As I’ve mentioned before my Schuler ancestors came from Switzerland. I’m five generations removed from Switzerland. An ancestor of mine drafted the Federal Charter of 1291, the constitutional founding document of the Old Swiss Conferation. That undoubtedly explains why I follow Swiss news more closely than most people do.
Switzerland recently voted in referendum to ban the wearing of face coverings in public. The target of the ban was clear from the advertising supporting the referendum: burqas. Medical masks are explicitly exempted from the ban. In a piece in the Wall Street Journal Tunku Varadarajan quotes a Swiss Muslim woman, a prominent supporter of the ban:
Ms. Manea is quick to dismiss the argument that the ban curbs freedom. You can’t separate the burqa and niqab from their “religious and political contexts†and turn this into “a simple question of ‘choice.’ †The burqa didn’t “come out of nowhere†and Muslim women haven’t “decided to embrace it on a whim.†Many Western feminists, she says, tend to “neutralize the context, as if it is of no consequence.†She urges those who are squeamish about the ban to ask which ideology teaches women to cover themselves completely. What are its theological features? What does it say about women?
The burqa is “a symbol,†she says. When you see it in a Western society, “it indicates that a neofundamentalist Islam is at work.†Women, according to this worldview, are a “source of evil, to be covered from head to toe to protect men from seduction. They are perpetual minors, to be controlled by their male guardian.â€
In her view, the burqa is the “face†of Islamist separatism in Western societies. It represents a form of Islam that “leads to the secession of Muslim minorities†into closed enclaves, paving the ground for radicalizing “disoriented youth.†So when we see women in burqas in the West, Ms. Manea warns, “think of the ideology they embody. It is not choice we should look at in this discussion,†but the consequences of leaving the dangers unaddressed.
This is no minor matter for the Swiss. It goes to the very heart of their society. To the best of my knowledge Switzerland is the largest (and oldest) direct democracy in the world. The only that can be preserved is that Switzerland is at base a consensus-based society. It’s also one of the most Catholic countries in Europe. It’s unclear to me how Switzerland can simultaneously maintain its consensus but become multicultural. I think that’s an issue the Swiss are struggling with.
This is a tough one but I think that I probably side with the decision. You need to play by their rules and if not you can leave. For a culture that overall prizes conformity it kind of makes sense. In cultures where freedom, free speech, etc are more valued it would be the wrong decision. That said, I would bet it wont be practiced consistently. Exceptions will be made for other groups but not for out groups.
Steve
Yep.
I’m not so sure. As a people the Swiss are very highly programmed. It’s hard for Americans to imagine.
Up until the 60’s, the US was a low-diversity country: 85% white, 12% black, plus traces of others. The blacks were marginalized and segregated. There were few Hispanics other than in the Southwest. The big issue was whether immigrant Southern European Catholics would assimilate to the WASP norm. They did, to the dismay of the Popes. (Jews didn’t.)
We are now rapidly transitioning into a highly diverse state (NOT nation). As should be obvious from their meanings, diversity and consensus are antonyms. Robert Putnam showed, in a large-scale study involving some 30,000 people, that diversity destroyed community. Diversity destroys consensus, liberty, cooperation, voluntarism, even voting.
Every truly diverse state, most of them empires, has a top down authoritarian government. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, Tsarist Russian are good historical examples, and Israel (if you are an Arab) is a good modern example. The authoritarian, often dictatorial, government is needed to maintain the peace and preserve the state, which otherwise would disintegrate.
We, too, are evolving into an authoritarian state, and our traditional liberties, which are those of the old non-diverse WASP nation, will disappear.
As Chateau Heartiste said,
“Diversity + Proximity = War”
(Chateau Heartiste, James C. Weidmann, aka Roissy in D.C.)
An exaggeration, born of lumping people of mostly European descent into the single category of “white”. Culturally and genetically there’s just about as much difference between a Greek and a Swede as there is between a person of sub-Saharan African descent and an Egyptian, or between a Greek and an Egyptian.
Papal complaints that American Catholics actually practice Americanism rather than Catholicism persist. Most Jews did in fact assimilate. Hasidic Jews did not. In 1960 Hasidim constituted about 1% of Jews in the U. S. (<50,000). Now they comprise about 8% of U. S. Jews.
Every group that has immigrated to the U. S. has had some proportion that didn’t assimilate to “WASP norms”. The Pennsylvania Dutch and Iowa Amish are notable examples. When I was a kid there were areas in Illinois in which German, French, or Chinese was the dominant language despite immigration having taken place a century or more before. Heck, there was a neighborhood in St. Louis in which Spanish was the dominant language—not spoken by Mexicans but by people of Spanish descent who had migrated to St. Louis when the Louisiana Territory was Spanish colony, nearly 200 years before. But the numbers of these unassimilated minorities have always been quite small.
Nowadays there are multiple factors that are retarding or even stopping assimilation including mass immigration from Mexico and modern communications.