E Pluribus Unum - "Out of Many, One" (original motto of the United States of America)
Whether it be Takfiri extremists killing cartoonists in Paris or an Atheist extremist killing Muslim college students in America the problem of reactionary tribalism that threatens Pluralism is a real problem impacting human lives now.
Pluralism is under siege and to protect the polis of Pluralism those who reside in it must not let the fanatics that assail it from different sides tear the great city apart.
Pluralism: the idea that people of different backgrounds and beliefs can be free and live with each other.
With the advance of globalization and information technology the world is becoming a much more crowded place. Ideas and people are becoming much more in your face and it is easier now to either offend or be offended by others opinions and actions. The opportunity is for a deeper and better understanding of the world and exchange of ideas but the danger is a rising reactionary balkanization, tribalism, and ethnocentrism.
Who am I? Who are we? Identity becomes a point of existential importance.
What is my group? Who is outside my group? For a naked ape and social primate it should not be surprising that social groups and cohesion is of evolutionary importance. Humans in general have a psychological drive to be sympathetic to family and that has expanded over human history to tribe, religion, and nation.
The ideal is to expand that circle of sympathy to the whole of humanity. The ideals of the Enlightenment may not be easy for humans to live up to.
With the recent events coming from Muslim extremists killing cartoonists in Paris or an Atheist extremist killing Muslim college students in America the problem of reactionary tribalism that threatens Pluralism is a real problem impacting human lives now.
Ideas have consequences. Not knowing or caring for people outside your particular in group has consequences.
How much ideas and memes impact human violence is an ongoing debate over the nurture versus nature argument. Which variables are greater or lesser factors is a hard metrics to pin down when dealing with human behavior.
Instead of getting into a long debate on nurture versus nature we can say that human ideas and the particular human brain it comes into contact with is the cocktail mix of action.
Whether one is a more dominant factor than the other is a case by case study. Human brains vary in their particular physiology and are not blank slates, however ideas still matter and the lack of an everyday pluralistic experience where you interact with others outside your group can matter as well.
I have heard the most vile things being said about unbelievers and others by Takfiri fundamentalists and I have also heard the most vile things being said about Muslims coming from those from another faith or the faithless. This is not an either/or position. One can be against Islamic extremism and Islamic phobia at the same time.
Whether it is Islamic extremists cutting off the heads of people simply because they belong to a certain hemisphere or the anti-religious extremist who shot three people in the head simply because they belong to a certain religion both are an assault on the great polis of Pluralism. The fanatics are waving the knives and pulling the trigger on Pluralism from all directions.
It seems there are people who have a hard time with the scientific method and nuance, they would rather have simplistic judgments based on superficial observations. When a human is viewed simply as a representation or a symbol it is easier to kill them instead of viewing the person as a distinct individual with a nuanced and varied life. As Kierkegaard understood, "Once you label me you negate me."
Cosmopolitanism and Pluralism need to be nurtured and nourished. Tribalism and solipsism can grow in famine and neglect.
Pluralism is under siege and to protect the polis of Pluralism those who reside in it must not let the fanatics that assail it from different sides tear the great city apart.
Original Post:Pangea Progress - Pluralism under siege
Quotes to Ponder:
"If men could only know each other, they would neither idolize nor hate."
Elbert Hubbard
"Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together."
Eugene Ionesco
"Ideal types are used to simplify a complex reality."
Patricia Crone
"I found the blind slavery, which ties the people’s present with their parents past, and urges them to yield to their traditions and customs, placing ancient spirits in the new bodies."
Kahlil Gibran
"...and Heaven have mercy on us all - Presbyterians and Pagans alike - for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending."
Herman Melville (Moby Dick)
“The need for a global ethic is inescapable. An ethical life is one in which we identify ourselves with other, larger, goals, thereby giving meaning to our lives.
At the end of the nineteenth century WH Lecky wrote of human concern as an expanding circle which begins with the individual, then embraces the family and ‘soon the circle... includes first a class, then a nation, then a coalition of nations, then all humanity, and finally, its influence is felt in the dealings of mankind with the animal world’."
Peter Singer
"Man is always inclined to regard the small circle in which he lives as the center of the world and to make his particular private life the standard of the universe. But he must give up this vain pretense, this petty provincial way of thinking and judging."
Michel de Montaigne
"The last thing man can admit to himself is that his life-ways are arbitrary: this is one of the reasons that people often show derisive glee and scorn over the 'strange' customs of other lands—it is a defense against the awareness that his own way of life may be just as fundamentally contrived as any other. One culture is always a potential menace to another because it is a living example that life can go on heroically without a value framework totally alien to one's own."
Ernest Becker
"A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
Albert Einstein