Extreme Multiculturalism and Political Correctness
When the announcement was made to the students in the English as a second language class of a small county college in upstate New York that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center, an immigrant student from Yemen stood, shouted his approval and began clapping his hands. The other immigrant students, mostly from Arab speaking countries, said nothing to him. The teacher, outraged at the insensitivity and overt hatred for his adopted country, demanded of the administration that the student be expelled.
The following day at a faculty meeting, a counselor, with a degree in psychology, made it clear to the faculty that people display their grief in a variety of ways and this student was expressing his grief with cheers and applause instead of tears. The administration told the instructor that she was overreacting and not to make waves. There are several disturbing behaviors here bordering on tragic. The first of course is the student who has come here for a better life and hates the culture which assures him and his family economic opportunities, freedom, and a peaceful night’s sleep. This student and others like him take full advantage of the protections of our Constitution and would work to see that Constitution replaced by the Koran. The second tragedy comes in the response of the students around him. None protested his response to the attack, thus supporting the dangerous value that blood, ethnicity, and religion are more important to protect than advancing the cause of truth and righteous behavior. This value states that to be part of a group means that the group or an individual member of the group, is to be supported no matter what the group or an individual who is a member of that group, does. The third, and possibly most tragic, is the response of the American college professionals who looked at a totally inappropriate response and excused it in the name of political correctness. The counselor stated an incredible and ludicrous rationalization so as not to have to deal with reality or his own inability to make a negative judgment on, or confront the behavior of a student from a culture different from his own. This counselor’s higher education taught him never to offend another person’s culture and never to be disrespectful of another culture. That is nice to a point, but another point to be made here is that this man is representative of those people who will stand by and appease evil, allow evil to flourish, and then rationalize the result of their own silence, usually in the name of democratic principals. Such people excuse all bad behavior with psychological and sociological jargon and ascribe any horrendous action to economic or social conditions, thus freeing the individual performing the action from any responsibility for his or her own behavior. The attack on the twin towers and the murders of almost three thousand people was an evil act and this counselor and other ultra-liberal educators, not wishing to offend, rationalize it and excuse it with reasons ranging from religious zeal to economic destitution. There is an effort among certain educators at the primary, the secondary levels, and at the university level, to cloak within the democratic vision, a dimension within the concept of multiculturalism that seeks to inculcate the erroneous and dangerous idea that all cultures are equal and all moralities are valid. This cloaked effort is really an effort to introduce moral relativism, cultural acceptance in the name of political and cultural correctness, and the elimination of standards. It is also a direct assault on the values of Western Civilization and the values of the Judeo-Christian traditions which support that civilization. The mantra in this assault is that all cultures are equal and it is the dominant culture of the United States, in the true spirit of democracy, who must accept these cultures on a par with its own. That reasoning is specious because it asks that democracy, a political concept, be substituted for a religious and secular based value system that has as its core ethical principles that specify that there is a right and that there is a wrong. While our judgments are tempered with compassion, the ultimate concept of right and wrong, or good and evil, remains defined by our revered documents. What dangerous nonsense it is to hold with a philosophy that states that anyone’s idea is just as valid as anyone else’s idea! Almost every war fought in the twentieth century was fought to address such ludicrous thinking. There are bad ideas and bad people and both bad ideas and bad people have to be judged, confronted, and stopped! But extreme multiculturalists maintain that all things are equal - that there should be no distinctions because distinctions imply that there is a good and a bad, a right and a wrong. They fear distinctions, standards, and value judgments, because they know that value judgments imply standards of behavior and standards of quality. They reason that if there are no standards of behavior and no standards of quality, everything then becomes equal and therefore correct, good, and beautiful. They reason that without standards, there is no such thing as ugly, common, or inappropriate, and without standards, no one can ever judged wanting and therefore, everyone can feel good and never feel the slightest twinge of inadequacy. Everything is acceptable and everything is valued and all things that raise the bar, especially in the area of values and morality, are to be obliterated. What extreme multiculturalists don’t realize is that without standards, no one ever need to come up to them and become a better human being or contribute something of value to society. They would prefer that we swim in a soup of mediocrity. We are asked by the extreme multiculturalists to accept everything as right in other cultures and in other people because we have to honor other people’s ways. Extreme multiculturalists ask us to allow the concept of right and the concept of wrong to change from person to person, group to group, culture to culture and nation to nation. If that is the case, then no one is safe. Western Civilization and the Judeo-Christian faiths which give that civilization its moral underpinnings, has set a criteria for judging behavior and that criteria requires us to make judgments based on the following specific questions: Young girls in Saudi Arabia are allowed to burn to death because they are not dressed properly as they flee their burning school. The religious police, supported by the government, watched them die. Is this concept of allowing girls to die acceptable because a certain level of modesty is the practice of another country’s religious beliefs? Decide. Though officially outlawed in India, it was, and in some places continues to be, traditional for a widow to be burned alive with her husband's corpse so she will not be a financial burden to her husband's family. Is this treatment of the bereaved acceptable to you? In certain African, Middle Eastern, and Asian countries, young girls undergo clitorectomies, the surgical removal of the clitoris so as to reduce sexual desire in them. Should this practice be allowed to be brought to America? In some Arab societies, young women are murdered by their families if they become pregnant out of wedlock or cause the family disgrace. Recently, a young woman was gang raped because she was seen with a young man who was not her husband. How do you judge this practice? Many Muslims fully support the idea that it is perfectly acceptable to strap a bomb to one’s body, enter a restaurant, university cafeteria, bus, or market, and murder innocent civilians. Is this disregard of innocent life acceptable to you? |
In China, female children are sometimes murdered or abandoned because parents prefer sons who will care for them in their old age. Do you judge this behavior as being appropriate?
Because sons are so highly valued in India, female fetuses are sometimes aborted. Is aborting a fetus because of its sex an acceptable practice to you? In many places in the world, it is acceptable to rejoice when three thousand innocent lives are lost because another culture finds it acceptable to hijack planes and fly them into American buildings. Do you judge the rejoicing? Western Civilization legally abolished slavery, but slavery still continues in certain third world countries in Asia and in Africa. Is the current practice of slavery acceptable because it is part of a third world tradition? You tell me. Since the United States is an open society, would you condone or condemn these cultural traditions being brought to this country and accepted because they are part of another’s culture and, in the spirit of democracy, should be honored? If you have agreed that the above examples of another person’s culture are unacceptable, then you are not a multiculturalist in the extreme. But if you agree that such practices are acceptable because they are the practices of another culture, then you are the type of person who has accepted moral relativism as a philosophy of life. You are the type of person who will say, "Who are we to judge another culture?"and "By what right do we impose our standards on another?" If you can say, "Yes, I accept these behaviors not only on the soil of the nations that practice them, but on American soil because it is in the spirit of democracy that we honor the cultural traditions of others," you are a true multiculturalist in the extreme. And if you are someone who can say these things, you are part of an increasing group of people in our country who have been indoctrinated in our liberal thinking high schools and universities that the Judeo-Christian standard by which we have, in the past, judged the behavior and values of others, is only one standard among many and no better than any other. You have also come to accept the idea that the Constitution of the United States is just one other document among many governing documents and of no greater or lesser worth than any other out there in the world. You are a true multiculuralist in the extreme and do not fully comprehend that you have substituted your concept of democracy for the value system taught us by the Judeo-Christian tradition under which you have lived and prospered. You have lost your standard of what is good and what is evil and you have become a moral relativist. For you, morality floats. From the genuine comfort of a society which has nurtured, fed, clothed, protected, and given them the freedom and security to open their hearts to the world and become more a citizen of the world than a citizen of America, extreme multiculturalists refuse to judge the evil of other cultures while freely condemning the inadequacies of the culture that allows them and their children to sleep soundly and unafraid. Yes, America does have a long way to go in the fairness and justice areas, and with that in mind, we must still ask ourselves why do so many people in the world continue to want to come here and why do so many who are here, not leave? Whether the extreme liberals on the left or the extreme conservatives on the right want to admit it, America was founded on the ethical principles ensconced in the moral code found in the Hebrew and Christian Testaments which state unequivocally that there is one morality regardless of your race, your gender, your religion, your culture, or your economic class and this morality is to be universally applied. This concept makes our tradition unique! This tradition defines right and wrong. This tradition says that certain behaviors are good and certain behaviors are evil and that judgment is demanded if the world is to be made a better place. If there is no right or wrong, we have moral relativism and we are doomed to live in a world without standards for behavior. To be sure, concepts of right and wrong change over the centuries and well they should. In our society, the Biblical admonition to stone one’s son for being disrespectful to his parents, or to burn a witch, is no longer acceptable. Religious leaders, cannot erase the laws from the Bible, but they can build fences around them so they cannot be implemented. In the same spirit of change, amendments to our Constitution enable us to adapt to raised levels of consciousness. Both secular and religious communities recognize the need to alter those laws that do not speak to the core of that unchanging value that is the bedrock of our society namely, that human life is sacred. And though Western Civilization has a poor record of action related to the latter value, the value remains the ideal and the goal and the ultimate value by which behaviors are judged. People who fly planes into skyscrapers or explode themselves in public places, do not hold "life is sacred" as a core value. But rest assured that the same people and groups for whom the ultra-liberals rally in the name of universalism and political correctness, have a hidden agenda and that agenda is to end our value system and impose on the world their own values, their own morality, and their own law. And the ultra-liberals who teach extreme multiculturalism in our schools, and the importance of not judging another culture on morality, do not see this hidden agenda or their own demise at the hands of those who would destroy our way of life. There is a fifth column of extremists in this country that would replace our Constitution with its own religious dogma and there are extreme multiculturalists teaching in our schools who are naive enough to stand by silently and watch this happen because of political correctness, their adherence to moral relativism, and their refusal to muster up the moral energy to make a judgment. Judging is what it’s all about. Without someone judging someone else, no one would improve. Without someone judging some thing, no thing would improve. Without someone judging it, no condition would improve. Without people judging governance, no government would improve. All wars are judgments of one government on another government. There are wars that must be fought. There are people who must be stopped. There are laws that must be changed. Judgment is absolutely necessary for the human condition to improve itself and judging another culture’s moral standards is perfectly acceptable. If the American way of life is to survive the onslaught of the extreme Left and the extreme Right, American teachers, professors, and parents have to teach that there are some moralities and some imperatives that are actually superior to other moralities and imperatives, and that that superiority remains true even though another group of people or another culture say differently. America and all other nations on earth make judgments on what is good and what is not among the moralities of the other nations. Are not the ongoing attacks on American targets by Muslim extremists not their judgment on what America values? Are they not making judgments on us? Where are the multiculturalists who affirm that attacks on innocent Americans and American interests are to be condemned? I’ve heard some extreme multiculturalists say that we must understand such attacks because such attacks are a response to what fundamentalist perceived as a threat to their way of life. I even heard some say that 9/11 was a statement of frustration from economically deprived people and we should understand their frustration and deprivation. How Marxist can you get! We must never claim to understand such evil no matter what the reason, and we must never forgive such evil either. |