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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (55584)	8/28/2002 3:10:47 PM
From: Solon	Respond to of 82486

At the end of the paper he gives his own pov that a compromise toward western values is perhaps most likely. I think this is true, for there is something fundamental about the individual urge to freedom which argues for a gravitation toward western democratic values. I agree that it is hard to visualize now. But it seems to me that as countries and individuals attain power, they are less likely to embrace absolutist doctrines but rather move toward exercising choice, which is what individualized power is about... "So who will "win" this conflict? That is difficult to say, because it is not at all clear what "winning" would entail. It used to be that it involved at least making the "losing" culture little more than a shadow of its former self, if not destroying it outright. But neither of those outcomes is likely. Instead, the more likely condition for "victory" would be for one civilization to experience fundamental changes, thus removing many of the cultural divisions between the two. This means that either the West must adopt many fundamental values from the Islamic East, or Islamic nations will have to adopt some of the fundamental values from the West. The latter, I think, is more likely in the long run. Muslims who live in the West, and some who live in Muslim countries, already accept and prize some of the most important liberal democratic values of self-determination, tolerance, equality, and so on. They don't find it difficult to adopt a democratic Islam rather than a militant Islam - we even see this starting to take hold among the people in Iran. If this became more widespread, many of the most violent conflicts between Islam and the West would probably end because a democratic Islam and a democratic West should be able to co-exist peacefully. Conflict itself would never end, because they would never be identical and they would always have divergent interests and values - we see the same even within the West and within Islam. But the existence of conflict and variety is not a bad thing: it only becomes a problem when it leads to violence and death, as we see today."