All Nature is but Art unknown to thee;
All chance direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good:
And spite of Pride, in erring Reason's spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.
-Alexander Pope, Essay on Man
I am writing this article while sitting on a windowsill in Sultanahmet, Istanbul's tourist district, with a view of the sun setting into the Bosphorus. In a couple of days I will be moving on, to a different country, taking full advantage of cheap global travel before the oil runs out.
I'm sure a lot of th!nkers are like me, in that we spend more of our time and money on travel than on any other form of entertainment. For us First Worlders, travel offers something priceless and almost impossible to attain any other way: perspective.
As noble a project as Th!nk3 is, its impact will be limited by the fact that a lot of readers and decision-makers have a limited perspective: issues of wildly different countries are not immediate to them. This is a gap that cannot be breached by any other means than travel. It's human nature: as much as we put it in an intellectual context, deep inside we will never fully believe that the starving children in Darfur are real.
The more you travel, and the more perspective you get, the more you realize an important truth: people all over the world have lifestyles very different from yours, and for the most part, they're quite happy.
This is why I've asked, on several occasions already, whether we are in fact right to tell other people how to live. On the one hand, there is an argument to be made that European values and European practices lead to the most open and prosperous societies. We have more money, more stuff, and a higher life expectancy than the rest of the planet. It takes a lot of perspective to realize that the rest of the planet - not their politicians, clerics or revolutionaries, but the overwhelming majority of people - remain distinctly unbothered by that. They're living their lives, achieving the best kind of happiness they can under the circumstances, striving for progress as best they can, and could not care less about the impact of the Common Agricultural Policy on the security of a domestic food supply.
And yet, the world is actually not completely subjective. There are genuine, unassailable evils out there. That is why an American president received the Nobel Peace Prize while commanding two simultaneous wars. Some injustices genuinely require intervention. To ignore them would be inhuman.
How to reconcile these conflicting ideas?
Through previous arguments, I have come up with this idea: there is a final factor in determining whether a society is tolerable to other societies. A fundamental level of respect for human values, above which people can be left to determine their own destinies, and below which inaction must be justified with strong arguments indeed.
The factor is this: does the opressive society allow emigration?
One of my all-time great blog arguments was with the fictionally deceased Julien Frisch, about the Swiss minaret ban. My argument was that on a fundamental level, when a society makes a genuinely democratic decision to restrict a certain kind of behaviour within its own borders, that decision must be respected without question. Any greater notion of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, lack of opression etc. only serves as a guideline when the issue is muddled, when a potentially unjust decision was made by a politician, civil servant or tyrant; in other words, when it is possible to argue that the decision does not reflect the true will of the people. When it unequivocally does, no outsider has the right to question it. People are free to pursue their own fate as they see fit, and if their choices are different from ours, so be it.
But the failure of democracy, in a case such as this, is that it does not represent the entirety of the population. Democracy is imperfect (we just haven't found anything better yet, as Winston Churchill said). It is not designed to defend the views of all people; only most of them. The dissenting minority can learn to live with the oppression, decide it is bearable, and campaign for a reversal at the next legal opportunity; or the minority can emigrate, go off and look for a society whose self-imposed rules are more to its liking.
If a society allows the dissenting minority to leave, that society is acceptable. Everything else is a deficit of perspective.
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Bonus application: by this standard, and from what I know, I find that Iran is an acceptable society. North Korea isn't. The Western world is only justified in allowing the North Korean regime to persist by the fact that any active involvement will instantly result in war, and life under an oppressive government is still better than life in a warzone.
Your posts are always impressively wel-written, but I fear I disagree on the Swiss minaret thing.
I do agree that immigration is very central to democracy, and more so than ever in the glocalised world.
Your point is that democracy means that immigrants have the freedom to move back if they don’t like to live like the majority in the country, or for example that muslims in France are free to move to Germany if they want to wear Burqas?
I think that if you allow immigration, you allow people to come with their culture. You can’t say that muslims can live in Europe and even build mosques, but these mosques must not have minarets. If you con’t want minarets, you should ban immigration. I don’t think you should do that, so I am open for minarets.
Daniel,
You are wrong on immigrants arriving with their culture. OK, they can arrive with their cuisine and art; but not with their own way of life. That is exactly the wrong way to go about it, and utterly defeats the purpose of immigration. It also destroys diversity.
Now, in a general sense I am a big fan of the idea that everyone should have sex until the world has the same skin color
but that is not the point of this post. Globalization and travel enables diversity; if no way of life, no society, is wrong (save for the basic level I mentioned), then societies should be allowed to exist within their own borders. This means that sets of values and lifestyles that are intrinsic to a community must be maintained within the community’s borders. Globalization allows societies to thrive without giving up their identities, if they’re clever about it; purely economic migration is a short-term solution that has worked on occasion (the Turkish workforce in post-war Germany, Irish in the US, etc.), but in the long term it is contrary to the idea of a diverse and exciting humanity.
If people want minarets and the Swiss living standard, they should take their own country that already has minarets in it, and work to make it as rich as Switzerland.
Now, all that is theory and philosophy. In practice, my point was that an expression of democracy as clear-cut as a Swiss referendum (and the minaret ban passed in a double majority, both of voters and of administrative regions) cannot be ignored, set aside, or thought to be in some fundamental way wrong. As long as it is not violent, it is fundamentally the most democratic thing you can have.
I understand why you feel the ban is unacceptable, and that immigrants should be allowed to bring their lifestyles with them - it’s that lack of perspective that I talk about, an upbringing in a safe Western European country - but you’re wrong.
Andrei,
if you allow in your country the presence of different religions, therefore you should allow the possibility to the people of this religion to express themself as far as religious practices is concerned. If there is a Muslim community in your country, they should have the opportunity to go to the mosques, and minarets are part of the mosque. It is like to say that a church should not have a basic and caracteristic part of itself such as the bells!
Actually, I was quite surpreside when I read your post because in my country, Jordan, we have a perfect and harmonius cohexistence of the Muslim and the Christian community, whith the latter having normal Churches with bells and everything and the Jordanian law would never prohibit or dictate how a church should be built or which parts of a church should be allowed in the kingdom. Probably, concerning integration and cohexistence between religious groups, Jordan has a lot to teach to Switzerland.
Hussam,
“if you allow in your country the presence of different religions”
...which is not a given.
“you should allow the possibility to the people of this religion to express themself as far as religious practices is concerned.”
As long as it does not infringe upon anyone else.
“minarets are part of the mosque”
As far as I am aware, a Muslim house of worship can function without minarets. Just like Christian houses of worship function well enough without bells. Really, it was all discussed in the comments to the post on my own blog: no, I don’t like intrusive church bells either.
“Probably, concerning integration and cohexistence between religious groups, Jordan has a lot to teach to Switzerland.”
How many people emigrated from Switzerland to Jordan in the last decade?