Anaxagoras
Posts: 3086
Joined: 5/9/2009
From: Eire
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No offense Aswad but I think the posts need to be shorter because it becomes a chore to reply to them, and others may ignore them.
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ORIGINAL: Aswad
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ORIGINAL: Anaxagoras
You referred to a belief that problems in Muslim communities had resulted in a failure of integrating them with the rest of society in Norway and elsewhere. This view looks different.
Not at all. There are definite problems there. The official policy is integration. I don't set official policy. Don't mean I can't comment on it.
The point Im trying to make is that you seemed to be advocating greater social integration even earlier on this thread but are now advocating an extreme form of multi-culturalism.
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What we have to understand is that all exist in one given society in a given space.
Yeah, Earth. The rest is subdivisions. Nucleation is funny that way, and not at all satisfactory.
when I referred to a given space it was a locale. Countries and regions are separate and/or distinctive entities for a reason.
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To sub-divide it was the failure of multi-culturalism.
Lack of proper management is the essential failure. Subdivision is the answer to the wrong question, pretty much. Multiculturalism has some inherent problems, and a lot of constructed ones (again, a function of shoddy management). To integrate is to pretend we have some viable way to unproblematically meld widely divergent cultures in a mutual deception of equivocal roles and valuation.
I disagree because I don't see how multi-culturalism can be "managed". To integrate is not to homogenise as you suggest but to just have a common ground that is shared to a moderate extent. For example, people of many ethnicities often integrate quite well (Greeks, Chinese, Italians etc. in other countries) whilst still retaining their own distinctive identities, religion and other cultural elements like language which is maintained for lengthy periods where communities are quite significant.
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To see one of the areas where integration is a non-starter, ask who integrates whom into what. The master and the slave cannot be integrated, and certainly not unilaterally. Being Irish, you should know this quite well. Diffusion works, and is one of the reasons the various human cultures have become what they are. Diffusion is a natural and equivocal process. Integration is something else, and generally must be viewed as the master's hand at work in offering the slave to be Roman in return for no longer being a Gaul.
Cite the Irish example does not back up your point. When barriers came down after the British were pushed out of most of Ireland, a certain amount of integration gradually took place as old animosities were left aside. The North was a different matter but an unequal power structure existed there that is nothing like the situation in Norway or other places in the West where Muslim minorities have emigrated to. I disagree with your point about diffusion. I see diffusion as a natural process of slow gradual integration.
I think you see integration too negatively, such as describing a master-slave situatio, which is why you problematise it.
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In any case I believe the society that can best ensures the optimum rights for all is one where there is a real divergence of opinion, where given time issues and competing claims can be debated hopefully for the betterment of all regardless of their religion.
Debate goes nowhere without will. And a majority never has incentive to listen to a minority unless a credible threat of violence or other significant functional infractions exist. Bear in mind that we're talking about doing a majority vote on what should be the consensus, and then imposing that on all equally. Hardly a useful process to those not included in the majority. Compromise is not a boon to one that is able to consistently win more in an all or nothing scenario. I am somewhat puzzled by your analysis.
I disagree. Votes are obviously a majority issue but we are not living in a direct democracy like Ancient Greece. Modern democracy has many examples of minorities influencing issues to the point where they are completely turned around over time, an obvious example is racism and homophobia. If majority rule was always enforced then the morality of societies would not remotely change once a dominant paradigm was instituted. Debate and discussion brought these things about mostly.
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Yet that was due to a shared experience in a largely singular culture.
Largely singular? The rest of the country wants Oslo gone from national politics. The inhabitants of Oslo want either Oslo East or Oslo West gone from Oslo, depending on which part one lives in. Oslo West is a Germanic city with upper class citizens and members of what could be analyzed as a party based hereditary ruling caste. Crime rates are low. Wages are high. Living costs are high. Employment is high. Multiresistant infections are unheard of. 'Exotic' diseases are unheard of. Oslo East is a multicultural city where half the population is ethnically norse, with the remaining half being predominantly Sunni. Schools are de facto segregated. Crime rates are inconceivably high. Wages are low. Living costs are low. Employment is lower than crime for about a quarter of the population. Multiresistant infections are on the rise. Exotic diseases are being introduced. Vaccination rates are low enough to reintroduce illnesses that have been extinct here for half a century, and both fluency in Norwegian and English, as well as literacy, is below the nationwide level of ~100%. Sexual assaults are generally confined to Oslo East, while date rapes occur largely in Oslo West, as few risk interethnic contact anymore. 7 of 10 marriages involve an outside source of someone of the same ethnicity and point of origin. Knowledge of Sunna is a prerequisite for being a woman with a tan and being left alone. A burkha doesn't hurt. A tolerance for being spit at is health insurance, though not as good as befriending a male that can act as escort.
Please explain to me how there is any cultural homogeniety?
Look back over the context of the point. You had stated "Incidentally, Muslims in Norway are getting far more integrated after Utøya, and vice versa." and I replied by pointing out that this happened in the current model of society, not the one you propose. Therefore, I meant a largely singular culture in contrast to your proposed example which would be a novel form of extreme multi-culturalism. Obviously Oslo West and East contrast a lot, judging by your description but that sort of situation is found elsewhere in Europe where the multi-cultural paradigm is pre-dominant. This is an issue of social class as well as religion and culture.
I should point out again that I don't regard integration as cultural homogeniety, rather I see it as a situation where divergence inevitably exists but there is still a meaningful societal commonality. I see it as an emphasis on what is shared rather than emphasising cultural difference as is the situation with multi-culturalism. It is not mono-culturalism.
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Integration has been of primary importance for 60 years and vigorously pursued.
However, it was from 4pm to 8pm, on 22 July 2011, that most of the real progress was actually made.
I don't know enough about Norway to comment but generally speaking multi-cultuaralism has been a fairly mainstream policy throughout Western Europe since the 1970's.
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I understand the point of setting foundation principles but societies are organic things that can take on a life of their own. They change over time and may well grow apart gradually. This problem already manifests itself with arbitration. I believe that to have a fully-fledged semi-autonomous system would cause even more problems in this respect.
I think you misunderstood the idea behind the metalaw-vs-law separation.
The actual word "metalaw" means something different to your use but if you meant an over-arching law applying to all societies within its domain, whilst the laws in those societies diverged due to cultural and religious differences, then I understood it.
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Good point but I think the latter issue relates to a real or percieved break down of society into a form of factionalism. This is why members of a society need to be more politically aware.
"Need to be" is a phrase used to describe something that "is not", usually the subtype that "will never be". In this case, I expect you are refering to a need which is of that subtype. I generally think it is productive to replace models that are based on needing things that will never be, with models that are based on things that are, or will be, or at least could be. By all means dream. I certainly do. But I will be issuing an edict on the subject of arbitration as world emperor before the average political awareness reaches a meaningful level. And I expect Lucifer Icecream will be a household brand at the time, following the hosting of the Winter Olympics in Hell.
I don't think we will agree at all but I do not see how a requirement is something that will never be. Many people in modern Western societies act quite responsibly and take an interest in politics. Apathy can have numerous explanations, and it varies from society to society, and era to era. Unless it can be proven to be an intractible obstacle, it should not be used as a reason to justify asserting that the general social system as it currently is should be destroyed or radically re-constructed.
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Either one enforces homogeniety or deals with heterogeniety.
No, once again you see the issue as too black and white. It is not a question of being the same as others, it is a question of sharing some common ground. That is integration as most people would understand it. Very few people that I am aware of which advocate integration expect those that are different to abandon their religion and culture.
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RE: Whoever's worried about sharia law in the US - 
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