Jay wrote:
It boils down to trust. People of a shared socioeconomic and cultural background tend to be more trusting towards each other. This worked well for centuries right up until the start of mass urbanization. In urban societies relationships and communities are transient. You may meet a person one time and never again after. This removes any social consequences from actions in people's minds and lends itself to poor behavior. Cut someone off and give him the finger in a small town and you might have him and his buddies at your house that evening. Do it in a city and you are anonymous.
This anonymity is the real problem. When people are anonymous it is easy to categorize them by how they look, talk or dress and assign blame to the entire group for the actions of singular individuals. This is how the human mind works. We learn from past experience and categorize threats. In an urban setting your fallback to protect you from boorish, asshole behavior is not the social ostracism of the offender as would've happened in the past, but the police, whom few trust.
Positive social capital is built between individuals and groups by fair dealing and trustworthiness, and it is destroyed instantly when violated. It's fragile. Many on the right feel that the intellectual left have given a pass to immigrant groups and cultures that behave boorishly by Western standards by adopting morally relativist positions towards their behavior. This prevents assimilation, now a dirty word, and trust building. For a society to function properly without massive oversight there has to be a universal culture or trust will disintegrate.
This has happened and largely explains identity politics. People are breaking themselves down into smaller and smaller subgroups that they can build trusting relationships with. The downside is that they then other every other group and cause even further division.
Well made point, but:
On the first part of your post, the transience of relationships in the 21st century has more to do with many other 'advances' than urbanisation. Let's not forget that urban centres have for milennia acted as places where ideas and cultures are constantly exchanged. The close proximity and shared futures of everyone within cities actually facilitated cooperation, creativity and community-building. The decline in long term relationships or any social bonds in people's lives, increased anonimity and antisocial behaviour have more to do with factors such as the 'entzauberung der welt', the replacement of community safety nets by the welfare state, the death of the nuclear family, the invention of the internet, people's increased mobility and financial independence and/or economic systems which can reward selfish pursuit of profit over cooperation. We have slowly but surely stripped away or discarded many things that were provided by & which defined traditional communities.
I agree that it's a problem - but not one connected to identity politics, at least not in the way you describe. The nationalist/'cultural superiority' politics we know today is actually a response to all of the above. While our communities and defined nation-states are dying and losing relevance in a globalised world, there's some unifying force to be found in defining an outsider or even common adversary of sorts.
I disagree on assimilation. Assimilation is a fairytale. Cultures can blend, change and metamorphose into a new shared culture, we've seen that the world over thousands of times. It's not always been a smooth process, but it happens and it's a natural evolution. What doesn't happen is people completely abandoning their cultural identity upon entering a new environment. Don't let the possible influence of one culture on another be a reason for more conservatism though. What is actually unnatural is trying to set identity into stone. Cultures continually change, from within and without.
Dilbert_X wrote:
Yes, ethnic tensions in the Balkans were invented recently by opportunistic politicians...
When the economy is at its best thats when there is most pressure from immigrants to gain access to successful economies, its not surprising thats when ethnic tensions start to heat up, when the economy slips back thats when they boil over.
The bottom line is being part of a delineated group, and seeking to achieve dominance of that group is instinctive human behaviour.
Whether its the Romans or Mongols sweeping continents and wiping out or enslaving all before them, or white supremacists sweeping across North America, its unchanged since the dawn of human civilisation.
If people don't feel part of a group they'll find one to be part of, religion, soccer, whatever, then they'll use any ends to achieve dominance.
Whats unusual is this recent period where multiculturalism and dominance of minority groups and people from other nations has been forced on the majority.
It hasn't worked and has not been accepted, hence we have Trump elected in America in a 'surprise' result, Brexit being the 'surprise' popular choice in the UK, and conservatives achieving a 'surprise' election result in Australia.
Mass-killings by the dominant groups and terror attacks by the minority groups seeking to achieve dominance are both symptoms of multiculturalism not working. I suppose a surprise is that the attacks by the dominant groups are 'lone-wolf' attacks and don't involve more people in groups. I guess if someone can get hold of an AR15 and a dozen magazines they don't feel the need to team up.
Liberals, social justice warriors etc can complain forever people should accept a new reality, but its going against tens of thousands of years of instinctive human behaviour.
Jay's comments about micro-behaviour are valid but it takes intense effort to keep a lid on ethnic tensions. Corrupt and racist police, selective unemployment by race, a racist pot-stirring President etc are not part of the solution.
You keep holding on to the wrong assumption that identity is a cause for conflict. It isn't and never was. People don't suddenly start attacking eachother because one is from group X and the other a member of group Y. There's a long string of social processes and dynamics that need to occur for people to talk themselves into defining another group as 'the enemy' and then to rationalise violence against them. It doesn't just happen.
On the topic of the Balkans, it is the war which created the delusion of 'ethnic tensions'. The violence was conducive to the formation of identity boundaries that were not at all clearly visible anywhere prior to the war. Major differences weren't the cause of war, they were created by war. That then led to a cycle of malignant narcissism giving 'reason' to more savagery.
A good thing for you to ask yourself is how you stereotype and portray the specific groups you believe are incompatible with yours. And how much of that image reflects reality?
Dilbert_X wrote:
Whether its the Romans or Mongols sweeping continents and wiping out or enslaving all before them
You may be surprised to know that they didn't. They demanded subjugation, yes, but once loyalty and territory were secured both empires thrived on cultural exchange.
Last edited by Larssen (2019-08-08 13:39:32)
