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 Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=16689