Via Mick Hartley-
Kenan Malik on ‘The Truth About Cultural Appropriation‘:
‘What is really being appropriated, in other words, is not culture but the right to police cultures and experiences, a right appropriated by those who license themselves to be arbiters of the correct forms [of] cultural borrowing.’
The collectivization of one’s own suffering, and politicization of the personal, doesn’t necessarily require the maturity, freedom and strength to think for one’s self. Self-love isn’t necessarily a virtue, after all, nor either is it honest self-reflection.
If an individual can’t persuade others with ideas and argument, they always have the recourse of grievance and collectivized victim-hood in which to retreat. It’s easy to melt back into the crowd and call others horrible names just for bringing up contrary ideas and arguments (declaring them violators of all that is right, true and good in the world, while declaring yourself closer to good intentions and the holy causes (‘-Isms’).
This taps into a pretty universal human desire: To gain as much as possible with minimal possible effort, and to view one’s self as virtuous, and one’s enemies not merely as lacking in virtue, but evil.
Whether such ideas are true is another matter, because there clearly are genuine victims suffering all manners of injustice in this world, but this particular set of doctrines far outstrips the possibilities of individuals to honestly self-reflect, learn from experience, and solve the kinds of problems which can be solved through politics.
‘There is a difference between creating a society in which we have genuinely reduced or removed certain forms of hatreds and demanding that people shut up because they have to conform to other people’s expectations of what is acceptable. To demand that something is unsayable is not to make it unsaid, still less unthought. It is merely to create a world in which social conversation becomes greyer and more timid, in which people are less willing to say anything distinctive or outrageous, in which in Jon Lovett’s words, ‘fewer and fewer people talk more and more about less and less’…’
(Below):
-Minogue, Kenneth. Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. (Pg 111).
On the many dangers of political idealism, and using political theory as the limits of your field of vision:
‘We may sum this up by saying that the more the style of what used to be called politics becomes theorized, the more political problems come to be reintrepreted as managerial. Working out the least oppressive laws under which different and sometimes conflicting groups may live peaceably together is being replaced by manipulation and management of the attitudes different groups take towards each other, with the hope that this will ultimately bring harmony. In other words, in the new form of society, human beings are becoming the matter which is to be shaped according to the latest moral idea.’
Free speech and Muslimst From Kenanmalik.com: ‘Introduction: How Salman Rushdie Changed My Life’… Via YouTube: ‘Christopher Hitchens Vs. Ahmed Younis On CNN (2005)’… ‘Mohammad Cartoonist Lars Vilks Headbutted‘During Lecture’……From The OC Jewish Experience: ‘UC Irvine Muslim Student Union Suspended’…From Volokh: ‘”South Park” Creators Warned (Threatened) Over Mohammed’… More From Spiegel Online After The Westergaard Attacks Via A & L Daily: ‘The West Is Choked By F