When Unity Causes Conflict (Rather than Ending It)
Sep 15th, 2009 by Micah Tillman | 6 Comments |
I was privileged to engage in a short comment conversation with Jeff S regarding unity and diversity yesterday.
Mr. S noted that some of the worst conflicts in our world today seem to occur in places where there are stark cultural divides. His examples were Iraq, Chechnya, and Sri Lanka.
The question is, “Wouldn’t a united culture in those places eliminate the conflict?” In other words, “Isn’t it the cultural differences in those places that create conflict?”
And, therefore, “Doesn’t cultural unity more closely correlate with peace than cultural diversity?”
Note: I’m elaborating. Don’t let me put words in Mr. S’s mouth. (Here is what he actually said.)
____
My response, which I feel so strongly about that I’m saying it twice (once in the comments, and once here at the blog’s top level) has two parts, and is as follows:
____
Part 1
Internal conflict can be a characteristic of a culture. To share in the same culture does not necessarily mean to live/work/act in what we would call “unity.”
Part of the essence of gang culture, for instance, is conflict. Part of the essence of capitalist culture is competition. Ditto for sports culture.
If everyone were a member of the same gang, or worked for the same company, or played for/were a fan of the same team, gang culture would cease to be, capitalist culture would disappear, and sports would evaporate.
Conflict is part of the lifeblood of some cultures. Without it, they could not continue to exist.
Therefore, having a single culture does not necessarily mean being unified (or “at peace”). Some cultures bring unity and peace, while others bring competition and conflict.
If we want peace, therefore, we cannot simply demand a unified culture.
____
Part 2
The demand for a unified culture is precisely the cause of conflict in Iraq, Chechnya, and Sri Lanka.
Cultures are sets of decisions that adherents each and all make. Some cultures include a decision to see the presence of (adherents of) other cultures as a contamination that must be eliminated.
That is, some cultures include a decision to see non-unity as an evil to be remedied by persuasion (in some cases) or force (in others).
In Iraq, Chechnya, and Sri Lanka (and National Socialist Germany, and Fascist Italy, and Soviet Russia, and Communist China), you have examples of taking the latter option: people trying to eliminate cultural divisions and create cultural unity by force.
If adhering to the various aggressing cultures didn’t lead one to be so worried about unity, you wouldn’t have the conflicts in question.
Well I’m certainly not advocating unity at the point of a rifle, and I’m not advocating unified cultures. I’m just wondering how disparate cultures can co-exist without a set of parameters between which they all agree to stay. Those parameters are what I’m calling unity; maybe that’s where we’re disagreeing..?
That sounds right to me. People have to have some basic agreements about things to be able to live peaceably side by side as part of different cultures.
So there has, at some level, to be a shared culture for there to be peace, even if that culture simply consists of one or two decisions (e.g., “I won’t attack people who aren’t attacking me,” “I won’t appropriate the property of others unless they offer it to me”).
But that’s more at the level of what one often calls “common decency” rather than a specific culture. Then again, just about everything counts as a culture, given my definition of culture.
So, whether you call the few basic decisions that allow people to live together peaceably a “culture” or not is too close to being a “merely semantic” issue, so I’m not going to base any argument on it.
Thanks helping me think this stuff through!
I got the sense that Mr. Buchanan was defining unity the way I’m defining it, which is what you described as “shared culture” in the previous comment. I’ll have to read it again and see if I’m understanding him correctly.
I don’t know a lot about Checknya or Sri Lanka.
But I think it’s worth noting, at least in Iraq, that the very concept of Iraq as a country is essentially a Western Construct. Several different ethnic groups were lumped together while others (e.g. the Kurds) were sliced down the middle as Europe bundled the Middle East into bit-sized morsels for Imperialistic consumption.
Before this time, Iraqi’s no more thought of themselves as Iraqi’s than Americans thought of themselves as Americans before The Revolution. In a very similiar way, colonial Americans identified themselves with regional and state identities but not one that we now recognize as national.
Interesting point. I think that goes back to what Micah first said about forced unity. It would be an interesting “what if” to go back in history and allow that region to carve out its own political boundaries and see how things would look today.
One gets a real sense of “arbitrariness” when one looks at a map of the Middle East (if I can generalize my personal experience). One often gets the feeling that it would have been more “natural” if the Middle East had been divided up differently.
However, I ultimately think it would have been more “natural” only if one conflates what’s natural with what’s automatic. People tend to group themselves along ethnic lines; that is one of the “automatic” things about being human. But people also tend to get excessively angry at each other for insufficient reasons, to fight wars over the wrong things, to be jealous the legitimate accomplishments of others, etc.
And (one must always remind oneself) the National Socialists in Germany thought it was more “natural” to divide up Europe according to ethnicity. They couldn’t distinguish between automatic and natural (or between ethnicity and nationality), and that got the world into a heap of trouble.
The “nice” thing about Iraq is that it, like America, is an embodiment of the fact that nationality and ethnicity are independent variables.