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COMMENTARY
September 7, 2011
Delectable lie
From time to time I recommend political books - which usually fall stillborn from the press - but which, if read and digested, would contribute to the recovery of a sane outlook. These are usually books that shine light into some dark swamp of political activity, so that we may catch a glimpse of all the slimy little creatures wiggling there.Today's recommendation will be Salim Mansur's Delectable Lie: A Liberal Repudiation of Multiculturalism. For full disclosure's sake, let me admit that I know this man; he is a dear friend. Let me add that he wouldn't be, if I didn't greatly admire him; that I've long been impressed with his courage and clarity as journalist and academic; and that I sincerely think his book is useful. It is being launched in Ottawa this weekend, and has already garnered some press notice; it has a chance of forming a blotch on the radar. I doubt any of the exponents or beneficiaries of the state's "multicultural policies" will argue with it, however, for debating is not their style. If the book makes enough of a splash, they will skunk its author, with their usual epithets. Salim is a Muslim, I am a Christian, both of us believers. He is a thoroughgoing liberal, in the best old-fashioned English sense; I am by contrast a Tory of the old school (Homer's). He has heroes (like John Stuart Mill) who are not heroes of mine; and vice versa. I am of English-speaking Canadian parentage, he of Urdu-speaking Bengali. Gentle reader will see that we are just two peas in a pod. And while I wrote that last sentence facetiously, there is truth in it. And as we would both note, it is the truth that puts the lie to multiculturalism. For the two of us are on a conversational wavelength - through agreements and disagreements - because of what we have in common. Our lingua franca, our shared culture, relies upon the universal conception of reason, brought to fruition in the West. There are no divisions in universal. Multiculturalism. The very word is like a bell, to toll me back. (Apologies to Keats.) Like so much of the jargon of the Left, it is mired in hamartia (the Greek pre-Christian word for "sin," carefully analyzed by Aristotle in the Poetics). There is a self-contradiction, a fatal flaw. By adding the prefix "multi" to "culture," we no longer have a culture. We have, instead, cultural disintegration. That there is good in every culture I know; in my travels I have seen much good (and much evil, too). So far so glib. But as Salim asserts, at the centre of his book, cultures are not interchangeable, and, get right down to it, they are not equal. The paradox here - what makes the lie of multiculturalism "delectable" - is in its source. It is such a western lie. Only the culture that carried anthropology into the field, as a free-ranging inquiry into culture itself, could conceive of the fatuously abstract idea that "all cultures are equal," and that social unity could possibly be achieved by having the state patronize every one, except its own. Only in western-style representative democracies could politicians see the use of maintaining this absurdity, as a way to capture various ethnic groups as voting blocks. For it is so much harder to carry an election one voter at a time. To my mind, though not to Salim's, this is the reductio ad absurdum of the western Enlightenment. That is to say, it brings the original ideals of the Enlightenment into question. To Salim's mind, which honours the Enlightenment, it is the perversion of those ideals. What begins in an affirmation of human dignity, and demands liberty for the individual, ends by abandoning this for "group rights." Salim is a very reasonable man; to my mind his arguments (and you must read the book, I have no space here) are understated. He sees so clearly the benefits of this "delectable lie" to political power, that he does not expect multicultural policies to disappear. He only hopes they will be relaxed or ignored. Whereas, I want them disowned and eliminated, root and branch. Our arguments are different, but we are rowing in the same direction. Cultures clash, and have done throughout history. This is because they contradict each other. The hard truth is that, for centuries, "Western Civ" prevailed in every encounter, because of its broad range of strengths. In the age of Imperialism, it became the global norm. Even those who reject the western heritage, have been transformed or twisted by it; all depend upon western inventions. Herein, to my mind, lies the deeper "delectable lie." We are according formal recognition of difference to simulacra; to various distorted pictures of ourselves. This is a form of schizophrenia. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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