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Please click to the next article if politics tend to annoy you. :- ) - Dr. D
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Seems to me that the European Union is something we ought to be able to discuss in a dispassionate, stimulating and enjoyable way. (You've said you have strong feelings about it, Matty; please be careful to be respectful of globalists on SSI.)
There are very strong arguments in favor of globalism. But there are also strong arguments in favor of the idea that the world should have nations, should have diverse homes for diverse populations, the same way that you and I live in different houses and neighborhoods on a cellular level. Personally I haven't sorted these arguments out well enough to take a firm position.
I lean towards Nationalism, but that's part of the reason we're posting this. Perhaps there is logic and information that, um, trumps my own first impressions.
James today said,
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All the xenophobia in the news (Trump, Brexit) made we wonder about the Man on the Train & whether the locals at the scene of the crimes were more likely to blame a stranger or to blame someone local, and why. As you've often written, the mind always wants an explanation or narrative, and I can see competing narratives - "Fred Jones never like the victim - must have been him." vs. "Nobody from our town could have done this - only a stranger." Wondering how strong you think the pull of each of those narratives was at the time. If the local explanation was stronger maybe it was because violence & death was more a part of life then, so it was easier to imagine someone local having committed the crime? Although, it seems it would have been tempting for locals to blame outsiders (as in politics now). Did the mobility and anonymity of the trains lead to an increased fear of strangers at all, or was that not something people thought about at the time? Sorry for unfocused question!
Asked by: marbus1
Answered: 6/27/2016
Well, what you SHOULD be sorry for is blaming the Brexit vote on xenophobia. That's not true, and, worse than simply not true, it is ignorant and elitist. It is explaining other people's views in terms of your own biases, rather than making a real effort to understand how other people see the issue. I would have voted to leave the European union, and I am certainly not afraid of whatever outsiders may be there; heck, they're all foreigners to me. I hate Trump as much as you do, so I'll let that one slide. . . .
The greater issue is actually fairly central to the book, and there is a clear answer to it. People much, much, much prefer to believe that a crime was committed by a local person, rather than that they have been victimized by a random, unknown stranger. This actually comes up again and again in the book. In the case of a murder in Houston Heights, Texas (now a part of Houston, but at that time a separate development separated from Houston by a mile or so of farmland). . .in that case the sheriff announced within days of the crime that the only realistic conclusion was that the crime had been committed by "a maniac who had satisfied his blood lust and then departed via the railroad track", apologies for putting quotation marks around what may be an inexact quotation; it's from memory. Anyway, his initial surmise was precisely true: the crime HAD been committed by a maniac who left town before dawn, three days before the murders were discovered. The Man from the Train has certain "signature" behaviors, and the crime scene has so many of those signatures that there is no doubt that it is him.
Yet having "seen" this truth, the sheriff and the prosecutors then spent three years trying to frame and prosecute a young man who could not possibly be more obviously innocent, and two or three equally innocent co-conspirators. This actually happens repeatedly in the book, although not always so starkly: that the sheriff immediately understands what has happened, but then goes into denial about it, and tries to prosecute a local person for a crime which he has already stated publicly was probably committed by a stranger just passing through. Their job is to solve the crime. It is so difficult for them to ACCEPT that they can't solve the crime that they will latch on to obviously baseless allegations, rather than coming to terms with the fact that they are just not going to solve it.
Villisca, Iowa, is the most famous example of this; the crime was fairly obviously committed by an outsider just passing through, but the town engaged in an absolutely amazing five-year battle over the effort to pin the crime on a local businessman. The battle ripped the town apart, to a remarkable extent; I spent about three chapters in the book on that story, which I thought had never been told the way it deserved to be told.
But my book has a biased view of these cases, of course, because I am writing about murders which actually WERE committed by an outsider; thus, if the local prosecutors get hung up on the effort to prosecute a local, I view that as prejudice. But in another Iowa case. . . .I think I wrote about this one here, years ago. . . a family named "Hardy" was murdered on a farm near Marshalltown. That murder probably was NOT committed by The Man from Train. I didn't have a full understanding of that when I wrote the article here, but eventually, years after writing that article, I concluded that that crime most probably was NOT committed by "my" murderer, although I am not certain that it wasn't.
But the local sheriff there convinced himself that the surviving member of the family, a young man who was going to be married a few days later, had committed the crime. It is TOTALLY irrational; there isn't ANY reason to believe that he committed the crime. But people still write about that crime today, in the 21st century, and people STILL will try to blame the crime on this obviously innocent young man, rather than accept that the family was murdered by some outsider. It comes up in almost every case in the book; the local people just will not accept that the crime was committed by a person passing through town, even when that is the only rational conclusion.
/James
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Dr. D Sez
One thing that occurs to me in favor of Nationalism is the idea that if you have ten different strong nations in the world, then when any one Hitler-style dictator arises, the other nine can oppose him. I don't know what the term for it is, but this "local autonomy" is a key theme in my own Christian "denomination." We don't have a pyramid authority structure with a tower in Chicago or New York; each local group makes its own decisions, and then if one city goes sour, the others are unaffected. There is a resilience gained by this. Which isn't to say it's the end of the discussion.
Another paradigm I favor is the benefit of having church leaders who sit in the same pews as I do, who know me and understand me. James brought this up in his answer to flyingfish:
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Yes, bureaucrats who are closer to you and more accessible to you are much preferable to bureaucrats who are further away and harder to talk to--but you might note that this decision was not made by bureaucrats, but by the people. /James
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I don't know that human rights causes are weakened by Nationalism. It goes to the whole problem of whether a Central Government should primarily take care of the weak, or whether we as people should evolve to care about the weak on an individual level. It's another very complex problem within the very complex problem.
Which isn't to say the U.S. Congress shouldn't vote big dollars to human rights issues, also. It should, and it does.
Perhaps some Trump voters are cold and uncaring about Syrian refugees. Personally, I don't know anybody who fits in this category. Do you? What is your real-life experience with this? The people I know who vote Trump, are simply people who admire the Founding Fathers, admire traditional American values, who resist the idea of America disappearing into a global assimiliation that is unlikely to have values consistent with George Washington's.
That might be a mistaken view of the world, but at least we can argue against the other side's position after we gain a clear understanding of their position.
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In the mainstream media, 90% of the time I see the anti-Brexit arguments made on an economic basis (if not even in "xenophobic" assumptions as the one above). That's fine, but the vote in Britain seems to have been affected much more by the Common Man's concern for maintaining England's identity as a culture.
They say there are large sections of London where you can no longer even hear English spoken. That's fine, if that's what society agrees on, but "respecting the vote" should also respect that this situation should be subject to the will of the people.
It seems that most English people assumed that the immigrants would mostly assimilate, and when they didn't, resistance to the EU gathered momentum.
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Regarding James' second paragraph: after the Orlando shooting, some Americans wished to view the problem as an interior issue with American gun control, while others wished to see it as an external problem with radical Islamic terrorism. As James points out, it can be much less scary to view a problem as originating at home.
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The best arguments in favor of Globalism, as I see them, are economic. These arguments are often quite convincing in a vacuum. Frictionless commerce? Hey, I'm an eBay PowerSeller. Nobody gets the economic power of frictionless commerce better than an eBayer gets it.
But economic arguments also hit me as a bit of a misdirection. Few Americans vote this issue based on the economics of it; they're thinking about the issue of cultural identity. So why not be open and direct about this aspect of the issue?
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Culturally and socially ... as an outsider, I understand President Obama to have a grand vision of a world that is not dissimilar to Star Trek Next Generation, where humanistic education and technology provide a type of eutopia with absolutely no one left behind. And with everyone 'educated' into common humanistic values. A segment of Globalists, such as most the New York Times' writers, it seems, envision an eventual state in which religion itself has been eradicated through advancement of knowledge.
That's admirable in many ways, if it's an accurate understanding of the position, but I have my own questions whether it's feasible. Lot of bad guys exist, and seems to me they always will. And eventual eradication of religion depends on a rather large assumption about the cosmos. :- )
But, like we said, there are more moderate globalists who have little intent of eradicating religion, free speech, or diversity of thought; they're thinking in terms of frictionless commerce and in terms of unity through commonality.
If a New World Order had a constitution with a First Amendment, that said No, No, No, there will be absolute freedom of religion and speech, then in my mind it would be a completely open question as to whether Globalism or Nationalism is the future of the world. That ain't the way it turned out in China, but maybe it would turn out that way in the NWO.
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Help me out here,
Jeff
