Читать книгу Incompatibility and other essays - Peter Lustig - Страница 9

Foremost lies the concern about demographic encroachment, so that the prospect of a “loss of identity” might afflict a polity as a consequence of having given way to multiculturalism. A case in point might be France, in danger of being taken over by a Muslim majority within the next so many years, as outlined in a big splash by one M. Picketty, an economist, with reference to a recent population survey.

It can only be remarked that countries geographically larger and emptier than France, that took in proportionally more culturally diverse people, were able to help immigrants adapt and become integrated within a couple of generations, even if this implied a measure of give and take that may have affected the outward appearance of society and modified to some extent its supporting cultural biases. Why would France be more vulnerable, being endowed with greater density of population, were it not for the inadequacies of its anti-discrimination legislation?

Aside from the consolidating experience of winning wars (as long as one’s own territory is never overrun), cultural identity does not come into consideration, at all. Involvement simply becomes a matter of taking sides and it has no bearing on who you are, how you look or what language you speak. It depends only on the way you think. A collective identity will have taken shape under unprecedented conditions, in the sense that life is, of necessity, unrehearsed and, therefore, unpredictable. Learning takes place in the course of events and this, in turn, becomes self-defining.

Whoever trains his sights on outlining a plan for the future -as in this case, to envisage a post-war scenario with tolerance for a shifting society- must be equipped with further insight, in order to exercise leadership where others are merely prepared to fall into step, as an alternative to millions being left entirely out of the picture, even to the extent that their survival were in the balance. Having made plain the difference between a leader and his following, there remains little to say about why some should succeed while others fail; but there can be no a priori certainty about outcomes, just as it would not make sense to attribute any initiative to the masses because they had responded to mobilization, in either political and/or military terms.

Some fixed notions as to why learning takes place can be traced to Antiquity. For instance, that knowledge is attained unrelated to practical interest, in response to “disinterested” curiosity. True as this may be, the only knowledge that counts is that which contributes to solve an existential problem. That people should at times take upon themselves the defense of a position detrimental to their fortunes, or their lives, in no way rules out that they may be doing so for a reason closer to their hearts, even if it means they would be bringing about their own downfall (as the Germans and the Japanese, in World War II). They partook of a gamble for the sake of something that meant the most to them, self-preservation, with an eye on what they held to be in their best interest.

Although not everybody can be expected to live up to such standards of “ïdealism”, neither are most people ready to muster the required intellectual effort to go about clarifying their disposition. This marks a form of basic inequality likely to raise a number of far reaching questions about the concept of universal suffrage and its effect on the running of public affairs. To say the least, it addresses the issue of leadership from the angle of a communal identity, referring indirectly to the practical implications of what is known or acknowledged. Why would anybody want to put forward notions unrelated to the realities germane to the following he is trying to rally and still expect to obtain results? Obviously, any such dramatic proposal should have greater appeal for the young, always ready to take things to extremes unguardedly, than to those whom experience has made more cautious or craftier.

Bearing in mind that what people are told will depend on who is being targeted with the information, subtlety is not likely to make much headway with the broader audience. Neither is learning. It is quite possible that history should stray from the more advisable course of action, if only because action is not always necessarily guided by knowledge or reason. Mostly, desperateness triggers responses more effectively than deliberation, because speed saves time. This leaves no room at all for rationalizing. There can be no pretense that decisions made on the spur of the moment might have anything to do with knowledge. The only reason for going into action unthinkingly would be because it was too late to engage in a debate (as when the Blitz began).

Once all hell has broken loose, the most anybody can hope for is that he will manage to slip through mayhem unnoticed. Nobody could blame a person for absconding from his responsibility toward his peers or “equals”, under circumstances devoid of ethical constraints (best described by Churchill’s claim that he was fighting for “my country, right or wrong”), in conditions of all out war! However, there are always some who are prepared to do more. They are the ones cut out to become leaders; even if, for the most part, they should only become such in thought (since there can be only one successful leader, always on the winning side, in any situation).

Broadly speaking, this attempt to encompass a reality associated with recent history is intended to help resolve the problem posed by the dearth of ideas capable of regulating a society that has surpassed the existing proviso for its own survival, on account of demographic and technological developments. This society may have been split into irreconcilable camps for cultural reasons; but it is more probable that these, chiefly expressed in terms of religious affiliation, should be reflecting economic conditions, rather than endorsing any irreducible incompatibilities. People everywhere tend to have similar goals and it would be reasonable to expect a person to want to adjust to a global environment, since that is the sort of world in which he must find his place.

It is well known that many would disagree with this outline. They make a point of upholding certain cherished cultural values. Some hard line moral imperatives are resilient to compromise, particularly as they are understood by the Muslim militancy. Conceivably, it is the religious leaders who are bound to present an unflexing front regarding the application of principles, to the extent that they should be preaching extremism and holy war (as an alternative to conventional war, which they could not muster, for the time being, due to an, as yet, unbridgeable technological backlog; although nobody can tell whether the gap will be closed sooner than later).

Once the threat of a Muslim conspiracy, worldwide, has taken root -as is the case-, the Muslim presence has added fear to the spontaneous rejection of its deliberate unconformity. It is not past the popular imagination to think of these people as a threat to world peace, failing to note the difference between a political crime, like terrorism, practised by fanatics, and an outright military onslaught, as was carried ought by the Nazis, in Europe, or the Japanese, in the Far East.

As a precaution, it would be sensible to keep track of the demographic expansion of a community that shelters in parochial custom, while it refuses to adapt and it grows in size. This does not amount to proposing that every Muslim deserves to be treated as a dangerous extremist, or even as a “sleeper”, because he looks and dresses differently, as is often unreasonably maintained. But the demographic effect of the presence of a larger number of Muslims might exert an influence similar to the much vaunted informality brought about by proletarianization, as promoted by the American servicemen wherever they were posted, after 1945. The result has been that people everywhere dress as if they were living in the U.S. and local costume is kept, at best, for ceremonial use on holidays. Not to mention the “refinements” of style trends that have done away with class distinctions linked to bourgeois conventionality. Hollywood and the cinema in general may also have contributed to this end; but one might argue that it all started with socially non-descript American soldiers being transported far and wide, because that was when it was first noticed. One can hardly say that this lapse into informality has improved the appearance of the milling city crowds; but the change is mainly on the outside. If, along with the hidden threat of terrorists becoming embedded in a society, the growth of this exotic flower associated with cultural defiance were to take control of the political system, in a country, invasion by means of demographic displacement would have anticipated a war of conquest, while actually making it redundant. There have been numerous precedents of this kind of “wandering” throughout history (and even earlier, before “homo sapiens” was left as the only surviving human type), not the least of them having taken place in Britain during the first millenium A.D., of which perhaps more is known than about most other such instances that took place in Europe, in spite of widespread illiteracy, at the time. Can it be said that the repeated cultural backslides, due to successive invasions that followed upon the withdrawal of the Romans, stood in the way of defining a national character, or that England was left at a disadvantage, in the long run, because it was made vulnerable to the Norman invader? One is inclined to believe that barely a physical or cultural trait remains in today’s population that could be traced farther back than 1066. Beyond that, one would have to move up to the XVII century to evaluate political and social developments that account for the stability that is taken for granted today. If anything, this stability, a lasting tribute to the traumatic overthrow of Charles I, in 1649, stems from the decision to abolish violence as a method to warrant political continuity and also because of permanent involvement with social progress, particularly as from 1945, when the war was won after everything else had been lost - except acquiescence to some kind of rule of law - and the welfare state was established, since now everybody was hungry and poor, in the wasteland that was post war Europe, and not least Britain.

With respect to how the present situation can be addressed (since the law does not provide for an instance in which a large sector of the polity chooses to exclude itself), it may presumably suffice to make up a list of regulations, to put an end to that, and seeing to it that they are enforced. A long way from stimulating bloodshed or recommending mass deportations, one would think.