Susan Jacoby tells a personal anecdote that nicely encapsulates the progressive West’s moral drift:
An 80-year-old friend of mine — a woman of forceful intellect who used to teach Renaissance history — now lives in a Florida retirement community where many of the part-time staff are teenaged children of recent Afghan immigrants. When my friend saw one of her favorite young Afghan-American women — a high school senior — weeping in the dining room, she asked what was wrong. “Oh, madam professor,” the girl replied, “my father has arranged for me to meet my future husband. He is 40 years old, and the wedding will take place in six months. I wanted so much to go to college, and this will not be permitted.”
When Jacoby’s friend reassured the distressed woman that no woman in America has to marry someone just because her parents tell her to, another resident chastised her for her lack of cultural sensitivity, telling her, “We have no right to interfere with her culture, her religion, her family.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali:
Here is something I have learned the hard way, but which a lot of well-meaning people in the West have a hard time accepting: All human beings are equal, but all cultures and religions are not. A culture that celebrates femininity and considers women to be the masters of their own lives is better than a culture that mutilates girls’ genitals and confines them behind walls and veils or flogs and stones them for falling in love….The culture of the Western Enlightenment is better.
Jacoby is wrong when she states:
“Her (Ali) thinking has clearly been influenced by the narrow prism of her colleagues — she is under the mistaken impression, for example, that most American feminists are indifferent to universal human rights…”
All of them are.
An example of why moral and cultural relativism is dangerous. Everyone has a moral compass. We cannot refrain from speaking or acting when something immoral is going on. I don’t mean railing against innocuous practices. Any reasonable person would conclude that. When a girl is forced to marry old enough to be her father, we should be hopping mad. We should be even more livid when some yahoo suggests we stay out of it.
You’re right, SDH, all the evidence clearly suggests that she is wrong on that count. She’s either just hopeful, or in denial.
In the strictly Canadian context, you *never* see the Judy Rebbick types standing up for the rights of Afghan women; all their time is consumed with attacking white men, who are probably unexamined psychological stand-ins for some Stepdad or uncle, or something. Who knows.
I would have loved to see Barbara Frum interview Hirsi Ali. The heads of everyone else at the CBC would have exploded but Frum would have drawn out the best Hirsi has to offer the public.
It’s sad how uncommon common sense actually is and how starved everyone is to hear it.
And this is why Western civilization will come to a crashing halt. The fact that this was in a retirement home, logically suggests that the majority of the occupants are between 65 and 100…The upper end of this population was the generation which fought Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo in WW2, fought Mao Tse-Tung and Kim Il Sung in Korea and began the Cold War (which the West eventually won–despite Jimmy Carter). If this is how they feel about this young woman’s plight, then some (many?) have also drunk the “kool aid” which their children and grandchildren have been given.
favill
am disgusted by the cowardly feminists and apologists amongst us – Ayaan Hirsi Ali should be a complete hero to them, and yet they ignore her and her message – they are despicable spoiled brats, who have become smug and cosy with their own freedoms, and wish not to share
Race is hardware. Culture is software. You can’t do anything about yours or anyone’s race and discrimination based on it is just stupid. But it is absolutely essential that you pass judgement on culture, and at the risk of Godwinning the whole discussion, I’ll point out that you can, and should detest the Nazis for what they did without feeling any distaste for blonde-haired, blue-eyed Nordics.
Forgive me…I have posted this point several times here. But it’s time to repeat it.
Feminists have never really been concerned about woman as individuals, only followers. And the agenda of the femistas is driven by a disdain for the Judeo-Christian family model.
Hence, they really don’t care about the Muslim women.
T Robert Wolfram – thank you for that wonderful line that I will be stealing and using as my own!
Why do we even need to explain this?
If there were a religion better than mine, I’d frickin’ convert. If there were a culture better than mine, I’d emigrate. Sure some people will disagree with my value assessment, but I think most of them would be wrong. Otherwise I’d believe otherwise.
Even the leftists would think I am wrong. Which means they think they’re right. Which means they think their belief system is superior to mine. Obviously there is a hierarchy. Which then just leaves the question; Why do you support (implicitly, by refusing to “judge”) suicide bombing/genital mutilation/forced marriage of minors when Judaism, Christianity and the West in general find these things morally repugnant?
This is obviously admirable; what I find a little… annoying?… is that Susan Jocoby – clearly intelligent, sane and decent – and women like her are struggling to accept and articulate a point of view that I’m sure would have been so self-apparent as to be not even thought of to anyone prior to, I dunno… 1950?
BTW – like “liberal”, “feminist” is a much-abused term, and for similar reasons, in similar ways.
Also – pet peeve, but I’ve always found it useful to stop thinking in terms of “culture” and start thinking in terms of “civilization”.
The Joel; please keep explaining in your clear way. As Kate has said many times if you belief in evolution then you must believe there is evolutionary improvement in culture. Cheers;
favill – you must remember that while some of the people over 65 (more like over 80) were involved with the fight against Hitler and Mussolini, those few heroes are outnumbered by the masses who fell for Keynesian economics, FDRs New Deal and the social welfare systems that they voted for in just about every election from 1945 to 1980 (until Thatcher and Reagan).
Throwing a skunk into the discussion. Libertarians are no better in this regard than the hard leftists in our midst. If you won’t stand for anything you wind up falling for everything.
You’re welcome, Mr. Larsen and feel free to use it.
The ecofeminist left was highly corrosive 20 years ago. They are now so hollowed-out, there is little left in them but contempt for anyone outside their empty toxic tent. There is no debate left in them, just brute force aimed at silencing opposition preferably dispensed by the state or their mobs. Much of their cultural relativism stems from their eco-depraved esteem of backward, pre-industrial societies living as “one with nature”. Just as they yearn for mythical socialist utopias, they point to pre-industrial societies as utopian (as long as they don’t actually have to live in one). Perhaps Islamic women, particularly the burqa clad, represent that pre-industrial, light carbon footprint, one with nature, tribal look. And the bonus for them is that those “awful Christians and conservatives” are opposed to their culture.
“We have no right to interfere with her culture, her religion, her family.”
And yet EVERYONE feels that they can interfere with ours!
Joe
The libertarian position on religion and culture is that the state should not be involved in either one. Further, that the state protects private property rights, meaning that citizens are free to use their property as they see fit including private discrimination against cultures or religions deemed hostile by their owners along with free speech, both rights not allowed in Canada by a “conservative” government that supports “multiculturalism”.
Black Mamba, 12:27: In-the-moment, (now), certain cultures are less “civilized” in certain ways than others, at least according to the terms (I think) you’re referring to, and which (I think) I share. But this arguably ‘less-civilized’ state is, in real-world terms, functionally inseparable from what most people would describe as “culture.” You or I might describe these cultures as ‘less civilized’ in order to avoid the word ‘culture’, or we could even, in what would certainly be perceived as a condescending attempt to be charitable, describe someone’s culture as being “not yet civilized,” but this will always meet with no end of argument from, and cause great offense to, those who insist that we neither understand nor respect said “culture.”
Neither the members of these cultures nor any of their western apologists will ever accept any worldview which posits that Islam, for example, is less civilized than Western culture. Most Muslims see us – our sexual licenstiousness (as a culture) and our, erm, mankinis – as spiritually uncivilized and un-advanced.
Practically speaking, in other words, you can’t draw a hard distinction between our definition of ‘civilization’ as we see it, and ‘culture.’ If we insist that certain behaviours are uncivilized we are in effect criticizing a culture, and there’s just no way around it. We can say “It’s not that I’m disrespecting your culture, it’s just that you’re uncivilized“, but in doing so we would be, in their minds, insulting their culture.
Seriously – try telling an Islamist that he’s simply uncivilized, and that in making a hard distinction between ‘civilization’ and his culture you mean no disrespect to his culture.
Actually…don’t. I like you.
I often wonder if a Canadian Leftist would react differently to these two scenes:
1. A Caucasian woman being yelled at by a clearly out of control Caucasian man at the top of his lungs.
2. A dark skinned woman in a Burka being yelled at by a clearly out of control dark skinned man at the top of his lungs.
The fundamental moral principle of a civilized society is that no person has the right to initiate the use of force on any other person. If someone does, that is when government is supposed to get involved.
The Marxist-multiculturalism notion that all cultures are equal is just as false as the rest of that failed philosophy. The moral principle above is what should be used to judge a culture. Remember that Marxism is a philosophy of extreme violence and its adherents are always trying to blur the distinction between what is voluntary and what is coerced, as a means of confusing the masses.
One cannot really say that the foods, costumes, dances, etc. of one culture can be considered inferior or superior to another, for they are voluntarily celebrated. But any cultural practice that involves coercion must be judged severely.
Great point, Robert (1:30). I say “point” and not “question” because the question is, at this point, rhetorical. Example #1 is a self-evident outrage to a Canadian leftist, while #2 is a….
Is a…..
Sorry, did someone ask a question?
(Puts on sunglasses, turns away, starts to whistle absently…)
From Wiki…..
“Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning “to cultivate”)[1] is a term that has various meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of “culture” in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions.[2] However, the word “culture” is most commonly used in three basic senses:
• Excellence of taste in the fine arts and humanities, also known as high culture
• An integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning
• The set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group “
I believe it’s the second and third point the common conservative wishes to preserve.
EBD – if there were world enough, and time, and I were lucid enough (2 hrs. sleep), I’d expand upon the notion of civilization v. culture (a dichotomy that was very meaningful to the Nazis BTW – Godwin etc.)
From a Theodore Dalrymple (Dr. Anthony Daniels) column – and I know because you’ve mentioned it that you respect him, as one should:
http://www.city-journal.org/html/11_4_what_we_have.html
“I recall as well a story told by the philosopher Sir Karl Popper, an Austrian refugee who made his home in Britain. Four cultivated men in Berlin, as they awaited their expected arrest by the Gestapo, spent their last night together—possibly their last night on earth—playing a Beethoven quartet. In the event, they were not arrested; but they too had expressed by their action their faith that civilization transcends barbarism, that notwithstanding the apparent inability of civilization at the time to resist the onslaught of the barbarians, civilization was still worth defending. Indeed, it is the only thing worth defending, because it is what gives, or should give, meaning to our lives.”
Civilization is an ideal; as expressed in the quotation above, in some way a spiritual ideal. Culture is just Anthropology; the equivalent of observing human bugs. Truely very fascinating, in its way, and I’m not being remotely sarcastic; but still, without moral dimension.
Cultural sensitivity is an euphemism for avoiding necessary conflict. Avoidance is Canada’s conflict resolution strategy.
You can blame these guys and their publications, John Paul Lederach and Kevin Avruch, for today’s cultural conflict resolution strategies.
The modern left has more sympathy and sensitivity to the aspirations of the Taliban than they do their own Christian neighbours
Where is NOW on topics like this? Far too busy worrying about important things like how many women belong to the Augusta golf club.
Multiculturalism was promoted by academics: the most privileged, protected, homogenous population in our nation. Let me tell you, academics may come in all colors, both genders, every sexual orientation, from all corners of the earth, but you get them together and they have one personality. There is nothing multicultural about them. And they have the arrogant self-assurance to believe that they are our leaders in all matters of the mind – hence their eagerness to snatch up political correctness and multiculturalism and apply them to our lives.
Once you accept that the modern Left in the West is dedicated to destroying our Western culture of individual sovereignty and replacing it with Utopian collectivism, their behavior makes perfect sense.
Feminists don’t believe -any- of the crap they spew. They’d have to be insane, after all, and insane people can’t function in society at a high level as people like Patricia Ireland do.
Because they don’t believe for a moment what they say, it is possible for them to abandon immigrant women to the unseemly practices of their cultures from back home without further thought. They don’t care about women.
What they care about is defeating their enemy and getting what they want. They will say any lie, commit any treason to achieve their goals. One need only look at the wreckage created by Obama in the last year and a half to see it in action.
I like Hirisi Ali and I agree with her about Islam and its inferiority to Western Post-Enlightenment Christianity. Our way -is- better, measurably so.
But that’s actually irrelevant, because she’s addressing the wrong enemy. Muslims are not a credible threat to the West. The true, real enemy of Western culture and our way of life is the Left and their Utopian socialism.
*
“no-one observes… Avoidance is Canada’s conflict resolution
strategy.”
hey… what’s a little ethnic cleansing between friends, huh?
*
Screw Susan and her liberal and Leftist buddies even if Susie has woken up about this aspect of the p.c. mulitcult.
mulitcult = multicult
Knight 99, I’ve actually read that Kroeber and Kluckhohn book. The reason they wrote it was to try to get a handle on the whole concept of “culture”.
Turns out that’s a lot harder than one would think. There’s a lot of the “can’t see the back of your own head” problem involved. Humans can’t “see” culture as a construct the way dogs can’t “see” the chain so they wrap it around the tree every time.
This has allowed intellectual charlatans to claim that everything is a construct or that everything is genetic. Leading to our current problems with multi-culti high priests saying “all cultures are equally valid” when a blind pig can see they aren’t.
As long as we remember that the people screaming “TOLERANCE!” the loudest are -liars- and saboteurs, whose goal is to have us all living in mud huts with them lording it over everyone, we’ll be ok.
“…. As Kate has said many times if you belief in evolution then you must believe there is evolutionary improvement in culture. ”
MikeSr – has Kate actually said that? (Can you quote a source). I ask because evolution and breeding prize winning animals aren’t the same and I know that Kate knows THAT.
Evolution has nothing to do with “improvement” (or morality, for that matter). It DOES have everything to do with trial and error and adaptation to change.
MM
Culture doesn’t change by evolution. Herbert Spencer was an idiot. Read what he wrote and you’ll see.
Godwin’s Law….an unjustified way to suppress criticism by the left…..only the left voted for it and all to many abide by it….with of course notable exceptions.
Osumashi Kinyobe
[….When a girl is forced to marry old enough to be her father, we should be hopping mad. We should be even more livid when some yahoo suggests we stay out of it……]
I recall such a situation when out in company of a good friend who is old order amish….His excuse….”I don’t believe in violence.” My response was “I do! Unto everything there is a season!”
Besides this stupid Godwin business….there is this “white guilt”…..
It is my position that white Christian Europeans ARE culturally superior….even the Russians.nnnand justifiably so.
In the space of a few centuries these “evil whitemen” conquered the entire world…introduced the rule of law, built roads and bridges, modern hygene and nutrician and almost ended piracy and slavery….despite a brief daliance with it.
All this nonsense about the trans-Atlantic slavetrade is just that….nonsense. Slavery was not part of European Christian Culture. It didn’t last in that culture and was in the fullness of time rejected quickly.
Those who invoke “Godwin’s Law” are our enemy and are losers.
We need to simplify this. This is about the law, our Canadian and American laws.
“When Jacoby’s friend reassured the distressed woman that no woman in America has to marry someone just because her parents tell her to, another resident chastised her for her lack of cultural sensitivity, telling her, ‘We have no right to interfere with her culture, her religion, her family.’”
That’s wrong. We have every right to enforce our laws. In fact we are obliged to enforce our laws. Our laws are not Shari’a laws. We have one law of the land and people are equal under those laws.
“Here is something I have learned the hard way, but which a lot of well-meaning people in the West have a hard time accepting: All human beings are equal, but all cultures and religions are not.”
Maybe let’s start here … some humans are incredible achievers, creators, thinkers, inventors, heroes and some people are dog shit.
We are NOT ALL EQUAL. That is a rumor started by the better people to pacify the dog shit people so they wouldn’t get out of hand with their envy and resentment.
We pay them off with welfare and cheap entertainment on their tax funded wide screens … hockey, football, sit-coms etc.
In Vancouver they even have tax funded hard drug lounges so they can destroy themselves with supervision.
All equal under the law? … depends who you are and how rich … We are all different and we are all of different value to the culture.
And don’t give me that idiocy about we are all equal in spirit mumbo jumbo.
When I read some of the comments here, clearly I see people who are smarter than me. How is that equal, or to use a leftist word ‘fair’? Why can’t I be as smart or as athletic or as creative as some others? I can’t. Why? Because we are not all equal!
But I digress … we should help Muslim women break free form their slave masters wherever possible.
Everyone should read “Infidel”. This woman is courageous beyond belief.
While applauding her defense of the vitoims of Islam, I’ll have to disagree – vehemently – with Jacoby for statements like this;
“This muddled thinking allows the American religious and political Right to misrepresent itself as the chief defender of Enlightenment values.”
Sure, in her ivory-tower world, she probably knows a handful of genuine liberals whose values are inpeccable. What she’s wilfully blind to is the fact that liberalism in her country has long since been completely dominated and represented by tiny-brained loudmouthed leftists. She ought to be grateful that the Right is always there to fill the vast moral and intellectual gulf left by this host of whiny self-indulgent parasites.
The Phantonm nailed it solidly in his last sentence at 9:26!
More of my old writings on ecolunacy, especially for John Chittick who is so clearly on the same page as me:
Many people in the West, with their distorted view of nature, still cherish one really misanthropic misconception that will be one of the hardest to abandon: that human beings are somehow “bad for the planet” unless we live in a hallucinatory Disneyesque “harmonious” idyllic relationship with every other species. Pardon me, but what a lot of nonsense.
Nature is not, in any way that you might imagine, about harmony – it is about the struggle for survival. And for many, for reasons that are so deep-seated in the psyche they are probably beyond understanding, this misguided view leads to a desire for degradation and eventual annihilation for our entire species. I assure you, my son won’t have to grow up with this bizarre, pointless, self-destructive guilt complex hanging over him, despite the best efforts of pseudo-Luddites and historical revisionists. If I hear that a teacher of his for example is preaching that gospel, I’ll find another school or teach him myself.
BTW I haven’t seen too many people who espouse this philosophy actually abandon the city for the bush. Who can blame them? They’d just freeze to death, or fall in a river or lake and drown, or get sick and die, or be killed and eaten by a predator, or break their leg and die of exposure, or starve, or live just long enough to watch it happen to their families – probably in a matter of weeks. Just like indigenous people in the developing world are doing in droves, daily, right now, and always have done.
Apologies for the long, long post – I think I better get my own conservative blog going. 🙂
This is an interesting discussion on the relative value of different cultures.
To look at it from a Darwinian perspective we have a very week culture and Islam is a very strong culture. They have six kids per woman, we are on the way to having less than one. This social model is a creation of our culture.
Even this wouldn’t be a problem if we weren’t prepared to let everyone from the third world colonize us. Their popluation would soar and ours would collapse. That wouldn’t matter if we didn’t have mass immigration because at the end of the day we would still be we. As it is my children will see in their lifetime the total collapse of western civilization and either war that will make WW11 look like a playground squabble or my granddaughters not learning to read and wearing tents.
I would much rather live in our culture but that is not the future my children face because we live in a very week culture and our enemies have a very strong culture.
@sasquatch: I’d like to point out – cuz you’re right – that it was Muslims that sold the West Africans into slavery, and that Muslims also enslaved Caucasian Christians. I know, because I’m descended from one such slave.
@Abe Froman: your post proves you ARE smart. Great stuff! And anyone who thinks we’re “equal under the law” needs to remember OJ Simpson and LOT of other similar cases.
Anyone who says culture doesn’t evolve ‘change by evolution’ is deluding themselves. Just as language evolves so too does culture. The phrase Life Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness certainly means something different now than it did when it was originally written. All men created equal has so lost its original meaning people don’t even know what it originally intended to say. The liberty fought for during WWII became ‘if it feels good do it’ in the sixty’s to you have an obligation to look after my every whim in the ’90’s . The vote for women evolved into the death of fetus’. The freedom of religion evolved into the freedom from religion which is evolving again into the freedom to practice only Islam.
A few thoughts…
First, I agree that liberals, Progressives and feminists have abandoned women around the world. What nobody mentioned yet, is how clearly RACIST the aforementioned liberals, Progressives and Feminists. After all, if the TEA Party is racist because of it’s demographic, surely the lib/Progressive/Feminists block is racist in their make-up and their application of Woman’s Rights. I’ve called this “Two Tiered Feminism” in the past and have said that “Brown, Yellow, Red and African women need not apply”. The liberals, Progressives and Feminists are the true racists today, as is evident if you look forward to the structure of the utopia they propose.
Secondly…I’ll finish later
Joe, I gots a degree in this stuff. Cultures -change- the same way fashions change. We make them change. Cultures do not “evolve” in the Darwinian sense of the word.
Most of what you just said is due to the program of the Left, which they have pursued with vigor for 100 years or more. Don’t let your cross hairs drift off the target.
One thing Susan Jacoby said bugs me. She said of Hirisi Ali, “Her thinking has clearly been influenced by the narrow prism of her colleagues — she is under the mistaken impression, for example, that most American feminists are indifferent to universal human rights — but liberals ought to be asking themselves why they never reached out to her.”
Susan Jacoby continues to maintain the pretense that “American feminists” are anything other than the girlie propaganda arm of the big, ugly socialist totalitarian machine. Like I said above, feminists aren’t indifferent to Hirisi Ali, they are actively and violently hostile to her, because she’d fragging up their scam.
Susan Jacoby is an -idiot-.
I think the phrase is “all people are born equal under the law” its sort of a crap shoot from there.
its a great leveler. remember statistics say 50% of the population is dumber than average. but the distribution of IQ’s and opportunities is not level through the whole world. one would have to judge the Muslim world as opportunity oppressive for 51%(females) of their own population in most places.
however most of them arent worried about careers ,nail polish colours or waxing their legs as the infomercials would have you believe , they are interested in their next meal.
geez , what a rambling post that was. sorry.
What I find interesting are the numerous numbers of unholy alliances on the Left. One rarely spoken of is between the Feminists and the Environmentalists. Ironically, they are the same people in many cases. If Feminists took a step back and considered the outcome for women under the Enviro-tard Utopia, we’d be farming our own food, washing our cloths by hand and carrying water from a well. Now I wonder… who do you think will be washing them cloths?
If the Enviro-tards get their way, we’ll be catapulted back into the what ever century that Gaia was happy. Feminists should be curious as to what their role might be in such a century.JMO