X-Message-Number: 16689
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 19:00:05 -0400
From: Jeffrey Soreff <>
Subject: inclusiveness Message #16656

Mike Darwin wrote:

>> In the rigorous scientific sense, I don't know which is the best group
>> survival strategy. The US, which is pretty tolerant and inclusive as
>> cultures  and countries goes has done spectacularly well.

Louis Epstein wrote:

>Tolerance and inclusiveness taken to
>extremes are suicidal.There is no
>escape from drawing lines.They just
>have to be drawn in the best places.

On balance, I think that the best line is the one
Libertarianism draws: Force and fraud are unacceptable
behavior, and other behaviors are inside the line
of acceptance.  I would perhaps modify it slightly to
coerce disclosure of some information from powerful
organizations (e.g. things like food labels, and injury
statistics).

Come to think of it, are there _any_ examples of cultures
that died due to excessive inclusiveness?  When there is
heterogeneity with a geographic component one sometimes
gets a split (as Quebec proposes periodically), but the
Swiss deal with multiple languages quite nicely.  Are
there any examples at all of a microscopically heterogenous
but spatially homogenous society disintegrating due to its
local heterogeneity?
                          -Jeffrey Soreff

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