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On Multiculturalism
A couple of essays on Multiculturalism and its failures. The first, from French thinker Pascal Bruckner (via No Pasaran. full text here, also available in French.
Bruckner attacks the Western fetishisation of relativism and recent condemnation by liberal writers of Muslim dissident Ayaan Hirsi Ali. It's all astonishingly quotable: Here is a key paragraph:
"Anglo-Saxon multiculturalism is perhaps nothing other than a legal apartheid, accompanied - as is so often the case - by the saccarine cajolery of the rich who explain to the poor that money doesn't guarantee happiness. We bear the burdens of liberty, of self-invention, of sexual equality; you have the joys of archaism, of abuse as ancestral custom, of sacred prescriptions, forced marriage, the headscarf and polygamy. The members of these minorities are put under a preservation order, protected from the fanaticism of the Enlightenment and the 'calamities' of progress."
The second, by historian Francis Fukuyama, appeared in Prospect Magazine earlier this month.
"Postmodern elites, especially in Europe, feel that they have evolved beyond identities defined by religion and nation", the summary reads, "But if our societies cannot assert positive liberal values, they may be challenged by migrants who are more sure of who they are."
Here's an interesting quote: "A few years ago, Germany's Christian Democrats gingerly floated the idea of Leitkultur—the notion that German citizenship entails certain obligations to observe standards of tolerance and equal respect. The term Leitkultur—which can be translated as a "guiding" or "reference culture"—was invented in 1998 by Bassam Tibi, a German academic of Syrian origin, precisely as a non-ethnic, universalist conception of citizenship that would open up national identity to non-ethnic Germans. Despite these origins, the idea was immediately denounced by the left as racist and a throwback to Germany's unhappy past, and the Christian Democrats quickly distanced themselves from it."
