[Torrere]

Originally Posted by tw

He asked ". . . Is the ultimate goal of society to oppose diversity?"

No one answered a simple question. Many instead asked for an 'agenda'. With so many responses, where did one ever answer the original question – without personal biases - emotions - attached to their response?

First of all, you lie. He asked the question in nine words and Lumberjim answered it with a thousand and seven words. Beestie and Elspode also answered the question.

The trouble is that it is very difficult to write about a simple question given with no examples. If you want to be able to write any sort of substantial response to the question, you must have a model in your head. You have to be thinking of some society -- of Rome, of 15th century Spain, of America, of Texas, of the High School football team -- which either acted to preserve, to embrace, to oppose, or to assimilate diversity.

From there, you use your knowledge of the model to build an argument, and fold that argument, I hope, into a clear and well written response.

If two people argue, and each person understands a different, contradictory model, they talk past each other. The argument goes nowhere and becomes stupid.

So someone has to introduce a model, as tw did and flint did not. The choice of model determines where the argument will go, if someone is hoping to win. Hellenistic Greece would be an excellent example for someone who wished to argue that merging cultures bring prosperity. The example of 15th century Spain, when King Ferdinand drove out the Moslems and endorsed Colombus, might make for a good argument for the prosperity of an undivided state.

Neither is particularly good for understanding or answering Flint's incredibly broad and somewhat ambiguous question.

I think that a good model might come from Physics. Consider a volume of high temperature air. Each molecule has high energy and high, albiet random, momentum. If you insert a mass of cold air, then the two types of air, cold and hot, will interact and circulate tempestuously. Ultimately, the entire volume of air will have uniform temperature.

All sorts of things could complicate this model, and it doesn't necessarily translate well to societies. It doesn't deal with the possibility that societies tend to develop, and that if two societies are isolated they will develop along divergent paths.

That brings along another ambiguity in Flint's question: what is the scale? Is he talking about the world? Is he talking about America? Is he talking about New Orleans? Is he talking about my math study group?

Having written all of this, I think that his original post was a passive-aggressive way of implicating the established group at the Cellar of being insular. If this was his real question, and he really wanted us to discuss it, he should have come out and said so.

One last thing: I think that Lumberjim's response was incredibly eloquent.