This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
One thing that I don't understand is how countries like France, with a larger and often more radicalised muslim population, doesn't seem to have the same problems. Sweden also has a larger muslim population (in proportionate terms) and while Jews in Sweden are under concurrent attack, at least elite institutions seem to weather the pressure fairly well. Their PM is openly saying things like immigrants from MENA have problems with antisemitism and even questioning their loyalty.
Perhaps it's a combination of two things. First, many Islamist radicals are not poor and downtrodden but often well-educated and from relatively more affluent families. Britain's status as a magnet for relatively more prosperous migrants from non-EU sources could perhaps account for this. Second, perhaps the British state itself has been a bit more hands-off rather than the forceful French assimilationist approach. I can't say that it seems like the French have succeeded with their attempts to assimilate these groups, but perhaps an inadvertent side benefit is that they have greater control over various radicals.
As a final note, in a sane society these remote Middle-Eastern squabbles should not have been a major issue in the domestic politics of various Western countries. But we are now well past that point in Europe.
I don’t think it makes a big difference. After 9/11 and 7/7 there were a huge number of commentators lauding the French approach of laicite, saying that the French handled Muslim assimilation much better than the Anglos, who had not only invaded Iraq but had clearly done something wrong to be subject to terrorist attacks domestically too.
Then, just a few years later, France became the epicenter of Islamist terrorism in Europe with the Charlie Hebdo attack, the 2015 Paris attacks, the 2016 Nice attack, the Toulouse attack on a Jewish school, the teacher beheading, the priest almost-beheading and so on. Of course, both the US and UK also saw Islamist terror attacks including the Pulse club, the Ariana Grande concert and so on, but France has had both a higher number of incidents and a much higher casualty count. Then, if people remember 2016, the Anglo-American approach of live and let live was widely lauded (especially by the center-left in France, which is pretty rare), whereas the French, who had supposedly discriminated against and annoyed their Muslim population, were criticized for stoking social tensions with burqa bans and tolerating ‘hate speech’ with Charlie Hebdo’s trolling that would have been banned in the UK and would simply not have been published by a mainstream publication in the US.
It doesn’t seem like the approach to assimilation really matters, unless you go Full Xinjiang.
(By the way, while France has a proportionally larger Muslim populations I don’t think it’s “more radicalized”. Some Arab French are radicalized, but the intermarriage rate is much higher, as is the percentage (iirc) who drink. There are millions of entirely secularized French Maghrebis, whereas most British Pakistanis and Bangladeshis remain socially conservative and pretty insular.)
For what it's worth, I think the French approach is less of a failure than the Anglo one, even if it evidently is a failure.
We have, in our country, a large contingent of well integrated immigrants and children of immigrants, people who have so adopted the values of the Republic that a lot of them are actually joining political parties that are most radical in opposing islamism.
Forcing the issue of integration has radicalized both those that would and those that wouldn't integrate, which makes the problem a lot more visible than the multicultural approach where multilateral tact is the rule.
Neither approach has managed to prevent the problem, owing I think mostly to the size of the flow, but I think the more forceful approach is less vulnerable to a complete dissolution of values. France will endure even if the ethnic French do not, this is not something I can say about England.
This is self-contradictory. What is France if not the home of the ethnic French? Is it just an economic/geopolitical administrative zone? What are “the values of the Republic” and why is the existence of an Arab country 150 years from now which pays lip service to those supposed values something worth preserving?
I guess you're not French, so you don't understand the specificity of French nationalism.
Unlike, say, the German nation which is ostensibly based on blood, the French nation acquired, through our sustained political troubles, a distinctly ideological, cultural and linguistic character.
An ethnic Frenchman who is unable to quote from Molière, Voltaire, etc; or doesn't speak French, or speaks it with a weird accent would very ostensibly be regarded as not or less French than a sub-saharan African who can do this.
And while in other places you may regard this as left wing subversive nonsense, this is actually true here.
Consider for instance the case of Charles Maurras, one of the towering figures of the French far right, someone who is more worthy of the title of nationalist than anyone, and one of our more notorious antisemites, whose only real problem with Jews had been and remained their cultural integration, and nothing else.
The French do not care much for blood. Though one must recognize that genetics are a real thing that plays a real part in shaping who we are, it is not a part of our national conception and hasn't been so for a very long time.
This has puzzled Anglo-americans numerous times, such as when we won the FIFA World Cup and some of your pundits found proper to opine that "Africa won" because a lot of the team was ethnically African, and our Ambassador had to write a letter to request that you stop trying to force your weird Anglo race obsessions on us. Or the oft remarked upon fact that ethnic statistics are illegal to produce here as they're regarded as means to sow division, which seems nonsensical to Anglo outsiders, but makes perfect sense from within.
This is too vast a topic for me to give a succinct answer, but I will say that when I say this I mean a lot more than the mere organization or even civic religion of a political entity. Frenchness is down to even small habits of character and weird quirks that are acquired culturally such as our simultaneous interest and detachment with philosophy, our gastronomic tastes or the outsized amount of prestige rendered upon literature.
Buddy, this is the same stuff I’ve heard about “what it is to be an American” my entire life. It’s as fake and subversive here as it is in France. If a country has no genetic/ancestral continuity with its founding population, it is a completely new and fundamentally different entity. Just because you’ve been psyopped into believing it, doesn’t mean it’s “true”.
I’m not saying that France should not allow anyone to live here who is not 100% ancestrally French. (And I’m well aware of the complicated nature of what “ancestrally French” means.) But “becoming” French should mean, at a bare minimum, being married to an ethnically French person, having a child with at least two ethnically-French grandparents, and changing one’s name (given name and surname!) to a historically French name. This, of course, means that few if any Arab individuals living in your country are currently French; perhaps they will become French if they truly and sincerely want to be - or at least their children will - but it’s going to take a hell of a lot more effort than what’s being undertaken right now.
I know, propositional nation and all that, and in part you've inherited this from us and not England (Tocqueville talked about this). But it's also more true in France than it ever was in the United States.
We really really really don't give a shit about race compared to Americans. And we very much care about culture. The French have a reputation for being racists, but it's inaccurate, we're just extremely convinced of the primacy of our own culture, and the rest is accessory.
To give you an idea, even a whiff of something like your university race quotas would be a government shattering scandal over here. It's one of many cultural differences, much like we give zero shits about sexual impropriety whilst you regard it as a career ender.
Yeah I think we're in charge of deciding what we are and what our own criterions for group affiliation are, thank you very much. We've hated the Germans longer than your nation has even existed over this particular thing.
That much is evident.
But the objections even at the furthest right never are about the genetic makeup of these people, it's that they, sacrilegiously, do not regard themselves as French and do not behave like Frenchmen. It (almost) never has anything to do with their ancestry.
If you find the time, would you care to talk a bit about the Dreyfus Affair? I'm quite curious about how it's interpreted in modern France.
Maybe I should. It's our ur-culture war after all, and there was a movie released recently about it that I thought was a fair treatment.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link