would look into recent history. another topic). For now their ideology core pretty much is unreformable. In the end they strife to live like Muhammed, that is true for the 1400y history of this ideology. why do they outrage about cartoons? because they ask themselves the question "what would Muhammed have done?" and source trough their respected material and abstract the "Muhammed behaviour" and adept it on the modern world.
I don't have to point this out do I? this is fundamentally different for christian believe and church. no one ever asks "what would Jesus have done" church made sure to never think that way to begin with and instead just confess and live by gods+church rule. And there you have another fundamentally different powerful concept "Confession" and "Forgiving". Without going into the whole quran is commandments vs the bible is full of stories and the church somehow power played a lot.
sure both hate gays and adulterers. muslims should and christians should read more because jesus certainty wouldn't ditch a good party, not back then nor today.
I'm not American as far as I understand, the founding fathers tried their very best to keep religion out of the bill as good as they can. that the whole "bless America" and "one nation under god" bullshit creped in is unfortunate and the price for transitioning towards other doctrines. witch we have paid also a lot of blood for, "the death of god" let us go into chaos and much death .. and we are far from save as our western believe and doctrines are fundamentally under heavy pressure from islamic ideology and from within like SJW feminist commie BS with 19th century philosophers ideology.
While I agree with the rule of law, you forget how many of our secular laws consider Christian customs.[..]
I do not deny christian roots. and the abstract stories we tell ourselves over generations to come towards something as abstract as law is important and another topic. it isn't all christian too, this goes as far as our historical records let us go. and yes church did a lot of shit. But in the end we abstracted good law or did we not? Just compare sharia ruled law to any western ruled law.
Russia is home to triple-digit count of different cultures that has lived together with much less conflict than one would expect. This is due to the central green bubble being large (and vague) enough to accomodate 80% of the population.
The core of Russia culture is a certain reading of Christianity that dials down the avenging angels and dials up the "God is love" angle, which makes it easy to deal with all cultures that are not openly hostile (and makes it even easier to deal with openly hostile ones).
Obviously, this joy isn't free. F/ex one of the prices we pay for that is utter and complete inability to implement the proper capitalist system, because money can't buy you love.
"While a bunch of people might tell her she is weird, but that's not an objective position and their argument is not more valid than the opinion of Fion"
Moral values are not arbitrary. The civilisation was built by people who farmed animals, produced excess food and thus allowed their kin to create a more prosperous society. Those who valued animal lives equally with human lives starved to death (while wild rabbits ate their vegetable patches)
"mainstream Muslim is the same as mainstream Christian. Please note that Christian faith and the Bible aren't much different from Muslim about gays (kill them), adulterers (stone them) and democracy (obey the church)"
This is so untrue it fucking hurts. I am a Polish Catholic by birth (I do not believe in supernatural God, though). I had religious education for the entirety of my public schooling. NOT ONCE did the priest or preacher condemn the gay people. Not a single time in 12 years did I hear that gay people should be punished - it was ALWAYS to pray for them and encourage them to refrain from their sinful practices. Gay sex was condemned, gay people were NOT. Poland is THE most Christian or EU nations and we're talking about schools 30-20 years ago. Now look at the Muslim countries and what they do to gay people. Equaling one mainstream with the other is gross misrepresentation, brought about by your desire to smugly put yourself "above that whole nonsense".
@Slawomir: Japanese (sinto) were practically vegans. Most non-nobles in Europe barely ate meat in their lives. The reason: meat production needs 10x the land than wheat of the same calories.
You were grown up in XX. century, Christianity already multiple-times reformed during the history. The same improvement happened in mainstream Islam. No New Jersey imam preaches death to homosexuals, just like no Vatican-following priest. But the Bible says:
If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them. (Leviticus 20:13 )
- which is a verse that weird Christians (like the American Evangelicals) often shout on protests.
Literal reading of Bible is NOT mainstream Christianity. You said yourself it's a verse that WEIRD Christians shout out.
While at the same time there are a dozen Islam dominated countries which actively hunt and punish homosexuals, sometimes by death. A poll amongst Muslims living in the UK shows over half of them think homosexuality should be illegal (found it in Guardian).
Holy books are all full of rubbish, but the mainstream thinking is completely different. Religions are NOT all the same, it's a claim made up by nihilists to muddle the water.
Gevlon:
While I'm surprised by your numbers, all it proves that the Canadian culture is compatible with Muslim.
Well, I think it is worth examining the problem further. Canada was one of the first countries in the world to legalise gay marriage on the federal level. Marijuana is about to become federally legal. On the hetero front, I am pleased to report that sexual mores, particularly in urban agglomerations (where the Muslim concentration is even higher, spiking to something like 7-8%) are delightfully permissive and in these hot days of June bare skin goes on for miles. Nothing about this is supposedly compatible with Islam.
Even if one day a Muslim 'lone wolf' excluded from this hedonistic carousel (who might even now be sitting somewhere in his mama's basement reading Rumiyah) were to carry out an attack on some Canadian crowd, it would prove absolutely nothing about the Canadian-Muslim community as a whole. In fact, that's a central weakness of your thesis, this idea that a particular community shelters its extremists. It is something that counter-terrorism officials who get much of their actionable intelligence from insiders would be quick to refute.
You will find, if you look closer, that extremists of all stripes revile outsiders who 'should be' like them but are not. Takfiris hate moderate Muslims, whom they see as apostates, more than ordinary infidels. The Stormfront boys hate white 'race traitors' more than people of colour (the origins of the now-popular term 'cuck' are pretty instructive on this matter). If you read the writings of Lenin, you will find that he reserved his greatest vitriol for non-communist socialists, liberals and other 'opportunists', who compromised with the bourgeoisie and tried to work within the democratic system. (see, e.g., this attack on Kautsky).
Fatima's self-interest dictates loyalty to society at large. Mohammed has nothing for her.
Slawomir:
While at the same time there are a dozen Islam dominated countries which actively hunt and punish homosexuals, sometimes by death.
And two dozen Muslim-majority countries where homosexuality is legal. What does that tell you about the ironclad rules of Islam?
Incidentally, for all the Greedy Goblin readers flipping through their Korans and Traditions in search of naughty surahs (as I know we all do on a Friday): the puritannical, Salafist streak in Islam is about two centuries old, and really only gained steam in the 20th. That is quite recent for a faith of fourteen centuries, and hardly irreversible or dispositive of social relations.
A poll amongst Muslims living in the UK shows over half of them think homosexuality should be illegal (found it in Guardian).
That's about on par with 'should society accept homosexuality' in Poland, and better than Russia, which clocks in at a negative answer from about 70% people. Glass houses, and all that.
Or you know, you can segregate those two cultures accordingly, like we do in Russia. Sure, law is the law. But law is somehow seemingly different for different places in one country. If a man kisses a man in public, Petersburg will be all ok, Moscow will sneer, but any Caucasus city will either heavily beat or outright kill those people. And we are kinda ok with that, because if you want to be gay, just choose what is the correct geographical place for that and if you don't comform to this, you are just an idiot. That consensus can exist for one reason only, though, mainstream media DOES NOT talk about those fringe problems at all. Just keep it hush and both weirdos can coexist.
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