Sunday , May 19 2024
Home / Socialdem. 21st Century / Rushdie on Extreme Multiculturalism

Rushdie on Extreme Multiculturalism

Summary:
If one reflects carefully on the left today, what Salman Rushdie says here is obviously true.Extreme multiculturalism is not just multi-racialism. Multi-racialism as a principle is right. The view that a country should not discriminate against people on the basis of skin colour or race is entirely right and moral.But culture is not race. So many cultural ideas are not biologically determined, and are flexible and changeable, even if no rational personal would deny that certain human traits and propensities are a complex mixture of biology and environment (e.g., height).More cultural diversity is not necessarily a good thing for a society, if this means more extreme religious fundamentalism, parallel legal systems and the introduction of values that radically conflict with the core values of a secular Western society (e.g., theocracy, gender segregation, homophobia, female genital mutilation, misogyny, etc.).As Rushdie says, extreme multiculturalism is cultural relativism. This is a very bad thing.

Topics:
Lord Keynes considers the following as important: ,

This could be interesting, too:

Lord Keynes writes Extreme Multiculturalism versus Liberal Nationalism

If one reflects carefully on the left today, what Salman Rushdie says here is obviously true.

Extreme multiculturalism is not just multi-racialism. Multi-racialism as a principle is right. The view that a country should not discriminate against people on the basis of skin colour or race is entirely right and moral.

But culture is not race. So many cultural ideas are not biologically determined, and are flexible and changeable, even if no rational personal would deny that certain human traits and propensities are a complex mixture of biology and environment (e.g., height).

More cultural diversity is not necessarily a good thing for a society, if this means more extreme religious fundamentalism, parallel legal systems and the introduction of values that radically conflict with the core values of a secular Western society (e.g., theocracy, gender segregation, homophobia, female genital mutilation, misogyny, etc.).

As Rushdie says, extreme multiculturalism is cultural relativism. This is a very bad thing.


Lord Keynes
Realist Left social democrat, left wing, blogger, Post Keynesian in economics, but against the regressive left, against Postmodernism, against Marxism

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *