A jackass? MOI?!?!? Inconceivable!

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Please recalibrate your irony detector.

SJ: I honestly don't think that societies must necessarily experience a complete dichotomy between atomized values that allow for individual freedom and totalitarian fundamentalism.


Personally I think Iran and Lebanon are better examples. I'll remind everyone who doesn't remember that Beirut was once called "the Paris of the Middle East", and Iran remains quite sophisticated and pleasant even today once you put aside the government's fundamentalism. Of course, Iran and Lebanon always had more religious diversity than Afghanistan, but that's my point: they maintained a diversity of religions and allowed the followers of each to attain full spiritual fulfillment as they would without fundamentalism.

Hell, I could classify regional cultures between those that have been conquered repeatedly, and therefore tend towards more moderatism and individual freedom (Iran, Lebanon, Egypt, Israel, France, England, Germany, America in a sense, India), and those that have been dominant/conqueror cultures and therefore have less tolerance and more tyranny (Saudi Arabia, Syria, China, Russia, Japan). I assert that this "axis", though positively correlated with freedom of belief, does not necessarily correlate with secularism. Specifically, religious and secular countries are found in roughly equal proportion in both categories.

Personally I think that in order to achieve a lasting peace in the Middle East, we'll need to kill all the goats. That was not a subtle racial slur, I literally mean kill all the domesticated members of the caprine family living in what used to be the fertile crescent and eating any attempt at trees coming back. Nothing turns a place intoa desert like a damned goat.

If you can give me scientific proof that removal of goats will cause a large, significant jump in the efficacy of irrigation and terraforming efforts in the MidEast, I will go into the streets preaching that in the name of God and the Earth we must all have a delicious barbecue of goat. This also explains many of the animal sacrifices made in ancient Judaism: feed God the goats so they won't desertify our country.

http://www.dianaswednesday.com/2006/12/cashmere-desertification-goats-and-dust-storms/

Technically, you need the cedars of Lebanon back on the hills to improve valley soil quality and improve the amount of ambient water in the ecosystem. Goats and sheep eat all the potential new trees. Cheap desalinization would help lots too.

I know; I don't either. What I'm saying is that some of today's Western societies have become so secular and so free that, as an undesirable side effect, they have become atomized. It's possible to fight atomization, but you fight it by creating a firmer social framework for people to tie themselves into. And, as an undesirable side effect, when you do enough of that, the firm social framework winds up being a straitjacket for at least part of the population, because the rules that you find reassuring I may find oppressive and vice versa.

It's a tradeoff on a sliding scale, not a dichotomy, and I don't think I ever said it was a dichotomy. But modern Europe is very far off to one end of the scale, and Islamic theocracies are very far off to the other end, so they make good illustrations of what the scale is. So while there isn't a dichotomy (middle ground exists), there is definitely a contrast. Again, oppressive "framework societies" where everyone has to occupy a defined place in the system are not merely clones of free societies only with all the freedom knocked out. They are different, and they have at least one advantage along with their many, many disadvantages.

This should not come as a surprise. If the "rigid social expectations" model had no advantages, it would not have survived for thousands of years. Lord knows there are plenty of good reasons for it to fall apart under its own weight; something has to be holding it together.
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I chose Afghanistan specifically to illustrate that even if you are a Muslim who lives among other Muslims, the radical Islamic fundamentalists don't really have your best interests at heart. They won't mess you up as badly as they would a non-Muslim, but they will mess you up. Quite a few Muslims know this; it's one of the reasons most Muslims are not radical fundamentalists.
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Since when has Syria been a conqueror civilization? No native society from the area we now call Syria has conquered a large empire since the Iron Age.

Nitpicks aside, I didn't say that only religious fundamentalism does this whole social framework thing. It's not a question of "secular versus religious" as such; it's just that the rigid-framework variations on Western society have already been confronted and defeated during conflicts within the West. So now the most influential single social model in the world is the one that the Western secular democracies came up with, because they had a head start on everyone else in wealth and technology and have already polished off the competing models in their own part of the world.

What's left is, therefore, both secular and a social near-anarchy. Which has advantages (everyone is free to do what they feel is best) and disadvantages (many people do not know what to do). I think the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages, but they both exist and I'd be a fool not to admit it.
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By contrast, in the Middle East the rigid societies won the internal conflicts, but then had to deal with the pervasive influence of more flexible Western societies. And that's been a problem for them, because flexibility offers advantages. So some Middle Eastern societies wound up copying the flexibility of the West, while others rebelled against that flexibility (which, again, is near-anarchy as far as social organization goes) and tried to go back to ultra-rigid versions of the rigid societies they had before.
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In the "far East" (India, China, Japan, and the smaller countries around them), I don't know how the conflict is going. Rigid social models seem to have won early on in China and Japan. Japan has managed to adapt to modern technology while still remaining fairly rigid, but dissonance is setting in and it's a toss-up how things are going to evolve. I can't presume to guess what will happen in China; India seems to be moving towards the flexible model.

Before we regard a rigid social structure as an advantage, I suggest we check with the people defined as the least powerful. It's easy for some jackass to be a hindu fundamentalist if it means he's going to have all of the privileges and powers of a brahmin, but I rather doubt he'd have as much enthusiasm about being an untouchable. Substitute other top-dog/under-dog combinations for every other religion as necessary; the same dynamic works in all of them.

I'm not saying it is an advantage, I'm saying it can have an advantage. It also has (as I said) a lot of disadvantages, among them that it really, truly stinks to be an underdog in such a society. That goes double when the rigid social structure in question tries to reinforce itself by designating and oppressing some specific group.

But the fact that System X has horrible disadvantages compared to System Y does not mean that System X must have exactly zero advantages over System Y, that there is nothing on the other side of the balance sheet.

I don't understand why this observation would be controversial. Doesn't anyone here wonder why people ever deliberately choose tradition over change, in any society? It isn't something as simple as "we hate freedom!" It's that a lot of people honestly like knowing the role they need to play in their society, and dislike the idea of having all the roles erased and replaced with randomness. Or with something that sounds a lot like some alien party trying to take control of their society.

Even if they find their role a burden, they often get used to the burden, and are worried about the new burdens they'd have to bear without a defined social role. Or about the consequences of dropping the burden when the next generation ceases to (in the old guard's eyes) "do their job."

I don't like it, but I don't think I should try to stick my head in the sand and ignore it.

I think you would do better to substitute strength and weakness for advantage and disadvantage. Every living society has it's strengths, no matter how dysfunctional and poisonous it may be on the whole (though they may not be enough to keep it alive for long). But advantage and disadvantage are comparative value judgments which need certain mutual assumptions to be true.

I also think people opt for roles that stink rather than push for change because they'd rather preserve the little they have rather than risk it for something better. This says nothing good about the society they're in, or necessarily demonstrates any of it's strengths; it just demonstrates that people can be risk averse.

In the "real world" this isn't as much of a problem for the Hindus. Most Brahmin I know are the more secular, pluralistic types with Western-style educations. They actually tend to move to Western countries and look down on the more religious lower-class Hindus.

However, the whole lot of them hate Muslims. Apparently Muslims are doing the same "breed until we can take over" thing in India as in the non-Muslim bits of the Middle East (which, admittedly, are very small). At least according to my Hindu friends. I figure we may be technically on the same "side" vis-a-vis Muslims, but it seems to me more like a class issue in sum total. The upper-class Indian Muslims move to places like Britain or America seeking a better life, while the lower-class ones stay in India and play the same breed-until-our-ecosystem-collapses game as the lower-class fundamentalist Hindus.

IMHO, the whole dynamic of smart, educated people moving away and leaving their home countries to stew strikes me as distasteful and cruel. How can Third-World societies ever improve if the ultimate dream of every kid growing up in them is to move to a rich country?

The daughter has the same rights as everyone else in Britain, and no - the father has no right to behave as he would in a traditional patriarchal society. There is no sharia law in the UK, and no sharia law is coming to the UK. All the Mail needs is to hear the word sharia mentioned and a poop headline about it being imposed appears.

What was actually being discussed was quite different. Under British law, the two sides to a civil dispute can agree to have their dispute mediated by any person or institution they so choose. Some Muslims choose to have their civil cases settled by sharia courts; but these courts have no special legal authority. If myself and my friend have a legal battle over something, and we agree that we'd rather it be settled by the British Association of Cheese Manufacturers than by a normal court, we could do so. This is a matter of personal freedom; giving people the opportunity to select their arbitrators instead of forcing them to accept a rulebook they may not agree with. It’s an ancient part of English legal tradition, and has nothing to do with immigrants or permissive multiculturalism.

Incidentally, this is actually used far more often by orthodox Jewish communities in London and the North East, where it's common to have all non-criminal matters dealt with by Beth Din. This doesn't seem to arouse any rage in the press, though.



No, no argument there. Just expressing a preference.



More's the point, since when was America ever conquered? And the last time England was conquered was the 11th century; since which it's done an excess of conquering itself. I think you’re inventing categories to fit a pre-conceived conclusion, Crazed.



Yet the Hindofascist BJP's leadership is full of Brahmins, and these at least claim that the Brahmin caste is the main base of their support.



People naturally strive to improve their own personal position and that of their family and friends. I don't see how someone has a responsibility to have a less successful and comfortable life just because they happen to be born in Mumbai rather than Atlanta.

Of course, the worldwide Jewish community isn't trying to have "defamation of Moses" recognized as an offence by the international community or seek other special changes to or exemptions from various national laws that might lead one to suspect that the Beth Din is a wedge to start having talmudic law encroach on the courts. Nor do they have a habit of calling for the death of (or committing the murders of) those the Jewish community feels has "insulted" Judaism.

Nor do young Jewish men have a propensity for violent behaviour against their female relatives who refuse to accept their "proper place" - ie, subordinate to the men. I can't think of any cases where a teenage Jew beat his sister because he didn't like who she was dating and then claimed the Torah justified it and it was a matter internal to their culture...

I can't say the same about muslim youth, within either Britain, or even Canada for that matter (which tends to be somewhat more cosmopolitan than Britain in a number of ways relating to immigrant communities).

OK, fine.

I think that's part of it.

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Suffice to say that I think the question is reasonable if there is a discussion about Muslims attempting to live according to sharia or sharialike codes in non-Muslim societies. And there is such a discussion- we're talking about it right now. Even if sharia isn't likely to be given any legal weight in the non-Muslim society any time soon, the question is worth looking at and answering.

OK. That's a specific detail of the English (British?) legal system I didn't know. However, it does raise a few awkward questions depending on what your arbitrator of choice tells you to do. Among other things, it's all too easy for people to be pressured into following a rulebook they're ambiguous about by the strong people in their lives. If father pressures daughter to accept the ruling of a sharia court rather than taking matters to the British judiciary it's easy for the paperwork requirements to say the daughter consented when the reality is a lot more gray.

I have the same concern about Orthodox Jews relying on the Beth Din, but Jews have a much longer track record of trying to coexist peacefully with societies full of people who don't follow their God-given laws. I'm not sure European Muslims have learned that lesson yet.

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Yeah. That's what I'm talking about. There are enormous numbers of Muslim immigrants who don't do any of this, but the ones who do call the whole idea of "we have a right to an autonomous legal system that settles our internal affairs according to the customs of our culture" into question.

Your customs include beating your sister for not keeping her head covered in public; my customs include throwing men who beat their sisters into prison cells. If you can exercise your custom, why can't I exercise mine?

I think far more important than discussing whether Sharia should be instituted in non-Muslim (or even Muslim) states is the discussion being conducted by many Muslim scholars (both imams and layfolk) about whether or not Sharia is a living, changing law or the Eternal Word of God. Traditionally, it has been the former, but in the modern era it has largely been the latter, and the result of this debate will have far more sweeping repercussions than whether or not it is allowed as law anywhere in the West.