Not Yet A Buddha

—Edward

A while ago a commenter on another blog argued to me that Globalism needs to precede Multiculturalism—that it’s better to bring people of other cultures "up to" our cultural standards (i.e., buy our products and want our lifestyle) before we mix among them, open our borders to them, let them benefit fully from globalism, etc. Implicit in this opinion is the notion that people of other cultures are fine as laborers for our corporations (and totally desirable as loyal consumers of our products), but until they’re Westernized to a (conveniently undefined) degree, it’s rational to consider them undesirable next-door neighbors.

Now culture clashes will happen. In multi-culti NYC you see it in different forms everyday. Hip-hop-loving teens swearing up a storm and happy to be out of school run through the subway bumping into suited Wall Street warriors making their way home. Ultra-ambivalent hipsters wear next to nothing at the outdoor cafe on the corner of an ultra-serious Hasidim neighborhood where women and men are well-covered at all times. Sometimes these clashes lead to serious confrontations.

And often all these people were born here. They are Americans. Despite that, though, they’re culturally different enough that clashes will continue to happen. One cannot rationally/legally argue that they should be quarantined or sent somewhere else. They simply must co-exist. And they do co-exist via a combination of ignoring each other, compromise, and genuine tolerance. That tolerance comes, in part, from exposure. Very few New Yorkers haven’t experienced the embarrassment of judging another person because of the way they are dressed just to have their rash opinion proved wrong by an unexpected act of kindness or overheard anecdote.

In other words, multiculturalism works just fine where there’s simply no other choice, and in fact, when enhanced, helps build the tolerance needed to make it work. Therefore, resistance to it seems based on desire (read: laziness, xenophobia, etc.) not need. The essence of valuing multiculturalism is recognizing the worth/equality of people of other cultures. By insisting they must first become more like you, one dismisses that equality. Within the context of Globalism, however, the consequences of such dismissals leads to all kinds of seemingly rational justifications for robbing people of other cultures blind.

Let me elaborate….

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Yo, humans…yeah, I’m talkin’ to youse guys. Listen up!

I been hearin’ ’bout some of youse who wanna shoot up cats in Wisconsin. The, uh, whachamacallit? Oh, yeah, the "Kitty Kitty Bang Bang" proposal.

Well, me an my friends got sumpin we wanna tell ya. It ain’t gonna be all as one-sided as youse think it’s gonna be. That’s right. Youse guys shoot at us, an we’re gonna shoot back. An we’re gonna start with that low-life cat-hating loser Mike Smith:

Hunter Mark Smith welcomes wild birds on to his property, but if he sees a cat, he thinks the "invasive" animal should be considered fair game.

The 48-year-old firefighter from La Crosse has proposed that hunters in Wisconsin make free-roaming domestic cats an "unprotected species" that could be shot at will by anyone with a small-game license.

His proposal will be placed before hunters on April 11 at the Wisconsin Conservation Congress spring hearings in each of the state’s 72 counties.

"I get up in the morning and if there’s new snow, there’s cat tracks under my bird feeder … I look at them as an invasive species, plain and simple," Smith said.

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by hilzoy

Last night, Eugene Volokh wrote the following about the slow and public throttling of an Iranian serial murderer:

“I particularly like the involvement of the victims’ relatives in the killing of the monster; I think that if he’d killed one of my relatives, I would have wanted to play a role in killing him. Also, though for many instances I would prefer less painful forms of execution, I am especially pleased that the killing — and, yes, I am happy to call it a killing, a perfectly proper term for a perfectly proper act — was a slow throttling, and was preceded by a flogging. The one thing that troubles me (besides the fact that the murderer could only be killed once) is that the accomplice was sentenced to only 15 years in prison, but perhaps there’s a good explanation.

I am being perfectly serious, by the way. I like civilization, but some forms of savagery deserve to be met not just with cold, bloodless justice but with the deliberate infliction of pain, with cruel vengeance rather than with supposed humaneness or squeamishness. I think it slights the burning injustice of the murders, and the pain of the families, to react in any other way.”

I read this this morning and considered posting on it, but didn’t, since everything I had to say seemed so obvious. To wit:

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by Edward _

I give a lot of thought to how we, as a society, choose what we treasure. It’s a big part of the art world, where works that don’t end up in museums often end up in landfills, and the process by which they do end up in museums is so complex, competitive, and often seemingly arbitrary it leaves lots to ponder.

Lately, I’ve been expanding this thinking to the world at large. Different societies prioritize what they treasure differently, but most treasure what I’ll call the Big Five: Religion, Culture, Wealth, Nationalism, and Family. Some societies place more emphasis on Family than Wealth, some more on Nationalism than Religion, some more on Culture than Wealth, and visa versa, etc. etc.

Here in the US, Family is the popular favorite of politicians, even when they’re slashing funding for programs that help children or protect workers, but if forced to rank the Big Five, I’d say collectively Nationalism is our overall first priority. I’ve thought this since my 7th grade American History class, actually, where it dawned on me that without instilling a sense of Nationalism into the children of immigrants, the US would likely be enduring perpetual civil wars. For the nation to move forward in relative harmony, Nationalism had to take priority over Religion, Culture, and even Family, because there’s no way these other things could continuously unite peoples from every corner of the world. And "Divided we fall," so….

Where what we treasure begins to get really interesting for me, however, is when it comes to what we’ll do to protect it. The old, "if the house is on fire and you can take one object" scenario usually helps clarify this for me.

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A couple quick housekeeping notes from Von:

1.  My hotmail account has gone inexplicably kaput.  Thus, if you’re trying to e-mail me, please use the work e-mail account.  (If you don’t know either e-mail account, don’t worry.  They’re nonpublic.)

2.  If you’ve been corresponding with me regarding continuing coverage of events in Lebanon, please drop a line to the ObWi kitty; I’ll presumptuously impose on our man Edward Underscore to forward it along. 

3.  Posting is gonna be light or non-existent for me for the next few weeks.  On the other hand, if you’re in Minneapolis, Harrisburg, and/or (possibly) New York, you may catch fleeting glipse of me.  If you know what I look like. 

My best.  Please use this as an open thread.

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by hilzoy

One of my favorite passages from C.S. Lewis is this one, which I’ve quoted before:

“The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything—God and our friends and ourselves included—as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.” (Mere Christianity)”

I generally try to act on this: not to draw any bad conclusions about people until I have what seems to me clear evidence that those conclusions are warranted. Sometimes, people take this to mean that I try to be nice to my opponents, and they ask, “Why should we be nice to them?” But to me this isn’t primarily about kindness at all, but about justice. When I think ill of someone who does not deserve it I am unjust to her. When I think something really bad about someone, I impugn her honor, which is worse. (Every so often I run into an article or a blog post that announces that “we no longer care about honor”, and I growl: “speak for yourself!”) It’s important that not thinking ill of someone without good reason is primarily a matter of justice, not kindness. While a decent person will be kind in general, she does not have to be kind to everyone; and if she does not go out of her way to be kind to some specific person, that person has no right to complain. But we owe justice to everyone, without exception; and if I am unjust to anyone, I have wronged her.

Moreover, not all my reasons for refraining from thinking ill of people without good reason concern them. I value my self-respect, for example, and one of the things it depends on is my not maligning people without good reason. As regards serious charges, like treason: they matter too much to me for me to throw them around and debase them. But there’s also one purely selfish motive: self-protection. Because hatred is a poison, and if you let it, it will destroy you.

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A recent post (which I’m not linking to since I don’t want to talk about that subject here) reminded me of one of the most interesting little pieces I read about 15 years ago.  C.S. Lewis had a 1944 speech (it appears to be something like a commencement speech) in which he clearly identifies a very key human motivation.  He describes peer pressure better than many psychologists:

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The ObWi authors have had a conference of sorts to discuss our current approach to banning commenters from the site and try to develop a better, more fair, more productive process. Unlike many other blogs, the success of Obsidian Wings depends upon a balance of authors and a balance of commenters. When the site begins to falter, it’s almost always due to an unbalance one way or the other. The following process is designed to address that need for balance, as well as to be fair to everyone concerned.

The following policy was approved by us all and goes into effect immediately:

• Any ObWi author can recommend that a commenter be banned and should do so via email to the all other authors.
• One writer (but only one) from the other side of the fence must agree to the ban for it to move forward (Von can vote as either side of the fence as he wishes). For the record, currently Charles Bird, Andrew, and Sebastian Holsclaw are on the right; Von is in the center; and Hilzoy is on the left.;-) Yes, that’s unbalanced…we’re working on it.*
• To avoid the delay our busy lives can cause in moving quickly when a commenter is disrupting an ongoing thread, any writer can implement an immediate temporary ban (and declare it as such) until a banning request is resolved behind the scenes. Should the ban not be agreed to by someone on the other side of the fence, the temporary ban will be lifted. (The temporary ban will hopefully be a useful way to let folks calm down when a thread gets too heated. At the very least it will allow a derailed thread to get back on track.)
• If one author from the other side of the fence agrees to a recommendation, the banning goes into effect immediately and is permanent unless overturned on appeal initiated by the commenter.
• Any appeal by a commenter to a banning should be done via email. Commenters should not move to another computer to make their case on the blog. All appeals will be considered after tempers have cooled. Appeals will be decided via a vote of all writers, majority deciding. Commenters banned under the old policy can also appeal their banning now. We will not make public any appeal or its results unless the authors vote to reverse a standing ban.

Although pointing out when a commenter is violating the posting rules in an ongoing thread is every participant’s best tool to help bring civility back to a discussion, if commenters wish to recommend a banning, per se, we ask that they do so via email. That helps take it offline and makes the roles of the authors in the banning process clearer to everyone.

We now we return to our regularly scheduled squabbling.

UPDATE: An appeal to a banning should cover 1) why the banning was uncalled for and 2) what the commenter will do to help prevent a similar situation from arising moving forward.

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Yesterday, I was handed a major setback in my plans for an entrepreneurial enterprise I’ve been working very hard for lately. (I don’t want to say more than that about it, but wanted to offer that information as context.) But, in a word, it made me feel like a failure.

After about an hour and a half of stubbornly resisting my partner’s very sweet and sincere attempts to cheer me up, though, I finally calmed down enough to watch the first episode of the new American Idol season. It didn’t take long before I was laughing and feeling less sorry for myself (certainly in comparison to some of the contestants).

Based on how many people acknowledged that they can’t stand to watch otherwise reasonable people make fools of themselves on TV in the Phobia post, I imagine watching the first few episodes of American Idol (when the really, really awful applicants get air time) is entirely too painful for many here, but it is an amazing human drama.

Sully put it this way:

I have to say that the early "American Idol" shows are some of the most consistently entertaining and unbearably cruel programs in America. Last night gave us that tender line between delusions of talent and borderline personality disorder – and smudged it. Are those people for real or very clever plants? I’m hoping the latter.

There were a few doozies.

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