The Liberal Way of Life

Freedom, open minds, solidarity

A Brief Explanation of what this Website is about,
in Particular for my Colleagues in CS and AI

Erik Sandewall

This website contains my writings about ethnic, religious, and other cultural diversity in society, together with an extensive bibliography that I have collected, for use as background and for citations. This is the result of work that has occupied a major part of my time for the last five years. You may well wonder why I ended up doing this, and the following is my brief explanation.

In late 2012, as I retired from my professor position at Linköping University and moved on to the status of emeritus, I foresaw using the following years for continuing my then on-going projects. This included, in particular, the writing of an open-source textbook on KR-oriented AI, as well as my work on 'software individuals' which is an approach to AI-oriented software architecture. But during those years, I became increasingly interested in two other topics.

'Diversity in liberalism' was one of these topics, although I did not choose this title until later. The idea was as follows. The nation-state model that has become a kind of world standard assumes that each state is based on an ethnic group that constitutes a significant majority there. Moreover, it also assumes that there is a set of 'national values' that the majority adheres to, and that underlies both the legislation and the daily life in the state in question.

This concept of 'national values' has been both promoted and questioned in recent years, and the increasing cultural diversity in several European countries has arguably been a reason for both the promoting and the questioning. Traditionalists have argued that newly-arrived immigrants are forming 'parallel societies' that do not share the 'national values' and that this is a threat to our way of life, whereas 'radicals' have argued that the idea of national values is becoming obsolete and that we can manage perfectly well without it.

My opinion about this is that neither of those two positions is viable in the long run. Instead, we should amend some of the basic concepts of liberal democracy (i.e. political liberalism) so that they correspond better to the new situation. The menu item 'Ideology' in my website contains an evolving set of articles describing my proposal for how this can be done.

However, a topic such as this can not be addressed only in the abstract; it must be related to real problems that come up in the context of contemporary diversity. Therefore I have collected articles of various kinds about aspects of diversity, including both newspaper articles, articles on personal websites or other Internet-based venues, and also some scientific articles. Only articles that are freely available on the Internet are included, with minor exceptions. The 'cliplib' section of the website contains lists of these articles, organized in a hierarchical structure of topic and subtopic.

This activity brought me to my second new topic, namely, what are the actual and the potential changes with respect to the "discourse of society" -- the continous exchange of opinions, arguments and facts that has traditionally been done with newspapers as the major medium. It is clear that this is changing, and that the change has already been going on for several years, with major effects on the character of this discourse. I have previously been working on open publishing and open reviewing in science, and it now struck me that this experience could suggest new ideas for how the "discourse of society" can best be supported using the Internet. Moreover, as my present website contains a combination of my own articles and a growing collection of background material, it is arguably an example of how one may organize a platform for an active participant in the "discourse of society". This gradually became my second major topic of interest; it is covered under the menu item 'Open Discourse' on my website.

This is a summary of activities since 2013. There is only one hitch: it has been done with Swedish as the working language. The website contains more than 100 articles or debate contributions by myself at present, though almost all of them are written in Swedish. The collection of articles by others is more evenly balanced, but still the Swedish-language articles are more than half of its 4800 articles.

At this point I have begun to think that my international colleagues and friends may actually have an interest, both in some of my own articles, and in the background materials that I have collected. Some of you may be interested in my approach to 'diversity in liberalism', both with respect to the key ideas and to their applications. The other point is that you may have seem dramatic and contradictory accounts of developments in Sweden in recent years, in particular regarding immigration problems and culture clashes. A few articles on my website could give a useful additional perspective.

For these reasons, I now consider the possibility of extending these 'publication' activities into English language. As a first step, some parts of the website have been translated into English. The section of the webpage that contains my own articles operates in two language modes since the beginning of this year, and forthcoming articles in English will appear there. Moreover, the newsletter that I have sent out once or twice a month during these years will now have an English-language edition, concurrently with the existing one in my own language.

My idea is that although incomplete, this English-language translation will be sufficient so that a limited number of invited readers can decide whether they think this project is of interest for them and is worth pursuing. If a positive feedback is obtained they I will proceed with the rest of the translation activity.

This is the reason why I am sending you this invitation to visit the website and to check out its contents. It is called 'Arguments and Facts', or 'Argument och Fakta' in Swedish, and the entry address for this experimental version is: www.argumentochfakta.se/divlib/ie/divlib.intro-site/ Your comments and your sincere opinions about this initiative are welcome and would be very much appreciated.