Relativist Fundamentalism, What's Next? (II)

Relativism maintains to offer a solution to what it sees as the problem: the tendency of people to kill each other. The basic thought is that they do so, because their beliefs and ideologies clash, be they religious or secular isms. The solution they are offering is that "minorities (in Western societies) should live according to their own customs (a Leftist pet policy that was widely practised and since discredited in The Netherlands), and - insofar as national culture is at variance with non-Western ideas - the national culture should adapt itself to new conditions", and "refrain from criticism"! I ask you, that's the multi-cultural contribution to world peace: refrain from criticism!

That criticism isn't at the root of Islamist terrorism may be obvious, but Cliteur is offering evidence in the fact that two soft-spoken Amsterdam city politicians who have avoided criticism ad nauseam, need 24/7 police protection. Multi-culturals draw the wrong conclusion and because of it, they don't benefit from the lessons on offer from appeasing Adolf Hitler before WWII: that you shouldn't appease bullies and that you cannot negotiate with someone who is out to destroy you. But that is just one of the dangers.

Cliteur is worried that it makes Western societies easy prey for the ideology of radical Islamism and that it would be a suicidal position. There's that too.

The barbaric necessity of sanitizing the entire Western legacy so as not to give offence, would constitute a mere inconvenience in comparison with what would follow. And it's a process that is already well under way - primarily as evidenced by ludicrous examples of political correctness: to mind comes the abolition of A.D. in favor of C.E., the removal of national flags and other visual expressions of national identity, calls for the French version of laïcité that foresees in the 'neutralization' of the entire public domain, etc., etc.

Much worse is the tenet that "the West is denied the right to defend itself", which is simply immoral!

Replacing universal human rights and other Western values with what Cliteur calls the "glorification of otherness" - whatever that may be - is another mere detail that would set civilization back some two millennia.

The real horror is the madhouse that awaits us once humanity has lost its sense of objective reality, another ongoing project! We ain't seen nothing yet!

Cliteur aptly debunks relativism's inherent fallacy to equate the most impossible entities with each other, simply because they carry the same adjective or adverb, or have some other feature in common (Christianity with cannibalism, Ayaan Hirsi Ali with the murderer of her associate, etc.). It is an offence against reason only forgivable, if made by véry young children.

The relativist world view is an irresponsible intellectual immaturity: while its tenet contains two oxymora, it is riddled with paradoxes and its undesirable outcomes can be predicted by a well-trained primate, they would nevertheless have us transform the world into one big post-modern lab test - and to hell with the consequences!

And then to think there are people - intellectuals, politicians - that take this sad piece of pernicious sophistry seriously and give it respectability! The best that can be said about defeatism-turned-respectable-policy is that the misguided objective may be to avert confrontation, but thereby denying a chance of mature debate and undermining tolerance as what it still supposes to mean: respecting and allowing another person's opinion.

Cliteur says that the consequences of multi-culturalism as proposed would be preposterous: that is why relativism and its derivatives aren't solutions at all but red herrings; and dangerous fallacies at that! In fact, while Muslims are experiencing noisy and at times lethal grow up pains and the whole of Westerns civilization is looking that way, the real enemy within sits here at the heart of our societies, chipping away at all we hold dear, as we shall see in the next post.