hugs all around

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Mar 16, 2007

Mark Steyn writes about his baffling experience with NPR and other lefty talk radio call-ins. The problem isn't battling contrary opinions, but fanning away the emotional vapor so as to find an opinion solid enough to battle:

As a lady called Kay put it: "We have a lot of work to do then so that some day a long way down the road [Muslims] won't want to slaughter us."

There may, indeed, come a day when they won't want to slaughter us, but it may be because by that day there's none of us left to slaughter. She had just told me that "we're all in this together. I don't care if you're Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist." Good for you. Unfortunately, they do care. In Gaza, in Sudan, in Kashmir, in southern Thailand, they care very much. But the great advantage of cultural relativism is that it absolves you of the need to know anything. For, if everything's of equal value, why bother learning about any of the differences?

Narrower questions in the same vein: how many fervent partisans of multiculturalism have ever made contact with a non-Western culture through a medium not filtered by their own? How many would insist, say, on mastery of a foreign language as a graduation requirement? How many embrace multiculturalism not as a duty to make sacrifices, but as a kind of diplomatic immunity by which they declare themselves free from moral constraints they dislike?