Thriving with high birth rates
Let’s read Giles Fraser’s Comment is Free piece that inspired Jesus and Mo. It is, predictably, retrograde in the extreme.
This week a doctor from north London was telling me about one of his patients, a lad of 20 who has lived in the borough of Hackney all his life. He was born here and grew up here. And he’s a bright boy – yet he speaks only a few very rudimentary words of English. The language he speaks at home and at school is Yiddish. Some may be appalled by the insularity of the community in which this young man was raised. But I admire it. In particular, I admire the resilience of a community that seeks to maintain its distinctiveness and recognises, quite rightly, that assimilation into the broader culture would mean the gradual dilution, and the eventual extinction, of its own way of life. It is no surprise to me that the ultra orthodox are thriving, with high birth rates and predictions that they will be constitute a majority of the Jewish population within 20 years. They have refused assimilation.
Notice the way he simply assumes, without argument, that “its own way of life” is good – that he doesn’t pause even to consider the possibility that it’s a way of life that is better for some of its members than others, or that it’s one that just plain frankly oppresses most of its members. There are such ways of life, but Giles Fraser ignores that obvious fact.
Then notice his ludicrous equation of “thriving” with a high birth rate and nothing else. What he means is that the ultra orthodox are increasing in number. It’s possible to have a high birth rate without thriving – and indeed for most people the higher the birth rate the less thriving there is.
Then notice his complete refusal to consider that the “lad” of 20 who lives in London but doesn’t speak English might be missing out on something.
It adds immeasurably to the richness and diversity of how life is apprehended that not everyone sees the world in the same way. It is mind-expanding to be challenged by those who commit to another way of life. What a miserably grey one-dimensional place it would be if the dominant model of middle-of-the-road liberal secular capitalism became the only acceptable way of living.
Blah blah blah blah. Easy for him – he’s not the kind of person who would be a lesser being in some of those other ways of life. I’m a woman, and I’m happy to have done without the colorful multi-dimensional life I would have had in a fanatical insular religious community, which is obviously the only kind Fraser is talking about. Hooray for miserably grey one-dimensional liberal secularism! And I suppose even miserably grey one-dimensional liberal secular capitalism, if the capitalism could be a lot more tempered with social concerns.
How does an insular religious community get high birth rates? By preventing women from doing anything other than bear and raise children. What about women who would like to do something else, in addition or instead? Nothing; they don’t have that choice; they don’t get a vote; they are subject to the rule of men. Hey it’s colorful, it’s traditional, it’s not assimilationist!
And Giles Fraser is a putz.
All we need for peace on Earth is a whole bunch of religions and sects, each telling its devotees that they are the Elect, Chosen People, enlightened ones, etc, etc, etc………..And ever onward.
What could possibly go wrong with that?
Not only don’t the women get a choice–as much as possible, they’re kept from understanding that there could even BE a choice to be deprived of. That’s why you don’t teach them English, why you isolate them, why you do everything you can to prevent them from seeing any other sort of life. The rules of these communities are created by cowards, who know/fear that their way of life will pale in comparison to life outside, at least for the majority of their sect.
.”And Giles Fraser is a putz”
Yes, and a patronising putz as well. He’s praising a system of control and oppression, as with any cult, and trying to present it as another triumph of ‘diversity’. Fraser and his fellow useful idiots should really try to live the lifestyles they admire so much, from a distance.
Fraser seems unable to understand that people are individuals and not generic physical manifestations of this or that “culture.” Muslims, for example, are actually people just like him, not factory-shaped Islamic-units.
The second thing to point out is that one can’t really experience the “richness” of diversity without allow it to affect and dilute the supposed “purity” of ones cultural authenticity. This means that the only people who get to benefit from this diversity are us culturally ambiguous unfortunates. Those “authentic” Jews or Muslims shouldn’t get to leave their environments, because what would a zoo be without separate and self-contained exhibits?
It’s worth noting that ‘diversity’ should, perforce, reject the notion of an insular community like this. The whole point of diversity is interaction with others ‘not like’ you, in part so that you can come to common understanding. Isolationism is a rejection of diversity, and so cannot be incorporated into it, any more than you can incorporate ice into fire.
Not to mention that Giles, as a white male, is going to be comfortably in the ruling class of the lifestyle even if he were to adopt it.
Interesting how keeping yourself insular is to enrich your experience…weird! I don’t find my life to be drab and gray, even though I live in a capitalist country in the west, without keeping totally to myself and refusing to learn anything about the other cultures that surround me. I would suspect I have a much richer view of the world, but then, I would think that, wouldn’t I? Because I haven’t locked myself away in that world, so I haven’t had the great benefit of not knowing anything about any other place or people.
If this is what passes for liberal thinking nowadays, we need a new group – not conservative, hell no, but something that recognizes a nuanced view of the world.
Freemage@4
That’s one definition of ‘diversity’ however I doubt that it would be accepted by many diversity advocates. Some would prefer the Ottoman style diversity of segregated communities where theocrats and their toxic ideologies rule. We don’t have a common currency when we use the coin, ‘diversity’.
Of course diversity is presented as an imperative for Western societies, while being rejected in most of the rest of the world.
iknklast, @6
“If this is what passes for liberal thinking nowadays”
Unfortunately that appears to be the situation, cultural relativism has been stretched to absurdity. Members of the “Left” are either too arrogant or simply too wilfully blind, to admit that they’ve painted themselves into a corner. It’s not a new development is it? Earlier generations of ‘progressives’ refused to acknowledge the horrors of both the Stalinist and Maost regimes.
How nice for Mr. Fraser that the Western world contains such diversity as allows him to play tourist on the quaint people wearing exotic clothes and speaking some incomprehensible dialect. Oh, look! The Orthodox Jewish ghetto! Two streets over, the Old Order Mennonites with their horse carriages! Over here, our First Nations community in their longhouses and buckskins! And if you’ll just step this way, we have for your viewing pleasure (imported at great expense!), our Wahabi Islam exhibit…..
Gods, you’d think these people were all just volunteers in a historical re-enactment village or something.