Blogger Hits Instalanche, Misses Point

Via Glenn Reynolds, I learned of a blog post that is interesting for two very different reasons. First, it points out how multiculturalism may become a victim of Islamofascism in Europe. This is good, and the article is worth a read for that reason. Second, however, the author himself has been so thoroughly indoctrinated by multiculturalism that he closes his article by declaring his allegiance to multiculturalism and by expressing his judgement of it as "good". How could this happen in the face of such compelling evidence? Because the author, as a multiculturalist, does not think in terms of individual rights.

Despite the good journalism of the blog entry, its analysis is in trouble from the start. Speaking of the murders of Theo van Gogh and Pim Fortuyn in Holland, he says, "The terrible irony is that tolerance, fully exercised, ends up enveloping intolerance." It is nearly always a bad sign when someone discusses "tolerance", because the term has two very different meanings that often end up conflated as they have been here.

In a society that respects individual rights, "tolerance" is nothing more than the broad cultural acceptance of the idea that an individual can, say, practice whatever religion he wishes, so long as he doesn't violate anyone else's rights. This idea is cited in the first excerpted news article: "This attitude is a byproduct of a disciplined civic society, confident enough to provide space for those with different ideas."

But moral relativists have added another meaning to the term "tolerance": moral equivalence. This is what underlies the taboo in relativist societies that the same article describes here: "It was simply not acceptable to discuss problems relating to religion and culture."

The blogger then shifts his focus to the news from England, saying that "mindless [Is there any other kind? --ed] multiculturalism is over". Interestingly, he quotes the article expressing agreement with the Ayn Rand Institute.

The Ayn Rand Institute is right to say that it is dangerous nonsense to pretend that all cultures are morally equivalent. Such sloppy thinking corrodes our ability to distinguish good from evil.

But he left out the following money quote:

[T]he Ayn Rand Institute (which bears the name of the author of The Fountainhead, the bible of individualism) claims that: "Multiculturalism is the view that all cultures, from the spirits worshipping tribe to that of an advanced industrial civilisation, are equal in value." It continues: "A culture that values freedom, progress, reason and science is good; one that values oppression, mysticism and ignorance is not."

The institute has battled against such terms as "black American" [sic: Should be "African-American". --ed] on the grounds that they invite us to categorise a person according to his ancestry rather than his qualities as an individual.

This might have helped him avoid the following closing paragraph.

So where does all this end up in my mind? Tolerance is good and necessary and civilized. Multiculturism [sic] is good; I'm so multi-culti I don't know how mult-culti I am. But tolerance for criminals is always dangerous and wrong-headed. See the post below on the angry young men. We would not tolerate and understand and whisper about KKK killers or Nazis or serial killers. Why should we tiptoe tolerantly around the murderers of 7/7 or 9/11 or any day in Iraq today just because they are multi to our culti? We should not.

No! No! No! No! His conflation of individual rights and moral relativism in the term "tolerance" immediately leads him to call "multiculturalism" good, a conclusion that flies in the face of all the evidence he has just presented.

The answer to the "paradox" of "too much" "toleration" in Holland and the contradictory conclusion of this post is to develop a firm grasp of the concept of individual rights. Only then does one see that there are two faces to the famed "tolerance" of the Dutch, and why one endangers the other. And only then does one realize that "good tolerance" is rooted in individual rights, and not multiculturalism, and that the latter is evil. For an example closer to home, multiculturalism is keeping us from profiling Moslems and Middle Easterners at airports. This makes us less able to prevent terrorist attacks like the atrocities of September 11, 2001. Our individual rights are not being protected as effectively as they should be.

This author reaches what otherwise sounds like a reasonable conclusion, but he explicitly accepts the ideology of multiculturalism. Thus, an ideology antithetical to individual rights has been made to look reasonable if not taken "mindlessly" while its antidote, the concept of individual rights, remains unused, forgotten and gathering dust in the medicine cabinet.

Once again, we see the importance of ideas in this war.

-- CAV

Crossposted to the Egosphere

Updates

7-18-05: Corrected typos.