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I finally read the infamous Elizabeth Moon citizenship post
Some reactions:
...the world is not their bowl of cherries, but everyone's bowl of cherries, that they owe something to the society that nurtured them...
Personally, I'd have used the word "community" rather than "society"; it's not clear to me that "society" nurtures much of anyone these days. But I understand her point to be that "citizenship" is the foundation of the social cohesion on which communities, states, and empires are founded, and without which they dissolve. And I cannot disagree with that.
Had the signers of the Declaration been as wedded to personal liberty as the right wing today, there would have been no successful Revolution.
Here I very much disagree, for I do not believe right-wing politicians give a fig for personal liberty; theirs is a thinly cloaked bid for power, and those of their followers who think they are defending anyone's freedom are deluding themselves, unless it is the freedom of the rich to get richer at everyone else's expense.
They were familiar with, and based their concept of citizenship on, ancient understanding of citizenship--that courage/fortitude, integrity, temperance, sound judgment were all desirable virtues which, if held by all citizens, would knit together a culture otherwise tolerant of diversity. They knew enough of human nature to know that no nation had yet achieved such a citizenry--that it was unlikely to exist in future even with the best possibilities--but they knew it was worth trying for.
I doubt anyone in eighteenth century America could have imagined the degree of diversity we have today, nor a world made as small as the technologies of communication and transportation have made ours. I suspect the founders had no inkling of a future society as complex and diverse as ours, but thought rather that if one didn't like one's neighbors and their strange ideas, one would always be able to move another fifty miles into the woods and carve out a new homestead.
Yes, a large and complex society needs a more complex social and financial structure--but a structure that increases the gap between rich and poor--that ignores or devalues the contributions of the poor and middle-class--is a society that creates bad citizens by its very structure.
As a socialist who believes that such a gap is a necessary consequence of unbridled capitalism, I can only applaud that statement.
We have always had trouble with immigrants (the native peoples had the most troubles with immigrants!) Every new group that landed on the shore was greeted with distrust (and often responded badly) until it showed that it was willing and able to contribute something those already here wanted.
That's not quite accurate. Immigrants with unfamiliar cultural elements have always been feared, distrusted, and/or resented; succeeding generations, having grown up more familiar with the newcomers and their cultures, have been less inclined to take issue with them. Rarely have any immigrants come to America unwilling to do their part; on the contrary, it is almost always the opportunity to work that draws them here.
Public schooling was viewed as a way to educate immigrant children into the existing American culture--to break down their "native" culture and avoid the kind of culture clashes (between religions and national origins) people brought with them from the old country. Refusal to send children to public schools was once considered a refusal of the duties of citizenship (this changed in the '60s/'70s, with the white flight from public schools as an attempt was made to create racial balance.)
Forced busing in the name of racial balance was probably the biggest mistake of the liberal era; it alienated a lot of people from the idea of public education. In some communities public schools have become a dumping ground for kids too poor to afford private schools, and I've heard some people on the right actually advocating the abolition of public education.
Groups that self-isolate, that determinedly distinguish themselves by location, by language, by dress, will not be accepted as readily as those that plunge into the mainstream.
There have always been such groups in America: Amish, Mennonites, Mormons, some Jewish communities -- yet no one can argue today that they should be forced to conform to "the mainstream", whatever that is.
A group must grasp that if its non-immigrant members somewhere else are causing people a lot of grief (hijacking planes and cruise ships, blowing up embassies, etc.) it is going to have a harder row to hoe for awhile...
I have a lot of problems with that; to begin with, the PLO and al-Qaida have little in common, and many Palestinians aren't even Muslims. Does Ms. Moon blame the Boston Irish or the Catholic Church for terrorist acts committed by the IRA?
When an Islamic group decided to build a memorial center at/near the site of the 9/11 attack, they should have been able to predict that this would upset a lot of people.
Why should it, unless political opportunists and media bosses decide to exploit it for their own purposes? And why, given Ms. Moon's definitions of good and bad citizenship, does she not point the finger of blame at these people, and not at the Muslims, who are only doing what churches and synagogues have done from time immemorial.
but to use that site to proselytize for the religion that lies behind so many attacks on the innocent (I cannot forget the Jewish man in a wheelchair pushed over the side of the ship to drown, or Maj. Nadal's attack on soldiers at Fort Hood) was bound to raise a stink.
Good God, woman, is every crime ever committed by a Muslim to be the fault of the religion as a whole? Will you then blame the Catholic Church for the acts of Mussolini or Franco, or the Methodists for Bush's invasion of Iraq?
Muslims fail to recognize how much forbearance they've had. Schools in my area held consciousness-raising sessions for kids about not teasing children in Muslim-defined clothing...but not about not teasing Jewish children or racial minorities. More law enforcement was dedicated to protecting mosques than synagogues--and synagogues are still targeted for vandalism.
I find these words very chilling; they sound like something Goebbels might have said.
It sponsored a talk by a Muslim from a local mosque--but the talk was all about how wonderful Islam was--totally ignoring the historical roots of Islamic violence.
It is a common practice in any community to invoke religion in support of communal acts of violence. History does not show Muslim communities to differ much from communities of other faiths in this regard, so Ms. Moon is off target here.
...excusing the building of a church on the site of a mosque in Cordoba after the Reconquista by reminding them of the mosque built on the site of an important early Christian church in Antioch
Ms. Moon has her facts wrong. The mosque in Cordoba was forcibly converted into a church, much as the Church of Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia) in Istanbul was later converted to a mosque, and more recently to a museum. No one in New York is forcibly appropriating anyone's sacred space; this is all a tempest in a tea(party)-pot.
The same with other points of Islam that I find appalling (especially as a free woman) and totally against those basic principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution...
Those points of view are not too far different from those of some conservative Christians and Jews. Here I would argue that the denigration and oppression of women is a likely consequence of any too literal interpretation of ancient scribblings, whatever their source. Women in classical times had roles prescribed to them that most rational members of modern Western society would find unjust and obnoxious.
I would recommend Ms. Moon study Islam and its rich and varied history, as I have, before shooting her mouth off about it, lest she be dismissed as yet another dupe of the media and those who manipulate it.
...the world is not their bowl of cherries, but everyone's bowl of cherries, that they owe something to the society that nurtured them...
Personally, I'd have used the word "community" rather than "society"; it's not clear to me that "society" nurtures much of anyone these days. But I understand her point to be that "citizenship" is the foundation of the social cohesion on which communities, states, and empires are founded, and without which they dissolve. And I cannot disagree with that.
Had the signers of the Declaration been as wedded to personal liberty as the right wing today, there would have been no successful Revolution.
Here I very much disagree, for I do not believe right-wing politicians give a fig for personal liberty; theirs is a thinly cloaked bid for power, and those of their followers who think they are defending anyone's freedom are deluding themselves, unless it is the freedom of the rich to get richer at everyone else's expense.
They were familiar with, and based their concept of citizenship on, ancient understanding of citizenship--that courage/fortitude, integrity, temperance, sound judgment were all desirable virtues which, if held by all citizens, would knit together a culture otherwise tolerant of diversity. They knew enough of human nature to know that no nation had yet achieved such a citizenry--that it was unlikely to exist in future even with the best possibilities--but they knew it was worth trying for.
I doubt anyone in eighteenth century America could have imagined the degree of diversity we have today, nor a world made as small as the technologies of communication and transportation have made ours. I suspect the founders had no inkling of a future society as complex and diverse as ours, but thought rather that if one didn't like one's neighbors and their strange ideas, one would always be able to move another fifty miles into the woods and carve out a new homestead.
Yes, a large and complex society needs a more complex social and financial structure--but a structure that increases the gap between rich and poor--that ignores or devalues the contributions of the poor and middle-class--is a society that creates bad citizens by its very structure.
As a socialist who believes that such a gap is a necessary consequence of unbridled capitalism, I can only applaud that statement.
We have always had trouble with immigrants (the native peoples had the most troubles with immigrants!) Every new group that landed on the shore was greeted with distrust (and often responded badly) until it showed that it was willing and able to contribute something those already here wanted.
That's not quite accurate. Immigrants with unfamiliar cultural elements have always been feared, distrusted, and/or resented; succeeding generations, having grown up more familiar with the newcomers and their cultures, have been less inclined to take issue with them. Rarely have any immigrants come to America unwilling to do their part; on the contrary, it is almost always the opportunity to work that draws them here.
Public schooling was viewed as a way to educate immigrant children into the existing American culture--to break down their "native" culture and avoid the kind of culture clashes (between religions and national origins) people brought with them from the old country. Refusal to send children to public schools was once considered a refusal of the duties of citizenship (this changed in the '60s/'70s, with the white flight from public schools as an attempt was made to create racial balance.)
Forced busing in the name of racial balance was probably the biggest mistake of the liberal era; it alienated a lot of people from the idea of public education. In some communities public schools have become a dumping ground for kids too poor to afford private schools, and I've heard some people on the right actually advocating the abolition of public education.
Groups that self-isolate, that determinedly distinguish themselves by location, by language, by dress, will not be accepted as readily as those that plunge into the mainstream.
There have always been such groups in America: Amish, Mennonites, Mormons, some Jewish communities -- yet no one can argue today that they should be forced to conform to "the mainstream", whatever that is.
A group must grasp that if its non-immigrant members somewhere else are causing people a lot of grief (hijacking planes and cruise ships, blowing up embassies, etc.) it is going to have a harder row to hoe for awhile...
I have a lot of problems with that; to begin with, the PLO and al-Qaida have little in common, and many Palestinians aren't even Muslims. Does Ms. Moon blame the Boston Irish or the Catholic Church for terrorist acts committed by the IRA?
When an Islamic group decided to build a memorial center at/near the site of the 9/11 attack, they should have been able to predict that this would upset a lot of people.
Why should it, unless political opportunists and media bosses decide to exploit it for their own purposes? And why, given Ms. Moon's definitions of good and bad citizenship, does she not point the finger of blame at these people, and not at the Muslims, who are only doing what churches and synagogues have done from time immemorial.
but to use that site to proselytize for the religion that lies behind so many attacks on the innocent (I cannot forget the Jewish man in a wheelchair pushed over the side of the ship to drown, or Maj. Nadal's attack on soldiers at Fort Hood) was bound to raise a stink.
Good God, woman, is every crime ever committed by a Muslim to be the fault of the religion as a whole? Will you then blame the Catholic Church for the acts of Mussolini or Franco, or the Methodists for Bush's invasion of Iraq?
Muslims fail to recognize how much forbearance they've had. Schools in my area held consciousness-raising sessions for kids about not teasing children in Muslim-defined clothing...but not about not teasing Jewish children or racial minorities. More law enforcement was dedicated to protecting mosques than synagogues--and synagogues are still targeted for vandalism.
I find these words very chilling; they sound like something Goebbels might have said.
It sponsored a talk by a Muslim from a local mosque--but the talk was all about how wonderful Islam was--totally ignoring the historical roots of Islamic violence.
It is a common practice in any community to invoke religion in support of communal acts of violence. History does not show Muslim communities to differ much from communities of other faiths in this regard, so Ms. Moon is off target here.
...excusing the building of a church on the site of a mosque in Cordoba after the Reconquista by reminding them of the mosque built on the site of an important early Christian church in Antioch
Ms. Moon has her facts wrong. The mosque in Cordoba was forcibly converted into a church, much as the Church of Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia) in Istanbul was later converted to a mosque, and more recently to a museum. No one in New York is forcibly appropriating anyone's sacred space; this is all a tempest in a tea(party)-pot.
The same with other points of Islam that I find appalling (especially as a free woman) and totally against those basic principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution...
Those points of view are not too far different from those of some conservative Christians and Jews. Here I would argue that the denigration and oppression of women is a likely consequence of any too literal interpretation of ancient scribblings, whatever their source. Women in classical times had roles prescribed to them that most rational members of modern Western society would find unjust and obnoxious.
I would recommend Ms. Moon study Islam and its rich and varied history, as I have, before shooting her mouth off about it, lest she be dismissed as yet another dupe of the media and those who manipulate it.