The Cultural Gulag of Islam & Liberal Progressivism
March 13, 2015 In Culture,Middle East,World News
A watch tower stands in a museum commemorating victims of Soviet-era political repressions located in a former prison camp, some 110 kms (69 miles) northeast of the west Siberian city of Perm, Russia, Friday, March 6, 2015. (AP Photo/Alexander Agafonov)
There are many threats to the continuity of the modern world, of which Islam in its manifold guises — international terrorism, the razia of unfettered immigration, Iranian nuclear ambitions — is the most prominent. But the Islamic agenda would not be what it is without the “progressivist” mentality and attendant policy making that are handing the barbarians the keys to the city. Islam and progressivism, to cite Jamie Glazov, are United in Hate [1]. Indeed, as Executive Director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism Stephen Schwartz remarks in First Things [2], the deep complicity between Islam and the left goes a long way back, to the writings of the chief Communist impresarios, Marx and Lenin, as well as to lesser lights like Bolshevik intellectual Karl Radek. America’s far-left[3], pro-Muslim [4] president has merely continued the dismal tradition.
Thus, we need to consider the broader canvas to which the camel in the room directs our attention. The obsession with multiculturalism that is destroying our civilizational patrimony is a sign of the feverish intoxication with the humanly improbable that characterizes leftist thinking: that we are all born equal (true with respect to rights, but not with respect to talent, intelligence or personal qualities); that sociopolitical changes can eradicate the flaws and blemishes of our nature (demonstrably wrong); that competition is a social evil that must be eliminated for the general advantage (pure fairyland); that education should be politically motivated to promote what is absurdly termed “social justice” (the death knell of critical thought); that tolerance for the “Other,” however defined, trumps due process in the courts (the erosion of equity); that ancient guilts require present expiation (rank unfairness); and, the great canard of our time, that all cultures are on an existential par, none being “better,” more ethical or more advanced than any other (manifestly false).
Hence the dogma of cultural and moral equivalence to which the liberal/left adheres, as practiced most conspicuously by the jerk in the White House and by the majority of our political, community and institutional leadership. No culture, religion or civilization, apparently, is superior to any other, an axiom derived, as I observed in a 2011 PJM article, “The Origins of Postmodernitis [5],” from the early anthropologist Franz Boas. Boas laid it down in his seminal The Mind of Primitive Man [6] that all cultures should be regarded with sympathy, that we should hold the conviction that all “races” — today we would say “ethnicities” — have “contributed to cultural progress in one way or another” and that they are equally capable of “advancing the interests of mankind.” Unfortunately, as I conclude there, what started out as a methodological discipline in the field of anthropology has mutated into an intellectual sickness that regards our own culture as nothing more than a provisional adaptation. We are all, it appears, moral and cultural isomorphs.
The utopian malady runs deep in the leftist psychodrama. Consider the irony of the Charlie Hebdo attack. As Clash Daily contributor William Spencer-Hale points out [7], “The employees, artists, writers and editors of Charlie Hebdo were all true to life followers of the Church of Leftism. They…eagerly embraced all the tenets of liberalism. They, like so many of their fellow countrymen, voted to implement those policies that are the hallmark of the modern leftist. Among them being gun control and unfettered immigration.” The fantasy world continues to impinge upon the real one, regardless of deadly consequences.
There is a lesson to be learned from contemplating the lasting damage that such torpid maunderings and emotional convulsions can inflict.
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