I just remembered a conversation I had with a friend in Utah a few years ago. She said that she wanted to live in Europe because of how beautiful it is. I told her that i would love to live in Sub-Saharan Africa because it was so beautiful and the birthplace of civilization.The topic somehow turned to what constitutes an advanced civilization. She insisted that advanced civilizations were clean and orderly, had a good police force that served and answered to its citizens and citizens were allowed to participate in the governing process without disturbing the peace. I strongly disagreed and posited that real civility embraces messy differences instead of brutally forcing a fake sense of clean homogeneity. Whether or not a nation is democratic makes no difference- unless citizens' differences are acknowledged and accepted, the clean and orderly streets of that civilization are merely a facade masking injustice and intolerance.
We talked about it for a while and I realized that she was raised to think that order equates to peace and justice. I was raised to think that respect equates to peace and justice. How to reconcile? I have no idea...
