Saturday, October 16, 2010

"cultural relativism is a fancy phrase for what is, in practice, smug racism"

Following is to consider and ponder... very carefully.

Brutally Honest

This one from Bookworm needs to be read in full, more than once, and passed on with the same advice. What follows is but a small teaser:

Modern so-called liberals, of course, would never dream of saying that the brown people of the world are less than fully human because of their race. May’s point, however, is that, when it comes to Muslims, we still manage to treat them that way. (I’ll add that the same holds true for the low, low standards so-called liberals establish for black people.)

Sure, we in the West treat women well, but we certainly can’t expect that level of sophistication from the brown people. And sure, we treat gays well, but we have to understand that the brown people haven’t evolved to that point, and we should therefore just ignore their sins. And sure, we can tolerate free speech (or, at least, if we’re a so-called liberal, we pay lip-service to the notion of free speech), but we’re big enough to recognize that the brown people haven’t matured enough as a race to handle it.

The exceptionally low standards we allow for Muslims and blacks are always phrased in terms of “respect” for the “other” culture. “Respect,” however, is a misnomer. True respect is impossible if we consistently assert that the “others” (who invariably have skin darker than ours) cannot hold themselves to the normative behaviors of which we’re most proud.

...

I don’t see any of our liberals recognizing in Muslims the common humanity that the more enlightened English and Christians saw in the East Indians or Native Americans. Instead, our cultural relativists glory in their own superiority. Sure, they’ll bad-mouth their own culture left, right and center, but they know that their respect for women, for gays, and for other people who have traditionally been oppressed, makes them better than other cultures that continue to oppress those same people. In other words, cultural relativism is a fancy phrase for what is, in practice, smug racism....


xtnyoda, shalomed

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