Multi-culti II

The pure spirit in us may safely cultivate universal sympathies; for it can have no grudge against anything...but the man must remain loyal to himself and his traditions, or he will be morally a eunuch and a secret hater of all mankind.

Geo. Santayana (1953)

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Byron's musings follow (snowed in here), which you are encouraged to skip:

Today's multiculturalism seems to me to have a contradiction at its core, because it assumes that no society will ever force the issue by insisting on beliefs and practices that are anathema to others. Multiculturalism thus assumes that cultures won't be very different from one another, an assumption that renders the whole scheme unproblematic, because you are never faced with the decision of how to respond to the utterly unacceptable in another culture. In other words, multiculturalism makes sense only as long as cultures are not very multi.

But that describes an ideal world, not the real one. The problem is that multiculturalists nevertheless want to behave as if the ideal is real. One way that shows up is that obvious outrages (e.g., brutal subjugation of women, execution of homosexuals) evoke a reflexive tendency to make excuses for them, or to pretend they don't exist by refusing to mention or discuss them. Another way it shows up is in the tendency to condemn as cultural imperialism any action taken against the outrage. We have lately been treated to certain internationalists arguing that Iran's nuclear program is not aimed at producing atomic weapons, which takes the concept of the benefit of the doubt to an absurdly dangerous extreme; the virtual silence of Western women's organizations about the treatment of women in Islamic societies has been similarly noteworthy.

This kind of thinking puts an idealistic theory about cultural differences ahead of the facts of the real world of actually existing cultures and their aims and activities. I can't think of when that approach to the world has ever turned out to be a good idea. It has long been a firm principle on the Left that no internal outrage can ever justify intervention by another state, a stipulation that goes back to the goal of protecting fledgling socialist revolutions from capitalist overthrow. If there is a Leftist bottom line in international relations, this is it: There can be no justification for intervention across a national border. For example, the fact that some regime is killing every domestic Jew it can lay hands on, while a terrible thing, cannot justify invasion by outside powers. This may be the sort of thing Santayana had in mind when he wrote of being a moral eunuch.

There lurks in my argument a presumption for the superiority of the values of the Western Enlightenment. But I think that presumption is supported, so far at least, by the greater ability of liberal societies to survive in military and economic competition with the other shop. But there are interesting tests of that view ongoing, so stay tuned.

Byron