| | Are you arguing that the problem in Ireland is that they didn't have enough languages and religions?
No, I'm saying that the problem in Ireland was a poorly diversified food system based primarily on a single starch, and with none of the massive diversity of potato strains found in the South American region where potatoes originated, making for a near-monoculture susceptible to collapse when a disease cracked the code for the potatoes and wiped out crop after crop.
I wasn't directly talking about languages and religions there, I was talking about the danger of having a monoculture of ANYTHING, be it potatoes or religions or culture or ethnicities.
My point was to rebut Ann Coulter's idiotic statement that the particular type of diversity she was talking about was always and invariably bad, throughout history, without exception. Rather than just address that single obvious fallacy, readily disproven (the U.S., for example), I generalized and said that diversity is usually a good thing.
And it is. The richest U.S. states, with the highest GDP per capita, are largely the states with a diverse array of ethnicities and cultures and everything else. This is no accident. If you have a bunch of different people with widely different backgrounds looking at a problem from a wide array of POVs, you're more likely to get someone who discerns an optimal, or at least better, solution.
Yes, there are some horrendously evil Muslims out there. But we would be worse off if we could somehow evict each and every Muslim from the U.S. -- or every Jew -- or every Mormon -- or every Catholic -- or ...
I was born to a Protestant mother and an agnostic father, I was a Mormon for a while and am now an agnostic, and I married a Catholic, and so I take it kind of personally when someone argues that a diversity of religions is bad for America. It doesn't comport well with the objective reality that I have observed.
Yes, some places like Ireland have had some huge problems touched off by religious differences, but the problem with radical fundy Muslims is that they are incredibly in favor of the sort of religious monoculture that Coulter advocates. They want the entire world converted to their precise strain of Islam, and are willing to kill anyone who stands in their way of imposing that upon us.
And that sort of monoculture religious thinking, whether by fundies like radical Muslims or fundies like Coulter, is precisely what the First Amendment's guarantee of religious freedom is meant to guard against.
|
|
