OK,so
you are talking to your neighbour, someone you trust very much. She
tells you that she has undeniable evidence that one of your other
neighbours regularly beats his wife and child, and asks for your advice
what to do. What do you do:
- Call the police, anonymously, and report it, along with your neighbour's evidence.
- Confront
the man and tell him that your community does not tolerate such
behaviour, and that if there is any evidence of repetition you will
call the police.
- Try to get the wife or child alone, and when
you do, tell them that you will find them safe sanctuary if they would
like it; if you can't get them alone, do nothing but keep vigilant.
- Try to persuade your neighbour that it is her duty, as the one with evidence, to do one of the above.
- Do nothing. It is not your business.
Now,
a week later, you happen to find yourself at a meeting attended by a
large group of people including the abusive neighbour, where a major
local rezoning proposal is being discussed. After the meeting, several
of you get together on an impromptu basis for coffee to talk further.
During this discussion, the man admits freely that according to his
religion, God chose men to lead the family, and to dispense "firm
justice" to their family members in any way blessed by their religion
that they saw fit, to keep them on "God's path", and that this was
men's right and sacred duty as leaders of the family unit. Now what do
you do:
- Argue, drawing your neighbours into the discussion
on your side, that the law of the land stands above the rules of the
church, and warn the man that any dispensation of justice that was not
tolerated by your country's laws would also not be tolerated by your
community.
- Argue, drawing your neighbours into the discussion on your side, about the morality of any religion that treats women and children as little more than property.
- Do
not bother arguing immediately, but repeat what you did a week earlier
(see earlier question) or do one of the other alternatives you did not
select a week earlier.
- Do not do anything more. What you did a
week earlier is all that is called for. A statement of beliefs is not
an admission of having actually done anything illegal.
The
discussion continues. One of your neighbours is a homosexual, but few
of your neighbours know this. The abusive neighbour continues to
discuss his fundamentalist beliefs, and states that he thinks
homosexuality is a grievous sin, an offense against God. Where he comes
from, he says, homosexuals are rightfully jailed or sent to
indoctrination centres to have such depraved behaviour beaten out of
them. "It is God's will that we act. These people cause great harm to
others. Even death is too good for them", he says. Now what do you do:
- Confront
the man for his intolerance, and warn him that unlike "where he comes
from", there are laws that protect people with different beliefs and
lifestyles here, and that no one has any business passing judgement on
others, and certainly not taking the law into their own hands.
- Shake your head, indicating your disapproval, but walk away and say nothing. You can't argue with people like that.
- Do
nothing immediately, but organize a vigilante group of your neighbours,
tell them what he said and what he is reportedly doing to his wife and
child, keep a close watch on him and ostracize him.
- Do nothing
more. As hard is it is to do, such people must be tolerated at least
until they act or clearly threaten to act on their beliefs.
An
article called The Dutch Model in this week's (April 3/06) New Yorker
(not online), written by Jane Kramer, explains that the people of the
Netherlands are facing these kind of questions with increasing
frequency, and are extremely uncomfortable trying to come up with
workable answers. The article concludes (emphasis mine):
Perhaps
it isn't surprising that the country remains preoccupied by what
happened to [radical filmmaker] Theo van Gogh [he was assassinated by a
fundamentalist fanatic] and what the politically correct position
toward people who live in your midst but feel free to kill you
should be. Friends who a few years earlier would walk you through a
neighbourhood like the [multicultural] Baarsjes, with its shrouded
women and its state-funded Islamic school and its defiantly secretive
mosque, and call this a "multicultural success" or a "model of
tolerance" have begun to suspect that that peculiarly Dutch myth of a democracy integrated but not assimilated
might be not only a contradiction in terms, but a dangerous fiction.
But, like everybody else in Europe, they have no adequate answer to the
question What now?
I want to try to rise above the issue of Islamic fundamentalism and get to the larger issue of how
to cope with fundamentalist belief systems (a) that believers in
principles of democracy and social liberalism find repugnant, and (b)
whose adherents believe they have the authority and imperative to
impose, by any means at their disposal, their belief systems on others.
Think
about that. There are 'quaint' tolerated religions in North America
where physical beating and subjugation of women and children, and even
child marriage and bigamy (by men only) are accepted and sometimes even
mandated. The McCarthyism era in the US was a sustained, nation-wide
reign of terror perpetrated by a gang of ideological fundamentalists
who, for a long time, had the levers of power at their beck and call.
The white supremacist movement in both North America and Europe is very
much alive and well despite its sordid history and reputation. Many
Christian fundamentalists today believe it is their right and duty to
convert or subvert opponents and unbelievers by whatever means is
necessary -- such as assassinating the elected president of Venezuela,
murdering abortion doctors and gays, and imposing Christian
fundamentalist law (which some might see as the Christian equivalent of
sharia) on the women of South Dakota.
There
is a compelling (and disturbing to us liberals) argument put forward by
some anthropologists that says humans, like our chimpanzee
cousins, evolved to be basically tribal and to interact minimally with
other tribes, for two simple, Darwinian reasons:
- very separate, differently-evolving gene pools made the species more resilient to pandemics, and
- as
we are by nature a fierce species, interactions between tribes
historically tended to be inherently hostile, suspicious and often
violent (so we survived best when such interactions were minimized).
I
put this argument forward not as a defense of racial, religious or
ideological intolerance, but as an explanation of its deep-rootedness.
Things are the way they are for a reason, and they have been that way
for millions of years.
Until recently, when we ran out of
inhabitable frontiers, those who were different were generally cast
out, and 'encouraged' to become pioneers in a faraway uninhabited land.
Even then we have demonstrated our inability to get along: The
Europeans who were cast out because their beliefs were unwelcome in
crowded Europe had no compunction about genocidal slaughter of the
native peoples in the 'new' lands 'they' discovered in the Americas.
I continue to be astonished, everywhere I travel, by the continuing de facto
segregation of races, cultures, and social classes within seemingly
cosmopolitan areas. There are invisible lines in most cities
(especially noticeable in the US) where the predominant ethnicity seems
to immediately and sharply change from block to block. In business and
social activities, the observable lack of interaction between those of
different cultures, religions, and political beliefs in cities that are
so utterly multicultural is astonishing. It does not surprise me at all
that America's 'red' states and 'blue' states both seem to be becoming
decidedly more so, or that the balkanization of nations seems to have
no end.
In fact those who are truly blind to physical, religious
and ideological differences seem to be a special class unto themselves,
not really accepted by left or right, black or white, orthodox or
secular. It is almost as if their very tolerance is intolerable, as if
they have become their own 'metro culture', distinguishable by its very
lack of distinguishability. Meanwhile, everyone else seems to end up,
sooner or later, seeking to be "among their own."
It seems to
me, therefore, that neither the assimilation approach that the US has
taken, nor the 'integration without assimilation' approach that other
affluent nations have taken, is working. So as Jane Kramer says, What now?
Regular
readers know I'm a big fan of intentional communities, a modern
imitation of ancient tribes. The advantage of such communities is that
they are truly self-selecting, and by virtue of that their members are
much more likely to get along than communities created by happenstance
factors like proximity to favoured schools, housing prices, or even
thinly-veiled exclusionary zoning
practices. Even if we could get around all the legal, logistic and
zoning obstacles to intentional communities, however, and get everyone
living in small, self-selected neighbourhoods, we would still have to
deal with three complex problems that such communities would not solve,
and might even exacerbate:
- In our crowded and overpopulated
world, there would likely be little space between, and hence a great
deal of constant friction between, neighbouring intentional communities.
- Vast economic disparity, endemic in the current economy, would be next
to impossible to eradicate in intentional communities. In some cases
this disparity would be so crushing as to be intolerable by anyone.
- Some
of these communities would inevitably consist of religious or
ideological fundamentalists who would object to the actions of other
intentional communities, or would impose conditions on their own people
that, even if the members ostensibly had chosen to live in that
community, many or even most people in other communities would find
abhorrent.
These problems were much less pervasive in the
pioneering intentional communities of previous centuries, because
population, space and the disparity of economic wealth and opportunity
were not such a problem, and because knowledge of what was going on
elsewhere was much scarcer. Overpopulation, obscene disparities in
wealth and opportunity, and the 'global village'-creating information
explosion have made the option of 'getting along by staying away from
those we can't get along with', non-viable.
I know there are
those who believe that, with education, time and practice, and perhaps
a little well-intentioned hegemony, we will all become culturally
homogeneous and/or tolerant, that like those in the 'metro culture' we
will get past our religious, cultural and ideological differences. I'm
not so sure. While a homomemeous (to coin a new word: "sharing the same
worldview") community may make sense, and a homomemeous world
might well be peaceful and tolerant, such a world would also probably
be uncreative, boring, and vulnerable to perilous memetic overreaction
and groupthink.
Homomemeity is, in fact, a desired end of both
the assimilation ("give us enough time and you'll think like us") and
integration ("give us enough time and our thinking will converge")
models. It's not happening, however, because there is a Darwinian force
within each of us pushing in the opposite direction ("that thinking
threatens our thinking; we must get together to resist this threat to
our beliefs"). You see this resistance in every separatist movement,
every minority group, and everywhere in the blogosphere. Diversity, of
every kind, is selected for as an evolutionary essential. It's good for us.
So
I would argue that the reason we haven't found a model that works, that
balances the tension between affinity and diversity and lets us all get
along, is that there isn't one.
We will only find one when we create the conditions necessary for one
to emerge: A much, much lower human population, without waste,
pollution, and overconsumption, in a world with lots of space for us to
create community and define our boundaries, a world of abundance
instead of scarcity where there is more than enough of everything to go
around. A world where information, not armies, will liberate the few of
us suffering from oppression, and where we will be so busy delighting
in our chosen community, making a living with those we love, we will
not have the time or inclination to meddle with other communities who
choose to see the world differently.
I'm sorry I don't have an
easier answer. Complex problems rarely have simple solutions. No matter
how much we may wish to, or see the logic and even the morality of
doing so, we cannot be what we are not.
Photo: From the BBC a year ago.
One-year old hippo Owen, rescued from the Asian tsunami, has befriended
100-plus-year-old tortoise Mzee, and the two are now inseparable. |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
