Societal harmony matters. It's why universal healthcare exists. It's why welfare exists. It's why affirmative action exists. Why countries spend money integrating immigrants. Everything that helps out poorer people is done with societal harmony in mind, these programs aren't 'fair' to the middle class that largely pays for them. But they reduce crime and increase social cohesion.
Countries exist that have dozens of languages and tribes. They usually have endless social problems, unrest, civil wars and often break up. Homogenous societies (culturally) almost always work better. It's why the US creation myth exists, ditto for Canada, it's why France and Germany try to teach their language to newcomers, etc...
Oh yeah, the history of the Swiss in the context of Europe is just non-stop insanity and violence. If only they could aspire to be more monocultural and peaceful, like their neighbors, the Germans...
> Oh yeah, the history of the Swiss in the context of Europe is just non-stop insanity and violence. If only they could aspire to be more monocultural and peaceful, like their neighbors, the Germans...
The Swiss, and their cantons, have almost un-heard-of amount political power and freedom. There is direct democracy where state matters are directly voted by the people. Also the Swiss cantons are sovereign don't have to follow federal law!
There is no need to rebel, if you can do whatever you want.
In some sense, the Swiss works more like a collection of tribes than a country.
What is clear from the history of the 20th century is that appeals to nationalism and uniformity of culture, broadly constructed, drive more violence and conflict than they prevent. Organizing around their ideology led to two world wars, bloodshed and destruction at a previously unforeseen scale.
Arguably, the postwar peace was only restored by a return to an older form of sovereignty: that as semi-autonomous subjects of a multicultural empire (in this case that of the US and USSR). These have long standing historical precedents for their durability (e.g. the Roman and Ottoman empires).
Also, all those powers also attempted to spread their culture, language and religion. Hence Latin based languages, Arabic being spread as far as it has, Russian being spoke all over the former USSR, English being the new lingua franca.
You state this as if it's a fact, but it simply isn't. There's lots of monocultural nations that don't have any violence problems whatsoever: Scandinavian nations come to mind immediately.
Moreover, the "golden" days of the Cold War were pretty awful for a lot of people. The US and USSR didn't go to war directly, but instead conducted a bunch of proxy wars: Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea, etc. The 20th century after WWII was full of violence, it was just kept away from the two imperial powers mostly. Instead they instigated violence in other places to pursue their "interests", such as when the USA overthrew the democratically-elected government in Iran and installed a brutal dictator.
As for stability, I would argue that stability is something we've never had anywhere, not long-term. I don't think you can point to anything that's been continuously stable for a long time, so I would argue that instability is the norm. Trying to keep a society stable is like trying to balance on a beach ball: you can do it for a little while, but eventually you're going to fall.
If language isn't the thing that matters for national harmony, then this is at best a red herring and at worst a fig leaf.
Culture is language + religion + food + social norms + ideology and probably other things. Not everything needs to be the same, but if too many are in conflict, social problems arise.
I feel like the more this is being explained to me the more unsavory it seems.
But evidence of this is all around the world. Hindu mobs attacks butchers who sell beef in India, there's tons of contention over the rise of halal butcher shops and Muslim demands for halal options in the west, or even vegans that protest butcher shops for a non-religious example.
For religion itself, tons of wars have been started over it, that's easy.
As for ideology, look at the US and how fractured it is because of politics today. Or the historic communist revolutions. Or political violence in South and Central America. Both left-wing and right-wing violence against the other side are a thing.
People shouldn't care about these things, but they do, it's a thing.
Not getting it. Starting to lean towards the "fig leaf" theory.
But it's pretty obvious that tribalism isn't dead. And what makes a tribe? And of course, we're trying to kill tribalism by simply making a more inclusive, bigger tribe. So what are the commonalities we'll have as part of that bigger tribe?
When borders don't exist anymore, racial discrimination doesn't exist, religion is dead, it won't be because we simply killed them. It'll be because we created a new ideology to supercede it.
The OP on this thread said they would be irritated by (and I'm paraphrasing) someone coming in who spoke a different language. I am aware that such a thing exists, but wanted an answer to why. What you're addressing is the unasked first question, does such hostility exist?
I got confused because it appeared earlier in the thread that you were trying to justify that viewpoint on its own consequence. But now it seems like you were just steelmanning, which honestly isn't that useful to me on questions that are basically "how does your worldview work?".
No historian worth their salt would be foolish enough to compare the circumstances of individual European countries with that of their former colonial subjects, nor things like the shifting borders and variations of thousands of years of Chinese history. Strife in China and India isn’t even independent from the influence of “homogenous“ countries in Europe!
Do you think a Japanese person who doesn’t speak English could build a successful company in the US without the help of someone who speaks English? It would be impossible.
A few years ago I worked with a Taiwanese company and we had to use translators because some of their engineers didn't speak English (and I don't speak Chinese). The person translating was also an engineer which helped massively as she understood what we were talking about and could sometimes anticipate our questions and "fluidify" the discussion but it was still a huge annoyance, it made every interaction more painful than it needed to be, you often wondered if they really understood what you meant etc... I can't really imagine myself working full time in such an arrangement.
I now live in Portugal and there's a massive American and French community in Lisbon. Many of them don't bother learning Portuguese and just interact with everybody in English. As such Portuguese people looking to work in Lisbon pretty much have to speak English. Actually you can now find restaurants where the waiter speaks English but not Portuguese (or at least not fluently). You can encounter similar situations all around the world where there's a huge foreign community. That can be fairly irritating for locals who end up feeling that they're the ones living in a foreign country...
Returning to the first point, we've had a lot of non-english-speaking immigrants over the years and no plausible threat to the primacy of English in the US. Shouldn't that be reason to think "maybe the thing I fear won't happen"?
For Portuguese people, perhaps it is. Who really wants to feel like a foreigner in their own country (esp. when that country is as small as Portugal)?
I know I'd be really irritated if I tried going to local restaurants around me and all the servers there only spoke Spanish. How would you feel about that?
>Returning to the first point, we've had a lot of non-english-speaking immigrants over the years and no plausible threat to the primacy of English in the US.
Yes, but that's because most of them either learned the dominant local language (English), or were not present in sufficient numbers to cause a situation like above. Sure, some formed little enclaves here and there, but that's a little different from what the OP described. And their kids grew up speaking English and fit into the new society. Finally, America is a really huge country, much larger than Portugal, and has historically accepted immigrants from many different places, so English (already being in place as the dominant language) was naturally the language everyone would learn so they could survive here. Given how huge English is now as a worldwide "lingua franca", I don't think you can compare America's history with what other non-English-speaking countries are experiencing today.
And the second part feels is framed as disagreeing with my point, but actually seems to support it: we've dealt with this issue before, the fear was the same, and the feared thing didn't happen. Shouldn't that mean we should dial down the fear this time around?
Who's "we", and where did I say "we" should fear this? I just pointed out the people of Portugal might not like this, nor might people in other places that might be having similar issues. If you're talking about the US, then no, that's not a well-founded fear at all.
>But at a glance Lisbon seems to be doing pretty well for itself-- certainly better than lots of places in the US.
Does that matter to the Portuguese? This idea that economic well-being (which frequently doesn't "trickle down" that much) trumps everything is exactly how we got Brexit and Trump.
>Besides your sense that such cultural changes are bad, what makes them bad? Why, objectively, should they be feared?
Well, I'd say electing people like Trump is demonstrably bad, and this is what happens when you simply ignore cultural changes. You end up with people voting for right-wing politicians, so we're seeing this in the US, the UK, and many other European nations.
>we've dealt with this issue before, the fear was the same, and the feared thing didn't happen.
Again, who's "we"? The US is not the world, and other countries are not like the US. You can't apply the US's experience with immigration to countries like Portugal; they have extremely different cultures and histories. Try going to Portugal and telling everyone there "you need to accept mass immigration and you all need to stop speaking Portuguese and switch to English", and see how friendly people are to you.
"We" in this case is shorthand for you and I. It seems you resent that association, so I apologize for extending it.
Regarding economics, I didn't say economic harm. I was simply asking what the actual harm is. Setting aside the question of whether something that can't be measured exists, let's try for an easier bar: can a harm that can't even be articulated exist?
Regarding Trump and Brexit, my views there are not germane to this conversation-- but since you asked and will undoubtedly try to force the issue, I'll state that I oppose both.
On the topic of telling the Portuguese to start speaking English-- if you think that was where I was heading here you're way off the mark and I don't think that's my fault.
It seems that for many people, loss of local culture and language is something they perceive as "harm", and they're resisting it. You can't objectively say whether this is harm or not, because most cultural things are purely subjective, so it's all a matter of perspective.
So if people in Portugal are worried their local culture and language are going to be bulldozed by outsiders, when a bunch of non-Portuguese speakers are moving in and restaurants are only operating in English as a result, I can't say they're wrong to feel that way. Personally, I think it's better to have more cosmopolitanism, but then again as an American I do know what it's like to live on a continent where there's a single dominant language and a huge amount of uniformity to everything, and it's really not that great. You can wander around in Florida, Maine, and Arizona, and everyone still speaks the same language, has basically the same culture, and all the stores and restaurants are mostly the same too, even owned by the same companies. Walmart isn't different between Oregon and Tennessee; it's pretty horrible in any state. The same fast-food chains serve the same garbage food wherever you go.
>On the topic of telling the Portuguese to start speaking English-- if you think that was where I was heading here you're way off the mark and I don't think that's my fault.
It's the natural end-state of the trend that you're asking about the harm of. If tons of English speakers move to Portugal, and all the service businesses eventually switch over to using English and not Portuguese, then it's exactly like I said: you're effectively telling the Portuguese to start speaking English, because they're not going to be able to survive in their own country any more if they don't, if things were to go that way.
>Returning to the first point, we've had a lot of non-english-speaking immigrants over the years and no plausible threat to the primacy of English in the US.
I want to start by saying that I'm very much an "open-border" kind of person so I don't really have a huge problem with immigration and cultural "melting pots" but as far as I know there are significant tensions in some southern American states when it comes to immigration from hispanophone countries. According to Wikipedia there are 50 million Spanish speakers in the USA and only about half of them declare speaking English "very well". There also appear to be large regions near the border when Spanish is a majority language. Again, I don't necessarily see that as a bad thing, but it's certainly significant.
Beyond that America has a huge advantage in that game: English is the de-facto international language nowadays. When the more educated Syrian refugees are interviewed on the German or French TV they generally speak... English, not French or German. I've never set foot in the USA, I must have spent a grand total of one month in the UK and yet like many Europeans I speak English fluently. Japanese and Portuguese don't quite have that aura...
I think a lot of people in countries like the US get worked up when people speak a language they don't understand because they feel excluded. And somehow it's vaguely threatening to have people talking and you are specifically cut out of the conversation.
Because conversation is how relationships form.
2. I'm still not sure why I should be upset about that.
Because if the foreigner has success, they may draw in other people who don't speak your language to do the same, and now the dominance of your culture is contested.
Not that I agree but that's what people would say.
Let’s consider: what is the value to a nation of importing immigrants?
First, they offer different perspectives, which is highly valuable in business.
Second, they introduce new customs, food, ideas, etc which help others in the community.
Etc, etc, etc.
All of this is lost if there is a strong language barrier between the existing culture and the immigrant. The immigrant who does not integrate, at least partially, brings little value to the broader community, though the community may bring value to him or her.
It seems to me that speaking a language is a skill. I know from my own experience trying to learn a second language that it isn't an easy skill for many people to acquire. Why should I be more irritated that someone doesn't speak English than that they, say, can't make a cabinet or can't write Java, or any other mildly demanding skill?
I get the argument that someone who doesn't speak your language doesn't participate fully in your culture either, but I guess I'm still not sure why I should be upset about that. Seems like something for them to be worried about.
Sorry if I'm making an argument here, but I hear this quite a bit and it doesn't make sense to me.