Protect rights. Get rid of the idea of human rights. Protect the West.
The UN adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Besides a bizarre list of entitlements with no regard to affordability (such as the right to housing and medical care) it follows this 14 in prohibiting discrimination based on "race, religion, sex, political views or any other status." This totally emasculates the ability of the cultures in question to practice culturism. Culturism, again, says majority cultures have a right to define, guide, protect and promote themselves. Islam cannot discriminate based on religion and China cannot discriminate based on race. That destroys their identities.
You may say GREAT!! But there is a hitch. This document is not Universal. Islamic nations ignore it. China ignores it. Only the West takes it seriously. That reflects the fact that these are Western values (the preamble is stolen from the American Declaration of Independence) and we mistakenly think all people believe in Western values.
You may still say, "Our values ARE universal!" The problem is, in the real world, Islamic nations practice culturism and fight for their side. China practices culturism and fights for their side. When we are the only one playing by these rules it puts us at a terrible disadvantage. We must open up to mosques. They need not open to churches. We cannot discriminate against any types of immigrants. Islamic and Asian nations do. In battle we must uphold universal values, they do not. We are held to these standards and they destroy our sovereignty. Other nations wouldn't dare implement them.
Even if you believe eventually everyone will eviscerate their cultures in favor of a totally open society without any cultural values or guidance, it behooves us for the time being to adopt culturism. Rather than the multiculturalist tact, it behooves us to recognize that we have a unique Western culture (pretend if you don't believe it) and employ our culturist right to protect it. That gives us a level playing field. And, universalist believers in human rights, if the West falls, human rights will cease to exist. This is because they really are just a Western concept. We in the West really have a unique culture. The UDHR concept undermines our ability to protect it.
9 comments:
Whether we want to believe it or not;whether we like it or not, human rights are incompatible with Islam. That is a basic problem with Islam.
Values are not universal. They are the result of being a part of a culture and inheriting its history; values are the lessons of a particular history. For example, it used to be that the United States did not have a standing army. The Founding Fathers were terrified by the history of standing armies and in their writings endlessly warned against the dangers standing armies posed to liberty:
"What, Sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty....” -- Elbridge Gerry
"...but if circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude, that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people, while there is a large body of citizens, little if at all inferior to them in discipline and use of arms, who stand ready to defend their rights..." --Alexander Hamilton
“A standing army is one of the greatest mischief that can possibly happen” –James Madison
When faced with a war, the nation would raise an army from volunteers, and then disband it once hostilities had ceased. The distrust of standing armies was one of the most characteristic of American values. This all changed with World War II where the nation suddenly adopted the new value of supporting standing armies. The threat from the Soviet Union, in light of the lessons of Pearl Harbor and the desire not to be caught unprepared in the event of sudden attack changed the nation’s values.
In all cases where one wishes to understand the origin of a value in an individual or a people you can trace the value to an historical event. They are not always as sudden and dramatic as Pearl Harbor, many times the value is fought over for decades with words and often arms before the new value is adopted, but it is always history that determines the adoption of a new value. For example, the values enshrined in the US Constitution embody the lessons learned about the abuse of power by centuries of European monarchs.
In contrast to this view, it is often thought or assumed that values are apprehended a priori, that they are written in the structure of the universe and are apprehended by pure reason rather than learned through the bitter lessons of history. The "Universal" declaration of human rights is an example of this thining. Western nations, under the continuing influence of Kant, are one and all in the sway of this view. This results in the continuing inability of westerners to understand cultures whose history has taught them very different lessons (or even the inability for one western nation to understand another). After all, if morality is a priori, and thus universal, all of humanity must concede to identical values. Much of our continuing conflict with Middle Eastern countries comes from this misunderstanding—we simply can not understand how they could fail to adapt western values when they are so obvious. But of course, these values are anything but obvious and what we now think of as “Western values” had an extremely painful birth in the previous centuries where they were often conceived in conflict, born in bloodshed, and nursed through many devastating wars before emerging today where we assume they should be obvious to all.
This is not to suggest that values always spread as the result of bloodshed, only that it is not obvious beforehand which values ought to be adopted.
What most liberal multiculturalists mean by "multiculturalism" is really monoculturalism. For example, Japan is an extremely sexist society. I doubt any self-described multiculturalists would want sexist cultures included in their list of acceptible cultures. The same goes for female genital mutilation practiced in Africa, or forcing women to wear the burka or headscarf in the middle east. And forget about historical cultures. Most of the cultural practices of the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, middle ages Europe, ante-bellum southern US, and just about any other historical society would be found abhorrent. Plus, most multiculturalists I know never cease to rail at the "souless homogenized suburbs" or rural redneck hicks. Just face it, to liberals, so-called multiculturalism is really a early 21st century, western, urban, upper-middle class monoculturalism. It mostly amounts to urban hipsters and yuppies desiring many choices of resataurants.
To immigrants to western countries, "multiculturalism" means something else.
So we use the same tactics as China and the Islamic world.
We allow them to determine our thought and values.
Great.
LEXCEN - good to see you!!
EMPEDOCLES - Are we the same person? Yes, as I write in culturism, Kant is at the root of our universalist tendencies. While I do not write about it in the book, I wholeheartedly agree with you about standing armies. Getting rid of the draft was a disaster.
While our values evolve, our cultural experience and the guidelines of our history should be used to judge our actions. There is a kernel in which the West, at its best, has been evolving towards a sustainable society which fosters individual exploration. This requires, however, a republican (culturist) sense of responsibility to the community. Otherwise you have a pathological individualism.
So we judge our cultural decisions by whether or not they are conducive to these ends of sustainable freedom.
DUCKY, you got me wrong. We must hold true to our values within our sphere and allow other cultures to do the same. This is a basis of culturism.
We, for example, would not destroy the separation of church and state. That would go against the trajectory of our historically generated values.
It does not violate the historically generated values of Islam to collapse church and state. Not that they need our permission, but culturism holds that they have a right to define themselves according to their standards.
It would violate OUR evolved ethics to make citizenship contingent upon race. We should not. But it is fine for China to do so. That is what their majority culture dictates.
Universal ethics gets us into situations where we want to sanction or invade other nations for violating OUR 'universal' ethics. We are us. They are them. No 'universals' exist.
And, again, as cultures are in competition, it is really bad for us to not know the distinction between us and others.
www.culturism.us
PS Empedocles, YES YES YES again. Multiculturalists, amazingly enough, do not really believe cultural diversity exists. They think deep down we're all progressive liberals!!
Culturists take diversity seriously. Female circumcision happens. Not all cultures celebrate rights and democracy. Culturism's anthropology chapter is all about this topic.
John, thanks for commenting over at my blog. I would love to get the "Persona" idea out there as I think it nicely encapsulates what is wrong with much of western society. Feel free to use it in any way you wish.
One other thing, I'm not really against standing armies per se. The point is merely that values change over time, they are adaptations to historical circumstances rather than a priori principles. As in evolution, a change in environment requires new adaptations. The events of Pearl Harbor and the threat of the Soviet Union caused the adaptation of new values as an adaption to a new environment. I suppose it was necessary, but also like in evolution once a species commits to a certain adaption it might make it less able to adapt the next time the environment changes. See Collapse by Jared Diamond for cases where values failed to adapt to a new environment.
While most multiculturalists may be Universalists, the evidence suggests they are willing to put up with the filth and chaos of their stated multiculturalist ideals, as long as they are able to separate themselves from the consequences of those ideals, and as long as the multiculturalist project is damaging the traditional Western project.
In other words, as long as the intelligentsia can lock themselves away behind the gates of their communities (using a combination of wealth and police force) then they are happy to have other people, who don't subscribe to their Universalist ideal (think John Lennon's Imagine), live with the consequences of their stated ideal.
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