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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   35215 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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Belgians are still split after 211 years in the same country. Northern Ireland can't overcome differences so small that the average western European would have difficulties telling them apart. Czechs and Slovaks couldn't function together. Turks and Kurds have tried for a millennia. Sri Lanka had major terrorist attacks committed by people whose ancestors came there during Charlemagne's lifetime. Sunni and Shia arabs have spent 1400 years fighting over a minute doctrinal difference and the conflict is so infected that some believe it is a divine will to exterminate the other. Russia has tried to integrate Chechens for centuries. 70 years of Soviet propaganda washed off in a few years.

People are wildly optimistic concerning integration. While most people realize that they would not become Ugandan by taking a language course or reading about Ugandan values, people assume that Ugandans can become middle class westerners simply by being informed. There is a deep underlying Chauvinism behind the western view of assimilation. It is simply assumed that our way of life is superior and once the barbarians have been instructed in our superior ways they will adopt them. Meanwhile, the west is busy deconstructing the same "racist, patriarchal, oppressive social structures" that we are bewildered that the migrants don't adopt.

Integration is exceedingly difficult, takes multiple generations, and often doesn't occur at all. The lack of miracles is not failure. France has succeeded far beyond Syria, Mexico with its natives revolting, Kashmir or Ukraine.

I honestly think much of the debate is driven by wishful thinking caused by the fear of accepting that the multicultural project won't work.

The USA assimilated most white immigrants quite well given enough time. France assimilated its fairly diverse white cultures over centuries (like the south and Bretons in the west). China took manifold Chinese peoples and turned them mostly into "Han". A similar process is occurring in India right now with Hindu Nationalism.

While pessimism is warranted towards assimilation in general, blanket pessimism is not. Assimilation can happen faster or slower given certain characteristics. Two big ones that make assimilation much harder are:

  • Differing religions. Religions evolved to be sticky and xenophobic towards other faiths. The total impact depends largely on how much conflict there are between the religions, e.g. Catholic vs Protestant used to be a huge faultline, but now its almost irrelevant in many places.

  • Obvious physical characteristics that can be used as a proxy for lower socioeconomic status. Think blacks in the USA, whose skin color marked them as lower-class. Anyone who isn't delusional will then use skin color as a shorthand for "poor", and take all ordinary precautions one would normally take with poor people, e.g. seeing them as more lazy, more crime prone, etc.

It is simply assumed that our way of life is superior and once the barbarians have been instructed in our superior ways they will adopt them

This assumption was largely correct and as long as it was correct, assimilation happened relatively quite successfully.

It is not so correct anymore so you see an increasing number of cracks in the system. There is not much more to it.

And yet people who came to the US voluntarily as settlers and not asylum seekers integrated themselves just fine, even when they came as huddled masses. If you keep stirring, your sauce emulsifies just fine. The French state used to stir hard and actually blended most of the local ethnicities into the French nation. It could've done the same to the Algerians: ban the use of Arabic, force the migrants to take French names, break up and resettle any ethnic enclaves.

There was no assimilation. The decline of WASP-majority American institutions had a profoundly damaging and destabilizing impact on American political and economic life. Entire cities like Boston and Philadelphia were lost wholesale to the Irish and Italians. We can't imagine an America where the European population remained 70% Anglo, but it would certainly be a very different place.

The decline of WASP-majority American institutions had a profoundly damaging and destabilizing impact on American political and economic life. Entire cities like Boston and Philadelphia were lost wholesale to the Irish and Italians.

Oh, yes, I remember reading about the terrible places that Boston and Philadelphia have become after being invaded by the Catholics and the Jews. /s

What exactly went wrong with Boston and Philly? Bossism? I wouldn't lay the blame solely at the Catholic feet. William Tweed, arguably the most notorious political boss, was a Scottish Quaker,

I’m not saying they got “worse”, clearly by many metrics (not least GDP/capita) America is much better than it was in 1840. But it is different. The Irish and Italians did not become Anglos, they didn’t become English or Scots-Irish or whatever. They established their own communities that slowly blended together with other white ethnics and the pre-existing (largely British) cultures in the US which itself over time gave way to modern American identity and culture. The social fabric that once existed disappeared, it was its own culture war at the end of the 19th century, the people of the time saw it happening, they lamented it. It was damaging in the sense that the old culture of those cities ceased to exist, vanished no less surely than the culture of Ottoman Greeks or German Ostsiedler. And sure, the presence of European immigrants in urban organized crime in the early 20th century was obviously substantial.

That the largely new country, new nation that adopted the name and flag and constitution of the USA ended up being wealthy and powerful and generally a good place to live is indeed fortunate, but it doesn’t mean the old America did not fade away.

Irish and Italian Americans never assimilated? How do you propose we measure assimilation, and what groups do you think have assimilated that the Irish and Italians fall short of?

They have “assimilated” in the sense of intermarriage (by this measure Brazil’s the all-time greatest success of diversity), but they didn’t adopt Anglo culture, they changed it to accommodate many of their own mores, habits and ideas.

Wait, so fourth generation Americans in Boston who add a lilt to their voices as they get drunker are actually just Irish because they don't pointedly refuse to talk about their divorces and put jam on their peanut butter sandwiches instead of marshmallow fluff?

Yet race is a constant major topic in the US that hasn't been solved despite decades of trying. There are vast differences in outcome, there is high level of segregation, there are large differences in crime. What would even be the point of removing all Algerian elements from Algerians? Why go through a massive social engineering process to try to strip people of their culture?

Why go through a massive social engineering process to try to strip people of their culture?

Social harmony, of course. And the US doesn't have a problem with race, it has a problem with the descendants of slaves. Their arrival wasn't voluntary, so it's not surprising their segregation was able to prevent successful assimilation.

Right, and even in Singapore - for all the state’s attempts to force integration - the government has tried very hard to maintain a Chinese majority. You can’t work miracles, at best you can pacify groups of violent young men by making the authorities appropriately scary. That’s probably the last thing France has yet to try, but there are complications there, too, as the current riots show.

Meanwhile, the west is busy deconstructing the same "racist, patriarchal, oppressive social structures" that we are bewildered that the migrants don't adopt.

This doesn't look right to me. The people deconstructing "racist, patriarchal, oppressive social structures" aren't bewildered at the fact that migrants aren't becoming devoted Christians, but the fact that they aren't becoming secular feminist progressives.

Well sure, because secular feminist progressives probably aren’t even a majority of native French.

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